“I mean, it’s a bird. They can fly pretty high, can’t they?” She looked at him and then shrugged. “No different from any usual flying target I’ve hit.”

  “Huh. So how did you get the bow?”

  “I got a selection of classes, and my bow came with the one that seemed fitting.”

  The two then fell silent. At her sister’s side, Sasha made faces at the dog as it walked beside Lucas. The creature would look at her in confusion and just shake his head. Clearly, he wasn’t an animal that was easily amused.

  A few minutes later, they stumbled upon a familiar sight. Towering over the three crushed buildings next to it, the bank loomed across the street. Lucas stopped, his trainers scraping on the gravel as he directed his gaze toward the structure.

  “I remember that,” he said.

  “This bank? I don’t think I’ve seen it before. Not from before all this happened,” Isabelle said.

  “I was running this way earlier,” Lucas replied, focusing on the cracked columns that lined the bank’s front exterior. One particular crack, where a column and the roof met, popped, widening slightly.

  Isabelle turned to him, and Lucas frowned as he continued. “A wolf was chasing me. Well, me and a bunch of other people.” He paused. It had felt as if the wolves were chasing everyone. “Didn’t one come after you?”

  “It did,” she said, then fell silent, her eyes going vacant. Images flashed through Lucas’s mind as the wind played in his hair: her father lying in his own blood, and the wolf’s bite marks on his leg. He could guess what had happened.

  “I see,” Lucas said. “But yeah, I came this way. So if my guess is right, at the end of the street there should be a familiar car, and perhaps even a familiar turn.” He couldn’t be exactly sure, but his gut told him he was on the right track.

  The group began walking again, and a few meters down the road, he found what he was looking for: Victoria Street. His street, where he’d grown up. Exactly the street he was looking for.

  His steps picked up, the rattling of suitcases behind him increasing as Isabelle and her sister tried to keep pace. The dog yapped at him, and Lucas shot a glance down.

  “I need to hurry,” Lucas said as the animal gave him a dubious look. It’s not like he was trying to abandon them.

  They turned onto the street.

  And it was carnage—blood trails led into a swaying forest of trees that weren’t there the previous day. Neighbours milled around like lost ghosts. Some of them huddled in corners, weeping.

  Others shouted at their phones before throwing them on the floor. A few walked around knocking on doors, trying to gather people, maybe trying to get themselves together before the authorities arrived. Though judging by that forest, if the authorities came, it wouldn’t be by car.

  At the end of the street, just before the forest started, his house sat almost peacefully. If it weren’t for everything else around it and the shattered front room window, it’d almost be as if nothing had changed.

  He broke into a light jog.

  “Wait!” Isabelle cried behind him, and he slowed down a bit, allowing the girl and her sister to catch up, suitcases rattling all the while.

  People on the street looked over—some of them frowning, others giving him grim smiles of recognition. Was something wrong? Did they know something he didn’t?

  “This is all so crazy. Did your street always look like this?” Isabelle asked from behind. It was a silly question. Though admittedly, her own road hadn’t looked nearly as bad. There wasn’t the start of a forest at the end of the road.

  However, didn’t she leave her house? Had she not been to this area before? Where she lived on Main Street wasn’t far from here, with only one or two turns.

  “No,” Lucas said.

  She fell silent at that, her cheeks reddening a little. “Dumb question, sorry.”

  She didn’t need to apologise; he didn’t really mind. As he pushed open the front gate, he frowned at the open front door. No one had closed it. Did that mean a wolf had got in? What would he find once he stepped in?

  He hesitated.

  “Lucas, if this is where you live.” Behind him, Isabelle set her suitcase down. She surveyed the street with what seemed like fake interest, though there was a sense of unease in her gaze. “Doesn’t that mean Ian also lives around here?”

  “Yes,” Lucas muttered. But the words were hollow, an automatic response, not a full understanding. He glanced over his shoulder, eyes moving to Ian’s house. “I think he lives over there.”

  Was any of this even real?

  Part of him wanted to turn around and never know the perhaps grizzly truth. Because if he never went in, he’d never know if they were okay—or if they were dead. Though time always revealed everything, he couldn’t wait forever for someone to emerge.

  Gritting his teeth, he stepped forward, the German shepherd striding at his side. He appreciated the support. This beast, even with his new intelligence, was still a loyal animal. Though it appeared it could now choose who it was loyal to—and it wasn’t just some strange instinct.

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  Upon stepping over the old, worn carpet and being hit with the smell of home, part of that hope reignited in him like a furnace. Aside from the open door, everything in the house was the same. There was no blood, no torn walls, no shredded carpet. Everything was the same.

  “Mum!” he called and waited. A moment passed.

  “Lucas, get up here!” she replied, her voice urgent and worried.

  His lips split into an excited grin, and he grabbed the handrail, sprinting up the steps. Normally, his mother would yell at him for this action, but he doubted she cared now.

  “Mum, Mum, are you alright?” He called as she stepped onto the landing.

  “Stop shouting!” She snapped from the other side of her room door. “Just get in here.”

  “Mum, it’s okay, they’re gone. The wolves—they’ve disappeared. It’s okay, you can come out now.”

  “I told you to be quiet!” Lucas’s mother scolded from the other side of the door.

  He’d seen his mother upset over the years—what child hadn’t? But this had to be one of the very few times he’d seen her scared, or at least heard her voice so scared.

  When the debts were due, and money was low, the threat of the house being taken had made her scared. Another time, they’d lost his brother at the park. She’d been so angry, but the overall emotion she seemed to feel that day was fear. Lucas himself had fared no better.

