They left the restaurant with the sky bruising purple. The air was thick, damp, carrying the stench of decay. Their bags bulged with meat and supplies, straps cutting into their shoulders.
It didn't take long before the weight slowed them.
"Faster!" one of the officers barked.
But greed had chained them down. Survivors staggered, panting, dragging their swollen loads as though they were dragging their own coffins.
The first moans rolled through the street—low, hungry, swelling. Shadows lurched from alleyways, eyes glowing faintly in the gloom.
The horde descended.
Gunfire cracked, loud and desperate. It only drew more. The street boiled with the dead.
Lexi's dagger gleamed, but she holstered it. She drew the silenced gun she'd prepared earlier, her shots quick, precise, merciless. The suppressed pops were almost delicate compared to the roar of rifles around her, but her bullets always found skulls.
"Shoot the brain!" she snapped, shoving a trembling man aside to save him from a lunging corpse.
Her movements were liquid, swift, efficient. Where others flailed, she cut a path. The two officers fell in step beside her, their eyes darting to her again and again—approval sharpening into calculation.
But not everyone could keep up.
A scream tore the night. Ricks, the broad-shouldered man who'd joked about Lexi being a delinquent, vanished beneath clawing hands. Another man, Paul tried to drag him free, only to be bitten across the throat. Their gurgles faded into the growl of the swarm.
Lexi didn't look back.
By the time they burst into the clearing where the truck waited, sweat plastered their clothes, lungs heaving fire. Two fewer bodies.
"Get in, get in!" an officer bellowed.
They piled into the truck, slamming the doors as fingers clawed against the metal. The engine roared to life, wheels spitting gravel as they sped off. The undead chased, howling, stumbling after them until the darkness swallowed their pale faces.
Inside the truck, silence fell—broken only by ragged breathing. Pale, hollow eyes stared at the floor. The losses weighed heavier than the bags of food.
By the time they rattled through the camp gates, they were ghosts of themselves.
Bags were surrendered to the quartermasters—greed stripped away as quickly as it had been stuffed into them. Some muttered protests, but soldiers with rifles silenced them fast.
Lexi shouldered her way back to the tent. Inside, it was emptier now.
The old man's bedroll was gone.
The fevered child, Carl, Brant, Maya.
Only the pregnant woman and a few others remained. They sat slumped, faces gray, eyes staring at nothing. The room felt hollowed out, as if every death had scooped another piece of humanity from them.
Dinner was ladled out—thin broth and bland rice. No one tasted it. They only chewed to survive.
Lexi ate slowly, as always, watching, listening.
Then the flap rustled.
"Lexi," a soldier's voice barked. "You're summoned."
She looked up.
The others glanced at her—some with envy, some with fear. No one was ever summoned to the big building unless they were important. Or dangerous.
Lexi rose, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and followed the soldier into the night.
The camp stretched silent around her, the glow of floodlights cutting shadows across barbed wire fences.