2. It Was A Street Feast - Finn
Two
It Was A Street Feast - Finn
Ipassed the intersection and slowed, an almost involuntary response.
Two bodies lay in the middle of the street, limbs bent at unnatural angles, as if struck by a car.
Three—no, four—figures hunched over them, shoulders working in fast, frantic movements. From a distance, it looked like a desperate rescue: first aid, CPR, pressure on a wound that wouldn’t stop.
Relief touched me for half a second before curdling into dread.
Their backs rolled and hitched in sharp, arrhythmic lurches, shoulders driving down, wrenching sideways.
No one spoke or looked up. The only sounds were wet and repetitive, unhurried, and beneath them, something lower, something that took a moment to identify: the faint crack of cartilage giving way under steady pressure.
My boot scraped the curb. One of the figures shifted its weight, and I caught a flash of red.
On his face.
The man’s jaw dripped, chin dark and slick.
He bent down and wrenched his head sideways, tearing something loose—a long strip of tissue that stretched and snapped between his teeth.
He swallowed hard and dove straight back in.
The body beneath him didn’t move, didn’t make a sound. It simply yielded.
They weren’t helping anyone. They were feeding.
The realization arrived in pieces, each adding to the horror.
My vision tunneled. The handgun was up before I realized I’d drawn it, the sight already settling on the nearest head.
For a long, suspended moment, I held it there, my finger resting against the trigger, not yet pressing, because some stubborn part of me was still waiting for one of them to stand up and explain themselves.
To turn around and be a person. The wet sounds continued, patient and indifferent, and my finger tightened a degree.
Then I stopped myself.
I forced air into my lungs. Slow. Controlled. The same deliberate breath I’d used a hundred times before in places that had no business being on any map.
My brain ran its checklist without being asked—rounds in the magazine, distance, angles, exit route.
Even if I dropped one or two before they reacted, the rest would run toward me before I cleared the street.
Gunfire echoed hard in urban centers. No idea how many more between here and the parking garage. Limited ammunition. No backup.
The wet sounds continued behind me.
Fiona. Still out there. Waiting for me to show up.
She came first. Everything else, second.
I lowered the muzzle. My arms shook with the effort, every nerve screaming at me to raise it back up, to empty the magazine into those hunched and feeding backs; to make the wet sounds stop.
I held the gun at my side and eased backward.
One of the figures raised its head.
A woman with dark hair hung in matted patches across her face.
Below her nose, thick, almost black blood coated everything.
Pale flesh swung from her lower lip, and she chewed once, slow and mechanical, before it disappeared.
Through the curtain of hair, her eyes stared out, irises swallowed almost entirely by pupil—just dark, wet circles in a slack face.
Then her head tilted, the way an animal’s does when a sound reaches it from a long way off.
For a single long second, those dead eyes found mine.
My chest seized, and I didn’t breathe. Didn’t dare blink. I eased my foot backward, set it down softly, shifted my weight forward, and drew the other foot back with the kind of deliberate care that had kept me alive in the past.
Carefully.
Quiet.
Don’t—
A woman ran screaming from a house further down the street.
All four heads snapped up, mouths open, slick faces turning toward the noise in unison—the same blank, predatory focus. One rose to its feet, strings of gore stretching and snapping between its fingers and the open cavity below.
I didn’t wait.
I turned and moved quickly down the sidewalk—not running yet, but eating up ground in long, controlled strides, my pulse hammering against my ribs, my fingers wrapped tight around the grip of the gun.
The streets of Boston looked like the opening act of a horror film, and whatever had started it showed no sign of slowing down.
* * *
Almost there.
I reached the parking garage faster than expected, lungs burning, each breath dragging hot and raw through my throat.
The entrance gate had stopped halfway down—some emergency protocol the hospital had managed to trip before everything fell apart. I ducked under it and kept moving.
The garage stretched ahead, dim and cavernous, fluorescent tubes guttering sick yellow light across rows of cars.
I slowed. Every footstep came back doubled off the concrete, every shift of my jacket too loud.
A garage map hung bolted to a pillar halfway up the first level. I swept the shadows behind me before I read it.
Two security offices. One here the other on the north side.
The closest had its door cracked. I nudged it wider with my boot.
