The gate shut behind them with a heavy clank.
Colt took it in as they moved. Tents pitched between old vehicles, campers with their windows patched over with plastic sheeting. Rope strung between them with clothes hanging limp. A few fire pits with cooking grates, scaffolding lining the walls.
Kids stopped and watched them pass. A little boy standing outside a tent opening, maybe six years old, holding something that used to be a stuffed animal. A girl older than her sitting on the hood of a rusted car, legs dangling. They didn’t run or hide. Just watched with the flat calm of kids who’d grown up knowing strangers meant trouble.
A woman near the fire pit looked up. Looked back down.
The building sat at the back of the compound. Walls thick and reinforced, no windows on the ground level. Whatever it had been before, somebody had bolted sheet metal over the exterior and run razor wire along the roofline.
They were halfway across the compound when the little girl came running.
“Dani!”
She burst out from between two tents and made straight for the Dani, arms out. Dani caught her and the girl buried her face in her side, arms locked around her legs.
“You came back,” the girl said into Dani’s shirt.
Dani’s hand went to the back of her head. She didn’t say anything for a second.
“Where’s daddy,” the girl said. “Is he with you?”
Dani crouched down to her level. “He’s still out there lookin’ around. He’ll be back soon.”
The girl pulled back and looked at her face. Kids read faces better than most adults. Her eyes moved over Dani’s the way you look at something you’re not sure you believe.
Then she nodded and stepped back.
Dani stood. She looked at Colt and Clay once, something tight around her eyes, then walked off with the girl’s hand in hers.
Colt looked at Clay.
Clay bit his lip and turned away.
They both knew. That man. Dani’s dad. He wasn’t coming back.
“Keep moving.” Marcus said.
The spears pressed them forward toward the building. Marcus held the door without looking at them. Inside, a wide corridor ran straight ahead, doors lining both sides. Lights in the ceiling. Black machines stacked floor to ceiling behind mesh panels on both sides of the hall, dead screens and cables hanging off them in loops.
Marcus walked ahead without slowing.
“Wait,” Colt said. “We can help you. Whatever’s goin’ on out there, whatever you need—”
Marcus didn’t turn around. He kept walking.
A spear nudged Colt’s shoulder blade. “Move.”
They walked.
Marcus stopped at a door near the end of the corridor. A number was stenciled on it in white paint. 68. He looked at the spear carriers and walked away.
They pushed Colt and Clay through the door and pulled it shut. The lock clicked.
Clay spun around. “God damn it.” He looked at Colt. “Why didn’t you do somethin’ out there? Dead Eye. Anything. We didn’t have to walk in here like that.”
“No.”
“No?” Clay’s hands went out. “They took everything, Colt. Your dagger. My bowie. We’re sittin’ in a box.”
“I know.”
“So open the map. Get us back to the HUB. We got some Puha. Ain’t no reason to sit here like prisoners.”
Colt leaned against the wall. “No.”
Clay stared at him. “What do you mean no?”
“The coyotes.” Colt crossed his arms. “She said they control everything west of the Mississippi. That ain’t a small thing, Clay. That’s a whole operation. Half the country under their thumb and we’re standin’ right in the middle of it.”
“Yeah,” Clay said. “Which is exactly why we should leave.”
“We need to figure out what their up to.” Colt started to pace.
“And my dagger.” Colt’s jaw tightened. “I ain’t walkin’ out of here without it.”
Clay looked at the ceiling. He put both hands on the back of his neck and stood there breathing.
“You’re gonna get us killed in a locked room on a zombie Earth,” he said. “That’s how this ends.”
“Nobody’s dyin’,” Colt said. “Marcus is smart. He’ll come talk to us.”
Clay dropped onto the floor with his back against the wall and his arms on his knees.
“He better,” he said. “He better come real soon.”
***
Time passed slow.
Colt sat with his back against the wall and his eyes on the door. Voices moved in the corridor outside, back and forth, then less, then quiet.
Clay stretched out on the floor and stared at the ceiling. “I could go for one of them gray balls right about now. How long we gonna wait before we just say fuck it?”
Then a siren broke through the air.
A gun shot, somewhere outside the building.
