Kevin didn't sleep. He told himself it was strategic--someone had to keep watch--but the truth was simpler and uglier: every time he closed his eyes, he saw Tom's face. The moment the light went out of it. The moment it came back wrong.
The kitchen's fluorescent lights hummed their way through the small hours. Derek had passed out in a booth near the wall, his snoring occasionally harmonizing with the distant moans from the hallway. Karen dozed upright on a stool, her clipboard clutched to her chest like a stuffed animal. Carl slept on the floor in his tablecloth cocoon, twitching through dreams Kevin didn't want to imagine.
Rachel was the only other one awake. She sat across from him at the prep counter, her notebook open, sketching with a stub of pencil she'd found in a drawer. Kevin watched her work in the peripheral glow of the emergency lights. She was drawing the kitchen--their barricade, the exits, the weapons laid out on the counter. Tactical illustration.
"You should sleep," she said without looking up.
"You first."
"I tried. Kept hearing the banging."
"The banging stopped an hour ago."
Rachel's pencil paused. "Exactly."
She was right. The silence from the main door was somehow worse than the noise. The absence of banging didn't mean the absence of zombies. It might mean they'd lost interest. Or it might mean they'd found another way in.
"Carl's sounds," Kevin said. "The organized ones from the loading dock. They stopped too."
"I noticed."
"I want to check it out."
Rachel set down her pencil. "Now?"
"We need to know what's on the other side of that door. If there's another exit, if there's anything useful out there. We can't just sit in this kitchen until the food runs out and hope for the best."
"That was actually my exact plan."
"Rachel."
She sighed. Stood. Picked up the fire extinguisher. "Fine. But if we die, I'm haunting you."
They moved to the loading dock door as quietly as they could, stepping over Carl and around Karen's stool. Kevin had the chef's knife in his right hand and the cleaver tucked into his belt, which made him feel like an unhinged line cook rather than a survivor. Rachel hefted the fire extinguisher into ready position.
Kevin pressed his ear to the door. Nothing. No footsteps, no breathing, no sounds of organized movement. Just the hum of the building's emergency systems and the distant, irregular moaning that had been going on since the windows shattered and showed no signs of stopping.
He looked at Rachel. She nodded.
He turned the handle and eased the door open.
The loading dock was exactly what Carl had described: a concrete platform roughly thirty feet wide and twenty deep, with a roll-up steel door on the far side leading to the outside. Emergency lighting cast everything in a dim amber wash. Pallets of supplies--boxes of paper goods, cleaning products, industrial soap--lined the walls. A forklift sat in the corner, its yellow paint cheerful and absurd.
The delivery truck took up most of the space.
It was a standard box truck, white, with MOUNTAIN SUPPLY CO. stenciled on the side in green letters. The cab faced the roll-up door, the cargo area pointing toward them. Its back doors were open, and Kevin could see boxes inside--more supplies, half-unloaded. Whoever had been making the delivery hadn't finished before the world ended.
"Truck," Rachel whispered. "That's transportation."
"If we have keys."
"Check the cab."
Kevin moved forward, every nerve screaming at him to turn back. The loading dock was open, exposed--no barricades, no chokepoints. If something came through that roll-up door or emerged from the shadows between pallets, they'd have seconds to react.
He was halfway to the truck when a mop handle swung out of the darkness and stopped an inch from his throat.
"Don't move."
The voice was calm. Not threatening--calm. The way a person speaks when they've moved past panic into something colder and more controlled. Kevin froze, the chef's knife useless at his side, the mop handle pressing lightly against his Adam's apple.
A woman stepped out from behind a pallet of cleaning supplies. She was in her forties, Indian, with dark hair pulled back in a tight bun and the remains of what had been a business-casual blazer. In her other hand, she held a spray bottle of industrial degreaser with a lighter taped to the nozzle.
