Leon awoke with a soft light hitting his face.
He blinked slowly, disoriented. The side of his neck was stiff from sleeping sitting up in a leather chair. He brought a hand to his forehead, where the cut had formed a thick scab. The pain was less than he'd expected.
The light that woke him came from the panoramic window. Through the cracked glass, he could see the sky beginning to lighten on the horizon, tinting the clouds a lighter gray.
Leon looked at his wrist instinctively, searching for the watch that was no longer there. Lost somewhere during the crash. He frowned, trying to gauge how many hours he'd slept by the sun's position, but gave up. What mattered was that he had slept deeply for the first time since the chaos began.
He got up slowly, testing his body. His ribs still hurt, but it was a dull, bearable ache. Not the agony from before. The cuts on his forearm had completely stopped bleeding.
His body was healing faster than it should. Much faster.
Leon wasn't an idiot. He knew that wasn't normal. People didn't heal rib fractures in hours. But he also wasn't in a position to complain. If the System was somehow accelerating his regeneration, then so be it.
He walked to the attached break room and turned on the faucet out of habit. Nothing came out but a dry hiss. No running water. Obviously.
Leon materialized one of the water bottles he had stored in his inventory and drank half in one go, feeling the cold liquid go down his throat. He put the rest away and grabbed a cereal bar, chewing mechanically as he walked to the table where Aylin was.
He placed a hand on her forehead. Still hot. The fever hadn't gone down. Her breathing was shallow and irregular, and her skin was too pale. Her broken arm was swollen, and there were purple marks in places.
"Damn," he murmured.
He tried to get her to drink a little water, tilting the bottle against her lips and letting it drip slowly. Aylin swallowed reflexively. He managed to get maybe three sips into her before giving up.
It wasn't enough. She needed antibiotics, proper bandages, a place with electricity to maintain a stable temperature.
But hospitals were probably full of infected by now. So a pharmacy would have to do.
Leon stepped away from the table and looked around the room, searching for something useful. His eyes stopped in a corner where he had left a notebook the night before.
He had found it in one of the executive offices during the initial sweep. It was on a charging dock, the cable still plugged into the outlet. Leon had checked quickly: it still had battery. About 30%. Not much, but it was something. At the time, he had been too exhausted to turn it on.
Now, however, he had time.
Leon picked up the laptop and returned to the chair near the window, where the natural light was better. He opened the lid and pressed the power button.
The screen lit up with the manufacturer's logo. After a few seconds, the operating system loaded straight to the desktop; luckily, there was no password.
The first thing Leon did was look at the bottom right corner of the screen, where the date and time were displayed.
Saturday, January 14, 07:42
He stared at those numbers for a long moment, processing.
Saturday.
When he had requested his discharge from the barracks, it was Monday, the 9th. He remembered clearly. Because it was literally the day the infected started appearing.
And now it was Saturday, the 14th.
Three days.
Leon closed his eyes and took a deep breath.
They had been unconscious for three entire days.
He looked at Aylin, processing this information. She had survived three days without eating, without drinking properly, with a broken arm and a high fever. How the hell was she still alive?
How the hell was she still alive?
It didn't seem like just willpower. Leon felt a chill on the back of his neck. There was an anomaly in that situation, a missing piece he couldn't decipher. And this ignorance made him more uneasy than her fever itself.
But how far did it go? How much longer could Aylin hold on without proper treatment?
Leon pushed those thoughts aside and returned his attention to the notebook. He tried to connect the notebook to a network, in the absurd hope of downloading a map of the area, but the WiFi icon remained with a red "X." No networks available. The communication towers were dead.
He closed the connection window and stared at the screen for a moment, thinking.
If there were survivors nearby, he needed to find them. Because they likely had information. They would know where there were resources, which areas to avoid, how many infected were still active in the region.
And more importantly, they might have medicine.
The problem was, how would he find them?
Leon thought about using his own cell phone to track the WiFi signal and triangulate its source, but then remembered with irritation that he had lost the device during the crash. It was probably at the bottom of the bay now, along with half his belongings.
If only he had put the damn phone in his inventory before...
He sighed and closed the notebook to save battery.
He would have to do it the hard way. A manual expedition.
Leon stood up and walked to the window, looking out at the flooded city.
The water had stabilized. It was no longer rising or falling. It had probably reached an equilibrium level with the bay. By his calculations, it was about four meters above the normal street level, which meant the second floor was completely submerged and the third partially.
