The alley breathed cold against their necks, slow and deliberate, as though the town itself had lungs and they were full of grave-dirt and old sins.
Kayden's flashlight shook so badly the beam jittered like a dying moth against the wet brick.
"Station's this way," he said. The words came out thin, apologetic, the way they used to when they were twelve and trying to explain to a teacher why they'd both skipped fifth period. Except now the lie was that there was still a station, still a sheriff, still a world that answered when you called.
He took one step.
Jake didn't.
Kayden turned. "Jake?"
Jake's eyes had gone glassy, pupils blown wide and fixed on the cross-street where the fog moved like something with intention. In the swirling grey, shapes almost formed—doorways, porch lights, the ghost of a swing set—then dissolved again. Kayden recognised the look. He'd seen it the night Jake's dad coughed blood into the sink and Jake just stared at the red swirl going down the drain, whispering over and over, almost politely, I think the world just ended.
"My house," Jake said now, the same polite whisper. "214. It's right there."
Kayden's stomach folded in on itself. He reached out, fingers brushing Jake's sleeve. "We're not doing this. We're going to the station."
"They might still be inside."
The sentence detonated between them like a claymore. Jake was already running, boots smashing glass into brief orange constellations that died before they touched the ground. Kayden swore, a cracked desperate sound, and followed.
They skidded to a stop in front of 214 Wills Residence.
The house looked flayed alive. Half the roof had been peeled back like the lid of a tin can, rafters jutting toward the black sky like snapped ribs. Windows bled long triangular shards that caught the moonlight and threw it back the colour of arterial spray. The front gate hung by one rusted hinge, swinging in a slow, patient rhythm: creak… creak… creak… the sound a throat makes when it's forgotten how to finish dying.
Jake walked through the gate like a man on a wire. Kayden followed, tasting his own pulse in the back of his throat.
The front door opened at Jake's touch with a sigh that sounded almost relieved, like the house had been holding its breath for three days.
Inside, the air was thick with spoiled milk and hot pennies and something sweeter underneath that turned the stomach wrong-side out. The living room had been dissected with surgical hatred: couch cushions slit open, stuffing dragged out in pale intestines that trailed across the floor like spilled bowels. Every family photograph on the wall had been turned upside-down; faces stretched into silent, elongated screams. In the middle of the rug sat one small glittery sneaker—pink, velcro strap undone, toe soaked black and gleaming like it had been dipped in crude oil.
Jake stopped beneath the staircase. One photograph had refused to fall. County fair, three summers ago. Ellie on Jake's shoulders, gap-toothed, triumphant, clutching two fistfuls of his hair like reins. Their parents below, laughing so hard their eyes were slits. A single crack bisected the glass, running straight through Ellie's paper face, splitting her grin into something that hurt to look at.
Jake lifted one trembling finger and touched the fracture as if he could push the glass back together, as if he could push time backward and un-say the words I'll be right back.
"Mom…?" A child's question asked by a voice that no longer belonged to a child.
Only wind answered, threading through broken windows like someone trying to whistle with a mouthful of razors.
They climbed the stairs. Each step screamed under their weight, old wood protesting the return of the living.
Ellie's room waited at the end of the hall. Pink door. The unicorn sticker she'd stuck on herself the week she turned five was half peeled away; the rainbow mane curled like shed skin. Someone had scratched a single word into the paint beneath it: MINE.
Jake's hand closed on the knob. His shoulders started shaking so violently Kayden heard bone grinding against bone.
"I can't—" Jake said. The words tore in half. "I have to."
He pushed.
The overhead bulb flickered, polite and dying, strobing sickly yellow across the carnage. The stench rolled out and punched them in the face: sweet rot, feces, copper baked into carpet for hours under a closed door.
They had been arranged like a tableau titled After.
Dad—headless—sprawled across Ellie's narrow bed, one arm still stretched toward the corner where her crib had once stood. His fingers were curled exactly the way they used to curl when he reached for her in the night to check for fever. The stump of his neck had been cauterised black, as though the blade had been white-hot.
