Chapter 7 (Anna’s POV)

  I couldn’t ignore the gnawing hollowness in my gut. With every passing hour, the city felt less like a place I knew how to navigate and more like a slowly constricting trap. My head pounded, my lips cracked, and the soup and stale water I’d managed to scrounge earlier already felt like a distant memory. I drifted through broken streets, uncertain if I was searching for food or just trying to outrun the hopelessness that crawled under my skin.

  The buildings around me slumped into themselves, windows shattered or blackened with soot, bullet holes pitting the walls. In some corners, skeletons of cars lay stacked like rusted gravestones, half consumed by weeds. Once, I might have felt a flicker of resilience moving through these ruins. Now, the emptiness only stoked the growing coil of darkness in my chest—a reminder that I was alone. A reminder that nothing here had changed, that my life was just a slow dance with misery.

  Exhaustion tainted my thoughts, pulling them toward the bleak. You should have left this city ages ago, a voice inside me whispered. Found a faction or carved out territory, done something real. But I knew the other side of that coin: factions demanded loyalty, demanded atrocities. And carving out territory alone? I was one woman with a bat, starving more by the second.

  It felt like my chest was caving in. At times, I imagined the scene of him flickering away. Over and over. With each replay, I felt the raw bite of betrayal, not just from him—some random city boy—but from a world that let him escape. I wanted to spit curses at the sky, to pound my bat on the asphalt until my arms gave out. Instead, I walked, my footsteps dragging, my stomach twisting tighter with each corner I turned.

  I spotted a tattered store sign that read something like “Pharm—something.” Inside, maybe a leftover protein bar or some bottled water. The door was gone, just a frame left behind. The interior stank of mildew and chemicals. My eyes scanned the half-toppled shelves, all picked clean, little more than shattered pill bottles. No food. Nothing.

  A wave of dizziness rocked me. My knees almost buckled, a film of sweat beading across my forehead. I can’t keep going like this. That single thought pounded through my mind, like a drum heralding my downfall. Pressing one hand to the wall, I waited for the spinning to pass. The rotting gloom pressed around me, stifling, suffocating. Maybe I could just sit and wait for it to end. Maybe that’d be easier than scraping for scraps. I blinked, swallowing dry, tasting bile. No, not yet.

  Outside again, the sky darkened with stormy clouds. Perfect. Rain might come soon, at least. Another chance to gather water. If I didn’t pass out first. My mind flitted through old hideouts—maybe the sub-level of an old library, or the car park near the gutted movie theater. Both likely stripped or occupied. I had no illusions that today’s struggles would magically fix themselves.

  Yet I couldn’t ignore the primal drive to keep moving. So I limped onward, trying not to let the broken city’s silence weigh me down.

  About a block later, I heard voices. Low, muttering, but definitely human. My heart lurched. In normal times, I might have hidden. People were as dangerous as roamers here. But the swirl of black hopelessness in my chest whispered, What does it matter? I found myself creeping forward anyway—maybe they had food. Maybe I could trade or scavenge from them. Maybe…

  Peering around a bent lamppost, I saw him: a man wearing a ragtag uniform piece, a metal plate strapped to his shoulder, the gold symbol of the Empire etched clumsily on it. My gut dropped. Empire. He wasn’t with a squad—no sign of backup, no heavy gear. He looked like a scout or a lone soldier, rummaging through a collapsed bar across the street. Several broken bottles were scattered at his feet, glass crunching under his boots.

  Rage twisted inside me—familiar rage, the kind that flared whenever I saw those bastards. I recalled friends shot down or tortured by them, crucified outside their territory walls. My pulse hammered in my ears, overriding the trembling weakness in my legs.

  He muttered curses, rummaging behind a shattered counter. He was so preoccupied he hadn’t noticed me yet. My heart pounded. If he was alone, that was rare. Usually they moved in pairs or squads. I considered walking away. But the darkness swirling in me felt like a magnet, pulling me forward. If he had supplies, I needed them. More importantly, this might be a chance to vent the fury that had haunted me since that door fiasco.