Kevin recognized her. Priya Sharma. HR Director. Not Denise--Denise was dead--but the other one, the senior director who'd been running the retreat's logistics from behind the scenes. The one nobody really noticed because she let Denise do the talking.
"Kevin Park," Priya said, studying him with eyes that were disconcertingly steady. "Software development. Hired four years and eight months ago. Two performance reviews, both satisfactory. One complaint filed against you by Derek Thornton for 'insufficient enthusiasm.'"
"You memorized my personnel file?"
"I memorized everyone's personnel file. It's my job." She lowered the mop handle. "Are you bitten?"
"No."
"Show me your arms."
Kevin rolled up his sleeves. No bites, no scratches. Priya inspected them with clinical precision, then nodded.
"You too," she said to Rachel, who had materialized behind Kevin with the fire extinguisher raised.
Rachel showed her arms. Priya nodded again.
"Clear. You can put the extinguisher down."
"I'd rather not," Rachel said.
A phone's camera shutter sound clicked from somewhere to the left. All three of them spun toward it.
A kid--barely old enough to drink--was crouched behind the truck's rear wheel, holding a phone with a cracked screen. Its flashlight illuminated his face from below: young, Asian, wearing a TechSolve polo that was still relatively clean.
"Sorry, sorry." He held up one hand in surrender. "Just documenting for the stream. I'm live right now."
"You're streaming this?" Rachel said.
"To zero viewers, but yeah." The kid grinned, and it was the specific grin of someone who had decided that ironic detachment was the only sane response to insanity. "I'm Marcus. Marcus Chen. I started Monday? I'm the new intern? We met at orientation, except orientation was like four hours of HR videos and then zombies happened, so."
"I remember you," Priya said. "You asked if the dental plan covered zombie bites."
"In my defense, that was before I knew zombies were real. I thought it was part of the team-building exercise."
Kevin looked between them. Priya Sharma, HR Director, armed with improvised weapons and a frightening calm. Marcus Chen, intern, broadcasting the end of the world to nobody. Two more survivors. Two more people to keep alive.
"How long have you been out here?" Kevin asked.
"Since the beginning," Priya said. "I was in the supply closet off the loading dock when it started. I heard the screams, locked the door, and waited. Marcus found me about an hour later."
"I was hiding in the truck," Marcus added. "Seemed like a solid play. Nobody checks the truck."
"The organized sounds," Kevin said, the realization clicking. "The footsteps Carl heard through the door. That was you?"
"I was doing perimeter checks," Priya said it like it was the most natural thing in the world. "Every twenty minutes. Check the roll-up door, check the corridor entrance, check the kitchen door. Establish patterns, maintain discipline."
"She's very intense," Marcus stage-whispered. "It's kind of amazing."
Kevin studied Priya more closely. The mop handle she carried wasn't just a mop handle--she'd broken it to a point at one end, creating a crude spear. The spray bottle with the lighter was a makeshift flamethrower. And the way she held herself, weight centered, shoulders loose, ready to move in any direction, wasn't the posture of an HR director.
"Priya, why do you have combat reflexes?"
The ghost of a smile crossed her face. "I do MMA as a hobby. Have for twelve years. Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Muay Thai, some Krav Maga." She shrugged. "HR is stressful. I needed an outlet that wasn't drinking."
"She already killed three of them," Marcus said, holding up his phone. "I got it on video. Well, most of it. My storage is almost full because I didn't delete my TikTok drafts before the apocalypse, which is my biggest regret in life right now."
"Can you not narrate everything?" Priya asked.
"It's a coping mechanism. Also, content is content, even post-civilization."
"There are five of us in the kitchen," Kevin said. "Me, Rachel, Derek Thornton, Karen Chen from accounting, and Carl Wilson. We lost three already--Tom from sales got bitten and turned, two others tried to leave and..." He didn't finish.
Priya absorbed this without visible emotion. "Seven survivors total, then. Out of a hundred and forty-seven."
"That we know of."
