And They Had Nowhere Else To Be -Libby
Nine
We prepared to move, and I forced my thoughts down.
Not the looks. Not the low, lingering warmth they left. None of it. Not now.
Finn moved first—low and controlled. I stayed close behind him as we crossed the street, the open ground pressing against every exposed inch of skin with the animal certainty of being watched from an unseen location. Each second stretched thin enough to see through.
But nothing came.
Nothing. No sound, no movement. Silence pressed outward from every direction as we crossed the remaining distance and reached the doors.
Finn’s fingers found the gap between the sliding panels and pulled. The rubber seal gave with a soft exhale that froze us both for a full second before we pushed through.
Cooler inside. Still.
The dim light came in slowly as my eyes distinguished the shapes.
Every shelf untouched. The store was exactly as it had been left.
Shelves fully stocked, displays packed tight, not a single overturned cart or broken bottle anywhere in sight. No evidence that anyone had panicked, that anyone had come through the doors at all.
It should have brought relief.
Instead, my throat tightened and stayed that way.
“Why does it look like this?” I whispered.
Finn scanned the aisles. “It spread too fast.” A beat of silence. “No one had time to loot.”
He turned to me, eyes sharp and already moving past the conversation. “High calories. Lightweight. We don’t have long.”
Rice, beans, anything shelf-stable and dense enough to justify the weight. I worked fast, shoving bags into my pack until the straps dug into my shoulders. I kept going despite it.
I cut through to produce without planning to. Grabbed apples and oranges. They wouldn’t last a week. I grabbed them anyway.
“Finn—batteries.” My eyes had caught a small rack near the end of the aisle.
“Grab them.” Immediately, no deliberation.
I swept the rack clean and moved on.
Behind me, sounds of him clearing shelves with no wasted motion, no hesitation. The sound of someone whose hands already knew what they were doing.
He stopped and hesitated at a display near the register.
Liquor. Two bottles of whiskey, snatched from the shelf and packed without comment.
I moved past him toward the door. “Planning on sharing that?”
The corner of his mouth lifted. Barely. “Carry it and find out.”
Despite everything—the exhaustion, the tunnels, the thing in the alley, the full shelves that should have been empty—I smiled.
Then a sound reached us from the back of the store, and everything stopped.
A thud. The worst part? It was faint, almost careful, coming from somewhere in the dark beyond the last row of shelves.
Finn’s gun cleared the holster before I’d consciously registered the sound fully. His whole body pivoted toward the back of the store.
The second sound came.
Dragging. The sound of something heavy being hauled across tile—catching, then sliding, and catching again, dead weight redistributing itself with each step. Not frantic. Not fleeing.
“Finn,” I whispered. It was the only sound I could make, the only word I had.
He didn’t glance at me. “Stay behind me.” Low and absolute, the voice of someone who already had a plan for when the dark answered back.
Abruptly, a new odor cut through sharper. Copper and iron, the stench of fresh blood, enough that it still hung in the air rather than settling into surfaces. Close.
Every instinct I had pointed me to the door. I held still anyway.
It had been there the whole time. Waiting in the dark between the shelves, still and patient, taking in everything—our entry, our voices—without moving, because moving hadn’t been necessary.
We had walked to it.
Finn didn’t hesitate.
“Move!” His voice cut the stillness, and his hand slammed into my shoulder hard enough to drive the air from my lungs and send me stumbling toward the door.
The things in the store woke up.
Not all at once. A single shape in the dark between the shelves. A head turning degrees too slowly. A scrape against tile. Followed by another. The silence underneath them gave way entirely.
They converged.
I stumbled forward, my boots sliding through something slick.
I didn’t look at it. Finn’s hand hit my back and stayed there, driving me toward the door, and when I slowed for half a second, his grip tightened to the edge of pain, and I understood that slowing was not an option he was giving me.
Something brushed my arm from the dark; fear prickled up my spine.
Then his body was between me and it, shoulder dropping, and the contact broke, and we kept moving.
He looked back once. Then at me. Then at the door. A fraction of a second to make the calculation.
The gunshot detonated inside the confined space. The glass door burst outward in a bright shower of fragments, spiderweb cracks racing to the edges of the panel before the whole thing gave way and crumbled. Cold air rushed in.
“This way!”
His hand locked around my wrist, and we ran.
Out through the broken door and into the daylight. Behind us, the shadows followed us into the street.
Finn cut left without warning, and his hand locked around my wrist hard enough to grind bone and pulled me between two buildings.
The alley swallowed us—walls so close I could feel the cold radiating off the brick, the stench of standing water and rot strong and overwhelming.
