Chapter 1: The Blackout That Killed the World

Mason Vale knew he was dead when the ambulance doors opened onto a crimson sky instead of the hospital bay.

For half a heartbeat, his ruined mind tried to stitch the world into something sensible. Red emergency lights. Smoke. A blood-slick ceiling reflecting the strobes. The bay doors of St. Ambrose Medical Center, painted the color of old brick and bad coffee, yawning open to receive another almost-corpse.

But there was no hospital.

No bay.

No rain-smeared concrete ramp under the rear tires. No security guard in a cheap poncho waving them in. No fluorescent spill of triage light, no hiss of automatic doors, no smell of disinfectant and burnt coffee.

Beyond the ambulance gaped a field of black grass beneath a sky the color of an opened artery.

Wind rushed in, hot and metallic. It carried the stink of mud, copper, rot, and something sweetly spoiled, like fruit left too long in a locker. The doors slapped against their hinges. Somewhere outside, something screamed with too many throats.

Mason lay on his back between the stretcher rails, pinned under a folded sheet of twisted metal that had once been part of the ambulance roof. His lungs moved wrong. Every breath bubbled. His left leg existed as a distant rumor below the knee, replaced by pressure and fire and a wet warmth pooling under him.

The last thing he remembered was Chicago going dark.

Not flickering. Not browning out block by block like an old grid choking in a heat wave.

Dark.

The entire city had died in one breath.

He remembered the ambulance screaming north on Ashland, siren cutting through rain, his partner Lina cursing at traffic that wasn’t moving because every light had gone black. Their patient had been a nineteen-year-old kid named Devon with three stab wounds and a pulse like a scared rabbit.

Then the sky split.

There had been no thunder. Just a sound like the world’s bones cracking, and every window along the block flashed silver from the inside. Cars stalled. Phones died. Streetlights imploded into showers of sparks. In the sudden black, people had begun screaming before anything touched them, as if the darkness itself had hands.

“Mason!” Lina had shouted from the driver’s seat. “Tell me you’ve got him!”

“I’ve got him,” Mason lied, pressing gauze into Devon’s abdomen while the kid bucked and sobbed. “Hey, Devon. Eyes on me. You owe me twenty bucks for bleeding on my boots.”

The kid had laughed through his teeth because people did that for Mason. They laughed when they were terrified and he gave them something stupid to hold.

Then a second ambulance came out of the intersection sideways, driver dead or blinded, headlights black, chassis skidding on wet asphalt like a coffin on ice.

Impact.

The world folded.

Now Mason stared up at that wrong red sky through the torn-open back of his rig and listened to Devon wheeze beside him.

The kid was still alive.

Of course he was. Mason’s luck was never clean enough to kill him before giving him one more impossible choice.

“D-Doc?” Devon’s voice trembled somewhere to Mason’s right. “Where are we?”

Mason tried to turn his head. Pain flashed white and emptied him. When his sight returned, he saw Devon half-buried beneath the collapsed stretcher, dark curls plastered to his forehead, lips blue, eyes huge and wet in a face gone gray. The abdominal bandages had soaked through. Blood pumped lazily between his fingers.

“Not a doctor,” Mason rasped.

His voice sounded like gravel in a blender.

Devon blinked. “What?”

“Paramedic.” Mason coughed. Something hot climbed his throat. He swallowed it. Bad idea. “If I’d gone to med school, I’d be disappointing my parents in a nicer car.”

Devon made a broken sound that might have been a laugh. Outside, the black grass rippled though there was no breeze.

Mason shifted his right hand. His glove was slick, fingers numb. He reached for the trauma kit by memory and found only splintered plastic. The rig’s interior had become a butcher’s drawer: sheared cabinets, cracked oxygen tank, monitor dangling by cords, saline bags burst open and dripping like rain.

Lina.

The thought hit harder than the metal pinning him.

“Lina?” he called.

No answer.

From the front cabin came a faint electrical click-click-click, though nothing in the city should have had power. The partition window had spiderwebbed. Through it, Mason could see the driver’s seat crushed inward around the steering column, airbag deflated and painted dark. A strand of Lina’s red hair hung against the cracked glass, unmoving.

Mason’s throat tightened around words he did not have time for.

He had been failing for years. Failed marriage. Failed debt repayment plan. Failed every promise to sleep more, drink less, stop volunteering for overtime like exhaustion could pay penance. He had saved strangers on Tuesday nights and missed his daughter’s recital on Wednesday morning. He knew the shape of guilt better than the shape of his own living room.

But failure could wait.

The kid was breathing.

