Angela Rost was not supposed to be a survivor.
She was supposed to be a mother, a wife, an architect. She was supposed to wear heels, not blood.
But the world had stopped keeping its promises, and now the only thing it delivered was the taste of iron and dust at the back of her throat.
The ledge trembled beneath her, a thousand tiny earthquakes under skin and bone. Every step was a dare: bare foot raw, slick with blood and rain, each nerve screaming. The concrete bit deep, sending up stabs of pain that made her vision go white at the edges.
Below, the city burned. The wind carried up a symphony of agony—screams, sirens, breaking glass. A thousand voices, some still human, some already animal, all crying out to a sky that didn't answer. The smell was everywhere: scorched plastic, burning metal, the copper-sweet stink of blood. It clung to her teeth, seeped into her hair, coated her tongue until she couldn't tell if she was tasting the world or her own fear.
"Rebecca. River. Oh God, where are you? Are you hiding? Are you running? Are you…"
Her mind spun like the wind—Ethan's face, pale, eyes lost somewhere deep, tubes snaking from his arms in the hospital's white silence. The kids, frozen in a smile on the fridge door, so small, so breakable now.
"I should be there. I should be with you."
Every memory struck her like a slap. Every sound made her flinch. The wind was a razor on her skin, pulling at her hair, threading its fingers through the mess of pins and sweat and blood.
She wasn't supposed to be here. She was supposed to be safe. She was supposed to be home.
Her hands shook as she pressed them to the cold concrete, knuckles gone white, breath frosting in the wind. Her foot slid, toes curling over empty air, a thousand feet of nothing between her and the ground, the city below smeared in blood and neon.
"Home," she thought, wild and delirious, "arguing with River about his homework, shouting at Rebecca for leaving her shoes in the hallway. Not… not here."
A sob caught in her throat, but she swallowed it down. Her skirt, torn at the thigh, spattered with her own blood, clung to her legs like wet plastic. One foot bare, sliced raw by glass, the other still imprisoned in a scuffed heel. The wind pulled at her hair, cold fingers rifling through pins and scalp.
Her mind jumped to Ethan, again.
"What if he's gone? What if he's…
No.!" She bit it back, hard.
"The kids. Find the kids."
She forced herself to look up, to really see the world around her. That's when she saw them, moving through the shattered skeleton of the building, crawling over scaffolds, staggering between upended girders and rebar.
At first, her brain refused to register what it was seeing. People, yes—faces half-ruined, eyes milky and wild, flesh drawn tight over bones like wax melted on wire. Limbs wrong—too long, too fast. Mouths open, gasping, leaking strings of saliva. Some stumbled, some twitched as if remembering how to walk.
A pair stood together, sniffing at the air. Another clung to the side of a broken window, gnawing at the frame, teeth leaving grooves in the metal. Their skin was mottled, veined with purples and blacks. Fingernails cracked, or missing entirely.
She saw one turn its head, slow and mechanical, until the broken white of its eye fixed on her. Its jaw hung slack, working wordlessly, then a sound, something deeper, almost a sob, full of pain and bottomless hunger.
They began to gather, as if pulled by gravity or the scent of her blood.
She shrank back, heart hammering, knees buckling. Her fingers closed on something rough, canvas, heavy and stiff. A painter's overall, abandoned beside a rusted bucket.
"I had that plan to paint the fence in the garden," she whispered, almost laughing, tears streaking dust on her cheeks. "Look at me now. Genuine painter. Five-star view, shit clientele."
Her hands shook as she struggled into the suit, half hopping, half crawling, every motion sending glass deeper into her sole.
Blood welled, hot and urgent.
She fumbled, tried to knot the sleeves around her waist. Her nails were cracked, she bit back a scream. Every sound seemed to echo up and down the empty floors, drawing them closer.
From the corner of her eye, she saw one of the infected climb over the ledge, hands like claws, mouth full of splinters and broken teeth.
Another leapt at her shadow on the wall, missing, twisting midair, and vanishing in a blur of rags and skin and wind.
She nearly threw up. The drop below was silent for a moment. Then...smack. Far, far below, out of sight.
Her legs trembled so hard she almost fell after it.
Another one came for her, this one a woman, hair in a tangled bun, wearing the tatters of a safety vest. She moved with a sick parody of purpose, arms swinging, feet barely touching the beam. Her face was bloodied, eyes wide, lips torn. But as she lunged, Angela saw, recognized, something: terror, pain, confusion. A flicker of the human soul, burning out.
Angela choked on her breath, paralyzed.
The Remnant's hand shot out, missing her shoulder by inches, the momentum hurling the woman out and away, into the abyss.
Angela screamed a raw, hoarse sound, half rage, half horror, all loss.
Her foot slipped, her palm skidded on the bloody beam, her body nearly following. But she didn't fall. She pulled herself up, gasping, sobbing, teeth gritted, skin stinging.
She found the painter's rag and wrapped her foot, barely slowing the blood.
