Chapter 19 (Joshua’s POV)

  I kept moving north, hurrying through what had once been a stretch of suburban office buildings. Each one stood half-gutted, windows shattered into jagged frames, the wind howling through the upper floors with a hollow roar. My boots skidded on loose gravel and chunks of fallen brick, heart still hammering with the urgency of returning to the cottage. If I could just make it back, barricade the doors, maybe I’d have a real shot at surviving until I figured out what to do about Anna.

  Then I heard it—a low, collective moan that rumbled from behind me, growing in volume with every second. A quick glance over my shoulder made my blood run cold: a horde of roamers, maybe a dozen or more, shuffled and lurched in my direction. As if my stench or the sound of my war hammer had drawn them. Their movements were uneven, some half-crawling, others bounding with unnerving speed, but they advanced in a ragged line of relentless hunger.

  “Christ,” I breathed, heart jolting into overdrive. My first instinct was to duck behind a nearby wrecked bus, but the undead were already too close—I’d never slip away unnoticed. Run. The idea screamed in my head, so I bolted, ignoring the burn in my lungs and the weight of my gear slamming against my back with every stride.

  Debris littered the road, chunks of concrete big enough to trip me at a misstep. I weaved, panting, war hammer banging against my hip, breath coming in ragged bursts. The moans behind me rose into a grotesque chorus, the collective sound of abject hunger. I dared a glance over my shoulder—an image of rotting faces, arms stretching out, some with jaws half torn off, all fixated on me. Fear spiked in my veins, my speed surging with adrenaline.

  Wheezing, I rounded a corner and nearly collided with a group of three men in red, tattered armor. They stood in the center of the road, apparently scanning the area for something. My heart jolted—could these be the same creeps who wanted Anna’s blood? I had no time to consider. Their heads snapped in my direction as I skidded to a stop.

  “What the—?” one of them barked, face twisted in confusion at the sight of a single runner tearing down the street.

  “Roamers!” I shouted, breathless, waving an arm behind me. The horde’s moans surged louder, echoing off the ruined walls. In the men’s eyes, I saw that moment of shock as the twisted shapes of the undead came into view.

  “Horde!” one shouted, lifting his battered rifle. Another cursed, fumbling to unholster a pistol. The third, bearing a short-barreled shotgun, simply swore. Their expressions flipped from surprise to furious resolve.

  I didn’t stick around to see if they’d open fire on me. The horde was too close, the men clearly armed and focusing their rage on the undead threat. I scrambled past them, lunging over a broken chunk of sidewalk. My lungs burned, the reek of the city merging with the sour sweat stinging my nostrils. Just keep running. The men shouted curses behind me, gunfire cracked through the air.

  I managed three or four more steps before my curiosity overcame me. I risked a look back, half-turning as I moved. The men had formed a haphazard line, rifles flashing in muzzle bursts. Hollow moans filled the street as the roamers rushed them, arms flailing, decaying faces contorted. One roamer took a bullet to the chest, flipping backward in a spray of blackish fluid. Another went down, half its skull exploding under a second shot.

  But there were too many. The undead surged forward like a wave, unstoppable. The man with the shotgun blasted a wide shot, taking three roamers in a spatter of gore—but then a half-collapsed roamer lunged at him from the side. The roamer’s teeth sank into his unprotected arm, a wet crunch audible even from where I stood. He screamed, dropping the shotgun. The undead wasted no time, piling onto him as he fell, their jaws tearing flesh in messy lumps, splattering red across the pavement.

  My stomach twisted. Another of the red-armored men kicked a roamer in the gut, tried to spin around—but a roamer grabbed his leg, yanked him off-balance. The first roamer he’d shot was somehow still crawling, fingers hooking into the man’s armor straps. With a wail of horror, he collapsed into the writhing mass of undead. Their moans mingled with his screams, black fluids intermixing with bright red as the creatures ripped into his shoulders and neck.

  A third man fired desperately, pistol shots cracking in quick succession, each muzzle flash revealing glimpses of the horde’s feeding frenzy. Roamer after roamer fell, riddled with bullets, but more replaced them. Then two fast-moving undead latched onto his back. He shrieked, arms flailing, the pistol flipping from his grip. The mass of undead descended, pulling him down under a flurry of teeth and broken nails, tearing armor plates aside with mindless hunger.

  I stifled a cry of my own, forced to watch as their screams rose to a crescendo, then choked off in a wet gurgle of rending flesh. The street filled with the wet slap of the feed, the rotting bodies crawling over the men, blood spraying in arcs under the flickering sunlight. Limbs twitched, rifles clattered to the ground, coated in fresh gore. One roamer chewed at a chunk of muscle hanging from what was once a man’s forearm, while another hissed, burying its half-shattered jaw in the man’s abdomen. The air reverberated with the vile, slurping noises of feeding.

