The scream from the retail floor cut through the corridor like a blade dragged across metal, sudden and raw and unmistakably human, which meant two things at once.
Someone was still alive out there, someone was also about to die if Arty chose wrong in the next three seconds.
He didn't give himself a fourth.
"Counter first," he said, already moving.
Leah didn't argue.
Her breath caught once, then steadied enough to follow, the water bottles thumping lightly against the first aid kit under her arm as she shifted her grip on the tyre iron and fell in behind him.
The corridor opened into the service station shop in a spill of flickering fluorescent light, the front half of the room half-visible through staggered aisles of chips.
Drinks, confectionery, and the cheap seasonal rubbish every servo seemed doomed to stock regardless of whether anyone actually wanted it.
Two ceiling panels near the fridges had blackened around the edges, one light buzzing so hard it looked ready to fail outright.
Glass crunched underfoot somewhere near the counter, a drink fridge hung open with its contents spilling onto the tiles, bottles rolling, hissing, and leaking across the floor.
Three zombies were already now in the retail space.
One stood near the front windows, battering mindlessly at the glass as if something outside had caught its ruined attention more strongly than the people inside.
Another had half-climbed over a fallen display rack and was dragging itself free in ugly, determined jerks.
The third was behind the counter, bent over something on the floor that Arty didn't need to see clearly to understand.
The screaming had stopped, that worried him more.
Leah saw it too.
He heard the sound she made behind him, small and involuntary, the kind of noise people made when they lost hope and knew it before they had time to lie to themselves.
"Stay with me," he said quietly, not taking his eyes off the room.
A movement near the back of the counter snapped his focus right.
A hand appeared first, pale and shaking, then the top half of a man's face rose into view behind the cigarette display, his eyes wide with the stunned, exhausted disbelief of someone who had already been sure he was finished and hadn't caught up to the fact he wasn't.
Alive.
For now.
The zombie behind the counter turned at the same moment, its head jerking sharply toward the new sound and then toward Arty as if it had to choose which fresh stimulus mattered more.
Arty made the decision for it.
He crossed the distance fast, stepping around a spill of glass and kicking the fallen rack hard enough to shove it into the path of the thing dragging itself free from the floor display.
The counter zombie lunged as he closed, one blood-slick hand slapping against the counter edge while its body twisted toward him with a speed that shouldn't have existed in something so badly broken.
The wrench came down before it reached full extension.
The impact cracked across the room with enough force to bounce the thing sideways into the register. It hit, dropped, twitched, and tried to rise again.
"Of course," Arty muttered.
He swung a second time, lower and harder, and this time the body folded fully out of the fight, collapsing behind the counter with a wet, ugly finality he chose not to examine too closely.
The one at the window reacted to the noise and peeled away from the glass, turning in a stagger that became a rush almost immediately.
Leah moved before he told her to.
The tyre iron flashed up and caught the thing across the side of the knee with a crack that twisted the leg inward at a wrong angle and dropped it to one side.
Arty stepped in and finished it with the wrench before it could fully reorient itself.
"Good instincts, definitely usefull." Arty thought to himself.
The third one, the one tangled in the fallen rack, made a furious scraping sound as it fought the metal and plastic, not trapped in any meaningful sense, just delayed.
Arty grabbed a stack of bottled water from the nearest shelf and hurled it down on top of the rack. Plastic burst, bottles scattered, and the extra weight collapsed the angle of the display enough to jam the thing more firmly under it.
"Three seconds," he said.
Leah didn't ask what he meant, she moved straight for the counter.
The man behind it tried to stand and almost failed, one hand pressed against his side while the other gripped the edge hard enough that his knuckles had gone white.
"Can you move?" Arty asked.
The man nodded too fast, then winced. "I can try."
"Try faster."
Arty vaulted the half-door at the end of the counter and crouched just long enough to confirm what he already suspected.
The thing on the floor that had drawn the third zombie's attention wasn't getting back up.
A woman in station uniform, maybe mid-thirties, lay twisted awkwardly beside the cigarette cabinet with one arm under her at a bad angle and most of her throat gone.
He let his eyes slide off her immediately and searched instead for anything useful.
Keys hung from a hook under the till, cash sat in the drawer, less than he wanted, more than he'd had.
A small lockbox stood open beside a terminal screen that had frozen halfway through what looked like a pump override menu.
Fuel controls.
That mattered a lot.
He swept the drawer contents and the keyring into his pocket, then yanked open the cabinet below the counter and found what he was hoping for.
Two packs of batteries, a utility knife, three cheap lighters, and a box of shelf-stable protein bars that now had a value far beyond what any sane world would have assigned them yesterday morning.
He shoved all of it onto the counter.
"Bag," he said.
Leah was already ahead of him, dragging a reusable shopping bag from a rack by the lotto stand and scooping the supplies into it with efficient, angry movements.
