Tally's eyes didn't close so much as they surrendered to the weight of her own exhaustion, the muscles in her eyelids finally snapping like overstretched rubber bands.
The floor of the bulletproof booth was cold—a leaching, industrial chill that seeped through her expensive jeans and settled deep into her marrow. For hours after the 8:00 PM twilight had faded into absolute night, she had sat in the dark, weaving a tapestry of resentment, stitch by jagged stitch. She had watched the back of Justin's head, the way he breathed with a heavy, self-important rhythm, and she had hated him for it.
But even a mind as sharp and glass-edged as hers had a breaking point. Sometime before midnight, the heavy silence of the store pressed against her, and her consciousness finally fractured.
As her head lolled against her shoulder, the Texaco dissolved. The smell of copper and stale chips faded, replaced by the cloying, heavy scent of Baccarat Rouge 540 and expensive Italian leather.
In her dream, she wasn't in a gas station. She was in the back of a black limousine—the one her father had rented for her sixteenth birthday. The one she had complained about for three days because the interior lighting was "too warm" and made her skin look sallow in selfies. She was wearing her white-and-gold SAVANNAH HAWKS cheerleading uniform, but the fabric felt different. It was heavier, slicker. When she looked down, the gold sequins were actually tiny, polished teeth, shimmering in the neon-blue fiber optics of the ceiling.
Outside the tinted windows, the world was a blur of motion, but it wasn't the city. It was a garden. A vast, manicured labyrinth of white roses and marble statues that stretched to a horizon made of violet silk. But the statues weren't made of stone. They were people she knew, frozen in mid-motion, their skin bleached to the color of bone. There was the girl who had tried to take her spot as flyer—frozen in a mid-air tumble, her face a mask of permanent, terrified failure. There was the history teacher who'd had the audacity to give her a B+—frozen at his desk, his hands raised to ward off a blow that never landed.
This is how it should be, her dream-self thought, sipping from a crystal flute of something dark and bubbling. Frozen. Silent. Decorative.
Because that was the problem with people: they had a habit of moving. They had a habit of wanting things. They had a habit of taking up space that belonged to her.
The limo pulled up to a massive, wrought-iron gate. Standing there, holding a velvet rope, was Ella Belle. The six-year-old looked perfect. No blood. No dirt. She was wearing her favorite unicorn shirt, and her hair was tied in two neat pigtails.
"Can I come in, Tally?" the dream-Ella asked, her voice small and tinny, like it was coming from a broken music box.
Tally leaned forward, her face inches from the tinted glass. "Did you find my charger, Ella? The one you lost?"
"I'm sorry, Tally," the child whimpered.
"Then you stay outside," Tally whispered, her voice a low, vibrating hum of satisfaction. "Rules are rules, Ella. You lose my things, you lose your place."
She watched as the limo pulled away, the little girl's hands reaching out for the bumper until she was swallowed by the white roses. Tally didn't feel a pang of guilt. She felt a profound sense of order. In Tally's mind, the world was a ledger. There were assets and there were liabilities. Ella Belle, with her sticky fingers and her constant need for attention, had always been a liability. She was a drain on the family's resources, a distraction for their mother, a toy that had finally been broken by the world.
It's better this way, Tally told herself in the dark, swirling depths of her REM cycle. Now there's more room for me.
The dream shifted. She was standing on the roof of the Texaco, but the store was a mile high, a glass tower piercing bruised purple clouds. Below her, the entire city of Savannah was a sea of dead, upturned faces. Thousands of them.
"Tally! Tally! Tally!" they chanted, their snapping, rigor-mortis jaws forming her name into a rhythmic, choral prayer.
She loved it. She loved the way they looked at her—with a hunger so pure it was almost holy. They didn't want her for her personality; they didn't want her to be "nice" or "supportive." They wanted her because she was the only thing in the world that still had value. She looked down at her hands. They were glowing. A bright, blinding gold that cast long shadows over the dead below.
"You see?" she screamed at the sky. "I'm the one! I'm the one who survives!"
But then, a hand reached up and grabbed her ankle. It was Mari.
But Mari wasn't a girl. She was a hulking, grey thing, her stomach swollen to a grotesque size. It wasn't a baby inside her; it was a hive. Tally could see the movement under the skin—thousands of tiny, purple-eyed spiders spinning a web out of Mari's entrails.
"Give me your light, Tally," dream-Mari hissed, her voice a wet, sucking sound. "I need it for the swarm. I need it for the replacement."
"Get off me!" Tally kicked at the grey hands, but they were like wet clay, sticking to her skin. "You're nothing! You're just an incubator! You're a parasite!"
That was the word. Parasite.
In Tally's waking mind, Mari was the ultimate thief. She had stolen Justin's focus. She had stolen the attention of the family. And now, she was stealing the future by growing a new life in the middle of a graveyard. Tally hated the baby. Not because it was an innocent life, but because it was a competitor. It was a new "star" that would demand the resources she needed to survive. Every bottle of water Justin gave to Mari was a bottle taken from Tally. Every hour he spent guarding her was an hour he wasn't guarding her.
In the logic of the narcissist, love is a zero-sum game. And Tally was losing.
Tally's eyes snapped open.
The dream shattered like a dropped mirror. She was back on the floor of the booth, her neck stiff, her mouth tasting of salt and bitterness. The digital clock on the lottery ticket dispenser blinked a neon green 1:15 AM.
She stayed perfectly still, listening. The store was dead quiet, save for the relentless, jaundiced hum of the emergency lights. Through the glass, over in Aisle 3, the shattered corpse of Bob the mechanic lay motionless in the chips, smelling faintly of voided bowels and copper. Just dead meat.