Mom sat against the far wall, legs folded beneath her at angles that belonged to marionettes with cut strings. Someone had placed her severed head in her own lap, tilting it so the dead eyes faced the door. Her hands had been posed to cradle her own cheeks, thumbs resting gently under the eyes as if she were comforting herself for what she'd been forced to watch. A single tear-track of blood had dried on her cheek like a red fingerprint.
And Ellie.
Ellie was no longer a person; she was geography.
Torso split from collarbone to pelvis with clinical precision, tiny ribcage yawning open like pale wings. The organs were gone—scooped out with care, as though someone had wanted the cavity perfectly clean. Limbs removed at the joints and arranged in a perfect semicircle around the hollow, palms up, as though the body had been posed to applaud its own emptiness. One small hand still wore the plastic star ring Jake had won for her at the fair. The ring pointed straight at the doorway like an accusation carved in glitter.
Jake made a sound Kayden had never heard from a human throat—something prehistoric, something that belonged to caves and extinction events.
He dropped to his knees in the congealing lake of family. His hands hovered, trembling, afraid that touch would cement the truth.
"Mommy… please…"
The confession tore out of him like fishhooks.
"I went to the store. She wanted the green gummy worms and we were out and I told her I'd be right back, I promised her ten minutes—"
A howl detonated inside his chest, huge and animal and final.
"I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry—"
Kayden's legs folded. He sank beside Jake, drowning in the same red sea, useless.
That was when the ceiling exhaled.
Four pale shapes hung upside-down like leeches swollen with night. Limbs folded tight to torsos, heads smooth and eyeless, swaying in a breeze that didn't exist. Their breathing was slow, patient, intimate—like lovers sharing the same dream.
Kayden's inhale sliced his throat raw.
One dropped.
Then the rest, unfolding with soft wet clicks of cartilage. They stood, heads tilting at impossible angles, sniffing. No eyes, no mouths, yet they catalogued the room with the certainty of predators who had already won.
Kayden grabbed Jake's collar and yanked him backward into the hallway, slamming them both against the wall. They pressed flat, palms clamped over mouths, tears and snot mixing into warm slime.
One creature glided past, inches away, leaving a glistening trail that ate tiny smoking holes in the wallpaper flowers. It paused. The blank oval of its face rotated a full circle, tasting the air, tasting terror, tasting the frantic drum of two hearts trying to occupy the same ribcage.
It stopped directly in front of Kayden.
Time dilated. Kayden felt it inside his skull—curious, almost tender, the way a child studies an insect before deciding which wings to pull. A memory flashed unbidden: Ellie at six years old, catching fireflies in a jar, whispering don't worry, I'll let you go later.
Then it moved on.
The instant the hallway emptied, Kayden hauled Jake down the stairs. They burst out the front door and ran until lungs bled and legs turned to water. They collapsed behind an overturned delivery van that reeked of spoiled meat and melted ice cream.
Jake shoved Kayden away so hard his shoulder cracked against asphalt.
"Don't touch me!"
"Jake—"
"DON'T!" The scream was barbed wire dragged across concrete. "My baby sister opened like a doll! They sat my mom's head in her lap so she could watch me find them! Dad still reaching for a crib that isn't there anymore! And I wasn't HERE!"
He drove his fists into the pavement. Skin split. Blood spattered like thrown paint.
"I WAS BUYING FUCKING GUMMY WORMS WHILE THEY SCREAMED MY NAME!"
Another punch. Another. Knuckles turned to pulp.
Kayden lunged, caught the next swing mid-air. "Stop it! Jake, stop!"
"Get off me!" Jake roared, tears whipping sideways in the wind. "You don't get it! They're gone and I didn't save them and they're GONE!"
His legs buckled. He crashed forward, forehead slamming into Kayden's chest. Fists kept swinging, weaker, until Kayden wrapped arms around him and held on like a man clinging to the last timber in a shipwreck.
"I got you," Kayden whispered, voice splintering. "I'm here. Right here, man. You're not alone. Never alone."