  I gripped my bat, creeping closer until I was just behind the half-fallen bar wall. He smelled of sweat and old liquor, maybe rummaging for a last bottle. Empire scum. My breath rattled in my chest, adrenaline slicing through the haze of hunger.

  I moved in a blur, fueled by desperation and raw hatred. One second he was bent over an overturned crate, the next I swung my bat at the back of his knees. The impact connected with a sickening crack, the shock vibrating up my arms. He yelled, buckling, a guttural sound of pain echoing in the half-collapsed bar.

  He whipped around, half-falling, eyes wide with shock. “Wh—?” he managed, blinking in confusion. The Empire crest glinted on his battered chest plate. My lips peeled back in something that might have been a snarl. I swung again, aiming for his head, but he jerked aside, the blow colliding with his shoulder plate in a jarring clang that nearly threw me off balance.

  He lunged at me with a knife—cheap, rusted. My body screamed with fatigue, but adrenaline pumped scorching heat through my veins. I wove aside, ignoring the fire in my muscles, slamming the bat’s tip into his gut. He staggered, coughed violently.

  “Fucking… bitch,” he spat, eyes wild with a mixture of pain and fury. He swiped at me again, blade glinting. I ducked, bat glancing off his forearm, and he let out a hiss.

  My breath came in ragged gasps, vision dancing at the edges. I had to finish this now, before my stamina gave out. With a trembling grunt, I raised the bat high, bringing it down in a savage arc toward his skull. He tried to block, but the angle was off. My bat connected with a wet thud, bone crunching under the force. The jolt nearly rattled my teeth.

  He collapsed to his knees, eyes rolling back. A gurgle leaked from his throat, blood trickling from a massive split in his scalp. I didn’t stop. Another blow hammered his temple, thick gore splattering across the bar’s sticky floor. My arms shook with each strike, but rage and despair propelled me. I felt the raw brutality of it, bone giving way, flesh tearing. The reek of iron filled my nostrils, stinging tears into my eyes.

  Finally, he went still, chest armor rattling as he pitched sideways. I stood there, panting, bat dripping with dark, viscous matter. In the hush that followed, only my ragged breathing disturbed the stifling air.

  Tremors ran through my limbs. I stared down at the mangled body, trying to steady my swirling mind. A soldier from the Empire. Another piece of scum who might have killed a hundred innocents in some twisted “purge.” He deserved it, I told myself, though the metallic taste in my mouth refused to vanish.

  My stomach churned, half from hunger, half from the sick realization of what I’d done. Not that I hadn’t killed men before—fighting was part of surviving here. But the darkness creeping in me felt thicker this time. More personal. My eyes stung with unshed tears I couldn’t place.

  “Supplies,” I muttered hoarsely, focusing on the reason I’d even risked a confrontation. I dropped to one knee—careful not to step in the spreading gore—patting down his pockets. My fingers came away sticky, but I found a small satchel slung over his chest plate. Inside, a half-eaten energy bar, battered canteen, plus a few worthless trinkets. My heart leapt when I shook the canteen and heard the faint slosh of water. Please dont be contaminated.

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  Flicking it open, I sniffed. Metallic, faintly sour—but no rancid stench. I took a cautious sip, relief flooding as I swallowed. It was lukewarm, a bit stale, but infinitely better than the foul stuff I’d had before. Another small sip, then I stashed it away. The energy bar wrapper was torn, but the bar inside seemed mostly intact. I bit into it—grainy, artificial sweetness stinging my tongue. Heavenly.

  I closed my eyes, ignoring the battered corpse at my feet for a moment. The sugar gave me a brief rush, enough to steady my shaking muscles. In the harsh glow of the broken sunlight overhead, a cold part of me recognized the vicious practicality: his death was my survival.

