The Glass Line had nearly reached their building by the time they reached the street. Hawk's little group had collected the few supplies they were offered. Flashlights. Plastic rope. Some glo-lights. They had more camera equipment than anything else, including both handheld cameras and go-pros they each strapped to their chests. Gotta get that footage for Kaiser, Hawk thought. But what more could they want? Guns? Hawk couldn't shoot. Alex might be able to. Em probably could. Kaiser's words, there's something alive down there, echoed unpleasantly. Far more unpleasant was the thought of oops. Untrained fingers on triggers. Unsure hands guiding shots. No thank you.

Not that they'd been offered guns.

As they reached the streets Em turned to Hawk's go-pro and said "Morituri te Salutant!" with the Live Long and Prosper salute.

"Ave, Imperator," Alex muttered, then, louder, "Knock it off, Em. This is either gonna be bad, or it's gonna be really bad. The more you joke before..." he trailed off. Humor bleached out of him like color from bone. He reached for the radios they'd been given, microphones pinned to lapels. "I've got a visual on the Glass Line. And a body."

The three other flashlights tracked Alex's. There, in the blank midnight ghost-town was a single man on a park bench. Dead. Blood dripped around his eyes and mouth, all mercifully closed. His clothes were rumpled and damp with an ooze of fluids. That and the glass ashes blowing on the wind had erased his identity. This could have been a businessman. It could have been a tourist, or maybe a homeless person. Someone's father. Maybe their mother. Maybe black or white. None of it mattered. They were unidentified. They were everyone. Maybe they had gone unwarned. No hands had reached them, no cries guided them out of danger. Maybe they'd wondered where everyone was. Maybe they'd known, and come here to loot. At some point they'd begun feeling ill, had sat down here, and their life had drawn closed around them.

The Glass Line approached. It was far more impressive this time, driven by an exponentially larger hole than the tiny pin-hole in Mrs. Cumming's yard. It curled through the leaves of a nearby plant, burning the color out, turning it to something frail and translucent. Some of these defied gravity and remained, a monument to life now extinguished. Most of them collapsed like the spans of a dying bridge, letting go with the same majesty and dissolving into more dust. It skated across the ground in great billows, matching the swoops of glowing energy that drove on down the street. Great arcs, what Em called aural spikes, rotated through the line as it devoured stem, leaves, petals, wood...and now skin, as it reached the body. It started on the body with a soft, high sound, something that demanded metaphor, dreams breaking, hope dying. It crested through skin, drawing it tight, draining blood, draining life. It etched through organic clothing, causing it to fall around the shoulders of this long-dead human, stopped only by the polyester jacket he had been wearing.

And then it was done, and rolling over them in a great white storm. The light played over Hawk, over Emile, over Alex and Dyson. It had a cool beauty, an evanescence driven harsh by the fact of its lethality. It left them alive. That felt almost worse. It should have killed them with its beauty, left them unable to experience what it left behind.

The body was now unrecognizable as a human. Its features were blunted by glass. Only the impression of a scream was left, for a handful of seconds before the neck, weakened into inorganic insensibility, shattered under the weight and angle. The head hit the ground, nothing but beige crystal.

Nothing but Glass.

Em said, conversationally, "This is it. This is our warning from the universe. It's only going to get worse from here."

"Oh, my God," Hawk whispered.

And looked in horror at the zoo. There'd been hundreds of people in there when this was set off. Hundreds.

The gates waited up ahead. They had been covered in attractive climbing ivy, with bromeliads and elephant-ears and philodendrons, bougainvillea and oleanders and other tropical flowering plants, and they were all beige now, light refracting through what was left of their flowers. The sky arced black above them all, eyeless, soulless. There was an empty, quiet, multi-lane street between them and the zoo. It should have rolled with cars, an eternal prayer to business and momentum. A few stray neon signs still stood, here and there. Not within the zoo. The electricity had been cut like a silenced pulse. They were crossing that street now, at a crosswalk that had been repainted to look like animal patterns. Zebra stripes. Leopard spots. An elephant statue stood at the mid-point, where a ribbon of grass and small trees had been left to make a green space. There had been no breeze to shatter the remnants of grass. Their passage sent the blades tumbling down to the dust. The street lamps were still working. Halfway across the second half of the street, the lights switched to walk and a beeping sound began. It existed to let the blind know it was safe to cross. It spoke to no-one but their little quartet.

