Kind Of A Plan- Libby
Seven
By mid-morning, we had what resembled a plan.
It wasn’t good; it wasn’t safe, but it was all we had.
Finn and I would go.
The plan had come together earlier over cold coffee and a map spread across the kitchen table.
I’d told him about the tunnels—a network carved out more than a hundred years ago, running beneath the city in long-forgotten corridors that most people had simply stopped thinking about.
Finn had leaned forward, arms crossed, and asked how I knew.
My father, an archaeologist, used to take me down into them on weekends when I was young.
We’d trace old brickwork for hours, following passages that branched and opened into chambers no map had ever recorded.
I still knew them the way you know a place you loved as a child—not by thinking but by moving, your hands and feet remembering what your mind has long since let go.
I remembered which routes flooded, which walls had collapsed, and which passages remained open.
I thought that if we could reach the eastern access point, a few hundred feet from the house through the alley, we could move beneath the city without ever surfacing into whatever was waiting above.
Fiona and Lily would stay.
There wasn’t much argument. Lily opened her mouth once, and I looked at her until she closed it again. The world outside had changed overnight into a hellscape I didn’t have a name for yet, and I wasn’t going to let her walk out into it.
Finn hadn’t even entertained the idea of Fiona coming.
“No,” he’d said, his tone flat and final. “Not happening.”
Fiona started to push back, of course.
“I’m not just sitting here while—”
“You are.” He didn’t raise his voice; he didn’t need to.
He merely looked at her—a look he must have used in the field, one that meant the decision had already been made, and the only thing left was whether she was going to make this harder.
He looked away from her for a moment, somewhere past her shoulder.
“I need to know you’re somewhere secure. ” A beat. “That’s how this works.”
“This isn’t the military, Finn.”
“No,” he held her gaze. “It’s worse.”
That stopped her.
Now we stood in the dim study. I picked up Finn’s backpack from the desk and held it out to him without a word. I pulled on my own, working the left strap twice before it sat right, my fingers clumsy with anxiety.
Finn checked his weapon one final time and looked at Fiona.
“Hey.”
She looked up, her eyes already glassy, the light catching the thin film of tears she hadn’t let fall yet.
He stepped closer, lowering his voice enough that Lily wouldn’t catch everything. I should have moved to the other side of the room, but I stayed where I was, a few feet away with my back half-turned, fingers working at the strap of my pack, not adjusting anything.
“If we don’t come back—”
“Don’t.” She shook her head, a barely-there whisper, her hand lifting as if to physically push the words away.
“Fiona.” His voice was firmer now, yet quieter, making it harder to process. “You need to hear this.”
Tears spilled before she could stop them, tracing fast, silent paths down her cheeks. She didn’t wipe them, only nodded, her lips a thin line, her eyes locked on his.
Finn took a breath, and I watched his jaw clench.
“You wait as long as you can, as long as it stays safe. You ration the food. Keep the house quiet.”
She wiped her face with the back of her wrist, a quick, almost angry gesture, a muscle jumping along her jaw. Her eyes remained on his, fixed as if releasing his gaze would finalize something that wasn’t final yet.
“And then?” Her voice cracked on the second word.
“You take Lily and you leave.”
Nobody moved. Lily had gone still beside me, and I became aware of my own breathing, too loud, too present. Somewhere in the walls, a pipe knocked once, then fell silent.
“Find a car,” he continued, his voice low and steady, each instruction given with the weight of what he rehearsed a dozen times in his mind before he’d spoken it aloud. “Any car. Don’t worry about the keys. You remember how Dad taught us to hotwire?”
Fiona let out a shaky breath. Trepidation flickered across her face—there and gone. She nodded.
“Okay…”
“Head for the coast. Stay off main roads if you can. If things go bad, ditch the car and keep moving on foot. Don’t stop for strangers. Don’t stop for anything.”
Lily was completely still beside me, her breathing shallow, watching them both with wide, unblinking focus.
“Finn…” Fiona whispered.
He reached out and gripped her shoulders.
“Listen to me. Get to the water. Find a boat—anything that floats—and go north along the coast. Once you’re past Gulch Point, twenty miles up is the island. You remember how to get there?”
Island? I pushed it back for later thought.
Her chin dipped once, twice. “Yeah…”
Her lips pressed together, then parted. “You’re talking like—”
“I’m talking as if I need you prepared,” he said.
Something in the way he said it made the room go still. Not the words—the words were almost nothing. It was the quietness beneath them. He held her gaze, didn’t look away, and said nothing else.
Nobody spoke. The clock on the wall ticked once, twice.
Fiona threw her arms around him.
He caught her immediately, his body absorbing the impact without shifting an inch, one hand cradling the back of her head, the other locked across her shoulders. He just held her there.
“I don’t like this,” she whispered into his chest, her voice muffled against the fabric of his jacket.
“Me neither.”
“You’d better come back,” her voice, unsteady yet fierce, shook against him. “You don’t get to show up here to die on me. I love you, Zeus.”
A low chuckle rumbled in his chest. “I love you too, Coolwhip.”
A faint smile ghosted across his mouth at that.
Fiona let out a broken laugh against him, half sob and half surrender. She pulled back slightly, searching his face.
“I’m serious, Finn.”
“I know.”
He brushed a hand over the back of her head, then stepped back.
Fiona turned away quickly, pressing the heel of her palm hard against her cheekbones.
But Lily already understood.
Lily’s eyes fixed on Finn. She quietly mumbled, “Don’t let anything happen to Mom.”
Something shifted in Finn’s expression—there and gone.
I stepped forward and pulled her against me, my chin resting on the top of her head. Her arms slid around my waist and held on. I felt the slight tremor in her shoulders, the way her fingers gathered a fistful of my jacket.
