Chapter 115 - 116: Somebody’s Home

Chapter 115: Chapter 116: Somebody’s Home

By the time they hit the tenth floor landing, Kai had already started narrating.

"Floor ten," he announced, like a hotel elevator with a grudge. "Executive suites, complimentary decapitations, continental breakfast not included."

"You’ve been doing bits since floor twelve," Ben said.

"I peak under pressure."

"You peaked in high school and never came down."

"That’s slander. I’m still climbing."

Erik pushed the stairwell door open without acknowledging either of them, though Penelope caught the faint downward tug at the corner of his mouth that meant he was listening whether he wanted to admit it or not. Killian moved in behind him, quiet as always, eyes already sweeping the corridor before anyone else had fully stepped through.

The hallway was empty. No bodies yet, no obvious damage — just the too-bright emergency lighting and a silence that felt less like safety and more like held breath.

"I don’t like it when it’s quiet," Kai said, dropping the bit for a second.

"You said the same thing on twelve," Ben said. "Right before you found something to hit."

"I have a gift."

"You have a curse."

Penelope walked between them, arms crossed loosely over her katana’s sheath, half-listening, half-scanning the doors they passed. It was strange, she thought, how quickly this had become normal — Kai and Ben trading insults like a metronome keeping time while the world burned quietly around them. She’d grown up with that rhythm. Kai had been talking over her since she was three years old and he was barely two years and nine months, both of them raised under the same roof, same rules, same overprotective older brother glaring down at them from across every dinner table. Ben had just been folded into it later, easily, the way stray dogs get folded into a family that already has too many mouths to feed and decides one more doesn’t matter.

It was strange to have that rhythm here, now, walking past doors that might or might not have something dead behind them.

Strange, but not unwelcome.

A door near the end of the hall stood open — not forced, not broken. Just open, like someone had walked out and simply never thought to close it behind them.

Erik raised a hand. Everyone stopped.

"Could be nothing," Killian said quietly.

"Could be something," Erik answered, already moving toward it.

Kai fell into step just behind him, axe up, all the joking momentarily set aside the way it always was the second something actually mattered. Penelope noted that too — how easily he could drop the noise when it counted, how nobody who only knew him from the jokes would guess how sharp he got underneath them.

Erik nudged the door wider with his boot.

Inside, the apartment looked untouched. A coffee mug sat cold on the counter. A blanket lay folded over the back of a couch. No blood. No overturned furniture. No signs of the kind of struggle they’d found on floor eleven.

"Someone left in a hurry," Ben said, nodding toward a pair of shoes abandoned by the door, laces still tied.

"Or they never came back," Killian said.

A soft thump came from somewhere down the short hallway — not a growl, not a groan. Just weight, shifting.

Kai’s grin came back instantly, sharp and pleased. "Called it."

"You didn’t call anything," Ben whispered. "You just got excited."

"Same thing."

Erik moved first, pistol low but ready, following the sound to a half-closed bedroom door. He nudged it open with two fingers.

A woman sat on the floor beside the bed, knees pulled to her chest, a kitchen knife gripped in both hands like she’d been holding it so long her fingers had forgotten how to let go. She flinched hard at the sight of them, knife jerking up.

"Don’t—"

"We’re not infected," Erik said, voice even. "Lower the knife."

She didn’t, not at first, eyes darting between all of them — the axe, the crowbar, the pistol, the sword — like she was trying to calculate which one represented the least amount of danger and coming up with nothing.

"How long have you been in here?" Penelope asked, stepping past Erik into the doorway.

"I don’t — I don’t know. A day? Two?" The woman’s voice cracked. "My roommate went to get help. She never came back. I heard her — I heard something outside the door last night and I didn’t check because I was scared it wasn’t her anymore and I just—" ℴ

She stopped, breathing hard, knife still shaking in her grip.

Kai crouched a respectful distance away, setting the axe down flat against the floor, out of her direct line of sight. "Hey. Look at me instead of the door for a second."

She did, reluctantly.

"Whatever happened to your roommate already happened," he said, gentler than Penelope had heard him all morning. "You didn’t do anything wrong by not opening that door. You’re the reason you’re still breathing right now."

The knife lowered an inch.

"There’s nothing in the apartment," Ben added from the hallway. "We checked. It’s just you."

The woman’s shoulders finally started to shake, the tears arriving late and all at once, the way they did when a body had been running on adrenaline for too long and finally got permission to stop.

Penelope let her have a moment before crouching down as well, keeping her voice level. "We’re not staying. We can’t. But before we go, you need to hear the important parts."

The woman nodded, wiping her face with the back of her wrist.

"They come back if the brain’s intact when they die. Doesn’t matter how. Destroy the head, they stop. They hunt by sound, so from here on out, everything you do needs to be quiet." Penelope paused. "And people are going to get worse before this gets easier. Not the dead ones. The living ones."

"What do you mean?"

"She means lock your door, trust no one, and start hoarding water like it’s about to become currency," Kai said. "Because it is."

The woman looked between them, some of the panic draining into something closer to exhausted clarity. "You’re not going to take me with you."

It wasn’t a question, not really. Just a fact she was working out loud.

"No," Erik said, not unkindly. "We have our own people to get back to."

"Then why help me at all?"

Kai stood, retrieving the axe. "Because you were sitting two feet from a door with a kitchen knife and no idea what was on the other side of it. Figured you’d earned at least the truth."

They left her with the knife, with the locked door, with everything they’d told her and nothing else — no supplies pulled from Penelope’s space, no offer of a spare weapon, no promise of return. It wasn’t cruelty. It was arithmetic. There were only so many hands, only so much time, and an entire building’s worth of people who all deserved the same fifteen minutes and not one second more.

Back in the corridor, Kai exhaled long and slow, some of the humor bleeding back into his shoulders now that the moment had passed.

"You’re getting soft," Ben said.

"I have always been soft. I contain multitudes."

"You told her to hoard water like it’s currency."

"Financial advice. Very responsible."

Penelope shook her head, already moving toward the next stretch of hallway, letting their bickering settle back into its familiar rhythm behind her. Ahead, Erik and Killian walked a few paces apart, silent in the particular way two people got when they didn’t need words to coordinate — the kind of silence Penelope recognized from her father’s old stories about men who’d served together long enough that instructions became unnecessary.

Killian glanced back once, checking the three of them the way he always did, some habitual leftover from command that hadn’t faded even now. His eyes caught Penelope’s for half a second before moving on.

She didn’t examine what that half-second meant. There wasn’t room for it yet. But she noticed it anyway, filed away next to everything else she wasn’t ready to look at directly, and kept walking.

Somewhere below them, floor nine waited, and with it, whatever was left of the people who’d called it home.