The view from the fifth floor offered a broad perspective.
Buildings emerged from the water like concrete islands. Some had broken windows, others were intact. Smoke still rose from three or four distant points in the city, indicating slow-burning fires with no one to put them out.
There was debris floating everywhere. Cars, furniture, pieces of structures. And bodies. Many bodies. Most were bloated and deformed by the water, floating face up.
Leon looked away from that and focused on what mattered: the routes.
He needed to get out of the building, explore the surrounding area, look for a pharmacy or a health clinic. Anything with antibiotics, analgesics, first aid supplies.
The problem was transportation.
The Valkyria II was stuck on the third floor, wedged in the debris. Even if he could get it out, the boat was too damaged. The hull had cracks, the engine was probably compromised. Trying to sail with it now would be suicide.
So he needed something else. Something smaller. Lighter. Improvised.
Leon looked around the boardroom, assessing the available materials.
An idea began to form.
Two hours later, Leon was on the second floor, standing in chest-deep icy water, pushing his creation through a broken window.
The "raft" he had made was primitive. Generously, it could be called a floating platform. But it looked like it would work.
The base was a solid wood door he had torn from one of the executive offices on the fifth floor. Solid, heavy, but with good natural buoyancy.
Tied underneath the door, he had secured four empty 20-liter water jugs he found in the break room on the fourth floor. They provided extra flotation, keeping the platform above the waterline.
Everything was tied together using network cables and electrical wires he had ripped from the walls. It wasn't real rope, but it worked. He had tested the knots three times before trusting them.
For a paddle, he improvised using the backrest of an office chair, attached to a meter-and-a-half-long PVC pipe he pulled from a bathroom.
For a moment, as he admired his precarious creation, he felt like a contestant on one of those survival reality shows. The difference was that if he failed here, he wasn't eliminated from the show, he was eliminated from existence.
Leon dragged the structure to the second-floor window, where the water reached the sill. He had pushed the raft out about ten minutes ago and was now watching to see if it would sink or come apart.
To his relief, the raft simply rocked on the surface and seemed stable enough.
"It'll have to do," he murmured to himself.
He checked his equipment one last time before setting out.
Leon took a deep breath, mentally preparing.
He had decided to go out during the day, not at night as would be safer in terms of infected. The reason was simple: visibility.
At night, he would need a flashlight to see anything in the dark water. And light would attract attention. Not just from infected, but from anything else lurking. And worse, on an unstable raft, he wouldn't have the mobility to fight or flee properly.
During the day, at least he could see what was coming. And if there were survivors, they might also see him.
Of course, this meant the infected would also be active. But he was betting that most had drowned during the flood or were trapped inside buildings.
It was a risk he would have to take.
Before descending, Leon had gone back to the fifth floor one last time. He had looked at Aylin, still feverish and motionless on the table.
He said nothing. What was there to say? She couldn't hear him anyway.
He simply made sure she was covered with the tarp to preserve body heat, left a water bottle beside her in case she woke up, and locked the boardroom door from the outside.
If something entered the building while he was out, at least the door would give a few seconds of warning.
Now, standing in the cold, foul-smelling water of the second floor, Leon grabbed the edge of the raft.
He used his arm strength to haul himself up. The platform rocked violently, almost tipping, and Leon had to throw himself flat on its center to stabilize it.
He lay there for a few seconds, panting, feeling the cold wood against his chest. The raft swayed beneath him like a nervous animal, but it didn't capsize.
Slowly, Leon maneuvered into a sitting position, legs crossed, in the center of the platform. The water lapped at the edge of the door but didn't come over. It was stable. More or less.
He picked up the improvised paddle and dipped the end into the water.
With a slow, careful stroke, the raft began to move.
Leon navigated away from the window, moving away from the building. Each paddle movement was careful and silent. He didn't want to create waves or unnecessary noise.
The flooded city opened up around him.
The silence was oppressive.
There was no sound of traffic, horns, people. Only the soft sound of water lapping against buildings and the occasional crack of a structure giving way somewhere in the distance.
Leon paddled slowly, staying close to building walls whenever possible. Using the shadows of structures for cover was an instinct now ingrained in him.
The water was filthy. It wasn't just seawater. It was a mix of sewage, oil, gasoline, and God knows what else. The smell was unbearable. Leon tried to breathe through his mouth to minimize the nausea.
