Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Day One — “The Noise of Breathing”
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CATCO
Night had a way of making the glass look thinner. From Cat Grant’s corner office, the city was a bruise of sodium orange and ambulance blue, lights smearing in the rain. The bullpen below was a late-shift hum: keyboards, the rattle of the AC, the hollow chime of the elevator no one wanted to hear anymore.
Kara Danvers stared at the live feed on her monitor: a cell phone’s shiver of video outside National City Memorial. The reporter on-screen—Jared from Metro—was filming the sidewalk like it was a wildlife documentary. Police tape snapped in the wind. A body bag twitched.
“Don’t publish the twitch,” Cat said without looking up. “We’re journalists, not carnival barkers.”
Kara swallowed. “We’re verifying with the hospital—”
“Verify faster.” Cat’s eyes slid to Kara, scalpel-sharp. “And drink water. You’re buzzing.”
Nia Nal, hair scooped into a bun held by a pencil, leaned over the shared desk bank. “CDC posted an update—no, wait, they deleted it. Something about ‘nonstandard postmortem reflexes.’ I screenshotted before it vanished.”
“Good girl.” Cat’s phone pinged; she glanced, frowned. “Legal says we’re clear on the shelter-in-place bulletin. Run it top-of-site with the governor’s quote. No adjectives. I repeat: no adjectives.”
A cough hacked through the bullpen. Heads turned. The cough belonged to Jared.
Which wasn’t possible, because Jared was at the hospital.
Except Jared, face gray and sweaty, was stumbling out of the elevator cradling his camera against his ribs, security badge still clipped to his jacket. He waved off the nearest copy editor, coughed again, and went to one knee beside Kara’s desk.
“Kara,” he rasped. “Battery died. Had to—had to run.”
The camera strap slid from his fingers. He tipped forward, hard enough that his shoulder struck the side of Kara’s chair. Cat was already out of her office, already shouting for someone to call 911, for James to grab the first aid kit, for everyone else to give the man room.
Jared stopped coughing.
The newsroom held its breath.
Kara pressed the heel of her hand to Jared’s sternum. “Jared? Can you hear me?”
His mouth opened. Nothing came out. There was a dumb, dry sound like paper. Then there was nothing at all.
Cat’s voice went low. “Danvers.”
Kara looked up. Cat didn’t have to say it. She tilted her head once: do what you can.
Kara began chest compressions. James counted under his breath. Nia stood frozen, fingers white around the edge of a desk.
Thirty compressions. Two breaths. Repeat.
Jared didn’t come back.
The elevator chimed.
“Phones down,” Cat said, barely a whisper. The room obeyed her the way a skittish horse obeys the smallest shift of weight. “Back up, give them room.”
Security arrived with a stretcher that no one was sure they wanted.
Jared took a breath.
Kara’s pressed hands were still on his chest. She felt the breath, the wrongness of it—not a gasp, not a cough. A hitch. A hinge opening the wrong way.
His eyes opened—flat, unfocused.
“Kara,” Nia said, small. “He—”
Jared’s hand snapped up, fast as a mousetrap. His fingers closed on Kara’s wrist.
Everything went loud at once: the scream of someone who didn’t know they’d started screaming, James swearing, a chair skidding, Cat’s voice cutting across it all: “MOVE.”
James shoved his shoulder into Jared’s chest, breaking the grip. The world broke with it. Jared—Jared—rolled with an animal thrash, teeth bared, jaws working. Blood trickled from his nose. He made a sound too wet to be human.
“Back!” Cat snapped. “All of you—doors, now. Olsen, Danvers, you’re with me. Nal—”
Nia’s eyes were huge and shining. A younger intern near the coffee station—the one who always over-steeped the tea—had gone paper-white and was hyperventilating, hands clawed at his throat as if the air had turned to smoke.
“Nal,” Cat said, gentler. “Go to him. Slow your breathing. He’ll match you. You can do that.”
Nia swallowed hard. “Okay.” She moved, kneeling in front of the panicking intern, talking low and steady, making a metronome of her own lungs.