All around, the Remnants howled—some in rage, some in confusion, some in that horrible, wordless mourning.
Angela spat dust, wiped her face with a shaking hand, forced herself forward.
The window-washer's platform was just ahead, swaying in the wind, the only thing between her and the ground. It looked impossibly thin, a wire-stretched promise.
She reached it, collapsed onto the cold metal, hands raw, feet bleeding.
She looked up, face streaked with dirt and tears, at the burning city.
"Rebecca. River. Ethan. Hold on. Please, God, hold on. I'm coming. I'm coming, I swear…"
She cranked the platform's lever, the cables screeching, lowering her into the red-lit chaos.
* * *
The city had gone quiet.
Not the good kind of quiet. There was no peace, no gentle hush of distant cars or the clatter of late-night kitchens. No, this was the silence that follows a slaughter. The kind of silence where even ghosts are afraid to make noise.
Ethan ran through it. Or rather, something in Ethan did. The line between man and movement blurred until he could barely remember which leg belonged to him, which muscle obeyed the old orders, which just followed the code.
No one left. No one to hurt. No one to save. For now...
He found himself almost relieved. There was no one to chase, no one to beg for mercy, no one to see the wet hunger in his eyes or the blood crusted on his hands. For the first time since the hospital, the city felt empty enough to breathe.
Except he didn't breathe anymore, not really. His lungs worked, but it was more for the rhythm than the need.
He moved. God, he moved fast. Faster than the body he remembered. Faster than a man who'd ever carried a hose or pulled children from burning rafters. His muscles snapped like wire, leaping fences, scaling the shell of an overturned city bus, vaulting over shattered glass as if gravity had signed a waiver.
And every time he landed, his nerves lit up—warmth, always warmth, like the world was mapped in body heat and trembling pulse.
There, a stain on the pavement. A trail of blood, thin and bright, cooling as it curled away from a gutter.
There...Thump-thump-thump, the echo of a stray dog's heart, so clear it was as if Ethan could see it beating through ribs and fur.
The code in him didn't care about dogs. Not now. But it tracked them, measured them, sorted them from the true prey.
People.
He smelled them before he saw them, sometimes hours away. A flash of iron on the wind, a curl of warm exhale drifting down from an apartment window, a heartbeat hammering like a signal flare in the dark. He could taste fear in the air. He could taste hope, too, bitter and bright, burning in the veins of those who still ran. It was all information now, nothing emotional, just data. He was a predator with perfect senses and too much memory.
Is this what a wolf feels? he wondered, for the thousandth time. Or a snake in the garden, tongue flickering, waiting for the mouse?
He didn't feel pain. Not from the broken skin, not from the torn nails or the glass in his soles. The code numbed him, made him efficient, made him hungry in a way that was never sated, no matter how many times he tried to close his eyes and remember home.
And yet, somewhere under it all, deep inside, the man was still there. Watching. Waiting for a chance to steer. Whispering:
"Don't. Not them. Not again. Please, not again…"
But the city was empty now.
The only warmth was his own.
And Ethan, for one breathless moment, felt almost free.
But freedom, in this new world, was just a longer leash.
Yet, he still ran. Or… his body ran. He was just a passenger, a ghost jammed into flesh that wasn't taking orders anymore. Every stride, every leap across broken concrete, every slam of bone against metal, he felt it and didn't feel it. It was all input, no agency. He could watch, but he couldn't choose.
The worst part wasn't the running. The worst part was when his hands closed around another human shape.
Warmth, the code whispered. Blood.
He watched his own fingers dig in, skin splitting, flesh tearing, the metallic tang of blood spattering up his arms. The horror didn't fade with time. It just got sharper.
Every time, he thought: Maybe this is the one that breaks me. Maybe I'll finally snap, fade, forget who I am, just like the rest…
But no.
He stayed. He watched. He screamed inside, but his mouth only opened to bite, to growl, to hunt.
"Good!" he told himself in the dark between memories. "If I can still be disgusted, if I still want to stop, then I'm still me. Still Ethan. Still human. That's all I have left."
It was like dying of a sickness no one could name, let alone cure. He was cryogenically preserved in his own body, a soul on ice, waiting for the world to thaw out, for some distant, impossible rescue.
He could almost laugh. Humanity had no cure for this. He could only endure, minute by minute, heartbeat by stolen heartbeat, the endless parade of carnage, and hope, against hope, that the next sunrise would find someone else in the driver's seat, or no one at all.
I'm sorry, he whispered to the ghosts in his head, to the faces of those he'd killed. I'm so sorry. Please don't let me forget who I was. Please, God, let there be something left of me at the end.
He kept running. He kept killing.
But somewhere in the blood and ruin, the fire still burned, not just the hunger, but the man.
And that, for now, was mercy enough. Ethan's mind burned with only one constant thought: his family.
Rebecca… River… Angela…
Faces flickered behind his eyes with every heartbeat, brighter than the sun, sharper than the hunger.
