TWENTY-EIGHT
DAKOTA
So, the garages are actually worse than they look. Which, if you ask me, is pretty impressive really. They look like the sort of place hope crawled into six years ago, took one sniff, and just straight-up died from something that could have been prevented.
Rust-eaten doors. Collapsed roofs. Oil-stained concrete. Weeds thick enough to hide ankles, teeth, tripwires, and every other delightful little surprise the apocalypse likes to tuck into places you wouldn’t think to look.
The first garage is empty except for a long-dead car with no wheels and a family of rats that scatter from the backseat when Ewan taps the doorframe with his knife.
“Oh, lush,” he mutters. “Very cosy. Homey. All it needs is cushions.”
“We don’t say cushions,” I warn.
He glances over at me. “Wait, what? Why?”
“Because the universe will hear you and give us a moldy couch full of claws and teeth,” I tell him.
Fletcher grunts from where he’s helping the pilot through the gap between two garages. “She ain’t wrong.”
“Thank you,” I mutter.
“Didn’t say I liked it.”
“Look at that. I didn’t ask.”
Kaito is walking too straight again. I notice because blood has this funny way of making itself everyone’s business when it keeps leaking out of someone who refuses to sit down and reconsider all of his life choices.
His face is paler under the grime, though I didn’t think it could reach a paler complexion.
Thankfully, it’s not fainting pale. Not yet, anyway.
But the tightness around his mouth has sharpened into something that makes my fingers twitch toward the medical kit I don’t currently have enough time or safety to use.
And I hate that.
The twitch, that is.
Not him being wounded.
Well, no. I actually hate that, too. For practical reasons. Obviously.
We cut through the second garage and duck behind a row of storage units that sit at the back of the block. Fletcher is leading us now, but he keeps looking back before choosing which way to turn, giving me information with small jerks of his chin instead of providing instructions.
Two Vector men hold the road, there’s still a rifle on the balcony, and there’s noise behind us.
Zeds are pouring out of the tower like someone kicked over and stomped all over a rotten anthill.
The compound route has been thoroughly trashed, and every fact arrives stripped down and useful.
I’d enjoy his new communication style more if we weren’t currently being hunted through a concrete maze by organized bastards with Omega suppressant gear and a possible blood marker attached to my body like a blinking sign reading:
Congratulations! You’re the problem, stupid.
My skin feels too hot. Not heat kind of hot, but stress kind of hot.
It’s a pain kind of hot. Too many scents under too much fabric.
There’s smoke in my throat. Runner blood is drying stiff on my sleeve.
My old arm wound is throbbing in tandem with my pulse and my knee is aching with every step I take.
Fletcher’s blood is carrying under it all. The pilot’s fever-soured sweat.
Alpha. Alpha, Alpha, Alpha.
Four of them.
Too close.
Too safe.
Too dangerous.
Too much.
I pull my bandana higher, but it does next to nothing. The air still tastes metallic and my blockers continue to sit bitterly in my system, weak and old and trying their very best like tired little soldiers armed with sporks and mops.
A Zed suddenly slams into the garage door behind us and the metal booms loudly. I flinch, though it’s not much. Just enough for Xeon to notice. Because of course he does. Apparently quiet people are not actually minding their own business like one would assume. They’re out here collecting evidence.
He doesn’t say anything, and that’s the first good thing he does.
The second is when we reach the drainage channel and the world just instantly gets worse.
Ewan was right. There is open space past the garages, but it’s not the neat little escape tunnel my battered little brain had envisioned.
It’s a concrete flood channel that runs behind the residential block, half-choked with weeds and old trash, cutting between the garage line and the compound’s outer district.
A narrow service bridge crosses it roughly sixty feet ahead. Between us and the bridge, three Zeds are dragging themselves through the weeds. Past the bridge, Vector shouts. Not close yet, but close enough.
Fletcher looks at the channel, then the bridge, then the barely conscious pilot between him and Kaito, who is annoyingly helping. “Bridge is exposed.”
Ewan tilts his head, listening. “Drainage channel goes under the road.”
I crouch by the edge and peer down. The channel drops maybe eight feet.
Could be ten. Hard to tell through weeds and shadows.
A trickle of dirty water slides along the center, shining under the weak morning light like oil trying and failing to look pretty.
