Chapter 6: Breached
"How long do we just wait here?" Mark’s voice was a ragged whisper in the gloom of the living room. The air was thick with the smell of dust from moved furniture and the faint, metallic scent of blood from the carpet.
"Until it’s quiet," Quinn answered, his eyes fixed on the front door’s peephole. He had been standing there for nearly an hour, a silent sentinel, his body rigid with tension.
"It’s not getting quiet," Sarah said from the hallway entrance. Her voice was flat, devoid of the hope she had tried to maintain earlier. "It’s getting worse."
She was right. The initial wave of chaotic noise—the screams, the crashes, the alarms—had subsided into something more rhythmic and terrifying. A constant, low-level shuffling sound from the street. The occasional sharp cry that was quickly silenced. The scrape of feet on asphalt. It was the sound of a patient, gathering threat.
Quinn leaned closer to the peephole, his world shrinking to that tiny circle of distorted glass. He could see them now. They were not hiding or running. They were roaming. He recognized the woman in the pink jogging suit who always walked her dog at dawn. Her dog was nowhere to be seen, and her movements were a jerky, twitching parody of a walk, her head snapping from side to side. A teenage boy he had seen a hundred times on a skateboard was just standing in the middle of the street, his head cocked at an unnatural angle, turning slowly in a full circle. There were others. Maybe six or seven just on their block. They were drawn to the houses where there had been noise. They were drawn to their house, a dark, silent box in a neighborhood of death.
They were hunting.
A scraping sound started at the back of the house. It was rhythmic, steady. Scrape. Pause. Scrape.
"What’s that?" Mark asked, his head snapping towards the kitchen. The sound was grating, methodical.
Quinn pushed away from the door. "Stay with Sarah," he said, his voice low. He moved silently towards the back of the house, gripping the iron poker, its weight familiar in his hand now. Mark ignored him, grabbing the kitchen knife from the counter and following a few steps behind, his shadow clinging to Quinn’s in the dim light.