Pel sped up just in time. The rear-view mirror gave her a front row seat as a group of zombies came out from the Fred Nelby’s and mobbed the looters. They knocked the hooligans onto the street and tore and bit.

The sound of an unearthly chorale swept through the street, sending shivers down Pel’s spine. Looking up through the windshield, she thought she saw figures flying mid-air, but they were hard to make out in the shadows of the looming high-rises.

“I’m going to take the side streets,” Pel announced.

She hoped it would be safer.

She turned at the next intersection and crossed one block over, and then another, trying to stifle a gasp.

There’d been a Norm on the first street.

Jules turned to her mother and stared. “Was that…?”

Pel tightened her grip on the steering wheel. “We’re almost there, honey. We’re almost there.”

The street scene two blocks away from Petta Drive was calmer than the anarchy playing out on the main drag, but that brought little comfort, because it was only calmer because everyone was dead, and in the quiet, the fungus had advanced its conquest, emerging in tree-like forms from the corpses sprawled out on the street, and climbing buildings’ sides like ivy. The tallest, thickest growths were beginning to sprout clusters of stocky, tubular structures, like the pipes of an organ. Pel wondered if those were the source of the strange sounds, but the noises didn’t seem to be coming from them

Suddenly, Jules let out a shriek, and Pel’s heart nearly skipped a beat.

“What is it? What is it?”

Jules pointed a trembling finger at the window.

“Mom—I saw something rooting through a trash bin. It was huge. It—”

—Pel yelped, and hit the brakes.

Up ahead, on the side of the street, a luggage-sized cross of a rat and tick waddled out from the gap in between two parked cars, clambering forward on a quartet of bony limbs. It clambered over to one of the corpse-trees and began to feed. Fungal flesh crawled down the trunk as the corpse-tree’s mass flowed into the tick-rat. The creature’s body cracked and twitched as its distended abdomen swelled.

Then Rayph screamed. Through the rear-view mirror, Pel could see him staring out through the back window.

“There’s more!” he yelled. “There’s more!”

Pel tapped an icon on the dashboard console, changing the display from the map to the rear-view camera. It showed more tick-rats waddling across the street. Further back, a hand of five jointed legs reached up over the roof of a car.

She prayed: Angel, help us.

And then she pressed her foot on the accelerator, and sped ahead, swerving around the corpse-tree in the middle of the road. The car jostled as it passed over the tick-rat. The creature burst with a wet pop, splattering black ooze onto the corpse-tree. Pel kept her eyes on the road, steering clear of any obstacles.

Suddenly, Pel’s eyes burned and everything went white.

“Mom! Look out!” Rayph yelled.

“Bear left!” Jules said. “Bear left!”

Pel did so, and the whiteness vanished. Through the flashing afterimages, she saw a fortress of a vehicle up ahead, barreling down the street. Its searchlight shone blindingly bright. Squatting her eyes, she veered left, aiming for an empty space by the sidewalk. Everyone jerked forward as the car’s front wheels rolled up onto the curb.

The military vehicle rumbled down the street.

The ground shook as the military vehicle passed on by.

“Heads down!” Pel said, just in time.

Semi-automating rifle fire spat through the air, shot out from slits in the vehicle’s sides. The bullets made quick work of the tick-rats. The creatures screeched and squealed as they died, and the sounds sat like acid in Pel’s head.

She blinked her eyes until her vision returned to her, and then glanced back at the vehicle, only to stare in horror. A stoic corpse clad in full tactical armor was sticking out of the manhole on the vehicle’s roof.

Shaking her head, Pel steeled herself, squeezing the life out of the steering wheel’s padding. Putting the car into reverse, she drove off the curb and back into the street, tracking the wheels through monster glop. Then, gritting her teeth, she pushed the stick shift all the way forward and pressed down on the accelerator.

Pel dropped any pretense of caring about the rules of the road. No one seemed to care, anyhow. The police and military patrol vehicles wandering the streets didn’t care, nor did the looters, or the zombies, or the people who just wanted to stay alive.

People like her.

“We’re almost there,” she muttered. The words were her prayer. Her mantra. And, for once, her prayer was answered.

Her parents’ building—1337 Petta Drive—was at the tail end of Ledèrvo Grove, where the neighborhood merged into the Finance District. The changes in the car’s surroundings signaled the impending change: the spacing between the dead, fungus-struck trees grew wider and wider while the high-rises rose higher still. Old new hotels—palatial classics, or neo-medieval revivals—and the new new boutiques stuffed into their ground floors gave way to the Finance District’s austere, steely-hued skyscrapers.

The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

Her father’s company owned nearly every single one.

The Finance District had grown beyond the sway of night and day. If the market was a hive mind, the Finance District was its hive, but that hive was deathly still. No multitasking businesspeople. No cluttered car traffic. The place was as bare and sterile as the spires of metal and glass that towered over its streets.

Pel stared.

“Keep your heads down, both of you,” she said. “Please…”

Wind howled through the urban canyons, blowing trash across the lifeless streets, the abandoned cars, darkened alleys. Corpses lay prone on the sidewalks, or crumpled at the base of a building—maybe huddled in a recess—their eyes fixed on a sky they’d never see again.

Angel help us, Pel prayed.

“It’s almost over,” Pel said, praying for it to be the truth.

And then something fell onto the roof of the car.

Everyone screamed.

A hairy, wingèd thing rolled down the windshield. It bounced off the car’s hood and tumbled into the street, flailing its too many limbs. Pel slammed the brakes, but not quickly enough.

The car rammed into the creature. Buts bounced on the seats as the screeching wheels tore into the creature. The horrible shaking lasted for only a moment before the car hit the road once more.