Hawk walked towards the gates. There were signs of flight, scattered papers, tossed belongings. The gate barriers had been completely opened and were filled with--she looked away, sharply, down at the ground. There was a shape just a few inches from her feet. Arm-shaped, attached to an elbow-shape, and thence to a shoulder-shape and then--she looked up at the black and soulless sky, then across the street behind herself, where the glass-line was burning trees to nothing, erasing the identities of the...the...the dead. She needed to think that word, the dead, and she needed to keep functioning in their name. There was a dead, beige ficus between two dead, beige bouganvilla, and it was easier to look at the beige crystals that had been a ficus than it was to look at the still form beneath them—forms, that she didn't see, that she couldn't see. Seeing them made her thoughts blank out, the way a loud scream could make a recording blank out at the roar of it. She took the camera out to take a picture. It was only of the ficus. She had to tell herself that. And yet the unwanted information still came in, like little waves overtopping a levy. There were forms at her feet. Two of the forms were small, and they were right next to, right next to—step away, take a big gulp of air, and she fell into Alex, who was what she needed. He was there. He was warm. He was alive, and his arms were around her.

"You okay?" He whispered.

She nodded and looked to the others. Dyson and Em were huddled together, and it was Em speaking to Dyson. Harshly, but from the drift of words--yes, they're fucking dead. I see them too. You gotta stay with me, Henry--it was a good harsh. Hawk said, "Check on them," with a jerk of her chin, meaning both Dyson and his non-binary shoulder-angel. Hawk watched her husband leave, and now she could turn back to the ficus, crystals trailing from it as deadened leaves collapsed. Steady the camera. There was a stroller next to the three still forms beneath the ficus. Most of the contents were crystalized, including an organic stuffie. Hawk could imagine it was made of hypo-allergenic cotton batting, double stitched for security. Maybe it had been a little teddy bear. She raised her arms to take a picture of the ficus and the stroller, and click, it was done.

The smallest form had been wearing a cheerful polyester onesie with friendly sunshine faces.

Oh, God, she couldn't do this.

She reeled away from all of it, stumbled over to the metal pole of a bike rack, bikes chained in place that would never be retrieved, and hurled most of an empty stomach on the ground. Her spit destroyed the remains of Glass plants. She didn't care.

"Hawk?" Em's worried voice.

"Zoos are where families go. You know? Families." She spoke to her shoes, the army boots Kaiser had given her. Thank God, he'd given her something to wear. She didn't have to ever look at these boots again. What would it have been like, if she'd had to wear her own clothes? "I didn't think about it, but...School would have been in session, so maybe not so many, but..." Hawk needed to get her breathing under control. Deep breaths. Deep and slow. Come on now. There'd been kids inside.

"We have to see it, Hawk." Emile said. They stepped forward now. Gently took hold of Hawk. "You know it, same as I do. There has to be a witness. A neutral, fair witness who can look at this and repeat it to the world. Otherwise people like Kaiser and Studdard win. This is on them. And the only way it stays on them is if you go in there and take pictures of it, so we can show—"

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The sound echoed as few sounds would, because it came from a place of absolute quiet. Ah-ha-ha-HOO-ha-ha-ha. There, ahead of them, to the right inside the zoo. It was a single hooting cry. Ape-like, echoing over the crystalizing ground cover and bodies all around them. And then another, from a different place to the left, still inside the zoo's encircling walls. AH-ha-ha-HOO.

Hawk was frozen. "Holy shit," She said.

Another series of soft hoots. Nothing terrifying, save that they were ape-like, and they were within the walls where nothing living could possibly exist. And, indeed, things were not precisely still. There was a whispering that had not been present at Mrs. Cumming's house. It was the collapse of the Glassed, certainly. Leaves and limbs all tumbling down to entropy. But there was also...more. It was a whisper of skin and claw, strangely absent most of its volume, but Hawk had heard the death-knell of everything, kneeling in an old woman's back yard. There was something alive behind the wall.

