The raiders had lost the field, and Lachlan was pretty sure that even the zombies knew that.

He had already clocked the two raiders moving through the trees before the cages were even empty.

They’d split off while the others focused on the trucks and the screaming mess of stupid zombies turning on their masters.

They were clever enough to think they could come in from the sides, but not clever enough to know that the horde had already marked them.

He shifted his weight against the barn wall and watched them slip through the brush like men trying too hard to be ghosts.

One carried a machete. The other had a rifle he clearly didn’t trust, checking the bolt too often, muttering something about "the girl" like that was going to end well for anybody tonight.

Smoke drifted between the trees, carrying the stench of burned fuel and rot. It mixed with the human smell riding the wind — sweat and gun oil, leather damp with old rain.

Lachlan tilted his head like he was listening to music only he could hear.

It wasn’t music, though. It was the forest telling him where to put his feet, where the wind carried their voices, how close he could get before they realized they weren’t the hunters anymore.

He caught Alexei’s eye through a gap in the boards. Gave a small hand signal. Wide flank. Cut them off.

Alexei’s mouth twitched like a man suppressing a joke. He melted into the smoke without a word, the air already starting to frost where his boots touched down.

The raiders didn’t notice.

Lachlan moved the other way, easy, unhurried, letting the machete swing loose in his hand like this was all a walk back home from the pub.

He could feel the thing under his skin stretching closer to the surface, the world sharpening around its edges. His grin had nothing to do with humor when it showed teeth in the half-light. 𝓯𝓻𝒆𝙚𝒘𝓮𝙗𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝒍.𝙘𝓸𝙢

The first raider froze when the cold hit.

It came from the ground first — a slick of ice racing across roots and fallen leaves, locking boots where they stood. Alexei stepped out of the fog behind them, his knife in one hand, the other still open like he’d simply told the frost to listen.

The second raider barely got his rifle up before Lachlan came in from the other side.

He didn’t run. Running was messy.

He just moved fast enough to close the space before the man decided where to point the barrel.

One hard swing took the rifle off its line. Another snapped the man’s balance sideways. The machete came down clean across his back before he hit the ground.

The man made a sound like the air leaving a tire.

The first raider tried to wrench his feet out of the ice, panic turning his hands stupid.

Alexei didn’t give him time to figure it out. A quick slice across the hamstrings and the man went down hard, legs folding wrong.

"Yours or mine?" Alexei asked without looking up, voice calm as church glass.

"Doesn’t matter," Lachlan replied, wiping the blade on his own pant leg.

The man on the ground twisted enough to see them coming. He started to beg.

The problem was that the words were wrong. The night was wrong. He was asking forgiveness but not truly understanding what he had done wrong.

It was fine though, Lachlan didn’t listen long.

The trees went quiet again fast.

Out in the field, the chaos hadn’t stopped. Trucks were burning, men were screaming, and the stupid zombies chewing through everything they could catch.

Gunfire echoed through the tress like bones breaking.

Lachlan stepped over the body of the dead man and moved back toward the noise.

He felt the creature under his skin settle again, slow heartbeat of a thing that liked the taste of panic in the air.

Alexei fell in beside him, his expression unchanged except for the thin fog curling off his jacket where the ice still clung.

Zubair was fire at the edge of the field, the second truck already a torch behind him.

Raiders tried to run from it, some rolling in the dirt, others throwing themselves into the shallow ditch where fuel still burned on top of the water.

Elias kept his rifle steady from the barn doorway, each shot deliberate. One man aiming for Sera’s back never finished lining it up before Elias put him down with a single crack through the smoke.

Sera hadn’t moved.

She stood with one hand on Luci’s head, the big dire wolf’s ears pricked forward, his eyes locked on the field like he was waiting for her to let him go.

She didn’t. Not yet.

The stupid zombies seemed to be coming for all directions, all bone elbows and snapping teeth. Their eyes rolled white as they caught the smell of blood already thick in the air.

But not one of them came toward the barn.

Every single one went for the raiders.

The men who had survived the first wave finally realized what was happening.

One scrambled onto the hood of the last truck, waving his arms like he could pull order out of this mess by shouting loud enough.

"Get them back in the cages!" he screamed, voice cracking over the engines and gunfire.

Nobody listened.

A stupid zombie hit him square in the spine and they went off the hood together, a tangle of claws and teeth and noise.

Two more raiders tried to drag a cage door shut with half a dozen zombies still inside. They didn’t make it.

Lachlan felt his grin stretch again as he wiped his blade clean a second time.

"Getting ugly out there," Alexei observed, ice still smoking faint off his sleeves.

"Ugly’s fine," Lachlan said. "Means they bleed easier."

He caught movement at the treeline — more raiders spilling in from the south, rifles up, trying to cut wide around the fight to get to the barn. Reinforcements.

Zubair saw them too. Heat rolled off his shoulders like the air itself was starting to sweat.

He lifted both hands and the ground between the new raiders and the barn went up in a wall of fire high enough to swallow the first two before they knew it was there.

Screams hit the smoke hard.

Elias shot through the flames when one made it out crawling. Precise. Efficient. Not a single bullet was wasted.

The stupid zombies were everywhere now, climbing the trucks, dragging men down into the ditches, tearing into anything that didn’t move fast enough.

The lead raider — bigger than the rest, chest armor made from welded license plates, mask cut from a welding visor — hauled himself onto the roof of the last running truck.

He had a megaphone in one hand, a rifle in the other.

His voice cut through the mess sharp enough to turn heads.

"Bring me the girl!" he bellowed.

Every raider who could still hear him turned toward the barn.

Sera didn’t blink.

Lachlan rolled his shoulders back and grinned like someone had just told him the night was about to get interesting.

"Your turn," Alexei murmured beside him, watching more engines roll smoke out of the treeline.

"Yeah," Lachlan said, grip tightening on the machete. "Looks like it."