HONK!
HONK!
HONK!
The relentless blare of car horns all around him wore Lazar's patience thin until a frown settled on his face.
He rolled the windows back up to muffle the noise, but the effect was limited and all it really accomplished was trapping him inside a car that was rapidly turning into an oven beneath a New York summer heat that felt harsher than usual.
Before leaving, he had known full well that expecting to get out of the city without running into traffic was a fantasy, apocalypse or not.
Even so, he hadn't expected to get stuck in a jam less than twenty seconds after pulling out of his building's parking garage.
'At this pace, I might not make it before dark.' He thought, before turning on the air conditioning.
Unfortunately, the next few hours on the road validated his concern.
Already condemned to crawl forward at a snail's pace, he also had to deal with the constant reckless cutoffs around him, most of which ended in road rage, or, in the worst cases, an accident followed by road rage.
Needless to say, that slowed him down even more.
Under those conditions, Lazar lost a considerable amount of time. Nothing pleasant, but nothing unexpected either.
Looking for some meager consolation, he told himself that at least no monster, nor anything resembling those pillars of fire from earlier, had shown up so far to make the trip even worse.
By the time New York was finally behind him and he could drive at almost a normal speed again, it was well past six.
Boston was still roughly four hours away, and that estimate relied on traffic staying manageable the rest of the way, which felt optimistic.
Glancing at the fuel gauge, which showed he had only a quarter tank left, Lazar added the need to stop at a gas station to the long list of things already cluttering his mind.
Even so, he pushed the car twenty miles per hour over the speed limit, favoring speed over fuel economy.
Lana was worth that much.
The relationship between Lazar and her had never been simple, especially since he had left Boston.
Still, twelve years after his arrival in the United States from his homeland, since the very day she had decided to begin the process of adopting him not even minutes after meeting him, the immense gratitude he felt toward her remained untouched.
At barely twenty-seven, with a taste for parties and a way of living that seemed utterly incompatible with long-term responsibility, taking in a child meant sacrificing, at least in part, the life she had been leading until then.
And yet she had done it without hesitation.
If Lazar had been in a cynical mood, he would have said Lana was known for making bad decisions when it came to her personal life, and that this had merely been another one.
'But definitely not the worse.' He thought irritably, recalling her tendency to leap into relationships with men who were each more disappointing than the last, purely because she wore her heart on her sleeve, making it easy to access… and even easier to trample.
The pattern held with her family too, as illustrated by the unconditional financial support she kept pouring into her parasitic mother, whose artificial approval he had trouble seeing as worth thousands of dollars a year.
Still, Lana's worst flaws were tangled up with her best qualities.
Before her, Lazar had been raised in an environment that was especially strict, almost military in nature, and largely devoid of affection.
She had given him the opposite.
She encouraged him through every challenge, even when it seemed like he didn't need it.
She tried to make him smile whenever the opportunity presented itself, with mixed results.
At the slightest sign of illness, she bent over backward to take care of him.
And instead of being relieved that he was such a well-behaved boy, she would jokingly complain that at his age she had been sneaking out to party with her friends, and that it was about time he started doing the same.
In short, a loving mother, if slightly too lax around the edges.
An hour later, Lazar was driving along an isolated road, a deliberate choice even though it made the trip longer in distance, because he had seen just how clogged the main roads were, which made this detour a time saver.
'Finally.' He thought when he spotted the gas station he had marked earlier on the map tucked away in his glove compartment, a few hundred meters (yards) ahead.
But as he drew closer, his enthusiasm died.
"Of course." Lazar muttered, telling himself that fate was definitely against him.
He stopped at the entrance to the station's turnoff.
From there, he could clearly make out the place's miserable state : the convenience store windows were shattered and the inside looked ransacked, there was a single car in the lot and it looked as if it had slammed into a deer at full speed, and...
Lazar narrowed his eyes when he saw the vehicle shaking from side to side, just before a scarlet splash spread across the hood.
'A monster.' Lazar concluded, before slowly opening his door and leaving it ajar so he could get out as quietly as possible.
He couldn't really turn back.
This was quite literally the only gas station on his route before his tank ran dry, leaving him with a single option : deal with whatever that thing was so he could refuel in peace.
The car was fifty meters (160 feet) away.
He began his approach with his weapon drawn, telling himself that in the best-case scenario, he was dealing with a creature as stupid as the one he had killed earlier, and all he would have to do was once again drive his blade into the back of the neck of a beast too busy feeding to notice him.
When he got close enough to brace himself against the rear of the car and still saw no sign that the monster had noticed him, or even finished its meal, he began to think the situation might be that simple.
So he looked over the trunk to get his first real glimpse of what he was dealing with.
And what he saw was not encouraging.
From where he stood, he could tell it was a quadruped with the body of, for lack of a better term, a huge dog on steroids, busy tearing apart the mangled remains of what had been an adult male, if the shredded clothes were anything to go by.
Still, telling himself that the same method he had already used would do the job, he straightened and moved toward the beast through its blind spot, weapon poised to drive into the back of its neck.
When he was barely two meters (6-7 feet) from the creature and it was still busy devouring its victim with no visible concern for anything else, he stopped.
Not out of hesitation this time, not because he wondered whether the monster had noticed his approach, but because he knew with absolute certainty that it had, and that it was pretending otherwise.