She looked to her left.
Justin was asleep, his head resting against a crate of Gatorade. Even in sleep, his brow was furrowed, his hand still gripped around the handle of the heavy Maglite. He looked exhausted, his "hero" mask slipping to reveal the scared twenty-three-year-old underneath. Tally felt a flare of disgust. Look at him, she thought. Our brave leader. Shackled to his own guilt.
Mari was curled up next to him, her head on his shoulder. Her hand was protectively draped over her stomach, even in the depths of unconsciousness. Look at me, I'm a mother, I'm sacred. Tally wanted to reach out and flick Mari's forehead, just to see if the girl would apologize for existing even while she was asleep.
Kenzie was a heap of denim and blonde hair further down the aisle, the Yorkie tucked under her chin.
Tally was the only one truly awake. She stood up, her joints popping silently. She crept to the security door, wrapping her fingers around the heavy steel deadbolt. She held her breath, easing the heavy metal cylinder back with agonizing slowness so it wouldn't click. She pushed the door open, slipped out of the bulletproof booth, her socks sliding over the linoleum, and walked toward the front windows.
It wasn't dark outside.
The military convoy that had torn down the highway hours ago hadn't brought salvation; it had brought hellfire. The sky was an angry, apocalyptic orange, choked with thick plumes of black smoke that blotted out the winter stars. Fires raged across the marshline and in the distant subdivisions, casting long, erratic, dancing shadows across the Texaco parking lot.
The horde had cleared out. The roar of the convoy and the widespread fires had acted like a massive dinner bell, pulling the dead away from the gas station. She could see the discarded items from the day's panic—strollers, shoes, abandoned cars with their doors hanging open—sitting like tombstones in the flickering orange light.
Tally leaned her forehead against the cool glass. She should have felt relief, but all she felt was cold, hard calculation.
She thought about her life three days ago. She had been furious that the custom velvet dress she ordered for the country club's winter gala had been tailored too wide at the waist. She had thrown a screaming fit in her bedroom until her mother promised to buy her a new one. Those problems felt heavy and real. This? This felt like a badly directed movie she was forced to star in.
She looked at her reflection in the glass. Her hair was frizzy, and she had a smudge of dirt on her cheek. I look like a victim, she thought, her lip curling. I hate looking like a victim.
She began to pace the length of the front windows. She knew what Justin was going to do. He wasn't waiting for a rescue squad. He wasn't going to sit tight. As soon as the sun came up, that sickening, suffocating guilt over leaving the nanny's son to die was going to break him. He was going to pack them into the Jeep and drive straight back into the meat grinder to look for Ella Belle. He was going to risk all their lives for a six-year-old liability.
I am not dying for her, Tally decided, the thought crystallizing into absolute ice in her veins. And I am not dying for Mari's parasite.
She reached into the pocket of her hoodie and felt the rigid plastic of the industrial box cutter. She had swiped it from the register counter right under Justin's nose before she fell asleep. Her fingers brushed against the metal teeth of the Jeep keys, too—snatched right out of Justin's jacket pocket while he was dead to the world.
She had been imagining a scenario where she just stole the vehicle and left them all behind. But driving a Jeep alone through a burning warzone toward her father's military base was a massive gamble.
Then, she froze.
About fifty yards away, near the edge of the tree line where the burning marsh met the road, something moved.
It wasn't the jerky, hitching movement of the dead. It was smooth. Deliberate. Cautious.
Tally squinted, her nose almost touching the glass.
In the flickering orange glow of the burning world, she saw them.
Emerging from the shadow of an overturned delivery truck were figures. They were crouched low, moving in a synchronized line. One, two... three... four.
Five.
Five people.
They were wearing normal, dark winter clothing—heavy coats and hoodies. One of them was holding something long and thin, though in the shifting gloom, it was impossible to tell if it was a rifle, a baseball bat, or just a heavy metal pipe.
They weren't mindless. They were talking. She couldn't hear them over the distant crackle of the fires, but she saw the way they paused, the leader gesturing toward the gas station. One of them pointed a finger directly at the front windows of the Texaco.
They were normal. They were alive.
Tally's heart didn't leap with hope. It didn't pound with relief.
Instead, a chilling, brilliant new calculation settled over her.
Her mind rapidly recalibrated. She looked back at Justin, fast asleep and drowning in his own pathetic white-knight syndrome. If she let these people arrive, Justin's predictable savior complex would flare up instantly. He wouldn't—he couldn't—just ignore five living, breathing refugees. He would feel entirely obligated to rescue them.
And logistically, with five extra bodies to protect, his suicidal mission to turn the car around and hunt for Ella Belle would be completely derailed. He couldn't fit a small army in the Jeep for a scouting run. The only logical, responsible choice left for their brave leader would be to drive the entire group straight to her father's military base first.
Perfect, Tally thought, a slow, predatory satisfaction blooming in her chest.
These strangers weren't a threat; they were her leverage. They were the buffer that would force Justin to do exactly what she wanted: drive her to safety without her ever having to lift a finger or risk the roads alone.
She didn't wake her brother yet. She didn't call out to Mari. She left the gun tucked into Justin's waistband right where it was.
She stood in the silence of the glass house, her fingers letting go of the stolen keys in her pocket, and watched the strangers approach. She watched them cross the concrete, a cruel, genuine smile slowly stretching across her lips.
Come on in, guys, she thought, her eyes narrowing as they got closer to the glass. Let's go save some lives.