Anya Hayashi

The water was just starting to get hot.

Anya stood under the stream, eyes closed, letting the steam curl around her face and weave through the strands of her long, black hair that hung heavy and wet against her shoulder blades. The heat was a blessing against her perpetually tired muscles, against the knots in her shoulders that had taken up permanent residence, against the ache in her lower back that came from carrying around a chest that would make most women weep with envy and a constitution that demanded she eat her weight in cheap takeout at least three times a week. She'd made it exactly thirty-seven seconds into her shower before her work phone started buzzing against the bathroom counter, the vibration loud and insistent against the porcelain tile. Thirty-seven seconds of peace. A new record. She wanted to cry. She wanted to laugh. Instead, she just stood there, water streaming over her face, and pretended for one more glorious, selfish second that she hadn't heard it.

The phone kept buzzing. It was the specific rhythm of the departmental emergency line—three short buzzes, a pause, three more—the kind of pattern that drilled into your subconscious after enough years on the job until you could hear it in your sleep. Which, given that she'd been asleep approximately two hours ago, was particularly fucking relevant.

She knew better than to hope it was a wrong number. Wrong numbers didn't call the departmental emergency line. Wrong numbers didn't have that specific, insistent rhythm that meant someone somewhere was dead and it was her problem now. Wrong numbers didn't make her want to throw her phone against the wall and crawl back into bed and pretend the world could handle its own disasters for once.

Anya cracked one eye open, letting the water stream past her face, and squinted at the clock on her phone through the steam-fogged screen of the shower door. Four-seventeen in the fucking afternoon. She'd finally crawled out of bed at two, having crashed at seven that morning after pulling an all-nighter on a trafficking case that had gone exactly nowhere. Two hours of sleep. A glorious, uninterrupted two hours of blessed unconsciousness where she hadn't dreamed about dead girls or missed evidence or her mother's disappointed voice asking when she was going to find a nice person to settle down with. Two hours. That was all she'd asked for. That was all the universe had seen fit to give her.

The phone kept buzzing.

Anya turned off the water with a sharp, angry twist of her wrist, the sudden silence somehow louder than the spray had been. She didn't bother drying off. Didn't see the point. She'd just have to shower again after this anyway, assuming whatever waited for her didn't end with her dead or in jail or both. She pushed open the shower door and stepped out onto the bath mat, water dripping from her body in steady streams, plastering her long black hair to her back and shoulders and the curve of her hips like a second skin, dark against her pale flesh.

She caught a glimpse of herself in the mirror as she reached for the phone—naked, dripping, exhausted circles under her green eyes that no amount of makeup would ever fully conceal, her heavy breasts swaying with the movement, water tracing paths down the soft curve of her stomach and the generous swell of her hips. She looked like hell. She looked like she felt. She grabbed the phone, looked at the screen, and sighed so deeply her lungs threatened to collapse inward from the sheer force of her resignation.

Detective Miller. Of course. Because the universe hated her specifically. Because somewhere out there, some cosmic force had decided that Anya Volkov-Hayashi needed exactly zero breaks in her miserable existence.

She swiped to answer and pressed the phone to her ear, water still dripping from her hair onto the screen. "What." She didn't bother making it a question. Didn't have the energy for the upward inflection. It came out flat, dead, the kind of greeting that told people she was this close to quitting and moving to a cabin in the woods where no one could find her.

Detective Miller. "Anya." Miller's voice had that tight quality it got when something was really, truly fucked. Not his normal work stress tightness. Not his frustrated-with-bureaucracy tightness. This was the voice of a man who had seen something that had cracked through whatever protective layers twenty-three years on the force had built up. "Warehouse district. Old processing plant off Thirteenth. You need to get down here."

Anya: She closed her eyes, water still trickling down her face. "I'm in the shower."

Detective Miller. "I don't care if you're in the middle of getting murdered yourself. Get dressed and get here. It's bad."

Something in his voice made her open her eyes again, made her straighten up despite the exhaustion pulling at her bones. Miller didn't use words like "bad." Miller used words like "complicated" and "messy" and "fucking headache." Bad was for amateurs. Bad was for people who hadn't seen what he'd seen.

Anya:"How bad?"

A pause. Long enough that Anya checked the screen to make sure the call hadn't dropped. Miller was a veteran, twenty-three years on the force, seen things that would make most people never sleep again. He didn't pause. He answered immediately, with gruff efficiency, because that was how he coped. He compartmentalized. He moved forward. He didn't pause.

