It Split The Morning Air -Libby
Twenty Nine
The gunshot split the morning air.
It hit me as if it had come from inside the room, jolting my body, my shoulder catching the wall. My ears rang. My vision strobed.
Then, the alarm shrieked to life outside, mechanical, impossibly loud. We hadn’t heard anything that loud in days.
My heart slammed upward into my throat and stayed there.
“He did it,” I whispered, the words barely a sound.
Above us, heavy footsteps. Fast. Controlled. Boot heels crossing toward the stairs.
Not panicked.
Purposeful.
Finn.
Moving.
The girls snapped into motion beside me.
“Go, go,” Fiona whispered, already snatching her tote from the floor. She moved with a precision that reminded me so much of her brother it made my chest ache.
Lily’s hands trembled as she lifted her bag. Her face had gone chalk-white, her lips bloodless. “Oh my God—”
“Hey.” Fiona stepped into her space immediately, one hand gripping Lily’s upper arm, fingers pressing in hard enough to register through the panic. “Look at me. He’s got this.”
Steady.
Certain.
“Okay?” Fiona added.
Lily’s chin dipped in a rapid nod, her throat working hard to swallow. “Okay.”
The siren outside wailed louder, or maybe the silence between its pulses just thinned into something suffocating. Through the boards nailed over the living room windows, I caught fragments of sound between the alarm’s screams. Groaning. Low and guttural. Noise drew them—mindless.
That’s the point. That’s the whole point. Let them come to the sound.
Boots on the main stairs now.
Fast.
Each impact reverberated through the old house, shaking dust loose from the ceiling.
Five steps.
The fourth one creaked.
The third.
I stood at the front door, fingers hovering over the last lock. My hand wouldn’t move. I’d turned this same lock ten thousand times: coming home from work, from the grocery store, from picking Lily up at school.
“Wait,” Fiona whispered behind me.
We froze.
All three of us. Statues in the dim hallway, totes clutched to our chests, the frying pans stuffed awkwardly into the tops of our bags. The siren screamed outside. The groaning swelled. Finn flew down the stairs, body angled low. I pulled the door open quickly as he moved out onto the stoop.
And then he stopped.
Turned.
Looked at me.
One second. Maybe two. His eyes held mine with an intensity that said everything his mouth wouldn’t. Not in front of the girls. Not right now.
I’ll come back.
I didn’t say anything. I just held his gaze until he looked away.
He nodded once. Then he was gone.
I pressed both hands flat against the front door and stood there, forehead nearly touching the wood, breathing in shallow hitches I couldn’t seem to deepen.
He’s out there.
Alone.
Surrounded.
The siren screamed on.
Through the boarded windows, I could hear them—the shuffling, the groaning, the constant grotesque sounds of bodies that didn’t work right anymore trying to move toward noise.
One of them scraped along the exterior wall.
I heard it clearly. Not searching. Not intentional. Just the incidental contact of a body shambling past, shoulder grinding against the house as it followed the siren’s call.
The sound moved from left to right.
Slow.
Dragging.
Then it stopped.
A low moan came through the door. My eyes squeezed shut. Every muscle in my body pulled taut, vibrating with contained force.
Move on. Follow the sound. Follow the alarm. Just keep walking. Keep walking. Keep—
Lily made a sound behind me. Small. Choked.
I turned my head just enough to find her with my eyes, raising one finger to my lips.
Quiet. Quiet. Please, baby. Quiet.
She clamped both hands over her mouth. Tears spilled over her fingers.
Fiona appeared at my side. She already had the frying pan in hand, its dark metal held low and ready. She must have grabbed it the moment the scraping started. She positioned herself between the door and Lily, her body squared, weight centered—her brother’s training in every line.
She looked at me.
I looked at her.
Neither of us dared to breathe.
The thing outside groaned once more—a long, gargling exhale. The dragging resumed. Left to right. Moving. Following the alarm.
Going.
Going.
Gone.
I let the breath out in a shuddering rush. My knees softened. I braced against the wall to stay upright.
“It’s gone,” Fiona whispered.
Lily dropped her hands from her mouth and sucked in air—ragged, shaking.
“I’m okay,” she gasped. “I’m okay, I’m okay—”
She wasn’t.
None of us were.
But the siren still screamed and Finn still moved somewhere out there in the streets, and the plan still held, and we didn’t have the luxury of falling apart.
I pulled Lily against me. Keep her calm, keep her calm. She buried her face in my shoulder. Her body shook in violent, silent tremors.
“He’s fast,” I told her. My voice came out steadier than I had any right to expect. “He’s smart. He knows what he’s doing.”
