He’s still not quite sure who it is, what it is. They see monsters every day, but this is something else, something they’re not prepared for.
He’s clearing the house fast, so fast, because Emily had motioned her entrance from the side door and he’d nodded, focused on saving that little girl.
It feels like he’s been sweeping through the rooms in an endless loop and he’s starting to panic at the complete silence around him until he hears something in the hallway. He listens again and his heart pounds in his chest.
A low growl, followed by the sound of bone crunching.
His throat is dry and his eyes are blurring but he sweeps past the basement door until he’s standing in front of the thing, and—
Oh, God, Emily. She’s on the floor beneath it and he can see blood but mostly he can see that her foot is moving and he lets him breathe just enough to shout out, “Freeze!” before pumping four bullets at it charges toward him.
The image of the thing’s mouth, red (the only descriptor he’ll allow himself to process), is all he sees as he rushes over to Emily, set’s his hand on her ankle.
“Em? Emily? Hang on, I’m calling the ambulance.” His phone is out and his fingers are sliding over the keys too much to dial and that’s when he realizes it’s the red, the blood, and he glances back down to Emily’s ankle, lying in a pool of the sticky fluid.
“No, no it’s not,” and he chokes the rest of the denial as he redials, focused so hard on the buttons it takes a moment to realize she’s starting to stand. “Emily?”
Her head is tilting toward him, and her eyes are cloudy, almost white. “What…” he trails off as she turns, lets him see her arm, her neck, her cheek.
He’s shaking his head and crying, backing away as her mouth drops open and she crawls toward him, her fingers grasping blindly at his leg.
His fingers twitch over his gun, holstered now at his side, and the news broadcast they’d all barely caught echoes in his ears.
“Breaking News: A recent outbreak of a new bloodborn pathogen has struck the East coast…”