  Eventually, the reality that I was kneeling in a pool of gore snapped me back. The smell caught up to me: raw blood, piss from his final moments. I gagged, forcing down the rise of vomit. My legs almost refused to straighten. Wiping my bat on a rag I found, I tried not to look too closely at the spatters of flesh.

  “You were Empire,” I muttered to the lifeless eyes. “Consider this justice.” My voice shook. Some bitter part of me asked, Who am I to talk about justice? But I shoved that thought away.

  I had to keep moving. The city was rarely quiet for long, and the man’s fresh corpse might draw roamers soon. Ears ringing, head pounding from the kill, I staggered out of the bar, canteen rattling in my satchel. My body felt heavier with each step, but at least I wasn’t about to collapse from thirst.

  The wind carried a faint moan from some distant alley. My heart clenched. I needed a safe place to crash for a few hours, to let my battered mind process the savage act I’d just committed. The canteen and energy bar might keep me upright a little longer, but it wouldn’t chase away the gloom creeping through my thoughts.

  With a final glance at the bar’s shattered facade, I slunk into the street again, hearing only the whisper of dust and the echo of violence in my mind. The city’s emptiness felt deeper now, the day’s pale sun a mocking light on twisted metal and broken lives.

  I wiped the blood from my forehead, unsure if it was his or mine. My bat, slick and dripping, weighed on my shoulder. Another kill in a world that demanded them—no end to it in sight. And as I walked, the image of that final blow repeated in my mind, a savage loop of bone shattering and blood spurting, fueling a strange mixture of triumph and revulsion.

  I walked, each step a dull ache behind my eyes, as if my body dragged a universe of grief with every motion. Exhaustion pressed on my skull like a vise, threatening to pull me under the gray churn of my thoughts. My vision blurred at the edges, a haze that swallowed the distant horizon. The ground felt unsteady, shifting beneath my feet like sand, but I pressed on, stubborn and unwilling to collapse under the city’s uncaring gaze.

  Behind me, the buzzing of flies faded into the distance, a final testament to the remains I’d left behind. Another kill. Another stain on my conscience. The roiling hunger, the near-starvation—I couldn’t let them consume me. Survival always won out, forcing me forward even as I stumbled through the rain-soaked ruins.

  Eventually, I found myself back at that familiar, battered door—the one Joshua had vanished through without a trace. Raindrops slid off the twisted metal, dripping steadily onto cracked pavement. My breath hitched, heart pounding in a sick, unrelenting rhythm. The door stood there, silent and unmoving, like a cruel monument to everything I’d lost. A day ago, I would’ve laughed bitterly at my own foolishness for coming here again. But some twisted part of me needed to return, as if I were waiting for a miracle I knew would never come.

  Memories rose like a relentless tide, pulling me back to a world before the outbreak consumed us—before roamers, before the Empire’s cruelty turned life into a blood-soaked battlefield. My eyes drifted shut, raindrops clinging to my lashes, tears mingling with the downpour as images flooded my mind.

  I remembered sunlit afternoons when the world still spun on an axis of promise. My mother’s voice, soft and warm, drifting from the kitchen as she told old family stories. My father’s patient, methodical way of fixing everything from squeaky doors to broken chairs—he’d always had a tool in his hand and a kind word on his lips. My brother’s echoing laughter, the two of us racing beneath a cloudless sky. The golden light of those days felt so tangible, so real, as if hope itself had been woven into every glimmer of sunshine.

  Then came the moment it all began to unravel—months after the final news station declared the infection rate had hit 99.8%. Chaos descended like a storm. But the infection wasn’t what ripped my family’s sanctuary apart. It was the Empire. My father’s voice of reassurance was drowned out by the savage onslaught of armed men who kicked in our door under the guise of order. I remembered the shrieking wind that night, rattling our windows, the mingled panic in our voices as we tried to understand why our home had become a target.

