Chapter 150: Coordinates

Chapter 150: Chapter 150: Coordinates

The satellite phone rang a second time before Penelope managed to make herself answer it, her thumb hovering over the screen like the call itself might bite.

"Hello?" Her voice came out careful, uncertain, nothing like the ease she fell into with Kai or Erik.

"Penelope." The voice on the other end was deep, steady, carrying an authority that settled over the line even through static. "It’s your uncle. Silver."

"Uncle Silver." She said it slowly, testing the shape of the address in her mouth. She’d never actually spoken to this man before — not truly, not in any way she remembered living through herself. Whatever conversations had passed between him and the body’s previous occupant belonged to someone else entirely, and she had no memory to draw on, no established rhythm to fall back into. "You’re alive. That’s — I’m glad."

A pause on his end, brief, and something in it suggested he’d noticed the stiffness in her voice, though he didn’t remark on it directly. "I’m alive. Banged up, but alive. Are you safe?"

"Yes. I’m with the Rykers. We’re secured on a high floor, we have supplies, we’re—" She stopped herself before she rambled further, unsure how much detail he actually wanted, unsure of the correct register to speak to him in at all. "We’re managing."

"Good." Something in his tone eased slightly, though it remained formal, measured — a man accustomed to command, not casual conversation. "I need your location. Exact address if you have it, or the nearest landmarks. We’re coming for you."

Penelope recited the address carefully, aware of how young and unsure her own voice sounded compared to his, and waited.

The silence on the other end lasted only a second, but something about its quality changed instantly — the pause of a man doing rapid math rather than simply listening.

"That address." His voice sharpened, something urgent and almost disbelieving underneath it. "Penelope, do you understand what building that is? That’s—"

A sound cut through the line, distant at first, then violent — the low, grinding roar of something enormous shifting, followed immediately by a man’s voice shouting something unintelligible, a woman’s sharper cry layered over it.

"Uncle Silver?" Penelope’s grip on the phone tightened, some old, unfamiliar instinct rising in her despite barely knowing this man at all — the simple, animal fear of losing someone before she’d even had the chance to properly know them. "What’s happening—"

"Hold on—" His voice, urgent now, pulling away from the receiver. "Get out, get out of the car, now—"

Tires screeched, prolonged and violent, the sound swallowed almost immediately by something heavier, a deep, rolling crash that seemed to go on far longer than it should have.

Then, nothing.

"Uncle Silver?" Her voice cracked, all the careful formality dissolving instantly into something rawer. "Uncle Silver, please—"

Static. Dead air.

"Answer me. Please."

Nothing.

Aunt Mary’s hand found hers, gripping tight, both of them staring at the phone as though sheer will alone might force it back to life.

"He’s a hard man to kill, Penny," Aunt Mary said quietly, though her voice wavered on the words too. "I’ve known him a long time. He does not go down easy."

Penelope didn’t answer. She just kept staring at the dead screen, throat tight, some strange grief rising in her that she didn’t fully understand — grief for a man she barely knew, an uncle whose voice she’d only just learned to recognize, gone silent before she’d even worked out how she was supposed to feel about him at all.

Do you understand what building that is?

She had no idea what he’d meant. And now there was no one left on the line to tell her.

The SUV’s front end had crumpled hard into a wall of mud and displaced earth, the entire vehicle tilted at an angle that made climbing out through the driver’s door impossible.

"Everyone out," Silver ordered, already forcing his own door open against the weight of debris pressed against it. "Now. Before the ground shifts again."

Victor was already moving, hauling himself through the passenger window and reaching back to help Dahlia clamber free, her leg still stiff from the earlier injury but holding steady enough to manage.

The mudslide had come without warning — a section of hillside above the road giving way all at once under the relentless rain, burying half the street in a churning wave of earth and debris that had clipped the SUV’s front corner and sent it skidding into the embankment. The satellite phone, still connected moments ago, had been knocked from Silver’s hand in the impact, swallowed somewhere beneath the mud and wreckage before he’d had the chance to finish what he’d been trying to say.

"Everyone okay?" Silver called, voice tight, scanning both of them for injury.

"Fine," Dahlia said, breathing hard. "Bruised. Nothing broken."

"Same," Victor confirmed, already pulling weapons from the wreckage of the trunk.

Silver’s eyes swept the buried ground around the vehicle, searching briefly, uselessly, for any sign of the phone before accepting it was gone. "Damn it."

"What is it?" Dahlia asked.

"I was talking to Penelope," Silver said, jaw tight. He hesitated a moment, some old, unfamiliar discomfort crossing his face — the particular awkwardness of a man who’d never quite known how to be an uncle to a girl he’d only ever loved from a careful distance, out of respect for a sister no longer alive to guide the relationship herself. "She gave me her location. It’s—" He stopped himself, shaking his head sharply. "It doesn’t matter right now. We’ll sort it out once we’re safe. Right now we need shelter."

The rain hammered down around them without mercy, visibility reduced to barely more than a few feet in any direction, the road ahead completely buried beneath a fresh wall of mud and uprooted debris.

They moved together, picking their way carefully along the edge of the ruined road, and it was Dahlia who saw it first — a shape lurching out from behind a collapsed section of guardrail, fast, closer than any of them had time to properly react to.

Victor’s weapon came up, too slow.

Silver’s tattoo tore free before conscious thought even registered the threat.

The black python ripped loose from his skin in the same searing, ice-cold rush he still hadn’t grown used to, launching itself across the short distance and wrapping around the creature’s throat before it closed the last few feet toward Dahlia. One violent constriction, a sickening crack, and the zombie collapsed into the mud, motionless.

The snake slithered back up Silver’s arm, coiling into stillness against his skin, exactly as it always did.

For a moment, nobody spoke.

"That’s new," Dahlia finally said, staring at her father’s arm with open fascination, some of the earlier fear in her expression giving way to genuine, startled wonder. "Dad. How long have you been able to do that?"

"I don’t know," Silver admitted, flexing his fingers slowly, still not entirely used to the sensation even now. "It happened the first time back at the estate. I don’t fully understand it myself."

"You’re just casually keeping a superpowered snake tattoo a secret?" Victor said, lowering his weapon slowly, disbelief written plainly across his face.

"I’m not keeping anything a secret. I’m still trying to comprehend what’s happening to me, same as the rest of you." Silver’s voice carried none of its usual iron control, just raw, honest uncertainty underneath it. "It saved my life once already. I’m not questioning it too closely as long as it keeps doing that."

Dahlia reached out, fingers hovering just above the tattoo without quite touching it, something between awe and unease in her expression. "Does it hurt? When it happens?"

"Every time," Silver said quietly.

He glanced back once toward the buried wreckage of the SUV, thinking of the phone lost somewhere beneath the mud, of the stiff, uncertain voice on the other end of the line — his sister’s daughter, a girl he’d spent years quietly loving from behind careful boundaries he’d never known how to cross, now somewhere out there believing, for all he knew, that he might already be dead.

She’s in the same building as Persephone.

He’d figure out how to tell her once they found a way through this. For now, the storm gave him no choice but to wait — and to hope she understood, wherever she was, that his silence meant nothing about how much he intended to reach her.

*

A/N: Dear Survivors,

I’d greatly appreciate it if you took a moment to leave a review. Writing a novel is an apocalyptic experience in its own right. My characters may be battling zombies, disasters, and the end of civilization, but believe me—I have my own apocalypse happening behind the scenes. 😂