Inside the glass booth, Justin's brain simply rejected the data. He scrambled to his feet, threw open the heavy steel security door, and burst into the main store just as the massive, jagged spiderweb crack spidered across the storefront.
"Tally," Justin whispered, staring at the failing glass, his voice trembling with a frantic, lethal edge. "What the fuck did you do?"
Tally turned to him, her amber eyes wide and glittering with a perfectly crafted, manipulative self-righteousness. "They need help, Justin! I couldn't just stand here and watch them die! I'm not going to let more people die because we were too scared to open a door!"
"THEY ARE BAIT!" Justin erupted. He grabbed Tally by the hoodie, shoving her backward toward the bulletproof register where Mari and Kenzie were huddled. "Look outside!"
Outside, the five survivors slammed against the fractured doors, their faces contorted into masks of desperate, ugly survival. Ten feet behind them, the mechanics were closing the gap, their jaws unhinging, their throats emitting that high, whistling rattle.
"We have to let them in," Justin roared, stepping toward the double doors.
"Justin, no!" Mari sobbed through the speaker hole of the booth, pointing a trembling finger at the approaching horde. "If you open that door, they all come inside!"
"If I don't open the door, they die right there, and the glass breaks from the weight anyway!" Justin screamed back. He wrapped his hands around the heavy aluminum handle of the main door and placed his boot against the frame for leverage. "When I pull this, everybody get out of the way!"
"ONE!"
The man outside locked eyes with Justin, tears cutting through the grime on his face.
"TWO!"
The lead mechanic lunged, its rotting arms outstretched, teeth snapping at the air just inches behind the trailing woman's back.
"THREE! PULL!"
Justin depressed the thumb-latch and threw his entire weight backward.
The door flew open.
The deafening, wet, visceral roar of snapping jaws and tearing flesh flooded the Texaco, accompanied by the suffocating stench of voided bowels, swamp gas, and raw meat.
The five survivors didn't step inside; they fell. They spilled over the threshold in a chaotic, tangled avalanche of limbs and desperate forward momentum. The man in the dark shirt hit the linoleum, slipping in floor wax, his momentum carrying him past Justin. The woman in the floral dress collapsed, howling in agony as her scraped knees hit the hard floor. The others scrambled over them—heavy boots, tearing clothes, frantic, grasping hands. They were alive.
"GET BACK!" Justin roared, grabbing the collar of the last man and hurling him deeper into the store.
The gap was still open, and the mechanics were right there. A grey hand, slick with dark blood, shot through the opening.
"HELP ME PUSH!" Justin bellowed.
The man in the dark shirt scrambled up from the linoleum, ignoring his bleeding hands, and threw his shoulder against the glass door beside Justin. Together, they pushed with everything they had, their boots slipping on the slick floor.
The heavy doors slammed shut with a concussive BANG, severing the tips of the mechanic's reaching fingers. The infected body slammed full-force into the reinforced glass outside, leaving a thick smear of dark blood and saliva on the pane.
Justin threw the deadbolt. His chest heaved like a bellows. The five strangers lay on the linoleum behind him, gasping, crying, absolutely broken. But they weren't dead.
Tally watched the scene unfold with a cold, predatory satisfaction blooming in her chest. Her sociopathic mind rapidly rewrote the chaos into a flawless victory. She had perfectly manipulated her brother into taking on five new meat-shields. She had her leverage. She had derailed his suicidal rescue mission for Ella without getting blood on her own hands.
Tally took a slow, confident step backward toward the safety of the bulletproof booth behind the register. She expected the heavy commercial glass of the storefront to hold long enough for Justin to corral everyone inside the cage with Mari and Kenzie. She was a genius.
But as the heavy, sickening thud of the runners' bodies hit the front window, followed instantly by a dozen more, the massive spiderweb crack spidered deeper across the center pane.
The night wasn't finished with them yet.
Nobody ran for the booth. Nobody moved. The five survivors on the floor, Justin by the double doors, Mari and Kenzie in the cage—everyone just froze in absolute, paralyzed horror, staring at the fractured barrier.
Dozens of infected were swarming the outside, burying the entrance in a writhing, snapping wall of grey flesh. The pressure was immense. Every inch of the plate glass was covered in hands, faces, and teeth. Purple eyes stared blindly into the store. Jaws snapped frantically against the pane, leaving thick, horrible smears of blood, dirt, and rotting tissue.
The sound was apocalyptic—a symphony of groaning metal and the high-pitched, wet whistling of the dead.
One of them—the waitress, her face a dripping mask of old gore—was pressed flat against the center of the spiderwebbed glass. She stared right through the store, her dead eyes locking directly onto Tally.
She raised a shredded hand and tapped a bloody fingernail against the failing glass.
Ting. Ting. Ting.
Tally couldn't breathe. Her "genius" plan had worked entirely too well. She had brought the leverage right to their doorstep, and now they were all entombed in a gas station, watching the walls of the store literally bend inward under the weight of a hundred corpses.
Justin slowly turned his back to the groaning window and looked at his little sister. His chest was heaving, his face pale and smeared with sweat and grease from the man he had just pulled inside.
"What the fuck did you do, Tally?" Justin whispered. His voice was trembling as he stared at her, the horde threatening to bury them alive acting as his backdrop. He didn't sound angry. He sounded completely, fundamentally broken.
Tally swallowed the thick, copper taste of fear in her mouth. She smoothed down the front of her hoodie, her breathing slowing as her sociopathic mind aggressively scrambled to rewrite the narrative and protect her fragile ego. She looked at her brother, her face an utterly flawless mask of victimhood.
"I tried to save them," she lied, her voice chillingly steady over the agonizing groan of the failing glass. "I tried to be a good person, Justin. Just like you."