Justin stopped trusting the GPS somewhere around hour two.
Not because it was wrong—at first it tried, bless its little digital heart—but because it kept insisting on roads that were no longer roads. It chirped cheerfully about "faster routes" while traffic sat dead, sideways, stacked like toys somebody got mad at and threw across the city.
So he drove by instinct.
By memory.
By whatever street looked like it still had space to move and whatever street didn't have… movement.
Hours in, the Jeep smelled like fear and sweat and old chips. The windows fogged every time someone breathed too hard. The air conditioner worked only when it felt like it. The generator-thrum of their old neighborhood was gone; now it was the constant vibration of the engine and the horrible, stop-start rhythm of survival.
Mari sat in the passenger seat with her shoulders pulled tight and her eyes always moving. Kenzie curled in the back seat beside Tally like she'd turned into something smaller than herself. Barbie, the Yorkie, was tucked into Kenzie's lap—ears twitching at every sound, tiny body trembling whenever the Jeep hit a bump too hard.
Justin's hands ached.
Not from driving—he'd driven long trips before—but from the way he'd been gripping the steering wheel like it could keep his world in one piece if he didn't let go.
They'd been out in it long enough for shock to start wearing off.
Shock was useful at first. It let you do things. It made you move fast. It kept you from thinking too hard about what you'd just seen in your own driveway.
But now shock was thinning, and what was underneath it was uglier.
Reality.
"You know what?" Tally snapped from the back, voice sharp and too loud in the enclosed space. "We should've stayed home."
Justin didn't look back. He kept his eyes on the road—what was left of it.
"Tally," he said, not angry, just warning.
"No, I'm serious," she pushed on. Bratty. Breathless. Like she needed the argument to keep from crying. "We had walls. We had lights. We had food. We had a generator. And you—" she made a bitter sound, "—you drove us straight into hell."
Kenzie flinched at the word.
Mari's jaw tightened. She didn't turn around. She didn't correct Tally either. But Justin saw it anyway—how Mari's fingers curled in her lap like she was swallowing down something sharp.
Justin kept his voice steady on purpose. "Home wasn't safe."
"It was safer than this!" Tally shot back, gesturing wildly toward the windshield like the city could hear her and would take it personally.
Outside, a man sprinted across an intersection with a backpack bouncing on his shoulders. He tripped on a curb, caught himself, and kept running without ever looking back.
Justin slowed without thinking. Not to stop. Never to stop. Just to ease around an overturned car blocking half the lane.
Tally leaned forward. "You didn't even check upstairs right. You said you did, but you didn't—"
"I checked," Justin said, firmer now.
"You glanced," she said. "You glanced. You didn't go in every room—"
"I KNOW WHAT I DID," he snapped, then immediately hated himself for how hard it came out.
Silence hit the Jeep.
Kenzie's breathing went shallow. Barbie let out a tiny whine.
Justin swallowed, forcing his voice down. "I did what I could in the time we had."
Tally's voice cracked anyway, even when she tried to hide it. "Ella Belle could've been up there."
Justin's stomach twisted like it always did when Ella's name landed in the air. Like a hook dragging through him.
He'd been trying not to think of her face too much because his mind kept doing something cruel: it kept pairing Ella Belle's small laugh with what he'd seen outside.
The nanny.
The jacket.
The eyes that weren't eyes anymore.
The way she'd moved like her body was still going through the motions of "go home, go home, go home," even though the person inside was gone.
Justin's throat burned.
"We would've heard her," he said, quiet but certain. "Ella doesn't do silent. She'd have been yelling, crying, calling—something."
"You don't know that," Tally whispered.
Mari finally spoke, and it came out controlled—too controlled. "We need to focus on what we can do now."
Tally rolled her eyes dramatically like Mari was being annoying, but her voice was smaller when she answered. "What we can do now is not die. Congrats."
Kenzie's voice was almost nothing. "My phone still doesn't work."
Justin checked his anyway out of habit. No bars. Nothing but a dead screen and the occasional phantom buzz that turned out to be his own nerves.
"We're still in the same loop," he said. "Main roads are clogged. Side streets are messy. We try to cut across and we keep getting shoved back."
"And we've gone nowhere," Tally said. "We've been driving for—what—four hours? Five?"
Justin didn't answer because he didn't want to confirm it out loud.
They'd been driving long enough for the sun to drop low, long enough for the light to start looking like it was bruising. The sky had turned that ugly yellow-gray that always came with smoke.
The smoke was everywhere now. Thin in some places, thick in others, drifting across neighborhoods and settling like a bad smell.