Bodies floated everywhere.
Most were bloated, their skin stretched and shiny like wet rubber. Some were face down, others on their backs, empty eyes staring at the sky.
The paddle blade pushed aside the body of a woman floating on her side; her hair spread in the dark water like dead seaweed. Just ahead, trapped between the bumpers of two submerged cars, was something small: a child.
He forced himself to look forward and kept paddling.
Even with all the training, even after everything he'd seen, his stomach still turned. Mass death wasn't something you got used to.
Thinking about it doesn't help, he scolded himself, gripping the PVC pipe of the paddle. They're gone. You're still alive. Keep it that way.
Leon turned right at a corner, following what used to be Central Avenue. Now it was just a wide channel between two walls of commercial buildings.
That's when the first danger appeared.
A car was floating adrift, coming toward him. It was a black sedan, completely submerged except for the roof. The silent current of the water pushed it slowly, spinning in lazy circles.
Leon stopped paddling and watched its trajectory.
The car would pass about three meters to his left. Close, but not dangerous.
He waited, keeping the raft still.
The sedan floated past him without incident, spinning slowly before lightly colliding with the glass wall of a submerged store. The impact was almost silent. The car stuck there, bobbing.
Leon let out the breath he was holding and started paddling again.
Five minutes later, he was passing through a submerged intersection when he felt something push the raft from below.
A direct impact. Something big had hit the base of the platform.
The raft rocked violently. Leon dropped the paddle and grabbed the edges of the door, lowering his center of gravity to avoid falling.
He froze, holding his breath, his eyes fixed on the dark water around him.
For a moment, nothing happened.
Then he saw it.
A shadow passed under the raft. It moved with an undulating motion, like a giant snake.
Leon couldn't see clearly what it was. The water was too murky. But whatever it was, it was at least three meters long.
An infected that fell into the water and mutated? A marine animal that entered with the flood? Something worse?
He didn't know. And he didn't want to find out.
The shadow passed under him again, circling the raft slowly, like a predator assessing prey.
Leon remained completely motionless. He didn't even breathe. He just watched the water, his right hand hovering near the holster.
Shooting into the water would be useless. Resistance would slow the bullet immediately. And the noise would attract anything else nearby.
So he waited.
Ten seconds.
Twenty.
Thirty.
The shadow began to move away, sinking deeper until it disappeared completely into the darkness below.
Leon slowly let out his breath, his heart beating erratically.
He sat there, tense, waiting another full minute before moving again.
When he finally picked up the paddle again, his hands were trembling slightly. Not from fear, but from pure adrenaline.
He continued paddling, more alert now.
Leon passed through two more submerged streets without incident. At every corner, he stopped and looked around before proceeding, always alert for strange movements or sounds.
He saw things.
On the fourth floor of an apartment building, there was a silhouette standing behind a broken window. Motionless. Just watching. Leon couldn't tell if it was human or infected, so he simply paddled away, keeping his distance.
At another intersection, he passed by a toppled bus, half-submerged. Through the windows, he could see bodies piled inside. Dozens of them. Some were still strapped in by seatbelts.
Leon averted his eyes and quickened his paddling.
He was about four hundred meters from the building where he had left Aylin when he finally saw something useful.
Ahead, on the left side of the flooded street, there was a five-story commercial building. The sign in front was partially faded but still legible:
"POPULAR PHARMACY – 24H"
But it wasn't the pharmacy that caught Leon's attention.
It was the light. On the third floor of the building, there was a lit window. Faint electric light, but unmistakable, leaking through makeshift curtains.
And hanging from the side of the window, swaying slightly in the breeze, was a white flag.
A sign of survivors.
Leon stopped paddling, letting the raft float still as he observed the building.
There was no visible movement. No sound. But the light was real. And so was the flag.
Someone was inside.
The question was: were they friendly?
Leon stayed there for a long moment, assessing the situation.
He needed medicine and information. And possibly allies, even if temporary.
But he also knew that desperate survivors could be as dangerous as infected—maybe more.
He looked at the Glock in its holster.
Finally, he looked back at the lit building.
Leon adjusted his position on the raft and began paddling toward the Popular Pharmacy.
When he got close enough, he tied the raft to a window grate on the second floor and began looking for a way inside.
There was a broken window right there. Dark. Silent.
Leon took a deep breath, materialized the crowbar in his hand, and started climbing.
It was time to meet the neighbors.