The road to Saint Mercy Hospital looked like the city had tried to tear itself open from the inside.
Kade Mercer drove through it anyway.
Rain sheeted over the windshield, turning burning wrecks and flashing emergency lights into smeared streaks of red, gold, and blue. Every other intersection was blocked—crashed cars, abandoned buses, overturned barricades, civilians running in blind, broken currents through the dark. The deeper he pushed into central Gravesend, the less it looked like a city and the more it looked like a failed evacuation frozen mid-scream.
His van fishtailed around a delivery truck jackknifed across Mercer Avenue.
A man slammed against the passenger-side panel two seconds later.
Not asking for help.
Attacking.
Kade jerked the wheel hard enough to throw the body off and kept moving, jaw tight, eyes cutting constantly from road to mirrors to alley mouths. He'd already learned the new rule of the night:
If somebody came at you too fast, too desperate, too wrong—you didn't wait to find out what they used to be.
His phone buzzed again in the cup holder. Nico.
He ignored it the first time.
Not the second.
Kade snatched it up at a red light that no longer mattered. "Talk."
Static. Breathing. Then Nico's voice, too loud and too thin. "Bro, where are you?"
"Driving."
"No shit, I mean where?"
"Near Mercy."
There was a pause. Kade heard shouting on Nico's end, metal clanging, somebody crying.
"I'm at Briar Heights," Nico said. "Whole building's gone crazy. People are tearing each other up in the hallways. I locked myself in the laundry room with three old ladies and a dude bleeding through his socks."
Kade's grip tightened on the phone. "Stay there."
"That's your plan? Stay there?"
"It's the only one you got."
The light ahead went black with the rest of the block as another section of grid power failed. In the sudden dark, something moved across the intersection—three figures, then six, then more, drifting out of the rain between stalled cars.
Not drifting.
Hunting.
Kade killed the call. "Nico?"
"Yeah?"
"Don't open that door for anybody."
Then he threw the van into gear.
The infected hit the hood almost instantly. A woman in a torn coat slid across the windshield, snarling, fingers clawing at the glass until Kade swerved and sent her tumbling into a hydrant. Another leapt from the median and smashed shoulder-first into the driver-side door. Kade punched the accelerator, engine roaring as the van plowed through the intersection and clipped a sedan hard enough to spin it sideways.
Two blocks from Saint Mercy, traffic became a graveyard.
Cars clogged the hospital approach in both directions. Ambulances sat abandoned with back doors open. One had a bloody handprint dragged all the way down the side panel. A city bus was lodged against the outer fence, its windshield shattered inward, dead lights glowing weak beneath the rain.
Beyond it all, Saint Mercy rose over the block like a wounded ship—upper floors still lit in places, lower levels pulsing with red emergency glare. Smoke bled from one wing. The front plaza was chaos.
Civilians hammered on the locked glass doors while security fought to keep them out.
Inside the lobby, shapes moved too fast.
Kade braked hard behind an overturned squad car and killed the headlights.
He could hear them now even through the rain.
Screaming.
Gunshots.
Shattering glass.
The dull, ugly impact of bodies hitting doors from the inside.
Then a new sound cut through all of it—short, controlled rifle bursts from the east side service entrance.
Not panicked.
Not random.
Professional.
Kade ducked low, scanning.
Across the plaza, through the storm and red wash of emergency lights, three black-armored figures moved along the outer wall of the hospital in sealed masks and hard plates, stepping over bodies without slowing. One of them drove a knife into a writhing infected at his feet with mechanical precision, then kept advancing as if the kill meant nothing.
Kade felt his stomach go cold.
South Hollow.
Same masks.
Same movement.
Same buried nightmare dragged into the present.
He reached under the driver's seat and pulled out the compact pistol he legally should've turned in two years ago, checked the mag, then grabbed the pry bar with his other hand.
The front entrance was suicide.
The service side might be worse.
He chose the service side.
Kade slipped out of the van into freezing rain, hood up, shoulders low, boots splashing through runoff threaded with blood. He moved between wrecked vehicles and broken planters, keeping the overturned police cruiser between himself and the hospital wall until a scream ripped across the lot.
A Fresh lunged from beneath the ambulance.
Kade fired once.
The shot punched through its cheek and spun it sideways, but it kept coming. He sidestepped at the last instant and crushed the pry bar into the side of its skull. Bone cracked. It fell twitching into a wash of red rainwater.
The rifle bursts on the east side stopped.
Bad sign.
Kade reached the perimeter fence and saw the breach—chain-link peeled back beside a loading bay where somebody, or something, had torn through. The service corridor beyond flickered under dying fluorescent lights. Blood striped the concrete. One body in black armor lay crumpled near the threshold, throat opened down to the spine.
Kade stared at it for one second.
Whatever had done that was still inside.
He lifted the pistol, stepped over the corpse, and crossed into Saint Mercy.