The slope is steep but climbable if you’re not half-dead, fevered, bleeding, or cursed by the collected bad decisions of everyone around you.
So, naturally, that is our route.
“Down,” Fletcher says. Then he stops, jaw tightening. “Drainage channel gives cover. We can use it to bypass the road.”
“Look at you,” I say, voice thin. “You’re learning to narrate instead of command. How’s that character growth tasting? Because it’s horrifying on my end.”
His mouth twitches, only barely. “Don’t get used to it.”
“Wouldn’t dream of it.”
We move for the drop, then a noise canister bellows from somewhere behind the garages. Not ours, and certainly not close enough to be a coincidence. Looks like Vector is setting the dead loose again.
The three Zeds in the channel jerk toward the sound, then toward us when Fletcher’s boot slips on loose gravel.
Everything happens quickly after that.
Fletcher fires twice and one Zed drops. Ewan vaults the edge and slides down the concrete slope with more grace than he has any right to even possess. Kaito tries to help lower the pilot, only to tear something in his side for the effort. He hisses through his teeth so softly I almost miss it.
I don’t miss it, though, which is a personal failing of mine.
Xeon appears suddenly beside me, not grabbing or hovering. Just… there. Then, quietly, he says, “The left side has footholds.”
I glance over and, sure enough, he’s right. The concrete has cracked near the edge, little ridges and exposed rebar making a rough ladder down the side. It’s safer than sliding. Slower, sure, but it’s safer on my knee.
I hate that he saw my knee, and that he didn’t mention it. It makes everything so much worse. Which is why I snap, “I know how to climb.”
His gaze remains on the drop rather than on me. “I know.”
No defense or apology. No wounded male pride bumbling into the conversation and shedding hair everywhere. Just two words. I know. Like he actually does know. Like he can see what I need and has no interest in owning the fact that he even sees it.
The channel below fills with noise then.
Ewan slams a Zed into the wall while Fletcher lowers the pilot.
Kaito covers the garages, blade in hand, still too pale, but still standing.
Xeon steps down first onto the cracked footholds, testing them with his weight.
One gives a little, so he shifts to another. Then he slips down two steps and waits.
Not with his hand out.
Not with his body blocking mine.
He’s simply below me, close enough that if I fall, he can reach out and catch me.
But he’s far enough that choosing the route still feels more like mine than his, and my throat tightens at that.
Because I’m ridiculous. And stupid. I mean, there are armed enemies nearby and dead things dragging their decaying bodies through drainage weeds, and my chest has picked this moment to make a weird emotional sound without my written or verbal permission.
I need to get my shit together.
I climb down after him, and the first foothold holds. The second bites into my boot. And the third slips. Pain sparks through my knee, and my body tilts sideways.
Xeon moves quickly. Quietly. His hand catches the concrete next to my hip, not me, bracing the space before I can fall into it. His other hand lands against the wall near my shoulder, creating a cage made of help without once touching.
My breath catches. For one second, I’m completely surrounded by him. Not trapped, just surrounded, and there’s a difference. A big one. And I hate that I even know it.
His scent slides through the chemical rot and blood. Frost and steel, clean enough to cut through the panic without making me feel cornered, and gentle enough that my Omega turns her stupid little head like an idiot deer in a field full of hunters.
“Take the next one lower,” he says softly. “It’s stronger.”
My fingers press into the concrete. “You always this irritatingly observant?”
“Sometimes I try not to be,” he says.
“Yet, here we are.”
“Yes.”
There’s no smile, not really, but something softens in his eyes. It makes my pulse trip and stumble harder than the shitty broken foothold did.
I force my boot to the lower ridge. It holds, so I descend the rest of the way without slipping again, which honestly feels like the biggest win I’ve had in days. A win I refuse to celebrate because celebrating is just a recipe for disaster.
At the bottom, Ewan finishes the last Zed with a pipe through the skull.
Seriously, where the hell is he finding these things?
Fletcher has the pilot propped against the channel wall.
Kaito reaches the bottom after us and instantly pretends he didn’t almost fold in half the moment his boot touched solid ground.
I point at him. “You’re really bad at lying with your entire body.”
He breathes out through his nose. “I said exactly nothing at all.”
“That’s my point,” I tell him. “It’s suspicious.”
Fletcher looks toward the far end of the channel. “We got movement up top. Two roads over. Balcony shooter shifting west.”