“Don’t look at it!” Pel yelled. “Close your eyes!”

And the kids listened—but others didn’t. Others, that prowled out from alleys on fours or eights or slithering nones. Pests and strays and worse filed out from the dark corners of the streets. Pel saw them through the rear-view mirror, and was too scared to look away.

There was a shambling figure, with twitching, tumorous clusters of infected pigeons melded into his flesh. Serpent-things snaked down the street, with bodies of dead insects, chained together by the fungus. Dogs and cats scampered along, their trumpet-flower heads in full bloom, branching tail-roots swishing behind them.

And all of them were chasing after the car.

Pel pushed her foot on the accelerator, but the engine sputtered.

Her words were truer than she’d known: the Pirouette-13 really wasn’t designed for long trips. All the time spent weaving through obstacles had taken their toll on the battery’s charge. Worse, the Change Battery had started to flash.

It wasn’t fair.

Frantically, Pel looked over the dashboard. The battery’s charge was almost gone. There was a smidge left, but it was below the Minimum Safety Level™ needed for the car to get moving again.

Oh god oh god.

The monsters drew closer.

“Move, dammit!” Pel yelled. “Move!”

She smacked the steering wheel. The horn blared. But the car didn’t move, and the creatures didn’t stop.

The pigeon-man clambered onto the back of the car.

In a single, mad moment, the girl I’d chosen to spend my life with put two and two together by the skin of her teeth.

The needle on the car’s charge display. was just below where it needed to be. She only needed a single spark.

Leaning to the side, Pel turned to face the back seats. “Rayph, gimme a console!” she yelled.

Rayph shoved one of the PortaCons into her hand.

“Jules, glove compartment!”

Jules opened the glove compartment, and then shrank into her seat as her mother leaned over her and pulled out the universal link cable.

“Mommmm!” Rayph yelled, staring out the back window.

Pel jammed one end of the cable into the PortaCon, and stuck the other end into one of the ports on the dashboard.

The needle quivered as the dashboard glowed with renewed light.

The engine roared back to life.

Pushing down on the accelerator, Pel grabbed the steering wheel and turned it hard, causing the car to swerve to the side and send the pigeon-man flying onto the pavement. The little pink car sped like never before, turning left and then right, back onto Petta Drive.

The monsters gave chase.

“Faster!” Jules yelled.

One of the creatures leapt. Pel’s heart did the same.

Pressing her foot down on the accelerator, she pushed the pedal as far as it would go, and then smashed her hand on the garage button overhead. Her mind raced along with the car.

Pel undid her seatbelt with a single hand.

The engine screamed and the creatures snarled, but the car was faster. Pel pulled into the lead, breaking away from the horde. Up ahead, the entry gates and door to 1337 Petta Drive’s private underground parking lot swung open.

In the rear-view mirror, the pouncing beast missed its mark, rolling across the street. Pel watched in disbelief as the other abominations leapt upon it and began to feast.

Pel veered hard right, turning down the driveway. The Pirouette caught the briefest air as it zipped over the incline. The thud of the car landing on the parking lot’s concrete floor made everyone yelp.

Pounding her hand on the garage button, Pel threw open the car door. She ran like mad, racing her heart as she crossed the concrete.

The metal gates out by the street were closing, as were the doors to the underground parking lot, at the top of the entry ramp, but, against the monsters, Pel trusted them about as far as she could throw them.

Rushing over to the ramp, she swiped her hand over the scanner above the plastic guard covering the big red button on the wall at the ramp’s base. The device beeped, and then there was a shink, and the lock came undone.

The plastic guard swung up.

The label beneath it read: Flood Protection Door.

The thing was a waste of money when her mother first purchased it—floods would never come this far into the city, no matter what Grandma Margret thought—and it was a waste of money now. But, for once, the Flood Protection System would finally get to be something useful.

Pel pressed the button.

Otherworldly sounds sung through the air, stretching louder as they drew closer. The ground shook, and shook, and shook.

A slit opened in the floor at the base of the parking lot’s exit ramp. A formidable metal barrier slid up out of the slit and rose to meet the ceiling.

The shaking and the bellowing made Pel’s head thrum, but the anti-flood door was too high up for her to see what was on the other side.

Just as the doors slid shut, whatever it was that was barreling down the driveway burst through the metal gates and the garage door at the top of the ramp. The metal dented and groaned as something big crashed into the flood protection door. Pel staggered back in fright, falling supine onto the concrete.

But the door held firm.

The thing on the other side slammed into the door again, denting it deeper.

Pel scrambled back, her limbs sliding against the gritty floor.

And then: gunfire.

Bullets rained onto the metal, pock-marking with dents. Unearthly bellows filled the air, accompanied by human screams, until, with a final thud, something wet and fleshy and shrieking smacked against the door, slumped over and died.

And then everything fell silent.

Neither Pelbrum nor Julette or Rayph dared move. It was a long while before Pel mustered up the courage to stagger back to the car to get the kids and the PortaCons. None of them said a word as they walked over to the elevator and rode it up to her parents’ penthouse. The elevator shaft turned transparent after a second or two, giving them a view of the street as it fell away from them.

Down by the driveway, the gate and the parking lot’s outer door had been ripped through as if they were paper. In the distance, a military vehicle rolled down the street, leaving behind its twin, which had been ripped open and gutted. The vehicle’s innards spilled onto the street, among the pieces of its chassis.

But, as for the creatures—the creature? All that remained was a collage of flesh, blood, bullets, and black ooze, left in the wake of whatever unbegotten life had bits of whatever had gone down the ramp, down, down into the earth.