"Fuck. Kaiser wasn't just spinning us up," Em said.

Lions, Hawk thought. Tigers and Bears. Oh, my.

"We can go back," Henry said, hopefully.

As an answer, Alex played his flashlight over his feet. "There's ten bodies out here at the gate. I've been counting. One of 'em is a family. I'm pretty sure these two," he paused the flashlight at two shapes in khaki that some blessed tailor had made cheerful and jaunty. There was embroidery on the lapels. "They were employees trying to get people out of the zoo." A pause. "I want to go back, too."

No more was said, but they kept walking. Onward beneath the gate, with the cheerful acrylic faces of a cartoon elephant and tiger slowly crumbling off their cork-board, already Glass and already mostly gone. There was a tangle of something that must have been a person, because the ends of thick braids in neon colors still lay there, between headphones and a crumbling limb structure stuck inside a shoe. Hawk looked away from it, into a kiosk filled with frozen glass, its little, eager motor creating gusts of cold for ice-cream that had long ago quit being ice or cream. With a whisper, the happy canvas awning gave way to gravity. Once-glorious wisteria was crumbling to paper shards. There was beauty here, oh yes. Death has its own slow grace as you fall into its depths. But this did not let you mistake it for anything but decay.

Something moved in the darkness ahead.

It was brief, a movement between two dead trees, but it was there. Em shrieked, startled, as a bush dissolved into nothingness. The whatever-it-was fled in a rush of dark fur and bright eyes, flashing once in the lights before vanishing with a hooting call back into the dark.

And it was answered. That was the true terror. A dozen-odd cries greeted it, all more distant and more hesitant. Even the sound of the voices brought another cataclysm to the remnants of trees and grass and people. Organic life did not belong here, but something hooted away from Alex and Hawk, none-the-less.

"Alright. Maybe we're not going in." Alex said.

AH-ha-ha-HOO, from right behind them, and the rest of the former ice-cream cart gave way with a crash.

"We're not going back, either," Em said.

Hawk thought for a moment, running through her brief stent of post-graduation minimum wage employment. There was a restaurant nearby, gleefully jungle themed with a whole explosion of artificial plants filling the world with green. "Let's go for the kitchens. They're gonna be relatively easy to secure, and there's knives and a walk in fridge we can barricade off if we absolutely have to." She said.

The other three considered it.

AH-ha-ha-HOO-ha ha.

"We're going. We're going!" Em said, grabbed Dyson, and began marching towards the restaurant.

There were many more bodies inside. Apparently the Event had started about two PM, based on the shattered remains of a dead clock. There'd been panic in here, too, at least at the entrance. At least ten bodies, one of which had been pulverized by the hydraulic arm closing the door, two strollers. The four of them pushed through the dead bodies, pausing once to photograph, once more for Alex to find a wallet on the floor between three bodies. The leather was mostly gone, but the cards were still there. He grabbed them all, shoved them in a pocket. "Keep going." He said.

When the door closed, they all gathered at the glass, peering through. Alex jammed a pole into the handle, effectively locking it in place. And outside, the dead brush was moving, whipping up a cloud of Glass particles until the air looked like fog. Ah-ha-ha-HOO echoed through the night.

"How the fuck is anything alive down here?" Em said.

"Keep going back to the kitchen." Alex said.

"Why a kitchen?" Dyson said, as they passed a table. It was laid out with bright colors, plastic folders, balloons that promised a Happy Birthday, a litter of crayons and backpacks and fanny packs, of small pocket toys and shoes. Hawk was frozen by the shoes. She remembered something from a documentary on Titanic, about how everyone was mystified by the presence of pairs of shoes in the wreckage, and there were pairs of shoes here, lined up neat, and they were all children's shoes and...oh God. Oh God.

She turned away from the tables of darkened, dead things over darkened, dead food and half ran after her team. Modern shoes used rubber soles. There'd be traces of every person here, for at least a while after their bodies had broken down to nothing at all. They'd be able to count the dead by counting shoes.

