The gas pump handle was stiff, crusted with grime, and for three agonizing seconds Jack thought the underground tanks were dry. Then the nozzle shuddered and fuel poured in a thick amber stream. He exhaled, adjusted the nozzle in the truck's tank, and reached for the first of two red plastic gas cans he had found strapped to the side of the pump island.
He worked in silence, filling one can, then the other, then topping off the truck. The fumes stung his nostrils. Every few seconds he paused and listened — scanning the overpass, the tree line, the ditch that ran behind the station. Nothing moved. The only sound was fuel glugging into plastic.
Inside the store, through the barred window, he could see Elena and Lily sweeping the aisles. Lily was stuffing jerky packets into a backpack. Elena was crouched behind the counter examining something on a low shelf. Ordinary movements. Safe.
Jack finished the second gas can, capped it, and set it in the truck bed beside the first. He wiped his hands on his jeans and was reaching for the nozzle to rack it when a crackle burst from the walkie-talkie on his belt.
"Jack." Elena's voice, low and tight. "There's someone in here."
His stomach dropped. He racked the nozzle, grabbed the Remington from the passenger seat, and crossed the lot at a jog. The station door was propped open with a cinder block. Jack rounded the threshold with the shotgun up and found his mother standing near the counter across from a tall young man with dark skin, a shaved head, and a vertical scar splitting his left eyebrow. The stranger wore a military surplus jacket over cargo pants, and his hands were raised to shoulder height — palms out, fingers spread — but something about the set of his jaw said the posture was a choice, not a surrender.
Lily stood four steps behind Elena, a can of baked beans clutched in one hand like she was deciding whether to throw it.
"Who are you?" Jack leveled the barrel at the stranger's chest.
The young man's gaze shifted from Elena to Jack, and something changed in his expression. A flicker of recognition, faint and uncertain, like catching a familiar song through a wall. "Hold on. Wait a second." His eyes narrowed. "You're — Morrow, right? Jack Morrow."
Jack didn't lower the gun. "How do you know my name?"
"Your dad used to bring you to my father's range on Miller Road. Coleman's Firearms and Range. You were maybe thirteen, fourteen. Scrawny kid, barely tall enough to see over the booth divider, but you could group shots tighter than half the adults."
The memory surfaced in fragments. A long concrete building with fluorescent lights and the smell of gun oil. Paper targets clipped to motorized tracks. A man behind the counter with a booming laugh and a jar of peppermints. And a teenage boy — taller even then — who loaded magazines behind the counter and called everyone "chief."
"Dex," Jack said.
"Dex Coleman." The raised hands came down slowly. "Your dad and my dad were friends. Hunting buddies. He brought you shooting maybe five, six times before —" He stopped himself, reading the shift in Jack's face.
"Before he died," Jack finished.
Silence settled between them. Elena's gaze moved from one young man to the other, calculating.
Jack lowered the Remington an inch. "What are you doing in a gas station, Dex?"
"Same thing you are. Surviving. I've been holed up at the shop — my dad's store — for about three weeks now. I come out for supply runs when the streets are quiet. Saw your truck pull in and ducked behind the register to get a read on you. Figured if it was raiders I'd slip out the back. Then I saw it was just a girl and a woman, and decided to introduce myself like a civilized human being." He glanced at Lily. "She almost hit me with that can of beans."
"I still might," Lily said.
Elena stepped forward, positioning herself between the boys. "Dex, is your father's store secure?"
"As secure as anything gets these days. I've got spike barricades out front, reinforced doors, good sightlines. Plenty of ammunition. The building's concrete block — those things can't claw through it."
Jack studied him. Dex's jacket was dirty but functional. His boots were laced tight. He carried himself like someone who had stopped being surprised by violence a long time ago. Something about that steadiness bothered Jack — not because it was threatening, but because it mirrored the thing Jack felt growing inside himself, and he wasn't sure he liked what that said about either of them.
"What would you be willing to trade for one of your guns?" Jack asked.
Dex's mouth twitched. "Smart. Alright, straight talk — what can you offer? Because I'm not running a charity, and supplies cost something even when money's worthless."
Elena answered before Jack could. "I'm a nurse. Twelve years of emergency and trauma experience. If anyone in your group is sick or hurt, I can help."
Dex went very still. The composure cracked, just for a heartbeat, and underneath it Jack saw something raw. "My dad," he said. "He's been running a fever for three days. Sweating through his clothes, can't keep food down. I don't know if it's infection or the flu or — or something from a bite, though I swear he hasn't been bitten."
"Take me to him," Elena said.
They followed Dex's directions — south on Miller, past the boarded-up laundromat, left at the dead traffic light. Dex rode shotgun with Jack while Elena and Lily sat in the back seat. Nobody spoke. The truck's engine was the loudest thing on the road, and Jack hated every decibel of it.
