The two Hiluxes sat idling on the A1036, their exhaust plumes curling into the jaundiced air like ghosts. Zach stood on the tailgate of the lead truck, his knuckles white as he gripped the roll bar, eyes fixed on the dark maw of the emergency exit. At the wheel, Samantha kept her foot hovering over the clutch, ready to punch it the second the shadows turned into teeth. In the second truck, Christine sat like a statue, the low rumble of the diesel engine the only thing keeping the encroaching silence at bay.
Inside the concrete guts of the car park, the slap-thwack of advancing limbs echoed off the low ceiling, growing louder, wetter, and more rhythmic.
"You know," Grant muttered, his voice surprisingly steady against the backdrop of approaching nightmares.
"I only joined this outfit because of Trudy. Her and Christine was-I mean, were-best friends. Bound at the hip."
"Look, Grant, we're getting out of this," Cairn snapped, his eyes darting to the nearest exit ramp.
"Keep your head in the game."
Grant stopped. He turned to look at Cairn, and for the first time, the haze was gone. "No, we're not. But I'm going to give you a chance."
Cairn felt a cold knot tighten in his gut. "What do you mean...?"
"Trudy... she'd want you to live, Cairn. She'd want you to have a shot at finding Francesca and Oscar. She was soft like that."
"Grant, you mad man-mountain, she'd want you to live too," Cairn growled, reaching for the big man's shoulder to pull him along.
Grant didn't budge. He gave a small, crooked smile that didn't reach his weary eyes.
"Maybe. But she'd also know I'd want to go out on my own terms. I was always too stubborn for my own good."
He reached into his heavy tactical vest and pulled out six olive-drab canisters.
Cairn's breath hitched. "Grenades? Where the hell did you get those?"
"Found them on a stalled army transport during that run to the checkpoint. Saved them for a rainy day." Grant looked toward the door as a shimmer of iridescent sludge began to creep around the frame.
"Well, it's pouring now. So you'd better run you haven't got an umbrella."
"You don't have to do this, Grant. We can make a stand at the trucks."
Grant looked at him, his expression settling into something immovable-a mountain that had finally found its place.
"Yes. I do."
Grant gathered the six pins in a single, massive fist and yanked. The metallic ting-ting-ting of the safety levers hitting the concrete was lost under the wet roar of the things climbing the walls. He didn't look back. He didn't need to.
"Go now!" Grant's voice wasn't a plea; it was a command that rattled the very foundations of the car park.
Before Cairn could even draw breath to protest, Grant was in motion. He didn't retreat toward the light of the A1036. Instead, he put his head down and charged directly down the dark throat of the ramp, a man-mountain turned into a kinetic force of nature. The shadows in the rafters shrieked, sensing the sudden, violent shift in the air. Cairn dove through the emergency exit just as the first concussive THOOM buckled the heavy steel door behind him.
***
The Scrap Box sat perched on the edge of the A1079, a familiar sight for anyone traveling the long stretch between York and Hull. Before the sky turned to fire, it was a place of grease-stained menus, the hiss of a deep fat fryer, and the rhythmic clink of cutlery against heavy ceramic plates. Now, it was a skeletal monument to a world that had stopped eating.The iconic signage, once bright and welcoming, hung at a crooked angle, one corner of the "S" having snapped off and dangled by a rusted wire. The large glass windows, designed to let in the morning sun, were now thick with a layer of yellow dust and the soot from distant fires. Two cars were abandoned in the small tarmac pull-in-doors flung wide, engines cold for weeks-looking like metallic carcasses picked clean by scavengers.The silence that rushed in after the engines died was heavier than the noise ever was. It was a thick, suffocating vacuum that seemed to press against the windows of the Hiluxes, demanding to be filled.
Cairn didn't move. He sat in the passenger seat, his hands still hooked into claws as if he were clutching the dashboard for dear life. The adrenaline, which had been a hot, humming wire keeping his spine straight since the car park, had finally snapped. In its place was a cold, hollow exhaustion that made his bones feel like they were made of lead.
His mind was a broken projector, looping the same three seconds of film: the sweat on Grant's brow, the steady light in his eyes, and the rhythmic, metallic tink-tink-tink of six pins hitting the floorboards. He could still hear the ghost of Grant's voice-"Go now"-shouting over the wet, rising tide of the things in the dark.
"Cairn?"
Samantha's voice was small, cracked with the same jagged grief he was feeling. She was staring through the windshield at the rusted "S" of the Scrap Box sign as it swayed in the wind. He didn't answer. He couldn't. He just looked at his hands. They were trembling-not with fear, but with the sheer effort of existing in a world that had just gotten several tons heavier. Outside, the yellow fire of the sky licked at the edges of the restaurant's roof, casting a sickly, long shadow over the tarmac. They were alive, they were out of York, but the cost of the ticket sat in the empty space between the two trucks like a physical weight.The bottled water was lukewarm and tasted of plastic, but it was the first thing to hit Cairn's throat in hours. He gripped the bottle so hard the thin sides crinkled, a sharp, rhythmic snapping sound in the stillness of the Scrap Box car park.
"What happened?" Christine asked.
Her voice was steady, but her eyes were red-rimmed, searching the empty space in the back of the Hilux where a mountain of a man should have been.
Cairn tried to swallow, but his throat felt like it was full of glass. "Grant... he... he-"
The words wouldn't form. They were choked off by the image of those six pins and the dark maw of the ramp.
"It's okay," Christine whispered. She didn't wait for him to finish.
