I thought I knew what we were getting into. There’d been a sea of cars in the street in front of the airport’s doors; that seemed more-or-less the same as a parking lot to me.

Maybe it was, but definitely more on the “or-less” half of that equation.

The economy parking lot at Denver Airport was huge, and cars spread out in all directions. When we’d left the airport, most of our attackers had run at us along the relatively-narrow road. A select few monsters had bounded along the roofs of the parking garage, but they’d stood out sharply against the white fabric roof, and we’d been able to see them coming long before they reached us. Our scouts only really had to check around and under three or four new cars at a time, and there were large gaps between clumps of stopped vehicles.

Now there were whole rows of them. A monster a hundred yards away could start running at us, and not be visible until the moment it lunged out at our side from under a pickup truck. Even if someone with a scouting ability noticed its approach - which wasn’t guaranteed - it was difficult for them to communicate its swiftly-changing location. Even if they did, the rest of us couldn't attack it until we saw it ourselves.

One minute, we’d been walking through a field, sniping down monsters before they got within twenty feet of us.

The next minute, we had to kill almost every monster in melee.

My spot on the frontline meant that I had to fight frequently. We were barely a hundred feet into the parking lot, and I’d already had to take down four monsters personally. Once, two monsters came almost at the same time. I’d swept my staff at the first one, a move that I’d learned in order to parry someone else’s weapon if they struck at my legs, but then stumbled as I tried to turn to face the second and knocked my feet into Davi’s. The spacedog raked its claws at me, trying to hamstring me and almost succeeding. The bottom ten inches of my right pantleg were fluttering in ribbonlike tatters, and a deep scratch ran along the surface of my shin.

Just a scratch, thankfully. Droplets of blood were running down my leg and staining my sock, and I could feel a stinging pain every time my frayed pants flapped against it, but my leg still bore my weight; it was irritating, but not debilitating.

A lot of people had suffered worse. The monsters did their best to sink claws into soft tissue, aiming for calves and ankles most of the time, but occasionally leaping to tear into guts or faces.

The carts in the middle of the group were starting to fill up with injured fighters and exhausted healers. They weren’t full yet, but I was worried. We were less than a tenth of the way through.

I was glad that John had been one of the first to exhaust himself; he wouldn’t have to watch us pilfer from the parking lot. That plan had clearly made him uncomfortable.

Our pace was glacial, and I couldn’t decide if that was a curse or a blessing. On the one hand, it did mean we had occasional breaks in the deluge of monsters. On the other, it extended the time we had to spend away from safety.

I kept passing my staff from hand to hand, shaking out tingling fingers to try to relax them. I could hear Davi, behind me, breathing irregularly. If she’d been a new student in my aikido class, I would have told her to take a break. That wasn’t an option, here. We were engineers and doctors, office workers and parents. None of us - myself included - was good at staying calm while risking our lives. Adrenaline was useful in an emergency, but this had gone on too long for that. It was flooding our systems with stress, making our muscles overtense and tire, keeping our brains jumpy and prone to mistakes.

The pace couldn’t be helped. It was why we were here to begin with, instead of traipsing through the relatively-trivial grass off to the right. We broke into cars methodically, with an efficiency that any thief would have envied. Our window-breakers had smashed dozens of windows by now, and had gotten really good at judging just how much force to use.

Minivans were the best sources of both water and food. More than two-thirds of them had a half-empty case of disposable water bottles or gatorade somewhere in the car, and more than half had some kind of food. A box of fruit snacks, those little cereal puffs for babies, crackers, pretzels… one had a big tub full of peanuts.

Sedans were the worst, and rarely had much in the way of water. Other vehicles fell somewhere in between these two extremes.

People had left squeamishness behind, finishing off any half-drinken water bottles or flat remnants of fast-food sodas we found in car cupholders.

You could be reading stolen content. Head to the original site for the genuine story.

I didn’t help much with the looting. I was a good fighter, and most of these people had zero situational awareness. They’d look in one spot, never checking to the sides or behind them. They needed me.

