Activity in the precinct abruptly lulled once Jase was brought in. All that meant to him is the tv didn’t have to compete for sound dominance.

It was odd though, because rush hour usually keeps the peacekeepers active. More people than ever were battling the tide of traffic, which is why nearly the whole city fell to a standstill when the missiles crested the horizon.

The news broadcast turned abruptly to focus on the missiles, speculating fireworks or a military display as they maneuvered above and around the taller skyscrapers. A riotous gasp preceded the panic when they exploded at regular intervals into a thick, blue mist, distinct against the overcast sky.

Sirens immediately blared. Auto locks denied sanctuary to all but the first of the throngs of people desperately beating against the windows and doors. Those with the morbid fortune to be inside watched in horror as the gas consumed the streets like a flood. The futile pounding on the walls weakened as the doomed citizens gradually succumbed. The briefest sense of perverse relief only just set in when the air vents suddenly latched open, followed by a cut to the main power, and the blue gas poured into the building.

Jase appreciated the blackout cutting power to the intercom, saving him from the cries and pleas of those denied their sanctuary. Emergency power kicked in minutes later, but by then the precinct was still.

He paced at first, but it quickly became clear he was wasting energy. The blackout made keeping time simple since the clocks reset. The blue gas cleared within ten minutes of emergency power turning on. Whether that meant the contagion was gone or simply not visible, Jase didn’t know. Three hours in he suspected this ventilation failure wasn’t an isolated incident, otherwise a response team would have checked on them by now. At four hours, it occurred to him his oxygen supply in the quarantine cell was not infinite. When the clocks struck five, Jase’s unwillingness to wait for rescue outweighed his fear of any lingering contagion.

By design the holding cell inhibited attempts to escape. The glass was bulletproof, the sole piece of furniture he might have used to chip it was bolted down, and the lock was electronic. In consideration of that, Jase recalled the blue card hidden in his shoe, not entirely certain if it carried access to peacekeeper quarantine cells.

Jase swiped the card across the back of the door panel a few dozen times, but the sensor wasn’t sensitive enough to detect a swipe, much less read it. His jacket had wire support like any other. Digging out a few lengths from the lining, he tried shoving it between the door, but the sealing insulation was too tough. The bench was bolted down, but it wasn’t indestructible. Some violent jostling was enough to dislodge a panel narrow enough to dig away at the rubbery filling.

Fifteen minutes of digging and a brief period of panic when the pressure stabilized got him an opening wide enough to fit the card. The air hadn’t killed him yet, so he coiled a wire around the card, hung it from another and snaked it through the opening, around the door, and over the security panel.

He held it there, but nothing happened. He had less than a centimeter to maneuver with on his side and his sweat tormented his grip. The card eventually fell off the hook, but not before the panel registered a read and the lock clicked.

The others incarcerated in the quarantine cells watched fevered with anticipation as Jase breathed the free air. Failing to die, he let his satisfaction briefly show on his face. The gas seemed to have settled into a fine, pollen-like dust. It might have been inert or it might need to be inhaled; regardless, Jase minimized contact with his bare skin.

Ignoring the other quarantined prisoners, Jase reclaimed his things from the evidence room, found the building manager’s key, and put the precinct behind him.

Apathy was difficult to maintain in the bleak city streets. The digital signage displaying their emergency “quarantine, stay inside” notification came across with increasing mockery with every building Jase peered into. After passing five with no signs of life, he stopped checking.

Sticking to the center of the road was the best way to avoid stumbling, but the roads were regularly closed down with security barricades. Oddly though, some failed to close when lockdown was established. Some could be attributed to vehicles in the way, but others were fully functional and wide open.

Jase turned on a swivel at the sound of breaking glass echoing down back alley sparsely populated with the dead. The corpses were still many hours out, possibilities ranged from survivors, response teams, or the party or parties responsible for the attack.