He would see River hunched over his books, brow furrowed, asking impossible questions about the world. Rebecca's wild laughter, her fierce eyes. Angela's hand in his, warm and real, the anchor that had always pulled him home.
"God, please. Please. If you're listening, if there's anything left of mercy in this world, let them be safe. Let them be far away from all this."
His mouth opened only for blood, but his mind chanted like a rosary, over and over, as the city blurred beneath his monstrous speed:
"Don't let me find them. Don't bring them my way. I'll take anything—death, fire, oblivion—but not that. Please, not that. Don't let me be the monster that ends my own family."
His body hunted, unstoppable as a nightmare. But inside, Ethan pleaded with the silence, with whatever god or ghost might still be listening in the ruins:
"Please… let them live. Let me forget. Let me die. Just… keep them safe. Keep them far from me. Please. Please!"
But the only answer was the empty city, echoing with distant screams, his own footsteps fading into a night that never ended.
* * *
Angela collapsed onto the cold metal, hands raw, feet bleeding, every nerve in her body burning with fear and exhaustion. Her breath came in ragged bursts. The city's ruin sprawled below, fires flickering in the black depths. The cables overhead groaned, taut as a bowstring.
The wind tore at her, the taste of rain and ash on her lips. She didn't dare look down at the abyss, or at the Remnants gathering on the floors above, eyes fixed and jaws working, drawn by the scent of her blood.
At first, just one noticed her, face smeared red, hands clawing at the glass. Then another. Then another. In moments, the windows above bloomed with hunger: dozens of faces, gnashing teeth, eyes wide with a pain deeper than death.
Then the mob surged. They hammered the glass—fists, elbows, skulls—a drumbeat of oblivion.
Crack.
The first pane spiderwebbed.
Angela screamed as the scaffold lurched, jerking her off her feet. The cable above snapped once, twice, a metallic shriek of warning.
Then…BANG.
The window shattered. Remnants poured through, not just one but a swarm, tumbling out with the broken glass, landing hard on the platform, bodies writhing, teeth snapping for her heels. The force of them nearly flipped the scaffold. One Remnant grabbed her ankle, jaws closing, and she kicked, heel connecting with bone, feeling it split, blood spraying.
No time. No thinking.
She grabbed a battered toolbox, her last weapon, and hurled herself through the broken window. Glass carved into her arms, her shoulders, her scalp. She landed hard, rolling across the floor, a Remnant tumbling after her, grabbing her hair.
She twisted, elbowed, scrambled free, tearing herself loose just as more bodies flailed through the ruined window. One impaled itself on twisted rebar, shrieking, half human, half nightmare. Others fell, some hitting the scaffold, some missing entirely, vanishing in the wind and the darkness below.
Angela staggered upright, wild-eyed.
Elevator. Now. Move!
She darted for the elevator bay, Remnants behind her, claws scraping tile, their hunger a physical heat. She smashed the "Down" button. The doors opened a foot, then jammed. Dead power.
Goddamn you!
She pried at the gap, shoved herself inside, Remnants lunging, hands catching her skirt, tearing. She kicked, stomped, screamed, forcing the closest one back with every last ounce of strength.
The doors slid shut, just enough to block their reach, Remnant fingers slamming and scraping, leaving bloody streaks on steel. Inside, the car was dark, trembling, power dead. Angela panted, tears cutting clean lines through grime. She mashed the buttons, nothing.
Above, the Remnants howled, pounding the doors, the car shuddering on its cables.
She looked up, emergency hatch, just open enough. No way up. She looked down, the black pit of the maintenance ladder. A death sentence, but the only way out.
No choice.
Angela jammed her bleeding foot into the ladder's top rung, gritting her teeth, slung herself out, every inch a knife-edge of fear and agony. She descended, rung by rung, her mind chanting the only prayer that mattered: Rebecca. River. Survive.
Glass rained down from above. Remnants shrieked, their bodies flailing in the half-open doors, desperate to follow. The elevator car trembled as Angela clung to the ladder, blood smearing every rung. She was halfway down the shaft when she heard it—a metallic shriek, worse than anything yet. The Remnants had forced the doors. Their weight tumbled into the car—a writhing, shrieking avalanche of bodies and broken teeth. The elevator cable groaned. Angela looked up and saw the cable fray. A brake screeched, then gave with a gut-wrenching snap.
The car jerked. Dropped half a meter. Slammed to a stop.
Three brakes.
Angela moved faster, every inch of her body screaming. She leapt down the next set of rungs, feet slipping, hands raw.
Rebecca. River. Move, Angela, damn you!
A second brake let go—SNAP!—and the car dropped again, closer, faster, filling the shaft with an iron roar.
Two brakes.
Angela looked down. A service door, barely marked, half-rusted. Maintenance access, her way out. She reached for it, prying with bloody fingers, but it wouldn't budge. Stuck, welded by time and fear.
The Remnants inside the car howled, their faces pressed to the shaft, hands reaching, teeth snapping as the car shuddered, cable unspooling.
