Chapter 124: What the City Sounds Like Now

Chapter 124: Chapter 124: What the City Sounds Like Now

The parking garage smelled like exhaust and something worse underneath it, a smell none of them had bothered naming out loud anymore.

Killian pulled the truck out onto the street with the headlights off, relying instead on the ambient glow bleeding from windows still lit throughout the city — apartment buildings, storefronts, the occasional streetlamp that hadn’t yet failed. Three days ago, darkness would have meant safety. Tonight it meant something closer to camouflage, and even that felt like it was buying less time than it used to.

"It’s worse," Kai said quietly, leaning toward the window.

He wasn’t wrong. The first supply run they’d made through this stretch of the city had been eerie — abandoned, echoing, a handful of infected wandering aimless and slow between empty cars. Now the street ahead moved like something with a pulse. Figures staggered between vehicles in loose clusters, drawn toward sounds that hadn’t fully faded, the residue of a day’s worth of panic still hanging in the air like smoke that hadn’t cleared.

Somewhere two blocks over, a car alarm wailed uninterrupted. Somewhere closer, glass shattered — the particular high, bright sound of a storefront window giving out under someone’s desperation rather than a zombie’s blunt persistence.

"People are still trying to get out," Ben murmured, watching a family sprint across an intersection half a block ahead, dragging suitcases that were clearly slowing them down more than helping. "Three days in and they still think there’s somewhere to go."

"There might be," Erik said, though his voice carried no real conviction behind it.

Killian eased the truck through a side street to avoid the worst of the open intersection, weaving around two abandoned sedans that had collided nose to nose sometime in the last twelve hours judging by how fresh the damage looked. A body slumped against the steering wheel of the nearest one. It didn’t move as they passed. Neither did anyone check to be sure why.

Penelope sat in the back beside Kai, quiet, watching the city crawl by through the window with an expression that gave away less than usual — not blank exactly, just distant, the same distance that had followed her through dinner and into the truck without anyone managing to close the gap.

"You good back there?" Kai asked, low enough that it wasn’t really meant for the whole truck.

"Fine."

He didn’t push. He’d stopped pushing sometime around the second "fine" of the evening, though something in the set of his jaw suggested he was cataloguing it the same way Killian had been — filing it away for later, when there was time to actually address it instead of just noting its presence.

The pharmacy came into view two blocks later, its windows still intact but its automatic doors frozen half-open, stuck on whatever backup power was keeping the lights inside flickering weakly.

"There," Erik said. "Park close. We’re in and out."

Killian angled the truck into the small lot out front, close enough to the entrance that the doors would only require a short, exposed run. He killed the engine.

For a moment, nobody moved. They all just listened — the low, layered hum of the city at night, growls threading somewhere underneath car alarms and distant, indistinct screaming, close enough to be real concerns, far enough that none of them could yet be sure how close was too close.

"Two teams," Erik said. "Kai, Ben, perimeter and cover. Penny, Killian, inside with me, fast sweep, grab what matters, get out."

"What matters?" Kai asked.

"Antibiotics. Painkillers. Anything for wound care. Baby formula if they’ve got it left, for Aurora." Erik’s eyes flicked briefly toward Penelope. "You good to go in?"

"I said I’m fine, Erik."

"I heard you the first time. I’m asking again because we’re about to walk into a building I can’t guarantee is empty."

Penelope met his gaze for a beat longer than strictly necessary, something unreadable passing behind her eyes before she nodded and reached for the door handle. "I’m good."

They moved fast across the lot, weapons up, eyes constantly sweeping the dark edges of the parking structure beside the pharmacy. A shape lurched out from behind a delivery van halfway through the crossing — not fast enough to catch any of them, Kai’s axe finding it before it closed half the distance, the impact swallowed almost entirely by the ambient noise of the street.

"One," Kai muttered, already moving again, no time left over for his usual commentary.

Inside, the pharmacy’s emergency lighting cast everything in a thin, sickly glow. Shelves had already been picked through in places — someone else had been here, recently, judging by the scattered boxes and torn plastic wrap littering the aisles — but plenty remained untouched toward the back, behind the pharmacy counter itself, where most people apparently hadn’t thought to look or hadn’t had the tools to get past the locked security gate.

Killian rested his hand against the grate.

He could feel the metal beneath his palm — not physically, but in the way his ability had taught him to perceive it. Layers of matter, countless particles held together in patterns so impossibly precise that most people never thought about them at all.

He did.

He always did.

The lock wasn’t difficult. It was simply a collection of atoms arranged to prevent movement.

Killian altered the arrangement.

The metal softened beneath his hand, not melting, not bending, but briefly losing the structure that gave it strength. The internal mechanism collapsed inward with a muted click.

He withdrew his hand. ℯℯ𝑙.

The grate swung open.

Erik ducked under it without comment, already moving toward the shelves behind the counter.

Penelope moved without needing direction, sweeping antibiotics and gauze and small vials of insulin off the shelves with quick, efficient touches — each item vanishing the instant her fingers brushed it, no bag, no basket, simply gone, absorbed into whatever unseen place she kept it. Killian watched the first few instances out of the corner of his eye with the same clinical curiosity he applied to most things he didn’t fully understand yet, filing it under space ability, storage, capacity unknown — the same category he’d have used for any awakened power he hadn’t personally witnessed the mechanics of.

Erik Kai and Ben, who actually knew what lived on the other side of that vanishing point — the spring, the golden cave, the phoenix curled in her nest — said nothing about it at all, the silence around it so practiced by now.

A crash sounded from somewhere near the front of the store.

All three of them froze.

"Kai?" Erik said quietly into the small radio clipped to his collar.

"Not us," Kai’s voice crackled back, tense now. "Something’s coming down the street. A lot of somethings. We’ve got maybe two minutes before this parking lot isn’t quiet anymore."

Erik’s jaw tightened. "Store what you can. We’re leaving in ninety seconds."

Penelope’s hands moved faster, clearing an entire shelf of formula into the space with one long sweep of her arm, no hesitation, no wasted motion — whatever fog had settled over her all evening seemed to lift the instant real danger required something from her.

Killian was already moving toward the front, checking the street through the pharmacy’s cracked window. What he saw made his expression harden.