But he paused now.

Detective Miller. "Anya." His voice dropped so low she had to press the phone harder against her ear to hear him. "It's the worst thing I've ever seen. And I've seen a lot of fucking things."

The line went dead.

Anya stared at the phone for a long moment, water still dripping from the ends of her hair onto the screen in fat, heavy drops that beaded and rolled down the glass. She could feel the chill starting to set in now, her wet skin cooling in the bathroom air, goosebumps rising on her arms and across the swell of her breasts. She should dry off. Should get dressed. Should probably eat something, given that her last meal had been a gas station granola bar at approximately three in the morning.

Instead, she just stood there, dripping, staring at the dark screen of her phone, and let the weight of Miller's words settle into her bones like ice water.

Then she scoffed—a sharp, humorless sound that echoed off the bathroom tiles—and reached for a towel.

---

Twenty-three minutes and seventeen seconds later—a personal best, considering she'd had to do her hair and makeup from absolute scratch and her hands were still shaking slightly from the adrenaline of being woken up by Miller's fucking voice—Anya Volkov-Hayashi was stepping out of her beat-up sedan and into what looked like the opening scenes of a horror movie.

The towel had been quick and efficient, more about function than comfort. She'd rubbed herself dry with the rough enthusiasm of someone scrubbing a car, paying extra attention to her hair because if she let it stay wet it would frizz into an unmanageable mess that would take hours to tame. The long black strands required maintenance, required care, required time she didn't have but made anyway because letting herself go completely would be admitting defeat. She'd wrapped it in a second towel while she did her face—foundation to even out the exhaustion, concealer for the dark circles that no amount of sleep would ever fully erase, a subtle smoky eye because she refused to look like death warmed over even when she felt like it, mascara to make her green eyes pop, a long-wear lip stain in a deep rose that would survive coffee and crime scenes both.

Her body she'd dressed with the efficient practicality of someone who knew exactly what she was walking into. Black lace underwear first—not because anyone would see it, but because wearing something pretty under all the horror made her feel like she was still a person and not just a walking badge number. A high-quality underwire bra in nude, the straps wide enough to actually support the heavy weight of her breasts without digging into her shoulders, the cups cut to minimize bounce and maximize comfort. Black stockings, rolled carefully up her strong thighs, the waistband sitting just below her navel. Then the armor: a charcoal-grey pencil skirt made of a thick, structured fabric that hugged the dramatic curve of her hips and the full swell of her ass like it had been painted on, falling exactly to her knee. A silk blouse in deep emerald green—her father's favorite color on her, she remembered suddenly, and pushed the thought away—tucked in to accentuate her waist, the top two buttons left undone because she refused to feel strangled on top of everything else. Low-heeled ankle boots in black leather, sturdy enough to run in if she had to, practical enough to spend hours standing at a crime scene.

Her hair she'd pulled back into a high ponytail, the weight of it swinging against her hips as she moved, a constant reminder of the femininity she clung to like a talisman. A quick spritz of her perfume—warm vanilla and sandalwood, a gift from her mother last Christmas, the smell of home—and she was ready to face whatever waited.

Her badge was already clipped to her belt. Her Glock was already holstered at her hip, a familiar weight she barely noticed anymore. Her gloves—thin black leather, worn soft with use—were tucked into her waistband, waiting.

The drive had been eleven minutes of pure, focused aggression, her sedan cutting through traffic like a knife through cheap meat, her mind already racing through possibilities even though she had no information to work with. Miller didn't use words like "worst thing I've ever seen." Miller had watched a man bleed out in his arms during a shootout in '09. Miller had pulled a three-year-old from a bathtub full of bloody water in '14. Miller had seen things that made Anya's worst cases look like children's cartoons.

So whatever was waiting for her in that warehouse was bad. Really, truly, fundamentally bad.

The warehouse sat at the end of a dead-end street, a crumbling brick behemoth from the early 1900s that had probably processed something agricultural back when this part of the city was still farmland, back before the factories moved in and the factories moved out and the whole neighborhood settled into the slow, grinding decay of forgotten places. Now it was just another abandoned corpse of a building in a neighborhood that had been slowly dying for decades, its windows boarded, its walls tagged, its soul long since fled.

Except tonight, it was full of actual corpses.