They passed a strip mall where the parking lot looked like a battlefield—cars abandoned, shopping carts scattered, broken glass glittering. A man in an apron lay facedown near the entrance of a grocery store, one arm bent wrong. His blood had dried dark on the concrete, smeared into handprints like someone had tried to crawl away.
Kenzie made a small sound and turned her face into Barbie's fur.
Mari's hand slid toward the glove compartment and then stopped, like she'd remembered Justin's rules: keep your hands free, keep your head up.
Justin's brain was running on two tracks now.
Track one: drive.
Track two: Ella Belle.
Every time he made a turn, it felt like he was either getting closer to her or moving farther away. And he had no way to know which.
At an intersection, the Jeep's headlights swept across something pale in the road.
Justin slowed automatically.
It was a woman on her knees, rocking.
He thought she was praying.
Then the headlights hit her hands.
They were red. Wet. Shiny.
Something lay in front of her—something small, something crumpled, something that made Justin's stomach drop before his brain could label it.
The woman's mouth worked like she was chewing.
Her shoulders jerked with every bite.
Tally screamed—high and sharp—and Justin hit the gas so hard the Jeep lurched forward. Mari grabbed the door handle above her head. Kenzie clamped both hands over her mouth, gagging.
Barbie barked once, terrified.
Justin didn't look back.
He couldn't.
If he looked back, the picture would stick. And he already had too many pictures stuck.
They drove another fifteen minutes—maybe twenty—on a tight back road that curved behind warehouses and a cluster of fast-food restaurants.
That was when Justin saw the gas station.
Not the bright, clean kind.
A tired one.
A battered sign out front half-lit, one number missing from the price board, the convenience store windows plastered with ads that looked like they'd been sun-bleached for years. The pumps were there. The canopy was there. The lights were on—somehow.
And behind it, there was a narrow service lane blocked by dumpsters and a delivery truck parked crooked, like someone had abandoned it mid-turn.
A hiding place.
Not safe.
But hidden.
Justin slowed and swung the Jeep behind the building, easing into the lane until they were tucked out of sight from the front road. The engine idled. He killed the headlights.
For a second, the silence was so loud it made his ears ring.
Then the world came back in:
Distant screaming.
Sirens—less now, but still there.
The occasional crack of gunfire far away, like someone trying to solve a problem with noise.
And underneath it all, that low, dragging moan that lived in the city now like a second atmosphere.
Justin took a breath and forced himself to speak like a leader, not like a terrified college kid pretending to be one.
"Okay," he said. "We're going to eat. We're going to drink water. We're going to breathe."
Tally scoffed. "You mean we're going to have a picnic behind a gas station while the world ends?"
Justin looked at her in the rearview mirror. "You'd rather do it out in the open?"
Tally opened her mouth, then shut it.
Kenzie's voice was shaky. "Are we… are we staying here?"
"Just long enough to reset," Justin said. "We can't drive like this forever. Not scared. Not hungry. Not exhausted."
Mari nodded slowly, like she'd been waiting for him to say it. "Good."
Justin reached into the back where he'd thrown their supplies earlier and pulled out protein bars and bottled water. He passed them back.
Kenzie took hers with shaking hands. Barbie sniffed the wrapper and then sneezed.
Tally stared at the protein bar like it had personally offended her. "This is disgusting."
Justin didn't react. "Eat anyway."
Tally made a face, but she peeled it open. She took a bite like she was chewing cardboard and bad decisions.
Kenzie nibbled hers like she didn't trust her own stomach.
Mari held hers and didn't eat at first.
Justin caught it in his peripheral vision. He didn't call her out. Not directly. He just said, gently, "Mari."
Mari's eyes flicked to him.
"Please eat," he said.
A beat of hesitation, then she nodded and took a small bite.
Justin pretended he didn't notice the way she swallowed hard after, like she was trying to keep something down. He pretended he didn't notice the way her hand hovered over her midsection for half a second before she forced it back into her lap.
Not because he didn't care.
Because he cared too much.
And because right now, keeping the secret meant keeping her calm. Keeping Tally calm. Keeping Kenzie from spiraling into a full panic collapse.
He ate his own protein bar in three bites, barely tasting it.
When he drank water, his hands shook so hard the bottle crinkled.
Tally watched him and said, quieter, "You're acting like you planned for this."
Justin's throat tightened. "Dad raised us."
Tally rolled her eyes, but there was less venom in it now. "Dad's a freak."
"He's alive," Justin said, and immediately regretted it because none of them knew that.
The car went quiet again.
Kenzie whispered, "Do you think… the hospital is safe? Like… if your mom is there?"