  The fear of losing someone you loved so deeply was like being strangled. Losing their father had been hard enough.

  “It’s fine, Mum,” he whispered, his voice weak, as he tried to calm her.

  “Just come inside,” she whispered. “I’ll unlock the door.”

  “Wait. Before you do that,” Lucas interrupted. He rested a hand on the door’s wood, the dried paint scratching against his skin. “Have you seen the screens, Mum?”

  “Screens?” she asked, the floor creaking as she shifted. “What screens?”

  “You know,” he said with some hesitation. Had she not received the notification? Though ‘what screens’ spoke volumes enough. “Mum, didn’t you have any strange feelings? Were you not unconscious?”

  There was silence for a moment, as if his mother was trying to digest what he was saying. Then Roland’s voice crackled through a little later, harsh and strained like he’d been crying.

  “Mum, why aren’t you letting—”

  “There was a headache,” their mother said, cutting Roland off. “Then I saw a screen, but I thought I was hallucinating. I thought it was all in my head. I’d hoped it was.”

  “Mum,” Lucas said, though the words failed to form. What could he say exactly? To deny reality and say none of this was happening would be foolish at best and downright evil at worst.

  His mother was struggling to accept things. He had to accept that, and he had to support her. But he couldn’t coddle her into her new reality. They had to work through it as a family.

  “Mum,” he started slowly. “The wolves are gone, but I believe they will come back. The system, the screens that you saw—they are not in your imagination. Do you think we can talk about it?”

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  Lucas shook his head as he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, his mother’s voice still sounding through her bedroom door behind him, telling him to come back.

  He just sighed. While he’d asked her to talk about it, the woman had blatantly refused and instead stated that they should first hunker down and try to get in contact with the authorities.

  While the idea in itself wasn’t wrong—if these were normal times, that is—they weren’t in normal times. The world had changed, and wolves, Flameback wolves, now hunted people with the help of burning boars and fiery crows that hawked in the sky, alerting their kin to people’s location.

  They were in a veritable war of species, and hunkering down, whilst deeply appealing to Lucas, didn’t seem like the right thing to do right now. Instead, they should figure out the system and understand what they could.

  Reaching the bottom of the stairs, he crossed his short hallway and stepped into the front room. There, he found Isabelle holding a family photo that had been resting on the mantelpiece. It was a photo from when their family had last been whole.

  His dad had taken them to a water park and asked a passerby to take a picture of them together. Roland had been beaming that day, bright-eyed and hopeful. He still carried most of that joy, though Lucas wouldn’t deny that he saw some pain in his little brother’s eyes.

  “You guys look cute together,” Isabelle said, her eyes lingering on the photo. She was perhaps thinking about her own family, the people she’d never see again. It was just her and her sister now. Her dad was gone, perhaps her mother too—Lucas hadn’t had the chance to ask yet.

  “We were happy then,” Lucas said, moving further into the living room.

  Sasha sat on their leather couch, kicking her legs back and forth. In the living room corner, the dog sat curled up, tail tucked under its head; its thoughts elsewhere. Glass still littered the carpet from earlier as a subtle wind blew in from the open window.

  From the shattered window, neighbours continued to drift around, clearing up pieces from their driveways while others stared in shock at blood trails.

  The wolves had dragged away what they could, though a few body parts still lingered on the floor. A mother across the street moved her child away as she stared back at a particular severed arm resting against a car wheel.

  Had that been someone she knew—the child’s father, perhaps? Lucas’s eyes fell to the old carpet, and he turned away from the window.

  “So what are you going to do now?” Lucas asked.

  “Where’s your dad?” Isabelle asked, ignoring his question.

  Isabelle raised a brow. She was definitely thinking about her father, and who could blame her? The man hadn’t died but two hours ago, maybe less.

  “He’s dead,” Lucas said.

  She glanced up at him; her gaze lingered for a moment, as if assessing him. “I’m sorry,” she said.

  He shrugged. “Life happens. There’s not really much you can do about it.”

  She nodded and turned back to the photo, looking it over for a moment before setting it back down onto the mantelpiece. Then she moved over to the TV and began messing with the buttons.

  “Do you think the electricity will come back?”

  A pit dropped into Lucas’s stomach. He hadn’t even considered that. Power and electricity hadn’t even seemed important when running from an animal that could tear you in half with just its claws.

  Was the water even still functioning? If not, they were in serious trouble, and the problems would stack quickly if the government couldn’t respond.

  Outside, the trees that hadn’t been there before, leading into a forest that was certainly not there before, swayed. Was it even possible for the government to come back together? Had it already dissipated?

  Surely not. Things were bad during the pandemic, but society was slowly getting back to normal, even though that normal was a cruel, pragmatic one. Surely this was but a small disturbance, and help would be there if not later today, maybe tomorrow.

  Glass crunched as a neighbour stepped into view from the side. He wore blue jeans and had on a red shirt. A black cardigan covered the shirt, and he dusted his hands before waving at them.

  “Hey, guys. Hope you guys are all right.”

  Lucas eyed him for a moment, trying to place the face. He recognised him. He was a neighbour, though not one Lucas had spoken to before.

  “We’re all right.”

  “This is all so messed up, isn’t it?” the man continued, his gaze shifting from Lucas to the two girls. He then glanced over his shoulder. A worried look seemed to take over his features before he turned back with a strained smile. “Mind if I ask you for a favour?”