Yellow crime scene tape stretched across the loading dock entrance in thick, plastic stripes, fluttering in the cold afternoon breeze like some kind of obscene celebration bunting. Floodlights had been set up even though the sun hadn't started setting yet—massive portable units on tall stands, their harsh white light bleaching the color out of everything they touched, turning the world into a black-and-white photograph. Someone wanted this scene lit up like an operating table, wanted every detail visible, wanted nothing hidden in shadows.

Anya ducked under the tape without breaking stride, her boots landing solidly on the concrete of the loading dock. A uniformed officer stepped forward, mouth opening to object, to demand identification, to do his job. He took one look at her face—her exhausted, pissed-off, don't-fucking-start-with-me face that she'd perfected over years of dealing with people who thought a pretty woman with a soft body couldn't possibly be a detective—and shut it again. Stepped back. Nodded once, jerkily, and let her pass.

Good boy. Smart boy. Boy who wanted to live to see retirement.

The smell hit her first. Even before she got through the door, even before she could see anything, the smell wrapped around her like a physical presence. It was the smell of a butcher shop that had been closed for a week in summer, all rotting meat and congealed blood and the sweet, sickly undertone of things beginning to liquefy. Mixed with something else. Something metallic and sharp and sweet and profoundly wrong, a note that didn't belong, a flavor that made her think of copper and sugar and death all at once.

Her stomach turned once, a sharp lurch that she felt all the way up in her throat. She clamped down on it hard, the way she'd learned to do years ago, the way you had to do if you wanted to survive this job. She'd smelled death before. Lots of it. Different kinds of it. Fresh death and old death and death that had been left in the sun too long. This was different. This was wrong in a way that went beyond the physical, that touched something primal in the back of her brain.

Miller was waiting just inside, his face the color of old paper, of newsprint left in the sun, of things that had been bleached of all vitality. He was a big man, barrel-chested, with the kind of face that looked like it had been carved from leftover granite and left to weather in the elements. Twenty-three years on the force had given him lines like road maps, a nose that had been broken more times than he could count, eyes that had seen too much and learned to show nothing.

Right now, he looked like he was about to throw up. His skin had a greyish undertone that Anya didn't like. His hands, usually steady as surgical instruments, were shaking slightly at his sides.

Detective Miller. "Anya." He nodded at her, the motion jerky, uncoordinated, like his body wasn't quite under his control anymore. "Thanks for coming. I know you were off. I know you needed the sleep. I wouldn't have called if it wasn't—" He stopped. Swallowed. Started again. "Thanks for coming."

Anya: She pulled her gloves from her waistband and began working them onto her hands, the familiar leather creaking softly as she flexed her fingers, watching him the whole time. "You said it was bad." Her voice was flat, professional, the voice she used when she needed to keep moving forward. "Show me."

He led her through the warehouse's main floor, past stacked pallets and rusted machinery that loomed in the shadows like sleeping animals, their shapes half-seen and threatening in the dim light that filtered through the grime-caked windows. The floodlights had been set up in a circle near the back, creating an island of harsh white light in the gloom, a stage waiting for the curtain to rise.

Eleven bodies.

Anya stopped walking. Just stopped, her feet rooted to the concrete floor, her brain struggling to process what her eyes were seeing. Eleven bodies, arranged in a rough circle like the spokes of some terrible wheel. But that wasn't the right word. Arranged implied intention, order, design. This was something else entirely. This was chaos made flesh, a tableau of violence so extreme that her detective brain—the part that always stayed calm, that catalogued and analyzed and compartmentalized, the part that had gotten her through every horror she'd ever witnessed—was screaming static.

They had been torn apart.

Not stabbed. Not shot. Not beaten or strangled or poisoned. Torn. Like something had ripped into them with hands and teeth and pure, animal fury, had pulled them apart like a child pulling the wings off flies, had left the pieces scattered like garbage.

A man in his forties lay closest to her, his throat torn out so completely that his head was attached to his body by only a thin strip of skin and a few vertebrae, his face tilted at an angle that should have been impossible, his eyes open and staring at the ceiling. His chest had been opened—not cut, opened, like someone had reached in and pulled—ribs snapped outward like the petals of some grotesque flower, and his heart was simply... gone. An empty, bloody cavity in its place, the edges torn and ragged, the bone visible in the harsh floodlight.

Beside him, a woman—couldn't have been older than twenty-five, her face still young despite the pallor of death—had been disemboweled. Her intestines trailed out of her stomach in a glistening, grey-pink rope, coiled on the concrete beside her like a sleeping snake, like something that might still move if you touched it. Her face was frozen in a scream, eyes wide and staring at nothing, mouth open in an O of infinite surprise.

