Ethan Cole noticed the sky had gone black.
He just didn't care enough to stop working.
Not immediately, anyway.
His spreadsheet was still open across two monitors, half the cells color-coded in a way that had made sense three hours ago and now looked like the dying thoughts of a very tired man. A forecasting error in column J had somehow infected three separate reports, which meant if he left now, tomorrow would be worse.
So when the office dimmed around him—when the windows along the far wall went from late-evening gray to something closer to bruised midnight in the span of a breath—Ethan only frowned, rubbed at one eye, and kept typing.
A few desks away, Ryan Park from marketing let out a long, offended sigh.
"No," Ryan said, staring toward the windows. "Nope. Absolutely not. It is six-thirty. It cannot be this dark at six-thirty."
Kara Doyle, the administrative manager, didn't look up from stuffing papers into her bag. "Maybe the weather finally got tired of your voice."
"Very funny."
Across the aisle, Claire Bennett from HR raised her head from her phone. "Was there a storm warning?"
"Noah?" Ryan called. "You're IT. Fix the sky."
Noah Mercer, hunched over an open desktop tower at the corner station, didn't answer right away. He had one side panel off a machine from accounting and a screwdriver between his fingers. After a second, he glanced toward the windows, then toward the ceiling lights.
"I don't think that's on our service contract," he said.
A few desks past him, Julia Reyes from accounting gave a quiet laugh that died almost immediately.
The overhead lights flickered.
Once.
Twice.
Then the entire office floor pulsed with a low electrical shudder, like the building had briefly forgotten how to be a building.
Ethan's fingers stopped over the keyboard.
His monitors glitched.
The spreadsheet vanished under a wash of static. Lines of pale distortion crawled across the screens. For an instant, something like text appeared across the black:
...icipant regis...
Then it was gone.
Ethan leaned closer.
The screen spasmed again.
...local environ... recalibr...
He stared at it.
"What the hell," Ryan muttered.
More screens were going bad now. Around the office, displays flashed, dimmed, recovered, and flashed again. The standing lamp near reception cut out completely. Someone in the neighboring department swore. Farther away, another voice laughed nervously and said something about a blown transformer.
The lights flickered harder.
Claire looked down at her phone. "I think I lost signal."
"You always lose signal in here," Kara said.
"No, I mean completely."
That got a little more attention.
Daniel Foster from sales got to his feet first. He was one of those people who never really sat still even in meetings, all restless energy and expensive shirt sleeves rolled to the elbows. "It's probably the tower," he said. "Or the grid. If the whole block lost power—"
A sound cut him off.
Not from inside the office.
From outside.
A car horn, blaring too long.
Then another.
Then a third, rising and cutting off in the middle like someone had slammed a hand over it.
Everyone went quiet.
The next sound was metal.
A crunch. Then another. Then a long shriek of brakes torn sideways across pavement.
Julia pushed back from her desk.
Ryan looked toward the windows again, this time without joking.
Another noise followed the brakes—a human voice, distant and thin through glass. Then more voices. Too many. Shouting. Screaming.
Ethan stood up.
No one said anything for a second. The office, usually full of keyboard clicks and half-heard calls and air conditioning hum, had gone still in the way prey probably did when the forest changed its mind.
Daniel moved first, heading toward the windows. Ryan followed him. Claire came around her desk, phone still in hand. Julia rose more slowly, already looking pale. Kara swore under her breath and went after them, less out of curiosity than irritation that everyone else was doing something stupid together.
Noah stayed where he was, looking between the windows and the dying glow of his monitor.
Ethan lingered a second longer beside his desk.
His screen flashed again.
...remain ca...
...hostile...
Then the display went black.
He didn't have time to think about that, because outside, someone started screaming in a way that no longer sounded human once it reached the end.
He crossed the aisle and joined the others at the window.
Traffic below had ceased to resemble traffic.
The intersection outside the office building was locked solid. Cars sat at impossible angles, jammed nose-first into each other. A city bus had mounted half the curb and stopped there like a beached animal, its windshield starred white. One sedan had plowed into a light pole hard enough to fold the hood back over itself.
People were in the street.
Some were running.
Some weren't getting up.
A man stumbled away from a stopped car with blood running down the side of his face. A woman was on her knees beside the crosswalk, both hands over her mouth. Another person was pounding on the side of a taxi as if the glass might let them in.
And moving through all of it—too fast, too low, wrong in a way Ethan couldn't immediately name—was something that wasn't human.
At first his brain tried to force it into a shape it recognized.
Dog, maybe.
Big dog.
No.
