My knuckles cracked against the heavy bag with a sound like a gunshot in the quiet studio. I lowered my hands, breathing steady. In through the nose, out through the mouth. The rhythm was everything. At twenty two, my body knew this ritual better than anything else. The crisp white cloth of my dobok, the clean lines of a proper stance, the control it took to make violence into something precise. This was my sanctuary. The one place where chaos had rules.
My name is Alex Calderon. The orphan. The foster kid who learned to read rooms before he could read books. The martial arts instructor who still sometimes felt like a fraud.
"Again, Luca," I said, my voice calm as I circled the sweating teenager. "You're throwing from the shoulder. It starts in your feet. Feel the floor."
Luca nodded, his focus intense. I saw myself in him. That desperate need to get one thing right in a world that felt like it had no center. Outside the tall windows, Virelia City hummed its normal Tuesday morning song. Construction noise from the new monorail, the deep rumble of a bus, car horns from the financial district a few blocks over. It was the sound of a world working.
Then the billboard across the street glitched.
One second it showed a waterfall of impossibly blue water for some expensive bottled water. The next, it shattered into jagged green static. The pixels pulsed and twisted for three full seconds before snapping back to the crystal clear cascade like nothing had happened.
I stopped talking.
Luca followed my gaze. "Sensei?"
Before I could answer, the sirens started.
Not one siren. Not even two. A chorus of them, rising from downtown, from the Riverside district, from the university area, all at once. They layered over each other until the sound became a physical pressure in the room. They didn't fade. They just kept wailing, a sustained note of pure wrongness.
My phone vibrated in my gym bag. Not a call. The harsh, pulsing alarm of the National Civil Alert System. I crossed the room and pulled it out. The screen was a stark white field with flashing red text.
EMERGENCY BROADCAST. CIVIL DISTURBANCE IN PROGRESS. ALL CITIZENS REMAIN INDOORS. AVOID DOWNTOWN, RIVERSIDE, AND CAMPUS SECTORS. AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTION.
Civil disturbance. The words felt sterile, small. I had seen riot footage before. The shouting, the chaos, the energy. This felt different. Outside, the construction noise had stopped. The traffic sounds were changing. The horns were becoming frantic, then sparse. I heard the distinct crumpling crash of metal on metal, too close, followed by the blare of a single, stuck car horn.
Luca and the other six students were all looking at me. Their faces were pale. They needed me to be the adult. The sensei. The one who knew what to do.
"Class is dismissed," I said. My voice left no room for argument. "Go straight home. Do not wait to change. Take your street clothes and go. If you drive, take side streets. If you walk, do not stop for anything. Lock your doors. Do not open them for anyone unless you are absolutely sure. Do you understand?"
A series of numb nods. They scrambled for their bags. The atmosphere of focused practice was gone, shattered. I watched them go, a flock of startled birds, until the studio door swung shut behind the last one.
Alone, I moved fast. I changed out of my dobok and into street clothes. Jeans, a grey t shirt, the lightweight tactical jacket my foster brother Marco gave me before he shipped out. It had too many pockets. He said I would find uses for them. I packed my gym bag. Dobok, belt, hand wraps, a full water bottle, my wallet, my keys. My movements were economical. Practiced.
I took one last look around the sunlit studio. The mats were empty. The heavy bag still swayed slightly from my last strike. A feeling of finality settled over me, cold and heavy. I doubted I would be teaching here tomorrow.
The air outside tasted wrong.
Beneath the familiar city smells of exhaust and ocean salt and fried food from the vendor down the block was something new. Acrid, like electrical fires and burning rubber. And underneath that, something metallic that coated the back of my throat.
The sirens were a physical pressure now. From the studio's small entry stair, I could see three distinct plumes of thick, black smoke rising downtown. Not from buildings. It looked like the smoke was rising from the streets themselves.
The street was a snapshot of abrupt abandonment. A city bus sat empty and idling in the middle of the lane, its doors gaping open. Several cars were angled haphazardly against curbs, doors left ajar. A single high heeled shoe lay in the crosswalk.
But it was the silence between the sirens that got to me. No voices. No footsteps. Just the wind and that one distant, stuck car horn.
Move. Don't freeze.
My apartment was a twenty minute walk northeast. I covered the distance in a tense forty minute odyssey. I didn't run. Running makes you a target. Draws attention. Burns energy you might need later. I moved with a swift, purposeful walk, sticking close to building lines, pausing at every corner to look before I crossed.
