EXTINCT

The Gulf wind did things to steel that ten years of abandonment couldn’t match. Along the elevated stretch of Interstate 45 the guardrails had flaked down to red lace and powder. And where the wind got under the loose panels it worked them, back and forth, all night, every night. As it had for a decade, and would after he was gone.

The sun was going down behind the Medical Center as Jack Summer came down the elevated lanes on foot, and it broke apart on the way. Orange light went into the blown-out windows of the hospital towers and stayed there.

The towers held it longer than the ground did. Thirty stories of dark glass with fire dying in them, block after block, the biggest dead hospitals in the world, and he was walking past all of it with a rifle on his back and a blister on his heel.

Sixteen miles on the day. The blister had opened around mile twelve and he’d walked the last four on the outside of the foot. He was three months into this pass down the corridor and the tiredness had gotten into his hips, and his eyes burned in their sockets. He knew what that meant. Four miles past thinking clean. It was a bad hour to be picking a room, and dusk was almost here.

He traveled alone. He hadn’t always.

Daytime belonged to people. Bandits, mostly young, in threes, high on whatever had come out of the last pharmacy raids.

Dogs had gone wrong years back and ran the drainage ditches in small packs, and the hogs had gotten meaner if that was possible.

And the Zeds stood around in the sun like men waiting on a bus the bus company quit serving ten years ago. Swaying. Leaking. Slow. You could walk around them all day. Mostly you could.

Night belonged to the others.

He had watched the change happen twice, both times from a rooftop with binoculars, his heart going like a hammer on sheet metal. Here is how it happens: A Zed stands slack in the last purple light, nothing wrong with it that wasn’t already wrong. Then its head snaps up. Then the spine goes. It bends the wrong direction all at once with a sound you can hear at two hundred yards—a bundle of dry sticks snapping inside a bag. It drops forward onto its hands and runs.

The survivors who still talked to each other called them ferals. Some called them night runners. Jack called them nothing. There wasn’t a word that did any work.

The sun was their problem. Full daylight cooked them. He’d seen one caught in the open once, nine in the morning, no shade for a hundred yards: the thin skin across its shoulders split and started to smoke, and it went screaming on all fours for the shadow of an overpass and denned there, chewing at itself until he was past.

So they denned by day. Towers. Garages. The black middle floors of every tall building in the city, and the Medical Center had forty floors’ worth of black.

At dusk the towers talked. That was a thing nobody had written on any map. If you stood under them in the last light you could hear it, high up, behind the broken glass. Something moving. Slow. Patient. The sun was leaving, and they knew it in whatever was left of their heads.

Jack kept his eyes at street level and walked. Anything that could reach him would come from street level. Whatever watched from up there could watch all it wanted.

Last night had been an auto-parts store off a feeder road. High broken windows. A slow one stood frozen in the parts aisle, staring blankly at a rack of fan belts. He put the rifle butt through its temple in the last of the light—a round at that hour was a flare with your name on it.

The office had a steel door, so he dragged the desk against it and lay underneath, Glock on his chest, lamp off. All night the ferals ran the streets. Growling. That chattering they do. Around three, one gunshot, blocks off. One. Then a man screaming, and the screaming went on maybe a minute, and then came the sound they make when they’re on something and after that nothing until the birds.

Now he has maybe forty minutes of light, and he needs a room.

He comes off the ramp and takes the surface streets east. The lanes are jammed with dead cars and overgrown weeds, forcing him out into the open every few yards. He keeps his pace flat and brisk—sprinting draws eyes from blocks away, and standing still makes you a target. He just keeps moving.

Halfway down a long block he allows himself a single look up the flank of the nearest tower. Burnt streaks run down the concrete. Dark floors stacked on dark floors, every window a black hole. You can’t see anything up there, and that’s the whole trick of it—you can’t see them, but they see you fine.

The sun is the only shield left, and the sun is leaving. He puts his eyes back on the asphalt. His heart keeps pounding anyway. It works on its own schedule.

Three blocks down, he turns into the complex, ducking under the brown, folded fronds of a dead palm tree. The sign on the curb reads ELM URT APARTM NTS. He doesn't stop. He moves past the manager’s office and steps into the courtyard, eyes sweeping the three stories of exterior stairs above him.

The empty swimming pool sits in the middle of the lot, choked with a foot of black sludge and leaf decay. He circles wide around the deep end, ignoring the faded HAVE FUN painted on the bottom, and heads straight for the nearest stairwell.

He pauses in the lot, listening.

The treefrogs in the ditch are roaring loud and steady. As long as that racket holds, the ground around him is empty. The moment it cuts out in a line, something is walking. The noise stays solid.

He cuts wide around a minivan sitting on flat tires, eyes sweeping the open stairwell ahead. A sun-bleached stick-figure family covers the rear glass. He ignores the side windows and keeps moving.

He bypasses the ground-floor doors and climbs the concrete stairs to the second floor, taking the corner unit at the end of the walkway. From the landing, he checks his sightlines over the rail: open view of the lot, the pool, and the broken fence. He glances down at the thick hedge eight feet below the balcony—an easy jump if the stairwell gets cut off.

He steps to the side of the doorframe, clear of the wood, and cracks the heavy aluminum barrel of his flashlight against the panel. Three hard strikes. He stays flat against the wall and counts to thirty in the silence. The building ticks in the cooling air. The frogs keep screaming in the ditch. Nothing moves inside.