The side door came in first.
Not all the way.
Just enough for the frame to scream and the latch plate to rip free in a shower of screws.
Then the garage moved.
Not the people in it. The room itself. Metal jumping. Shelves rattling. The bowed door coughing dust and rust into the air. The blood-slick face jammed through the torn lower panel gave one ecstatic jerk and then the whole corrugated slab punched inward half a foot.
Ren fired twice through the gap.
The smile vanished.
Didn't matter.
Hands hit the side door from the outside in a flat, slapping rush.
Human palms. Human fingers. Too many.
"Ladder," Ren snapped.
Everybody finally did what she said.
Ty hauled Marlon off the table with a noise that was half effort, half panic. Marlon nearly folded on the first step and caught himself with a curse that came out weak enough to scare Isaac worse than the blood had.
Jadah shoved off Isaac's shoulder and staggered toward the wall ladder under her own power because dying politely in a garage full of strangers would've offended her personally.
Isaac moved with her.
The side door blew inward.
One of Ren's people caught it in the chest and went down under the weight of two bodies piling through. Human bodies. Human faces. Both wrong in different ways. One was sobbing while he clawed forward on all fours, tears and blood mixing down his cheeks. The other was laughing through a broken jaw, each breath clicking wetly.
Ren shot the laughing one in the throat.
It dropped.
Still moving.
Still reaching.
The sobbing one got up with one arm hanging wrong and slammed the fallen man's head into the concrete hard enough to pulp it, then turned toward the nearest living thing.
Ty.
"Move!" Isaac shouted.
Ty moved because this time the thing was already on him.
He yanked Marlon sideways instead of backward, took the hit on his shoulder, and both of them crashed into the base of the ladder. Marlon barked out a sound through gritted teeth, then nearly blacked out on the spot.
The thing went for Ty's face.
Isaac was there before the teeth got there.
He caught a hanging chain off the wall—something meant for a hoist or a lockup gate, greasy and cold—and wrapped it around the thing's throat on instinct. Not planned. Not graceful. Just hard.
It thrashed.
Strong in a horrible, directionless way.
Isaac planted one foot against the wall and hauled back with both hands.
His bad shoulder lit up so bright it almost took his vision.
Didn't matter.
The chain bit in. The thing clawed at its own neck, then at him, nails scoring his forearm wrap and biting into skin. Its face changed under his hands. Not back to human. Just more pitiful. More obvious that a man had once lived in there and maybe still did in scraps.
That almost got him.
Almost.
Then it smiled through the choke and tried to bite its own shoulder to tear free of the chain.
Isaac leaned back harder and felt something inside the motion go strange.
Not stronger.
Cleaner.
For one second the whole room thinned. Not slowed. Not exactly. More like the useless noise dropped away and left only lines: where Ty was dragging Marlon, where Jadah's foot would slip on blood if she planted there, where Ren's next shot would punch through shelving if she fired now, where the chain needed to turn in his hands to close fully.
One second.
Maybe less.
Enough.
He twisted.
The chain locked under the thing's jaw.
Its spine gave with a wet, compact pop.
The body hit the floor and kept jerking against the concrete.
Isaac stared at it.
His own hands were still moving, tightening the chain long after there was no need.
"Isaac!"
Jadah.
He looked up.
She was on the ladder already, three rungs up, one hand white-knuckled around the rail, blood running down from her shoulder to her wrist and dripping off her fingers. She looked furious that climbing while wounded existed as a concept.
Ty had Marlon half over the first rung now and was swearing him upward one body part at a time.
"Come on, bro. Come on. Be a person."
"Trying," Marlon muttered.
Good. Still talking.
Ren fired again. One of the things at the side door lost half its face and still got three more dragging steps into the room before her surviving man jammed a pry bar down through its eye socket and pinned it to the floor like a lid.
The garage door finally gave.
Not all at once. A jagged scream of bolts. Then the whole lower third slammed inward and three more bodies rolled through the opening in a wave of blood, rust flakes, and night air.
One got up laughing.
One got up silent.
One didn't get up at all, just lay there shaking on the concrete with its hands over its own ears while blood pumped between its fingers.
Outside, beyond them, the city kept dying loud.
Isaac looked once at Evelyn on the floor.
Still there.
Still dead.
No time.
He grabbed the wall ladder and started up.
The steel was cold and greasy under his hands. Blood on his palms made it worse. His ribs screamed every time he pulled. Behind him Ren shouted something to her last standing man and the answer got swallowed by a gunshot.
The hatch at the top of the ladder was already half open.
Somebody had left it that way years ago or tonight, hard to know which.
Jadah shoved through first and disappeared onto the roof without waiting for permission from the universe.
Ty got Marlon up another rung and lost his grip for half a second.
