By the time the Humvee rolled to a stop, the city had changed again.
Not in the large, obvious way it had changed when the sky first broke open, and monsters poured into the streets. This was quieter than that. Meaner. The kind of change a battlefield made when too many things had died in one place, and the rest had learned how to smell it.
The abandoned apartment complex loomed ahead in a jagged silhouette of concrete and broken balconies, a cluster of old residential blocks rising out of the dark like black teeth. Windowpanes were shattered. Corridors hung open to the night. Laundry poles jutted from upper floors like snapped bones. Around the base of the buildings, abandoned cars sat half-buried in debris, and the roads leading in were lined with overturned dumpsters, cracked planters, and the dried black stains of things that had bled there earlier.
The engine cut.
For one heartbeat, there was silence.
Then Jason's eyes opened.
"Out."
