3. Jackpot. Enough Ammo To Fill My Magazines -Finn
Three
Jackpot. Enough Ammo To Fill My Magazines -Finn
“How far is your place from here?” I asked, still holding her.
Fiona didn’t answer right away. Outside the door, something slammed into the metal.
BANG.
She flinched against me, pulling back enough to meet my gaze. Her eyes, swollen, and her face, blotchy and stiff from crying, showed grime on her cheeks that had cracked as it dried.
“Four blocks,” she rasped, her voice raw. “My room’s on Hanover.”
I pulled up the city map I’d saved to my phone, relieved it was accessible offline, and found her street. “Doable. The hotel was farther.”
“You came all the way here on foot?” Disbelief sharpened her voice, cutting through her exhaustion. “Finn, the streets are insane.”
“Didn’t have much choice. Everything’s gridlocked.” I let out a slow breath. “The streets are a parking lot.”
Her eyes scanned my face, neck, and arms—the way a doctor searches for injury, or simply the way she always had, looking for what I wasn’t saying.
“Are you hurt?”
“No. A couple of close calls. I’m good.”
Another thud rattled the door behind me, and we both jumped.
Three or four seconds of silence passed, then a soft drag against the steel. A pause, followed by a blunt impact and a low, wet, continuous sound underneath it.
Fiona swallowed hard, her gaze snapping back to mine.
“They were patients,” she whispered, as if in a daze. “The first ones.”
I studied her face. “What do you mean?”
“They brought them in this morning.” A tremor ran through her voice, but she forced it down, the doctor in her taking over.
“From an incident downtown. The report said violent attacks, but it was wrong.” She paused, looking lost in thought.
“One of them bit a nurse before security could restrain him.”
I glanced at the door, the scraping sound outside a constant reminder. “And the nurse?”
“Collapsed twenty minutes later,” Fiona whispered. She started to breathe heavily, her struggle for composure visible. “Then… she opened her eyes and attacked. Bit through one of their cheeks. Tore another one’s ear off with her teeth.”
Outside the door, something let out a long, choking groan that rose in pitch and faded into silence.
Fiona’s fingers tightened on my arm.
I looked at her for a long moment without speaking.
My youngest sibling. Graduated college at nineteen, med school at twenty-three—while the rest of us stumbled through life pretending we had a plan.
I’d driven down from Maine yesterday morning for her birthday. We’d had dinner on Salem Street—candles jammed into wine bottles, a server who kept calling her dottoressa no matter how many times she corrected him. She’d laughed so hard she snorted into her wine.
Twelve hours between birthday candles and the start of whatever the fuck this was.
“Jesus,” I muttered.
She looked back at me. Something shifted in her face—not the doctor—only Fiona, the way she’d looked at me across the backseat on long car trips when we were kids, the two of us watching the same thing out the window without pointing it out, not needing to.
“You’re insane,” she hissed. “Crossing the city on foot. For me.”
“I know.”
She shook her head. “Runs in the family.”
Thud.
Fiona’s expression crumbled at the edges.
“Finn,” she breathed. “What are those things?”
I glanced toward the door, the slow, persistent scrape moving across its surface with no urgency and no intention of stopping.
“I don’t know.”
I drew my gun, my hands moving through the motions without a thought—drop the magazine, check the round count, seat it back in, rack the slide. A decade of muscle memory that no amount of civilian life had touched.
“But we don’t want to be here when more of them find this door.”
I looked back at her.
“Four blocks?”
She nodded.
The corner of my mouth pulled up.
“Then let’s go home.”
“How?” Fiona asked.
I pushed myself to my feet and crossed to an electronic panel on the far wall.
The plastic casing was cracked, a schematic of the garage underneath hazy with age.
I traced the faded lines, trying to make sense of the layout.
Most of the grid was dead, but I could just make out our position—level one, north side—and an exit ramp.
Then my eyes caught it: three floors up, on the opposite corner, a single green light blinked next to a fire alarm icon. It was the farthest point from us.
“They follow sound,” I said.
Fiona stepped up beside me, her eyes following my finger on the panel. “A diversion. You’re going to draw them away.”
I pressed the button.
Half a second of nothing.
Then the fire alarm wailed three floors above us. The strobes hit first—white light slamming through the gaps in the concrete at a frequency that made it hard to focus on anything. Then the sound, bouncing off every level at once, so that by the time it reached us it seemed to come from everywhere.
The effect outside our door hit instantly.
The pounding stopped.
Then movement—a lot of it, rushing away from our door and funneling upward through the ramps. Bodies crashed into cars. Groans and shrieks chased the alarm toward the upper levels and kept going, the total mass of them redirected at once.
Fiona’s mouth fell open.
“Holy—”
“Shh.” I held up one hand.
We stood absolutely still, listening until the last footsteps disappeared into the alarm overhead.
I turned back toward the desk and stopped.
A small duffel bag sat on the floor beside the chair, half hidden behind a tactical belt with an empty holster—security issue, or an off-duty cop who’d been here when everything came apart and hadn’t made it back for what they’d left behind. I dropped to one knee and flipped the bag open.
For a moment, I stared at it.
“Thank fuck,” I breathed.
Inside the bag was a flashlight, a bunch of scattered 9 mm ammo and a few shotgun shells, as well as some lint. I quickly scooped up the ammo.
“Finn?” she asked, her voice low.
“Jackpot. Enough ammo to fill my magazines.”
I pulled them from inside my jacket and started loading—thumb pressing each round down against the spring, brass clicking into place, one after another.
A decade on a SEAL team taught me: You carry more than you think you need, because the moment you run out is the moment everything that comes after gets decided for you.
Fiona watched with wide eyes.
“You just carry spare magazines everywhere?”
“Always.”
A hint of a smile crossed her face—brief, but genuine enough to matter.
I slammed the last magazine into my back pocket, tucked two more into my jacket. I shouldered the backpack and moved to the door.
The alarm still screamed through the upper levels. The ramps sat empty.
For now.
I lifted the security bar and set it against the wall. Slid the deadbolt back. Cracked the door open an inch.
Cold garage air pushed through the gap. The concrete between us and the exit ramp sat dark and empty.
I opened the door wider and listened.
Nothing.
“We’re moving.”
Fiona stepped out beside me, arms crossed tight, eyes cutting across every shadow between the vehicles.
“Stay right behind me,” I told her. “Close enough to touch. I stop; you stop. I move, you move. And if I say drop—”
“I drop,” she said.
“Good.”
I checked the corners one final time, strained to catch any sound on our level, and started toward the exit ramp with the gun up and Fiona’s footsteps falling soft two feet behind me.
The alarm wailed on.
Below them, we moved through the dark—two people, four blocks of open city, a house on Hanover Street.
The Navy had built something in me that most people never needed.
I intended to use every second.