Chapter 7

# Chapter 7: Day Zero

"Look at the sky, miss. The news said it was a meteor shower."

"Then why is it screaming?"

The traffic light had gone green a minute ago and nobody was moving. Every driver on Dalton Avenue had a head out of a window. Mrs. Alvarez sat beside me in the passenger seat, rosary in her fist, her lips moving without sound.

It was Tuesday, March seventeenth, 11:56 a.m.

I had gotten away from Julian's people on Sunday without much trouble. When the man with the clipboard came up the stairs, the mark on my palm went cold, and I knew which door held the sedative. Hank's truck blocked the van in the yard, I took the service tunnel under the loading dock, and by the time Julian realized I was gone I was three blocks away. He had spent two days since then calling hospitals and police stations. Dale told me that much. Dale also told me Julian's mother had hired a private guard.

None of it mattered now.

I had come to the penthouse for Mrs. Alvarez. She had spent twenty years in my family's kitchen, and I wasn't leaving her behind this time. It had taken an hour to convince her to pack a bag. "The sea will rise, ma'am?" she kept asking, and I kept saying yes, close enough.

"We need to move," I said. "Seatbelt, please."

"Serena, the light is green."

"I know." I checked the dashboard clock. 11:58.

The sky was a blameless blue. Far above the skyline, thin clouds drifted over the glass towers. A man on the corner had stopped to take a photo with his phone.

11:59.

My palm began to burn.

"Hold on," I said, and put the car in drive.

At noon exactly, the sky tore.

There was no thunder. There was only a sound like a huge sheet of canvas being ripped down the middle, and a line of red light that split the blue from one end of the horizon to the other. The light spilled out, thick and slow, like blood from a cut. The phone on the corner went dead in the man's hand. Every car horn in the street began blaring at once.

Mrs. Alvarez screamed. I floored the gas.

We swerved around a stalled taxi and clipped a mailbox. The first things came down out of the red a few seconds later, small and quick, like black rain. They hit the street and the roofs and the cars, and where they landed, people started yelling.

Skitters. Low, fast, and hungry, with long fingers and mouths in their chests.

"Don't look," I told Mrs. Alvarez. "Just hold on."

A bus ahead of us was trying to turn around in the middle of the road. The driver had panicked. He cranked the wheel too hard and the whole thing tipped onto its side with a crash that shook the windshield. Glass sprayed across the asphalt. A dozen Skitters dropped onto it at once.

I knew this exact moment. I had seen it in my last life, from a rooftop two days in. Nobody on that bus had survived.

"Stay in the car," I said, and I stopped the engine and jumped out.

"Serena!"

I ran. The Skitters had not noticed me yet. They were clawing through the shattered windows, and from inside I could hear people shrieking. I grabbed a steel pipe from the gutter, part of some broken barricade, and swung it at the nearest creature's head. It went down with a wet crack.

Another turned. I hit it too.

My hands shook, but my feet knew where to go. I climbed up onto the side of the bus and reached through the broken roof hatch.

"Take my arm!"

A woman in blue scrubs looked up at me through the dark. She was young, maybe twenty-six, with a smear of blood across her forehead and a boy of about eight clutched against her chest.

"I can't," she gasped. "My leg is pinned."

"Give me the boy first."

She hesitated for half a second. Then she lifted him, and I hauled him out and set him on the road. A Skitter lunged at his ankle. I broke its spine with the pipe and shoved the child toward Mrs. Alvarez's car, where she had already flung open the back door.

I went back for the nurse.

"What's your name?" I asked, wrenching at the seat that had pinned her.

"Marcy. Marcy Doyle."

"Marcy, I'm going to lift. When I say, pull your leg."

I put my whole weight under the bent steel. It would not move. The mark on my palm burned hotter, and something moved through my arms, a quiet, impossible strength, as if I were not the only one lifting.

The seat gave a groan and rose.

"Now!"

She yanked her leg free and screamed. I caught her under the arms and dragged her out onto the street as the first Skitter reached the bus door behind us. I swung the pipe back blindly and felt it connect.

We ran. All of us, Marcy limping, the boy in Mrs. Alvarez's arms, me with the pipe. The red light poured down and the whole street was screaming now, cars burning, people running in every direction. Behind us the Skitters swarmed over the bus.

"Where are we going?" Marcy panted.

"Underground." I pointed at the entrance to the old pedestrian tunnel that connected Dalton Avenue to the river road. "It's the only way to reach my warehouse before the highways jam."

"Is that safe?"

"No," I said. "But it's the least unsafe."

The tunnel was dim and cold, lit by a few emergency lamps that flickered like dying fireflies. We slowed to a quick walk. Our footsteps echoed. Somewhere ahead water dripped steadily into a puddle.

Marcy leaned against the wall and gasped. "How did you know?"

"Know what?"

"That the sky would open. You were already out of the car before it happened."

I didn't answer.

We had reached the middle of the tunnel when the emergency lamps went out, one by one, down the line.

The mark on my palm turned cold. Dead cold.

I put my hand up. "Stop."

Something stood in the dark ahead of us. It was tall, thin, and perfectly still, like a person who had learned to wear a person's shape. It had no face I could make out. It tilted its head, slowly, and I heard a soft, wet sound as though it was smiling.

"Serena Hale," it said in a calm, pleasant voice, the voice of someone greeting an old friend. "We wondered when you would come back."