I smelled smoke before I saw him.
That alone was enough to make my pulse spike. Smoke meant fire, and fire meant people, and people meant decisions I wasn't ready to make. I slowed my pace, careful with each step, easing forward until the concrete skeletons of old buildings broke the wind. The smell was faint—old smoke, not fresh—but it clung to the air stubbornly, like it didn't want to leave.
Someone had been here. Recently enough to matter.
I crouched behind a collapsed storefront and waited, breath shallow, eyes scanning for movement. My legs trembled from the cold and the distance I'd covered, but I forced them still. Stillness was dangerous—but recklessness was worse.
A shape moved near the alley across the street.
Not dragging. Not pacing.
Walking.
That shouldn't have been comforting. It was.
He came into view slowly, hands visible, shoulders hunched beneath too many layers. A rifle hung from a sling across his chest, barrel angled down, finger nowhere near the trigger. He moved like someone who knew exactly how loud each step was. That kind of control didn't come from panic.
It came from practice.
I stayed hidden, watching. He stopped near a burn barrel tucked between two dumpsters, nudged it with his boot, then crouched to stir the ashes with a piece of rebar. Nothing flared. Whatever fire had been there was long dead.
"Damn," he muttered, voice hoarse but calm.
Hearing a voice out loud felt unreal. I flinched despite myself. He didn't.
He stood, rolled his shoulders, and turned—slowly, deliberately—until his eyes landed on the storefront I was hiding behind.
I froze.
For a long second, neither of us moved. The distance between us felt fragile, like thin ice. I could see his face clearly now: mid-thirties maybe, beard frost-streaked, eyes sharp but tired. No wildness there. No hunger-glaze. Just caution layered over exhaustion.
"You're not hiding well," he said. Not loud. Not accusing. Just stating a fact.
I tightened my grip on the crowbar and stepped out where he could see me. Keeping it half-lowered was a choice. Raising it would have been a decision.
"Neither are you," I said.
A corner of his mouth twitched. "Fair."
We stood there, snow whispering around us, both of us measuring how fast the other could kill if it came to that. He took in my clothes, my pack, the way my hands shook despite my effort to keep them steady.
"You alone?" he asked.
"Yes," I said, then corrected myself. "For now."
He nodded, like that was the only honest answer available. "Name's Rowan."
I hesitated. Names had weight. Names made you real to people who might bury you later.
Still—I gave it. "I'm—"I stopped. Swallowed."Call me whatever," I finished.
Rowan studied me for a moment longer, then nodded again. He didn't push. That earned him more trust than anything else could have.
"You're moving east," he said, not a question.
"Yes."
"Good. West is picked clean. South's worse." He gestured vaguely with his chin. "You got food?"
I didn't answer right away.
He noticed. "Right. Stupid question."
We stood in silence again. The cold filled the gaps easily.
"You heard them yet?" Rowan asked finally.
My stomach tightened. "Heard what?"
He didn't smile this time. "The ones that don't move until you do."
The words slid into place too neatly. I nodded once.
"Good," he said. "Means you're still alive."
He turned away from me then, just enough to signal something important: he wasn't planning on shooting me in the back. He started walking east again, boots crunching softly.
I stayed where I was.
After three steps, he stopped. Didn't turn around.
"You can keep following at a distance if you want," he said. "Or you can walk with me. Either way, don't stop moving."
"Why?" I asked.
"Because winter punishes hesitation," he replied. "And because whatever's out there?" He paused. "It notices patterns."
That settled it.
I fell in beside him, keeping a careful arm's length between us. Close enough to talk. Far enough to react.
We walked like that for hours, trading silence back and forth. The city thinned as we went, buildings giving way to long stretches of buried road and skeletal trees bent beneath the weight of ice. The wind cut sharper out here, but it carried sound farther too. That mattered.
Rowan broke the quiet first. "You see any standing dead yet?"
"Yes."
He exhaled slowly. "They don't like the cold. Not the way we do."
"What way is that?"
"They don't fight it," he said. "They let it take them. And then they wait."
The image settled heavy in my mind. The upright body in the grocery store. The ones under the overpass.
"What happens when they warm up?" I asked.
Rowan's jaw tightened. "We don't let them."
That answer came too fast. Too practiced.
As daylight thinned into that long, gray stretch before dark, we came across a farmhouse half-buried in snowdrifts. Smoke stains blackened the chimney. Windows boarded. The door reinforced with scrap metal and prayer.
Rowan stopped well short of it.
"Occupied?" I asked.
"Maybe," he said. "Or maybe it was."
We circled carefully, scanning for tracks. Human footprints—old, half-filled. Drag marks too shallow to mean much. No fresh movement.
Inside, the house smelled like mold and burned wood. Furniture was gone, walls stripped bare. Someone had lived hard here, then left harder. We found a single room still usable, its door braced shut, the hearth cold but intact.
We didn't light a fire.
We ate instead—measured bites, backs to opposite walls, eyes never fully closing. I shared the peaches. Rowan didn't comment, but the way his shoulders eased told me it mattered.
Night settled in, heavy and absolute.
That's when we heard it.
Not close. Not far.
A sound like ice cracking under pressure. Followed by a low, wet exhale.
Rowan's eyes snapped open. Mine never closed.
He lifted a finger, silent, and leaned toward the door. The sound came again, closer now. Then another. Multiple.
Something brushed the outside wall.
I felt it in my teeth.
Rowan leaned back, mouth close to my ear. "They smelled the food."
My heart hammered. "What do we do?"
He didn't answer right away. He was listening—really listening—the way you did when every second mattered.
Finally, he said, "We don't wait."
We moved as one, quiet and fast, slipping out the back window into the dark. The cold hit like punishment, but movement kept it at bay. Behind us, something scraped along the wall where we'd been sitting moments before.
We didn't look back.
By the time we stopped running, my lungs were on fire and my legs felt like they belonged to someone else. Rowan bent over, hands on his knees, breath fogging thick.
"You see?" he said between gasps. "Stillness costs more."
I nodded, too tired to argue.
As we walked on into the dark, I realized something that scared me more than the sounds behind us.
For the first time since the power went out, I wasn't alone.
And winter had noticed.