Look At Me -Libby
Fifteen
Finn’s hand closed around mine, and he hauled me to my feet.
The rain hadn’t let up; if anything, it had gotten worse. Water ran into my eyes, down my collar, and soaked through my shoes, so each step squelched, and my socks bunched under my toes. My jacket, heavy and sodden, was now merely a weight pulling at my shoulders.
I trembled.
“Do you know where we are?” Finn asked, already moving, his eyes sweeping the street in both directions before I could answer. He released my elbow.
I forced myself to focus.
Think, Libby. Don’t spiral.
Wiping a hand across my eyes, I turned into the downpour, squinting hard at the street signs on the corner. The letters swam, blurred by water, exhaustion, and the long, crashing tail of adrenaline—
Wait… I knew this intersection. I knew exactly where I stood.
“Yes.” I pointed down the street, past an overturned delivery truck. “Two blocks down, there’s an alley between two brownstones. It goes straight through to my street.”
“Okay, let’s move,” Finn said, his voice stripped of whatever warmth it held on the rooftop, leaving only something functional and flat.
I followed his gaze south.
They were still out there.
Three of them were visible in the intersection a block down, moving through the rain with that lurching, disconnected gait.
The downpour pelted their bodies, and they gave it nothing; no flinch, no hunching of shoulders, no instinct to seek shelter.
They stood in the deluge as if it were a minor inconvenience, vacant and inhuman.
One walked directly into a fire hydrant, bounced off the impact without registering it, stumbled two steps sideways, and kept going.
The second stood motionless in the middle of the road, its face tilted skyward and its mouth open.
The third was crouched at the mouth of an alley, hunched tight over something, arms working in short, rhythmic jerks.
A sound came from it that I had not known before two days ago and would never be able to un-know: connective tissue separating from bone.
A pale arm reached out from beneath its body, fingers open against the wet pavement.
Beside it, something coiled and glistening caught the rain.
None of them looked our way==——-
The thunder pulled their attention sideways. The lightning made them twitch and stagger toward it. The sheer, overwhelming volume of the storm drowned whatever hunting instinct drove them otherwise.
For now.
“Once it stops—” I said, my voice coming out thinner than I intended.
“They’ll hear everything,” Finn finished.
I nodded.
And we moved.
Finn set a fast, low pace, somewhere between a jog and a sprint.
Our boots kicked up arcs of water from the flooded gutter, the sidewalk a shallow river.
Rainwater ran with a pink tinge I chose not to examine.
Near the curb, a split garbage bag had scattered its contents wide.
Among them, half-submerged and turning slowly in the current, was a human jaw.
I stepped around it without breaking stride.
We reached the alley and slipped inside.
Four stories of brick pressed in on both sides, close enough to touch both walls at once.
The rain funneled down through the narrow strip of sky in a single, hard stream.
Sound had nowhere to go in the tight space—it simply built and built until it stopped being noise and became something felt instead.
Finn stayed just behind me, one hand loose at his side.
The other reached forward at intervals—two fingers grazing my sleeve, my wrist, the back of my hand.
Not grabbing, just finding my edge and letting go.
Each time, I caught myself holding the contact for the half-second before it broke.
Each time, I told myself it was the dark.
I stayed close. Closer than the passage required.
Lightning split the sky above the narrow gap between the buildings.
The passage blazed white for a single, frozen instant.
And as I looked back, I saw him, really saw him.
“Libby.”
His voice was sharp, pulling me out of my musings.
“Yeah.” The word came out a half-second too fast. I swallowed, forcing the next words out. “I’m here.”
“Keep moving.”
Not a request and not quite an order.
“I am.”
The passage opened onto my street.
Twenty yards. Fifteen.
My legs shook. My hands shook. Everything shook—cold and exhaustion and whatever stays in your body after it has spent hours convinced it is about to die.
Ten yards.
Finn’s hand found mine. Not a grab, just his fingers threading through mine in the dark, quiet and certain. I closed my hand around his and held on with everything I had left in me.
My mind was still forming the question when it was already over.
One second we stood at the mouth of the passage, the gray light of my street opening up ahead of us, close enough that I could see the cracked planter by the stoop.
The next—
It filled the gap.
A man.
No. Not anymore. The remnants of a man.
Massive. Shoulders broad enough to swallow the exit whole.