The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.
Colt’s head came up.
Another shot. Then two more fast.
Screaming. A woman’s voice, cut short.
Footsteps pounded past the door, running hard. More than one set. A door slammed somewhere down the corridor. Then another. Kids crying, muffled through the walls.
Clay was already on his feet.
Another shot.
“What the hell?” Colt said.
He crossed the room and hit the door with his fist. “Hey. Let us out. We can help.” He hit it again, harder. “Let us out.”
Nothing. Just more footsteps running past, more doors slamming shut.
Clay stood in the middle of the room. “Fuck. Now what.”
Colt stepped back from the door. His mind went to the DISPLACEMENT DRIVE MK-I. Portals broke you down into molecules, pulled you apart and put you back together somewhere else. That’s what Kevin had said, more or less. The drive had done the same thing for that ship, moved the whole thing through space without a portal.
It was in him now. Sitting in his module bay.
He looked at the wall.
He backed up to the far side of the room. Lined himself up with the door.
Clay watched him. “What are you doin’.”
“Thinkin’.”
“About what.”
“The drive,” Colt said. “Portals break you down into mole-cules. Put you back together on the other side. That drive did the same thing for that whole ship.”
Clay looked at the door. Back at Colt. His mouth pulled at the corner. “What are you gonna do. Run through the wall.”
“Yeah,” Colt said. “Maybe.”
He opened his module bay and found the drive. That slow pulse running through it. He focused on it the way he’d learned to focus on Dead Eye, wanting it, pushing his intention into it.
DISPLACEMENT DRIVE MK-I
ACTIVATE?
“Yes.”
The world snapped.
Cold rushed through him from his boots to his teeth, there and gone in less than a second. His vision whited out. He felt himself come apart and come back together.
His boots hit the corridor floor.
He stood outside the door, facing it from the other side.
The lock was right there in front of him. He reached out and turned it and pushed the door open.
Clay stood in the middle of the room staring at him.
“Ok then,” Clay said. “Let’s go.”
The corridor was chaos. People moving fast, pulling kids by the hand, shoving into rooms and pulling doors shut. Nobody looked at them twice.
Then Colt saw her.
Dani had her sister by the shoulders, pushing her backward through a doorway. The little girl’s face was wet, eyes squeezed shut. Dani got her through and pulled the door shut and turned around.
She saw Colt and Clay.
“What’s happening,” Colt said.
“Coyotes.” She was already moving.
She ran to a door across the corridor and dropped to one knee in front of a crate sitting against the wall. She popped the lid.
Dani looked at them both. “You said you wanted to help.”
Colt’s satchel. His revolver. The Conduit Dagger and the Bowie.
He grabbed them without breaking stride, dagger going to his belt, revolver into his holster, satchel over his shoulder. Clay reached past him and pulled out his bowie.
She pushed through the door and they followed her out.
The compound was loud. People up on the scaffolding that ran along the inside of the walls, some with rifles, some with bows, shooting out into the dark beyond the perimeter. Firelight flickered from somewhere outside the walls. Howling cut through the gunshots, coming from more than one direction.
The gate had started to glow.
Yellow first, bleeding up through the seams where the metal panels joined. Then violet underneath it, pulsing slow like something breathing on the other side.
The gate shook.
Marcus was already there. A line of men and women in mismatched armor stood behind him, rifles up, bows drawn. Marcus had a gun Colt had never seen before, thick through the barrel and mounted on a strap around his neck. He held it with both hands and his jaw was set.
Colt and Clay ran up beside Dani.
Marcus looked back. His eyes went hard. “Why the hell’d you let them out.” He looked at Dani. “How do you know they ain’t—“
The gate exploded.
The gate was gone, both panels blown back, one hanging off a single hinge and the other flat on the ground.
Colt got up.
Coyotes poured through the gap.
Shoulders at chest height, fur matted, eyes burning yellow-violet. The people on the scaffolding opened up, rifles cracking, arrows cutting down. Two coyotes went down in the breach. Three more came over them.
People were screaming somewhere to his left. A man went down under two of them.
Then Marcus’s gun opened up.
