4. Behind The Water Heater -Libby
Four
Behind The Water Heater -Libby
“Mom! Mom!”
The scream came from upstairs. I straightened from the couch, hands still braced against its back. I’d been at it for ten minutes and hadn’t moved it an inch. Three years ago, I’d gotten it through the front door by myself. Apparently, that was a different couch, or a different me.
“What?” I called back, breathless.
“Open the door! Hurry, Mom—hurry!”
Lily came barreling around the corner from the staircase, bare feet skidding on the hardwood. She caught herself against the wall with both hands, eyes huge, chest heaving.
“Fiona’s on the stoop,” she gasped. “Those things are right behind them!”
Them.
I lunged for the front door, threw the deadbolt, and fumbled with the security gate beyond it. My nails slipped under the latch, lost it, then found it again. My hands shook so badly I could barely work a lock I’d opened a thousand times.
Footsteps thundered up the outside steps. Heavy. Fast. Two sets.
Fiona burst through the doorway, stumbling over the threshold. She nearly went down, breath coming in ragged gasps, hair wild and plastered across her face with sweat.
A man came right behind her, so large he had to duck his head to clear the frame.
He filled the doorway, one hand gripping the molding, the other holding a handgun low at his side.
He looked as if he’d covered hard ground through hellish trouble—shirt soaked through, dark blood spattered across one sleeve and up the side of his neck.
A vein pulsed hard in his throat. His eyes swept the room in a single, sharp pass.
“Shut it!” he yelled.
I didn’t need to hear it twice.
I slammed the door and threw the deadbolt home just as something crashed into the security gate outside with a deafening bang that rattled the hinges and shook dust from the door frame.
The man didn’t hesitate. He holstered the gun, crossed to the couch I hadn’t moved an inch, and shoved it across the floor in one powerful drive of his legs. The feet shrieked against the hardwood as the frame hit the door flush.
Another impact hit the gate outside.
BANG.
Plaster dust drifted from the ceiling. Something on the other side shrieked—a ragged, inhuman sound that climbed in pitch and scraped against the inside of my brain—and then came the scratching, slow and deliberate, nails dragging down steel in long strokes.
A guttural growl seeped through the cracks.
The man stood in front of the barricaded door and faced it, perfectly still. His eyes were closed. In through the nose, out through the mouth.
Listening. Waiting.
The scratching slowed. Stopped. The growl faded and gave way to the distant echo of shuffling movement retreating down the front stoop and into the street below.
He turned around.
Up close, he was even larger than the blur that had charged through my front door sixty seconds ago.
Broad shoulders and thick arms spoke of a dense, functional build, forged by years of hard physical labor rather than a gym.
Dark hair was pushed back from a face that looked assembled from spare parts: a jaw too sharp, a brow too heavy, a nose that had been broken and reset slightly wrong, and a small, pale scar cutting through his left eyebrow.
His eyes were a pale silver-gray, the color of lake ice in early March.
Those eyes found Fiona first.
“You good?” The bark from the doorway was gone, replaced by a low, even tone—the voice of someone who had simply needed to be heard over the noise and now didn’t.
She nodded weakly from the floor where she’d slid down the wall, her lungs still working hard.
“Thanks to you.”
He gave a small, almost automatic, dismissive shrug, as though sprinting through a city of the dead didn’t warrant acknowledgment.
Lily looked up at me from beside Fiona, her seventeen-year-old face pale and stripped of everything except wide-eyed shock.
“Mom,” she whispered, “He shot one of them coming down the street. Its head just—”
I looked at my daughter. Then at Fiona, still catching her breath on my floor. Then at him.
The hallway was very quiet.
“You did what?”
He met my eyes—calm, not a trace of apology in his expression.
“Had to,” he said simply. “It grabbed her jacket. Another second and it would’ve had her neck. It was a last resort; sound seems to draw them, but it was my only option.”
Fiona, still catching her breath on the floor, looked between us and managed a weak wave of introduction.
“Libby, this is my brother.” She gestured loosely in his direction.
“Finn. Finn, this is Libby—my landlord. And that’s Lily, her daughter.
” She pointed toward my daughter, who had already abandoned her spot beside Fiona and migrated to the front window, pressing her face against the glass to peer down at the street through the gap in the curtain.
Finn rubbed the back of his neck with one hand, and something in his posture shifted.