Jared lunged again.
James took the hit, drove him back into a desk. Wood splintered. Someone swung a metal trashcan; it clanged off Jared’s shoulder, useless. A copy editor—six months out of college, hero for exactly one second—took a wild swing and connected with James instead. James’s head snapped sideways. He grunted, staggered.
“Enough!” Cat’s voice cracked like a starter pistol. “We are leaving.” She pointed. “Stairs. Phones, bags, nothing else. Go.”
Kara grabbed Nia by the elbow. “We’ve got to go, come on—”
“I can’t just leave him!” Nia’s voice trembled; the intern’s breath hitched like a stalling engine.
Kara squeezed, soft but sure. “You’re not leaving him; you’re bringing him with you. That’s the assignment.”
Cat had already torn a fire axe out of the wall box. She met Jared’s blank stare with a look that said I made America listen to me; don’t think I won’t make you do it too. The axe came down. Wood, bone, a wet thunk.
“Move,” Cat said again, and the room finally listened.
They surged for the stairwell. Someone fumbled the crash-bar, and then the door banged open and the stairwell breathed back at them—dust, old gum, a handprint on the wall at shoulder height that hadn’t been there this morning.
On the landing below, a woman in a pencil skirt was crouched over a janitor in a green shirt, shaking him by the collar. The janitor’s arm jerked, puppet-fast.
Kara didn’t think; she put two fingers to her mouth and whistled. It was a clean, bright sound that cut the panic the way rain cuts smoke. Heads snapped toward her, including the woman’s.
“Upstairs,” Kara said, calm she didn’t feel. “We’re evacuating by the lobby. You can come with us.”
“What lobby?” the woman spat. “They’re—there are bodies—”
The janitor sat up.
“No time,” James said. He shouldered past, and the woman swung at him with a closed fist fueled by adrenaline and terror. It connected with his cheekbone so hard Kara felt it in her teeth.
James blinked at her, stunned but steady. “Okay,” he said mildly, “that’s your one.” He took her wrist—not cruelly—and steered her toward the stairs. “Come on.”
Behind them, somewhere deep in the building, an alarm finally remembered how to be an alarm. The sound galvanized everything dead and living. Below, doors banged; above, feet thudded. The janitor made a raw, wet sound and lurched to his feet.
The noise woke the dead.
Cat didn’t flinch. “Up. Now.”
They made the lobby with the kind of luck that feels like theft. Glass doors shuddered against a press of bodies outside—living, desperate. Inside, the building’s marble gleamed like a lie. Security guards yelled orders that sounded like prayers. Someone’s blood smeared the info desk in a single, petulant handprint.
“Service corridor,” James said, pointing. “It cuts to the alley.”
Cat nodded once. “Danvers, Nal, with me. Keep eyes up and voices down.”
Kara’s heart hammered. She looked at the glass—out to the city, where sirens were a constant line on the staff paper of the night—and then back at her people. Nia had the intern moving. The woman who’d punched James had gone silent, breathing like she’d run a marathon. Cat was all angles and decision.
It felt, stupidly, like a lead.
“Okay,” Kara said, more to herself than anyone else. “Okay. We go.”
They slid into the service corridor, lights flickering overhead. The world narrowed to concrete, to the stink of bleach and metal, to the drag of their shoes. At the end of the hall, a steel door with a push bar and a sign that said NO RE-ENTRY watched them like an eye.
Cat shoved the bar. The door gave, grudgingly, and the alley breathed cold on their faces.
They ran.
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L‑CORP
The night shift at L‑Corp tasted like coffee and static.
Sam Arias had three monitors open and a fourth she pretended not to notice. On one, a hospital intake spreadsheet with too many red flags. On the second, an email chain with subject lines that kept adding RE: until they looked like a fence. On the third, a magnified frame from a coronial video that had been pulled from the National Database two hours after it was uploaded. The fourth monitor—off—held her reflection, hair escaping its clip, mouth a determined line.
