“I thought you’d been here watching your parents’ house?” Wil asked. “How do you know what downtown is like?”

“Cause it was on the news,” Qadira said. “And because you could hear the explosions for miles.”

“She’s right,” Hector said. “It was one of the last things on the news. Something exploded in the Wells Fargo Center, blew off the top ten or fifteen stories of the building, and then it collapsed. The power went out a little after that, but we heard other explosions too, even down here.”

“It doesn’t mean the entire city is lost,” Wil said. “There were at least fifty or sixty of those things just two blocks from here. You managed to survive this long, and Naomi could too.”

“Hey, you can do what you want,” Qadira said, “but if their son gets back her with a car that can fit me, I’m out.”

“So am I,” Rosa said. “Same as before.”

“It would have to be a full-size van to fit all ten of us,” Mr. Gutierrez said.

“I’ll be moving on with Wil,” Matsuda said.

“So eight,” Rosa said. “Mama, where did Raul say he was going?”

“Up Knott Street, said he wasn’t going to go past 40th,” Mrs. Gutierrez said.

“Shit, that’s where that huge-ass fight was,” Rosa said. “How long has he been going out for?”

“Not long, maybe an hour at a time at most.”

“It’s been at least that,” Mr. Gutierrez added.

“Okay,” Rosa said and took a breath. “I’m going out to look for him.”

“Mija, no!” Mrs. Gutierrez said and grabbed her daughter’s arm.

“We need that ammo from our car too,” Rosa said. “If we can get the other stuff, great, but the ammo is hard to come by.”

“It might’ve gotten soaked by the fire hydrant spraying everywhere,” Wil said.

“The stuff we got from the gas station might be, but the ammo was in those ranger packs, zipped up tight, inside the trunk. Should still be dry,” Matsuda said. “I was going to suggest going back. We already know the way.”

“Might as well,” Wil said. If they were going to head into the center of downtown, and it was half as bad as the outskirts, they’d need every bullet they could carry.

And at least one extra for ourselves, Wil thought.

“We’ll keep an eye out for Raul and any cars on the way,” Rosa said and kissed her mother on the forehead. “Stay here, and if Raul comes back, wait for us for an hour. If we’re longer than that, and he has a car, you go.”

“Absolutely not,” her father said.

“Papa, you go,” Rosa insisted. “We should be fine. Just a couple blocks, right?”

“Hm,” Matsuda grunted.

“Yeah, no biggie,” Wil said though his voice shook. Qadira snorted and shook her head.

“Good luck,” she said in a tone that suggested it wouldn’t make much difference.

“Let’s go,” Rosa said and gave her family a last quick hug before she, Wil, and Matsuda left the basement. Once they were on the main floor of the house, she crouched down and moved with slower, softer steps. The house was still completely open to the street, and the streets didn’t belong to normal people any more.

“Same way we came in?” Wil whispered.

“Mm,” Matsuda said, “You okay leading us back, Ranger?”

“Yeah, no problem,” she said. Wil was glad to see that neutral, dead-eyed look had left her. He couldn’t imagine what she was going through, having to watch her lover get brutalized and then reanimate and then having to put him down. To be that low, and then to be brought back up upon finding her family. Whatever she was feeling now, she appeared steady, at least.

Rosa waved them forward and they crouch-walked out of her home.

“Mind the garage,” Matsuda whispered. The garage was on their left, a narrow addition to the side of the house with enough space for one car and some storage. The roof had been smashed in, and the truck inside tilted forward with the weight of something just out of sight.

The rock with the black stuff in it.

Wil had to admit he was curious.

Not curious enough to risk horrible death and mutation into something unnatural, but definitely curious. From out here, he could only see the lines of its descent. From what O’Donnell had described about the one that had destroyed the road leading out of Oak Rest, it had fallen at an angle. Judging from the damage to the garage and the way the truck was slammed into the concrete floor, this one looked like it must have fallen straight down.

“Wil?” Matsuda whispered.

“Sorry. Just…it’s not important. I’m ready,” he said and followed Rosa across the street. The fog had lifted a bit and they could see further along the streets and ahead of them. This also meant they could be spotted more easily, but then Wil realized he wasn’t entirely sure how the things tracked their targets.