But she'd lost track of the others. They'd gone in one direction, through artificial topiary and sheets of polyester—there'd been a whole tiki-bar set up in here, but the banks of rattan wall-weaving was unraveling flake by crystal flake, above disintegrating paper umbrellas in twenty-odd beverages. The sign behind them advertised family-friendly lemonade, five dollars a glass. The ice was mostly melted, but some condensation still waited for hands that would never smear it.

Alex and the others were gone. Hawk was alone.

A bang at the front of the restaurant. Hawk shrieked and dropped behind a table. There was a woman's purse at eye-level, in the middle of a seat covered in ash. She swallowed the urge to vomit and stared through to the windowed entry.

Movement. A brief glimpse of a shape mostly broken by chair legs. Limbs and fur and darkness and wide, wild eyes, and bang, something lept upon the glass and came back down, and a muted shrieking, unique and horrible, echoed through the restaurant. Hawk grabbed the point-and-shoot camera they'd given her and aimed it at the front of the restaurant. Bang. The something lept again and this time the howl was distinctly ape-like, and angry.

Silence. She began to relax.

Bang, and worse than bang, the sound of shattering plate glass. Good old human, pedestrian stuff, a barrier that was no match for the thing in front of her. Now she was frozen, absolutely, peering through a maze of chair and table legs, a posthuman jungle-world ruled by...by what? Certainly not Hawk.

She heard glass crunch, a grunt of pain...and then a noise from behind. She wheeled on it, one hand firmly in her mouth, biting down on the scream and her own fingers. The other hand struck out, closed and hard—and was stopped by Alex's own hand. His eyes, wonderful, the best blue she'd ever seen, glimmered with both admiration and terror, and he motioned for her to go behind him. She didn't need to be told twice. Glass was skittering once more, followed by another grunt of pain, but it wasn't going to take long for something intelligent to figure this out.

Hawk slipped through a service door, stood up in the safety of shadows, and waited for her husband to join her.

He didn't. He dropped a chair to one side, then crawled behind it and stayed to watch.

In a hush of broken glass and blood, something emerged from behind the wall. It half dragged itself, favoring feet that had, she supposed, met glass for the first time. And at first it was everything Hawk had feared. A flash of wild eye-whites, rimming around feverish mammalian gold. Fur, thick and black as velvet, skin even darker, swift and lithe and creeping. It rang every bell in Hawk's lizard brain.

And then it paused, made a keening noise, and rolled onto its rear in a pool of overhead light.

It was ape-like, and smaller than a gorilla. Its teeth were large, white, and quite blunt. One of them was capped with something. The rest were yellowed ivory. It had something gathered cloth-like around its loins, with several other objects. It hooted softly, whimpers more than expressions, and turned its large, blunt feet up to the light. Its forelimbs were...oh, call it what they are, Hawk, it had hands, with opposable thumbs that it used to pull large, painful fragments of glass out of its feet. There was something very strange about its chest, something that made Hawk's breath catch in both awe and sour fear, because no sooner had Hawk noticed the creature's strange anatomy, but it started moving independently. Spider like...no, baby like, because that's what it was. A dark-furred baby, limbs wrapped tight around it's mothers' neck and...and...

And the mother spotted Alex, leaving the rest of the observations scattered to the wind. Her eyes widened, and she screamed, showing her huge teeth. She swept around onto hands and bleeding feet, and flashed her teeth again. They were better developed than any ape Hawk had ever seen, and with that flash of dominance and fear, Hawk's whole world changed a second time. Because she'd been right. The creature's lower left canine was capped off with metal and red stones. This was a made thing in her teeth. Made. Which meant Hawk had to admit it had a loin-cloth, with baubles dangling off the main rope that gleamed with the most essential of made quantities, and the infant had a doll-like shape in its grip, wrapped with a white cloth. And maybe there was a sane explanation for it, but Hawk would never hear it because the creature darted, inhumanly fast, back out into the night beyond the restaurant.

"Holy fuck," Alex said, summarizing everything tumbling through Hawk's mind like a blender. He looked back at her. "It had clothes."

And, as the silence drew closer and tighter, she had nothing else to say.