I passed scenes that would stick with me.
A man in an expensive suit and a torn shirt sprinted past me. His eyes were wild. His mouth was working but no sound came out. A trail of spit ran down his chin.
A woman huddled in the doorway of a closed pharmacy. She clutched her phone to her ear and sobbed uncontrollably. "Please, please, please pick up," she begged to a dead line.
In an alley, two figures were locked in a desperate struggle against a dumpster. It was a furious, silent tangle of limbs. One of them, a man in a delivery jacket, had his back to the wall. The other, a woman in business slacks now ripped at the knee, was pressed against him. From my quick glance, I couldn't tell if it was an attack, a fight, or something else. Her head was buried against his shoulder. He wasn't pushing her away. He was slapping weakly at her back, his movements getting slower.
I didn't stop. I didn't call out. A cold, familiar instinct from my foster years kicked in. The instinct to avoid other people's chaos. I averted my eyes and picked up my pace, my heart hammering against my ribs. The metallic smell was stronger here.
A block from my apartment, I knew. This wasn't a riot. Riots have a direction. A fury. This was a fracture. This was panic with the volume turned down, and it was so much worse.
I found Jonah exactly where I knew he would be. Slumped in our battered second hand armchair, bathed in the cool glow of his triple monitor PC setup. The screens were a chaotic mosaic. A live news feed on the left showed a reporter in a helmet standing before a burning barricade, the audio a garbled mess. The center screen was a cascading torrent of Twitter feeds and Reddit threads, updating too fast to read. The right screen displayed a paused first person shooter game, a hyper realistic military rifle frozen mid reload.
"Alex," he said without turning. His fingers tapped a nervous rhythm on his keyboard. "Thank Christ. You see it out there?"
"I saw enough." I slammed the apartment door behind me and threw the deadbolt. The solid thunk of the lock engaging was the first vaguely reassuring sound I had heard in an hour. "What's the feed saying?"
I dropped my bag by the door and went to the window, peering through the blinds down to the street three stories below. It was quieter here, but the same pattern held. Fewer cars. People moving with their heads down, a sense of frantic evacuation.
"It's saying everything and nothing," Jonah replied. His voice was strained. He finally swiveled in his chair. His face, usually relaxed in the glow of digital victories, was pale. His eyes were too wide. "It's like the whole net is having a seizure. Official channels are just repeating the stay indoors line. But the raw feeds, man. The stuff people are uploading and then deleting."
"Show me."
Jonah clicked a few keys. A shaky, vertical phone video filled the center screen. The footage was dark, jostling. A subway platform. People were screaming, running. The camera focused on a man in a security guard's uniform on the ground. Two people were on top of him. They weren't robbing him. Their heads were ducking down, coming up, in violent, jerking motions. The camera zoomed in for a horrifying second. A flash of torn fabric. Dark wetness. Then the person filming screamed and the video cut to black.
"Another one," Jonah said. His voice was hollow. He pulled up a different clip, shot from an apartment balcony overlooking an intersection. A group of people, maybe five or six, were surrounding a stalled car, beating on the windows. Their movements were unnervingly synchronized. Relentless. They didn't yell. They just hammered. One of them picked up a chunk of concrete and brought it down on the windshield again and again until it webbed. Then they reached in.
"Jesus," I breathed. The coldness in my gut was turning into a solid block of ice.
"Police scanners are worse," Jonah continued. He pulled up an audio feed. It was a chaos of overlapping transmissions.
A voice, tight with stress. "Units respond to 5th and Meridian, we have multiple 10 71s, individuals exhibiting extreme aggression."
A pause. Then the same voice, higher pitched, fraying. "They're not responding to commands! They're just open fire! OPEN FIRE!"
The transmission dissolved into static. Then screams. Then a wet, gargling sound before it went dead.
Another voice cut in, calmer but laced with a terror you could feel through the speakers. "Central, this is Unit 44. We are falling back to the Riverside precinct. The hostiles. They don't go down. I repeat, they are not incapacitated by standard protocols."
Jonah killed the audio. The silence in our apartment was deafening.
"They're calling them hostiles on the scanners," he said quietly. "Or 11 99s. Or non compliant actors. But on the forums. The dark corners of the web nobody's managed to shut down yet." He met my eyes, and in his gaze I saw the crumbling of everything he thought he knew about the world. "They're calling them the infected. The turned." He swallowed hard. "Or zombies, Alex. They're saying they're zombies."