Justin pictured his mother—sharp, controlled, the kind of woman who took chaos personally and shoved it back into a box.
"She'll handle it," he said, even though his chest hurt with the lie of certainty.
Mari turned her head slightly, eyes scanning the narrow slice of world they could see from behind the building.
"I hate this," Mari said softly.
Tally snorted. "Welcome to the club."
Mari's eyes cut toward the back seat—quick, private, and annoyed in a way she tried to soften before it reached her voice. "I'm not talking to you."
Tally's mouth dropped open in offended disbelief. "Excuse me?"
Justin cut in before the fight could ignite. "Plans."
Both of them looked forward.
His voice went firm again. "We need a direction that makes sense, not just random turns."
Kenzie whispered, "We need Ella Belle."
The way she said it—like it was a sacred thing, like it belonged in church—made something in Justin crack.
He nodded. "Yeah. We do."
Tally's eyes glistened, and she blinked hard like she was mad at her own face for betraying her. "If she's at school—"
"She's not at school," Justin said quickly, because the thought of his little sister alone in a dark building made him want to vomit. "School would've cleared."
"Cleared?" Tally echoed bitterly. "You saw what we saw. How do you clear anything?"
Justin didn't answer because he didn't have a good one.
He shifted in his seat and leaned forward slightly, peering past the dumpsters toward the street.
The front of the gas station was visible in fragments from where they were—part of the lot, part of the storefront.
And in that narrow view, he saw people running.
Not jogging. Not hurrying.
Running like their lives were already half gone.
A woman in scrubs sprinted across the lot with a bag clutched to her chest. She looked over her shoulder once—just once—and her face collapsed in terror.
Behind her, three figures staggered out from between parked cars.
They moved wrong.
Not smart. Not coordinated.
Just pulled toward sound and movement, like magnets with teeth.
The woman screamed.
That scream—high, raw—made Justin's skin tighten.
The figures sped up, not because they understood her, but because she made noise.
One of them lunged, tripped over its own feet, hit the pavement hard, then pushed up again like pain didn't mean anything anymore.
The woman made it to the convenience store door, yanking at the handle.
Locked.
Her hands slapped the glass.
She screamed again.
Justin watched, frozen, as one of the figures grabbed her by the back of the scrubs and yanked.
The sound she made wasn't a scream anymore. It was something torn from deep in her body.
She fell.
The first one dropped on her like an animal.
And then—God—then there was the sound.
The wet tearing. The sloppy chewing.
The way the woman's heels kicked against the concrete in short, useless jerks before going still.
Kenzie made a choking noise in the back seat.
Mari clapped a hand over her mouth, eyes wide and shining.
Tally whispered, "Oh my God."
Justin didn't blink.
He couldn't.
His brain was recording it whether he wanted it to or not.
A second figure joined, bending over the body. Its head bobbed with ugly focus.
Blood pooled quickly under the woman, spreading in a dark, glossy fan that caught the overhead light.
Then the third figure lifted its head, face slick, jaw working.
It turned—not toward the store.
Toward the street.
Toward the sounds of other people running.
Justin's pulse hammered in his throat.
They weren't smart.
They weren't opening doors.
They weren't planning.
They were just moving from noise to noise, life to life.
A man burst into the lot with a child in his arms. The kid was crying, loud and terrified. The man was sobbing too, half-carrying, half-dragging.
Justin couldn't hear what he was saying, but he didn't need to. The kid's crying was like a beacon.
The figure's head snapped toward it.
Then another one's.
Then another.
The man saw them and changed direction, sprinting toward the road—
and then he tripped on the curb.
He went down hard.
The child screamed.
The figures rushed in, fast in that horrible, jerky way, and Justin had to look away because he couldn't—
Tally made a sound behind him, half-sob, half-gag.
Kenzie whispered, shaking, "They're… eating them."
Justin forced his eyes back to the slice of street. He made himself watch just enough to understand what he was up against.
To understand what could be between them and Ella Belle.
He turned his head slightly toward the back seat, voice rough. "Don't scream. Not here."
Tally looked at him like she hated him for saying it. "I didn't—"
"I know," he said. "I'm saying it now so nobody does it later."
Mari's voice came tight. "Justin, we can't stay behind this building forever."
"We're not," he said. "We're resting. We're thinking."
He took another sip of water and forced his brain to do something useful.
"Okay. Options," he said quietly. "We try to reach the school. Or we try to reach the hospital. Or we try to reach a police station or fire station."
Tally barked a bitter laugh. "Did you not see what's out there? There's no 'try to reach.' There's just 'drive until you die.'"
"Stop," Justin said, and his tone made her shut up.
