They listened to the broadcast for thirty-seven minutes. Kevin knew because Karen timed it on her watch--the only timepiece among them, a practical Timex that had outlasted smartphones, smartwatches, and apparently civilization itself.
The message never changed. The same cities, the same instructions, the same dead voice cycling through catastrophe like a GPS recalculating a route through hell. After the third loop, Kevin turned the volume down but left the radio on, its static filling the loading dock like whispered confirmation of everything they'd feared.
"Every major city," Carl said. He was sitting on a pallet of paper towels, his Eagle Scout composure fracturing at the edges. "Every single one. That's not an outbreak. That's... that's an extinction event."
"Let's not spiral," Priya said. She was leaning against the truck, arms crossed, her face betraying nothing. "We don't know the full picture. An automated broadcast on loop could mean anything. The system could have been triggered early. The situation could be improving."
"Or it could be worse than the broadcast says," Rachel countered. "If the system's automated, nobody's updating it. Nobody's at the controls."
"That's also possible."
"So we're on our own."
Priya met Rachel's eyes. "We were always on our own. The broadcast just confirms it."
Everyone processed this differently, and Kevin found himself watching their faces the way you watch people on a bus when the driver slams on the brakes — each person's particular flavor of panic suddenly visible. Derek went quiet. Not his usual performative quiet, where he was clearly preparing his next motivational speech. Actually quiet. He sat on the loading dock's concrete floor with his back against the wall and stared at his hands, and for the first time since Kevin had known him, Derek Thornton had nothing to say.
Karen doubled down on organization. She started a new section on her clipboard labeled STRATEGIC RESOURCES - LONG TERM, her handwriting growing smaller and more precise, as if she could impose order on the apocalypse through sufficiently detailed bookkeeping. She asked Kevin how much fuel the truck had. She asked Priya about water access. She asked Carl about the caloric density of rice versus flour. The questions were practical, useful, and also clearly the only thing keeping her from screaming.
Carl had a panic attack. Kevin had never seen one up close. The accountant's breathing went shallow and rapid, his face drained of color, and he slid off the pallet onto the floor, clutching his chest. Priya was beside him immediately, her hand on his shoulder, her voice low and steady.
"Breathe with me, Carl. In for four, hold for four, out for four. You're safe. You're here. You're breathing."
It took five minutes. Carl came back to himself in stages, his eyes refocusing, his hands unclenching. "Sorry," he muttered. "I'm sorry, I don't--"
"Don't apologize," Priya said. "You're having a perfectly reasonable response to an unreasonable situation."
Marcus made a meme reference. Because of course he did.
"This is fine," he said, sitting on the truck's bumper with his dying phone. The screen was at seven percent, its glow painting his young face in blue-white light. "Everything is fine. We're in a building full of zombies, the world is ending, and my phone's about to die, which means I'll lose my Duolingo streak. Three hundred and forty-two days of Spanish, gone. Muerto." He paused. "That means dead. See? It was worth it."
Rachel got focused.
That was the thing about Rachel that Kevin had always admired and never told her. When most people encountered a problem, they panicked, denied, bargained, or froze. Rachel sharpened. Her eyes narrowed, her jaw set, and her mind started working with a mechanical precision that made Kevin think of engines engaging. She pulled out her notebook and started sketching--not the kitchen anymore, but the building. A floor plan from memory, rough but detailed. Exits, stairwells, elevators, windows. She marked their position with a star and began drawing possible routes through the lodge.
"If we have to move, we need to know where we're going," she said to no one in particular. "This building has three floors, a basement, and a rooftop access. We know the ground floor is compromised. Upper floors are unknown. Basement is unknown. Rooftop is..." She trailed off, thinking. "Rooftop might be our best option if we need to signal for help. Assuming there's anyone out there to signal."
"The roof also means we're trapped if they get up the stairs," Kevin pointed out.
"Everywhere is trapped, Kevin. We're just choosing which box we die in."
"Optimistic."
"Realistic."
Kevin watched her sketch, the pencil moving in quick, confident strokes. She'd always been good with spatial reasoning. In the office, she'd redesigned the entire development floor's layout in a weekend, creating collaborative spaces that actually worked instead of the open-concept nightmare Derek had insisted on. Now she was applying the same skills to survival architecture.
He was struck, suddenly and without warning, by how much he didn't want her to die.
"Hey," he said. "Can we talk?"
Rachel looked up from her notebook. Something in his voice must have registered, because she set the pencil down and followed him to the far corner of the loading dock, behind the forklift, where the amber emergency light didn't quite reach and the shadows offered something that passed for privacy.
They sat on the concrete floor, backs against the wall, shoulders almost touching. The radio's static whispered from the truck. Somewhere in the building, something moaned and fell silent.
"You okay?" Rachel asked.
"No. You?"
"No." She pulled her knees up to her chest. "I keep thinking about my apartment. My cat. Mrs. Whiskers is going to starve, Kevin. She's an indoor cat. She doesn't know how to survive."
"Your cat's name is Mrs. Whiskers?"
"I adopted her when I was twenty-two. Don't judge me."
Kevin almost laughed. Almost. The sound died in his chest, replaced by something heavier. "I don't have anyone to worry about," he said. "My parents are in Korea. My sister's in Vancouver. Even if I could reach them, there's nothing I could do. And beyond that..." He trailed off. "It's just work. My whole life is work. I come to the office, I go home, I eat takeout, I sleep. I don't have a Mrs. Whiskers."