“Devon,” Mason said, forcing each word through the bubbling in his chest. “Listen to me. We’re going to get you out.”

“You’re bleeding.”

“Occupational hazard.” Mason dragged his right arm across the floor. The metal slab over his torso groaned. Fresh agony tore through his ribs. His vision narrowed to a tunnel with Devon at the far end. “Can you move your legs?”

“I don’t—I don’t think so.”

“That’s fine. Legs are overrated. Very dramatic. Always wanting shoes.”

Devon sobbed. “I’m scared.”

“Good,” Mason said. “Scared people stay awake.”

Outside, something thudded in the field.

Once.

Twice.

Heavy. Patient. Coming closer.

The ambulance suspension creaked.

Mason froze.

Through the open doors, past the tilted bumper and one spinning wheel, he saw shapes moving between the black blades of grass. At first he thought they were dogs. Then one rose on jointed legs too long for any dog, its body armored in gray plates, its head crowned with a rack of fingerlike horns. It lowered its muzzle to the mud and inhaled.

Another scream tore across the field, human and not far away.

The horned thing snapped its head toward the sound and bounded out of view.

Mason’s pulse tried to sprint with a body that had already quit the race.

“Mr. Mason,” Devon whispered. “Was that—”

“Don’t look outside.”

“What was it?”

“Tax auditor.”

Devon’s eyes squeezed shut. “Man, you’re really committed to jokes.”

“Only thing my insurance covers.”

Mason’s hand found the release lever for the stretcher. Bent. Useless. He gritted his teeth and pulled anyway. Metal bit through his glove. The lever snapped free, taking a strip of skin with it.

Nothing happened.

He looked at the collapsed stretcher pinning Devon. One side had crumpled, the frame twisted like taffy. The kid could not get out because the cot had become a cage.

Mason could cut him free if he had power tools, a fire crew, a spine that wasn’t cracked, and ten minutes not currently occupied by alien coyotes.

He had one functional arm, a trauma shear, and a savior complex sharp enough to be a clinical condition.

“Okay,” Mason whispered. “Okay, okay.”

His eyes crawled over the wreckage. Oxygen cylinder. Broken suction. Monitor battery cracked. IV pole. The jagged panel pinning his chest. The folded cot frame over Devon.

He could not lift the slab off himself.

But he might move the stretcher.

Mason hooked two fingers into the cot’s torn fabric strap and pulled. His shoulder screamed. The frame shifted a fraction, enough for Devon to gasp.

“Hurts?” Mason asked.

“Everything hurts.”

“Excellent. Means you’re not dead.”

“You sure?”

Mason looked at the red sky, the black field, the shapes moving in the grass.

“No,” he said. “But let’s act like we are, and maybe we’ll surprise somebody.”

He pulled again.

Something inside him tore loose.

Pain became light. The world flashed white at the edges. He heard his own breath wet and ragged, heard Devon begging him to stop, heard the far-off insectile chitter of creatures in the grass.

He did not stop.

The cot frame groaned upward inch by inch. Mason wedged his bloody boot under a crossbar, using his pinned body as leverage. His ribs grated. His left leg screamed from a place beyond anatomy. The metal slab crushed deeper into his sternum.

Devon slid one arm free.

“Good,” Mason gasped. “Now crawl.”

“What about you?”

“I’m taking a nap.”

“No.” Devon shook his head hard. “No, I’m not leaving you.”

The field thudded again.

Closer.

A shadow fell across the open doors. Long horns split the crimson light. A plated muzzle appeared, nostrils flaring. Its eyes were coins of green fire. Saliva hung in ropes from a mouth full of sideways teeth.

Devon stopped breathing.

Mason’s hand found the cracked oxygen regulator.

The creature stepped into the ambulance, claws punching through the floor with delicate little taps. It smelled like wet stone and opened graves. Its gaze fixed on Devon’s blood.

“Hey,” Mason croaked.

The thing’s burning eyes shifted to him.

He smiled because his face was too tired to do anything else.

“You like barbecue?”

Mason slammed the regulator against the oxygen cylinder’s bent valve.

Nothing.

The creature lunged.

Mason slammed it again.

The valve sheared.

Compressed oxygen shrieked into the ambulance, a white jet blasting across the creature’s face. It recoiled, claws skidding, horns smashing cabinets. Mason grabbed the broken defibrillator paddle hanging near his head, ripped the cord until sparks spat from the cracked battery housing, and jammed the exposed wires into the oxygen stream.

For one beautiful second, nothing happened.

Then the back of the ambulance became the sun.