Kenzie whispered, "What if Ella Belle is with your mom?"
Justin's stomach clenched. "She wasn't. She would've called. She would've—"
He stopped himself. Forced himself to breathe through it.
"We find her," he said, voice lower. "That's the plan. That's the whole plan."
Mari's hand brushed his arm—small, quick. A private grounding touch. She didn't say anything out loud. She didn't need to.
And then, as if the universe wanted to prove it still had jokes, Tally's voice cut through the tension:
"I need to pee."
Justin stared forward. "Now?"
"Yes, now," Tally snapped, like bodily functions were a personal attack. "I've been drinking water like you said and now I need to pee."
Kenzie swallowed. "I… I kind of do too."
Mari didn't answer immediately, but Justin saw her shift, uncomfortable. Her eyes flicked toward the store. Then away.
Finally she said, quietly, "Me too."
Justin exhaled slowly through his nose.
Of course.
Of course their bodies chose now, behind a gas station while people were getting eaten in the lot.
He checked the fuel gauge.
The needle was lower than he wanted. Not empty, but headed there.
He muttered, "And I need gas."
Tally threw her hands up dramatically. "Perfect. Awesome. Love that for us."
Justin ignored her and leaned forward, peering around the dumpsters again.
Out front, the feeding had moved on. The figures had shuffled away, drawn by new sounds—screams farther down the street, a car alarm blaring somewhere, a crash that echoed like metal folding.
The lot was smeared with blood now. Dark streaks where bodies had been dragged or rolled. A trail of red footprints—bare, slipping—leading toward the store door and then away again.
The convenience store windows were streaked with something brown-red. Handprints. Smears.
Justin's jaw tightened until it ached.
If they went to the bathrooms inside, they'd have to go into the store.
If they went outside, behind the building, they'd be exposed.
And they couldn't stay in the Jeep forever—not if the gas ran out, not if darkness fell, not if sound brought the wrong kind of attention.
He turned the key slightly, letting the engine drop lower into a quieter idle. Every sound mattered.
He looked at them—at Tally with her glossy eyes and stubborn mouth, at Kenzie holding Barbie like the dog was her last tether to normal, at Mari trying to look calm and failing in the smallest ways.
Justin forced his voice steady.
"Okay," he said. "Listen. We do this smart."
Tally scoffed. "Oh, so now you have rules."
"Yes," Justin said flatly. "Now I have rules."
He pointed, not aggressively—just clear. "Nobody goes alone. Nobody runs. Nobody screams. We move fast and quiet. In and out."
Tally opened her mouth.
Justin cut her off. "And if you can't handle that, you can pee in a bottle."
Tally stared at him in horrified offense. "Justin!"
He didn't blink. "I'm not arguing."
A beat.
Then Mari's voice—soft, private, for Justin only, barely above a whisper—pushed back from the passenger seat without turning into a fight. "You can't keep making every decision like you're the only one with a brain."
Justin's throat tightened.
He kept his eyes forward, but he heard it—the strain underneath. The exhaustion. The fear. The you're allowed to be scared too.
Tally's head tilted slightly, eyes narrowing.
She'd overheard it.
And something changed on her face—not understanding, not fully, but suspicion. A tiny crack in her bratty certainty.
Justin didn't acknowledge it. Not yet. Not with Kenzie there. Not with Barbie shaking. Not with Ella Belle still out there like an open wound.
He just nodded once, like he'd taken Mari's pushback and stored it.
Then he spoke to the whole car again.
"We're going to get what we need," he said. "Bathroom. Gas. And then we move. Because sitting here is not safer. It's just slower."
Outside, another scream rose from somewhere down the block.
The figures out front lifted their heads in unison, turning toward the sound like it had a scent.
Justin watched them shuffle in that direction—unthinking, hungry, reactive—and felt cold settle deeper into his bones.
Hours out in it, and the horror still didn't feel real.
It felt like the city had been skinned open and they were driving through what was underneath.
He gripped the steering wheel again, not to hold the Jeep together—
to hold himself together.
"Alright," he said quietly. "We go on my count."
Tally's voice shook with irritation and fear. "Hurry."
Kenzie whispered, "Please."
Mari didn't speak, but her hand found her seatbelt latch like she was preparing for impact.
Justin stared at the gas gauge one last time.
Then he looked at the darkening sky reflected in the rearview mirror.
And he thought—just for a second—of the hospital across town, of his mom on some floor somewhere, listening to this same kind of night through walls.
Parallel nightmares.
Same city.
Same hell.
"On three," Justin said.
Outside, the world kept screaming.
And the dead kept following the sound.