Another body. A man, this one older, maybe sixty, with grey in his hair and lines on his face that spoke of a hard life lived badly. His jaw had been torn off. Literally torn off, hanging by a flap of cheek muscle, his tongue visible and still somehow pink and wet against the ruin of his lower face, lolling against his chest like he was about to speak.

Anya forced herself to move forward, to step into the circle of light and death. Her heels clicked against the concrete, each step a small, obscene sound in the silence, a reminder that she was still alive in a place full of people who weren't. The sound echoed off the walls, off the rusted machinery, off the bodies.

A young woman, early twenties, lay with her arm torn off at the shoulder. The arm itself was several feet away, the fingers still curled as if reaching for something, for help, for the life that had fled. Her throat had been opened too, but not torn—this one looked almost... bitten. Like someone had taken a chunk out of her neck, had sunk teeth into her flesh and pulled. Teeth marks, clear as day, pressed into the pale flesh in a perfect, terrible arc.

Anya: "Teeth marks," She said, her voice flat, emotionless, the voice of a machine processing data. She was in detective mode now. The horror was still there, still screaming in the back of her mind, still clawing at the walls of the box she'd locked it in, but she'd thrown away the key and turned up the volume on her rational brain until the screaming was just background noise. "On the neck. Multiple victims. Human?"

Detective Miller: He shook his head, the motion slow, dazed. "We don't know yet. That's the thing. They're—they're not consistent. Some of them look human. Some of them don't. Look at this one."

He led her to another body, a man in his thirties, lying face down in a spreading stain of blood that had long since dried to brown. When they turned him over—Miller taking the shoulders, Anya taking the hips, the body heavy and wrong in her gloved hands—Anya felt the box in her mind crack, just a little.

His face was gone.

Not torn off, not bitten, not cut away—gone. Like something had eaten it starting from the forehead and worked its way down, methodically, thoroughly, leaving nothing behind. The skull was visible in places, white bone gleaming through shredded tissue, through torn muscle and stripped cartilage. One eye remained, staring up at them from the ruin with an expression of infinite surprise, of endless horror frozen in time.

Anya: "Jesus Christ," She whispered. The words escaped before she could stop them, before she could lock them away. She pulled a small flashlight from her bag—a heavy-duty tactical light she'd bought after her third crime scene in a row with inadequate lighting—and leaned closer, clicking it on, ignoring the way her stomach heaved at the proximity to the ruined face. The light illuminated details she didn't want to see, didn't want to catalogue, but catalogued anyway because that was her job, because someone had to bear witness.

Anya: "The bites—they're not animal." Her voice was steady, even as her hands trembled slightly. "Look at the spacing. Too wide for a dog, too narrow for a bear. The arc is wrong for any predator I know. Human dentition, but... wrong. The canines are too pronounced. Way too pronounced. Like someone filed them down, or—" She stopped. Didn't finish the thought. Didn't want to.

Detective Miller: "Like a fucking vampire?" His voice was strained, cracking on the last word, the word he'd probably been thinking since he first walked in here, the word that made him sound like a hysterical civilian instead of a twenty-three year veteran.

Anya: She shot him a look, her green eyes sharp despite the exhaustion. "Like something with really fucking sharp teeth. Let's not jump to monsters yet, Miller. We're detectives. We deal in evidence." She straightened up, wincing as her back protested the movement, as the weight of her chest pulled at muscles that had been abused by too many crime scenes and too little sleep. "Has CSU been through?"

Detective Miller: "They're waiting outside. I wanted you to see it first. Fresh. Before they started moving things." He swallowed hard. "Before they started bagging them."

Anya: "Good." She started walking the circle, cataloguing with her eyes and her brain and her gut. Eleven bodies. Various ages. Various genders. Various stages of decomposition, but all relatively recent—within the last twelve hours, maybe less. All torn apart. All with evidence of—she stopped at the last body, a teenage boy, maybe seventeen, with a young face and a spray of acne across his cheeks and a peace sign tattooed on his wrist.

His chest was rising and falling.