Vision seemed obvious for both the black and green-eyed creatures. But if the black ones were dead, did their brains still function? Could they interpret visual stimulus? What about the green ones? The one that had attacked O’Donnell in the gas station had eyes that had gone almost entirely white once it died, like it had been blind.

But if they have some other means of tracking people, the Gutierrez’s wouldn’t have been able to survive, Wil thought. So it must be at least partly visual. Maybe.

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His attention was drifting again. Normally he would have seen this as a good thing, and Dr. Carroll would have agreed: interest in subjects that engaged him were positive things. Still, it was cold comfort given the reality of everything around him. Somebody’s arm was in a bush, fingers curled in tight with rigor mortis. Wil wondered who it had belonged to. It was a right arm, and he wondered if they were an artist like him, if that was what they’d used in their life to draw, or write, or play music. How many hands it had shaken upon meeting people, how many lovers it had caressed, if it had ever held children.

Now it was just a macabre addition to a bush, one limb amongst many, doomed to rot and die.

So cheerful, Wil thought and looked away. The apocalypse really is great for a distraction.

“Distortion ahead,” Rose whispered. It was the one with the scorched clothing around it and the swirl of asphalt marking its presence. They crept around it and passed through the next pair of backyards without incident before Rosa halted.

“One more street to cross and a couple yards and then we’ll be back at the wreck,” she said, voice low. All three of them squatted against the side of a house painted off-white and surrounded by long-neglected rose bushes. They would be hard to spot from the road, but could see most of the street just by leaning up a few inches.

“If any of those big things are still there, I vote we forget it and just head back, maybe do a quick sweep up another road for Raul. But if it’s just the slow ones, I vote we get as much shit as we can carry.”

“Agreed,” Matsuda said. “Though the green-eyed ones quickness seems to vary. If there are five or six of the slow black-eyed ones, it shouldn’t be an issue. But if there’s two or three of the green-eyed ones, they might be a problem.”

“Right. Yeah they’re different when there’s more, or something,” Wil said.

“Okay. If there’s more than two of the green-eyed ones, we bail. Agreed?” Rosa asked and Wil and Matsuda nodded. With that settled, the group eased forward and scurried across the open street. Wil caught a distant glimpse of a large, shambling shape in the distant fog at the far end of the block, but it had already loped away before he could think to mention it.

Wil thought of Thalassophobia: the fear of the sea. The woods had felt a bit like this, murky beyond a certain distance, the sun filtered and faded through layers of branches. It was fog now, but it gave off the same impression. Any moment, some hideous predatory abomination could come swimming at them from the gray depths and that would be it.

Except they crossed the street without incident. Wil didn’t even know if Matsuda had spotted the whatever-it-was. Wil thought of what Qadira had described: something like a roach as big as a station wagon, with a grown man in its mouth and crawling over a house.

Wil took a deep breath and tried not to think about a huge roach or giant spider grabbing him.

He managed to succeed this time, but mostly because he had to focus on Rosa ahead. She had passed the first house and was now approaching the second. This was the house they had ducked into, immediately following the attack and the crash. The kitchen door they had exited through swung open in the still, foggy afternoon. The hideous roars and bellows that they had all fled from were gone.

Rosa pointed around the side of the house, indicating she would stay outside rather than risk going into the house again, and Matsuda nodded. Wil just shrugged. He trusted the ranger and the…whatever Matsuda was. Spy. Survivalist. Ex-Mercenary. Whatever.

Rosa took the approach to the street one slow, silent step at a time, easing her feet down heel-first with each progressive move forward. It was progress by inches, but Wil was in no hurry to fling himself into what had been a battlefield of nightmares not even an hour before.

Rosa let out a sigh as she poked her head out from behind the corner of the house and nodded at Wil and Matsuda.

The street was a mess and Wil almost gagged at the sight. Blood was absolutely everywhere. The water from the fire hydrant had long since stopped, but not before turning much of the street on lawns nearby into a large bloody pond. Bodies and pieces of bodies were scattered and splattered over pretty much everything, including some of the homes down the street, far from where the fight had happened. Half a head peered down at Wil from a rain gutter across the road, its eyes white and unseeing.