Lena Luthor stood in the doorway of Lab 3 in a lab coat that made her look like a surgeon about to tell someone the truth. Her name badge said L. LUTHOR / R&D – SPECIAL PROJECTS. Jeans, boots, a blouse that had survived two board meetings and a donor dinner without wrinkling. She’d rolled her sleeves up. The cuff creases looked like decisions.
“Walk me through it again,” she said.
Sam didn’t turn. “Initial onset reads like viral pneumonia, high fever, rapid decomp. Postmortem… anomalies.” Her fingertip traced the timeline across the screen. “Some patients experience postmortem movement. More than reflex. There’s coordinated muscular activity.”
“Coordinated,” Lena repeated. “As in goal-directed.”
“As in not random.” Sam exhaled. “CDC scrubbed their notice. Someone’s spooked.”
“Someone should be.” Lena moved closer, eyes knife-bright. “Signal pathways?”
Sam clicked open a second set of graphs. “There’s a spike here—postmortem—like a last gasp of electrical noise. Then… something else. Not brain, not heart. Peripheral. Almost like the body is listening for a different conductor.”
It was quiet enough to hear the building breathe: HVAC through ducts, the elevator whispering up and down somewhere outside their wing. The glass looked like it was waiting to be a mirror.
The lights flickered.
Sam and Lena looked at each other.
The lights went out.
In the dark, a door slammed down the hall. A long moment later, the emergency strips kindled red along the baseboards. The lab went submarine—everything in deep-water colors, the edges of the world too soft.
“Backup should have kicked in,” Sam said.
“It won’t.” Lena’s voice was too steady to be comforting. “Someone cut main power. Manual override prevents auto-start without a live check.”
“How do you know that?”
Lena’s half smile didn’t reach her eyes. “I designed it.”
Something thumped against the glass of Lab 2. Another thump. Another.
Sam moved to the door window and peered down the corridor. Figures in the red glow. Stumbling. One of them in a lab coat. One in night security gray. One barefoot, hospital gown flapping like a sail.
“Med transport from Memorial,” Sam said, throat tight. “We took three research cadavers tonight for comparative postmortem. Someone rushed a transfer.”
“Not cadavers,” Lena said softly.
On cue, the woman in the hospital gown found the glass. Her face slid over it, smearing, mouth working like a fish at the surface of a tank where the pump had broken. Her pupils ate the color of her eyes.
Sam’s hand went to Lena’s forearm without asking permission. Lena didn’t pull away. “Security?”
“Already called.” Lena’s voice sharpened. “We do this clean. First, we don’t panic. Second, we isolate. Third, we get survivors out.” She turned, raised her voice. “If you can hear me, this is Lena Luthor. All personnel: move to Lab 3. Calmly.”
Two shapes materialized from a side office. The first, a tall man in a black suit with a stoic face Sam had only ever seen at the periphery—J’onn, Head of Security, always too quiet, always exactly where he needed to be. The second, a woman with copper hair braided back, wearing a maintenance polo with a name patch that read MGANN.
“Power’s manual,” J’onn said, voice even. “We lost comms on floors two through nine. Stairwells are clear for now. North freight elevator’s dead.” He looked to Lena like a man reporting to a general he trusted. “Ma’am.”
“M’gann?” Lena asked.
“Basement cafe,” the woman said, mouth wry even now. “Late close. I know the tunnels.” She nodded at the floor. “Loading dock’s a warren. If you want people out, that’s your rabbit hole.”
Lena exhaled once, decision settling on her shoulders like a coat. “All right. J’onn, you’re with me and Sam. We collect who we can on this floor and move along the south corridor. M’gann, take a second team down through the service lift shaft; pry it if you have to. Meet us at Dock C. If we don’t make it in twenty minutes, you go without us.”
M’gann’s eyes flicked to the glass, to the mouths dragging wetly across it. “Copy.”
Lena pivoted to the whiteboard, uncapped a marker, and in three lines gave the building a spine: ASSEMBLE (Lab 3) → ARMORY (Sec. Annex) → DOCK C. She underlined the last point twice.
