POV: Leo
The bat was no longer a tool. It was a limb. A cold, unfeeling extension of his will that had grafted itself onto his soul. Leo slept in stolen minutes, propped against a wall in a looted hardware store, his body screaming for rest but the bat humming a low, constant note of hunger that vibrated through his bones. It was a demanding parasite, and its appetite was insatiable.
He didn't dream of Mark anymore. He dreamed of the click.
It was the only thing that made the humming stop. The only moment of silence in the screaming orchestra of his existence. The click was peace.
Fall Creek was his butcher's block. He knew its alleys and backyards better than he knew the lines on his own scarred hands. The military thought they controlled the perimeter. Troy thought he ruled the center. Leo knew the truth: he owned the spaces in between. The shadows were his kingdom.
His target today was the Fall Creek Pharmacy. The bat's pull was a compass needle pointing toward a concentration of the fever-bright agony he'd come to recognize as the infected. Not the mindless ones—they were static, background noise, worthless to the bat's true purpose. This was a sharper signal. The strong-willed. The ones who hid. The ones who thought. Their fear and lucid pain were a complex, flavorful meal, and the bat was hungry for it.
The front door was barricaded with shelving units. A futile gesture. He didn't bother with the front. He moved to the loading dock out back, his movements fluid and silent. The metal door was locked from the inside. He placed his hand on it. The bat, sensing the proximity of its preferred prey, grew warmer. He felt a surge of its alien strength flood his arm. With a single, brutal jerk, he ripped the handle and the deadbolt clean out of the metal frame with a shriek of tearing steel.
The gloom inside stank of stale medicine, sweat, and the coppery tang of old blood. Muffled whimpers came from behind the pharmacist's counter.
"Please... we have food... take it and go..." a man's voice, cracked with fear.
Leo stepped into the open. Three of them. A man in a torn pharmacist's coat, a woman clutching a tire iron, and a teenage boy hiding behind them. Their eyes were wide, the whites jaundiced with the tell-tale yellow glow. But they were lucid. They were terrified. Of him.
The man held up a shaking hand. "We're not like the others! We're sick, but we're still us! We just... we just need to wait this out."
Leo said nothing. Words were a waste of energy. The bat did the talking. It thrummed in his hand, eager. It didn't want the broken or the mindless. It wanted this—the vibrant, conscious terror. The will to live, marinating in its own suffering.
The woman screamed and lunged, swinging the tire iron with surprising speed. Leo didn't dodge. He moved through the swing. The iron connected with his ribs. He felt the bones crack, a white-hot flash of pain that was instantly drowned out by the bat's warm, prickling energy as it knitted the bone back together. The sensation was vile, like maggots squirming under his skin.
His free hand shot out, grabbing her wrist. He squeezed. The bones crunched like dry twigs. Her scream turned into a high-pitched shriek. He shoved her away, sending her crashing into a shelf of cough syrup. The glass shattered, the sticky liquid mixing with the blood from her shattered arm.
The man rushed him, brandishing a scalpel. A pathetic, desperate weapon. Leo swung the bat in a short, economical arc. It wasn't aimed at the head. It connected with the man's knee. The sound was a wet, explosive pop. The man collapsed, his leg bending at an impossible angle, his scream choking off as he fainted from the pain.
The boy was the last. He was just standing there, trembling, tears cutting clean paths through the grime on his face. He couldn't have been more than sixteen.
"Please," the boy sobbed. "I don't want to hurt anyone."
For a fraction of a second, Leo saw Mark. He saw the betrayal in his eyes. The bat hummed impatiently in his hand, its golden veins pulsing faster. The hunger was a physical pressure in his skull. The click was so close. He could almost taste the silence.
The mercy died before it was born.
The swing was a piston motion. Brutally efficient. The boy's head snapped back.
There was a terrible, wet sound. Then, for a heart-stopping moment, nothing. No click. Just the sound of the body hitting the floor and the woman's muffled weeping. A spike of panic—had he broken it? Had he finally killed someone it didn't want?
Then it came.
The bat flared, hot as a brand. The boy's essence—his fear, his pain, his stolen future—was siphoned out of him in a torrent of faint, golden light, absorbed into the wood. The humming ceased. For three glorious seconds, there was silence. True, profound silence. The relief was so powerful it was euphoric, a drug flooding his system, washing away the horror, the guilt, the very memory of what he had just done.
Then, as the euphoria faded, the shame rushed in to fill the void, colder and heavier than before. He had enjoyed it. He had needed it.
The woman was still mewling in the puddle of syrup and blood, clutching her ruined arm. The man was unconscious, his breath coming in ragged gasps. They were no threat. They were just... meat. But the bat wasn't interested in the crippled and the broken. It had gotten what it came for. It was sated.
Leo turned to leave. As he passed the woman, she looked up at him, her eyes full of a hatred so pure it was almost beautiful.
"Monster," she spat through broken teeth.
He paused, looking down at her. His own reflection stared back from the dark, blood-smeared lenses of a fallen pair of glasses. A gaunt, hollow-eyed creature, covered in dirt and other people's lives, fused to a piece of cursed wood.
He didn't disagree.
He stepped over her and walked out into the gray light, leaving the two broken survivors to their fate. They would either die slowly, or the hunger would finally win and they would become the mindless things he would have to come back and clean up later.
The hunt was over. For now. The bat was sated, its golden veins glowing with stolen light. Leo leaned against the brick wall of the alley, the brief silence already fading, replaced by the familiar, hungry hum. He closed his eyes, not in sleep, but in a futile attempt to escape the sound.
He was the Butcher of Fall Creek. And the night was young.