One brake.
The car was coming for her. Angela wedged her shoulder against the grate, kicked once, twice, her foot slipping—no grip, no hope—then screamed, a sound so raw it burned her throat.
"COME ON!"
She kicked again, all her weight, all her terror. The grill bent, just enough. She wriggled through, glass slicing her arms, body half in, half out.
The last brake screamed.
The elevator dropped.
Angela lunged, yanked herself through the opening. The falling car howled behind her like wind, screaming metal, Remnants shrieking as the elevator plunged past, a blur of faces, hands, death.
She rolled into the darkness of the maintenance shaft just as the car slammed into the bottom with a hellish boom, metal twisting, Remnants silenced, a blast of dust and hot wind flinging her hair back.
Silence.
Angela lay gasping, bleeding, wild-eyed in the dark.
Alive. Just barely.
* * *
Angela dropped from the air vent with all the grace of a body thrown from a moving car. The grate clanged behind her, bouncing once, twice on the concrete floor before settling in a ragged, uncertain hush. She landed hard—knees buckling, hands splaying on the dust-choked tiles.
And then, nothing moved.
She just lay there. Face pressed against cold linoleum, breath coming in ragged, tiny gasps. Her whole body screamed: fire in her foot, glass in her shoulder, wrists stinging, lungs raw. Every muscle trembled, refusing to obey.
Blood dripped from her elbow, sketching a red Morse code on the floor. She watched it bead, then spread, dizzy and detached. The pain pulsed through her in waves, and for a moment she couldn't even remember her own name—only the ache, the pain, the fear.
The city's noise was muffled down here, swallowed by the walls, replaced by the shallow thunder of her heart. She tried to move. Failed. Tried again. Her body felt too heavy, half-broken. She let her cheek rest against the tile, eyes closed, listening to the distant hum of old pipes and the rattle of her own teeth.
She could taste iron, dust, exhaustion so deep it felt like sleep was pulling her under.
Just a moment, she thought. Just let me breathe. Let me stop. Let me disappear, if only for a minute.
But somewhere under the pain, the grief, the weight of everything lost, a thread of will twitched.
Rebecca. River. Ethan.
Get up!
She rolled onto her back, every nerve protesting, and stared at the cracked ceiling. For those few stolen seconds, she let herself feel every bruise, every cut, every ugly, aching piece of survival. She was human, and she hurt, and that, for now, meant she was still alive.
Alive. Still alive. Again.
The office was a cave of ghosts: filing cabinets overturned, chairs wedged against the only door, as if someone had tried and failed to barricade themselves from whatever horror haunted the hallways above. The flickering green of an emergency light bled across the cracked glass of a maintenance window. Every surface was dusted with ash, glass shards, and the kind of fine concrete grit that made every cut sting twice as much.
Angela sat up, breath hissing between her teeth. Her foot throbbed with every heartbeat, the rag still knotted around it now heavy with blood. But she was off the ledge, off the edge, and for a brief, feral moment she wanted to laugh at the absurdity of it all.
She scanned the room.
Survive. Gear. Move!
Along one wall: the locked red cabinet, fire team only. She limped to it, rifled through her pockets, found a maintenance key still clipped to the belt of a dead security guard slumped behind the desk. She didn't let herself look at his face. Not now.
The lock clicked. The doors opened.
Inside:
Orange overalls, fireproof.
A pair of heavy-soled boots, two sizes too large.
First-aid kit, half-used.
Splintered fire axe, paint peeling, but the edge still keen as heartbreak.
She stripped away what was left of her blazer and skirt, the fabric tearing in sticky, blood-dark ribbons. Pulled the overalls on—one leg, then the other, wincing as the boots scraped across her raw heel. She cinched them tight, rolled the cuffs, and pressed a gauze pad to the worst of her cuts, wrapping it with duct tape from the tool chest.
She found a battered mirror hanging by a single screw above the ancient steel sink. The glass was shattered, a spiderweb of fractures making her face look like a stranger's—bloody, wild-eyed, a mat of hair hacked short by panic and sweat.
Angela stared at herself for a long, unblinking moment.
You're not dead yet. You're not done. They need you. Pull it together!
She turned on the tap. Water trickled out, thin and brownish at first, then clearer. She cupped her hands, splashed her face, washed the blood and dust from her arms, wincing as grit worked into the wounds. She found a comb in the first-aid kit, dragged it through the mess on her scalp, twisted her hair into a knot, and tied it off with an elastic scavenged from her old jacket's sleeve.
Piece by piece, she remade herself: Not a wife. Not an architect. Not a ghost.
Mother. Fighter. Avenger. Whatever it took.
She strapped the axe to her back, found a battered flashlight, checked the batteries. Faint glow. Good enough.
She exhaled, slow, steady. Reached for the door.
And then…
A sound.
Soft, high, a breath held too long.
Her grip tightened on the axe. She pressed her ear to the thin wall. Again: a shuffle, the gentle clatter of plastic, then silence.
