Meteor Over Michigan

Eli watched those fragments with the wary devotion of a man guarding embers in a rainstorm. Monsters could be fought with bullets, blades, fire, and evolution. Despair had to be fought with routines. He made himself walk the perimeter after every battle. He learned names, checked locks, tested ladders, smelled the wind, and listened for the small wrongness that meant a mutation had found a new way in. His altered senses turned the world into layers: human sweat, old fear, fungal bloom, gun oil, river water, hot wires, infected spoor. Under all of it ran the distant pulse of the crater, patient as a buried heart. It never shouted. It waited. That patience frightened him more than the screams.