Brice woke before the sun.
It was a lingering, hard-wired habit. The warehouse was entombed in silence. David was curled into a ball against a structural pillar, his breath hitching in a low rasp. Carla was a vague, shivering hump under a moth-eaten moving blanket.
Brice pushed himself up, grabbed his tape-wrapped tire iron, and slipped out onto the loading dock.
The morning light was a bruised purple, leaking over the distant, jagged skyline. Columns of smoke were still corkscrewing into the clouds.
Then, the ground began to vibrate.
It wasn’t a roar, but a smooth, pressurized hum. Brice ducked low against the rusted railing as three gleaming white buses rounded the corner. Behind them, two white SUVs hugged the center line. They were pristine, their paint jobs mocking the debris-strewn, cratered asphalt of the district. They looked like they’d just been waxed, an impossible anomaly in a burning world.
David appeared in the doorway, his silhouette backlit by the morning light. “I was wondering when they’d come back,” he said, his voice completely flat.
Brice didn’t take his eyes off the convoy. “You’ve seen them?”
“Yesterday,” David murmured. “They’re picking people up. Some kind of mobile extraction. They’ve got doctors, medical supplies.”
“They’re not rescue,” Carla’s voice cut through the air. She stepped out, her eyes narrowed, glaring at David’s back. “I watched them yesterday from the roof. They’re selective.”
Brice turned to her. “Selective how?”
“They passed up a family in the alley,” she said, her voice tight with suppressed anger. “They took a guy who looked like he’d been through a meat grinder, but left the elderly couple right next to him. Like they were shopping for parts.”
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The lead bus hissed to a stop. The doors folded open.
Figures stepped out into the morning chill, dressed in crisp white scrubs that stood out like surgical scars against the grime. They weren’t just doctors; they wore tactical vests over their tunics, and they moved with the practiced, predatory grace of soldiers. Behind them, two men stepped out of the SUVs, faces hidden behind dark ballistic visors, fingers resting casually on the triggers of suppressed rifles.
“Doctors with assault rifles,” Brice said, his stomach turning. “That’s a hell of a bedside manner.”
“It’s safe!” one of the doctors shouted through a megaphone, his voice synthetic and hollow. “We are authorized to transport survivors to a secure medical facility. Food, water, and decontamination are provided.”
A father, gaunt and trembling, poked his head out from behind a smashed storefront. He ran for the bus, pulling his family along. The doctors ushered them inside with clinical efficiency. The doors hissed shut.
The convoy didn’t move. They just sat there, waiting.
Brice felt a cold, oily sensation pooling in his gut. One of the men in the white coat turned, scanning the line of warehouses. He paused, his head tilting slightly, and his gaze locked exactly onto the loading dock where Brice was hiding.
For a heartbeat, time felt liquid. The doctor smiled—a thin stretching of lips that didn’t reach his eyes. It was the look of a scientist who had just identified a missing variable.
Then, with a casual gesture, he climbed back into the lead SUV. The convoy rolled forward, vanishing into the maze of warehouses.
“We should probably find out where that shelter is,” Brice said, his voice sounding thin.
David and Carla exchanged a look.
“You’d trust them?” Carla asked.
Brice looked down the empty, silent street. “I don’t know. But something about them… it feels like we’re the ones being hunted.”
Evening returned. The fire in the steel drum was dying. Brice sat in the shadows of a pallet rack, his hunting knife scraping rhythmically against a whetstone. He didn’t see David slide away toward the darkness of the loading dock again.
But Carla did.
Three blocks away, the alley was pitch black. David stepped into the gloom, his boots crunching loudly on broken glass.
A pristine white SUV sat idling. The doctor from that morning stepped out, his white coat catching the moonlight. He looked like a ghost.
“Is he still there?” the doctor asked, his voice melodic and detached.
David felt the heat leave his body. He nodded, unable to summon the strength to speak.
The doctor reached into his coat and produced a high-resolution printout. It was a digital photo of Brice, snapped from a distance. The red stamp across the top read: SUBJECT IDENTIFIED: ANOMALY.
“Tomorrow,” the doctor said pleasantly.
David’s hands shook. “My family? The ones you took from San Diego… are they safe?”
The doctor’s smile didn’t change. “Do your part tomorrow, and you’ll see them.”
David turned and walked back toward the warehouse. Every step was an agony. He wasn’t walking back to a shelter; he was walking back to a betrayal.
When he stepped into the warehouse, Brice looked up and smiled warmly. “There you are. I was starting to think the monsters got you.”
David forced his mouth into the shape of a smile. “Not yet.”
He sat down, turning his face away. From the shadows, Carla stepped out, walking directly up to Brice. She didn’t look at David. She leaned down, the firelight catching the cold fury in her eyes, and whispered a devastating truth.
“He just sold you to them.”