The man had made it upright but looked one hard shove away from dropping again.
He wore a servo polo darkened with blood near the ribs, though the stain sat low enough that Arty couldn't tell at a glance if it was his.
"What's your name?" Arty asked.
"Dale."
"Bitten?"
Dale looked down at the blood on his shirt as if he hadn't fully processed it yet. "Cut on a shelf," he said, breathless. "One of the glass fridge doors blew when they hit it. It's mine. Mostly."
Mostly was not a confidence-inspiring word.
Still, he was speaking, focusing, answering like a man rather than snarling like something emptied out and reanimated by hunger, that was good enough for ten more minutes.
The rack in the aisle groaned as the trapped zombie freed one arm.
Ten minutes might be optimistic.
A heavy slam came from the rear corridor, then another, something had found the shed door or the cool room door and decided it objected to obstacles.
Leah heard it too. "This place is done."
"It was done before we got here," Arty said.
His eyes flicked to the cool room door again, the blood smear beneath it had been drawn outward.
That meant someone had been dragged from inside or had tried to get out and failed, either way, checking it now would cost time they no longer had.
The scream had come from here, not there.
One living person was a certainty. More than that was wishful thinking.
The trapped zombie tore free enough to twist its upper body toward them.
One shoulder remained pinned by the collapsed rack and drink crates, but its head and one arm were mobile now, fingers clawing against the tiles with blind determination.
"Leave it," Arty said as Dale lifted a hand toward a nearby mop handle like he might use it as a weapon. "We're moving."
Dale looked at him, then at the front windows. "Out there?"
The front forecourt remained visible in jagged slices between aisle ends and advertisement stands.
At least four more shapes had gathered near the entrance now, drawn by movement, sound, or some miserable combination of both.
One was pressing against the automatic doors hard enough to trigger them half-open before the damaged sensor stuttered and shut again.
Another kept slamming into the glass beside it in a rhythm too thoughtless to be called patience but too relentless to ignore.
"Not front," Arty said. "Rear lane. Ute's there."
Leah hitched the bag higher over her shoulder. "Rear gate's gone."
"Then we move before the yard fills."
Dale pushed away from the counter and nearly folded.
Leah caught his arm with her free hand and gave him a glare sharp enough to keep him upright out of sheer embarrassment if nothing else.
"Try not to die while walking," she said.
Dale managed a thin, disbelieving breath that might have been a laugh in a saner world.
Good. Humour still worked on him, another point in the alive column.
Arty led them back into the corridor at a quick pace, resisting the urge to run because running without visibility in a narrowing kill box was how people turned urgency into stupidity.
The office door stood open where they'd left it, the cool room door sat three metres beyond, silent now in a way he trusted even less than the banging.
They were almost at the rear access when something hit the inside of the cool room hard enough to bow the metal outward with a hollow boom.
Dale swore.
Leah tightened her grip on the tyre iron.
Arty didn't slow, but his eyes tracked the door automatically, another impact landed, higher this time, followed by a wet scraping noise that suggested more than one body behind it and not all of them upright.
"Tell me that's not one of the others," Leah said.
"No," Arty replied. "That's me not telling you anything."
They reached the inner door to the shed just as another crash came from the yard outside, then the unmistakable metallic squeal of something pressing along the corrugated wall.
The space beyond the door looked darker now, more crowded somehow, though that might have just been his nerves trying to sketch movement into every shadow.
He opened it a fraction and looked out.
The rear gate had fully collapsed inward, two zombies were through, one was dragging itself across the concrete after getting tangled in the chain-link.
The other had reached the bins and was using its shoulder against them in the same mindless fashion the others used against doors and glass, not because the bins mattered, but because motion and obstruction had become the same invitation to it.
A third shape stood just beyond the fallen gate, then a fourth moved past it.
The lane beside the ute remained technically open, though technicality was doing a lot of work.
Arty's mind snapped into the kind of cold calculation that always came easier once the room for hesitation had burned away.
Distance to ute: maybe twenty metres, three people, one heavily injured, at least two active threats in the yard, more incoming, shed wall and bins creating a funnel.
Narrow but usable, fighting there would work if he controlled order and momentum, it would fail if they clustered or if Dale fell.
He looked back once at the retail floor, front route impossible, staying impossible, cool room a waste of blood and time, that left exactly one answer.
"We go now," he said. "I take point. Leah you stay with Dale, if something gets too close, don't stop to help me unless I'm already down." Arty spoke with confidence.
Leah's expression darkened. "That's not a great plan."
"It's the only one we have." Arty replied
She accepted that with the kind of grim economy she was starting to appreciate.
Arty stepped into the yard and made himself the loudest thing in it.
"Come on then."
The nearest zombie turned immediately, good, that's just what he wanted, the wrench felt steadier in his hand now than it had at the house, not because the danger was less, but because the shape of it was clearer.
