THE LAST 100 DAYS

Vanishing Point

Chapter 3: Vanishing Point

"Don't answer it," Marcus said. "Ethan. Step away from the phone."

Ethan's hand hovered over the receiver. It had been ringing on the abandoned desk for ninety seconds, long past the point where a machine should have stopped.

"Someone's calling," he said. "Someone's *alive* out there."

"Or someone's listening for who picks up." Marcus caught his wrist. "Last night you told me they hunt by sound. You want to test whether that includes phones?"

The ringing cut off mid-note.

Neither of them moved.

Behind them, the survivors stood in the gray morning light that smoke had turned the color of ash. Five people. One toddler. One clerk with a bandaged shoulder who hadn't stopped shaking since the alley. The mother, Dana, had given her name an hour ago. Nobody had asked for it. She'd just needed someone to know it.

"Fourteenth floor," Marcus said quietly. "Every desk looks the same. Coffee still warm on that one. Lunch half eaten on that one. Nobody packed. Nobody ran. They were *here*, and then they weren't."

"So where did they go?"

Marcus didn't answer.

Ethan stared at the blue numbers in the corner of his vision. 99 DAYS, 14 HOURS. Still falling. Steady. Patient.

*Why give us a clock?* Monsters didn't need one. Disasters didn't announce themselves. Whoever built this wanted people counting.

"Security office is on this floor," Ethan said. "Cameras. If they're on a backup battery..."

"You want to watch it happen?"

"I want to know what *it* is."

The clerk grabbed his sleeve. "Please. Please don't go in there. What if there's something..."

"Then I'll be quiet," Ethan said, and slipped his arm free.

The office was a closet with a desk and six monitors. Four were dead. Two flickered gray.

Ethan hit the rewind. Static, then 11:58 p.m. The lobby. A guard sipping from a mug. A woman in a blazer walking to the elevator.

12:00. Every screen froze for thirteen seconds. Then picture returned.

The guard was gone.

The mug sat on the desk, still steaming.

Ethan's pulse hammered in his ears. He scrubbed backward. Forward. Again.

No creature. No blur. No scream. One frame, a man. The next, an empty chair.

A second camera showed the elevator. Three people inside, mid-conversation. Frame by frame, one flickered out like a deleted pixel. The other two turned to look at the space where he'd stood.

Then they screamed.

Only after that did the first pale shape drag itself out of the stairwell.

"Marcus," Ethan breathed. "Come look at this."

Marcus leaned over his shoulder. His breath caught.

"They didn't eat him," Marcus said slowly. "They didn't even touch him."

"The monsters came *after*." Ethan's throat tightened. "They're not the disaster. They're just what's walking through it."

"Then what took them?"

"I don't know. But everyone who vanished last night was standing in the same place as everyone who didn't. There's no pattern." He gripped the desk. "Which means it isn't random. It's selecting."

The monitors died.

So did the hallway lights. The emergency strip along the floor blinked once and went out, and the dark came down like a hand.

Dana's whisper carried from the corridor. "Marcus? Something's on the stairs."

Below them, a long, slow scrape dragged across concrete. Then another. Then the unmistakable wet click of a seam opening.

"How many?" Marcus murmured.

Ethan listened. *Slow. Heavy. Climbing.* "One. But it's big."

"Roof?"

"Fire stairs are the only way up. We have to pass it."

"Then we pass it." Marcus pulled the survivors into a tight line. "Hands on the shoulder in front of you. Nobody speaks. Ethan, you lead."

"Me? I'm not—"

"You heard it before I did." Marcus met his eyes. "Lead."

Ethan swallowed and took the stairwell door.

The fourth-floor landing smelled like rot. Something filled the doorway ahead, wide as a refrigerator, its pale skin stretched over plates of grayish bone. The seam in its face was already open.

The delivery man's crowbar had split a creature's face open last night. This one had no face left to split.

"Weapons won't work," Ethan whispered. "Look at the armor."

A fire axe from the wall hit the creature's shoulder with a crack. The blade bounced off. The man who'd swung it, a mechanic in a stained jacket named Pete, stumbled back, wide-eyed.

"Pete, *stop!*" Ethan hissed.

Pete swung again, harder, screaming.

The creature turned.

It moved faster than anything that size had a right to. Pete's axe flew from his hands. Ethan saw the claws rise and saw the exact angle of the swing.

*Left leg's planted. Weight's committed.*

He dove, slammed both hands into Pete's chest, and shoved him sideways. Claws tore through the air where Pete's throat had been and gouged six furrows in the concrete wall.

"Move!" Ethan screamed. "All of you, *left*, around it!"

The creature spun. Ethan didn't wait. He snatched a fire extinguisher off the wall, yanked the pin, and emptied it in the thing's face. White powder erupted. It reeled, shrieking, clawing at its own seam.

"Go! *Go!*"

They poured up the stairs, Marcus hauling Dana and the toddler, Pete sobbing, the clerk limping. Ethan took the rear, hurling the empty canister back down. It clanged. The creature lurched toward the sound, away from them.

The roof door burst open on gray sky and drifting smoke.

Ten feet away, across a narrow gap, an adjacent rooftop waited. Between the two lay an eight-story drop.

"Ladder," Marcus panted, dragging a maintenance plank across the gap. "Now! Everybody, now!"

One by one they crossed. Ethan went last.

Halfway over, the stairwell door behind him exploded off its hinges.

Ethan froze on the plank, looking back at the creature, then at the blue numbers burning in the corner of his eye.

*99 days. Maybe less. And I can't even scratch it.*

Below, the street shook with the footfalls of something far bigger than what had chased them upstairs.

Marcus grabbed his collar and hauled him onto the far roof. Together they kicked the plank into the void.

The creature reached the edge and stopped, swaying, staring at them with its sightless seam. Then it threw back its head, and from the streets and rooftops and towers of Meridian City, hundreds of voices answered.