  The memories surged, images so vivid they made my throat close in terror. I saw my mother again, her gentle spirit twisted into terror as uniformed soldiers dragged her across the floor, mockery dripping from their snarling lips. I heard her muffled sobs, each one a dagger to my heart, every shred of dignity stripped from her with obscene indifference. The sight of her face, once lit with kindness, contorted in pain and violation—that carved a wound in me too deep to ever truly heal.

  My father tried to protect us—God, how he fought. His eyes burned with defiance, love fueling every desperate swing of his fists. But the Empire’s cruelty was unstoppable. I witnessed their methodical brutality, how they bound him and laughed as they tortured him finger by finger. I recall his scream—a sound no human should ever have to produce—a raw wail of agony mingling with the roar of my own silent horror. He died bit by bit in front of me, the man who once held our family together fractured under their deliberate sadism.

  And my brother—he was so young, still brimming with the naivety of a world that used to be bright and fair. I couldn’t do anything but hide in the shadows, powerless as the Empire’s soldiers found him, too. His cries, the sheer disbelief in his eyes, as if his mind couldn’t process how the world could be so cruel. They took him, tore him from our home in a manner too monstrous to recount without my heart splintering. I’d hidden behind a crumbling wall, hearing every whimper, imagining every blow, the horror of it sealing my lungs in ice.

  The stink of burnt wood and coppery blood, the howls of the Empire’s men, the whimpering sobs of my family—these memories had etched themselves into my soul like scars that never fully scabbed over. Even now, I smelled it on the wind, felt the ghost of my mother’s arms around me, as if she were trying to shield me from a fate we couldn’t escape. Only I had escaped, and that fact sometimes weighed heavier than any chain.

  I stood there, in front of the rusted door that had claimed Joshua so easily, tears mingling with raindrops sliding down my cheeks. I didn’t understand why I kept returning, except that some irrational spark in me clung to a shred of hope—hope for something more, something better than the endless cycle of violence. Maybe I wanted to prove to myself there was still a possibility of good in this ruined world, that not everyone ended up a victim or a killer.

  But in the dripping silence, reality settled like a cold blade at my throat: the door did nothing, and the city offered no comfort. My mother’s screams, my father’s broken form, my brother’s terrified cries—they all lived beneath my skin, fueling a hatred for the Empire and a despair I couldn’t bury. If I was honest, that despair was the only reason I knew how to keep fighting—because I refused to let their memory fade without vengeance, without ensuring that the nightmares which claimed them would pay.

  I reached out, pressing my palm against the battered metal. It felt cold and unyielding, as lifeless as the roamer-infested streets. There was no swirl of fractals now—just a worthless hunk of steel. A sob hitched in my throat, and I let the tears come, a choking, angry grief.

  “This world… took everything,” I whispered, voice trembling. “And you… you got to leave.”

  Rage and sorrow mingled in my chest, as unstoppable as the rain. My knees threatened to buckle. I could practically hear my brother’s voice, the way he’d used to poke fun at me for being so serious, telling me to lighten up. I imagined my father’s reassuring hand on my shoulder, or my mother’s soft lullaby on restless nights. But it was all gone. Stolen.

  After a while, the storm’s downpour intensified, soaking me to the bone, the door glistening under rivulets of water. My teeth chattered from the chill. Yet I stayed a moment longer, letting the sky’s tears wash over me like a half-hearted absolution. The apocalypse had no gods to pray to, no saints to beg for mercy.

  Eventually, I pulled my hand from the door, stifling a final sob. I wiped my wet face with the back of my trembling wrist, shoulders sagging under the weight of memory. “I’m sorry,” I murmured to the ghosts of my family, to Joshua, to everything I’d lost. “I’m so… so sorry.”

  Then I turned, the battered door left behind in the swirling rain, my heart a shattered mosaic of regrets and grim resolve. The city stretched before me, an endless gray labyrinth where nightmares prowled. My battered bat was still my only companion.

  Despair lingered, hunger still gnawing at the edges of my gut, darkness still clouding my heart. But I had a canteen and half a bar, enough to last the day—maybe. And in this place, that small victory had to be enough.