The weak, grey light filtering through the foyer windows finally caught the figure on the stairs.
Tally's twisted smirk dropped.
It wasn't a burglar.
"Justin?" she breathed.
Her older brother stepped down onto the landing. He looked like absolute hell. His salt-stained hoodie smelled like stale Wawa coffee, burned rubber, and cold Pennsylvania turnpike air—a harsh, ugly contrast to the expensive vanilla candles their mom always burned.
Seeing him standing in their dim Savannah foyer at eleven in the morning instead of a library in State College just didn't compute. Tally's brain scrambled for a logical reason why her brother was standing on their rug looking like he'd crawled out of a ditch.
She moved before she could think about it. The heavy chef's knife slipped from her fingers, clattering loudly against the hardwood, and she basically threw herself at him. She buried her face in the rough, pilled fabric of his sweatshirt. For just a second, the nightmare outside—Eric Miller seizing in his own black blood, the girl staggering in the woods, the endless sirens—faded out.
Justin was the anchor. He was the guy who taught her how to throw a spiral, how to lie to their dad, and how to survive the pressure of this house.
But he didn't hug her back. His arms stayed at his sides.
Tally pulled away, her cheeks flushing hot with immediate, defensive embarrassment.
"What the fuck, Justin?" she snapped, scrubbing her face with the heel of her hand and backing up toward the kitchen island. A fresh wave of cramps twisted her stomach, making her voice come out high and brittle. "You owe me for the emotional damage. I almost stabbed you. Why the hell aren't you in Pennsylvania? It's Tuesday morning. You're supposed to be failing Organic Chemistry, not sneaking around the house like a serial killer."
Justin didn't answer. He didn't even look her in the eye. He just pushed past her into the kitchen with this frantic, wired energy that made the hair on Tally's arms stand up. He started yanking open the lower custom cabinets, his movements loud and jerky, pulling out every empty Tupperware container, Nalgene bottle, and oversized glass pitcher they owned.
"I left the dorms three days ago," he said, his voice totally flat. "I didn't even pack. I just grabbed my keys and got in the car."
"Three days ago? Justin, you haven't even had your winter formal." Tally watched him start lining the bottles up in the sink. The sound of the water rushing from the tap was incredibly loud in the quiet house. "You're acting like a freak. Turn the water off. You're splashing the granite, and Mom's going to lose her shit when she gets off her double shift at Memorial."
"I saw things on the way down, Tal. On 95." He finally shut the faucet off and looked at her.
The sight of his face stopped her breath. His eyes weren't just tired; they were bloodshot, rimmed with a deep, hollow exhaustion that made him look ten years older.
"It started in Philly," Justin said. "Just… glitches. The power would drop for an hour, then snap back. But the people didn't. They started getting this flu. Except it wasn't a normal flu. They'd just stop. I saw a girl in the middle of a crosswalk, just standing there while a bus honked at her. She was staring at nothing, sweating through her coat in thirty-degree weather. And then she started screaming. Not because she was scared. Because she was… leaking."
Tally scoffed. "It's a fucking virus, Justin. It's 2025; we've lived through this before. Kenzie's mom is an ER nurse. She said the news is just blowing it out of proportion to get ratings. It's just a bad strain."
"It's not a mutation," Justin snapped. His hands were shaking as he gripped the edge of the counter. "I passed a pile-up near D.C. A twelve-car wreck in the middle of a clear day. No cops. No ambulances. Just people sitting in their smashed cars, staring at their dashboards while the engines smoked. I saw a guy trying to climb over a concrete highway divider. His hands were shredded to the bone, and he didn't even notice. He was just trying to get over. Like he'd forgotten how to be a human being."
Tally's stomach lurched. She thought about Eric's shattered teeth. The girl at the edge of the woods with her throat ripped open. The way her head had been tilted so completely wrong.
She shoved the images down. "You're being dramatic," Tally said, her voice climbing. "You've been chugging Red Bull for fifteen hours. You're hallucinating."
"I saw the towers go dark in North Carolina, Tally! One by one, the horizon just vanished. That's why I'm here. I had to get south of the line before the grid went completely dead."
A soft rustle of fabric drifted from the hallway, followed by a muffled cough.
Tally froze. "Justin. Who the fuck else is in this house?"
Justin let out a long, ragged sigh and glanced toward the darkened living room. "I couldn't leave her. Her car ran out of gas near the border. The stations were already being looted."
A woman stepped into the kitchen doorway. She was wrapped in a thick wool coat, her hands tucked deep into the sleeves. She had blonde hair pulled back in a messy clip, and her green eyes darted between them cautiously.
"Hi," she said, her voice quiet. "I'm Mari. I promise I'm not a squatter. I was a T.A. in Justin's psych department."
Tally blinked, giving the woman a withering up-and-down look. "You brought a random TA? Are you kidding me? We don't even let the neighbors in without an RSVP."
"Mom isn't here, Tally," Justin said, his tone dropping. "Neither is Dad. And they aren't answering their phones."
"Because the cell towers are down, genius!" Tally shouted, pointing at her useless phone on the counter. "You're acting like the world ended just because the 5G cut out. It's Savannah. A light breeze knocks the power out here."
