The motel room was a tomb. The silence was no longer just empty; it was anticipatory, heavy with the echoes of screams from the town below and the memory of the gunshots they'd heard an hour ago. The battery-powered radio on the nightstand had gone silent mid-broadcast.
Chloe clutched the radio, twisting the dial through hissing static. "Hello? Is anyone there? Please..." Nothing. The last, fragile thread to a sane world had been severed.
Jake was pacing a worn path on the cheap carpet, running a hand through his hair. "They're not coming, are they? No cops, no ambulances... nothing."
"They've locked us in," Chloe said, her voice hollow. "We're not a town in trouble. We're a contaminated site."
A new sound cut through the silence. Not a scream. A slow, dragging scrape. Like something heavy being pulled along the outside wall of the motel.
They both froze.
Jake crept to the broken window, peering through the slats of the blinds. His breath caught in his throat. "Chloe..." he whispered.
She joined him. Outside, in the misty twilight, figures moved. They shambled, they lurched, but they were moving with a terrible purpose, forming a loose circle around the motel. Their eyes, when they caught the light, glowed with a faint, sick yellow. Among them, standing perfectly still and watching with cold calculation, was Troy. His arm was still bent at a wrong angle, but he seemed utterly unconcerned by it.
"They found us," Jake breathed, his face pale.
A soft, rhythmic thump began at the motel room door. Thump. Thump. Thump. It wasn't frantic. It was patient. Relentless.
"We know you're in there." Troy's voice rasped through the door, calm and utterly terrifying. "You don't have to be afraid."
"Go away!" Chloe shouted, her voice cracking.
Troy's laugh was a dry, humorless sound. "Or what? You'll call your friend? The one with the bat? He's busy." The thumping continued. It was the sound of a head being gently bumped against the wood. "The pain... it doesn't have to be a burden. It can be a tool. It shows you what's real. It shows you how weak everyone else is."
The door shuddered under a heavier impact. A crack splintered the cheap wood.
"He's going to break it down," Jake said, panic rising in his voice.
"No, he's not," Chloe said, her mind racing. "He's trying to scare us. He wants us to come out. He wants us... willing." She looked at the bathroom. "The window. We go out the back."
"And go where?" Jake asked, his eyes wide.
"Anywhere but here!"
They moved quickly. Jake grabbed a lamp, yanking the cord from the wall. "Create a distraction."
As another, louder CRACK sounded from the door, Jake hurled the lamp through the front window. The glass exploded outward. A chorus of snarls and guttural shouts erupted from the front of the motel.
"NOW!" Chloe yelled.
They scrambled into the bathroom and shoved the window open. They tumbled out into the damp, cold grass of the motel's backyard, landing in a heap. They could hear the infected converging on the noise at the front.
"This way!" Jake hissed, pulling Chloe towards the tree line at the edge of the parking lot.
They ran, their hearts hammering against their ribs. The mist swallowed them, disorienting them. They didn't know where they were going, only that they had to get away.
A figure stepped out from behind a truck, blocking their path. They skidded to a halt. It was one of Troy's followers, a woman whose arm was bent at an impossible angle, her eyes burning with a pained, hungry light.
Before she could lunge, a sharp voice cut through the night.
"Freeze! Get down on the ground! Now!"
Sgt. Eva Reyes emerged from the mist, her rifle trained on the infected woman. She looked like hell—covered in grime and spattered with dark, dried blood that wasn't her own. Her eyes were hard, haunted pits.
The infected woman snarled and charged.
Reyes didn't hesitate. A three-round burst caught the woman center mass. The impact slammed her against the truck, but she pushed off, still coming. Reyes fired again, and again. Bullets tore into the woman's body, but she kept stumbling forward, a puppet with its strings cut, driven by a will that was no longer her own.
"Get down!" Reyes yelled at Chloe and Jake, her voice raw with a desperation they couldn't understand.
Finally, a round struck the woman's leg, shattering the bone. She collapsed, but began dragging herself forward, her fingers clawing at the asphalt.
Reyes backed away, her face a mask of horrified confirmation. She looked from the crawling thing on the ground to the two terrified kids in front of her. Civilians. Uninfected. Alive.
"Are you hurt?" she barked, her weapon still scanning the mist.
"N-no," Chloe stammered. "They... they were surrounding our room..."
"Come with me. Now." It wasn't an offer. It was an order. Reyes gestured with her rifle for them to move ahead of her, away from the motel, towards the center of town where her forward operating base was supposedly set up.
To Chloe and Jake, she was an angel of deliverance. A soldier. A professional. The first sign of order they'd seen in days. Relief, sweet and overwhelming, washed over them. They were saved.
They had no idea they were now walking directly into the custody of the one person on earth whose sole mission was to capture and use their best friend. They didn't see the calculating look in Reyes's eyes as she watched them, the gears turning in her head. They weren't just survivors to her.
They were leverage.