Cautiously, he strayed toward the direction of the sound. He wandered a seldom used back street, unsure of what to look for, but certain when he found a woman sprinkled with broken glass laying motionless between two buildings.

The glass seemed to be from a window several stories up. If a crack on the opposite building meant anything, she must have failed to leap from one building to the next. Her dark suit was a far cry from civilian fatigues and peacekeeper uniforms, but not so much as her gas mask caked with blue dust around the filter. A badge dangled from her blazer depicting an emblem of a rook and her arm hung limp over a case showing ballistic damage, but most telling detail was the retention of color in her skin.

She was warm to the touch. Jase pried off the gasmask and held a finger under her neck, but before he could detect a pulse she suddenly gasped and jerked from his grip. Jase shoved her away and put as much space between them as the confines of the alley would allow, but she did the same. She pressed herself against the wall with the case in her arms, eyes darting around like a cornered animal.

“You!” she maniacally called when she noticed Jase was present and alive. “You’re not one of them?”

“I’m no one important!” he stammered.

The woman’s legs folded unsettlingly beneath her when she lurched forward and thrust the case into Jase’s arms, pleading, “Take it! Please, take it!”

“Woah, woah, I don’t want your case! Just tell me if there’s a safehouse nearby and I’ll–”

“Nonono you have to take it! It can’t stay here! They knew! They knew and they came for it! They came and everyone died!”

“Slow down, who came?”

“Go! Take it somewhere safe! Somewhere far from me! Now!”

The woman suddenly seized up and gagged on her words. Spasmed on the floor when Jase managed to break her iron grip and staggered away. Out of the corner of his eye he might have seen a cracked syringe with a feather like a tranquilizer dart fall from the folds of her clothes, but he couldn’t tear his eyes from her darkening veins creeping from under her collar. By the time he’d backed out of the alley her skin had given over to the color of rust and muscles squirmed and expanded underneath.

Jase took off the way he came as fast as he could bear, but the anguished gasping rose to meet him until ending in a guttural cry. The mass of flesh emerging from the alley only partially resembled the woman it used to be. Easily three times its original size, bone and muscle pushed through skin, one leg dragged behind it like a sock full of mud, the other partially useful with only a single fracture. It dragged itself after Jase with terrifying speed the instant it spotted him with its puss-yellow eyes, snarling with every breath through its chewed off lips.

With only its arms and one partially useful leg it was still faster than Jase. He scanned the bodies carpeting the ground, for the inability to turn a corner without bumping into one when the city was alive, it took him forever to find a dead peacekeeper. He pulled at the sidearm, but holster would not surrender the weapon until the peacekeeper’s wrist was near the mechanism. He fired at the monster, but the safety locked the trigger. The creature was uncomfortably close when he finally got some shots off into its leading arm. The stun darts were far from lethal, but their collective charge paralyzed the arm long enough to put distance between them.

A cord prevented the weapon from leaving the body, so Jase ran unarmed until coming to a dead end. Paths opened up on either direction, but the highway was on the other side of the gate, and while quarantine was in effect any other path would take him in circles. So, he ran along the wall until he came across a maintenance hatch. It and its control panel were locked down tight as always, but Jase smashed the panel open with the case he neglected to drop and crossed wires until the hatch opened. He never thought he’d be so happy to see an on ramp when he emerged on the other side of the barrier.

The faint hope the bloated creature might not fit through the hatch was dashed when its starved wails echoed through the shaft and it pressed itself through the opening to the detriment of its own flesh. Its putrid visage pressed through the opening soon enough to spot Jase rounding up the ramp, a point it reached before he was halfway up, and it was gaining.

The vehicles littering the road were abandoned shortly after the missiles went off. Jase wasn’t about to count on their owners leaving their keys behind, but he reached into an open car and disengaged its parking break. It barely lurched before the monster reached its bumper, and it carried the thing partway down the ramp before it leapt off. Encouraged by this, Jase did it again, this time with enough space between them to pick up enough speed for a substantial impact. It didn’t ride it down the ramp this time, rather catching it and flipping the car over the railing.