“I’ll be okay,” I said into her hair.
“Promise?”
I hesitated.
I forced a small smile, the kind that costs everything, and pressed my lips to the top of her head.
“Promise. I love you, Lily. Always.”
Finn’s voice came from beside me, steady and grounded as bedrock.
“We’ll be back before you know it.”
I glanced at him.
He stated it as a fact, like something already decided.
And for one brief second, I believed him.
But I was looking at Lily’s fingers twisting the hem of her shirt. I saw Fiona’s arms folded tight across her chest. And the fear flooded in anyway.
Finn opened the front door just enough to slip through, every movement slow and deliberate, his body already oriented to the outside before the rest of him had crossed the threshold.
The security door let out a faint creak as he eased it wide.
He winced and went completely still for half a second before stepping out onto the stoop.
I followed him into the hostile world and stopped.
The stoop, the steps, the street below—all of it identical to how it looked every morning for fifteen years. The same and completely unrecognizable all at once.
The street below was empty and silent.
Not the chaos of yesterday—no one running in every direction, no sirens. This stillness carried its own horrific quality, heavier and more unsettling than any amount of chaos would have been.
Two figures drifted at the far end of the block, moving with a jerky, broken rhythm down the middle of the road, as if they had lost the thread connecting intention to movement. One walked into a parked car and stayed there, its head twitching in sharp, repetitive spasms, going nowhere.
I pulled my eyes away.
Finn glanced back at me—one look—and gave a small, sharp motion with his hand.
Move.
I nodded and stepped down behind him, staying close, exactly as he’d told me.
We slipped down the steps and into the alley between the brownstones. The temperature dropped immediately. The smell hit next—damp stone, old garbage, and something metallic and faintly sweet that registered in the throat before the nose made sense of it.
I breathed through my mouth in slow, shallow breaths, staying close enough to Finn to hear the controlled rhythm of his own breathing.
The city was quiet in a way Boston never was.
No traffic, no voices, no dogs, no horns—none of the thousand sounds a living city made without trying.
The rumble of the T somewhere underground.
A siren blocks away. Someone’s television through a thin wall.
All of it gone, replaced by an absence so complete it pressed against the ears like something solid.
For a few moments, we were just two people cutting through an alley on a gray morning. Nothing unusual about the image if you didn’t look too closely.
Then a scream.
It was close enough that my body responded before my mind processed the sound—every muscle clenching, breath stopping.
Finn’s hand shot back and caught my arm, yanking me hard against the wall, his body shielding mine.
“Don’t move.” His breath was at my ear, barely a disturbance in the air.
His arm braced against the brick beside my head. His other hand held the gun low, angled toward the alley entrance. My back hit the cold wall, and I stopped—breathing, thinking—stopped everything, because the alternative had just announced itself thirty feet away and it sounded like…
Footsteps. Panicked and irregular, the sound of someone running without coordination.
They tore past the alley opening so close I caught everything—the wet breathing and the frantic slap of shoes on wet pavement.
“Help me! Someone please…HELP ME…!”
Followed by other footsteps.
Heavier. A lurching gait that moved faster than it had a right to, given the broken mechanics producing it.
Finn pressed us deeper into the shadow, his chest solid against me, his body positioned between mine and the alley entrance—protective.
“Stay quiet,” he breathed against my ear.
I pressed my head back against the brick in silent acknowledgment.
They rushed past the alley entrance, and I caught enough, too much, the kind of image that haunts dreams.
Three figures moved with the loose coordination of animals drawn toward the same sound.
The first had no lower lip—just teeth, exposed gum, and a chin dark with dried blood.
The second dragged one leg, its foot twisted completely backward at the ankle, yet kept pace.
The third carried something in its right hand, held low at its side, and I looked away before I could identify it.
The man screamed again, just beyond the alley wall, the sound of someone who had already understood what the next few seconds held.
“NO—NO PLEASE—”
Then a sound—something between tearing paper and something dense and wet giving way, the heavy quality of organic material under sudden force—and then the man’s voice, so human a moment before, climbed into a register that no longer sounded like a voice, and stopped. Not faded. Stopped. Like a switch.
The silence of an ending.
Chewing and frenzied feeding sounds followed. Rhythmic and patient, the sound of something working without urgency. The click of teeth contacting something hard. The pull and release of tearing.
I pressed my eyes shut.
Lily’s face appeared in the dark without invitation. Not a memory. Simply her face, the way it had looked this morning when she’d asked me to promise.
Finn didn’t move. Didn’t breathe.
We stayed pinned in the shadows, the brick cold through my jacket, his body rigid against mine as the last of the terror faded.
The sounds slowed, becoming intermittent. A shuffling movement followed—retreating, directionless, the particular drift of something that had satisfied what brought it here and lost interest in everything else.
One minute.
Two.
Finn angled his head toward the alley entrance in a single, slow movement. His eyes scanned carefully. No reaction on his face, no flinch, nothing.
“Gone,” he murmured.
My legs went weak, and I had to press my hand against the wall to stay upright.
“Jesus,” I whispered.
His eyes found mine and held them with the same focused attention he brought to everything.
“That’s what happens if they hear you,” he said, low and serious, no softness about it.
Past his shoulder, I could see the alley entrance and the stretch of sidewalk slightly beyond it.
A dark smear across the pavement, glistening in the gray morning light.
One shoe sat upright in the middle of the sidewalk, placed with an accidental neatness that made it worse somehow than anything else I’d seen.
Nothing else of the man remained.
I swallowed against the acid climbing my throat and held his gaze. “I understand.”
He held my gaze a second longer—making sure—then stepped back enough to move.
“Stay close,” he said.
“I will.”