The word hung in the stuffy air between us. Absurd. Grotesque. A childish fantasy. A movie monster. My rational mind rebelled.
"That's impossible," I said, the words sounding weak even to me. "Mass hysteria, maybe. A toxin. A drug in the water supply. Not that."
"Then explain the videos!" Jonah's voice cracked. "Explain why people are biting each other! Why the cops are saying they don't go down!"
Before I could formulate a counter argument, and I was desperately trying to, clinging to any shred of scientific plausibility, the world outside our window changed.
The streetlights died.
The glowing signs of the bodega and the laundromat across the street winked out.
The ambient glow from a thousand apartment windows vanished.
The city's lights died in a wave, plunging everything into a deep, profound twilight, broken only by the angry orange pulse of the fires downtown.
The hum of our refrigerator ceased. The LED lights on Jonah's computer routers and consoles blinked out. The city's mechanical heartbeat flatlined.
The sirens, one by one, began to choke off and die.
The new silence was a physical thing. A heavy wool blanket smothering the city.
Then the screams started.
Not the chaotic shouts of a riot. Individual, piercing, hair raising shrieks of pure terror that seemed much closer now in the dark. They came from different directions. The apartment building next door. The street below. A block over. And each one was cut off, abruptly, with a finality that left the silence deeper and more menacing than before.
Jonah made a small, pathetic sound in the back of his throat. "They're here."
My mind, which had been spinning in frantic circles of denial and analysis, clicked over with an almost audible snap. The debate was over. The cause didn't matter. The effect was here, at our doorstep. My thinking shifted from what is happening to what do we do. It was the same shift I made stepping onto the competition mat. Assessment was over. Action began.
"We can't stay here," I said. My voice was low, stripped of all emotion. Pure operational command. "The Chens' apartment is right below us. Their door is a hollow core piece of junk. If anything gets into the building, it's a straight shot up these stairs to us. We're a corner unit with one exit. It's a death trap if we're cornered."
Jonah stared at me. His eyes were wide pools of reflected orange light from the windows. "Go where? It's pitch black out there! They're they're everywhere now!"
"Mr. Chen's bodega. On the corner. The security gate is solid steel, inch thick bars. The back stock room has no windows, concrete walls. He kept extra stock of everything in there. Food, water, batteries. It's a bunker compared to this place. It's our only chance."
"The gate's locked with a heavy duty padlock! We can't break that!"
"He showed me the spare key hide five years ago when I helped him unload a truck after my bike got a flat. Told me it was for emergencies, if he ever had a heart attack or something." I was already moving, crossing the dark room to my gym bag. I upended it, letting my dobok and belt spill out. I kept the full water bottle. I detached the multi tool from my keyring. I tossed Jonah his own empty backpack from the floor of the closet. "Pack. Now. Only absolute essentials. Calories, water, medicine, light, tools. No sentimental stuff. We move in two minutes."
We worked in the oppressive dark, guided by the hellish, pulsating glow from the windows. The silence between the distant screams was a taut wire.
I became a machine of efficiency. I raided the kitchen by feel and faint light. My hands found the familiar shapes. Cans of kidney beans and tuna. Sleeves of saltine crackers. I scooped the last of the chunky peanut butter into an old plastic container. A half full bag of rice went into my own pack. I filled our two reusable water bottles from the still flowing tap, a small, temporary blessing I knew wouldn't last. From under the bathroom sink, I grabbed the small, inadequate first aid kit. A pack of lighters from a junk drawer. A nearly empty roll of duct tape. A heavy Maglite flashlight. The batteries inside felt weak, but it was better than nothing.
My only weapon leaned against my bedroom door. The weighted, aluminum baseball bat I used for swing conditioning drills. I hefted it. It was perfectly balanced. It could deliver a crushing blow to a baseball, or a human knee. But against what? My Taekwondo was designed for the ring. For human opponents who flinched, who felt pain, who bled and stopped. The things in the videos, the things making those screams stop, they didn't seem to stop.
"Ready?" I whispered.
Jonah nodded. His backpack bulged awkwardly.
I led us to the apartment door. I pressed my ear against the cool wood. Nothing but the faint, now constant backdrop of suffering from outside. I turned the deadbolt. The snick of the mechanism was deafening. I winced, held my breath, and pulled the door open a crack.