Too long.
It crossed the hood of a car in a single twitching bound, landed in the middle of the street, and hit a running man hard enough to spin him sideways before taking him down. Not tackling. Not really. More like folding him.
Julia made a small choking noise.
Ryan stumbled backward from the glass. "What the fuck is that?"
Nobody answered.
Farther down the block, another shape darted between abandoned vehicles.
Then another.
The screaming outside rose in pitch.
Claire pressed her phone to her ear, then lowered it almost instantly. "No service."
Daniel was still staring. "That's not possible."
Kara grabbed the back of his shirt and yanked him a step away from the window. "Back up."
"No, hold on—"
"Back. Up."
He did this time, though reluctantly.
The whole office seemed to come apart all at once after that.
Phones came out. Calls failed. People talked over each other. Someone from the far cubicles started crying. Ryan was swiping at his screen hard enough to leave fingerprints.
"It's not going through—"
"Try emergency services—"
"I am trying—"
"What are those things?"
"Maybe it's some kind of attack—"
"With what?"
Claire raised her voice. "Everyone stop talking for a second."
Nobody did.
Ethan looked around the room instead.
Glass-walled conference room to the left.
Reception desk near the front.
Main office door.
Break room beyond the printers.
Desks that could be shoved.
Chairs with metal legs.
A fire extinguisher mounted near the copy station.
His pulse was loud enough to feel in his teeth.
He became aware, dimly, that his own breathing had shortened. Not panic, not yet. Something flatter. Tighter. The body's quiet admission that normal had ended while no one was paying attention.
Noah finally stood and looked down at his own monitor.
"It's not the network," he said.
That cut through more effectively than Claire's attempt at order.
Ryan turned. "What?"
Noah's face had gone a little pale under the office lights. "I don't know what it is, but it isn't a server issue."
"What does that even mean?" Daniel snapped.
"It means," Noah said, "my computer just displayed text that definitely wasn't the operating system."
Ethan looked at him sharply.
"You saw it too?" he asked.
Noah's eyes flicked to him. "You did?"
Before Ethan could answer, Ryan gave a disbelieving laugh. "Great. Awesome. Love that. Haunted computers during the monster riot."
Julia wrapped both arms around herself. "Should we get away from the windows?"
"Yes," Kara said immediately.
Daniel raked a hand through his hair and turned in a circle like motion alone might force the situation to become legible. "Okay. Okay, no. Standing here isn't helping. We need to find out what's happening in the rest of the building."
Claire looked at him. "Or we stay put and lock the door."
"And if the stairwells are clear? If there's a safer floor? If everyone else already moved?"
Kara folded her arms. "Or if the hallway's full of whatever the hell that was?"
Daniel opened his mouth, closed it, then pointed toward the office entrance. "We can't just sit here and wait."
Ryan did not move from where he stood. "I actually think sitting here and waiting is the strongest plan anyone's proposed so far."
No one laughed.
The silence that followed was worse than the shouting had been.
Because Daniel wasn't wrong.
Not entirely.
They didn't know if staying was safer.
They didn't know if leaving was suicide.
They didn't know anything.
Daniel exhaled sharply. "I'm just checking the hallway."
"Don't," Claire said.
"It'll take two seconds."
Kara stepped toward him. "If you open that door without knowing what's on the other side—"
"What, we all die?" Daniel snapped back, gesturing at the windows. "You think that part hasn't already started?"
Nobody had a good answer to that.
Ethan felt the wrongness return—the same subtle pressure he'd felt staring at the glitched text on his monitor. Not a thought. Not logic. Just the prickling certainty that opening the door now was a terrible idea.
But certainty wasn't proof.
And in a room full of frightened coworkers, instinct without explanation sounded a lot like fear.
Daniel was already moving.
He crossed the office in eight quick steps.
Claire told him to wait.
Kara told him not to be an idiot.
Ryan said, "Man, seriously—"
Daniel grabbed the handle.
For one absurd second, Ethan focused on the completely ordinary details.
Daniel's hand.
The brushed metal latch.
The faint reflection of overhead lights on the narrow strip of glass beside the frame.
Then Daniel pulled the door open three inches.
Something hit him from the other side.
Not hit.
Entered.
A pale limb—too long, too thin, jointed wrong—punched through his chest and out between his shoulder blades in a spray of red.
Daniel froze.
So did everyone else.
His mouth opened.
No sound came out.
Blood sheeted across the door glass.
Claire screamed first.
Then the thing on the other side yanked backward.
Daniel's body lurched with it.
The door slammed wide.
And something came in with him.