“Security annex?” Sam echoed.
“My brother was paranoid and I inherited the inventory,” Lena said. “Tasers, batons, a few sidearms, nonlethals. We’re not cowboys; we move quiet. Volunteers only.”
“I’ll go,” M’gann said immediately. “I know the dead zones.”
A lab tech in scrubs hugged herself, shaking. “I’ll go with her.”
“Good.” Lena’s nod was crisp. “You’re Team Two. J’onn—open the annex.”
He was already moving. The annex door chirped open under his card, revealing a narrow room with lockers and a metal cage full of security gear. The smell of gun oil sat metallic on the air.
Lena rolled up her sleeves all the way. “Take what you can actually use. A baton is as good as a bullet if you’re not practiced.” She caught Sam’s eye. “You okay?”
“No,” Sam said truthfully. Then she picked up a baton, tested the weight, and squared her shoulders. “But I’m good.”
The glass in Lab 2 spidered under a hit from outside. J’onn handed Lena a collapsible baton and a small flashlight; she clipped both at her waist.
“Move,” Lena said, and the room obeyed her.
They found three more survivors in the south corridor: a junior chemist missing a shoe, a clinical auditor with a crooked tie, and a night janitor bleeding from a cut on his scalp. The auditor flinched when J’onn touched his elbow to steady him, then looked embarrassed. The chemist cried silently and kept pace.
The first body reanimated behind them when someone dropped a tray.
It wasn’t the sound itself, Sam thought later, but the way sound stacked in a building like this—reflections and bass, a quarry of noise. The man on the floor hiccupped back into motion like a bad toy winding up. He clawed at the tile, teeth bared.
“Don’t engage,” J’onn said gently, as if telling a child not to wake a sleeping dog. “Eyes forward.”
They made Dock C in eighteen minutes with the kind of luck you don’t spend lightly. M’gann had the outer door propped with a toolbox, the alley slick with recent rain. Night air hit Sam’s face like swallowing cold water.
“Two vans,” M’gann said. “Keys in the office. I’ll hotwire if I have to.”
“We won’t have to,” Lena said, already moving. She ducked into the dock manager’s cubby, came up with a ring of keys long enough to be a necklace. “Everyone in. J’onn—rear guard.”
They packed the first van with eight, the second with six. Sam slid into the passenger seat of the lead van. Lena took the wheel like she would be offended if it tried anything clever. J’onn climbed into the back, braced, baton across his knees.
“Where?” Sam asked.
Lena’s jaw flexed once. “Not home. Not yet. There’s an interim site we can hold. Mid-city, good sightlines, backup generator on a private loop.”
“What is it?”
“A lab that doesn’t officially exist.”
Sam stared at her, then laughed once, bright and disbelieving. “Of course you have one of those.”
Lena didn’t quite smile. “Seatbelt.”
She drove. Behind them, Dock C breathed out, and the building exhaled something that wasn’t human.
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CATCO
They didn’t slow until two blocks and three alleys later, tucked under an awning that smelled like old cigarettes and rain. The city had a new sound—sirens like sewing machines gone feral, the chop of helicopter blades, the radio-scramble of a dozen agencies forgetting how to share.
Cat checked the street with a predator’s glance. “Phones. Inventory. Who’s got what?”
“Me,” James said, touching the pocket where his phone lived. “Battery at forty.”
“Twenty-three,” Nia said. “I screenshotted everything.”
Kara’s phone buzzed like a trapped fly. Alex: three missed calls. A text half-written and unsent. Kara’s throat tightened.
Cat caught the look. “Family?”
“My sister,” Kara said. “She—she’s CDC. Or FBI liaison to CDC now, I don’t—she changes her title when the world changes.” She tried to smile; it felt wrong on her face. “She’s in the thick of it.”
