Chapter 7 — No More Maybes
The rooftop groaned under their weight as they huddled near the edge, panting, coughing, each of them trying to gather breath and bearings. The fog below pulsed like a living thing, swallowing the streets, blurring shape and sound. The infected were still down there — not mindless anymore, not aimless. They paced. They circled. They waited.
Ethan leaned over, hands on his knees, sweat rolling off his brow despite the cold. “That was too close.”
Harper didn’t say anything. He was watching the street, fingers white around the wrench in his hand. His heart still slammed against his ribs like it hadn’t figured out he was still alive.
Renee dropped her satchel beside the vent shaft and sat down hard on the rooftop gravel. She opened the case and checked her samples like she was trying to make sense of chaos with order. Her hands weren’t shaking. They should have been.
“Six miles to the ranger station,” Harper finally said. “Through that.”
“That,” Ethan said, “is a suicide march.”
“We don’t have options anymore,” Renee said. Her voice was low but steady. “We lost the gas station. We lost the depot. We’ve got maybe a few more hours before that horde breaks through and spreads into the hills. Then it’s not just a town problem — it’s a statewide one.”
Ethan stared at her, then out into the fog. “You think this is going to stop in Lakeshore?”
“No,” Renee said. “I think this was a test run.”
The words hung heavy in the air. The fog rolled up over the rooftop edge like it had been listening, waiting to agree.
“Tested on sixteen thousand people,” Harper said bitterly. “And no one saw it coming.”
“That’s the idea,” Renee replied. “You don’t test something like this in a city. You start small. You track how fast it spreads. How people react. You let it incubate — then you bury it.”
Ethan sat down next to her, pulling the knife from his belt and running it along his jeans, cleaning grime and blood that wouldn’t really come off. “You’re saying someone planned this. That this wasn’t an accident.”
Renee looked at him. “I’m saying someone signed off on this. Funded it. Created it in a lab — maybe not here, maybe not even in this country. But they didn’t lose control of it, Ethan. They released it.”
Harper turned to her. “Then why are you here? Passing through? Right when it started?”
Renee didn’t flinch. “Because I wasn’t supposed to find it. But I did.”
“How?” Ethan asked.
She hesitated, just for a second.
“There was chatter in private med networks. A biochem researcher flagged abnormal spikes in mortality in rural hospitals across five states — Montana, Nebraska, Idaho, here. ERs seeing bodies coded as cardiac arrest or stroke, but the blood samples… they didn’t make sense. I pushed for access to one of the samples. Two days later, he disappeared. I started driving.”
“You knew something was coming,” Harper said.
“I knew someone was hiding something.” She looked up. “I didn’t know it would hit here this fast.”
A heavy silence followed. The wind picked up. Somewhere far off, a distant siren wailed, and then it died, swallowed by fog and quiet.
“We move at first light,” Harper said finally. “No more delays. Ranger station or bust.”
Ethan nodded once. “Agreed.”
“No hero plays,” Renee added. “If one of us goes down—”
“We drag them back up,” Harper interrupted.
She met his eyes. “If they’re bit… we don’t risk the rest.”
Neither Ethan nor Harper responded.
They didn’t have to.
Morning never really came — just a gray fade in the fog that said time had passed. They climbed down through an old maintenance hatch, moving building to building across the rooftops for as long as they could. The infected had grown quiet, but that quiet didn’t mean safe. It meant calculating. Watching. The sound of them had changed — no more mindless moans. Now it was low snarls and quick movements. Clicking sounds, like teeth snapping in rhythm.
They reached a parking lot behind an old grocery store around noon. Harper scouted ahead, checking through the broken glass of the store’s windows. The place was ransacked. Shelves toppled. Blood on the floor. Drag marks toward the back.
But something else, too.
A sound.
Clicking.
Soft. Mechanical. Repeating.
He waved Renee and Ethan over. They moved carefully, silent, ducking behind a freezer case near the center aisle.
“What is that?” Ethan whispered.
Harper motioned them to listen.
It was a radio. Some kind of emergency transmitter — still plugged in, miraculously powered from a backup generator humming deep inside the store.
A voice came through, distorted by static.
“…shelter… north… this is Echo Point Station… repeat… Echo Point Station… safe zone established… repeat… safe zone… ranger outpost… transmission every hour…”
Harper and Renee locked eyes.
“That’s it,” she whispered. “That’s where we’re going.”
Then the voice repeated — same pattern, same distortion.
“That can’t be coincidence,” Ethan muttered. “Why’s that still running?”
Renee moved toward the counter, keeping low. She found the transmitter — a handheld model, jury-rigged into the emergency broadcast system with duct tape and stripped wires. Next to it was an open notebook, water-damaged but still legible.
She flipped through it, scanning page after page.
“Journal,” she said. “Looks like someone stayed behind.”
Ethan leaned over her shoulder. “Who?”
Harper stepped back toward the broken glass at the front of the store. Something caught his eye across the street — a figure standing still in the fog.
Then another.
And another.
They weren’t moving. Just watching.
He turned back to the others. “We’ve gotta go. Now.”
Renee tore a page from the journal — the last entry.
“Day 4 — They don’t come for the blood. They come for the signal. Something in the frequency. It calls them.”
Harper’s heart sank. “They’re not tracking us. They’re tracking this.”
Then the transmitter cracked again.
“…Echo Point Station… repeat… safe zone…”
And the glass shattered.
A rock. Thrown hard. Then another.
Figures moved fast now, sprinting across the street, limbs flailing, mouths open wide.
Harper grabbed Renee. “Go!”
They bolted out the back door as the infected poured through the front. Ethan kicked down a trash bin, sending it tumbling behind them to slow the pursuit.
Down the alley. Over a fence. Through a wrecked yard filled with overturned lawn chairs and a doghouse that stank of rot.
They ran until the sounds faded behind them, until the only noise was their own breath and the wind scraping against trees.
Finally, they stopped.
Renee was bent over, catching her breath. “They weren’t after us.”
“No,” Harper said. “They were after the signal.”
Ethan stood, staring into the distance where the transmitter had been.
“We’re not just running from the infected,” he said. “We’re running from whoever’s still sending them orders.”
And in that moment, they all knew it.
This wasn’t survival anymore.
This was war.
To Be Continued…
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