Alexei decided to take the first watch, letting Zubair soak up the contentnt that was Sera. He watched silently as the others gravitated around her like planets around the sun.
It was fitting, after all, since that was exactly how he saw her... as his sun... giving hope in the middle of a cold winter.
The house dimd as the movie credits ended and the television went dark.
Sera had drifted sideways on the couch, pulling the blanket up to her chest as Oogie Boogie settled into the curve of her arm. Zubair shifted imdiately, taking the floor beside the couch so he could rest within arm’s reach of her, one knee bent in silent guard.
Lachlan stretched out near Luci at her feet, the wolf’s head resting on his thigh as if anchoring the pack in place, and Aerenyx sat on the rug near her shoulder, posture still and watchful, the faint glow of the streetlight reflecting in his black eyes.
Happy that everyone had settled in their place, Alexei took the armchair angled toward the door, but his attention never left the window looking out into the street in front of them. Sera was only as safe as they could make her... and he was determined to keep her safe.
The problem was that Region T looked deceptively calm.
The streetlamps cast steady pools of light across the road, illuminating empty asphalt and the tidy line of houses. There were no creatures stalked the roofs, no blood rain fell from the sky, and no parasitic frog crept under doors and down chimneys.
If soone had shown him a still image of the scene after the ’nights’ he experienced in Region O, he might have mistaken it for sothing from the pre-collapse.
But he knew better.
The bodies they’d watched earlier still lay where the soldiers had dropped them. The sheet-wrapped shapes were arranged in a row along the curb, like trash awaiting collection.
The only difference now was the silence; no bullets echoing around them, no shouted orders, no boots on pavent.
Alexei tracked them automatically. One, two, three, four, five. All unmoving.
A patrol passed at the far end of the street, flashlights cutting quick arcs across porches and windows. The soldiers glanced at the row of bodies but didn’t stop, apparently satisfied that the day’s work was finished. Their beams never reached the house were Alexei was, and he exhaled slowly when they disappeared around the corner.
Behind him, the house murmured with the small sounds of settling bodies and shared breathing.
The only problem was that Alexei should have felt calr than he did.
He almost turned away from the window when sothing caught his eye.
One of the sheet-covered shapes twitched.
At first, he thought it was a trick of the light. A breeze, maybe. The fabric lifted just slightly along the chest area, then settled. His gaze narrowed, every trained instinct sharpening in the span of a heartbeat as he felt Psycho fluttering under his chest.
The sa body shifted again.
The movent was wrong—slow, dragging, like muscles rembering how to work without having any reason to. The sheet strained as the arm beneath it flexed. A head rolled to one side. The entire bundle jerked once, then went still.
Alexei did not move. He did not call the others. He simply watched.
Another body further down the line gave a smaller twitch, a faint jerk along what should have been a hip. The sheet there rippled and fell back into place.
His mind catalogued the possibilities automatically. Misdiagnosed death. Spinal reflex. Late-stage nerve firing. He had seen plenty of corpses do strange things after the last breath.
But none of those ever tried to sit up.
The first body struggled like sothing trapped inside a cocoon. The sheet shifted and dragged along the pavent as the figure underneath slowly dragged an arm forward. The elbow bent. The head lifted by inches, then dropped again.
Alexei’s hand tightened on the edge of the curtain.
"Alexei?" Aerenyx’s voice drifted from behind him, quiet but cutting.
"Stay where you are," Alexei murmured.
He did not sound alard. He used the sa tone he always did when sothing demanded attention but not yet movent. Aerenyx raised a single eyebrow and obeyed, but Alexei could feel the creature’s focus sharpening from across the room.
A door opened farther down the street.
Two soldiers erged from a house Alexei hadn’t noticed earlier, still in full gear, helts crooked with fatigue. One yawned, the gesture wide and careless. The other rubbed a hand across his face and then spotted the shifting sheet.
"Shit," the man muttered.
The first soldier followed his gaze and swore under his breath. They did not look surprised. They did not look horrified.
They looked annoyed.
One of them raised his pistol again and walked toward the moving body with the slow stride of soone cleaning up a ss. He didn’t shout for dics. He didn’t call for help. He just approached until the barrel hovered inches from where he estimated the forehead to be under the sheet.
The bundle jerked more violently now. The figure inside clawed at the fabric, fingers pushing out in ugly shapes. A low, wet sound carried faintly on the air, not a groan but the ghost of one.
The soldier fired once, and the movent stopped.
He went down the line, stopping at each sheet to press his boot near the head. The ones that didn’t move got a cursory tap and were left alone. One at the far end shuddered when he made contact, and he sighed before firing again.
A quick, precise bullet. Skull. Brain. Stillness.
Alexei watched without flinching. This was not the worst thing he had ever seen. It wasn’t even in the top ten. What unsettled him wasn’t the violence.
It was the routine.
The second soldier stood with his hands on his hips, eyes half-lidded with exhaustion. "Thought they got these earlier," he said.
"They rushed the last few houses," the first replied. "Always happens. End of shift, they get lazy. You know the protocol. Anything that doesn’t get cleared reanimates."
"Yeah, well," the second muttered. "Better these than when they start clawing at windows again."
They laughed once, a short, humorless sound, and moved on.
Alexei let the curtain fall back into place.
He stood there for a long mont, letting his heartbeat level out. His creature stirred faintly inside him, not in fear but in recognition of a pattern. Region T did not bother with dical treatnt for its dead. It removed the chance of second chances entirely.
Behind him, Aerenyx spoke again. "What was it?"
"Protocol," Alexei said. He turned away from the window and walked deeper into the room, shoulders relaxing by degrees. "They don’t want their dead getting back up."
Aerenyx considered that. "Weak," he decided with a scoff. "If the corpses fear the living enough, they shouldn’t rise."
Alexei almost smiled. "That’s not how this works."
"It is how it should work."
He let that go. "Nothing we need to handle tonight," he said. "Go to sleep. I’ll wake Zubair in a few hours."
Aerenyx didn’t move. "And if the corpses co here?"
"They won’t," Alexei said. He glanced toward the ceiling, where Sera slept. "They aren’t brave enough."
It wasn’t bravado. It was simple observation. Whatever reanimated the dead in Region T, whatever drove them to claw and bite and scream, would take one breath of Sera’s scent and reconsider its priorities.
Aerenyx seed satisfied with that answer. He sat back down on the stairs, posture once more going still. Luci’s ears twitched, catching the last fading sounds from outside, then flattened again as he drifted back into deep rest. Lachlan shifted, mumbling sothing about "bad dinosaurs" in his sleep.
Alexei returned to his post at the window but didn’t lift the curtain this ti. He didn’t need to. The picture outside had already lodged itself in his mind.
Region T had been doing this for a long ti.
He stayed awake until Lachlan woke up from his sleep, ready to take his own watch. His thoughts circling the sa conclusion. Whatever this region called a pandemic wasn’t about the living.
It was about managing what they left behind.
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