Also, looking in the cars was… tough. One minivan’s seat held a Mad Libs book; my oldest son, Micah, kept a similar one in the car, and was always asking us to give him a verb or a plural noun. An abandoned water bottle with Spider-Man decor reminded me of my six-year-old, who loved the funny superhero. When I opened one door, a mess of napkins fell out of the door pocket, just like the ones my wife stored to have ready for the kids’ inevitable messes. When I saw a green crayon scribble on a car wall, the viridian twin of the blue one my toddler had left in our own car, I decided I was done.

I’d been trying not to think about my wife and kids. Surely, they’d be safe inside? The monsters were nasty, but they hadn’t been going into buildings, and my wife, Meghan, was a bit of a packrat. They’d have enough food for… for… I wasn’t sure. But at least a few days.

“You okay?” Davi asked.

I raised my sleeve to my face, wiping away the water that was blurring my vision. “Yeah. I’m fine!”

She stared at me, seemingly unconvinced, then pulled a half-empty water bottle out of the car and passed it to me. “Here. Have a drink, at least.”

My lips felt dry and stiff, and I welcomed even the half-drunk bottle she passed to me, shaking it before I drank to cool down the overheated water. It was still warm, but it didn’t burn my mouth. Good enough.

“Thanks,” I told her.

I watched Davi’s back as she helped search the cars.

Food and water weren’t the only useful things we found. There were dozens of automotive first-aid kits, and when Davi passed me one I took a minute to swipe my leg with an antibacterial wipe and haphazardly wrap some gauze around it. I passed the rest of the kit to the center, where anxious healers were trying to figure out how to best conserve their strength while managing an increasing number of wounds. These would help.

There were tons of guns. None of them worked. If we could get them to work, they’d be amazing, but if not, it was a bunch of dead weight for us to haul. There were plenty of people willing to haul them, though, so I guess it was no business of mine.

I’ll admit I stuffed a handgun in my back pocket. Just in case people could get them to work.

We found tons of potential weapons. Mostly umbrellas, which could double as sunshade if needed, but lots of other things too: sledgehammers, crowbars, baseball bats, hockey sticks, tennis rackets, camp knives… even a few machetes, to my envy. I briefly regretted that I’d stopped searching the cars, since the people who’d grabbed those weren’t inclined to hand them over.

No armor. Nothing to make us safer, except by making us better killers.

We inched through the rows of cars.

No matter how careful we were, we couldn’t seem to stop taking injuries. The carts were full now, and we’d started pulling wagons out of the backs of minivans, loading full-grown adults into groaning constructions of folded canvas that were never meant to carry so much weight.

Maybe we made a mistake coming this way.

The thought darted through my mind, quick and guilty. Ruthlessly, I turned away from it. I’d made the choice already; questioning it now was just a waste of energy we needed to survive.

There was one blessing; almost all the cars were empty, so the myriad smells of rot and death that had permeated the road were largely absent.

We did find one survivor, a girl who’d taken some kind of digging or earthmoving ability and entombed herself in the gravel and soil in an exposed median. She’d left a tiny hole for ventilation, and the spacedogs had… ignored her. She was weak: hungry, and thirsty from 24 hours without food or drink, and she seemed traumatized and unwilling to answer questions, but she wasn’t injured.

I hoped she’d get a chance to recover.

I was getting worried about our chances of making it to the building in the distance.

We were most of the way through the parking lot, but the only one of our healers still upright was Sarah. She stood aboard a cart, grimly clinging on with one hand and holding her clipboard in the other. I got the sense that it was willpower keeping her awake and not much else.

A spacedog lunged at me from beneath a nearby pickup. Startled, I managed to bat it away with my staff, sending it rolling along the frontline to come to a stop in front of one of the people who’d snagged a machete. She stabbed down with it, her motions awkward, but sufficient to hit an immobile target. The blade sunk deeply into the spacedog’s underbelly, and the monster immediately began to dissipate.

“Damnit,” I muttered. I turned back to the direction the monster had appeared from, readying myself to respond to another attack. We needed to cripple them, not kill them! If they died, they respawned immediately and we just had to…

I frowned.

“Where is it?” asked Davi.

Strangely, the monster’s replacement didn’t appear.