Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 3:35 PM
Countdown to Extraction: 59 Hours, 06 Minutes Remaining
They smelled the blood before Mari actually heard them turning.
It wasn't the aimless moaning that came first anymore—not the lazy, scattered groans that used to drift through the city like background noise. This was different. This was pure intent.
A brutal, biological change in cadence. The shuffle behind them sharpened, the dragging footsteps accelerating. Grey bodies violently bumped and slammed into one another as something ancient and horrifyingly simple rewired itself around a single instinct.
Food.
"Move," Mari choked out, hauling Ethan upward with every ounce of strength she had left.
Mari staggered as they broke from the cover of the pallets, nearly blowing her knee out as Ethan's dead weight sagged entirely against her shoulder. His heavy arm was slung around her neck, slick with hot blood that actively soaked right through her winter jacket. It was warm, sticky, and completely unstoppable. Every step they took sent a fresh pulse of agony through the combat medic, and she could physically feel it in the way his massive body jolted against hers—like a ruined car driving on the rims, throwing sparks and grinding metal instead of tires.
The sky above the lot was a bruised, suffocating black. The thermobaric bombs had choked out the sun entirely. The ash fell so thick it felt like wading through a blizzard of pulverized concrete and human remains. It coated Mari's eyelashes and burned her lungs despite the filthy flannel rag tied over her face.
"I can't," Ethan rasped. His boots dragged heavily through the debris, leaving thick smears of blood on the asphalt. His breath was jagged, wet, and failing. "Mari—stop. You have to—"
"Don't," she hissed, though her voice barely made it past the violent pounding of her own heartbeat.
He stumbled again, his knees buckling, and this time she almost went down to the pavement with him. Her boots skidded violently on grit and something shockingly soft that burst underfoot with a pressurized, wet pop. A crushed torso hidden beneath the heavy layer of ash. She didn't look down. She didn't want to know what the fuck she had just stepped in. She just fought to keep them moving.
"They're close," Ethan said, forcing the desperate words through fiercely clenched teeth. "You hear them. You need to let me go."
"I said don't."
Ethan grabbed her jacket sleeve with the hand that still worked, his thick fingers digging into her bicep with frantic, agonizing strength.
"I'm dead weight," Ethan said, his voice dropping into the cold, clinical reality of a man who evaluated battlefield casualties for a living. "You know it. I'll slow you down. You can make it if you drop me."
The word drop hit her harder than a closed fist.
Drop him.
Like he was just heavy cargo. Like he was a piece of trash. Like he was already dead.
She dragged him another step, then another, her legs burning with lactic acid, her lungs absolutely screaming. The world had narrowed into claustrophobic fragments—dark brick walls, shattered pavement, the thick stench of blood and opened bowels layered so heavily in the air she could actually taste it. Her arms shook violently. Her shoulders felt like they were actively tearing from the sockets under his bulk.
"You could live," Ethan pleaded quietly, a dying medic trying to save one last life. "I'll buy you time."
Mari laughed then—once, a sharp, broken, hysterical sound that startled even her.
"Live for what?" she snapped.
He didn't answer.
She didn't wait for one.
Justin's face crashed violently into her mind without a single warning. Not the way he'd looked at the very end—smeared with dirt, sweat, and absolute terror as the horde closed in around the bank alley. But the version she kept tucked away, safe. Justin leaning casually against the black Wrangler with his arms crossed, the Savannah sunlight catching in his dark hair. Justin grinning that crooked, easy smile, like he always knew a joke the rest of the world hadn't heard yet. Justin promising her, in a thousand small, everyday ways, that the future was still a tangible thing.
If anything happens to me…
Her chest tightened so hard she thought her ribs might physically splinter.
She hadn't let herself think past that horrific moment at the convenience store. She'd violently shoved the grief down, packed it tightly away under white-hot anger and constant forward motion. As long as she kept moving, as long as she had a mission, she didn't have to feel the exact shape of the massive, jagged hole he'd left behind in her life.
But now she was moving slower.
Now the mechanics were gaining rapidly behind them.
Now there was absolutely nothing left to distract her from the crushing, undeniable truth.
Justin was gone.
Marcus was gone.
Kenzie was gone.
Ella Belle was missing in a burning city.
And her parents—God, her parents.
The thought landed in her mind like a delayed explosion. She had been avoiding it deliberately since the sirens first started screaming, skirting carefully around the reality like a landmine. Her mom's gentle, worried voice. Her dad's terrible, repetitive jokes. The absolute certainty that no matter what time of night she called, they would always answer the phone on the second ring.
They weren't answering now.
Mari swallowed hard, her throat burning with the toxic ash and unshed tears.
They're dead, she thought, the realization finally breaking her in half. Or they're worse than dead.
The new world simply didn't leave any room for softer possibilities. There were no miracles left. Only meat, and the things that ate it.
Ethan stumbled again, a heavy, dead-weight collapse that nearly pulled them both down into the dirt. Mari barely caught herself, her right knee slamming brutally into the frozen concrete. Pain flared, sharp and blinding, but she didn't feel it for long. Pain had simply become background noise—just another heavy fucking thing she was forced to carry.
"Leave me," Ethan begged, his voice cracking, entirely stripped of the hardened operator. "Please, Mari. Don't make this worse."
Worse.
She wanted to scream at him. She wanted to physically shake him. She wanted to yell that he didn't get to unilaterally decide who she lost next. But the words wouldn't come out of her throat. She was too exhausted. Her body felt completely hollowed out, like something sharp and jagged had scraped her perfectly clean from the inside, leaving nothing behind but an empty shell.
The mechanics were close enough now that she could hear their individual, horrific sounds—the wet, sticky slap of bare, rotting feet on the concrete, the rattling, broken breaths that sounded like lungs entirely full of gravel. One of the infected shrieked, a high, sharp, starving sound, and a dozen others instantly answered from the smoke.