Trash exploded underfoot. Something alive fled through the dark ahead of us, and I didn’t look at what it was.
We ran harder.
“Up—there!”
A fire escape. The bottom rung dangled just above reach, the whole structure dark with rust.
Finn left the ground and hit the metal with both hands—the clang shattered the alley’s silence, and he wrenched downward, his full weight against it, the hinges screaming as decades of rust gave way all at once.
“Go!”
No space between the word and his hands finding my waist. He threw me up.
I caught the rung on its way down, fingers slipping through grime before locking on, and I climbed with everything I had, boots sliding against the slick rungs, not thinking about what was behind us, not looking down, but up, just the next rung.
He came up right behind me.
But something caught him.
A hand closed around his calf. Gray, bloated, the skin split along the knuckles to expose the dark tissue beneath. A second hand followed, blackened nails raking at the fabric.
“Finn—!”
He snarled and drove his boot down. The thing didn’t register it.
Its jaw hung unhinged, snapping at the air slightly below his leg with a hollow click of bone on bone, and what was wrong wasn’t the sound but the rhythm of it—patient, like it could do this forever.
The stench from its open mouth was a physical thing in the air, a flavor I couldn’t spit out.
It looked up at me. Whatever was behind its eyes was still in there.
“Climb!” he roared.
I climbed. The metal shook and groaned beneath us, and beneath that sound came the other one—fingers finding the rungs below our feet, the scrape of them methodical and unhurried, as though they already decided how this ended.
Their faces tilted upward. Torn lips pulled back from dark gums, teeth cracked and stained, and none of that was the worst part.
The worst part was the expressions. Each face wore something that was almost concentration—brows furrowed, eyes tracking, heads adjusting incrementally as we moved. Like they were solving something.
I cleared the platform’s edge, and my legs went.
Finn was still on the ladder.
The thing had climbed to his thigh, grip tightening, fabric splitting. I got my bag off my shoulder and swung it into the side of its skull.
Once.
Twice.
Bone caved inward with a wet give that traveled up through the bag and into my hand. Dark fluid seeped from the depression—not blood, something thicker and fouler. A strip of scalp hung from the backpack’s canvas on the back swing.
The thing shrieked—a high, tearing sound with no clean upper limit, metal and biology failing at the same frequency.
Its hands stayed locked on the ladder as the rest of it hung in limp disarray.
“Let go!” I swung again with everything left in my body behind it.
Finn used the momentum, wrenching his leg sideways at the same instant.
The grip slipped just enough. He drove his boot directly into its face, and the jaw dislocated on impact, the lower half swinging loose on a single remaining strip of tendon, and something dark and viscous began tracking from its ear as one eye bulged outward from the force.
It dropped from the ladder.
For one second, I thought it would simply fall.
It landed on its feet.
Its head tilted upward past the angle where a neck is designed to stop. The dislocated jaw swung with the movement.
Then the mass reached it. They moved over each other without acknowledgment of individual bodies, hands finding faces for grip, bones snapping under weight that didn’t register as damage, climbing toward us as one thing with one appetite.
“Finn!” I grabbed his arm with both hands and pulled with everything remaining in me.
He surged upward, caught the platform edge, the muscles in his forearms standing hard against the skin as he dragged himself over. The moment he cleared the edge, we both turned on the ladder, hands slipping and fumbling, and wrenched it upward.
The metal screeched as it rose. One of them had already reached the lowest rung and held on as its body swung free, dangling, until the weight of the others tore it loose. Four snaps. It dropped into the mass below, and the mass absorbed it and kept moving.
We collapsed against the wall of the platform with our backs to the brick and gasping for air that tasted of copper and decay. The pulse in my temples beat so hard it narrowed my vision to a dark-edged tunnel.
Finn’s chest heaved beside me. Neither of us spoke. Neither of us had anything yet.
Below, they didn’t stop.
They circled the base of the building and drove themselves into the wall. Fingernails first, then the raw stumps where they had been, leaving dark smears against the brick. The sound continued after the flesh was gone. Bone on stone. Patient. Unhurried.
I pressed my back harder against the wall and worked on breathing.
Finn sat beside me, close enough that his shoulder touched mine, and I left it there, and he didn’t move away.
Below, the milky, ruined eyes tracked every small movement we made on that platform without losing a single degree of focus.
Not the teeth. Not the hands. Not the sounds they made or the things they had done to themselves climbing toward us.
What carved the deepest was simpler and worse than any of it.
They knew exactly where we were.
And they had nowhere else to be.