Tous les chapitres de : Chapitre 1 - Chapitre 8

Chapter 1: The Gate "Please, Julian. I'm your wife." He didn't look back at me. I was on my knees in the dirt in front of Safe Zone Four, my broken leg bent under me, my hands pressed against the cold steel of a gate that stood twice as tall as a house. Behind me the night was full of sounds I had stopped trying to name. Wet breathing. Claws on asphalt. Something dragging itself along the road, slow and patient, like it already knew I wasn't going anywhere. On the other side of the bars, the floodlights made everything bright and clean. Julian stood in the middle of that light in a pressed gray jacket. He looked like a man who had slept well for forty days. Because he had. "Sir," said the guard beside him, a young man who kept glancing at me and then away. "She says she's your wife. She's not bitten. I can see her arms from here. The rules say if there's no infection, we can open the side door." "She's infected," Julian said. "Sir, I don't see any..." "I said she's infected."

# Chapter 3: Six Days"I want everything he has, everything he hid, and everything he thinks I don't know about. You have forty-eight hours."The man across the desk didn't blink. He was fifty or so, built like a retired boxer, with a gray crew cut and a coffee stain on his tie. The sign downstairs said *D. Mercer Investigations*. The office was above a laundromat, and the whole room smelled like warm detergent."Forty-eight hours is a short time, Mrs. Reed.""I'm paying for a short time." I slid an envelope across the desk. Inside was twenty thousand dollars in cash and a flash drive with every photo I had taken at the restaurant. "Julian's second phone. A woman named Camille Voss. A boy named Oliver. I want addresses, bank records, dates, and who knows what. If anyone helped him hide them, I want their names."Dale Mercer opened the envelope, counted the bills without hurry, and looked up at me."You know I have to ask. Is this a divorce, or are you planning something worse?""Divor

# Chapter 5: The Warehouse"Ma'am, you've ordered three hundred tons of rice, forty generators, and a lot of salt. Are you opening a restaurant?""No," I said. "A funeral."Hank Dolan, the broker, laughed like I had made a joke. Then he looked at my face and stopped.It was Saturday morning, three days before the sky broke. We stood in the yard of an old cold-storage facility on the east edge of the city, a gray concrete block with no windows and a loading dock big enough for six trucks. It had been empty for two years. The owner wanted it gone. I had bought it the day before for cash, under Harrow Holdings, and Julian would never find it."Where do you want the generators?" Hank asked."Inside, along the north wall. Fuel goes in the sub-basement. Water filters next to them, and I want the steel plates welded over every window and the back door by tomorrow night.""Tomorrow night? Ma'am, that's forty men working overtime.""Then pay them double. Triple, if they stay quiet."He scratch

# 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