Cat’s eyes found the horizon, calculating. “Good. We’ll need her.” She looked at their little knot of survivors: the intern whose name none of them could remember right now, the woman who’d punched James and now wouldn’t meet his eye, a copy editor with a bloody knuckle and a stubborn jaw. “We are not equipped to babysit the apocalypse. We find authoritative logistics. That means CDC. That means your sister.”
Kara nodded, something like heat behind her eyes. She thumbed the call.
It rang once.
“—Kara?” Alex’s voice was breathless and too loud. Somewhere on her end, alarms chirped. “Can you hear me?”
“I’m here. I’m okay. We’re—Cat, James, Nia—we got out.” Kara swallowed. “Where are you?”
“In a hole,” Alex said, and Kara could hear her smile even over the noise. “Literally. CDC field office downtown moved into a basement to keep out of the way. Power is—spotty. We’re triaging bad data and worse rumors.” A clatter. “Listen to me: you need to shelter. Barricade. Do not try to cross town in the dark. We saw what happens when people start moving in packs. It attracts them.”
“Them,” Kara repeated.
“People who aren’t people anymore,” Alex said, voice gone iron. “We don’t have language yet and that’s half the problem.” A beat, softer. “Are you really okay?”
Kara looked at Cat, at Nia, at James with his already-bruising cheekbone, and at the little constellation of strangers who had become theirs by accident. “We’re okay.”
“Good. Then listen. Find a building with one way in and more than one way out. High floors. Water. Doors you can lock. Keep everyone quiet. You move at dawn—first light. Not before.”
“Where to?”
“To me,” Alex said. “I’ll send coordinates when the system stops eating texts.” A rough laugh. “Kara—tell Cat Grant I still have that photo of her yelling at a senator in the rain. It’s framed.”
Cat, who could hear everything, arched one eyebrow, pleased despite herself.
“We’ll come to you,” Kara said. “At first light.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
The call stuttered, then died.
Cat didn’t waste the moment. “There’s a storage facility two blocks east with climate control and terrible Yelp reviews. Thick doors. We hold there. Olsen, recon. Danvers, you’re on point with me. Nal—keep our breathing even.” She turned to the survivors, voice carrying like a lighthouse. “We are going to walk. We are going to be very boring about it. Boring people live longer. Ready?”
No one was ready. They went anyway.
Rain started up again, soft as a whisper. The city changed shape under it, edges blurred, streetlights halos. Kara stepped into the street and felt the day crack like ice under her heel.
They moved.
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L‑CORP
The interim site turned out to be a square building with blacked-out windows and a barely-there sign that read FAULKNER LOGISTICS, which was a lie. Inside, the lobby smelled like dust and old printer toner. A stairwell yawned, promising concrete and echoes.
Lena killed the alarms with a keycard and a look that said try me. The generator thunked alive after a manual coax; the lights stuttered and held.
They triaged on instinct. Sam turned a conference room into a ward with bottled water and a first aid kit that belonged in a history museum. J’onn took a window and watched the street the way a man watches a chessboard. M’gann moved like a tide pool, finding what needed doing before it remembered to ask.
“Security sweep,” Lena said. “Two teams. No heroes, no solos.” She looked at Sam. “You’re with me.”
“You sure?”
“I am many things,” Lena said, something bleak and bright in her eyes. “I am very sure.”
They climbed. On the third floor, a row of offices waited with their chairs tucked under their desks like good students. On the fifth, a door had been propped with a binder clip and then forgotten, the clip bent like a broken promise.
“Listen,” Lena said.
Sam held her breath. Beneath the generator’s steady thrum, the city sang its new, wrong song. But up close, in this building—nothing. No shuffle, no breath.
“Clear,” Sam said.
“Clear,” Lena echoed.
They returned to the lobby to find M’gann doling out protein bars like communion and J’onn turning a whiteboard into a map. Sam felt her adrenaline start to ebb and hated the way her hands shook in the quiet.
Lena saw it and said nothing. She set her lab coat on the back of a chair and rolled her sleeves again, as if the ritual itself kept the panic obedient.
“Next,” Lena said. “We get eyes outside.”