Jake clutched Kayden's jacket with blood-slick fingers, knuckles grinding against spine. A broken sound tore out of him—half scream, half surrender. His whole body convulsed with sobs that sounded like bones trying to leave the flesh.
"I see them every time I blink," he choked into Kayden's shirt. "Ellie's little hands reaching up for me like always… Mom's eyes still looking for me in the doorway… I can't unsee it. I can't breathe around it. It's in my lungs now."
"You don't have to carry it alone," Kayden said, fierce and trembling. "That's what I'm for. Eighth grade, when your dad's scans came back bad and you sat on my roof and didn't speak for six hours? When my mom lost the baby and I punched that locker until my hand looked like yours does now? We carried it then and we carry it now. I swear on my life, Jake—I'm not leaving you with this."
Jake's fingers dug so deep Kayden felt bruises bloom like dark flowers. The fight leaked out of him in one long, shuddering exhale that sounded like dying.
They stayed locked together until the wind shifted and footsteps approached—slow, deliberate, amused.
Tyler stepped from the fog, hands buried in pockets, eyes glittering with something too bright to be sane.
He took in Jake's shredded knuckles, Kayden's tear-streaked face, the way they held each other up like two halves of one ruined thing.
Tyler smiled—small, sharp, almost tender.
Then he walked away, swallowed by the dark.
––––––––
Harlan Residence, Maple Street
Later that night
The kerosene lantern guttered, throwing long shadows that clawed at the walls like they wanted in.
Five faces turned when the door opened.
Sheriff Good stepped inside, hat crushed in one fist, three days of death living under his eyes. The lines in his face had carved themselves into canyons overnight. His uniform was stiff with dried blood that wasn't all his.
"I looked," he said, voice gravel over broken glass. "Every street. Every basement. Every crawlspace. Nothing left that still breathes."
Silence swallowed the room whole.
Jake rose first. Blood had crusted black under his nails; his eyes were swollen but something colder had moved in behind them and made itself at home.
Good saw it immediately: the exact moment the boy he'd coached in Little League had snapped along every fault line and reforged himself into a weapon.
"Jake—" Good started.
"No." Jake's voice was low, lethal, and perfectly steady. "You don't talk yet."
He stepped into the lantern's trembling circle.
"I held my little sister's ribs in my hands tonight. They fit in one palm. She was six."
Every word landed like a hammer on steel.
"They arranged my mother so she could watch me scream. They left my dad reaching for a crib that wasn't there anymore. That's what's waiting outside these walls. That's what took everything from me."
He looked at every face—Sasha, Emily, Maya, Kayden, Good—holding each gaze long enough to brand it.
"I'm done hiding. I'm done waiting to be next. This isn't survival anymore. This is vengeance. This is war. And I will walk through every shadow, every alley, every goddamn nightmare left in this town until I've killed every single one of them—or they kill me. Either way, it ends."
His voice rose, cracked, became something holy and monstrous.
"They wanted to play with what's mine? Fine. I'll play. I'll burn their world down and salt the earth so nothing ever grows again. Because if I don't—if we don't—then Ellie died for nothing. And I will die before I let that be true."
He was breathing hard, blood dripping from reopened knuckles onto the Harlan's faded rug.
Kayden stood beside him without hesitation, shoulder to shoulder. "Together," he said simply. "Always together."
Emily was crying openly now, hands pressed to her mouth as if to hold the sobs inside. Maya's knuckles had gone white around the pistol grip in her lap. Sasha stared at the boys like she was watching ghosts of men they hadn't become yet.
Sheriff Good took a long drag on his cigarette, the cherry flaring like a tiny angry sun. Smoke curled from his nostrils as his eyes never left Jake's.
"Then we fight," he said quietly. "God help whatever's left standing when we're done."
From the window, Tyler watched.
A soft, delighted laugh slipped from his throat, fogging the glass.
"Fools," he whispered, smiling the way a man smiles when the last piece finally slides into place.