"How long do we just wait here?" Mark's voice was a ragged whisper in the gloom of the living room. The air was thick with the smell of dust from moved furniture and the faint, metallic scent of blood from the carpet.
"Until it's quiet," Quinn answered, his eyes fixed on the front door's peephole. He had been standing there for nearly an hour, a silent sentinel, his body rigid with tension.
"It's not getting quiet," Sarah said from the hallway entrance. Her voice was flat, devoid of the hope she had tried to maintain earlier. "It's getting worse."
She was right. The initial wave of chaotic noise—the screams, the crashes, the alarms—had subsided into something more rhythmic and terrifying. A constant, low-level shuffling sound from the street. The occasional sharp cry that was quickly silenced. The scrape of feet on asphalt. It was the sound of a patient, gathering threat.
Quinn leaned closer to the peephole, his world shrinking to that tiny circle of distorted glass. He could see them now. They were not hiding or running. They were roaming. He recognized the woman in the pink jogging suit who always walked her dog at dawn. Her dog was nowhere to be seen, and her movements were a jerky, twitching parody of a walk, her head snapping from side to side. A teenage boy he had seen a hundred times on a skateboard was just standing in the middle of the street, his head cocked at an unnatural angle, turning slowly in a full circle. There were others. Maybe six or seven just on their block. They were drawn to the houses where there had been noise. They were drawn to their house, a dark, silent box in a neighborhood of death.
They were hunting.
A scraping sound started at the back of the house. It was rhythmic, steady. Scrape. Pause. Scrape.
"What's that?" Mark asked, his head snapping towards the kitchen. The sound was grating, methodical.
Quinn pushed away from the door. "Stay with Sarah," he said, his voice low. He moved silently towards the back of the house, gripping the iron poker, its weight familiar in his hand now. Mark ignored him, grabbing the kitchen knife from the counter and following a few steps behind, his shadow clinging to Quinn's in the dim light.
The scraping sound was coming from the sliding glass door, which they had barricaded with the heavy dining room table. Through the narrow slats of the vertical blinds, Quinn could see a silhouette. A figure was standing on their back patio, methodically scraping its fingernails down the glass, searching for a weakness.
Then the scraping stopped. The silhouette backed up a few feet.
"Get down," Quinn hissed.
The creature threw itself against the glass. The thick pane shuddered in its frame, a deep, resonating groan echoing through the kitchen, but it held. The dining room table, pressed tight against it, absorbed most of the impact. The creature did it again, a mindless, full-body impact. And again. On the fourth impact, the safety glass did what it was designed to do. It did not shatter into shards. It fractured into a million tiny cubes, held together by a thin film for a split second, and then the entire pane exploded inward with a deafening roar.
The heavy dining room table stopped most of the glass, but the creature, a man in a mail carrier's uniform, began clawing its way over the tabletop. It ignored the broken glass that sliced its hands and arms, its only focus on the two figures it could see in the kitchen.
Quinn did not wait for it to get its footing. He lunged forward, swinging the poker at its head as it crested the table. The creature was fast, ducking its head. The poker caught it in the shoulder, and it let out a hiss of air, tumbling off the side of the table onto the floor. It landed in a crouch and sprang at Mark.
Mark yelled, a sharp cry of surprise, stumbling backward and swinging the kitchen knife wildly in a panicked arc. The creature swiped at him, its long, dirty fingernails catching his forearm, tearing through his sleeve and leaving four deep, bloody scratches from his wrist to his elbow. Mark cried out in pain, falling back against the kitchen counter and dropping the knife.
The creature was on him in an instant, but Quinn was faster. He brought the heavy end of the poker down on the back of the creature's skull with all his strength. The sound was a wet, hollow crack. The creature stiffened, its limbs locking for a second, and then it collapsed on top of Mark, a dead weight.
Mark shoved the limp body off him, scrambling away on the floor, his eyes wide with terror as he stared at the bleeding gashes on his arm. "It got me."
"Did it bite you?" Quinn demanded, standing over the dead thing, his chest heaving. The question was sharp, clinical.
"No, it just… it scratched me." Mark's voice was thin, reedy with shock.
Before Quinn could process the implications of that, a new sound ripped through the house.
SMASH!
It came from the den at the front of the house. The sound of a smaller window breaking. The desk they had shoved against it was not heavy enough.
They were being flanked.
"Mark, watch the kitchen! Don't let anything else come through that door!" Quinn yelled, already running from the kitchen.
He sprinted into the living room, poker held ready. He could see into the den. The desk had been pushed aside, and a new figure was climbing through the broken window. It was the woman in the pink jogging suit. Her eyes were milky white, and a thin line of dark blood trickled from her ear. She dropped to the floor and immediately started towards the sound of his footsteps, her movements unnaturally quick.
Two breaches. Two active threats. Quinn's mind was racing, calculating angles, threats, and probabilities. He was a soldier trying to hold a position that was collapsing on two fronts. He braced himself in the living room, preparing to meet the woman's charge.
Then came the sound that turned his blood to ice.
A scream. A pure, piercing scream of absolute terror. It was Sarah.
"QUINN!"
The scream came from the central hallway. The hallway that led to the closet under the stairs, where the children were hiding.
Quinn's carefully constructed battlefield, his tactical assessment of the den and the kitchen, dissolved into a single, overwhelming priority. He abandoned the den, abandoned the new threat, and spun around, sprinting for the hallway. His heart hammered against his ribs with a force that felt like it would break them.
He skidded to a halt at the entrance to the hall, his shoes slipping on the hardwood. The scene was a nightmare. A small barricade they had made from a hall table had been overturned. An infected—the teenage boy from the street—had somehow smashed through the small, high window in the downstairs bathroom, a weak point they had completely overlooked in their haste. It was standing over Sarah, who had fallen backward onto the floor, her hand outstretched to keep the thing at bay. It was snarling, snapping its teeth, trying to get past her arm. It was only feet from the closet door.
Quinn saw it all in a fraction of a second. The creature in the hallway directly in front of him. The sound of the woman in the den scrambling over furniture to get to him from behind. The memory of the open, breached patio door in the kitchen where Mark was hurt and likely in no condition to fight.
One in front of him. One behind him. One breach in the kitchen.
Three points of entry. Three active threats. They were surrounded. He was one man with an iron poker, and he could not be in three places at once. The barricades had failed. Their fortress was a trap. The cold, brutal truth crashed down on him with the weight of a physical blow. The plan to hide, to defend, to wait it out—it was over. It had been a fatal miscalculation from the start.
The creature lunged at Sarah again, its hands reaching for her throat. Quinn roared, a sound of pure rage and desperation, and charged down the hall. He had to get to Sarah. He had to get to the kids.
But he knew, with a sudden, gut-wrenching clarity, that killing this one would not save them. Not anymore. The house was breached. It was lost.
He swung the poker, his mind screaming a single, frantic thought. Their only chance was not to fight. Their only chance was to run.
"SARAH, GET THE KIDS!" he yelled, his voice raw with terror and adrenaline as he brought the poker down on the creature's head. "WE'RE GETTING OUT! WE'RE GETTING OUT NOW!"