Their Ford was still there, propped up at an angle by the broken fire hydrant beneath it. Rosa hurried to it while Matsuda swept his gaze and his rifle up and down the road, and Wil stayed between the two, pistol in one hand, axe in the other.

The only sign of movement on the street came from the faint rippling on the bloody pond. Otherwise it was empty of anything but the signs of the fight that had taken place.

“I’m going for the trunk. Wil, with me,” Rosa said and Wil followed. They had to slosh through the impromptu pond to get to the car, and Rosa pointed him at the trunk while she went for the driver’s side to pop it open. Wil tried to keep his sloshing to a minimum, all too aware of the sound it was making in the opaque pink waters.

Something roared in the distance, perhaps a few blocks ahead of them, toward the highway.

“Quickly,” Matsuda said. Wil had just reached the trunk and tapped it softly to let Rosa know he was ready. She sloshed for the driver’s door and swung it open, then leaned in.

And something from beneath the bloody water seized her and she was yanked back. Rosa gasped and seized the steering wheel as ashen, muscular hands appeared from beneath the water, clawing at her legs. A soaking wet head briefly emerged and sank its teeth into Rosa’s ankle. She had dropped the hunting rifle inside the car and fumbled for her pistol in its holster.

“Don’t shoot it!” Matsuda hissed. “Wil! Axe!”

Wil had already taken several stumbling steps forward, placed his pistol on the trunk of the car and raised his axe. He hesitated for a second, terrified he would hack into Rosa’s leg, but then saw the horror in her eyes, and figured anything would be better than having the black-eyed freak gnawing on her any longer.

He swung, and buried the blade of the axe in the wet skull of the thing. It stiffened, gurgled, and fell still. Rosa kicked it away with a quiet curse, and Wil saw that the thing had had everything below its lower back torn off during the fight. It floated for a moment, then sank below the water again.

“It bit you!” Wil said. “It was one of the strong ones.”

“It got my boot,” Rosa whispered back and raised her pant-leg to show the rough, black leather surface of her ranger’s boot. Wil heard Matsuda’s sigh from several feet away and added his own to it. Rosa popped the trunk and then she and Wil grabbed two of the backpacks each, and two of the bags from the gas station. It wasn’t everything, but it was all they could carry in one trip back to Matsuda.

“I’ll carry most it,” Wil said. “I’m not much good for shooting, and you two need your hands free.”

“Just try not to lag behind,” Rosa said. “We’re gonna swing up to the next street, see if there’s any sign of my brother or cars.”

“I’m gonna make a fair amount of noise hauling all this,” Wil said. “I mean, I’ll try not to but I don’t have much option.”

“We should head back the way we came first,” Matsuda said. “If we encounter anything, we risk losing the supplies again.”

Rosa bit her lip and frowned, then nodded. “Fine. Raul might have come back, but if not, I’m coming back out.”

“Fair enough, but there is one more thing I want to do if you’d indulge me,” Matsuda said.

“What do you want to do?” Wil asked.

“Borrow your axe. Chop off that thing’s head, examine it,” Matsuda said.

“Jesus,” Rosa said and shook her head. “Fine, no noise. You got thirty seconds.”

“Wil: axe,” Matusda said and Wil handed it over. Matsuda set the bags and his assault rifle down, then used the axe to pull the bisected creature toward him. He hauled it onto the nearest spot of dry lawn, then gave it two quick, hard whacks on the neck. The head fell off, rolled, and Matsuda grabbed it by the hair.

“Ew, gross,” Wil said and made a face. He combined the contents of one of the gas station bags and offered the newly empty to the old man, who nodded his thanks and put the head inside.

“Whadda you wanna do with that, huh?” Rosa asked as they began sneaking back the direct route they had come.

“I told you: examine it. We know these things only stop once the head is damaged, but not why. If they’re dead, hitting them in the brain shouldn’t make a difference. So why? We’re all in the dark. Knowledge is a far better weapon than any gun.”

“Whatever,” Rosa said, and led the way back they had come, leaving the sight of the nightmare battle and O’Donnell’s death behind.