Someone hiding. Someone alive.
Angela moved with the new animal grace of someone who'd already faced the monsters once today. She crept to the maintenance closet door, pressed her hand flat, listening.
A cough. Muffled. Human.
She knocked once, hard, with the axe handle.
Nothing.
Then a voice, quavery, desperate, male, the words tumbling out in a rush: "Wait, wait…don't! Please! I'm…please, I'm not…"
She knocked again. "I know you're in there," she called, voice low, level. "If you're still human, now's the time to prove it. Open up, or I come in swinging."
A silence, brittle as glass.
Angela, voice hard as the axe in her fist:
"Last chance, tell me who's President and what year it is, or I'm coming through this door swinging. And if you say Kanye, I'll swing twice."
A long, terrified silence. Then a voice, quavering:
"Elon Musk...2031...unless… unless there's been a coup while I was hiding. Please, please tell me you're not one of them?"
Angela's expression: somewhere between disbelief and bitter amusement.
"Correct. The world ends and the meme king is in charge. Out. Now."
The door creaked open, and he tumbled out, blinking in the emergency light, still clutching a multitool like it was a talisman.
A thin, bespectacled young man, blinking in the emergency light, shirt clinging to him with sweat. He raised his hands, fingers trembling, a white-knuckle grip on a multitool that wouldn't have fended off a rabid hamster.
"I'm not infected," he stammered, eyes wide, darting between Angela's face and the axe. "I…Jesus, are you bleeding? Are you… are you one of them?"
Angela stared at him. For a moment, all she could manage was a laugh—wild, hollow, on the edge of weeping. "Would a Remnant be asking if you're one of them?"
He blinked, then shook his head. "No…No, I guess not. I… I heard you fall in. Thought you were one of those things. I've been in here since, since it started. Haven't even peed, for, I don't know, hours? Days?"
Angela's shoulders slumped with something dangerously close to relief. "Name?"
"Sam. Nichols. I do comms, network install. Was supposed to be wiring the backup grid. And then…" He stopped, eyes going glassy.
Angela nodded. "You're with me now, Sam. Get a grip."
He swallowed. "What's the plan?"
Angela considered the blood on her hands, the axe at her back, the city screaming somewhere far below.
"We get out. And if anything comes through that door, you swing first, you ask questions later. Understood?"
Sam nodded, already paler than before, but in his eyes, Angela saw a flicker of something—resolve, or maybe just the absence of any better options.
Sam grabbed a mop stick, stared at it as if it were a lightsaber that had somehow run out of batteries. "Like this is going to stop them," he muttered, voice tight with the kind of laugh people make at their own funeral. "But hey… desperate times."
Angela gave him the once-over: small, thin, built like someone who'd lost a fight with a server rack. The epitome of a geek. Everything about him said "last picked in gym class" and "most likely to die first in a horror movie." If she'd met him two weeks ago, she'd have put him in charge of a spreadsheet, not a weapon.
She almost smiled, almost. "Don't worry. It's not about the size of the stick. It's about how pissed off you swing it."
He gave a dry, trembling laugh, twisting the mop in his hands like he wanted it to become Excalibur through sheer willpower. "Great. Maybe I'll get bitten and develop super strength. Isn't that how it works?"
Angela's eyes went flinty. "If you get bitten, I'll put you down myself. You want to live? Don't think. Don't hope. Just move. And if anything gets close, you swing for the teeth. Got it?"
He nodded, Adam's apple bobbing, the edge of panic still simmering in his eyes, but behind it, something else: a raw, stubborn thread of survival.
She slung the axe, wiped her palm on the overalls, and nodded at the door. "Let's go, Sam. Quiet at first. Then fast, if we have to."
He swallowed hard, shoulders squaring as if pretending to be braver might make it true. "Yeah. Okay. Lead the way, boss."
Angela cracked the door open. The hallway beyond was choked with shadows, but for once, she wasn't just running. She was hunting for a future, even if she had to drag this unlikely sidekick behind her.
And with that, they slipped out into the dark, two ghosts in borrowed armor, making a stand in a world that had forgotten what hope felt like.
The hallway was a slaughterhouse masquerading as modern architecture. Ceiling panels hung like broken wings. Neon lights flickered in fits—pink, blue, sickly green—spilling color onto devastation. Glass crunched under their boots, the floor littered with the kinds of things nobody ever expects to see in real life: a blood-soaked briefcase, a shattered coffee thermos, a child's sneaker lying sideways in a pool of what might once have been someone's father.
Dead bodies everywhere. The ones who'd been spared the code, spared "salvation," only to become rations for whatever the city had become. Faces frozen in surprise or terror, eyes open, mouths slack. Some half-consumed, torsos chewed open like rotten fruit. Gore smeared across walls in patterns that, in another life, might have been mistaken for abstract art.
Sam choked back bile, covering his mouth. "Jesus," he whispered, voice trembling. "What the hell are we walking into? Looks like an episode from The Walking Dead." His laugh was a strangled thing, meant to break the tension, but it only made it worse.