Mari took a step into the kitchen. "The power didn't just go out, Tally. We passed a Walmart in Florence. The automatic doors were ripped off the hinges, but people weren't taking TVs. They were just… standing in the aisles. Some of them were fighting, but it wasn't over food. I saw a man trying to bite the neck of a security guard. It wasn't a robbery. It was a feeding."
Tally looked from Mari to Justin. They looked like two people who had seen a ghost, and they were waiting for her to stop pretending she didn't see it too.
"House rules," Tally said, her voice shaking despite trying to sound in control. "Don't touch Mom's mugs. Don't go in my room. And stop talking like we're in a fucking horror movie. It's embarrassing. Everything is fine."
But the massive house didn't feel fine. It felt like a bunker.
Justin ignored her attitude. He moved with a grim efficiency he'd definitely inherited from their military dad, forcing Tally to help him fill the bathtubs—an old hurricane trick they used for coastal flooding.
"Why are we doing this?" Tally complained, crossing her arms as she watched the water swirl into the master bath. "It's barely noon. We should be calling the electric company."
"The city water pressure is already dropping," Justin said, keeping his eyes on the faucet. "If the municipal pumps fail, this is all we have. Go fill the guest tub."
Mari helped Tally drag the heavy teak porch furniture into the mudroom to barricade the secondary doors. It felt completely insane—stacking expensive outdoor chairs in a hallway just because her brother was having a panic attack. Outside, the heavy standby generator kicked on with a low hum, a steady heartbeat keeping the lights running in the house.
Tally's mind kept drifting back to the school parking lot. The sickening crunch of the laptop under her Audi's tires. She thought about Kenzie locking her front door. Had Kenzie's mom made it home from the ER? Was Kenzie sitting in her own dark house right now?
At 11:45 AM, the sun was high, throwing bright, harsh light across the manicured cul-de-sac. It should have been the quiet part of the workday, but the air outside felt heavy and wrong.
"See?" Tally said. She was standing at the living room window, pulling back the sheer curtain. "It's a beautiful day. Everyone's just laying low."
"Then why are all their cars in the driveways?" Justin asked, walking up behind her. "Mrs. Harland should be at her bridge club. The Miller kids should be at school with you. Look at the Henderson house."
Tally looked across the street. The Hendersons were obsessed with their lawn. Their massive house was entirely dark, but the front door was wide open, swinging back and forth on its hinges in the winter breeze.
"They probably left," Tally whispered.
"Without closing the door?" Justin asked softly.
Suddenly, the dogs stopped barking.
It wasn't a gradual fade. It was a synchronized, total cut-off. One second, the wealthy subdivision was a wall of frantic howling; the next, it was dead silent.
The silence was heavy—thick and deeply unnatural, pressing against the windowpanes.
"They finally tired themselves out," Tally said, her voice barely a breath.
Justin didn't respond. He reached out and slowly pulled the heavy velvet curtains shut, overlapping the thick fabric so not a single sliver of sunlight could get in.
"While the lights still work," he said, stepping back from the glass, "we stay away from the windows."
"You're scaring me, Justin," Tally said. Her bottom lip trembled. The tough-girl act was finally fracturing. "Stop it. Call Dad. Use the satellite emergency thing on your watch."
"I tried," Justin said. "It can't find a signal. Whatever this is… it's high up, Tally."
Mari was sitting on the living room sofa, staring hard at a paper map of Georgia she'd spread across the glass coffee table. The generator-powered lamp in the corner threw long shadows over her face.
"The bases will be the first to close their gates," Mari said, tracing a line with her finger. "If your dad is at Fort Stewart, he's locked in. They won't let him leave until they know what the contagion vector is."
"Contagion?" Tally snapped. "It's a flu!"
"Maybe it is," Mari said, her wide green eyes looking up at Tally. "The world ends all the time, Tally. For someone, somewhere, the world ended today. We just have to make sure it's not ours."
Far off, toward downtown Savannah, a series of low, rhythmic thuds echoed. It sounded like something massive hitting the earth.
And then, much closer—maybe only three houses down—a single human scream tore through the morning air.
It wasn't a scream of panic. It was a jagged, wet sound—the horrific noise of someone being physically torn apart. It cut off so abruptly that the silence afterward felt like a punch to the chest.
Tally collapsed onto the sofa beside Mari, her hands shaking violently. She reached into her designer bag and pulled out her phone one last time. She just wanted to see a notification. A TikTok. A text from her mom saying, Sorry, I'm picking up lunch.
The screen stayed black. A twelve-hundred-dollar piece of glass that told her absolutely nothing.
"Tally," Justin said, sitting on the edge of the coffee table in front of her. "Look at me."
"I want Mom," she whispered. The untouchable high school queen was gone, leaving only a terrified seventeen-year-old girl.
"I know," Justin said gently. "But we have the generator. We have the house. We just have to wait for Dad to get back from the base."
"He'll be here," Tally whispered, clinging to the image of her father in his pristine military uniform. "He's probably the one fixing it right now."
Justin didn't contradict her. He just looked past her, staring blankly at the heavy, locked front door.
The generator hummed loudly in the backyard.
The lights stayed on.
While they still could.