The sound filled the compound, a continuous hammering roar that drowned out everything else. Colt had never heard anything like it. The barrel swung in a slow arc and coyotes came apart where it touched them. Bodies piled up at the gate. Marcus walked forward into it, jaw set, not stopping.
Clay grabbed Colt’s arm and leaned close. “What in the—”
The gun stopped.
Marcus yanked at it. Yanked again. He looked down at it with his teeth pressed together.
Three coyotes broke from the pack. They came straight, low to the ground, closing fast.
Marcus dropped the gun. His hand went to his belt and came up with a knife. He set his feet.
“Alright, You mother fuckers.”
Dani stepped up beside him, knife out.
Colt ran up on Marcus’s other side. Clay took the end.
Colt pulled the Conduit Dagger.
MELEE WEAPON EQUIPPED
CONDUIT DAGGER
The coyotes leaped.
DEAD EYE: ACTIVATED
0:05
They hung in the air, three of them, jaws open, paws spread. Colt was already moving.
0:04
He drove the dagger up into the first one’s skull. Violet pulsed white and pulled through the blade into his palm.
PROJECT: LAST STAND v1.11
Puha: 134.8
0:03
He spun to the second one. Same motion. Blade in, pulse out.
PROJECT: LAST STAND v1.11
Puha: 154.8
0:02
He turned to the third.
It was looking at him.
Not the dead, locked stare of something frozen mid-lunge. Its eyes were tracking him, yellow-violet burning, head shifting slow to follow him.
It shouldn’t have been able to move.
Colt felt it then — not fear. Recognition.
If he pulled back, if he let time snap, it would land on Marcus.
0:01
“Fuck.”
He threw himself at it.
They hit the ground together, the coyote twisting under him, claws raking his forearm, teeth snapping inches from his face. Time snapped back. Colt got his weight on its neck and drove the dagger down.
The violet pulsed once and went out.
PROJECT: LAST STAND v1.11
Puha: 174.8
The coyote went still.
Then it changed.
The fur pulled back. The frame shrank. The paws became hands. In the space of a few seconds the thing under Colt wasn’t a coyote anymore. It was a man. Middle aged, dark hair, face slack.
Marcus stood ten feet away. He had his knife up ready to fight and now he just stood there with it hanging at his side. His eyes moved from the two dead men on the ground to Colt kneeling on top of the third. Back and forth. Like his brain was trying to catch up to what his eyes were showing him.
Dani hadn’t moved either. Her knife was still out but her arm had dropped. She stared at the body under Colt.
“How,” Marcus said. Just the one word.
Colt didn’t answer. He looked down at the man beneath him. At the cord around his neck. He reached down and lifted it.
A small metal cylinder, no bigger than his thumb. Plain except for faint lines running along the surface.
MODULE DETECTED:
BREACH CHARGE MK-I
“Oh, shit.” Colt whispered.
WARNING: HOSTILE SIGNATURE IN PROXIMITY
He looked up at the sky.
A violet streak cut across it. There and gone. Then another, crossing the first.
Clay appeared beside him breathing hard, blood on his sleeve. “Uh. Colt.”
The cylinder in Colt’s hand started to pulse. Yellow first, then violet. Getting brighter. Getting faster.
Colt knew that rhythm. He’d seen it on the gate thirty seconds ago.
He dropped it in the dirt and was on his feet.
“Run,” he said. “Run. Get back.”
Nobody moved for a half second.
“It’s gonna blow!” Colt grabbed Marcus by the arm and shoved him. “Move!”
They ran. All of them, Marcus and Dani and Clay and the people closest to them, sprinting back toward the building. Colt pumped his arms and didn’t look back.
The blast picked him up and threw him forward.
He hit the dirt face first and slid. The heat rolled over his back. Debris rained down around him, chunks of metal and dirt and things he didn’t want to think about.
Silence.
Then his hearing came back, ringing at first, then the sounds underneath. Fire. Someone coughing. The distant moan of shamblers drawn by the noise somewhere beyond the walls.
Colt lifted his head.
The ground ten feet to his left exploded.
A violet streak had punched straight into the dirt, the impact crater still smoking. A violet sphere shot out and pulsed in the air and flattened out.
