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She steps to the side, hooks the crowbar behind its knee, and pulls.

It drops hard, skull cracking against the concrete. She brings the crowbar down again. Bone caves. Thick black fluid splashes across her boot and lands in sluggish droplets that barely spread in the cold.

Lyla steps beside Clair, eyes still on the bodies at our feet.

Then she looks up. “Well, I’d say you handled that.”

Clair’s face opens before she can stop it. “Thank you.”

Trish crouches near the one by the lift, careful not to get too close to its teeth. She tilts its head with the edge of her knife, eyes narrowing at the red rings around its eyes and the blue-gray cast of its skin.

“Cold’s doing weird things to them,” she says. “If there’s any vascular response left in these things, the low temperature would constrict what’s still functioning. The rest is settling, freezing, and tearing tissue apart. That explains the darker feet, the swelling, the blistering.” She points her knife toward a foot swollen almost twice its normal size, the skin blistered and splitting, toes dark with tissue death. “And the red around the eyes. Burst vessels, irritation, maybe pressure changes from freezing and thawing.”

Joanie makes a face. “So they’re dead-dead, frozen-dead, and gross-dead?”

“Medically speaking,” Trish says, standing, “yes.”

Lyla wipes her blade on the corpse’s coat. “Good to know. Watch the joints. They’re slower, but the jerking makes them harder to read.”

We move out.

The city tightens around us. Narrower streets. Taller buildings. Less sky. The festering smell grows stronger near an underpass where bodies are piled against a chain-link fence, trapped there by something or someone. Most are still. Some are not. Fingers twitch through the links when we pass. A gray hand slides between the metal diamonds, nails torn off, reaching for Clair’s sleeve.

Her breath catches.

I step between her and the fence.

A body near the bottom of the pile shifts. Then another. The fence rattles as the dead behind it wake in layers, groans stacking on top of one another. One corpse shoves forward hard enough that its cheek splits open against the metal. Teeth scrape through the gap. Skin tears. Black blood beads along the wire.

“Move,” Jacob says, low.

The rattling follows us for half a block.

Then something breaks behind us with a metallic pop.

The fence.

Shit.

The first infected spills through the gap and hits the pavement on all fours, jaw snapping, legs dragging behind it. Another crawls over its back. A third wedges itself through, tearing open from shoulder to ribs as the jagged fence catches decayed flesh and peels it away like wet cloth.

“Left,” Lyla orders.

We cut down an alley before the rest can get free, boots splashing through filthy slush pooled between buildings. The alley smells worse than the street. Rotting food. Human waste. Dead things hiding in dumpsters. Clair’s shoulder bumps mine as she squeezes past an overturned trash bin, and a tremor runs through her.

I want to pull her behind me and keep her there.

I don’t.

She needs to know she can move through this. She needs to know her fear doesn’t get to steer.

But I stay close enough to kill anything that tries to stop her.

At the end of the alley, Jacob signals left toward a row of small shops with another street cutting behind them. We move across the open stretch fast and quiet. Joanie hangs back near the alley mouth, one hand lifted in a loose signal, watching our six.

That’s when it goes wrong.

Movement.