The hallway was a pit of absolute blackness. It smelled of dust and old carpet. The stairwell at the far end was a void.
"Slow and quiet," I breathed, my mouth close to Jonah's ear. "Feel for each step. Don't use the rail. It might creak."
The descent was a nightmare of amplified sound. Every shift of weight on the aged wooden stairs produced a groan or a crack that echoed in the narrow shaft. Jonah's nervous, hitched breathing was a loud rasp. My own heartbeat was a drum solo in my ears.
We reached the ground floor foyer. A small, tiled space that felt like a trap. The building's main door was the only way out. A single wooden frame with a large pane of glass.
I pressed my back against the cold wall beside it. I willed my breathing to slow. I leaned forward, just enough to peer out through the glass into the street.
The world had been remade in fire and shadow.
The crash I'd heard earlier was now visible. A silver sedan had jumped the curb and wrapped itself around the base of a streetlamp. The impact had popped the trunk and both passenger doors open. One headlight was smashed. The other pointed crazily into the sky, its beam cutting a cone through the swirling ash and dust. Papers and trash skittered in the hot wind.
And there, in the middle of the road, caught in the diagonal slash of the crashed car's single working headlight, was a man.
He was maybe fifty. He wore the tattered remains of a grey delivery driver's uniform. One of his cheap sneakers was missing. He stood perfectly still, his head cocked at a severe, unnatural angle to the left. For ten full seconds, he didn't move.
Then, with a jerky, spastic motion, his right leg lifted. It didn't bend properly at the knee. It swung forward stiffly from the hip, like a puppet with a single tangled string. His foot slapped down on the asphalt. The left leg followed. Shuffle slap. Shuffle slap.
He was moving toward the open driver's side door of the crashed car.
Inside the car, a shape shifted. An arm, smeared with dark fluid, pushed weakly against the dashboard.
The man reached the car. He let out a sound. A low, wet gurgle that held no human emotion. No anger. No rage. Just a hollow, empty hunger. He dropped to his knees, his body moving with the same stiff, unyielding awkwardness. He leaned into the dark opening of the car's interior.
The sound that followed was wet. Organic. Brutally intimate. A ripping, like canvas tearing. A crunching, like someone stepping on a bag of chips. A greedy, liquid slurping.
Next to me, Jonah made a small, choked noise. He clapped both hands over his mouth. His whole body began to shake.
My own stomach roiled. A vicious wave of nausea threatened to overwhelm me. I swallowed against the bile.
But a detached part of my mind, the part honed for combat, compartmentalized the horror. It was a cold, clinical function. It noted the details. Extremely slow. Poor coordination. Single minded focus. No apparent pain response. No peripheral awareness. It was a threat assessment. But the subject of the assessment defied all known categories of threat.
"Oh my god," Jonah whimpered behind his fingers. His voice was thick with vomit and horror. "Alex. He's. That's a zombie. That's a real, fucking zombie."
The word made it real. All the absurd late night movies, the guilty pleasure video games Jonah loved, the dog eared comic books. They collapsed from fiction into this one, terrible, irrefutable point of data in the street. Denial was no longer a luxury we could afford. The world had just switched genres.
Before I could respond, movement at the far end of the street snapped my attention away.
Another figure.
This one was different.
Its silhouette was leaner. Rangier. Its movements were not stiff, but fluid. Almost simian. It paused under the flickering, sputtering neon sign of a shattered sushi restaurant. Its head swiveled on its neck with an alarming, bird like speed. It wasn't staring blankly. It was scanning. Left. Right. Up at the fire escapes.
Hunting.
For a frozen, heart stopping second, it was perfectly profiled against the burning fabric store behind it. I saw its posture. Low. Center of gravity forward. Arms slightly bent. It wasn't shambling. It was poised. A coiled spring.
Then it dropped. Not to its knees, but into a deep, sprinter's crouch, the palms of its hands touching the ground.
And it moved.
It crossed the fifty foot width of the intersection in a blur of terrifying, low to the ground speed. Its gait was a grotesque, loping gallop. It disappeared into the black mouth of an alley with a silence that was more frightening than any noise.
It was fast. Impossibly, nightmare fast for something that looked so wrong.