Coleman's Firearms appeared at the end of a gravel lot: a squat concrete building with a flat roof and narrow windows set high. A painted wooden sign hung above the entrance, its letters faded but legible. What caught Jack's attention were the defenses. Wooden stakes — sharpened two-by-fours and fence posts — jutted from the ground in angled rows around the building's front and sides, creating a jagged perimeter that forced anything approaching to weave or impale itself trying.
Two of them already had.
A figure in a torn housecoat hung on a cluster of stakes near the left corner, three wooden points punching through its torso. It twitched faintly, jaw working, hands opening and closing on nothing. A second zombie — this one larger, in denim overalls — was pinned through the thigh and abdomen five feet to the right, still trying to drag itself forward, still grinding its teeth.
Dex reached for the pistol on his hip. Jack caught his wrist.
"Don't. Gunshots carry. I've seen them come from half a mile off when they hear a shot." Jack handed the Remington to Elena, picked up the baseball bat from behind the seat, and stepped out of the truck.
He approached the first zombie with his jaw clenched and his breathing steady. It saw him and lunged, but the stakes held it fast. Jack swung hard. The aluminum connected and the creature went limp, sliding down the wooden shafts until its weight settled. He moved to the second one. This one was stronger, thrashing with enough force to rattle the stakes in the ground. Jack waited for the rhythm of its movement, timed the gap, and brought the bat down twice. Silence.
When he turned around, Dex was watching him from the truck with an expression Jack couldn't quite parse — respect mixed with something sharper, like recalibration.
"Quick thinking," Dex said. "Most people panic and start blasting."
Jack wiped the bat on the dead grass. "Most people haven't been doing this long enough to learn better."
Inside, the store was exactly as Jack half-remembered — long glass cases displaying handguns, racks of rifles and shotguns along the walls, ammunition boxes stacked on metal shelving. The air smelled of Hoppe's solvent and something warmer, sicker. In the back room, behind a curtain of army blankets, Dex's father Marcus Coleman lay on a cot with sweat soaking the pillow. He was a big man made small by illness, his face ashen, his breathing shallow and wet.
Elena knelt beside him, placed the back of her hand against his forehead, and began a methodical assessment — pulse, pupils, lymph nodes, the color of his nail beds. She lifted his shirt and pressed gently along his abdomen. Marcus winced and groaned.
"Fever's high, at least a hundred and three," Elena said. "There's tenderness in the upper right quadrant. Could be a kidney infection, could be something bacterial he picked up from contaminated water. Either way, he needs antibiotics. Real ones, not the fish-tank amoxicillin I've seen people hoarding."
"Closest pharmacy?" Jack asked.
Dex pulled a folded town map from his jacket. "Rite-Value on Birch. Ten-minute drive if the road's clear."
Lily dropped onto a bench behind one of the display cases, her face pale. She had barely spoken since they left the gas station. The day's accumulated fear was catching up, settling into her shoulders like a weight.
"I'm staying here," she said, not asking.
Elena looked at her daughter, then at Jack. "She stays. Dex, Jack, and I go. Lily — lock the door behind us and do not open it until you hear my voice on the walkie."
Lily nodded and pulled her hoodie tighter.
The Rite-Value on Birch Street had been looted but not gutted. Its front windows were smashed, shelves overturned, but the pharmacy counter in the back still had its security gate intact — bent but closed. Jack and Dex pried it open while Elena vaulted the counter with a nurse's practiced efficiency. She moved through the shelves reading labels in the dim light, pulling bottles and blister packs: ciprofloxacin, ibuprofen, hydrocortisone cream, a full box of sterile gauze. She swept an entire shelf of antibiotics into her bag, then added electrolyte powder and a bottle of children's Tylenol.
"Grab everything," she murmured to herself. "Grab it all. We won't get a second chance."
A sound came from the front of the store. A wet, dragging shuffle.
Jack and Dex pressed against the endcap of an aisle and peered around the corner. A single zombie had wandered through the broken window — a woman in jogging clothes, one arm dangling from a strip of tendon. She moved toward the back of the store, drawn by some noise or smell.
Dex caught Jack's eye and held up a hand. Then he stepped into the open, deliberately scuffing his boot on the tile. The zombie's head swiveled toward him. It moaned and lurched forward, arms reaching. Dex backpedaled slowly, drawing it away from the pharmacy counter, away from Elena.
Jack circled behind. His sneakers were silent on the linoleum. The pulling sensation bloomed in his chest as he raised the bat, but he didn't need the gravitokinesis this time. He brought the aluminum down on the base of the creature's skull in one clean stroke. It folded and hit the floor.
