DAY ZERO

Start the damn car

KAI

The ration storage was exactly where the map said it would be.

Kai moved through it fast and without sentiment — protein packs, sealed carbohydrates, water filtration tablets, anything that wouldn't expire in the next three months went into the bag. He worked the way he did everything, which was efficiently and without wasting motion.

He was almost done when he heard them.

He turned slowly.

Two of them. Low to the ground. What had been guard dogs once — big ones, the military kind, the kind trained to be obstacles — except that whatever they had been trained to do was gone now, replaced by something older and simpler and entirely wrong. Blood and saliva hung from their mouths in strings. Their eyes had that same vacancy. Their feet moved with that same horrible mechanical certainty.

Infected, Kai thought. Of course they are.

He raised his gun and shot the first one.

The sound in the enclosed space was enormous.

He shot the second one immediately after, before it could close the distance, and that sound was just as enormous, and in the ringing quiet that followed Kai stood very still for exactly one second and listened.

Then he heard them. From multiple directions. The growling, low and building, getting closer.

"Wonderful," he said, to nobody.

He went back to packing.

He moved faster now — not panicking, Kai didn't panic, but operating at the elevated efficiency of someone who has recalculated a timeline and found it significantly shorter than preferred. Rations into the bag. Bag onto his back. Gun up.

The first blinker came through the door at the far end of the storage room and he shot it without breaking stride. The second appeared from his left and he turned, fired, kept moving. A third was in the corridor outside and he went right past it, close enough that he felt the air move as he cleared it, and put a round in its head on the way past without stopping.

He was running now. Back the way he'd come — the junction, the ramp, the way out that Tobey was supposed to be waiting at the top of.

He could hear them behind him. Multiple sets of the wrong kind of footsteps.

He came up the ramp and burst through the door into what passed for daylight and saw Tobey standing beside the camo jeep looking at his watch with the casual posture of someone waiting for a bus.

"TOBEY."

Tobey looked up.

One look at Kai's face and he was already moving — door open, engine on, all of it happening simultaneously, Tobey's hands doing three things at once with the practiced ease of someone whose hands had always been his best quality.

Kai ran.

The door was open. The car was already rolling — slowly, but rolling, Tobey moving it forward because the alternative was stopping completely and stopping completely was not something the situation allowed.

Kai's hand found the door frame.

He pulled.

His feet left the ground. His body swung. He got one leg in, then the other, pulled the door shut behind him and the blinkers that had made it out of the facility entrance hit the side of the car instead of him by approximately half a second.

He sat back in the seat.

Looked at the side mirror.

"Faster," he said.

"This is as fast as it goes right now—"

"Tobey."

"I'm going, I'm going—" Tobey took a hard left and the tyres made a sound that suggested they had opinions about it. "Could you maybe slow down a little on the screaming my name thing, by the way? You scared me."

Kai looked at him.

"You looked scared," Tobey clarified. "Which scared me. Because you don't look scared."

Kai looked back at the mirror. The facility entrance was shrinking behind them. The blinkers that had made it outside were already losing ground.

"There were infected dogs," Kai said.

Tobey processed this.

"Dogs," he said.

"Guard dogs. Infected."

A pause.

"Okay," Tobey said. "So it's dogs now too."

"Apparently."

Tobey drove. His fingers found the wheel in that rhythmless drumming pattern. "Do you think other animals can get it? Like what about birds? Because if birds can get it that's a completely—"

"Drive," Kai said.

Tobey drove.

DAVID

The armour storage was on the third level and it was, genuinely, impressive.

Racks of it. Different grades, different builds — light tactical for mobility, heavy reinforced for situations where mobility was secondary to not dying, and everything between. David walked the rows slowly and thought about each of them.

He picked Kai's first — medium grade, mobility friendly, something that wouldn't slow him down. Held it up. Nodded.

Tobey's next — lighter, because Tobey needed his hands free and his movement unrestricted. Something that wouldn't get in the way of whatever Tobey's hands were doing at any given moment.

He moved down the row.

He found one for Lia and held it up for a long time before deciding. Thin but genuinely strong — he tested the plating, pressed his thumb into it, checked the joint points. Convenient. It wouldn't restrict her movement or her hands. He set it aside with the others.

Then he looked at the remaining options for himself.

He reached for one. Standard. Practical. Efficient.

Put it back.

Looked at another. This one had a cleaner line to it — same protection rating, same weight, but the design had something to it. Something that didn't look like he'd just grabbed the nearest thing.

Lia was watching him from two rows over. "Are you—" She stopped. "Are you picking based on how it looks?"

"I'm picking based on multiple criteria."

"David."

"Fit is important. Mobility is important. Aesthetic contributes to—"

"We are in an apocalypse."

"Which is exactly when you need to maintain some standards," he said. "These blinkers aren't going to take me seriously if I look like a dummy."

She stared at him.

Then she laughed. A real one — the kind that escaped before she decided to let it out, bright and surprised and completely genuine.