Fire punched outward. The creature screamed as flame wrapped its armored head. The blast blew Devon through the open doors and into the black grass. Mason felt the metal slab lift off his chest, weightless as paper.

He also felt himself come apart.

The world spun. Heat. Red sky. Lina’s hair behind cracked glass. Devon coughing somewhere outside. The creature thrashing, burning, its horns carving sparks from the ambulance floor.

Mason landed hard against the rear bumper, half in the vehicle, half out. He could not feel his legs anymore. That seemed merciful.

Devon crawled toward him through the mud, one hand pressed to his belly. “Mason! Mason!”

“Stay down,” Mason mouthed, but no sound came out.

More shadows moved in the grass.

The burning creature staggered away, collapsed, and smoked. The other shapes circled the firelight, hesitant. Hungry, but not stupid.

Devon reached Mason and grabbed his vest. “Come on. Come on, please.”

The kid tried to drag him.

Mason weighed nothing and everything. Devon’s arms shook. Blood dripped from his chin. He was dying too, but slower. Sometimes slower was enough.

Mason lifted a hand and pressed it against Devon’s chest, stopping him.

“Go,” Mason managed.

Devon’s face crumpled. “No.”

Mason hooked two fingers in the kid’s torn hoodie and yanked him close with the last strength in his body. Their foreheads almost touched. Mason smelled smoke and blood and teenage deodorant.

“Listen,” Mason whispered. “You run until your legs remember they work. You find people. You tell them not to trust the grass. You hear me?”

“I can’t.”

“You can.” Mason’s vision blurred, red sky melting into red rain. “Because I didn’t just blow myself up for you to be a quitter.”

Devon laughed and sobbed at the same time.

Something growled beyond the ambulance. The pack had decided fire was only fire.

Mason shoved Devon.

“Move!”

The kid stumbled back, caught himself, and ran. Not fast. Not graceful. One arm hugging his stomach, one leg dragging. But he ran into the black grass, away from the burning ambulance, away from Mason, away from the jaws gathering in the crimson dark.

Mason watched until the grass swallowed him.

Only then did he let go.

The first creature leapt onto the ambulance roof. Another crawled through the doors. A third circled wide, green eyes bright as corrupted stars.

Mason thought of his daughter, Emma, six years old and furious that he had missed the recital. He had promised pancakes the next morning. Chocolate chips shaped like smiley faces. He had promised. He was always making promises to tomorrow, because tomorrow had never billed him upfront.

Sorry, kiddo.

Teeth closed around his shoulder.

The pain was immense, then distant, then not his at all.

Darkness came like a hand over a monitor.

Flatline.

For a while, there was nothing.

Not peace. Peace implied someone had bothered arranging the silence. This was absence. No body. No breath. No ambulance burning in a field that should not exist. No memory, even, except the impression of falling through miles of black water toward a voice that had forgotten how to be human.

Then a sound.

A chime.

Bright. Artificial. Cheerful in a way that made the darkness feel offended.

SIGNAL ACQUIRED.

Mason opened eyes he did not remember closing.

He lay facedown in wet grass.

For three seconds, he did not move. Breathing hurt, but it was the honest hurt of lungs that worked. His heartbeat slammed against his ribs. He smelled iron-rich mud and smoke. He tasted blood and ash.

His hands clawed into black grass.

Hands.

Both of them.

He rolled onto his back with a strangled gasp.

The crimson sky loomed above, veined with slow-moving bands of gold light. Not clouds. Code, his brain supplied nonsensically. The lines pulsed and crawled like living script beneath the skin of the heavens.

Mason sat up too fast and nearly vomited.

His uniform was shredded. His chest was whole. His left leg, somehow attached and aching, ended in a boot full of blood that was not fresh enough to be his. His shoulder bore tooth marks through the jacket, but beneath the torn fabric his skin was sealed, pink, and tender.

The ambulance burned twenty yards away.

And beside it lay Mason Vale.

His corpse sprawled half out of the rear doors, chest ripped open, one arm twisted backward, face turned toward the sky with an expression of tired surprise. Creatures fed on it in the firelight, jerking and snarling over the remains of his torso. One tore loose a strip of his paramedic vest and shook it like a toy.

Mason stared at his own dead face.

His mind stepped sideways.

He had seen bodies. Hundreds. Old women in recliners. Kids blue in bathtubs. Men folded over steering wheels. He had zipped people into bags while family members made sounds that never left his ears.

He had never seen himself as inventory.

“Nope,” Mason said.

His voice came out thin and hysterical.

One of the creatures lifted its head.

Green eyes fixed on him.

“Nope, nope, nope.”