The hospital was gone. Lauren stumbled to a halt, her dark hair plastered over the freckles of her face by the rain, her breath coming out into the cold air in silver clouds of fog. The hospital was gone. What remained was a sagging heap of broken walls and bent metal, bleeding out muddy ribbons of debris as the rain dragged cement dust down from the ruins and into the rivers flowing through the streets.

Her brother was going to die.

A choked noise of panic hiccuped out of her. She had run all the way here, the skinless hounds chasing at her heels until she had broken through some invisible barrier that prevented them from going any further. She hadn’t stopped running.

The thought of her brother bleeding out as Pike - useless, half-mad Pike - tried to stitch him up had kept her going, burning reserves of desperate energy she didn’t know she had as she slogged through the cold and rain.

Something was wrong with the wound. Her brother - Cayden - was burning up, a fever twisting his body into spasms. He needed antivenom, anti-inflammatories, something. They’d try medicines until one cured or killed him, if that was what it took.

But first she needed to find medicine. And the hospital was gone.

So she didn’t know what to do. Ever since the world went insane, she had clung to her brother, and he had clung to her. There’d been no space for dispair between the two of them. To let hopelessness creep in would have meant letting him down.

The rain felt very cold.

As she watched, a black, shapeless blob pushed up from the hospital ruins. It slid down the slope of rubble, forming arms and legs as it tumbled, collapsing down into the shape of a man. Something like a man. Stick thin, with skin the color of old leather and wild hair sprawling down to its shoulders. The withering of its face made its eyes bulge out.

Some kind of slime-ghoul. Another monstrosity. Lauren gripped the knife in her pocket very tight, but she didn’t step back. Something between bravery and suicidal intent refused to let her leave. Even if she had to dig through the ruins until her nails were bloody, she wasn’t going back.

She wasn’t going to sit by Cayden while he died and try to tell herself she gave it ‘her best shot’ when she’d ran at the first sight of danger.

Lauren stepped towards the ghoul, and it finally seemed to notice her, turning its head down from the sky.

Then, to her surprise, it spoke.