  I pressed myself against a battered wall, shaking, breath ragged from horror. I can’t help them. The men were beyond saving, torn apart by a dozen starved undead. My chest tightened at the primal brutality unfolding mere yards away. The wind shifted, blowing the reek of fresh blood and rancid rot right into me. Bile surged in my throat, but I forced it down. I had to vanish before the horde noticed me again.

  A narrow alleyway beckoned on my right, half-blocked by a toppled fence. I ducked beneath the twisted metal, sliding into the alley. My boots crunched over broken tiles, but I quickly stilled, half-squatting behind a chunk of concrete. My heart hammered as I peered out from the darkness.

  In the distance, the horde roiled around the men’s corpses, still biting, gnawing, devouring. I wanted to scream, or vomit, or both. Instead, I watched in numb horror. One roamer lifted its head, dark fluid dripping from its jaws, then resumed feasting with a frenzied hiss. The men no longer moved, torn open from chest to thigh, bones and organs on ghastly display. The gore-slick street glistened under the half-light, crawling with a fresh swirl of flies.

  My arms shook, war hammer gripped so tight my knuckles ached. I have to move. But I couldn’t tear my gaze away from the horrifying spectacle, a cold lesson in how swiftly the undead overcame armed men. What if that was me? The notion hammered home: in this realm, being outnumbered for even a moment led to a fate worse than death.

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  At last, I ripped my eyes away, sweat beading on my brow, forcing a shaky exhale. I can’t let that be me. Or Anna. Careful not to kick debris, I shifted deeper into the alley’s shadow, away from the moans and the disgusting squelch of feeding. The wind died momentarily, leaving the hideous sounds more pronounced: the wet slurp of flesh, the tear of ligaments, the hissing moans of roamers drunk on fresh kill.

  Don’t draw them here. My breath ragged, chest tight, My entire body shook, adrenaline crashing. The scene burned itself into my retinas—red armor drenched in redder blood, severed limbs, rotted jaws digging in. I gagged softly, spitting bile onto the ground.

  The men’s screams faded into a sickening silence, replaced by the wet slurp of the undead feasting on torn flesh. My heart hammered so wildly that each beat felt like it shook my entire body. Hidden behind the half-collapsed wall, I stayed very still, breath shallow and ragged, waiting for the last echoes of violence to die away. It was a mercy that the roamers hadn’t followed me into this little nook of rubble, too preoccupied with the fresh kill.

  After what felt like an eternity, the moans and shuffling grew fainter, followed by the scratching of limbs dragging across broken pavement as the undead wandered on, presumably sated. I dared to peek out, skin crawling with dread. The street was quieter now—only a handful of stragglers picked at the remains, but soon those too shambled off, leaving a mangled scene of blood and broken bodies.

  My throat tightened. Why am I even thinking about going back? The rational part of me howled, wanting to flee this massacre. But I remembered Anna’s instructions about pearls—how valuable they could be for trade or self-improvement. And beyond that, these men had been armed. Their weapons, if they weren’t completely destroyed, could be a lifesaver. My mind churned with revulsion, but necessity clamped down: I can’t let resources go to waste.

  Clutching my war hammer, I crept from the alleyway, each footstep cautious on the gore-splattered ground. A vile mixture of congealed blood and torn viscera stained the asphalt, the stench so overpowering I had to breathe in short bursts. Broken bits of flesh—arms, partial faces, scraps of shredded organs—lay scattered in a grotesque tableau. Flies swarmed in a throbbing black cloud, their droning hum a maddening lullaby of death.

  My stomach lurched the instant I stepped closer. One of the red-armored men was half-propped against a caved-in sedan, his torso opened wide like a butcher’s display, ribs snapped and splayed. A swarm of maggots already wriggled in the warm remains. The sight pried a strangled gasp from my throat, and I nearly lost my footing on a slick smear of gore.

  “God—” I rasped, but forced myself to approach, eyes stinging with tears. My instincts shrieked that this was beyond monstrous. Yet the savage logic of the apocalypse spurred me on: I needed any gear they had.

  Swallowing a surge of bile, I knelt by the first body, rummaging around the man’s chest. His bulletproof vest was torn open, the plates battered. I found an old pistol, jammed under his collapsed flank. My trembling hands retrieved it, sticky with wet lumps of matter. My gut convulsed at the thick, Offal smell that wafted up. Breathe through your mouth, Joshua. I tried. The stench still permeated every sense.

  Numbly, I checked the pistol’s magazine: half full. That was something, though the gun’s slide had gore jammed in it. I’d have to clean it thoroughly. Better than nothing.

