The wall of cars was behind them now, swallowed up by the bend in the road, but the feeling it left behind hadn't faded. Jake walked a few paces ahead of the group, saying nothing, his jaw tight in a way that had nothing to do with exhaustion.
Something about that wreckage had been wrong. Not the twisted metal, not the shattered glass crunching under their boots as they picked their way through the gaps — that part was ordinary, the kind of ruin the world had gotten used to producing. It was something underneath all that. A wrongness he couldn't have explained to Jim or Ellie even if he'd wanted to, a texture in the air that pressed against something inside him he didn't like to think about too hard. No human hands had piled those cars like that. He didn't know how he knew. He just knew, the same certain, bone-deep way he always seemed to know things lately that he had no business knowing.
"You okay?" Jim asked, falling into step beside him, voice pitched low enough that Cecil and Ellie, trailing a few yards back, wouldn't catch it.
"Fine," Jake said, too quick.
Jim didn't push, but he didn't look away either, not for a few seconds longer than was comfortable. There was something in the way Jim watched him sometimes — not suspicious exactly, more like a man doing quiet math in his head and getting an answer he couldn't quite make sense of. Jake had noticed it before and always brushed it off. He had bigger things to worry about than Jim's stares.
A chill crawled up the back of Jim's neck as they passed the last of the wreckage, subtle but unmistakable, the kind of cold that had nothing to do with the weather. He rubbed at his arms without really meaning to and cast one more glance over his shoulder at the twisted metal graveyard behind them, half expecting something to be standing there watching. Nothing was. That somehow made it worse.
"Same feeling as the supermarket," Jake muttered, mostly to himself, eyes narrowed at the empty road ahead.
Jim caught the words anyway. "The supermarket?"
Jake didn't answer right away. Weeks back, in some dead little town whose name he hadn't bothered to remember, they'd cleared out a supermarket for supplies, and the second Jake had stepped through those sliding doors, something had crawled up his spine and refused to let go. Nothing had attacked them that day. Nothing had even shown up. But the feeling had been unmistakable, wrong in a way that words didn't quite reach, and he'd been right to trust it — they found out two days later that the whole block had been sitting on top of something none of them wanted to think about anymore.
"Just a feeling," Jake said finally, which wasn't a lie, exactly. Just not the whole truth. "This place has the same one."
Jim huffed his eyes kept drifting back toward Jake, watching the set of his shoulders, the tightness around his eyes. Worry, Jim decided. That's what this was. Jake didn't get like this over nothing. He'd seen it once before too, a flicker of something on Jake's face right before things went sideways, and he'd learned the hard way not to ignore it. There was a lot about Jake that Jim had learned not to ask questions about — small things that never quite added up, moments that should have gone one way and instead went another, undead that should have torn Jake apart on sight and instead had simply... stopped. Turned away. Once, Jim could have sworn he'd seen one step between Jake and a swarm like it was shielding him, though he'd told himself afterward it was just adrenaline playing tricks, just a bad angle in bad light. He'd never told anyone. Wasn't even sure what there was to tell. But he kept it filed away all the same, tucked behind the kind of watchfulness that didn't need words to explain itself.
"C'mon, let's move," Jake said, waving the thought aside — his own thought, not Jim's, though Jim's silence in that moment felt oddly heavy too. Jake picked up his pace without waiting for agreement, the others falling in line behind him the way they always did now.
The road stretched ahead of them, cracked and empty, flanked by dead fields on either side and the distant, broken skyline of what might have once been a small town. No movement. No sound but their own footsteps and the wind combing through dry grass. Too quiet, still, in that same way it had been for two days now — but this kind of quiet felt different. Heavier. Watched.
None of them noticed the billboard.
It stood a few hundred meters off the main road, rusted and faded, an old advertisement for some soda brand nobody would ever buy again, half its lettering peeled away by weeks of sun and rain. And on top of it, crouched low against the metal frame like something that had been waiting there a long, long time, a figure stood perfectly still, watching.
It wasn't shaped quite right. Not anymore. Whatever it had been once, human most likely, had long since been carved away and replaced with something leaner, hungrier, wrong in the way its joints bent and the way its head tilted too far to one side as it stared down at the group moving along the road below. Its eyes — if they could still be called that — tracked Jake specifically, locked onto him and nothing else, ignoring Jim, Ellie, Cecil entirely as if they didn't exist.
A low sound rattled out of its throat, wet and satisfied, as a long, gray tongue dragged slowly across cracked lips.
"I finally found you, Jake," it rasped, the words thick and mangled, barely holding the shape of language anymore. "I found you."
It didn't move yet. Didn't need to. It had waited this long already — a little longer wouldn't matter, not with the road only leading one way, and not with that unmistakable pull thrumming under its rotted skin, drawing it toward something it recognized in Jake that none of the others could ever hope to sense.
Down on the road, Jake slowed for half a step, a strange prickle crawling up the back of his neck — the same one from the wall of cars, the same one from the supermarket, and the same one from when he had fought the undead that bit him except sharper now. Closer.
He turned his head, scanning the horizon behind them, the tree line, the rooftops, the billboard standing silent and empty against the darkening sky.
He saw nothing.
But he didn't stop feeling watched.