The last vehicle on the ramp was a flatbed. It took forever to start moving, but it didn’t even bump when it hit the creature, carrying it all the way down the ramp and into a building, bisecting it at the waist.

Jase was slow to believe it was over, but when the exhaustion caught up to him he hit the floor and laid there. That was more exercise than he got in a year and more excitement he intended to have in his lifetime; now that the adrenalin was ebbing away he felt just as dead as anyone else in the city and twice as miserable. The difference being he could move right now, and he’d have to if he wanted to live.

Legs trembling, barely able to bear his weight, he hobbled to the closest car. When he found the keys he callously dumped the limp driver into the road and turned on the heater. There, in the driver’s seat he contemplated his exhaustion, his survival, the damned case he tossed in the passenger’s seat, but mostly he dwelled on his own misfortune and whether or not he’d be better off dying right then and there.

As if to answer his question, the car lurched upward and a gurgling howl mingled with crumpling metal and cracking glass. Jase floored the accelerator, but the front wheels spun freely until the mutation reached in and they could touch only long enough to pull forward a few feet before the monster’s weight lifted them again. Jase was battered senseless before the thing became frustrated and flipped the car over the railing, then he was helpless to watch as the ground rushed at him from four stories away.

A combination of an airbag and a compulsive need to put on a seatbelt even in a stationary vehicle saved Jase’s life, or prolonged his suffering, depending on the perspective. He was in so much pain and the simple act of breathing was so labored he didn’t realize he’d survived until death crashed through a nearby car.

He pulled himself from his wreckage before the monster pried itself from its own. The arm it landed on dragged limp behind it, but Jase barely had the faculties to stand anymore. Limping, then stumbling, then crawling with the same desperation the creature pursued him, it didn’t occur to him the creature’s rasping weakened with every lunge. Lethargic from the gallons of ruddy fluids draining through its waist, the creature slowed to an ultimate collapse less than an arm’s reach from Jase. It might have been conscious, hungry, but no longer able to move.

As far as Jase was concerned, if it got up and killed him now, it earned it.

Drawn by the noise, a curious, mostly silver cat came to investigate.

“That you, Smudge?” Jase muttered when he noticed it perched on a nearby car, completely apathetic to the enormous abomination. “Are you… alive?”

To his eternal disbelief, the cat meowed once, groomed itself, then meowed again the way it does when it’s hungry. It didn’t seem to care the ration he opened for it was dry.

Now that it looked like he was going to live after all, Jase limped off to find a way back to the highway from whatever part of the city he landed in. The case sitting in the wreckage floated through his mind barely long enough to consciously disregard it.

Things weren’t looking good when he abruptly stopped and backtracked a few steps to a notice board like any of the thousand others on this road alone, except this one didn’t have a quarantine notice, it was occupied by a featureless command prompt reading only,

“hello jase”

No one up the street, no one down the street. Even the cat had wandered off.

“Thirty degrees east by north east

mega city armitage

trust slowly

they thought it was worth a city

what is it worth to you?

commandcode -Lupa”

The window closed and an error report popped up in the prompt’s place. Almost immediately a nearby quarantine gate opened.

Jase groaned, now certain he was being watched. After much thought, he retrieved the battered case from the crushed car, harvested phones and batteries from the nearby corpses, confirming they had a compass function before following the newly opened path to the highway.

Sitting in the driver’s seat of a peacekeeper cruiser was a unique experience, but not nearly as odd as the cat when it leapt in and curled up in front of the heater. Jase considered kicking it out. That it managed to survive in the city where hygiene and cleanliness was paramount was suspicious on its own, to say nothing about making it through the gassing. Deciding it wasn’t worth the effort, he let it lie. He had several hours to drive before reaching the edge of the city. Then come the wilds.