The Walker at the car jerked its head up. A string of something dark and glistening stretched from its mouth back into the car. Its face was a ruin of shadows and wetness, but its eyes. They caught the stark white light. They weren't fierce or intelligent. They were blank. Polished stones of mindless hunger. And they were now looking directly at the glass pane of our building's door. Right at me.
It gurgled again. A more urgent, phlegmy sound. It began to disentangle itself from the car. Its trajectory was clear. It was coming toward the building.
Toward us.
"Now," I hissed. The word cracked with an urgency that brooked no argument. I wrenched the building door open. The sudden rush of outside air hit us like a physical blow. Thick with smoke. Decay. Death. "To the bodega! Don't look back! Don't stop! Run!"
I burst onto the sidewalk. Jonah stumbled after me with a half sob, half gasp. The fifteen yards to the corner bodega's rolling steel security gate stretched before me like a mile. The night air was hot and foul in my lungs. My training screamed at me to move with balance, but raw, electrifying panic had my muscles. I ran.
Behind us, I heard the shuffle slap, shuffle slap quicken. That relentless, hungry gurgle, now closer.
I reached the gate first. My fingers scrabbled over the cold, flaking paint metal. I found the heavy, hardened steel padlock. My mind went blank for one terrifying second.
Then muscle memory took over.
Third brick from the corner. Waist height. Finger width gap underneath.
I drove my fingers into the gritty space beneath the rough brick. My fingertips brushed cold, thin metal. I pulled. The small, flat magnetic key case came free. My hands were shaking so badly I fumbled the tiny key. I dropped it. I snatched it up from the pavement and jammed it into the padlock.
Click.
The sound was absurdly, beautifully loud.
I ripped the open padlock free. I grabbed the handle of the security gate and pulled with all my might. It groaned on its rusted track. It moved a foot, then stuck.
"Get in!"
Jonah didn't need to be told twice. He dove through the narrow gap. He landed on the linoleum inside with a crash.
I risked one glance over my shoulder.
The Walker was ten feet away. Close enough to see the details in the car's headlight. The torn cheek flapping loosely. The unblinking eyes. The dark, viscous matter covering the front of its uniform. It reached for me. Its arm extended with a stiff, marionette like jerk. Pale fingers ending in broken nails clawed at the air just short of my jacket.
I threw myself backward through the gap. I landed hard on my side on the grimy floor. I immediately kicked out with both feet, slamming the heavy steel gate shut just as the Walker's body thudded against it from the outside.
The gate shook violently in its frame.
But it held.
Darkness. Total, except for the thin, vertical bars of chaotic orange light that sliced through the gate. They painted the interior of Mr. Chen's small shop in stripes of hellish glow and deep, velvety black. The smell was of old spices and dust. The faint, sweet decay of overripe fruit from a forgotten basket under the counter.
Thud.
A soft but immense sound. A solid, meaty impact of a body against steel.
Thud.
Again.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
A slow, stupid, patient rhythm.
Jonah was curled into a tight ball behind the counter. His body was racked with silent, violent tremors.
I pushed myself up to my knees. My back was against the solid wooden door behind the security gate. I gripped the baseball bat so tightly the molded grip creaked. My forearms ached with the strain.
I listened to the pounding.
It wasn't angry. It wasn't trying to break the gate down with intelligence or fury. It was just persistent. A mindless machine set to a simple task. Object in the way. Push. Push. Push.
That was almost worse than rage. Rage could burn out. This would not.
From the darkness of the shop's interior, from the shelves of canned beans and bags of rice we would need to look at when the sun came up, I heard a new sound. A soft, skittering rustle. Rats, probably. Or cockroaches. Seeking shelter from the chaos. Just like us.
And from outside, carried on the wind that whistled through the gate's slats, came the answers to the Walker's call.
First one low, drawn out moan, from down the street to the left.
Then another, higher pitched and wetter, from the alley to the right.
Then a chorus. Rising from different points in the surrounding blocks. An apartment window. A parked van. A sewer grate. A gathering symphony of empty hunger, tuning up for the long night ahead.
The quiet was utterly gone.
Virelia City had learned to bleed. And now it was learning to scream in a voice that was no longer human.
We had shelter. We had a few cans of food. A few liters of water. We had a locked gate between us and the night.
And outside, the new rules were being written in blood and darkness.
The fight for tomorrow, I understood with a cold, sinking certainty that settled in my bones, was going to be longer, and harder, and more horrible than anything I had ever trained for.