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Joanie steps beside Carlos, quieter than I’ve ever seen her, and rests one hand over her heart. “Sadie served with honor.”

Carlos laughs through the tears. “She did, mi flor.”

Joanie squints at him. “Not sure what you just called me, but I’m going to assume it means I’m amazing, so thank you.”

Wesker presses his nose into Luis’s hand and whines. Luis bends over him immediately, burying both hands in the dog’s fur. Carlos drops one hand to Wesker’s head too, fingers scratching behind his ears as if making sure he is still there. Wesker licks Luis’s wrist, then Carlos’s knuckles, tail thumping fast.

Leon’s arm tightens around me. I look up at him, and he’s staring at the mall, face lit by distant fire. His red hair hangs loose around his face. Eyes still too bright with rage and grief.

I reach up and touch his cheek. “Leon,” I whisper.

He looks at me.

His mouth finds mine, hard and desperate. The kiss tastes like relief. His hand cups the back of my head with impossible gentleness, careful of the bruises and cuts.

I kiss him back like I can pour every unsaid thing into it.

Carlos groans. “Gag.”

Joanie gasps. “My eyes!”

“You are literally staring at them,” Trish says.

Lyla’s voice softens. “Aww.”

Jacob cuts in, deadpan. “Clair, you could do better.”

I break the kiss against Leon’s mouth, laughing even though it hurts everywhere.

Leon’s eyes warm for half a breath, and after everything, that feels like sunrise.

Poppy squeezes us together. The mall burns, screams, and fills with the dead. Poppy breathes against my ribs, Leon’s hand stays locked around mine, and the people I love bicker over each other like the world hasn’t just cracked open again.

We stay there until the screams die down and what is left is the growing moans of the undead.

Trish exhales. “Let’s go home, folks.”

Home.

The word lands soft and impossible.

For the first time in a long time, I let myself believe we might actually make it.

EPILOGUE - BEWARE. CLIFFHANGER AHEAD.

LEON

A week after Chicago, the cold starts to feel personal.

It creeps into everything. Under gloves. Through boots. Beneath the collar of my coat no matter how high I pull it. It lives in the truck doors that freeze shut overnight, in the breath fogging the inside of the windshield, in the stiffness of everyone’s hands when we load weapons before dawn. The farther west we drive, the flatter the world gets, and the more the wind seems to find us.

North Dakota does not care that we are tired, that Clair still limps when she thinks no one is watching, or that Poppy sleeps with one hand curled in the back of my jacket. Some wounds do not close just because the car keeps moving.

Still, the farm is close now. Less than a day away if the roads hold, if the engines keep running, if the dead stay slow.

That is too many ifs.

By the time we roll into Beach, North Dakota, the sky is a hard sheet of gray and the wind cuts sideways across the road, carrying loose snow in thin white ribbons over the cracked pavement. There is no beach. No waves. No easy horizon softening the edges of the world. Just a small town stretched under a pale, hard sky, all flat streets, wind-battered storefronts, dead cars, and snow-crusted dirt along the curbs.