The first grey light of dawn didn't feel like hope. It felt like an inspection. It crept through the slats of the gate, turning the bodega from a pit of shadows into a cramped, dusty room full of someone else's life. I could see the dust floating in the thin beams. I could see the price tags on cans of beans. I could see Jonah, still asleep on a nest of cardboard in the corner, his face slack with exhaustion.
The thudding had stopped a while ago. The moans had faded with the darkness, leaving behind a silence that was almost worse. It was the silence of a city holding its breath.
My body ached from sitting on the hard floor. My eyes felt gritty, like they'd been rubbed with sand. But the cold, clear part of my mind that had gotten us through the night was still awake. It was looking at our situation and seeing all the holes.
We were in a box. One way in, one way out. We had the food and water in our backpacks, which meant maybe two days. We had a dying flashlight and a baseball bat. Jonah was barely functional. The list in my head was short and terrible.
I needed to see what Mr. Chen had left us.
Moving quietly, I stood up. My knees popped. I picked up my weak flashlight and turned it on. The yellow beam cut through the dimness.
I started behind the counter. My light swept over spare rolls of receipt paper, a cup of pens, a faded calendar from two years ago. Then it found the metal.
The shotgun was right where I remembered it. An old side by side double barrel, the wood dark and smooth from years of handling. It lay on two simple brackets under the counter. Next to it was a small metal cash box with a lock.
I got the key ring from my pocket. My hands were steady now. The small silver key fit. The lock turned with a clean click.
Inside, on top of a neat stack of bills no one would ever spend, were two boxes of red shells. 12 gauge. I took one box out. It was heavier than I thought it would be. I didn't know anything about guns. Marco, my foster brother, had tried to teach me once, but I'd shrugged it off. Self defense was in your hands and feet, I'd thought. Not in a piece of metal you pointed.
I was an idiot.
I set the shells on the counter. They looked alien there, next to a display of chewing gum.
The real prize was behind the faded floral curtain next to the dead cooler. The stockroom door was unlocked.
I pushed it open and my breath caught.
The room was small and windowless, lined with floor to ceiling metal shelves. And they were packed. Cases of bottled water, stacked five high. Cartons of canned soup, chili, stew. Giant twenty pound bags of rice and beans. Boxes of protein bars and ramen noodles. Batteries. Candles. A real first aid kit in a bright orange plastic box. Heavy duty LED lanterns, still in their packaging.
Mr. Chen. He was a quiet man who always had a hard candy to offer. He believed in being prepared. For a hurricane, for a blizzard, for a bad economy. He had been ready for any disaster the old world could throw at him.
He hadn't been ready for this.
The relief that washed over me was so strong it felt like weakness. My shoulders actually slumped. We had time. Not forever. But we had a fighting chance.
I carried two of the lanterns back to the main shop. I put one on the counter and clicked it on. A brilliant, white light flooded the space, harsh and clean. It chased the last of the night away. It made the place look like a store again, just one that had closed very suddenly.
The light and the sound woke Jonah. He sat up slowly, blinking, looking around with the confused expression of someone waking up in a strange place. Then he remembered. The confusion hardened into a kind of numb dread.
"We're alive," I said. My voice was rough.
He just nodded. His eyes found the shotgun on the counter. "You found it."
"I found everything," I said. I jerked my thumb toward the stockroom. "There's a back room. It's full of food. Water. Everything."
That got through to him. He stood up, his movements stiff, and peered through the curtain. I saw his back tense. "Holy shit," he whispered.
"We need to know exactly what we have," I said. "Can you do an inventory? Write it all down. Food, water, medicine."
He looked at the notepad and pen I'd pulled from behind the counter. For a long moment, he just stared at them like he'd forgotten how they worked. Then he took them. "Yeah," he said, his voice flat. "Yeah, I can do that."
It was something. A task. A purpose. It was what he needed.
While he started cataloguing our new fortune, I got to work. We couldn't stay in an open box. The gate was strong, but it was just a gate. If enough of those things pushed on it, or if something smarter found us, we needed another layer.
I went back to the stockroom and started hauling. Bags of rice and cases of water were the best bricks I had. I built a low wall in front of the wooden door behind the security gate. It wasn't high, maybe two feet, but it was solid. If something got past the gate, it would have to climb over that wall. It would be slow. It would be off balance. It would give us one second to react. In this new world, a second was a lifetime.
As I worked, I kept one ear on the street outside. The silence was beginning to break. Not with moans, but with the normal sounds of a city waking up, except all the sounds were wrong. A car alarm whooped in the distance, unanswered. Birds were singing, which felt bizarre. Once, I heard the unmistakable sound of glass shattering, a sharp, violent noise that echoed between the buildings.
Jonah came out of the stockroom, his face less pale. He had a list in his hand. "There's enough food here for months, Alex. Seriously. Water, too. And there's a camp stove and fuel cans back there. And a tool box."
He was talking faster now, the numbers pulling him out of his shock. It was a good sign.
"Okay," I said. "Good. Now we need to know what's outside our door. Really know."
I walked to the gate and looked out through different slats, building a panoramic view. Our street was a wound. The crashed car was still there. The dark stain on the pavement was bigger in the daylight. The newspaper box was dented from where the woman had hidden. There were no bodies. They'd been dragged away.
Across the street, the laundromat's door was broken inward. The sushi restaurant's sign was dark. Every business showed signs of violence.
But there was no movement. The dawn light had pressed a temporary pause button on the horror.
"It looks clear," I said, more to myself than to Jonah.
"We're staying, right?" Jonah asked. He sounded hopeful. "With all this stuff?"
"For now," I said. "But we have two big problems. We have no way out the back. And we don't know what's in the building behind us. Mr. Chen's apartment is right under ours. If he's in there..."