Marlon slipped.
Isaac caught him under the arm before he could go all the way back down.
Pain tore through Isaac's shoulder so hard he saw white.
Marlon hung there, one leg useless, one hand barely holding the rail.
"Don't," Isaac said through his teeth.
"Excellent instruction," Marlon breathed.
Ty got back under him at once. "I got you, I got you."
"You keep saying that."
"Because it keeps being true."
Together they shoved him upward.
Below them, something hit the ladder.
Not enough to shake it loose.
Enough to make the whole metal spine ring.
Ty looked down and immediately regretted being born.
"Nope."
One of the silent ones had made it to the base. Human face. Human work shirt. Human hands. It was climbing wrong. Too many limbs in the motion somehow even though there were still only four. Teeth bared, eyes leaking blood, head jerking every time the pressure outside the world pulsed.
Ren appeared below it and fired point-blank into the back of its skull.
The body folded backward off the rungs and took another one with it in a tangle of meat and momentum.
"Up!" she shouted.
The bruise-colored light outside flashed brighter for one sick instant and the whole roof hatch rattled above them.
Isaac shoved Marlon the last few feet.
Ty hauled from above.
Jadah appeared again at the opening, lay flat on her stomach on the roof, and grabbed Marlon's shirt with her good arm.
Between all three of them, they dragged him through.
Then Ty.
Then Isaac.
Ren came last.
She slammed the hatch down behind her and dropped the steel locking bar into place just as something hit it from below hard enough to make all five of them feel it through the roof.
Nobody spoke for two breaths.
Then all of them looked up.
The city was gone and not gone.
Still there. Same blocks, same towers, same bridges, same water. But the lights were wrong now. Whole sections blacked out. Other sections flickering with emergency reds and dirty sodium yellows. Fires burned in three different directions Isaac could see without even turning his head. Sirens wailed and cut and wailed again, then got swallowed by sounds he had no names for.
And above all of it, splitting the distance over downtown, the bruise in the sky hung open.
Not a door.
He knew that.
Didn't help.
It was a vertical wound in the world, miles tall, not touching anything and touching everything at once. The air around it rippled like heat haze and oil slick and torn film laid over each other. Sometimes it looked thin enough to vanish if you blinked. Sometimes it looked close enough to fall through.
Ty saw it cleanly for the first time and sat down hard on the tar roof without meaning to.
"No," he said. Then again, like repetition might fix scale. "No."
Marlon lay on his side where they'd dragged him, trying and failing to get enough air around the pain in his leg and arm to make the view matter less.
Jadah stood because falling down felt too much like surrender, then immediately bent at the waist with one hand over her mouth like she might throw up. She didn't. Pride again. Stupid, useful pride.
Ren crossed the roof in three quick strides and got low by the parapet.
"Get down."
Isaac did, finally because his legs had started deciding for him.
From here the sounds changed.
Less sky. More street.
Screaming in some places. Nothing in others. Cars jackknifed at intersections. One bus halfway up a median with both front doors open and no one coming out. On a roof two buildings over, three figures pounded on a locked access shack while a fourth crawled at them in a weird low rush.
Then one of the three turned on the others.
Human.
Still human.
Ty saw that too and made a rough, disbelieving sound. "They're everywhere."
"Not everywhere," Ren said.
He looked at her. "That was not comforting."
"It wasn't meant to be."
Her eyes kept moving over rooftops, alleys, windows, the neighboring warehouse line. Counting motion. Counting absence.
Isaac looked at her, then at the black case still in her hand, then out at the bruise in the sky.
"Is this because of that."
She didn't answer right away.
That was answer enough.
No certainty. Just enough.
Jadah straightened slowly. Her face had gone gray under the blood and sweat.
"What do you mean, because of that."
Ren still didn't look at them. "I mean something opened."
Ty stared. "To what."
Ren said nothing.
Good. Honest for once.
Marlon dragged in a breath. "Route."
Everybody looked at him.
He had his eyes closed. Still talking through it anyway.
"Need one."
Ty pointed at him like outrage could keep him awake. "Yes. Exactly. Thank you. We love routes."
Ren nodded once, like Marlon had handed her a tool.
"North roofline. Two jumps, one ladder down, then service stairs into the freezer plant."
Ty turned and actually looked at the gap between buildings.
"You think I can jump that carrying him?"
"Can you drag him out of hell by the ankles?"
Ty opened his mouth.
Closed it.
"Fair."
Another impact hit the roof hatch below them.
Then another.
Metal boomed under their knees.
Jadah whipped around. "That bar isn't enough."
"No," Ren said. "It isn't."
Isaac felt that thin, wrong clarity flicker again.
Not the whole-room version from downstairs.
