Page 94 of The Pack

“Thanks,” she said softly, taking a bite.

A short while later, we prepared to leave the cottage. Zara dressed, slipping into a new flannel shirt along with a pair of jeans we’d found packed safely away in a trunk holding clothes, some of which happened to be her size.

“You ready?” I asked, stepping closer.

She nodded, adjusting her tank top under the flannel and rolling her shoulders. “As ready as I’ll ever be.”

Magnus stood near the door, looking off into the distance.

“Let’s move,” he said firmly.

The six of us set off into the forest, the path winding upward as the Wicklow Mountains loomed ahead. The air grew thinner and cooler as we climbed, the dense canopy of trees thinning to reveal jagged rocks and patches of green. We walked for a long time, until the sun reached its zenith in the sky. We paused at the crest of a mountain peak and took a moment to really look at what lay waiting for us in the distance.

The view was both breathtaking and haunting at the same time. In the distance, the ruins of Dublin sprawled out, the corpse of a once-thriving city. The fractured skyline jutted against the horizon, jagged and uneven, with skeletal remains of several buildings leaning precariously like they were frozen in their final moments before they went down.

I remembered this place like it was only yesterday.

Back during the Collapse, when the virus was spreading faster than anyone could control, one of the last organized human armies had gathered near the Rockbrook area just outside Dublin. It was the site of their last stand, a final attempt to hold the line against the feral wolves. The soldiers fortified what they could, set traps, dug trenches, and fought like hell.

The wolves came in endless waves, though, stronger, faster, and more coordinated than anyone had imagined. When it became clear the battle was lost, London made the call that changed everything. A nuclear strike, ordered without warning, turned the entire battlefield into a smoldering crater. Thousands of lives—human and wolf alike—were snuffed out in an instant, and the fallout poisoned everything for miles for a long time.

I’d been there once before in the time since then, and the memory never quite left me.

The heart of the zone was Rockbrook. What had once been a quiet suburb was now an unnatural expanse of fractured terrain, where the earth had been fused into jagged, glass-like formations in some places and crumbled into fine gray dust in others.

The land bore the weight of two hundred years of radiation, its once-searing presence now settled into the soil and air. The ground was uneven and pockmarked, the craters left behind by the explosion softened by erosion, but still gaping like open wounds. What vegetation attempted to grow here was twisted and wrong—patches of thin, brittle grass that shimmered faintly in hues of yellow and sickly green, and trees with bark that peeled away in long, brittle strips, their gnarled branches bare and fragile.

The River Dodder, which once meandered peacefully through the southern suburbs, had been transformed into a lifeless trickle, its waters tinged with a faint iridescence. The banks were coated with layers of strange sediment that sparkled faintly in the light of the sun, remnants of radiation that had seeped into the soil and spread with every rainstorm.

Dublin itself was on the very edge of the nuclear zone. In order to get to the city, we’d have to go through the fallout zone or go well around it.

Zara stopped beside me, her breath catching as she took it all in.

“That’s Dublin,” I said quietly, nodding toward the ruins.

“That’s it,” she answered softly, her voice trembling. “That’s where he is.”

“You don’t know that. He could be somewhere else by now or worse, he—” Tobias began, his dark eyes narrowing as he stood behind us.

“I do know,” she shot back, cutting him off as her gaze locked onto his. “He was taken to Dublin. I saw it on the truck. He’s there, and I’m going to find him.”

Magnus crossed his arms, his expression calm, but unyielding. “We’re not going into the nuclear zone. We’re going to go around it.”

Zara turned to him, her jaw tightening. “Cutting through there is clearly the fastest way. That could take a day versus, how long, a week to go around it?”

“You don’t even know if he’s still alive,” Tobias said, his tone cutting, but not unkind.

“I have to try,” she said, her voice breaking slightly.

Magnus sighed, his eyes softening as he looked at her. “We’ll find another way. A safer way. But we’re not going through the zone. It’s not safe.”

“Magnus—”

“No,” he said firmly, his tone leaving no room for argument. “I understand what he means to you, Zara, but you won’t save him by getting yourself, and us, killed.”

The tension was palpable, the weight of her desperation hanging in the air between us, but we had to stand our ground.

Going through the nuclear zone was too dangerous and she would just have to accept that. We’d go around it and that was that.

---