Anya stared. Blinked. Stared again. The boy's chest rose. Fell. Rose again. Slow, rhythmic breathing, like someone in a deep and peaceful sleep. His abdomen was torn open, a gaping wound that exposed glistening loops of intestine, the dark mass of his liver, the pale curve of his stomach. His legs were twisted at angles that suggested multiple compound fractures, bone visible through torn flesh in at least three places. But his chest rose and fell with the steady rhythm of life.

Anya: "Miller." Her voice was very quiet, barely above a whisper. She didn't look away from the boy. Couldn't look away. "This one's alive."

Detective Miller: He was at her side in three steps, his big feet slapping against the concrete, his breath coming in short, sharp gasps. "What? That's impossible. I checked—we all checked. No pulse, no breathing, nothing. I checked them myself, Anya. All of them. They were dead. They were all dead."

Anya: "He's breathing." She pointed, her gloved finger steady despite the chaos in her mind. "Look. Right there. See? His chest. Rising and falling. That's breathing, Miller. That's alive."

They both looked. The boy's chest continued its slow, steady rhythm. His eyes were closed, his face relaxed, almost peaceful. Young. He looked so young. Like he should be in school, should be worrying about exams and girls and whether his friends were really his friends. Not lying in a warehouse with his insides on the outside, breathing like nothing was wrong.

Detective Miller:"Medic!" His voice echoed off the warehouse walls, bouncing back at them from the shadows, from the rusted machinery, from the circle of dead. "Get a medic in here now! We've got a survivor!"

Two paramedics rushed in from somewhere outside, a man and a woman, both young, both pale as ghosts as they took in the scene around them, as they saw what was waiting. The woman's face went white, then green, then white again. The man made a small sound in the back of his throat, quickly suppressed. But they were professionals. They'd been trained for this. They dropped to their knees beside the boy, the woman reaching for his wrist to check for a pulse, her fingers pressing against the cool skin, her face screwed up in concentration.

Anya: "Thready," she said, her voice wavering slightly. "But there. Weak, but there. How the hell is he—how is he alive? His intestines are outside his body. His legs are—"

The boy's eyes opened.

They were wrong. Wrong in a way that Anya couldn't immediately process, that her brain refused to categorize. The whites were yellowed, jaundiced, the color of old cream. The irises were clouded over like old marbles, like the eyes of a fish left too long on ice. And they fixed on the female paramedic with an intensity that made Anya's blood run cold, made the hair on her arms stand up, made something primal and ancient in the back of her mind start screaming warnings she couldn't quite hear.

Anya: "Get back!" Her voice came out sharp, commanding, years of authority packed into two words. "Get back now!! Move!"

But it was too late.

The boy moved with a speed that shouldn't have been possible, not with his injuries, not with his legs broken and his abdomen torn open, not with his intestines trailing on the concrete behind him. He lunged upward like a snake striking, like a predator attacking, like nothing human or natural or right. His mouth opened wide—too wide, impossibly wide, his jaw dislocating in a way that should have been agonizing—and fastened onto the paramedic's face.

She screamed.

It was a high, thin sound that cut through the warehouse like a knife, like a siren, like nothing Anya had ever heard from a human throat. It was the sound of pure, animal terror given voice, and then it became a wet, choking gurgle as the boy's teeth sank into her cheek, her nose, her eye. Blood sprayed, hot and arterial, painting the concrete in long, arcing stripes that caught the floodlight and gleamed wetly. The woman's body jerked, spasmed, her hands coming up to push at the thing attached to her face, but it was too late, she was too weak, and the boy just bit down harder.

The male paramedic stumbled backward, screaming, his hands raised in front of his face as if to ward off a blow, his eyes wide and white with terror. He tripped over something—a piece of debris, a body, Anya couldn't see—and went down hard, scrambling backward on his hands and knees, still screaming.

The boy—the thing that had been a boy—tore its head back with a wet, tearing sound, and it took half the woman's face with it. Flesh and muscle and skin came away in a chunk, revealing bone beneath, revealing teeth, revealing the terrible architecture of a human skull. The woman collapsed, her body twitching, blood pouring from the ruin of her features in a steady, pulsing stream.

For one long, frozen moment, no one moved.

Then the other bodies started to twitch.

It began slowly. A finger curling inward, nails scratching against concrete. A foot jerking, heel drumming a brief rhythm against the floor. A head turning with a sound like wet gravel grinding together, vertebrae popping and grinding in ways that should have been impossible.

One by one, the torn and broken corpses began to move. Began to stir. Began to push themselves up on shattered limbs and torn muscles, on bones that shouldn't support weight and joints that shouldn't bend.