Angela scanned the corridor with cold, pragmatic eyes, taking in every shadow, every twitch of movement, every possible hiding place. "That's because it is," she said, stepping over a splayed hand with wedding ring still on the finger. "Just without the makeup crew to clean up between takes."
Sam hugged his mop stick like a talisman. "I thought IT guys were supposed to die off-screen. Why am I here? Why am I…?"
A flicker down the hall. A body—no, not a body, not still. Something moved. Low, scraping. A Remnant, jaw working soundlessly as it gnawed on the side of a corpse, the sound wet and obscene.
Angela froze, one hand raised. Sam's eyes went wide as dinner plates, the stick shaking in his grip.
"Don't look at it," Angela whispered. "Eyes forward. Breathe through your mouth. We keep moving, we keep breathing. No sudden noises. No running, unless it runs first."
Sam nodded, sweat trickling down his neck, but his feet obeyed. Together they crept past, boots slipping in streaks of congealed blood, the Remnant's head turning, milky eyes tracking them with the lazy interest of something that hadn't decided if it was still hungry.
Angela gripped her axe tighter. Sam gripped his mop tighter.
And together, like two survivors in a world that had chewed up hope and spat out nightmares, they moved deeper into the darkness, one step, one breath, one heartbeat at a time.
Mother. Architect. Warrior. And her geek with a mop, marching through hell, because the only way out was through.
* * *
Ethan lost the feeling in his limbs.
First it was just his hands, those hands that once held a hose, a child, his wife's trembling fingers. Now they hung useless, flung this way and that as the code inside him moved his body like a meat puppet. Then his feet, legs, hips, all slipping away, as if someone was unthreading him from the bones outward, one memory at a time.
He felt himself shrinking, reduced, the core of him pressed inward by a mounting, suffocating pressure. His body had become a suit of armor made of meat and hunger. He wore it, but he didn't command it. He simply watched. Felt the sway of movement. Heard the rhythm of a heart he no longer owned. Eyes opened and closed by some other will.
A marionette with no strings, only wires, only hunger. Only the code.
He tried to scream, but the sound died in his throat, choked off by the thing that now used his lungs for hunting, not pleading. He tried to clench a fist, tried to run, to fall, to do anything but what the predator demanded. Nothing. He was a ghost in a killing machine.
And worse, now, even his senses were blurring. Touch faded. The warmth of blood on his fingers, the cold wind across his face—these became echoes, faint and far away. Smells dulled. Sounds muffled. His mouth opened to bite, to tear, to drink, but the taste was fading too.
It was as if a pane of glass had come down between him and the world—thick, smeared, fogged with the breath of a dying man. He pressed against it, desperate, frantic, but it held. He could see the world. He just couldn't reach it.
He felt himself drifting backward, receding into the deep well of his own mind, each heartbeat pushing him farther from the light. Passenger, now, not driver. Witness, not actor.
Is this what dying feels like? Or is it worse—a living death, a man outlived by the thing wearing his name?
He clung to scraps: a memory of Angela's laughter, River's small hand in his, Rebecca's fierce, defiant smile. He whispered their names into the void, over and over, like a man pressing photographs to his chest in a burning house.
But the fire inside him only roared louder. The armor grew thicker. The distance grew longer.
And so Ethan—husband, father, fireman—clung to the last ember of himself, and watched as the monster marched him deeper into the ruins, one fading heartbeat at a time.
He drifted through the ash-stained streets, the cityscape a broken puzzle of memory and oblivion. But then, the architecture of his soul snapped into focus. A red-bricked silhouette, familiar as the shape of his own hands. The flagpole bent, the battered roll-up door still half-painted from last year's "volunteer day." The old, sun-bleached sign, letters peeling: ENGINE 33 — DUTY. FAMILY. HONOR.
Ethan felt something seize inside him, a ghostly echo of the man he'd been.
Wait… wait a minute…
That voice, his voice, deep down in the marrow, surfaced, trembling with something like hope and terror tangled together.
This is… home.
His body didn't hesitate. Didn't flinch. The predator inside, the code, whatever name he could give the thing at the wheel, marched him straight across the ruined avenue, through the drifting curtain of smoke and the crackle of dying fires, right up to the yawning mouth of Station 33.
It was a corpse now. A cathedral gutted by its own worship. The roll-up door hung askew, shredded by some impact. The front glass—gone, shattered, its shards ground to powder beneath a hundred fleeing feet. The engine bay empty, not even the glint of chrome or the scent of diesel, just a cold, iron silence.
He staggered over the threshold, boots crunching glass, and the weight of memory crashed over him:
Late nights around the scarred kitchen table, laughing over terrible coffee.
William's rough hand clapping his shoulder, pride and warning in equal measure.
Angela, pregnant, waiting by the lockers, her smile a promise stronger than any alarm bell.
