The wheelchair rolled forward without my hands touching either wheel, the frame held loosely in my Telekinetic grip, while Tikki lay curled in my lap, along with two mugs of coffee, drifting beside me at shoulder height.

[Okay... now for the fun part]

I guided the chair through the open balcony doors into the afternoon air, the warmth doing very little to improve how my chest currently felt about existing.

Leo stood exactly where he had apparently been standing the entire time, both hands gripping the railing, eyes fixed on something below that he had clearly been staring at for hours.

I stopped the wheelchair just beside him, setting one mug onto the railing within his reach.

The second floated up to my own mouth, and I took a slow sip without using my hands for any part of the process.

Tikki and I both leaned forward at roughly the same moment, looking down at the same thing Leo had apparently been studying since last night.

The blue sedan still sat crashed into the side of the eight-floor building across the street, buried almost completely under bodies now.

Neither of us said anything for a while until-

"Why are there no kids among them?" Leo asked, breaking the silence first.

"Why, you wanna be shooting kids now?" I raised an eyebrow at him.

"Nikki..."

"Okay, fine." I let out a small chuckle and took another sip. "Kids till the age of seventeen... their bodies can’t handle the changes... so they die outright. Same goes for the elderly."

"What exactly are the changes?" Leo asked, not taking his eyes off the horde below.

"Other than what’s obvious..." I said, "Insanely high libido."

"Nikki, come on."

"No, I’m serious." I laughed properly this time. "Give it a day or two, and you’ll have balcony seats to the largest orgy you’ve ever seen in your life."

"They won’t... just starve out?" Leo turned to look at me for the first time since I’d arrived.

"Nope..." I shrugged, and pain flared through my bruised chest immediately for the trouble. "They eat anything a deer would. They cannibalize the weak and injured among themselves. They consolidate around water bodies. And they fuck worse than rabbits."

"Fuck..." Leo cursed under a shaky breath as he looked back down at the sedan and stayed quiet for a long moment, working through what I’d told him at his own pace. And I gave him the time he needed before making things worse.

"Worse still..." I said once he’d settled, "It takes only a few weeks for the kid to eat its way out of its mother’s stomach... Takes only a few months after that to reach adulthood. And the moment one of those second-generation Infected spots you, it lets out a blood-curdling scream that draws every Infected within earshot straight to your position... They’ve also got a very high chance of turning into variants."

Leo’s mouth had gone slightly open, his eyes staying wide the entire time.

"In their baby stages..." I went on, completely unbothered, "... after eating their way out of mommy’s stomach, they stay right there on her body, eating their way through it until either nothing remains or they’ve reached adulthood, whichever comes first. The adult males nearby consolidate around the young one too, protecting it the whole time."

I looked over at him and let a shit-eating smirk.

"Best way to deal with them is shooting the babies from a distance, but the noise of that shot will bring an entire horde down on you fast... You can also handle the protective males with melee first and then finish the baby the same way. But you’ve got to have the heart for it... Most people don’t."

I let that sit for a second.

Somebody else had needed to teach me that exact lesson once, a very long time ago, in a previous version of this shit-show. Guess it was now mt turn to teach the young ones.

"Just... what the fuck..." Leo breathed, turning back toward the horde below. "How’s anyone supposed to... Y-you said something about variants."

"Those are basically super Infected..." I chuckled, "If an Infected gets the perfect environment, the right physiology, and enough food, it develops extra abilities, or whatever it already has gets stronger."

"An example?"

"Look at the horde below." I jerked my chin toward it. "Say we shot every single one of them right now... We’d then have a pile of bodies. Given enough time, those bodies would merge into what’s called The Sludge, a massive single blob of flesh, bone, and teeth that consumes anything organic it touches... Trees, other Infected, or whatever’s nearby... And it keeps growing the entire time. The Sludge can instinctively sense which direction has water and crawls toward it on its own... And if you attack it, it gives birth to Infected that look like they walked straight out of a body horror film. Bony arms bigger than you are, little flying things barely the size of your hand, the whole shebang... each Sludge births out its own flavour of bullshit."

Leo had gone completely horrified at this point, which I will fully admit I was enjoying slightly more than a well-adjusted adult probably should.