“Finn,” he said, extending his hand toward me.
I took it.
The contact was a jolt against the frantic energy still humming through my veins.
His hand swallowed mine, all rough calluses and a surprising warmth that cut through the cold sweat coating my own skin.
It was too much, another shock to a system already overloaded. I pulled my hand back as if burned.
He looked up at me with a slight crease between his brows—brief, unreadable—and for one suspended second, those pale eyes held mine before he turned away to check the window beside Lily.
Jesus, Libby. Get a grip.
I pressed my back against the hallway wall, telling myself I was just catching my breath.
Finn leaned past my daughter to scan the street below, one hand braced against the window frame.
Before I could stop them, my eyes found the place where his shirt had pulled free from his waistband—a strip of skin, damp and warm-looking. I did the involuntary, traitorous math.
He looked twenty-seven. Twenty-eight on a generous day.
I had thirty-nine years, a teenager, a mortgage, enough common sense to know better, and trauma for days.
The world outside was ending, and those things walked the streets of Boston. Something had torn civilization apart between last night and this morning, and my oxygen-deprived brain had chosen this moment to notice that my tenant’s older brother had pale eyes and was hot as fuck.
He is practically a child. You are a grown woman. People are eating people. Prioritize.
I straightened up, smoothed my shirt, and walked over to where Fiona still sat on the floor, extending a hand to pull her to her feet.
“Welcome to my home, Finn,” I said, keeping my voice level. “Sorry about the circumstances.”
He turned from the window. Something shifted at one corner of his mouth; brief, controlled.
“Appreciate the hospitality,” he said.
A shriek from somewhere outside, distant and carried on the wind through the old walls of the house.
Finn stepped back from the window.
The handshake, the introductions—all of it was gone. His eyes swept the room with the same hard, calculating focus he’d come through the front door with, pale gray gone flat and cold. Whatever he’d been for those thirty seconds, he wasn’t that anymore.
“How many entrances?” he asked.
I blinked. “What?”
“Into the house.” He turned to face me fully. “How many ways in?”
“Two. The front door and the back door off the kitchen.”
“What kind of door?”
“Wood. Old. There’s a deadbolt, but—”
He was already moving.
He crossed the hallway and disappeared into the kitchen before I finished the sentence. I heard his boots on the tile, then the sound of him testing the back door—handle, frame, edges—running a methodical hand across every surface.
I followed him in.
He stood at the door with one hand flat against the wood, pressing his palm into it once, firmly. Then he pressed it again.
“Hollow core.”
I opened my mouth.
“Don’t apologize for it,” he said.
“It’s a brownstone,” I said, folding my arms. “The building is a hundred and forty years old. Unfortunately that door was replaced years ago from rot.”
He looked at me over his shoulder—not with judgment, more the expression of someone filing a problem under urgent and moving on. “Security gate on the outside?”
“No. Just the door and the deadbolt.” I stopped. “I kept meaning to get one installed.”
He pressed the door again. The wood flexed slightly under his palm, and something behind his eyes tightened, though his expression didn’t shift.
“One good hit and this thing gets obliterated,” he said quietly, more to himself than to me.
He turned from the door, systematically scanning the kitchen: the window over the sink, the window beside the refrigerator, the narrow transom above the pantry. Each received a full second of attention before he moved to the next.
“Back windows—security grates?” he asked.
“The ones facing the street, yes. Front of the house, all three floors. The building came with them.” I hesitated.
His eyes locked onto my hesitation like a hawk tracking movement in an open field. The question was evident.
“The back windows don’t have grates,” I admitted.
He crossed to the kitchen window over the sink and looked out at the small garden below—overgrown ivy climbing the neighboring brick, a rusted fire escape zigzagging up the back of the building next door.
He tested the latch. It wiggled loosely under his thumb, the kind of lock that existed more as a suggestion than security.
“How many windows without grates total?” he asked, still looking out at the garden. “All floors.”
I ran through the house in my head, the inventory taking longer than I wanted it to.
“Six. No—seven.” I pressed my fingers to my temples. “Two in the kitchen. One in the half bath on this floor. Two in the bedrooms on the second floor facing the back alley. One in the bathroom up there. And the small one in the basement laundry.”
He turned from the window. “How do you access the basement?”
“There’s a door in the hallway. Under the stairs.”
“Exterior entrance?”