The man whose throat had been torn out sat up. His head lolled on the thin strip of tissue holding it to his neck, flopping sideways at an impossible angle, his eyes—those same clouded, wrong eyes—fixing on the living with a hunger that was almost palpable. His mouth opened and closed, opened and closed, but no sound came out, because his throat was gone, because there was nothing left to make sound with.

The woman with the torn-off arm pushed herself to her feet, her missing limb leaving a trail of blood as she swayed unsteadily, compensating for a balance she no longer had. Her jaw worked, opening and closing, opening and closing, even though her throat had been bitten open and no sound could possibly emerge from the ruin of her neck. The stump of her arm moved like she was reaching for something, like she'd forgotten the hand wasn't there anymore.

The older man with the hanging jaw tried to stand, his legs buckling under him, his exposed tongue lolling against his chest, wet and pink and obscene. He fell, caught himself, tried again. His eyes never left the living.

The boy who had been breathing dropped the paramedic's face—literally dropped it, the chunk of flesh falling from his mouth to land on the concrete with a wet slap—and turned. His eyes found Anya. His mouth, slick with blood and tissue, opened. A sound came out. Not a word. Not even a moan. Just a hungry, desperate, animal sound that made something primal and ancient in Anya's hindbrain start screaming run run run run run.

Detective Miller: "Anya..." His voice was barely a whisper, barely a breath, the voice of a man who had finally seen something that broke through every defense he'd ever built. "Anya, what the fuck—what the fuck is happening—"

Anya: "Everyone out!" Her voice cut through the chaos like a whip, like a gunshot, like the voice of someone who had spent years learning to be heard over chaos and death. "Get the fuck out now! Move! Go!"

The male paramedic was already running, his footsteps echoing as he fled toward the door, toward the light, toward anything that wasn't this. The uniforms who had been standing at the edges of the light were moving too, some drawing their weapons with shaking hands, some just running, all of them with the same expression of pure, animal terror stamped on their faces.

The dead were standing now. All of them. Eleven bodies, torn and broken, missing pieces, leaking blood and viscera, standing on legs that shouldn't hold weight, moving with joints that shouldn't bend, their eyes fixed on the living with that same hungry, desperate intensity.

The woman with the torn-off arm took a step forward. Her foot landed wrong, her ankle twisting with a wet crack, but she didn't fall. She didn't even stumble. She just kept coming, her remaining arm reaching out, fingers curling and uncurling like she was grasping for something just out of reach.

The man whose chest had been opened, whose heart was missing, lurched toward them. Each step left a wet slap of blood on the concrete, each movement sent more fluid spilling from the cavity where his heart should have been.

The boy was moving too, faster than the others, his ruined abdomen trailing loops of intestine behind him like some grotesque bridal train. His clouded eyes never left Anya's face.

Anya's hand moved on its own, dropping her flashlight—it hit the concrete with a clatter and rolled away, its beam spinning wildly—and reaching for the Glock holstered at her hip. The weight of it was familiar, comforting, the one constant in a world that had just proven it could break every rule she'd ever known. She pulled it free, the motion smooth and practiced, raised it, sighted down the barrel at the approaching dead.

The woman with no jaw was closest now. Ten feet away. Eight. Six. Her tongue, hanging against her chest, was turning black at the tip, the flesh darkening and shriveling even as Anya watched. Her eyes never left Anya's face. Her ruined mouth worked soundlessly.

Miller was shouting something behind her—orders, prayers, warnings, she couldn't tell, couldn't hear the words over the roaring in her ears. All she could hear was the wet shuffle of dead feet on concrete, the awful hungry sounds they made, the pounding of her own heart in her ears like a drum, like a countdown.

The woman took another step.

Four feet.

Anya's finger tightened on the trigger, the pressure steady, controlled, the way she'd been trained. Center mass. Double tap. Watch them fall. But these weren't criminals. These weren't suspects. These were—

Three feet.

She could smell them now. Death and rot and blood and something else, something that made her think of slaughterhouses and battlefields and all the places in the world where humanity had learned that other people could become meat. It was the smell of the food chain turned inside out, of predators and prey confused, of everything she'd ever known about the order of the world turned upside down.

Two feet.

The woman reached for her, her torn arm rising, her clouded eyes fixed on Anya's face, her ruined mouth opening wide, wider, too wide, impossibly wide—

Anya's gun came up.

Her finger tightened on the trigger.