Chapter 273: Behind Closed Doors.
"Careful," Venna whispered.
She moved along the wall behind me, her hand locked in mine, patient, matching every step without ever tugging. The corridor was narrow and cool. Grey light from the front of the building reached us in thin, dirty washes, just enough to give the stone walls hard edges again.
I put my head around the corner properly.
The rooms were clear. The reception room stood with its front doors wide open—heavy glass and wood framed against the black outside—which told me everything I needed and nothing I wanted.
If the infection got in here, then nobody outside those doors is still standing.
That was their whole job. Abuela and the two men at the entrance. They existed so the people in the dark rooms could go under and stay under. If the doors were open, that arrangement had ended. The air pouring through them carried the night and something else underneath it—faint, sweet-rot wrong.
We crossed. I put my shoulder into the doors and drove them shut. The bolt slammed across with a sound that cracked too loud in a building this quiet—metal on metal, final. The lock caught with a hard metallic bite. Whatever was inside now was ours. Nothing else was getting in behind us.
I looked out through the glass.
The sky had gone fully dark. Nothing moved on the ground outside. Not a person. Not a shape. The cars still sat exactly where they’d been parked when I arrived—silent, untouched—which said as much about Abuela and her guards as anything else could have.
Nobody had driven away.
"We check the whole house," I said, testing the door with my palm, feeling the solid resistance under the pressure. "Every room."
"Do we have to?" Venna asked.
She said it lightly. I understood why. She still didn’t grasp what it means to share a building with one of them. Nobody does until they’ve done it. The knowledge sits different once you’ve heard the breathing up close.
"At some point tonight we’re going to sleep," I said. "I’d like to know what’s in here before we do."
She went and checked the windows without being asked, working the latches one by one—soft, methodical clicks—then we turned back toward the rooms.
Room by room. Find what’s in here. Find where we’re spending the night.
"Do you think those things got Abuela?" Venna asked as we came back into the reception room, her voice at normal volume again. The words sounded too ordinary for what they carried.
"We can’t know yet." I kept mine low.
The doors were open and her car was still outside and she was an old woman who moved with a hand on the wall. The odds had done their arithmetic without asking me. The knowledge sat in my chest like a stone.
Then I heard the counter.
Small sounds from behind it. Murmuring. The wet catch in a throat. The soft, continuous noise of something that had forgotten how to be quiet.
I put my hand up flat.
Venna stopped hard behind me. I glanced back and read her face in the thin white light and saw exactly what I expected. She hadn’t bought it yet. Not fully. And she was entitled to that, because she hadn’t seen a single one with her own eyes. The two in the dark room had lived and died in blackness—sound and smell and the sudden white of the charge, nothing else.
Her comms started ringing.
Silence it.
She answered it instead. The connection opened with a sharp electronic crack in the quiet.
"Hang up," I whispered.
"It’s my uncle," she whispered back. "He’ll be worried about where I am."
She hadn’t got a word out when the thing came over the counter.
It exploded upward into the hard white light—body launching, arms already stretching, fingers splayed like hooks, skin slick and grey under the fluorescents. The wet, tearing sound of its breathing suddenly filled the room. I sent charge. White light cracked brighter than the overheads for a fraction of a second and found only empty air where the thing had been. It was already past the flash, body airborne, coming straight for her.
I hit it out of the air.
Shoulder and hip, full weight, bone and muscle driving into its center mass. The impact was solid and ugly. It went down in a tangle of limbs. Venna dropped hard on the floorboards, the comms skidding away from her hand with a thin plastic rattle that seemed to go on forever.
I didn’t look back.
I kept my eyes and ears forward because they never come alone. Two more came out of the same space behind the counter—one high, one low—both moving with the same broken, jerking urgency, every detail of them lit: the milky eyes, the black-rimmed teeth, the wet shine on their skin. The air filled with the wet, animal sound of them.
The high one came first, arms windmilling. I sent charge point-blank. The white flash lit its face for a single frozen frame—eyes milky, mouth open, teeth rimmed in black—then the body folded in mid-air and hit the floor smoking. The low one was already under my line of fire, scrabbling across the boards on all fours. I dropped my weight, drove a knee into its spine, and fired again. The charge took it between the shoulder blades. Light. Smoke. The sharp chemical stink of burning meat cut through the ordinary dust of the room.
Then I moved.
Corners first. Desk. Shadow under the stairs. My hearing stretched into every pocket of quiet, hunting for the wet catch of another throat. Nothing. Clear.
Five so far. Five inside a building in the middle of the capital. The walls had received the same party as everywhere else, and Sinn’s broadcast had been the polite version of it. The scale of what that meant pressed against the back of my mind and stayed there.
"You good?" I offered Venna my hand.
"Oh my God." She took it and came up shaking. Her fingers were cold. "That’s what Uncle Eddie was calling about. He’s been trying to reach me. He must be terrified, Abram."
"He is." I let her have it, because it was true. The worry in her voice was real and earned. "And we can’t do anything about that until we know this building is empty."
She nodded, holding herself together well for someone who had watched three things come over a counter thirty seconds ago. Her breathing was still too fast, but she was standing.
"Let’s check the rest," she said.
I led. She followed.
Safety first. Everything else after.