This one came from the left, half-limping around the bins with one hand up and its mouth hanging open.
He met it three strides short of the bottleneck, swung once to check its momentum, then stepped through with the second strike and dropped it hard enough that it skidded across the concrete.
The one dragging itself across the ground clawed at his boot, he kicked its arm away, stamped once on the wrist to break its grip, then drove the wrench down into its head without stopping his forward movement.
"Move," he barked.
Leah pushed Dale through the gap, both of them staying closer to the wall than he liked but fast enough to keep pace with the moment.
A shadow crossed the lane ahead.
Not another zombie, a person.
A man vaulted the low side fence from the neighbouring property and hit the ground running, wild-eyed and bleeding from one cheek, a backpack bouncing against his shoulders as he sprinted toward the ute like it was the last vehicle left on earth.
Arty reacted before he thought it through, stepping sideways to block the lane and shoving the wrench up between them.
"Stop."
The man nearly crashed into it, his hands came up instantly. "I'm not turned."
That was exactly what a desperate liar would say and exactly what a desperate honest man would say, which made it useless as evidence.
Behind them, another zombie forced through the gate.
Leah swore, and Dale stumbled.
The stranger looked past Arty toward the movement and then back toward the ute. "Please," he said, voice cracking at the edges. "They're coming from the houses."
Arty had half a second to make a choice and hated all available versions of it.
Two things tipped the balance.
First, the man smelled like sweat, blood, and fear, not like the rotten-sour taint hanging off the infected.
Second, the backpack might matter.
"Passenger tray," Arty snapped. "Stay where I can see you."
The man nodded too quickly and moved.
Leah shot Arty a look that promised a future argument if they lived long enough to afford one.
"We don't have room," she said.
"We have seconds."
The ute was six strides away.
Three, if you ignored consequences.
Arty reached the driver's side first, yanked the door open, and threw the wrench onto the seat as the stranger hauled himself into the tray with the graceless speed of a man powered entirely by terror.
Dale nearly collapsed at the rear quarter.
Leah shoved him hard enough to keep him upright and got the bag into the cabin before practically throwing him after it.
Arty got one hand on the steering wheel when a thud slammed into the side of the tray.
The stranger shouted.
Arty looked up just in time to see one grey hand clamped around the top rail behind him while the rest of the body dragged itself upward.
He snatched the utility knife from the supplies bag, twisted in the seat, and drove the blade into the wrist pinned over the metal.
It took two ugly sawing motions and a burst of black-red spray before the hand came free enough to drop.
The body followed with it, vanishing beneath the side of the ute just as he threw the knife back and slammed the door.
"Everyone in?" he shouted.
"Go!" Leah yelled.
Good enough.
The ute lurched forward hard, tyres shrieking on concrete before catching as he fishtailed through the open lane and out toward the service road.
Something hit the rear once, then slid away. In the mirror he saw shapes converging, not just from the station now, but from the neighbouring yards and side lanes too, as if the noise had rung a bell across the whole edge of town.
He didn't slow until the station had shrunk behind them and the next block of houses had opened into a wider industrial strip with more yard space, fewer windows, and the kind of heavy structures he trusted on principle.
Only then did he risk a proper breath.
Leah was twisted in the passenger seat, one hand braced on the dash, the other still gripping the tyre iron.
Dale had his head back against the seat and his eyes closed, breathing through clenched teeth.
In the rear-view mirror, the stranger in the tray was crouched low behind the cab with both hands visible and blood from the severed zombie wrist splashed across one shoulder.
"Names," Arty said, eyes still on the road.
Leah answered first. "Still Leah."
Dale gave a weak thumbs-up instead of words.
The man in the tray leaned toward the rear window opening. "Tom."
Arty nodded once.
Three survivors. One ute. Half a tank. One bag of stolen time.
The service station had been a trap.
That didn't mean it had been a mistake.
It had given him supplies, fuel cards, and proof of something he would have preferred not to confirm yet.
The outskirts weren't empty, they were only quieter.
His phone buzzed again on the dash.
He stared at it for half a second before picking it up.
Unknown.
Two words.
Not enough.
Arty looked at the road ahead, then at the industrial buildings rising beyond the next intersection, larger, stronger, more defensible than any house had a right to be.
"Yeah," he said quietly, more to himself than to the message. "I know."
Because for all the movement, all the planning, all the small corrections he had made this time, the shape of the truth was closing in around him from every side.
He had changed the route, he had changed the timing, he had changed the body count, none of it had changed the scale.
The world wasn't collapsing in one place, it was collapsing everywhere at once.
He tightened his grip on the wheel and aimed the ute toward the industrial strip, where steel sheds and fenced yards stood waiting like rougher, uglier versions of possibility.
This life still wasn't enough, he could feel that now in his bones, the question was how much more it would cost him to admit it.