Chapter 302: Nowhere Safe.
"Venna. Venna."
I called her name looking at her upside down, the roof of the car underneath my shoulders, the road where the sky should have been.
The world had turned over and stayed there. Glass glittered across the inverted ceiling in small, bright shards. The seatbelt dug hard across my chest. My own blood was warm against the side of my face where the window had come in.
She wasn’t answering. Her eyes were closed and her hair hung down toward the ceiling in a loose blue curtain, and her body swayed gently in the belt with the last residual movement of the crash.
It had happened in under two seconds. That was the part my head couldn’t catch up with. One moment a key going into an ignition and a joke about seatbelts, and now this—the entire geometry of the world reversed and broken.
My eyes moved past her.
The other car had come to rest a short way off, half turned, steam coming off the crumpled front in a slow white column under the street light. Metal ticked as it cooled.
And somebody was getting out of it.
"Ven."
She coughed. The sound was small and wet. Her eyes opened and found nothing and then found me—upside down, blood on my face, the wrong way up—and she started breathing properly again. The breath came in short, careful pulls.
I kept watching the shape working its way through the driver’s window.
It wasn’t a person.
The eyes told me before anything else did. They always do. Empty. Focused. The particular vacancy that lives behind the infection.
Infected.
I started on my belt, twisting to reach the buckle, watching it drag itself out of the frame. The metal of the buckle was warm and refused to give under my weight. My whole body hung into the strap. Outside, the thing kept coming.
It came out at the waist.
That was all of it. The legs stayed in the car, still hooked under the wheel, and it kept coming anyway, hauling itself down onto the asphalt on its forearms without any awareness that it had left half of itself behind. The motion was wrong in a way that went past horror into something almost mechanical—pure drive, no inventory of what the body still possessed. Blood slicked the dust beneath it in a dark, continuous trail.
"Fuck."
The buckle wouldn’t give. My weight was on it, my whole body hanging into the strap, and the thing was already across the first stretch of road and moving fast. It had blood on its mouth already, fresh, and it had smelled us. The empty eyes locked. The forearms pulled. The torso dragged forward with terrible efficiency.
Venna was still hanging beside me, both of us belted into a box on its roof. The inverted world stayed perfectly still around the movement outside.
It reached the window.
The buckle released and dropped me hard onto the ceiling. The impact drove the air out of my lungs in a single sharp rush. And the thing came in over me in the same second—hands on my chest, mouth coming down, the wet heat of its breath and the copper smell of the blood already on its teeth.
Charge went through it.
White light flared in the confined space of the inverted cabin for a fraction of a second. The body stopped like something had been switched off. The weight of it came down on me and stayed—heavy, absolute, the smell of burned cloth and skin rising immediately.
"Bram."
"I’m here." I shoved it off. The torso rolled against the broken glass and lay still. "I’m here, I’m fine."
"What happened?" She was working at it, trying to build the last minute back out of pieces. Her voice was thin, the words arriving in the wrong order in her own head.
"A car came out of the road with no lights."
I got a hand under her shoulder and released her belt. Her weight came down into my arms and I caught it, then pulled her out through the broken window into the dirt of the yard. Glass scored my arms on the way out. The dirt was cool against my back for a second before I rolled and got us both clear.
The car was finished. Roof crushed on one side, both front wheels gone, the frame twisted into a shape that no longer remembered being a vehicle. And whoever had been driving the other one had been bitten recently enough to still have blood on his face, which meant it had happened tonight.
They were spreading faster than they were walking.
Venna lay on her back in the dust looking straight up at the sky. The street lights laid yellow across her face. Her chest rose and fell in careful, measured breaths.
I crouched and gave her my hand and pulled her up.
She came onto her feet unsteadily and I got my arm across her shoulders and held her there while she found the ground. The weight of her against my side was familiar and absolute. Her boots scuffed once in the dirt before they held.
"How do you feel?"
"Good." A breath. "Dizzy. But good."
"We can go back inside." I still had the keys in my pocket. The metal was warm from my body. "One more night in there costs us nothing."
"No." She planted one boot and put her weight on it, testing. The knee held. "I’m good."
"Venna."
"I’m good, Bram."
I went back to the wreck and pulled the bag out through the window. Whatever essentials meant, we were going to need them sooner than either of us had planned. The bag was still heavy. Glass clung to the fabric in small bright points.
Then headlights swung across the yard wall.
Another car came up the road, weaving badly, crossing both lanes and correcting and crossing again. I caught it in the moment it passed under the street light—the interior lit for a fraction of a second by the yellow overhead.
A man behind the wheel with one hand on it and an infected in the passenger seat with its arms around him, and the two of them fighting over the steering. The man’s face was a rictus of effort and terror. The infected’s mouth was already at his neck.
It never made the corner.
It came off the road at speed, mounted the yard, and went straight into the front of Abuela’s building.
The wall took it. The impact was a single, enormous sound that travelled through the ground and into the bones of my legs. Then the fuel went up, and the whole ground floor lit at once with a sound that hit us both in the chest—a deep, expanding whoomph that pushed the air outward in a hot wave.
Everything went orange.
Flames climbed the doorway we’d walked out of ten minutes earlier. The corridor. The dark room. The stone room with a fridge in it, food, water, cold air, a door that held. The fire moved with terrible appetite, finding the wood, the fabric, the ordinary things that had kept us alive for two days. Heat rolled across the yard in a continuous wave. Sparks lifted into the evening air and vanished.
"What the hell was that?" Venna’s face was lit up with it, the fire moving on her skin in shifting orange and black. The blue of her hair looked almost black in the new light.
"There was a man in it. He was being bitten while he was driving."
I watched the flames climb higher into the doorway. The building that had held us—the best building in the capital, the one nobody knew about—was becoming a column of light and smoke against the darkening sky. Everything we’d survived on for two days going up in front of us.
Well. That settles going back.
"The streets are full," I said. "Whatever’s out there, it isn’t a few of them anymore."
Venna let out a long breath, watching the building burn. The fire reflected in her eyes. The sound of it was continuous now—wood cracking, glass giving, the low roar of something that had found enough fuel to keep going.
"We need to be careful," she said.
"Very."
I put the bag over my shoulder. The weight settled against my side. We walked out through the broken gate onto the road. The street lights burned down on empty asphalt that wouldn’t stay empty for long. Somewhere far off the organised shouting continued, rolling between buildings, the sound of a city that still believed it could take the streets back.
My sister on my right, and the two of us heading into a burning capital to find Max Donman.