“Scouting?” J’onn asked.
“Volunteers,” Lena confirmed. “We need to know what’s between us and the river. If power holds, we can hold. But we are not the only ones who’ll think so.”
“I’ll go,” M’gann said, soft and certain.
Sam lifted her hand. “Me too.” She met Lena’s gaze. “I know the data points we need.”
Lena considered, then nodded. “We go armored, not armed. Noise is a magnet.” She looked at J’onn. “You hold here. If we aren’t back in two hours…”
“You will be,” J’onn said. It wasn’t a hope. It was a fact he had decided.
Lena almost smiled. “We’ll try to live up to your expectations.”
She turned to the room—sixteen people with too many questions and not enough answers. She lifted her voice. “We are safe for now. We are not safe forever. We will act like both these things are true.” She paused, eyes moving over faces until they caught and held. “There will be a time for fear. This is not that time. This is the time for calm and work. Breathe.”
They breathed.
Outside, the rain wrote on the city.
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CATCO
The storage facility had a front office that looked like it had been decorated by a man who loved laminate. Behind it, rows of units like little metal chapels. The clerk was gone. The cash drawer hung open, mouth emptied.
James found a unit with a roll-up door and a padlock still dangling open. Inside: someone’s life in boxes. A lamp with a jaunty shade. A crib they had meant to sell. A crate of books that smelled like college.
Cat stepped inside, looked once, and nodded. “We nest,” she said. “Olsen, makeshift barricade. Nal, inventory what we can eat without cooking. Danvers—call your sister again in an hour. If she doesn’t pick up, we still move at dawn.”
“First light,” Kara said, and the words felt like a handhold.
They worked. It looked nothing like TV. It looked like dragging boxes and taping paper over the strip of glass in the door and finding a bucket because someone always has to find the bucket. It looked like fear with a job.
Kara texted Alex their coordinates. Message failed. She tried again. Failed. She typed, We’re okay. We’ll come to you. First light. She didn’t hit send. She couldn’t stand to watch it fail again.
Cat sat with her back to the door, axe balanced across her knees. In the dim, with rain drumming steady, she looked less like a myth and more like a woman who had refused to learn the word retire.
Nia doled out protein bars and water, eyes still glassy but breath steady. The intern fell asleep with his head against a box labeled TAXES, 2018.
James pressed an ice pack made from frozen peas he’d stolen from the storage facility’s breakroom against his cheekbone. “I’ve had worse,” he told Kara when he caught her looking. He grinned. “I’ve had better, too.”
Kara’s laugh surprised her. It came out sounding like a person.
She thumbed open her phone one more time and found one bar of signal like a miracle.
She called.
Alex picked up on the second ring. “You holding?”
“We’re holding,” Kara said. “We’ll move at dawn.”
There was a pause on the line. Then Alex: “Good. That’s the smartest thing you’ve said all year.” The gentleness under the tease made Kara swallow wrong.
“Tell me where to go,” Kara said.
“I will. When the system behaves.” Alex exhaled. “Get what sleep you can.” She hesitated. “Kara—”
“Yeah?”
“I love you.”
Kara closed her eyes. “I love you too.”
The line clicked dead.
Cat’s voice, dry: “Was that my favorite Danvers?”
Kara wiped her face with the heel of her hand. “She says we move at dawn.”
Cat looked at the door like she could see the sun through it. “Of course she does.” She tapped the axe head against her boot, once. “All right, troops. First light.”
They made places to sit. They made a rotation for the door. They made a night out of a day that had gone wrong in slow motion and then all at once.
Kara didn’t sleep. She listened to the rain and to the breathing of people she’d chosen. She watched the thin line of light under the door and waited for it to thicken.
Somewhere across the city, a woman in a lab coat wrote a plan on a whiteboard and rolled up her sleeves. Somewhere under the city, a sister counted the minutes until she could send a text that wouldn’t vanish.
The night held.
At the edge of it, dawn began to lift its head.
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End of Chapter
Next: Day Two – first light, first route, first losses