Dex looked at the body, then at Jack. "You've done this before."
"More than I'd like."
They drove back to the gun store in tense silence. Elena was through the curtain and beside Marcus within seconds of walking through the door, crushing pills, mixing powder, tilting his head to help him swallow. She worked with the focused intensity Jack had seen a thousand times — the same hands that had bandaged his childhood scrapes now fighting for a stranger's life.
An hour passed. Marcus's breathing steadied. His forehead cooled by a single degree, then another. Elena sat back on her heels and exhaled.
"He needs to keep taking the cipro every twelve hours for at least a week. Fluids constantly. If the fever spikes again, wake me."
Dex stood in the doorway, his arms folded tight across his chest, watching his father sleep. When he spoke, his voice was rough. "Take whatever you need from the store. Ammo, holsters, cleaning kits. Whatever."
Jack clipped the second walkie-talkie from his belt and held it out. "Channel four. If you need us, or if you see anything — herds, fires, anything — you call."
Dex took the radio and turned it in his hands. "You don't trust easy, do you, Morrow?"
"No."
"Good. Neither do I." He pocketed the walkie. "But I trust what I've seen today."
They loaded the truck with ammunition boxes, a second shotgun, a hunting rifle with a scope, and four boxes of protein bars Dex had been stockpiling. Lily was already in the back seat, half asleep, when Jack turned the ignition.
Then Elena grabbed his arm.
"Jack. Look."
He followed her gaze through the windshield. At the far end of the gravel lot, where Miller Road curved south, the gray afternoon light had darkened. Not clouds. Not smoke. Bodies. Dozens of them, maybe more, shuffling in a loose column that filled the road from shoulder to shoulder. A horde.
At the front walked a figure unlike the others. It moved with its head raised, swiveling left and right in slow, deliberate arcs, its nostrils flaring. Where the rest of the horde drifted mindlessly, this one searched.
It stopped. Its head turned toward the gun store. Toward the truck. Toward them.
And it screamed.
The sound was nothing like the low groans Jack had grown used to. It was a shriek — high, jagged, splitting the air like a siren. Every zombie in the column stopped shuffling. Every ruined head snapped in the same direction. A hundred milky eyes locked onto the storefront.
They charged.
The horde hit the spike barricade and the first rank impaled themselves without slowing, bodies folding over the sharpened wood, making bridges for the ones behind them. More came. Always more.
"Inside!" Dex shouted from the doorway.
They abandoned the truck and sprinted through the door. Dex threw the bolt. Elena pulled Lily behind the counter. Jack pressed his back against the reinforced door and felt it shudder as the first bodies slammed against it.
The windows. The narrow, high-set windows were too small for a body to fit through, but fists were already hammering the glass, cracking it in spiderweb patterns.
Jack planted his feet and reached for the pulling sensation. It answered like a furnace igniting — roaring up through his chest, down his arms, out through his palms. He threw both hands toward the door and the windows and pushed.
The gravitational force hit the storefront like a wall. Zombies that had been pressing against the door flew backward. Glass that had been buckling inward held. The entire front of the building hummed with invisible pressure, and Jack felt every ounce of it passing through him like electricity through a wire.
Dex stared. "What the hell are you doing?"
"Holding them," Jack gasped. His vision was tunneling. The force drained him like sprinting uphill, every second a mile.
Dex's expression shifted. He looked at his own hands. Then he looked at the horde pressing back against Jack's barrier, bodies stacking, weight building.
"Alright," Dex said quietly. "My turn."
He stepped to the nearest cracked window, pressed his palm flat against the glass, and Jack saw light bloom between his fingers — orange and white, pulsing, impossibly bright. The air rippled.
The detonation was surgical. A chain of concussive blasts erupted through the front line of the horde, each one snapping a skull like a firecracker in a melon. Five. Ten. Fifteen bodies dropped headless, their momentum gone. Dex pulled his hand back, flexed his fingers, and pressed again. Another volley of explosions ripped through the second wave.
Elena and Lily opened fire from behind the counter — Elena with the Remington, Lily with the hunting rifle. Shots cracked and sparked. Most went wide, punching into shoulders and torsos that didn't care, but a few found skulls and dropped their targets.
Jack's knees buckled. The gravitational wall flickered. He gritted his teeth and poured everything he had into it — every ounce of fear, every memory of his father's journal, every image of his family behind him — and the wall solidified for three more seconds, five, seven.
Dex detonated the last cluster. The explosions overlapped into a single roar that shook dust from the ceiling. When the sound faded, nothing moved outside.
Jack's hands dropped. His legs gave out. He hit the concrete floor on his knees, then his side, and the world smeared into gray and silence and the distant sound of his mother calling his name.