Small room. Two dead monitors. A chair tipped on its side. Coffee pooled across the desk, dripping off the edge in a slow patter, uncomfortably close to a pulse.
Empty.
She had to be in the North office.
I kept moving. The silence thickened as I pushed deeper—no ventilation hum, nothing but boot scuffs and my own pulse.
I rounded the final corner and froze.
Thirty feet away, between two parked sedans, stood a man.
His button-down shirt had gone almost black, plastered wet to a torso hitching with shallow spasms. Its right sleeve ended at the elbow—below it, a bite had torn the forearm to the bone, the wound edges oozing something too dark and too slow.
His face.
The skin was the color of old candle wax, gray-yellow and tight, stretched so taut over his cheekbones that the flesh between them had collapsed into graying trenches.
Dried blood crusted black around his mouth, cracking at the corners where his lips twitched—small, rhythmic flinches, like a sleeping dog, except there was no dream behind them.
And his eyes.
Milky, clouded over with a film like the skin that forms on cooling fat.
The light from the guttering fluorescentes caught it and threw nothing back—just a dull, wet opacity where a person’s eyes should have been.
Not blind; worse than blind. They moved in quick, twitching arcs across the garage, each sweep too fast, too mechanical, like a security camera stuck on a short loop, scanning, hunting, finding nothing and starting over.
A sound crawled from his throat, ragged and caught somewhere between a growl and a breath, like air being forced through a windpipe full of blood.
One leg popped when he shifted his weight, the ankle bent at a wrong angle—and then he took another step on it, and another, the joint clicking with each one, the foot dragging a half-beat behind the rest of him. His eyes kept moving. Kept sweeping.
Still hunting.
I raised the handgun slowly, the front sight trembling no matter how hard I locked my wrists. The thing’s head shifted to one side—tilted—listening, and then those dead, milky eyes found me across thirty feet of concrete, focused, locking on with a recognition that had nothing human left in it.
Its mouth opened wider than a jaw should stretch, tendons popping along the hinge. It screamed—or something like a scream—the sound bouncing off every concrete surface in the garage, carrying up through the levels like a signal.
My finger squeezed the trigger.
The gunshot was a physical blow in the enclosed space, leaving only a sharp, high ring in its wake.
The bullet exploded through the side of its skull and blew out the opposite temple in a spray of dark blood and bone that spattered across the hood of the car behind it.
The head snapped sideways, and the body stood for what seemed like an impossible second, swaying, jaw still hanging open.
Then it folded and hit the concrete with a heavy, meaty slap.
The echo rolled through the garage and kept going.
A door slammed somewhere above, followed by another. Feet scraped against concrete in long, uneven drags. Something heavy toppled off a hood with a hollow metallic boom. From the ramp to the upper level came a sound like wet fabric being pulled across asphalt, growing louder.
Shit.
To my left, someone slapped the hood of a sedan.
A figure staggered out from between two SUVs—a woman in hospital scrubs, soaked through and dripping.
The right side of her neck was gone, a fist-sized chunk torn away down to the vertebrae, the carotid artery a severed stump leaking dark fluid down her collarbone.
She didn’t notice. Didn’t slow.
Her head jerked toward me, eyes wide and filmed over, and she started moving—not running, but a lurching stride that closed the distance faster than anything with that much damage had any right to manage.
Another emerged behind her, followed by another.
A man in a charcoal business suit, the lower half of his face gone—jaw ripped free, tongue swinging loose with each step. Behind him, a teenager, both arms cratered shoulder to wrist, tendons glistening where the skin had been stripped away.
My brain ran the numbers.
Too many. Way too many.
I backed up, gun raised, scanning the shadows as the woman in scrubs lurched closer. She opened her mouth, and a shrill, broken shriek ripped out of her—high and jagged, scraping along every nerve in my spine.
Ten feet.
Eight.
I fired.
The round caught her just above the left eye. Her head snapped back, her feet left the ground. She came down mid-stride, legs tangling under her, and the momentum carried her forward across the slick concrete until she stopped against my boot with a soft, wet sound.
The others didn’t flinch. They didn’t register her dropping for even a fraction of a second. They simply kept coming—guttural sounds spilling from throats that should have gone silent hours ago.
I pivoted and fired again.