"Ah, here’s a cherry on top. Each Infected you kill and leave behind becomes food for the others... " I said, grinning at him. "Let me give you the full life cycle. A fresh Infected starts off exactly like what you’re seeing down there... Over time, as malnutrition sets in, they become what we call shamblers... slow as hell, barely functional. A shambler only cannibalizes other Infected as a last resort, and even then only enough to keep itself alive. Which means a single body left lying around could feed an entire group for a long while."

"Then even killing them is..."

"You really seem to be loving these cherries, so let me add another one..." My grin widened. "Some Infected don’t have that instinct at all... They eat and eat and keep eating without ever stopping, and malnutrition never sets in for them, so they stay sprinters permanently. Which means you can never be fully sure whether the Infected you’re hearing snarling inside a building is a slow shambler or a fast sprinter... Those particular Infected also have a much higher chance of turning into variants... Tank, spitter, runner. I’ve got a whole catalog."

Leo looked completely stunned now, staring at me with his mouth slightly open.

"You want another one?" I asked, the grin on my face stretching ear to ear now.

"N-no."

"Nonsense, of course you do." I cackled, fully meaning it. "... Then there’s the Alpha Variant. You see one, or it sees you, and you’re basically dead already... It’s got infrared vision, an insane sense of smell, a body armored more than a Tank variant, capable of sprints at ninety kilometers per hour... the thing can leap two floors in a single jump... got claws sharp enough to go through concrete, which it uses to climb buildings whenever it wants, so if an Alpha shows up right now, we’re fucked... And if that wasn’t enough... It can even command entire hordes of Infected and is about as smart as a 12-year-old... And worst of all, that fucker is one vicious, vengeful stinking piece of doo-doo."

I looked out at the view ahead and let out a deep sigh.

"It was an Alpha Variant that did my group and me in the last time... The one we aggroed in our three-year run..." I said, turning to face Leo directly. "... It hunted us across 300 kilometers. Didn’t matter how fast we went... where we hid, or what traps we set up... one by one, it killed us all... The point I’m trying to make here is that this is your life now. The Infected aren’t going anywhere, and things are only going to get worse from here. Your priority cannot be anything other than this group. Even one person not following that will get every single one of us killed."

"B-But there were kids in there..."

"And? What did you actually manage to do about it? You had a Gucci gun with a hundred-round mag in your hands, and you were standing at a perfectly safe distance the entire time. And all you managed to do was waste bullets."

"The fuck else was I supposed to do?" Leo roared, finally turning his whole body toward me. "Watch them get eaten alive?"

"Yes." My answer came immediately, no hesitation behind it, and I held his eyes the entire time I said it. "Nothing, and I mean nothing, comes before the group, Leo. If they’d been one of ours, we would have spared no effort getting them out. But they weren’t... Honestly, I’d have been more annoyed if you had somehow saved them, because Kara would have begun pestering me to share supplies with them."

"Nikki, what the fuck." Leo’s voice had gone sharp. "You hear yourself right now?"

"Oh, I hear myself perfectly..." I chuckled and took another sip of coffee. "Your first day in this shit-show has barely started, and you’re already this close to crying... I’ve lived three years of this... I’ve seen the absolute worst it’ll throw at your face more than once... I’ve already lost every single person I cared about once... This isn’t trauma or shock at this point, Leo, this is-"

"Bullshit." He cut me off.

"Look, I get it..." I took in a deep breath and kept my voice level. "This is your first day, and there’s a whole lot of humanity still left inside you... So take from someone who’s lived through this longer than you’ll probably survive... You can either snuff that humanity out yourself, on your own terms... or you can watch it get snuffed out of you while you watch each person you care about die."

Looking at his face, my voice hardened by itself as I said the last of my piece, "Nothing other than the group matters, Leo... Absolutely nothing."

"That’s some fucking bullshit..." Leo said, hands gripping the railing hard enough that his knuckles had gone white, eyes still locked on the sedan below.

"So... what’re you gonna do?"

Several long seconds passed before he said anything at all, and then-

"I’m going home, and I’m taking Nora with me."