"You have me," Rachel said. Then, quickly: "I mean, at work. You have me at work. Had me at work. Jesus, tenses are confusing when the world ends."
"Rachel."
"Yeah?"
"You're the only person at this company I actually like. You know that, right?"
She was quiet for a moment. In the dim light, he could see her profile--the sharp line of her jaw, the way she tucked her hair behind her ear when she was thinking. They'd been friends for three years. Desk neighbors, lunch companions, mutual survivors of Derek's endless meetings. He'd never told her how much that mattered to him. There had never been a reason to say it. There had always been tomorrow.
"I broke up with James last week," she said.
"Your boyfriend?"
"Ex-boyfriend. As of last Tuesday." She exhaled. "Worst timing ever. Or best timing, depending on your perspective. At least I don't have to worry about him."
"What happened?"
"He said I was emotionally unavailable. Which is rich, coming from a man who communicated exclusively through sports metaphors." She paused. "He wasn't wrong, though. I am emotionally unavailable. I'm available for sarcasm and deadline panic. That's about it."
"You're available right now."
Rachel turned to look at him. In the half-light, her eyes were dark and very serious. "Yeah," she said softly. "I guess I am."
Neither of them said anything. Kevin was acutely aware of the warmth of her shoulder against his, the sound of her breathing, the impossible intimacy of being alive together in a world that was dying around them.
He wanted to kiss her. The thought arrived fully formed and undeniable, and he hated its timing--hated that it took the literal apocalypse to make him honest about something he'd been denying for years.
"Kevin," Rachel said.
"Yeah?"
"If we survive this, I'm going to need you to buy me a drink. A real one. Not the watered-down garbage from the office holiday party."
"Deal."
"And if we don't survive..." She reached over and took his hand. Her fingers were cold and her grip was tight and it was the most human thing Kevin had felt in hours. "Then I'm glad you're here. I'm glad it's you."
He squeezed her hand back. "Same."
They sat like that for a while, hand in hand in the amber half-dark, listening to the radio's static and the building's groans and the distant, irregular moaning that had been going on since all of this started. It wasn't romantic. It wasn't a movie moment. It was two terrified people holding onto each other because the alternative was holding onto nothing.
Eventually, they rejoined the group. Nobody commented on their absence, though Priya's eyes lingered on their faces with the perceptive attention of someone who'd spent decades reading people's unspoken dynamics. Marcus's phone had died, and he was staring at the blank screen with the hollow grief of a man who'd lost a limb. Karen had completed her strategic resource inventory and was now categorizing their weapons by "effectiveness per unit weight." Derek hadn't moved from his spot on the floor.
"We should get some sleep," Priya said. "I'll take first watch. Carl, you're second. Kevin, third."
"I can take second," Rachel offered.
"Carl has Scout training. He knows what to listen for." Priya's tone was professional, but Kevin caught the subtext: she was assessing skills, assigning roles, building a command structure without calling it one. Denise would have called it team-building and handed out name tags. Priya just did it.
They filed back into the kitchen, pulling the loading dock door shut behind them. The main door--the one leading to the hallway and the rest of the lodge--was still quiet. The barricade of chairs and prep carts Kevin had built hours earlier was untouched. For now, they were sealed in their stainless-steel cocoon, surrounded by rice and canned beans and the body of a man they'd known for less than two hours.
Kevin was just settling onto the floor, his back against a cabinet, when the lights came on.
Not the emergency lights. The real lights. The full fluorescent overheads blazed to life with a buzzing, blinding intensity that made everyone flinch. The kitchen was suddenly bright, searingly bright, every surface gleaming, every shadow banished.
"Power's back," Carl said, shielding his eyes.
"How?" Karen asked. "The grid was down."
"Backup generator, maybe. Or the main power was restored--"
Then the phones started ringing.
Not their phones. The building's phones. The landlines mounted on the walls, the cordless handset on the manager's desk, the ancient intercom system wired through every room and hallway in the Evergreen Mountain Lodge.
They all rang at once.
The sound was enormous. Not just in the kitchen--Kevin could hear ringing from every direction, through walls and floors and closed doors, hundreds of phones screaming in simultaneous, piercing unison. It was the sound of a building waking up, every nerve ending firing at once, an electric screaming that drilled into his skull and wouldn't stop.
"Oh no," Priya said. It was the first time Kevin had heard fear in her voice.
"The sound," Rachel said, her face draining of color. "They're attracted to sound."
Every phone in the building. Every ring echoing through every hallway. A dinner bell that could be heard for a mile in every direction.
The moaning started almost immediately. Distant at first, then closer. Then closer still. Not the scattered, random moaning they'd grown used to. This was a chorus. A wave. Every zombie in the Evergreen Mountain Lodge and the surrounding grounds, drawn by the irresistible shriek of a hundred ringing phones, converging on the building.
Converging on them.
The banging on the kitchen door resumed. Not the slow, patient thumping from before. This was a frenzy. Dozens of fists, hundreds of fingers, the door vibrating in its frame, the chair barricade sliding an inch across the floor.
"They're coming," Marcus said, his voice cracking. "They're all coming."
Kevin grabbed his knife. Rachel grabbed her extinguisher. And the phones kept ringing and ringing and ringing, calling the dead home.
