EXTINCT

And the Zeds stood around in the sun like men waiting on a bus. The bus company that quit serving ten years ago. Swaying. Leaking. Slow. You could walk around them all day. Mostly you could.

Night belonged to the others.

He had watched the change happen twice, both times from a rooftop with binoculars, his heart going like a hammer on sheet metal.

Here is how it happens: A Zed stands slack in the fading purple light, showing nothing wrong that wasn’t already wrong. Then the head jerks toward the sky. The spine gives way next, folding backward all at once with a dry, muffled splintering—the sound of firewood snapping inside a burlap sack. It hits the dirt on all fours and runs.

The survivors who still spoke to one another called them ferals. Others called them night runners. Jack called them nothing. No word did any work anymore.

The sun was their problem. Full daylight cooked them. He’d seen one caught in the open once—nine in the morning, no shade for a hundred yards. The thin skin across its shoulders split and started to smoke. It went screaming on all fours for the shadow of an overpass and denned there, chewing at itself until he was past.

So they denned by day. Towers. Garages. The black middle floors of every tall building in the city. The Medical Center had forty floors’ worth of black.

At dusk the towers talked. That was a thing nobody had written on any map. If you stood under them in the last light, you could hear it—high up, behind the broken glass. Something moving. Slow. Patient. The sun was leaving, and they knew it in whatever was left of their heads.

Jack kept his eyes at street level and walked. Anything that could reach him would come from street level. Whatever watched from up there could watch all it wanted.

Last night had been an auto-parts store off a feeder road. High broken windows. A slow one stood frozen in the parts aisle, staring blankly at a rack of fan belts. He put the rifle butt through its temple in the last of the light—a round at that hour was a flare with your name on it.

The office had a steel door, so he dragged the desk against it and lay underneath, Glock on his chest, lamp off. All night the ferals ran the streets. Growling. That chattering they do. Around three, one gunshot, blocks off. One. Then a man screaming, and the screaming went on maybe a minute, and then came the sound they make when they’re on something. After that, nothing until the birds.

Now he had maybe forty minutes of light. He needed a room.

He came off the ramp and took the surface streets east. The lanes were jammed with dead cars and overgrown weeds, forcing him out into the open every few yards. He kept his pace flat and brisk—sprinting drew eyes from blocks away, and standing still made you a target. He just kept moving.

Halfway down a long block, he allowed himself a single look up the flank of the nearest tower. Burnt streaks ran down the concrete. Dark floors stacked on dark floors, every window a black hole. He couldn’t see anything up there, and that’s the whole trick of it—you can’t see them, but they see you fine.

The sun is the only shield left. And the sun is leaving. He drops his eyes back to the asphalt. His heart keeps pounding anyway. It works on its own schedule.

Three blocks down, he cut into the complex, ducking under the brown folded fronds of a dead palm tree. The curb sign read ELM URT APARTM NTS. He kept moving. Past the manager’s office, straight into the courtyard—his eyes already sweeping the three stories of exterior stairs above him.

The empty swimming pool sat in the middle of the lot, choked with a foot of black sludge and rotting leaves. He circled wide around the deep end, ignoring the faded HAVE FUN painted on the bottom, and headed straight for the darkness of the nearest stairwell.

He paused at the foot of the steps, listening.

The treefrogs in the ditch were roaring loud and steady. As long as that racket held, the ground around him was empty. The moment it cut out in a line, something was walking. Under the cover of the noise, he took the first step.

He cut wide around a minivan on flat tires, his eyes tracking the open stairwell ahead. A sun-bleached stick-figure family covered the rear glass. He ignored the dark side windows. He just kept moving.

He bypassed the ground-floor doors. Climbed the concrete stairs to the second floor. He took the corner unit at the end of the walkway. From the landing, he checked his sightlines over the rail. Open view of the lot, the pool, the broken fence. He glanced down at the thick hedge eight feet below the balcony—an easy jump if the stairwell got cut off.

He stepped to the side of the doorframe, clear of the wood. He cracked the heavy aluminum barrel of his flashlight against the panel: three hard strikes. Staying flat against the stucco, he counted to thirty in the silence. The building ticked in the cooling air. The frogs kept screaming in the ditch. Nothing moved inside.

End of chapter one. 13 more chapters in the full book.