Now, nothing but ruin. The radio desk upended, papers soaked in blood. Helmets scattered like toys, bunker coats shredded, one still pinned to the wall by what looked like a fire axe, left there in a last, hopeless stand. The pole to the sleeping quarters gleamed with something that wasn't just old wax.
His body moved deeper.
Ethan's heart slammed in his chest.
No. Not here. Not this place. Please, God, not here…
But the code didn't listen. The passenger could only watch as his feet tracked the old, familiar route, weaving past overturned lockers, the board with the faded "Call-outs" from the last normal day, now smeared into illegibility.
And there, behind the remnants of the kitchen wall, a shadow moved.
Ethan's mouth opened, but what came out wasn't a name, wasn't a prayer, just a growl, hungry, empty, monstrous.
Not here, Ethan begged, somewhere behind his own eyes.
Please… don't let me defile this place. Don't let me become the ghost that haunts my own home.
But the monster walked on, hunting for warmth.
The cathedral had become a mausoleum, and the only thing left to bury was the last ember of the man he used to be.
"Ha, there you are!"
The words knifed through the static in Ethan's skull—a voice, not his, not entirely alien either.
He staggered, blinking at the shadows, at the ruins of Station 33, confusion swirling behind the eyes he no longer truly owned.
What the hell…?
That thing again.
Elian, what was that guy calling it? The Choir?
He tried to focus, to anchor himself in the wreckage. "Who is that?"
A pause, then a thread of laughter, thin and rusty as an old siren.
"It's me, Ethan. Elian. Thought I'd lost you to the bullets back at the hospital. Can't get rid of me that easy, buddy. Trust me, I've tried."
Ethan's mind reeled, the world tilting between memory and blood.
"Where...how are you…?"
"Same as you, pal. Hitchhiker in my own skull. Or what's left of it." Elian's voice came through like a bad radio signal, warped by distance and pain, yet somehow still warm. "You made it all the way back here, huh? The old firehouse. Kinda poetic, if you're into that sort of tragedy."
A jagged grin flashed across Ethan's mind, not his, but gifted by the psychic link.
"I used to watch Engine 33 on the news," Elian mused, his voice low and haunted. "You were always the hero, weren't you? The one who ran in when everyone else ran out. And now look at us, monsters coming home to die."
Ethan fought to speak, to form anything but a growl.
"Why are you still here?" he managed, the words crackling in his head like dying sparks.
A sigh, deep as a funeral bell.
"We're all here, Ethan. Everyone the code touched. Everyone it couldn't quite finish off. We ride along, pieces in the dark. Some give up. Some scream themselves into silence. But you...Hell, you fight like a dog. You keep the lights on. Figured I'd tag along, see how your story ends."
A pause, full of old sorrow and the neon flicker of ruined hope.
"Feels like home, doesn't it? Even if it's just another coffin."
Ethan pressed against the inside of his mind, desperate.
"Are there more of us? Still awake?"
Elian's answer was slow, ragged, but not unkind.
"Not many. Most burn out. Some fade. But I'll stick with you, fireman. You got the stubbornness. Makes the code nervous. Besides, you're better company than most. And hey, who else can say they died twice and still got a shot at redemption?"
A moment's silence as the monster moved, stalking deeper into Station 33, memories pooling like oil at Ethan's feet.
The Choir buzzed, far away, a chorus of agony, a handful of voices still bright enough to matter.
"Let's see what's left in your old castle, hero," Elian murmured, wry as ever. "Maybe a ghost or two. Maybe a miracle. Maybe just another bad ending. But hell, at least we're not alone."
And for the briefest, sickest moment, Ethan almost felt grateful for the company.
But then the shadows moved.
Shapes staggered out from the bunkroom, limped from the half-collapsed kitchen, shuffled up from the broken basement stairs. Outside, through shattered windows, more came—figures peeling off the street, drawn by the scent of one of their own.
Remnants.
Not a pack. Not a herd. A gathering, like mourners at a funeral that never ends.
Their bodies jerked, twitching, barely human under the flicker of dying lights. Some faces half-familiar. Firehouse ghosts, old neighbors, the night shift from the deli, all twisted now, hollowed out by the code. They closed in, eyes blank and hungry. But behind those eyes?
Their minds were screaming.
The Choir exploded in Ethan's skull, voices flooding in, raw and desperate, a hundred channels of static and broken music.
Where am I?
It hurts. God, it HURTS.
Mom? Dad? Why can't I see?
Get out! GET OUT! This isn't me...
Let me go. Please!
I want to wake up. Please…
It was a river of terror and confusion, and Ethan felt himself slipping, his memories washed away in the current.
Elian's voice was gone, swallowed by the flood.
The Remnants pressed in, crowding the engine bay, arms reaching, not to attack, but to clutch, to beg, to anchor themselves in the middle of the storm.
Inside, the psychic link hummed like a wire ready to snap. The voices swirled—crying, pleading, looping scraps of old songs, some just screaming: Help. Help. Help.