She reached across the console and pulled him into a hug, her wool coat smelling of woodsmoke and the faint, lingering scent of lavender. That was the breaking point. The soldier cracked, the tactical shell splintering under the weight of a simple, human gesture. The tears didn't just fall; they came in floods-a raw, primal release of everything he had been bottling up since the station in York.
He wept for Francesca and Oscar, lost in the fire of a thirty-mile exclusion zone. He wept for Grant, who had traded his life for a few more miles of road. He wept for Ronald and Gloria, who had been erased by a stain of brown goo in a quiet suburban living room. Every name was a fresh jagged cut. He leaned into Christine, his shoulders shaking with the force of it, his forehead pressed against her shoulder as the jaundiced light of the A1079 faded into a bruised, smoky dusk.
****
The silence of the A1079 was absolute, a heavy, airless weight that settled over the Scrap Box as the jaundiced sun finally dipped below the horizon. The only sound was the occasional, metallic tink of the Hilux engines cooling down and the low, rhythmic whistle of the wind through the restaurant’s broken signage. Cairn didn't go inside. He couldn't face the hollowed-out interior of the diner, with its slashed booths and ghostly menus. Instead, he crawled into the rear of Sam’s Hilux, collapsing onto a pile of grease-stained tarps and gear bags. He was asleep before his head hit the canvas, but it wasn't the rest he needed.
His dreams were a fractured, strobe-light nightmare. He saw Francesca and Oscar, their faces clear and glowing with the light of a world that no longer existed. They were always just ahead of him, running through a blurred version of Camden, their laughter sounding like distant bells. But every time he reached out, the pavement turned to iridescent sludge, and they drifted further away, swallowed by a thirty-mile wall of white fire and then there was Grant.
The big man appeared in the gloom of the car park over and over, his massive frame illuminated by the faint glow of the creatures in the rafters. He would look back at Cairn, that cheeky, crooked smile fixed on his face—the look of a man who had finally won a bet against fate.
"Go now," the dream-Grant would whisper.
Then came the detonation. A silent, blinding roar of orange heat that vaporized the smile and the man, leaving Cairn reaching into a vacuum of soot and ash.
He woke with a violent jolt, his breath hitching in the cold night air. The interior of the truck bed was dark, save for the faint, eerie glow of the yellow-tinged stars above. His face was cold where the tears had dried, and his heart was hammering a frantic rhythm against his ribs. He sat up, his hand instinctively reaching for the tire iron, his eyes searching the shadows of the Scrap Box for anything that moved like spilled ink.
The light inside the Scrap Box was thin and sickly, filtered through windows caked in layers of sulfurous dust. Cairn stepped through the shattered entrance, his boots crunching over a mosaic of glass and dried leaves. The interior was a wreckage of domesticity; tables were upended like discarded shields, and the rhythmic clack-clack of the ceiling fans had been replaced by a heavy, stagnant chill. He found the group huddled in a corner booth, the red vinyl slashed and leaking yellow foam. They looked like ghosts haunting their own lives.
"Cairn, I think you’re going to have to place your order at the bar, I’m afraid," Zach said, his voice cracking slightly as he tried to force a smile.
"Looks like the service is out."
The joke was a fragile thing, a paper-thin shield against the memory of the fire in York, but Cairn took it. He had to.
"Thanks, Zach," Cairn rasped, sliding into the edge of the booth. His joints felt like they were filled with sand. "What’s the specials today?"
"Soup... always soup," Zach said wearily.
He nudged a dented tin of unlabelled cream of tomato toward the center of the table. A single camping stove sat between them, its blue flame the only clean thing in the room. The smell of the warming soup—metallic and salty—filled the cramped space. It was a pathetic feast, but as the steam rose into the jaundiced light, it felt like a communion. They sat in the ruins of a roadside diner, surrounded by broken chairs and a world that had stopped making sense, clinging to the small, rhythmic ritual of a shared meal.
The blue flame of the camping stove flickered, casting long, jumping shadows against the grease-stained walls of the Scrap Box. The steam from the tomato soup curled into the air, but no one seemed particularly hungry.
"So, what happened?" Rachael asked.
The usual sharp, defensive edge of her voice had been blunted by exhaustion, leaving her sounding younger, more vulnerable. Cairn stared into the flickering flame, his eyes reflecting the tiny blue light.
"Grant... um... Grant sacrificed himself. For me. For all of us."
"He always had to do things his own way," Christine said softly, her hands wrapped around a chipped mug for warmth.
A sad, knowing smile touched her lips for a fleeting second.
"Trudy was forever frustrated by it. He was a man-mountain with a mind like a mule. Once he decided on a path, there was no moving him."
Cairn nodded, the weight of that stubbornness still sitting heavy on his chest. He scanned the faces around the booth—Sam, Zach, Christine, Thomas—and then a cold, prickling sensation crawled up the back of his neck. The count was wrong.
"Where’s Richard and Mark?" Cairn asked, his voice snapping back into a sharp, command register.
He looked toward the darkened corners of the restaurant, expecting them to step out of the shadows. Thomas didn't look up; he just kept stirring the soup in the dented tin, the spoon scraping rhythmically against the metal.
"They disappeared in the confusion of the attack," he said, his tone flat and hollow.
"When the ceiling started coming down and the smoke got thick... they just weren't there anymore."
The silence that followed was different from the grief for Grant. Grant’s death was a closed book, a hero's end. But Richard and Mark—vanishing into the "inky" dark of the car park—was an open wound.