I didn't finish the sentence. I didn't need to. Jonah's eyes went to the ceiling, as if he could see through it to the apartment below our old one.
"I need to check the alley," I said. "See if there's a back door. See what's there."
"By yourself?" The hope vanished from his voice.
"Quieter that way. You'll be my eyes. Watch from the gate. You see anything, anything at all, you tap the gate twice. Don't yell."
I picked up the baseball bat. It felt familiar in my hands. Then I looked at the shotgun. It felt like a betrayal of everything I'd trained for, but last night had rewritten the rules. I broke the action. The hinge was stiff. I took two red shells from the box, slid them into the twin barrels, and snapped it shut. The click clack sound was final. I leaned it against the wall by the gate.
"This is for if something goes very wrong," I said. "You don't touch it unless you have to. The sound is a last resort."
He nodded, his throat working.
I took a deep breath. The air in the shop tasted like dust and fear. I slid the key into the padlock, turned it as quietly as I could, and pulled the gate open just wide enough to slip through.
The morning air was cool and carried the city's new smell. Smoke, yes, but underneath it was the smell of garbage left too long in the sun, and that faint, sweet metallic tinge. The silence was immense. No traffic. No voices. Just the wind and that one distant car alarm.
I moved with the silent steps I'd practiced for years in the dojang, staying close to the rough brick wall of the bodega. My senses were so sharp I could hear the rustle of my own jacket. I reached the corner and peered down the narrow alley that ran between our building and the next.
It was a canyon of overflowing dumpsters and torn plastic bags. At the far end, a chain link fence blocked the way to the next street. Halfway down, a metal door. The back entrance to the bodega.
And ten feet from that door, a Walker.
It was a woman. She wore a pink bathrobe and one fluffy slipper. Her hair was in curlers. She stood perfectly still, facing the brick wall, like she was admiring the graffiti.
My blood went cold. Was it sleeping? Did they do that?
I took a slow step back, planning to retreat. My foot came down on a discarded soda can.
The crunch was tiny, but in the absolute stillness of the alley, it was as loud as a shout.
The Walker in the bathrobe jerked. Its head rotated toward me. Not its body. Just its head. It turned a full one hundred and eighty degrees with a wet, grinding sound. Its milky, cataract filmed eyes locked onto mine.
It didn't snarl. It just opened its mouth, revealing a perfect set of white dentures, and let out a hissing sigh. Then it started walking toward me. Not fast. Not with purpose. Just with a slow, direct inevitability. Shuffle slide. Shuffle slide.
I backed up, leading it out of the narrow alley into the slightly wider space at the mouth. I couldn't run back to the bodega. I couldn't lead it to our door.
I had to deal with it.
It emerged into the grey light. Its robe was stained with something brown. It reached for me, its arms extending, fingers curled into stiff claws.
My training screamed options. A spinning kick. A palm strike. But all those moves were designed for a living opponent who would react.
I let it come. As it entered my range, I sidestepped its lunge with a fluid pivot. As it stumbled past, off balance, I didn't aim for the head. I drove the heavy, weighted end of the baseball bat down in a short, vertical arc onto the back of its right knee.
Crack.
The sound was sickening. The leg buckled sideways at an impossible angle. The Walker went down hard on its side, its face smacking the asphalt.
But it didn't cry out. It didn't clutch its leg. It immediately began pushing itself up with its arms, its broken leg dragging uselessly behind it, hissing that same empty hiss. It started crawling toward me.
The bat strike had been perfect. It had failed. It had changed the threat, but not ended it.
A cold certainty settled in my stomach. Pain meant nothing. Only destruction.
The crawling Walker was at my feet, grabbing for my ankle. I stepped back. I raised the bat high with both hands. I aimed for the base of its skull, where it met the spine. I put my hips and shoulders into it, all my weight, all my training, every bit of fear and rage from the last twelve hours, and I brought it down.
Thwump.
It was a wet, final sound. The Walker's face drove into the pavement. Its limbs gave one last shuddering twitch and then lay still. The hissing stopped.
I stood over it, breathing hard. The bat was slick in my hands. I felt nothing. No triumph. No guilt. Just a hollow, vibrating shock. I had just killed something that wore the shape of a person.
A soft, scraping sound from down the alley. I looked up.
Another shape. Drawn by the noise. A man in mechanic's coveralls was shambling out of the shadows near the dumpsters.
I couldn't fight another one. Not here.
I turned and ran the few steps back to the bodega gate. Jonah, his face white with panic, yanked it open. I slipped through, and he slammed it shut, fumbling the padlock back into place.
We stood there in the bright light of the lantern, listening. The slow, steady shuffle slide of the mechanic approached the gate, stopped, and then the soft thud of a body pressing against it began again. A new heartbeat.
Jonah stared at me. At the dark spatter on my jeans. At the bat. "You killed it."
"It didn't work," I said. My voice sounded distant, like it belonged to someone else. "The leg. Breaking the leg didn't stop it. Only the head. Or the spine." I looked at my hands. "They don't feel pain. They don't stop."
I walked to the counter. I took a bottle of our precious water and poured a small amount over my hands, scrubbing at the bat's grip. The water was a luxury. The clean hands were a necessity.
"We have a back door," I said finally, looking at Jonah. "But we don't have a backyard. We have a kill zone. And if we want to survive here, we need to clear it."
He looked from the gate, with its new, persistent thud, to my face. The reality settled over him, heavier than before. We weren't just hiding. We were digging in. And the first trench had just been dug.
Outside, under the cold grey sky, the city was no longer just a place of danger. It was a battlefield. And the fight for it had just begun.