They were almost on them.
Mari spotted the back of a commercial building just ahead in the gloom—nothing special, just shadowed brick and a narrow service alley that disappeared entirely into pitch darkness. She didn't remember turning off Abercorn. She didn't remember deliberately choosing this path. Her body moved on pure, adrenaline-fueled instinct alone, dragging Ethan with the absolute last reserves of her physical strength.
They stumbled blindly into the narrow alley, the world shrinking as the towering brick walls closed in tight around them. The smell instantly changed—there was less open, smoky air, and significantly more trapped mildew, rotting garbage, and old, stagnant piss. She lost all sense of geographical direction. Left, right, forward—it didn't matter anymore.
The CVS was gone.
The mall was gone.
Everything familiar had vanished entirely behind an impenetrable curtain of panic.
She hauled Ethan another few torturous feet into the dark, then another, until her burning legs finally buckled completely. They collapsed together near the dead-end back wall. Ethan slid heavily out of her arms, his massive weight dragging her down onto the filthy, trash-strewn concrete with him.
She pressed her back flush against the freezing brick, violently gasping for air that tasted like death.
Ethan sagged against the wall, his head lolling heavily forward onto his bloody chest.
"Ethan?" she whispered, her voice a ragged, broken thread.
No response.
His eyes were closed, his dark lashes resting still against his ash-smeared cheeks. His chest still rose, but the breaths were incredibly shallow, wet, and uneven. His grip on the titanium 9-iron had gone entirely slack, the club rolling away into the trash.
He was out. He had finally bled out the last of his consciousness.
"Okay," Mari breathed, though she wasn't sure who the hell she was talking to. "Okay. Okay."
She could hear them clearly now.
The horde poured into the mouth of the alley like filthy water rushing through a broken dam. Shadows stacked upon shadows, shifting and multiplying. Grey, rotting bodies bumped and tangled together as they pressed relentlessly forward into the narrow space, drawn irreversibly by the heavy, thick blood trail she'd just painted across the asphalt.
The stench hit her full in the face, a physical wall of odor.
Rot. Voided waste. Sweet, sickening decay.
Her stomach turned violently.
She pressed a trembling, blood-stained hand tight over her mouth beneath the flannel mask, fighting the desperate, biological urge to vomit, knowing the sound alone would be enough to send them charging the last twenty feet.
Her other hand drifted slowly down to her lower belly without even thinking.
She froze completely when she realized what she was doing.
Her dirty fingers curled tightly there, resting just beneath the heavy fabric of her winter jacket, as if she could actually feel something through the thick layers of cotton, muscle, and bone. It was a phantom sensation. A cruel, biological joke.
The baby.
The word felt entirely foreign now. It was absurd. It was a punchline.
She and Justin had talked about it just days ago in quiet whispers and soft jokes. They had engaged in half-serious what-ifs that had always felt safe because the future was supposed to actually exist. They'd talked about names. They'd talked about how he'd teach the kid to drive a stick shift, about how she'd be the strict one and he'd be the fun one who let them stay up late.
That life was gone. It had burned to ash.
I don't want this anymore.
The intrusive thought was sharp, ugly, and profoundly, brutally honest.
What kind of world was this to bring a child into? A world made entirely of shattering teeth and cold blood? A world where survival meant running until your legs completely gave out, only to be eaten alive in a filthy alley smelling of piss? A world without a father, without a single shred of safety, without even the fragile promise of tomorrow morning?
Her chest hitched.
Maybe this was it.
Maybe she was finally done.
She was so incredibly tired of running.
She was tired of crying over people who were never coming back.
She was entirely tired of surviving purely out of spite.
Her arms trembled violently as she tightened her hold on Ethan's limp, bleeding body, pulling him closer to her chest, shielding him with her own frame even though she knew logically it didn't matter. When the teeth came, they would both be ripped open.
The mechanics were steps away now. She could hear their dead hands bumping mindlessly into the metal dumpsters. She heard one of them knock over something heavy and metallic that clanged loudly against the brick before being instantly drowned out by a chorus of wet snarls and rattling, fluid-filled breathing.
She closed her eyes tightly, completely surrendering to the dark.
"Please," she whispered into the freezing air—not to God, not to any specific higher power, just a desperate plea to the universe itself to finally turn the lights out. "Just make it quick."
She leaned the back of her head against the hard brick wall, her breath shuddering heavily in her chest.
Let it be fast, she thought. For him, at least. He fought so fucking hard.
Suddenly, she felt the stagnant air change directly behind her.
A sudden, sharp shift. A specific, deliberate movement that didn't match the mindless, dragging rhythm of the horde closing in from the front.
Something scraped heavily against the wall she was pressed against—the distinct, heavy sound of wood sliding on brick. A low thud. A sharp hiss of human breath.
Her eyes snapped open just as a hidden, heavy service door directly behind her burst violently inward.
She barely had time to register the hands in the pitch black. They were entirely too thin, the fingers gripping like steel vises, the nails long and dirty. They grabbed frantically at the heavy fabric of her jacket, locking tight onto Ethan's broad shoulders.
She fell backward into the sudden void with a startled, breathless cry, instinctively curling her body fiercely around Ethan as they were both violently dragged backward through the doorway and into the absolute, suffocating darkness.
The heavy steel door slammed shut behind them with a deafening, concussive boom.
The alley instantly vanished.
Let this be quick, Mari thought as the black swallowed them whole.
And then there was absolutely nothing but the grip of the unseen hands, the thick, heavy shadows, and the terrifying, muffled sound of the dead furiously clawing at the other side of the brick wall.
Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 3:42 PM
Countdown to Extraction: 58 Hours, 59 Minutes Remaining