Day Zero: The Last Bite

The Broadcast

The shelter sat behind a chain-link fence two miles north, exactly where Priya's phone said it would be. From a block away, it looked right—floodlights on, a banner reading EMERGENCY SHELTER: SAFE ZONE strung across the entrance, a speaker mounted on a pole repeating the same message on a loop.

"This area has been secured by the National Guard. Food, water, and medical aid available inside. Please approach slowly with hands visible."

"Hands visible," Reyes repeated. "That's a good sign. Means somebody's actually managing this, not just a recording running on its own."

"Or it's exactly that," Priya said. "A recording running on its own."

"Don't say that in front of her," Marcus said quietly, nodding at Elena, who walked between him and Mrs. Hart, gripping her rabbit with both hands now.

They crossed the last stretch of road toward the fence. No guards at the gate. No movement inside, either, just floodlights burning over an empty parking lot and rows of folding tables set up like they were expecting a crowd that never came.

"Hello?" Marcus called out. "Anybody here?"

The broadcast kept looping. "This area has been secured by the National Guard—"

"Somebody turn that thing off," Reyes muttered, pushing the gate open. It wasn't locked. That bothered him more than if it had been. "A real safe zone locks its gate."

They stepped inside. The parking lot smelled wrong, coppery, the same smell Marcus remembered from the maintenance corridor. Elena pressed closer to his side.

"Dad, why's it smell like that?"

"Stay behind me," Marcus said, keeping his voice level for her sake, though his stomach had already dropped.

They moved past the folding tables, past crates of water bottles still sealed, untouched. Reyes swept his flashlight across the ground and stopped.

"There," he said.

Blood, dried dark on the concrete, smeared in long trails leading toward the main building. Not pooled from one spot. Dragged.

"Everybody stays close," Marcus said. "Mrs. Hart, you good?"

"I'm not going anywhere fast, but I'm here," she said, leaning harder on his arm now.

They reached the main building's entrance, a double door propped open with a fire extinguisher. Inside, the lights were still on, buzzing fluorescents over rows of cots, all empty, all undisturbed except for the ones near the back that had been knocked over, blankets torn, one cot flipped completely on its side.

"No bodies," Priya said, scanning the room. "That doesn't make sense. If people died here, there should be bodies."

"Maybe they got up again," Reyes said. "Maybe there's nothing left to find because everybody who died here is walking around somewhere else now."

Elena's hand tightened around Marcus's fingers. "Are the monsters going to come back?"

"They already left," Marcus said. "This place is quiet. That means it's safe enough to keep moving through."

He didn't believe his own words, but Elena needed something to hold onto, and right now that was all he had to give her.

Priya crouched near an overturned table and picked something up off the floor—a small black box, wires taped along one edge, a tiny light blinking red.

"Marcus."

He crossed the room and looked at it. The same kind of device Reyes had pulled off the dead soldier's belt in the parking garage.

"Another beacon," Reyes said, taking it from Priya and turning it over in his hands. "Except this one's not just marking a location. Look at the wiring. This one's rigged to the door frame."

"Rigged how?" Marcus asked.

"Like a trigger. Somebody wanted this building wired to trip something the second the door opened." Reyes looked up at the propped-open fire extinguisher holding the door in place. "Except it never triggered, because somebody left the door jammed open before it could shut."

"Who would do that?" Priya said.

"Somebody trying to warn the next people who walked in," Reyes said. "Or somebody making sure it didn't go off before they were done inside."

The broadcast speaker outside kept looping, faint through the walls. "This area has been secured by the National Guard—"

Mrs. Hart lowered herself onto the edge of an upright cot, catching her breath. "I don't understand any of this. Why would anyone build a shelter and then rig it to hurt the people who came for help?"

"Because it was never a shelter," Marcus said, the pieces falling into place as he said it out loud. "It was bait."

Priya nodded slowly. "The broadcast draws survivors in. The beacon marks the location. Whoever's coordinating that has been using shelters like this one to gather people in one place and then—" she stopped, looking at Elena, and chose her next words carefully. "And then deal with them all at once."

"Deal with them how?" Elena asked, looking between the adults.

Marcus crouched down to her level. "I need you to trust me on something, okay? We're not staying here. We're going to keep moving, and I need you to hold Mrs. Hart's hand and stay close to me the whole time."

Elena studied his face, the same way she had back at the house, checking if he meant it. She nodded and reached for Mrs. Hart's hand.

Reyes disconnected the beacon's wiring with careful hands, setting it down gently on the floor once it was safe. "Whoever's running this operation isn't infected. Isn't panicked. This took planning. Somebody's coordinating shelters across the whole outbreak zone, using them to clear out survivors."

"Which means this isn't containment anymore," Priya said. "This is cleanup."

Marcus stood, taking Elena's other hand. "Then we find out who's giving these orders, and we stop assuming anybody broadcasting 'safe zone' actually means it."

They moved back toward the entrance, past the empty cots and dried blood trails, and just as they reached the propped door, the looping broadcast outside cut off mid-sentence. Silence for a second, heavy and wrong. Then a new voice came through the speaker, calm, unhurried, nothing like the recording before it.

"You found the beacon," the voice said. "Smart. Most people don't look."

Everyone froze. Reyes raised his rifle toward the speaker mounted outside, useless as that was against a recorded transmission.

"Who is this?" Marcus called out.

The voice continued, even and measured, like it was reading from a script it had used a hundred times before. "You're going to want to leave that building now. And you're going to want to stop asking questions you're not equipped to survive the answers to."

The speaker clicked off.