The sun had climbed higher, brutal and unforgiving, turning the entire plain into a blinding sheet of white-gold heat that shimmered off the sand like liquid fire. The city square looked like a battlefield from hell.

A hundred dried-out infected lay scattered across the ground in grotesque, brittle heaps, gray, cracked skin stretched tight over bones, mouths frozen in silent screams, limbs twisted at unnatural angles.

The old car sat dead in the center, hood smoking faintly, its reinforced windows streaked with dust and handprints. The air smelled of ozone, dry rot, and hot metal.

Then the voice cut through the silence. "Help me..."

For a moment I thought I had imagined it.

"You heard that?" Mercury asked. She was still pressed tight against my chest, her body warm and trembling slightly from adrenaline.

"Yeah," I said. "Loud and clear."

"There’s someone in the building," Jenn confirmed, tilting her head up, shielding her eyes against the glare.

"Help me." The voice again, more insistent now. "I can literally see you from up here."

I looked up. Fourth floor. One of the shattered windows. A man leaned out, waving both arms frantically, half his torso hanging over the edge as if terrified we might vanish.

"Maybe this city was just attacked," Jenn said. "Recently."

I thought about the infected I had just cleared. Some of them hadn’t been decayed. The woman with no clothes had an almost intact body, the kind that hadn’t been infected long enough to break down. Fresh converts.

"You might be right," I said.

"Help me please!" The man was still shouting. "There are only four zombies outside my apartment!"

Mercury looked at me. "We’ve got enough problems already. We can’t add another burden."

I was leaning her way. I waited to see what Jenn said.

"Mercury is right," Jenn said. Then: "I’m also hungry."

"You didn’t have to bring up hunger," Mercury groaned, rubbing her stomach. "Now I can’t think about anything else. I’m hungrier than I’ve ever been in my life."

I was starving. The fight had taken whatever the meal at Major’s had given me and spent it completely.

"Any chance of finding food in this city?" Mercury asked.

"We’d have to go building by building," I said.

"You idiots." The voice from the window had shifted from pleading to genuinely offended. "Fuck you all. I’m going to die up here and you fools—"

Jenn looked at me with the specific expression of someone who has just made a calculation.

"That man knows this city," she said. "And we don’t have a car."

"No option," I said.

"No option," Mercury agreed, with the tone of someone who was not thrilled about it.

"Hey," I called up. "How do we get to you?"

The voice immediately found new energy. "The stairs. Elevators are full of infected. Stairs have less. Fourth floor, room two zero zero."

Talkative. I noted it and started walking.

The sun beat down mercilessly as we crossed the square. Plain sun, harsh, indifferent, and blinding.

"You two staying down here?" I asked.

"Hell no," Mercury said, already moving.

We went in. The ground floor of the building was eerily quiet. Shafts of bright sunlight cut through broken windows like spotlights, illuminating floating dust and long shadows. Old newspapers and debris littered the cracked tile floor. I went up first, the girls close behind on the wide, dusty staircase.

"I actually love your ass," Mercury said, somewhere below me on the stairs.

I turned my head.

"I’m quiet," she added innocently, and I heard the two of them share a low, conspiratorial laugh.

"Would you date Bram," Mercury said, conversationally, as if I wasn’t directly above them, "if things were normal?"

"Yes," Jenn said. "You?"

"I don’t need things to be normal to date someone like him. I’d have to be blind."

"Girls," I called down. "Stay close."

They said something I didn’t catch and kept laughing.

Second floor. Clear. Third floor. Also clear, which was why they were comfortable walking at their pace and discussing my romantic prospects on the staircase.

The fourth floor corridor stretched long and narrow under dusty shafts of sunlight slicing through shattered windows. Peeling wallpaper hung in torn strips like dead skin. Broken glass and debris crunched underfoot. The air was thick with the smell of rot, old blood, and heated dust.

I stepped onto the fourth floor.

An infected exploded out from a side doorway like a coiled spring, fast, unnaturally fast. Its decayed limbs moved with predatory purpose, jaws wide, black veins pulsing beneath gray skin.

I twisted at the last second. Its clawed fingers raked empty air where my throat had been, tumbling down the stairs with a snarl toward the girls.

I didn’t have time to follow it. Four more were on me before I had fully registered the first one. These moved differently. Not the stagger. Not the confused lurch of standard infected. They moved with purpose, cornering, cutting angles, the specific intelligence of something that had learned from watching how people moved.

What are these, I thought, discharging the one that hit me first and squaring up to the other three.

They came together. I released charge from a distance, not contact, a pushed discharge that dried them before they reached me.

Behind me, the stairwell erupted with sudden noise and movement. Mercury and Jenn came rushing up, their footsteps pounding hard on the stairs, breath sharp and fast.

The infected that had gone down was now sprinting back up after them, no longer shambling, but running on all fours like a beast, jaws snapping.

I released charge between the girls, threading it through the gap, hitting the pursuing infected clean. It collapsed and rolled back down the stairs.

The four of us arrived on the fourth floor simultaneously. Me, Jenn, Mercury, and the realization that these infected were a different category from anything we had encountered so far.

Mercury looked down the long, empty hallway, chest heaving, then let out a short, breathless, slightly wild laugh.

The kind of laugh that comes when the alternative is something worse.