Through the wall, a distant crash—glass shattering, followed by a heavy, wet impact. Then growling. Human growling, pitched garbled, like a voice box full of fluid trying to produce sound. A second impact. A crack.
Lily’s fingers dug into my back.
“Don’t listen,” I murmured. “Focus on me.”
Minutes passed. Two. Three. Each one an eternity measured in heartbeats and the rhythmic scream of the car alarm and the sounds of dead things dragging through our neighborhood.
Two minutes.
How long does it take to reach a car fifty yards away?
How long when the street between you and it is crawling with things that will tear the skin from your body and eat it while you watch?
How long, Finn?
How long?
I looked at Fiona. She’d positioned herself near the window—the one with the narrowest gap between boards—her eye pressed to the sliver of light. Her body had gone completely still. Watching. Tracking what she could see of the street.
“How many?” I asked over Lily’s head.
“A lot.” Flat. Clinical. “A bunch. All heading east toward the alarm. None looking in this direction.”
Thirty.
Forty.
And Finn sneaking through them.
“Can you see the Suburban?”
Fiona shifted, angling her head. A pause.
“Partially. The hood and front. Something’s—” She stopped.
“What?”
“One of them. Leaning against the driver’s side door.”
My stomach plummeted.
“Leaning?”
“Not moving much. Just… pressed against it. Head down. Like it got tired and stopped.”
Tired. As if the dead got tired. As if the thing slouched against the door of our only way out needed a moment to collect itself.
“Will Finn see it?”
Fiona didn’t answer right away. Her eye remained pressed to the gap in the boards.
“Yeah,” she said. “He’ll see it.”
I almost believed her.
Three minutes.
Too long.
That’s too long.
I stared at the back of Fiona’s head, willing her to say something—anything—that meant he’d made it, he’d reached the car, he’d gotten past the dead thing slumped against the door and gotten inside.
Nothing.
She just watched.
Her hand—the one hanging at her side—closed into a fist so tight her knuckles went ivory.
“Fiona,” I said carefully.
“He’s fine.”
“It’s been fou—”
“He’s fine.”
Her voice got super high on the second word. A fracture in all that composure. The first one I’d ever heard from her. It scared me more than the thing that had passed our door.
The siren wailed on.
Relentless.
Screaming into the empty morning, pulling the dead east, buying us time measured in decibels and battery life.
How long did a car alarm run? Finn had said five minutes.
I didn’t know if that was right. What I knew was the sound—I’d hated it my whole life, the way it burrowed under your skin, made your molars ache, made you want to throw something.
I’d complained about it to Finn once, some neighbor’s Jeep going off at midnight, and he’d laughed at me.
My hands had stopped shaking the moment it started.
Now that sound—
It stuttered.
One pulse skipped. Then another. The rhythm hiccupped—shrieked, faltered, shrieked again—like a mechanical heartbeat starting to fail.
I straightened.
Fiona’s head snapped toward me.
Our eyes met.
“No,” I whispered.
“No, no, no—”
“Libby.” Fiona’s voice sharpened.
The alarm stopped.
The silence hit harder than the gunshot had. Vast. Ringing. Total. No siren. No mechanical shriek. Just the low ambient groan of the street, the thud of my own pulse, and the soft, confused sounds of dead things that had just lost the only thing pulling them forward.
They’d stop now.
They’d mill.
They’d scatter.
Some of them would turn around.
And Finn—wherever he stood, however close or far from that Suburban—had just lost his cover.
Lily lifted her head from my shoulder.
“Mom?”
Her voice, trembling.
“Why did it stop?”
I couldn’t answer.
Fiona pressed her eye back to the window gap. Her breathing quickened—the first time I’d ever seen her composure slip into something approaching real fear.
“They’re stopping,” she said. “The ones heading east. They’re turning. Some of them. Looking around.”
Looking for new sounds.
Looking for new prey.
Looking for him.
“Can you see him?” My voice came out raw. Scraped. “Fiona—can you see him?”
A long pause.
Too long.
“No,” she said.
The word landed between us like a dropped blade.
Lily’s grip on me tightened until her fingers hurt.
Fiona pulled back from the window and turned. Her face was a mask of control, the same one she’d worn since day one. But the composure didn’t reach her eyes; in them, I saw all her twenty-four years, raw and terrified.
“What do we do?” Lily asked.
Nobody answered.
I closed my eyes.
Opened them.
“We wait,” I said. “We trust him.”
“And if—” Lily started.
“We wait.”
Fiona gave a single, sharp nod and turned back to the window.
Searching.
The silence screamed louder than any alarm.