Apocalypse Ground Zero: Refusing To Leave Home-Chapter 75: Run!

One of the dead broke from the left and came straight for Lingyun’s exposed side.

Jian Yuche shifted Wei Lingyun’s weight and reached out with his free hand. His fingers closed around a loose strip of metal hanging from a broken sign bracket at the edge of the sidewalk.

He yanked it without thinking and the strip tore free with a shriek and whipped forward as he turned, catching the zombie across the face hard enough to split skin and drive it backward. He stared at the warped metal in his hand for less than half a second, then used it again when another one pushed too close.

Zhenlan stepped into a narrowing angle near the curb, his own crowbar rising. The swing should have been too short to do much more than stagger the zombie in front of him.

Instead, the air in front of the crowbar seemed to shove with it. The dead thing went back a full body length, hit another behind it, and both of them went down in a heap that gave Chenghai room to move past.

Zhenlan’s eyes narrowed, but he didn’t waste time examining it. He swung again.

Lingyun was breathing harder now, his weight dragging on Yuche’s shoulder, but when another shape rushed them from the rear quarter of the SUV, his hand came up on instinct.

Heat licked across Yuche’s forearm before he saw the glow, faint and unstable, spreading across Lingyun’s palm like a coal being breathed alive. Lingyun stared at it as if it belonged to someone else for a moment.

Then the zombie hit the side of the SUV hard enough to make the whole frame shudder, and the moment broke.

"Save it," Yuche growled. "Whatever the hell that was, save it."

Lingyun gave a weak, humorless laugh that dissolved into a cough. "Helpful."

The dark kept changing the dead.

That was the second thing that became obvious.

They weren’t just faster.

They were leaner in motion, cutting corners, using wrecks and curbs and broken hoods to launch themselves instead of crashing into everything headfirst.

One cleared the trunk of a taxi and landed almost silently before charging again.

Another hit the side of a building with both hands, pushed off it, and changed direction mid-lunge in a way no body that broken should have been able to manage.

"Back alley," Zhenlan warned, crowbar jerking toward the cut between buildings behind them.

Three more were coming through there.

"No," Yuche answered immediately. "It’s too narrow. We get sealed in."

He kept scanning, forcing the city into the only shape he knew how to read.

Not zombies but gangs.

What would he do if he was in hostile territory where one wrong move would unleash death? The dead didn’t need to think to take a block from you if you made the mistake of choosing the wrong ground. They only needed speed and numbers, and they had both now.

A recessed storefront across the street caught his eye. There was a metal security grate half down with all the glass around it shattered. The entry was narrow enough to limit how many could come at them at once.

It wasn’t safe by any stretch of the imagination, but it was useful.

"There," he muttered, already turning Lingyun in that direction.

Chenghai trusted him without question.

Yuche threw some bullets at Chenghai, and the other man loaded the gun and pivoted immediately, firing once into the nearest cluster of zombies. The recoil snapped back harder than Chenghai expected, but the shot hit true and the dead thing dropped.

Zhenlan shifted with him, using the crowbar and whatever strange pressure now rode with it to keep the opening from collapsing before they could cross.

They moved.

Not cleanly, not quickly, but at least they were together.

One of the dead hit the side of the SUV and vaulted over the trunk, landing almost on top of them.

Chenghai caught it mid-descent and threw it hard enough that it skipped across the pavement like a sack of wet cement.

Another came low at Yuche’s legs and the strip of metal in his hand snapped down and caught it across the temple. The impact traveled up his arm and into his shoulder like the strike had landed through steel instead of flesh.

Lingyun stumbled and Yuche hauled him upright and kept going.

The storefront was closer now, almost within reach.

Unfortunately for the men, the dead rushed them with a terrible near-silence, all speed and impact and claws on concrete. Their sounds were swallowed by the dark until they were almost on top of them. It made every approach feel too late, every reaction feel a fraction too slow.

Something moved above them.

Yuche’s head snapped up just in time to see a shape drop from a second-story fire escape.

"Down!"

Zhenlan reacted first, air shifting hard enough around the falling body that its path kinked sideways just before it hit. Chenghai stepped through the altered angle and smashed it out of the air with a blow that should have broken his hand and didn’t.

The dead thing hit the ground and did not get back up.

Three steps.

Two.

The storefront was right there.

Then the street behind them erupted in a chorus of movement, more bodies pouring in from the intersection they had just left, drawn by the earlier blast, the gunfire, the smell of living flesh in the dark.

Too many.

Chenghai took one look and understood before anyone spoke.

"We won’t make it to the door," he snarled.

Yuche knew he was right.

The route had closed while they were running for it.

The world after sunset was smaller. Faster. Crueler. Where every decision was a race against time and they were always on the loosing end.

Lingyun lifted his head from Yuche’s shoulder, his face pale under the ash and sweat. The glow in his hand came back, faint at first, then stronger, crawling between his fingers like something waking up.

Yuche felt the heat before he saw it.

So did the dead.

The nearest ones changed direction.

All of them.

Toward him.

Chenghai’s expression hardened. Zhenlan shifted his grip on the crowbar. Yuche locked his arm tighter around Lingyun and turned him half behind his own body out of pure instinct.

Then the dead rushed them all at once, and Chenghai bared his teeth and barked, "Run!"