Ethan's mind buckled. The borders of himself blurred, threatened to dissolve in the mass of lost souls.
No. No. I'm still here. I'm…
A child's voice, cutting through the chaos:
"Daddy? Where are you? I want to go home…"
A woman, sobbing:
"He's coming back. He has to come back. He promised…"
Another voice, Elian, fighting to be heard:
"Don't let them take you, Ethan! Hold on, fireman! Hold on!"
But the wave kept coming, smothering, relentless.
For a moment, Ethan was swept away, lost in the static, just one voice among the maddening Choir.
He tried to scream, tried to remember his name, but only the monster's growl came out.
The Remnants drew closer, hungry not just for flesh, but for something to hold onto in the dark.
And in that suffocating, boiling psychic storm, Ethan clung to the only thing that still made him Ethan:
His family's faces. Their voices. Their memory.
He screamed their names inside his mind, a lighthouse against the black tide.
Rebecca. River. Angela. Don't let me go. Don't let me disappear. Not yet. Not here. Not in this house.
But Elian…
Elian was an old soul, stubborn as an oil stain. He squeezed his eyes shut, not the ones in his skull, but the ones in his mind, and started to filter. One voice at a time, then two, then three, he forced the howling torrent into a trickle, until it was just him and Ethan, standing in the ruins of Station 33, shoulder to psychic shoulder.
Ethan felt the noise clawing at the edges, the tidal surge of fear and memory, but he reached, desperate, for something solid, something before the hunger, the code, the collapse.
A song.
An old song.
He could barely remember the melody, but the words came back, rusty, raw, rising up from a place even the code hadn't touched.
He began to hum, soft, broken at first, then louder.
His lips never moved, but the Choir heard him.
He found the words, a grin, real or imagined, on his face for the first time since the world ended:
"Hey, they call me the fireman, that's my name
Makin' my rounds all over town
Puttin' out old flames
Hey, well, everybody'd like to have what I've got
I can cool 'em down when they're smolderin' hot
I'm the fireman, that's my name…"
At first, it was just a whisper inside his head, drowned by screams and static.
But Elian caught it. picked up the verse, off-key, but defiant:
"That's my name…"
Another voice joined.
A woman, someone he'd never met, her tone ragged, but there, threading through the psychic gloom.
"I'm the fireman, that's my name…"
The storm of voices faltered, wavered, softened. The fear didn't disappear, but it became background, a tide that ebbed for a moment while the Choir remembered. For a heartbeat, they were more than hunger, more than the code.
They were…
Firefighters.
Nurses.
Mothers.
Children.
Singers, dancers, broken souls clutching at a tune from a world that still made sense.
Ethan sang louder, not caring if the notes broke, not caring if he was half growl, half song.
It was hope, made real. One man's memory, one station's anthem, holding the line against oblivion.
The Remnants around him stilled. Their bodies twitched, jaws snapped, but the psychic noise was quieter now, shaped by song, by ritual, by the stubborn, human ache for meaning in the dark.
Elian's voice faded out, but his thought lingered, warm as a hand on Ethan's shoulder:
"See, fireman? Still got a little heat left in you. Never let 'em take the music. Never."
For one sacred moment, Ethan felt himself, truly himself, at the center of the Choir.
And for the first time since the code claimed him, he did not feel alone.
And in that echo, a battered tune from another, better world, a hush settled over the Remnants. The manic hunger bled out of their eyes, replaced by something older, something aching. As the last notes faded, the mob drew closer, bodies swaying in time to a beat none of them could remember but all of them craved.
Shoulders brushed, hands found arms and sleeves and ruined flesh, each touch a seeking, trembling question: Are you still there? Do you remember? They pressed together, huddled in the ruins of Station 33, a tangled mass of ruined uniforms, broken skin, and faint, fragile memory.
And as Ethan stood among them, his own body a ruin, his mind flickering, he felt it. Not just the weight of arms around his shoulders or the press of hands against his spine, but something deeper, something he hadn't felt since before the code:
Breathing.
Not the ragged pant of hunger or the desperate gasp of prey, but a rhythm. A human rhythm, rising from within, low and slow and shared. It didn't come from lungs anymore, most of these bodies had forgotten how to use them. No, the breath was psychic, soul-deep, a tide rolling through the Choir, through the marrow of the beast and the last unbroken corner of the man.
In… out… in… out…
It was peace, for a heartbeat. The kind of peace you find only in the eye of the storm, when the world has already ended but the memory of comfort lingers.
The silence wrapped around them, soft as smoke. Ethan felt tears sting his eyes, tears his body no longer knew how to make.
He was not alone.
Not anymore.
None of them were.
He listened to the breathing, not with ears, but with the ache in his chest, the old, fireman's heart that refused to die. Each inhale was a promise: We are still here. Each exhale was a requiem for the world they'd lost.
For a single, impossible moment, the monsters became mourners, and the Choir became a congregation.
And Ethan, standing at the center of it all, felt a flicker of hope.