He took the better looking armour.

She walked over and looked at it against him. Tilted her head. Something moved in her expression — something that was trying to stay neutral and not quite managing.

"It suits your shirt actually," she said.

He looked down at himself. The black shirt — worn now, tired, been through things. The shirt he'd put on the morning of Brian's graduation ceremony. The morning of wanna get a drink. He'd been wearing it ever since, through the cliff and the coma and the hospital and all of it, because there had been no reason to change and also because changing felt like—

Wherever you are, he thought. I hope you're somewhere good.

"Hey," Lia said. "What did you mean by that?"

He looked up. "By what?"

"You said wherever he is. What did you mean?"

He looked at her for a moment. At the question in her face, genuine and careful, the way she asked things she actually wanted to know.

"Nothing," he said. "Never mind."

She looked at him one more second. Let it go.

She picked up his armour and held it out.

"Arms up," she said.

"I've got it—"

"Your left arm says otherwise. Arms up."

He put his arms up.

His left arm informed him, clearly and immediately, that it had not signed off on this. He kept it up anyway while she worked — fitting the armour, adjusting the straps, doing up the fastenings with those quick precise hands of hers. He watched the top of her head. The focused expression she had when she was doing something she wanted to do correctly.

She reached up to adjust the shoulder fitting on his right side and looked up to check the alignment and found him looking at her.

She stilled for just a moment.

Something moved through her face that was too fast to name but not too fast to notice. A warmth that started at her ears and she blinked it back with visible effort and looked down at the strap she was adjusting.

She finished.

Stepped back.

"How is it?" she said. Not quite meeting his eyes. Quiet.

He looked down at himself. Rolled his right shoulder. Tested the range of motion.

"Perfect," he said.

She nodded. Started picking up the bags.

Then they heard it.

The engine — low and fast and getting louder very quickly from the direction of the corridor behind them.

They both turned at the same time.

The camo jeep came around the corner moving significantly faster than anything should move inside a building and David grabbed Lia by the shoulders and pulled her to the side and the front of the jeep stopped approximately one foot from where they'd been standing.

The window came down.

Tobey's face. Slightly wild around the eyes.

"GET IN," he said. "Blinkers incoming right now—"

They moved. David grabbed the weapons bag. Lia grabbed the medical supplies. They could already hear it — from back down the corridor, from outside, from somewhere below — the growling that meant too many, too fast, too close.

"Go go go—" Lia got in first. David in right after her. Kai pulled the bag in from the back window. Door shut.

Tobey hit the accelerator.

The car didn't move.

Everyone felt it at the same time — that horrible dead silence from an engine that was supposed to be doing something and wasn't.

"Tobey," Kai said.

"I know—"

"Did you check the condition of the car before you—"

"I checked it, it was fine, it's—" Tobey tried the ignition again. Nothing. "It was fine—"

The first blinker hit the side of the jeep.

Then the second. Then more than David could count — bodies pressing against the windows, against every panel, the sounds of them filling the car from all sides, the growling and the screeching and underneath it all the horrible intimacy of being surrounded by something that used to be people.

One of them dragged itself across the hood. It had scratched something — its own arm, the car, David couldn't tell — and left a dark streak of blood across the windshield that Tobey stared at with an expression David had never seen on his face before.

He looked over at Lia.

She was pressed back against her seat, both hands gripping the door and the headrest, jaw set, eyes forward. Completely silent. Doing what she did — containing it, holding it, performing fine when fine was not the operating condition.

David reached across and found her hand.

She looked at him.

He gave her the smile

Small and steady and we're okay.

Something in her face released. Just slightly. Just enough.

She held his hand back.

Tobey tried the ignition.

The car shook. Something hit the roof. The windshield streak was still there. Kai had his gun up against the window, tracking, saying nothing, his jaw working slightly.

Tobey tried again.

And again.

And then — in the way that things sometimes decide, at the last possible moment, to cooperate — the engine caught.

It turned over. Held. Roared.

"YES—" Tobey floored it.

The jeep surged forward and the blinkers on the hood went with the momentum and those on the sides fell away and they hit the facility ramp at speed and then they were outside, properly outside, real air and real light and distance growing between them and everything back there.

Tobey drove. Hard and fast and without speaking.

Nobody spoke.

For a long time the only sounds were the engine and the tyres and everyone's breathing doing what breathing does when it's been held for too long and finally gets to be loud again.

Then Tobey said: "I did check the condition."

Silence.

"Just so everyone knows," he added.

Kai looked out the window.

David looked at his hand, still holding Lia's.

She let go quietly. Looked out her window.

He looked out his.

The road opened up ahead of them — long and empty and going somewhere. David watched it come toward them and thought about his mother, about where north was,and about all the people still out there scared and scarred about the blinkers, he was just lucky he found a team

"Where now?" Tobey said eventually.

David looked at the road.

"Keep going north," he said.

And they did.