"The building's big," Marcus said. "Other people could be holed up somewhere. The gym, the business center, the spa. There's a spa here, right?"
"We're not going to the spa, Marcus," Priya said.
They brought Priya and Marcus back through the kitchen door, where the commotion woke the others. Derek reacted to Priya's appearance with visible discomfort--the power dynamic of having a senior HR director present clearly unsettled whatever fantasy of command he'd been nursing.
"Priya. Good to see you. Great. Really great. I've been, uh, leading the team here with--"
"Derek, sit down." Priya's voice carried the quiet authority of someone who'd mediated a thousand workplace conflicts and had lost patience for all of them. Derek sat.
Carl greeted them with renewed tears, though Kevin suspected these were relief tears rather than terror tears. Karen updated her clipboard without comment, adding two names to the survivor list with her careful block letters.
Marcus immediately began filming the kitchen, providing commentary to his nonexistent audience. "So this is base camp. Very industrial chic. We've got knives, a fire extinguisher, and I think that's a body in the freezer, so that's normal. The vibes are, like, post-apocalyptic Chopped."
"Is he always like this?" Karen asked.
"It's been four hours and yes," Priya confirmed.
"It's my first week," Marcus said, turning the camera on Karen. "Technically I'm still in my probation period. Can you get fired during a zombie apocalypse? Is that still a thing? HR, what's the policy?"
"The policy," Priya said, "is survive."
Kevin let the group settle into their introductions while he returned to the loading dock with Rachel. The truck was the thing that interested him most. Transportation meant options. Options meant not dying in a kitchen.
He climbed into the cab. No keys in the ignition. No keys in the visor, the glove box, the center console. Nothing but a clipboard with delivery manifests and an empty McDonald's bag.
"No luck?" Rachel asked from below.
"No keys. Driver probably had them."
"Driver's probably a zombie."
"Yeah." Kevin sat back in the driver's seat and stared through the windshield at the roll-up door.
He noticed the truck's radio mounted to the dash. A CB unit, old-school, with a spiral cord and a chunky handset. On impulse, he picked it up and turned the dial.
Static. Dead air across every channel. He was about to give up when the handset crackled and a voice punched through the white noise.
"--repeat, this is not a drill. All citizens are advised to shelter in place. The outbreak has been reported in the following metropolitan areas: New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Houston, Phoenix, Philadelphia--"
The voice was mechanical, automated, reading from a list. Kevin's hand tightened on the handset as the list continued. City after city after city, an alphabet of catastrophe rolling out in the flat, affectless tone of an emergency broadcast system.
"--Seattle, Denver, Atlanta, Boston, Miami, Dallas--"
"Rachel." His voice came out strangled. "Get everyone in here."
She didn't ask why. She could hear it.
Within minutes, all seven of them were crowded around the truck's cab, listening to the radio broadcast cycle through its message. The automated voice listed cities, then moved to instructions: shelter in place, avoid contact with infected individuals, do not attempt to travel, await military response.
Then it started over. The same cities. The same instructions. The same flat, dead voice.
"It's everywhere," Carl whispered. "It's not just us. It's everywhere."
Kevin looked at the faces around him--Karen's jaw set, Derek's eyes wide and glassy, Carl's hands gripping the truck's door frame until his knuckles went white, Marcus's phone held up in trembling fingers, Priya's expression flat and unreadable, and Rachel, standing next to him in the cramped cab, her shoulder touching his, her breathing carefully controlled.
The radio continued its litany. No rescue coming. No cavalry on the horizon. No one out there who wasn't fighting the same fight or already lost.
The roll-up door at the end of the loading dock was the only thing between them and a world that was falling apart in every direction, and Kevin understood that staying in this kitchen wasn't waiting for rescue.
It was waiting to die.
The broadcast looped again. City after city. Instruction after instruction. And somewhere in the static between words, Kevin could have sworn he heard moaning.
