2. It Was A Street Feast - Finn #2
The teenager’s head came apart. The round entered through the forehead, and the exit wound opened the back of his skull, spraying red and gray across the windshield of a nearby sedan in a dripping pattern. His body dropped straight down, knees buckling, hitting the concrete in a heap.
Three down. More coming.
They crawled out from between vehicles now—hands over bumpers, bodies dragging from under cars. One slipped in the blood pool and slammed face-first into the concrete, nose crushing flat. It didn’t pause. It just started clawing forward on broken fingers, raw tips leaving thin red trails behind it.
My pulse was loud enough in my ears that I had to concentrate to hear past it.
Not here. Not now.
Fiona.
I backed toward the north wall, eyes sweeping the dark—more emerging from the upper ramp—searching for the security office while I counted rounds and distance and the narrowing gap between me and everything converging on my position.
One of them lunged from behind a pickup truck.
No warning, no building groan—just a sudden impact.
Hands slammed into my chest, lifting my feet off the ground and driving my backward into a parked car with enough force to dent the metal.
The air exploded from my lungs, and the gun nearly flew from my grasp.
Only pure adrenaline kept my fingers locked around it.
Its face filled my vision, inches away. Skin hung loose from its cheekbones, peeling back in gray, papery sheets. Teeth, slick with blackened blood, parted and snapped toward my throat with mechanical, relentless force. The clack of its jaws slamming shut echoed deep in my skull.
Then the smell hit me, stopping me cold: sweet and putrid, the cloying stench of tissue breaking down from the inside.
It lunged again, teeth grazing the skin of my neck—close enough to hear enamel scrape against stubble.
I jammed my forearm under its chin, driving its head back hard. Its mouth continued to work against the pressure—snapping, snapping, snapping—as dark saliva soaked through my sleeve, warm against my skin.
I set my jaw and kept moving.
I brought the gun up, shoved the muzzle into the soft tissue beneath its chin, angled the barrel toward the brain stem, and pulled the trigger.
The blast took the top of its skull off. Every muscle released at once, and its full dead weight dropped onto my chest, driving me backward against the dented car door.
Half a second of near-silence. Just the high ringing in my ears and the warm, wet weight pinning me against crumpled metal.
Then the groans surged back. Closer. Louder.
I shoved the corpse off me and staggered upright, my boots sliding in the blood pooling beneath it. More shapes emerged from between cars, dragging across the concrete toward me.
I backed toward the north wall, scanning for the door, pulling air that tasted like iron and gunpowder into my lungs.
“FIONA!”
My voice tore out, raw and desperate, bouncing off every wall and pillar in the garage, carrying through the structure and returning to me in broken pieces.
The door at the far end of the north wall rattled hard on its frame.
A voice from the other side. Muffled. Shaking.
“Finn?!”
“Open the door!” I shouted, already moving. Behind me—close, too close—the shuffle of dead feet picked up speed. One shrieked, a high, shattered sound that bypassed training and discipline, finding something older. A spike of cold drove down my spine.
The door jerked open just as I reached it.
Fiona’s face—pale, tear-streaked—flashed in front of me for half a second before I lunged through the opening, spun on my heels, and threw my full weight against the door.
“Shut it!”
She threw herself against it beside me without hesitation.
Something hit the other side before the latch caught.
The impact traveled through the steel and into my back—a deep, shuddering clang that rattled the door and rang through the small room.
Fiona scrambled for the deadbolt, her fingers, slick with sweat and shaking too hard to find purchase, slipped off the mechanism.
“Come on—come on.”
The bolt slid home with a heavy click.
I grabbed the security bar mounted beside the frame—thick steel, industrial grade—and dropped it into the brackets. It seated with a solid, final thud that I let myself believe in for exactly a single second.
Another impact rocked the door. Then another. Then another.
Each blow rang through the small office, the metal flexing just enough to see. Between the hits, a guttural, mindless snarling seeped through the cracks, followed by the long, slow scrape of fingernails dragging down steel.
Just clawing. The way something claws at a barrier to reach what it can smell on the other side.
My legs gave out.
I slid down the door until I hit the floor, the cold steel pressing and vibrating against my back with every impact, my gun clattering against the concrete beside me.
My hands wouldn’t stop shaking. I stared at them—the blood drying in the creases of my knuckles, my fingers curling and uncurling around nothing—and couldn’t make them stop.
Fiona stood a few feet away pressed against the desk, her arms wrapped tight around herself, staring at me.
For a long moment she didn’t move, her eyes searching my face as though she needed to confirm I existed—that I’d actually come through that door, that the blood soaking my sleeve belonged to something else, that she hadn’t constructed this out of desperation and fear behind a locked door in the dark.
Then her face crumpled.
She crossed the space between us in two steps and fell against my chest, fingers twisting into my jacket and pulling as if she needed the resistance to confirm I was real.
I pulled her in, pressed a hand to the back of her head, and held her there as tremors ran through her.
The sounds that came out of her weren’t quite crying.
“I’ve got you,” I said quietly. My voice came out rougher than I intended. “I’ve got you.”
BANG.
The door jumped in its frame, and Fiona flinched so hard against me her teeth clicked together.
A fresh wave of pounding started up—not a single set of hands now, but several.
Between the impacts came the scraping. And beneath that, a new sound: teeth against steel, jaws working at the barrier with the same mechanical patience as everything else out there.
The door groaned. The frame held—solid steel bolted into reinforced concrete—but the sound of them working at it, that relentless and mindless scratching and gnashing, settled under my skin and stayed there.
Fiona pressed her face harder into my shoulder, her breath coming hot and ragged through the fabric.
“They were eating people,” she whispered, her voice scraped hollow. “Finn, they were actually—I watched them pull a man apart in the stairwell. He screamed for so long, and then he just stopped. And then he got up and—”
“I know.” I tightened my arm around her. “I know.”
Another thud rattled the door. A long, gurgling moan rose in pitch on the other side before fading into wet clicking. Then, silence settled over us—just the two of us on the floor of a ten-by-ten security office, listening to the dead claw at the steel between us and them.
Her grip on my jacket tightened, knuckles digging into my ribs.
“I thought I’d die in here,” she said quietly, almost matter-of-factly—the way people state things they’ve already accepted. “Alone. Behind a locked door. Just… listening to them.”
I looked over her head, taking stock of the office.
Two monitors hung on the wall—one dead with static, the other cycling through a shaking camera feed from the garage ramp.
On the grainy screen, I counted shapes. Five.
Seven. More coming up from the lower levels.
A desk. A rack of keys. An emergency radio in its cradle, power light a steady red—dead.
The stale smell of old coffee cut through the sharp, copper tang of blood drying on my clothes.
Outside, the pounding continued. Patient. Tireless. No frustration in it, no flagging—just the same force applied again and again, like a heart beating.
I rested my head against the cold steel and closed my eyes, trying to slow my breathing to something that felt like calm. I couldn’t quite get there.
Fiona’s heartbeat hammered against my chest—fast and desperate—and I focused on it, counting the beats, willing it to slow even as my own refused.
“Not like this,” I murmured against her hair.
She exhaled a long, shaking breath and pressed closer without a word.
I opened my eyes and stared at the ceiling.
If the streets of Boston already looked like this, then this room was the safest place on earth, yet every instinct told me it was already a tomb. We couldn’t stay here. The door wouldn’t hold forever.