  I staggered upright, turning to the second man, his body pinned under a roamer’s dismembered torso. The roamer’s arms were gone, but its jaw still clung to the man’s shredded shoulder, teeth embedded in muscle. Flies buzzed around the conjoined figures, the stench rank enough to cause my vision to swim. The man’s shotgun lay half-buried beneath the roamer’s remains. Gagging, I pushed the roamer’s torso aside with a foot, the flesh sliding off the bone in a nauseating slop. My chest heaved.

  That was it—I vomited without warning, a thin stream of acid burning my throat, splattering at my feet. My eyes watered, every part of me recoiling in disgust. “Shit… I can’t—” I mumbled, spitting the bitter aftertaste away. But I had to finish. My head spun with the tension.

  Gulping back another wave of nausea, I yanked the shotgun free of the tangled gore, noticing how the barrel was bent at the tip from a bad fall. Maybe salvageable? I’d have to tinker. Up close, the man’s armor was a battered chest plate, the red paint now blotched with blackish stains. No use wearing that, My biker outfit worked better. A half-ruined pack on his back contained just a few spare shells. My hands shook as I rifled through, ignoring the bits of bone that clung to the straps.

  “Check the roamers,” I whispered, half to remind myself. Anna had hammered it in—pearls. Those undead that attacked the group must have pearls in their necks. Another savage wave of dread passed through me, but I forced it down. If I found them, I’d push my total up. Already, I’d had seventeen from prior kills. More would give me leverage.

  Heart pounding, I inched toward the nearest roamer corpse—its head half blown apart by a shotgun. A sticky ring of sinew ringed the base of its neck, the flesh battered into a pulp. My stomach roiled again at the thought of slicing into that gore. But I knelt with my knife, pushing aside lumps of muscle. The stench assaulted me anew, and I nearly retched again. The rotting tissues parted with a sickening squelch, blackish fluid dribbling over my gloves.

  Then my blade tapped something small, spherical—a pearl lodged amid the vertebrae. My teeth clenched. I pried it loose, choking back vomit as thick slime clung to the orb. One more pearl. Okay. Nine more roamers—two more men or so?

  Well, it turned out there were at least ten roamer bodies scattered around the men’s remains, each in varying states of bullet-riddled ruin. The next half-hour passed in a nauseating blur of cutting, hacking, rummaging. Every fresh corpse I peeled open sent me deeper into a delirium of horror, my gloves caked with congealed blood, the reek so overpowering I had to puke twice more. My eyes burned, tears dripped down my face. But for every roamer’s neck, I discovered a small, greasy pearl lodged near the base of the skull. Each one added to my total, the grisly reward for forging through a scene of unimaginable carnage.

  Finally, trembling all over, I stepped back from the last cadaver, knife dripping foulness onto the road. Ten more pearls. That made twenty-seven total rattling in my pack, each forcibly wiped as clean as I could manage with rags. My mouth tasted of bile. My arms felt weighted with revulsion. But I’d done it. Better these pearls are in my pack than rotting in a corpse.

  Swallowing, I glanced at the men’s pockets, reminding myself they might carry worthless bills or something else. My mind balked, but I’d come this far. The men were too shredded to identify, but a frantic search revealed a few scraps. One had a pocket that was still intact enough to rummage, producing a handful of old bills. Another’s belt pouch had more crumpled notes, sticky with gore. Counting them quickly, I came to about five hundred dollars total. It’s so grim…

  At last, I couldn’t stand it any longer. My entire body screamed for fresh air, distance from the butchery. I left the corpses, stumbling away, hammer and knife slick with vile fluids. The wind gusted, swirling the scents of blood and rot around me in a last nauseating wave. I retreated behind a collapsed piece of wall, choking on the reek.

  There, I collapsed to my knees, inhaling shallowly, bracing myself on the rubble. My mind spun with a cocktail of guilt and grim satisfaction. I survived… I scavenged. Twenty-seven pearls, two new weapons—shoddy as they were—and five hundred more in worthless bills. Enough to possibly trade for real supplies, if I found a settlement. But the price weighed heavily on my conscience, an image of men screaming as roamers devoured them fresh.

  At length, I forced a ragged breath, forcing my mind to focus. Get to the cottage. No time for moral debates. The apocalypse had no time for moral qualms, either. I’d done what I needed to. Slipping the new pistol and battered shotgun into my pack, I forced myself upright, ignoring the dryness in my throat. Don’t linger, Joshua.

  With one last, hollow glance at the carnage, I resumed my trek, fighting to keep my stomach settled. The city’s wind whistled overhead, as if mocking me with the laughter of uncaring gods.