The world had taught Mark two fundamental lessons over the past two years: hope was a currency more valuable than gold, and they were bankrupt. He lay on his belly on the rooftop of the 'Quantum Dynamics' office building, the gritty gravel digging into his elbows. The binoculars were heavy in his hands, a relic of a past life when he'd used them for birdwatching. Now, he used them to watch the dead.
Beside him, Miller, the old veteran, was methodically cleaning a bolt-action rifle, his gnarled hands moving with a practiced economy that betrayed his sixty-plus years. The rhythmic scrape of the cleaning rod was one of the few sounds that could cut through the oppressive silence of the city. Below them, five stories down, the street was a thick, moving carpet of Shamblers, an undead tide that had pinned them here for three agonizing days. They had come for the building's backup generators, a desperate gamble for sustainable power, but a silent alarm had tripped. By the time they'd cut it, the damage was done. The entire block was swarming.
The rest of their small, desperate family was huddled behind the rooftop's central elevator housing. Anya, the pharmacist, was counting their remaining antibiotics, her face a mask of grim concentration. Sarah, the doctor, was pretending to read a tattered paperback, though her eyes hadn't moved from the page in an hour. And then there was old Mr. Henderson, Sarah's father, who mostly just stared at the bruised sky, lost in memories of a world that no longer existed. Five people, an island of flickering life in an ocean of death.
Mark scanned the horizon out of habit, tracing the lines of the dead city, the broken skyscrapers clawing at the sky like gravestones. His gaze drifted towards the massive Super Savers Megamart a half-mile away. It was a place they'd always avoided, too large and too open to ever secure.
And that's when he saw it.
At first, he thought his eyes were playing tricks on him, that the hunger and exhaustion were finally making him hallucinate. A car. A delivery van, actually. It was lifting into the air. Not from an explosion, but lifting smoothly, as if being raised by an invisible crane. He twisted the focus knob on his binoculars, his heart beginning to thud against his ribs.
The image sharpened. Beneath the floating van was a figure. A man? No. It was too big, too bulky. It was a giant, encased head-to-toe in dark, functional armor, like a walking tank. He watched, breath held, as the giant carried the van with impossible ease and placed it on top of another car, adding to a crude but formidable-looking barricade.
"Miller," Mark whispered, his voice hoarse. "Miller, you need to see this."
The old soldier paused his cleaning. "What is it, kid? Another herd shifting west?"
"No. Look." Mark handed him the binoculars, pointing towards the distant megamart. "At the intersection. You'll see it."
Miller grunted, taking the binoculars and raising them to his weathered eyes. He was silent for a full thirty seconds. Mark watched his face, saw his eyebrows climb up his forehead, saw his mouth fall slightly agape.
"What the fuck," Miller breathed, the words coming out as a puff of astonished air. He lowered the binoculars, blinked, and raised them again, as if needing to reset his vision. "What in the goddamn hell is that?"
"I don't know," Mark said, his voice trembling with a nascent excitement he hadn't felt in years. "But it's killing them. The Shamblers. It's been at it for the last hour. Just… tearing them apart and building that wall."
The words spread like wildfire through their small camp. Anya and Sarah scrambled over, their faces etched with caution and a desperate need to believe.
"What is it? What are you seeing?" Sarah asked, her voice tight.
Miller lowered the binoculars again, his face a complex mixture of military disbelief and dawning awe. "It's a soldier. A big one. Nine feet tall if he's an inch, wrapped in armor I've never seen. Strong enough to lift vehicles with his bare hands. He's clearing the area around that megamart."
Hope. It was a tiny, fragile spark in the cold darkness of their despair. For three days, they had been rationing the last of their food, listening to the ceaseless moans from the street below, accepting the fact that this rooftop was their tomb. But now… now there was a chance. A ridiculously small, unbelievable chance in the form of a titan building a wall half a mile away.
"He could save us," Anya whispered, voicing the thought that was blooming in all their minds. "If he's clearing that area… if he can fight them like that…"
"He's too far away," Miller stated, his ingrained pragmatism battling the hope in his gut. He handed the binoculars back to Mark. "He won't see us from here. We're just another rooftop."
"Then we have to make him see us!" Sarah said, her voice filled with a sudden, fierce energy. "There has to be something! A fire! A flare!"
"A fire would bring every Shambler for three blocks right to our front door before he ever noticed," Miller countered grimly. "And we used our last flare two months ago getting out of the downtown quarantine zone."
The spark of hope flickered, threatened by the cold winds of their reality. They looked at each other, the despair beginning to creep back in. They were trapped. They had a potential savior in sight, a walking miracle, and no way to signal him. It was a special kind of hell.
Mark gripped the binoculars, his knuckles white. He looked at the giant, Tertius, as he effortlessly hoisted another car. He saw him pause, turn, and shatter a shambling corpse with a single, brutal punch before returning to his work. The sheer power on display was divine, or demonic. Mark didn't care which.
"No," Mark said, his voice resolute. He scanned his own rooftop. His eyes fell on a large, reflective glass panel that had fallen from a nearby skyscraper's façade, miraculously unbroken. It lay propped against the elevator housing. The sun, weak as it was, was breaking through the clouds. "He's a soldier, you said. A professional. He'll be scanning his surroundings."
He pointed at the panel. "The sun. If we can angle this just right… we can flash him. S.O.S. It's a long shot, Miller, but it's the only shot we've got."
Anya, Sarah, and Mr. Henderson stared at the panel, then at the distant, impossible soldier. Miller looked from Mark's determined face to the mirror-like panel, a glimmer of his own rekindling in his old, tired eyes.
"Goddamn it, kid," the veteran muttered, a small, grim smile touching his lips. "It's a stupid, desperate plan. Let's do it."