A construction vest, neon yellow, hung open across a torso that had partially caved on the left side—three ribs jutting through the skin at broken angles, something dark leaking steadily from between them, unhurried, as though the body had simply accepted the arrangement.
His jaw had come unhinged on the right side.
Gray, fibrous flesh dangled from between his molars and swayed as his head snapped toward us.
His eyes found me.
Empty. Fixed with that absolute, terrible focus.
From the collapsed chest, something rose. Wet. Guttural. A sound no living thing should make.
And it was looking at me.
“Libby—” Finn’s voice was behind me, sharp and urgent.
Too late.
It lunged, closing the distance in a single stride. I twisted, throwing my weight sideways, but my boot caught the rain-slick concrete at an awkward angle, and my leg shot out from under me.
I hit the ground hard. The pavement came up fast, my chin clipping it first, then my shoulder. For a moment, I couldn’t tell which way was up—just a flat, ringing silence where sound should have been, my body refusing to remember how breathing worked. Before I could gasp, before I could roll—
It came down on top of me.
The weight alone nearly finished what the fall had started.
Two hundred and fifty pounds slammed me against the pavement, pinning my hips and stomach, driving my spine into the concrete until my vision compressed to a single bright point and then nothing.
Its hands, massive and gray, fingers thick as rebar, clamped down on my arms with a grinding pressure I heard before I registered as pain.
Its face dropped toward mine.
The smell hit first—hot and rancid. At this distance, I could see everything: gums blackened and peeling back from cracked teeth, a tongue swollen purple-black, too large for the mouth that held it.
I bucked and shoved and kicked. My hands drove against its chest, my fingers sinking into something soft where the ribs had ruptured—wet and yielding, giving under the pressure with a sound like a boot pulling free of deep mud, a sound that had no business coming from a person.
I yanked my hand back, coated to the wrist in a dark, thick fluid that existed somewhere between liquid and solid.
Its head jerked downward, jaw working in rapid, mechanical repetition—open, shut, open, shut—teeth grinding together inches from my throat and closing the distance with every snap.
Its hands dragged me upward, toward its mouth, and I could see the strings of old saliva stretching between those broken teeth, could see something dark and pulpy lodged deep in its throat—
“No—GET OFF—!”
Then the weight shifted violently, a blur of fast, savage movement above me, and the thing’s head wrenched hard to the side. Its grip on my arms broke for a fraction of a second.
Finn.
He’d come in from behind me. I hadn’t seen him move, hadn’t heard him cross the distance. One second the thing’s face hung inches from mine—the next, Finn had its head locked in one hand, fingers dug into the divets behind its jaw, wrenching it backward and exposing the temple—
And drove the knife in.
The blade sank into bone with a wet, crunching collapse. Something inside gave way entirely. Dark fluid—thicker and blacker than blood—erupted from the entry point, spraying across my face, hot and foul. It found my lips. Copper, rot, and a nameless chemical taste filled me.
The thing convulsed, every muscle firing at once in a full-body spasm that slammed its weight onto my chest one final time, driving an uncontrollable cry from me. A low, gurgling sound escaped its throat, fading out like a signal losing its source.
Then nothing.
Dead weight.
For half a second, the world stopped completely. The rain. The sound. My own heartbeat, suspended between one moment and the next.
My scream came—delayed, tearing out of me in a sound I didn’t recognize as mine, too loud, too long, and impossible to stop once it started.
Finn ripped the knife free. The blade came out with a wet, sucking resistance, trailing something gray and fibrous.
He shoved the body off me with one arm—a single, dismissive motion that rolled two hundred and fifty pounds of dead weight off my chest like an afterthought.
It hit the pavement face-down beside me, the back of its skull cratered and weeping a thick blackness onto the wet concrete.
“Get up.” His voice was hard and flat.
I couldn’t breathe. My chest convulsed in empty, airless spasms, refusing to expand, refusing to cooperate with anything my body needed it to do. My hands shook so badly they barely functioned. The thing’s fluid covered my fingers, my forearms, my face. I could still taste it on my lips.
He grabbed me—both hands hooking under my arms—and hauled me to my feet. My legs buckled, and he caught me before I could go back down, one arm locking hard around my waist, holding me upright through sheer force of will applied to my body from the outside.