Smaller. Meaner. Like some hidden part of him had woken just enough to say not yet, not safe, move now.
He looked across the roofline.
The first gap to the next building wasn't huge. Four feet maybe. Five if you counted wrong and died for it. Beyond that, a lower roof with HVAC units and ductwork. Beyond that, the ladder Ren mentioned, hanging off the side of a brick utility box.
Possible.
Ugly.
Possible.
Something moved on the next roof.
Everybody saw it.
A man near the far parapet turned toward them in stages. Office shirt. Tie hanging loose. Blood down the front. One hand pressed flat to his own stomach like he'd been trying to hold something in before he forgot why. He stood there, forty yards away, and stared.
Then five more heads rose around him from behind the HVAC units.
Not dramatic. Not fast.
Just there.
Watching.
Ty whispered, "Great."
The first man smiled.
Jadah grabbed Isaac's wrist. "No."
He looked at her.
She nodded once toward the other roof.
Meaning not that way.
Meaning the route was already seeing them.
Ren saw it too and changed the math without comment.
"South edge," she said. "Fire escape."
Ty laughed once, sharp and empty. "Love when the plan gets worse."
"It's getting shorter," Ren said.
The hatch below them boomed again. Louder. Metal bending now.
Isaac pushed up off the roof.
His body hated him for it.
Didn't matter.
He went to Marlon first because Ty couldn't carry him and joke and panic all at the same time forever, no matter how committed he sounded.
Marlon's eyes opened when Isaac crouched beside him.
"You look bad," Marlon said.
"So do you."
"Good."
Isaac got an arm under his shoulders and almost dropped him when the weight hit his own ribs and shoulder together.
Ty was there immediately on the other side. "On three."
"No one says three in real life," Jadah snapped.
"Then on now."
They hauled him up.
Marlon made a sound through his teeth and bit the rest of it off.
The roof hatch bar bent.
Not snapped.
Bent.
Below them, something laughed again.
Human voice.
Broken in the middle.
Ren moved to the south parapet, black case slung now, gun up in one hand, checking the alley below. "Clear enough."
"Enough for what," Ty said.
"For surviving the next minute."
That was fair. He hated that it was fair.
They started moving.
Slow because of Marlon. Fast because of everything else.
Isaac felt Jadah at his back, one hand occasionally touching the middle of his shoulder blades not out of affection but because blood loss and roof tar and apocalypse made balance a team sport.
At the parapet, Ty looked over and immediately regretted having eyes.
"Absolutely not."
The fire escape below wasn't a ladder so much as a series of rusted insults bolted to brick. One platform, then another, then a drop to the alley where trash bags and one overturned shopping cart waited in a puddle of something black.
Ren holstered her gun long enough to swing over the parapet one-handed, black case thumping against her hip.
Show-off, Isaac thought automatically.
Then immediately hated himself for the thought because some part of him was still normal enough to be petty on a roof while half the world was dead.
"Pass him down," Ren said from the platform below.
Ty stared at her. "That sentence is crazy."
The roof hatch burst open behind them.
Not wide.
Enough.
A blood-slick arm shot through first, fingers clawing over the tar roof. Then a head forced up under the bent metal, eyes running black-red, jaw working around a smile too big for its face.
Jadah made a sharp sound.
Ty stopped talking.
Good.
Isaac and Ty swung Marlon over the parapet together.
He was conscious enough to hate every second of it.
"Drop me and I haunt you."
Ty actually laughed once. "That's the spirit."
Ren took Marlon's weight from below with a noise that said he was more than she wanted but less than she'd admit. Isaac got over next. Then Ty. Jadah came last—
and the thing from the hatch got all the way onto the roof.
It rose wrong.
Not smoothly.
Shoulders jerking into place, one knee snapping straight, head tilted too far to one side. More shapes moved under the hatch behind it, pushing, climbing, tangling.
The first one saw Jadah at the parapet and ran.
Fast.
Too fast.
Isaac moved before thought.
He went back up two rungs, caught Jadah by the waist as she swung her injured shoulder over the edge, and yanked her downward so hard both of them slammed into the fire escape platform together.
Pain ripped through both of them. Her breath punched out. His shoulder nearly gave.
Above them, the thing hit the parapet with enough force to shake rust from the ironwork.
Its fingers clawed over the edge an inch from where Jadah's leg had just been.
Then Ren fired once.
The thing's face came apart sideways and the body folded backward out of sight onto the roof.
No one waited to see if it stayed down.
The whole fire escape shuddered as they started down.
Below them the alley waited.
Above them the bruise in the sky pulsed once, so huge it seemed to darken the whole city for the length of a heartbeat.
And somewhere inside that pulse, so small Isaac almost thought he imagined it, something under his skin answered back.