Chapter 36: Spectator

The four-month flood had drowned billions of ordinary people, but it had also preserved them in a freezing, silty soup. Now that the sky had stopped vomiting water, the planet had essentially turned into a rotting, planetary-scale incubator.

Down in the subterranean heart of St. Jude’s Spire, none of that foul stench existed.

Julius took another sip of his hot black tea, feeling the fragrant bergamot clear his throat. He tapped the armrest console of his leather chair, bringing up the master surveillance matrix on the main wall display.

The screen split into twelve high-resolution panes. Through encrypted commercial satellite relays that Julius had bought outright before the world collapsed, feeds were panning across every major landmass.

"Mercer," Julius said into the open bridge comms. "Enhance quadrant four. The Appalachian perimeter."

"Right away, sir," Colonel Mercer’s voice sounded crisp and composed over the fiber-optic line.

On screen four, the Appalachian mountain range looked like an anthill kicked by a giant.

The floodwaters that had settled into the lower valleys were churning violently. Millions of gray, bloated human bodies, preserved by the icy deluge, were dragging themselves out of the silt. Their flesh was mottled green and white, skin peeling off in wet ribbons, but their movements defied all biological logic.

They did not shamble. They sprinted.

Driven by the Trial’s parasitic pathogen, their spines curved unnaturally, and they bounded on all fours across the mudflats like starving hounds. They clawed up the sheer rocky inclines with black, broken nails, scaling slopes that normal mountaineers would have struggled with.

A red tactical marker was flashing along the high ridge: an outpost manned by soldiers under Arthur Vance’s telepathic command.

Through the optical zoom of the satellite, Julius watched the military detachment attempt to hold a reinforced trench line. Concrete barricades, razor wire, and twin M2 Browning heavy machine guns had been set up across the mountain road to cover a deep cavern entrance.

The machine guns opened fire. Muzzle flashes flickered against the gloomy yellow haze of the sky. Heavy .50 caliber rounds tore into the charging horde, severing limbs and exploding rotted torsos into wet red mist.

Dozens of corpses tumbled down the cliff face. But behind them came hundreds. Behind those hundreds came thousands.

They did not feel fear. They did not slow down when their ribcages were punched open. They trampled over the bodies of their fallen, using the growing pile of mutilated corpses as a ramp to clear the razor wire.

Suddenly, the front line of the horde parted.

A monstrous figure leaped over the mound of dead flesh.

It was a mutated candidate—a player who had drowned in the early weeks of the rain. His corpse was swollen to eight feet tall, his muscles bulging with dark purple veins that leaked black ichor. Across his gray chest, jagged plates of calcified bone had erupted through the skin, forming natural armor.

Candidate #219, formerly an earth-type warrior named Terran.

The heavy machine-gun bullets struck Terran’s chest, sparking off the hardened bone plates with sharp pings. With a guttural, waterlogged shriek that blew microphone levels on the military feed, the undead candidate slammed both fists into the concrete barricade.

The bunker wall buckled. Concrete shattered into powdery dust.

Within seconds, the infected horde poured through the breach. The mind-controlled soldiers fired their assault rifles until their magazines ran dry, but their glassy, emotionless eyes never changed expression even as three ghouls tackled them into the mud, tearing through their tactical vests with bare teeth.

The screen went black as the outpost’s relay was severed.

Julius chuckled softly, taking a bite of a freshly baked cinnamon pastry resting on a small porcelain plate beside his keyboard. The sweet sugar and warm spice melted over his tongue.

"Arthur’s ground defenses are crumbling," Julius observed, leaning back into his leather cushions. "He spent all his energy controlling generals in deep bunkers, forgetting that a puppet army still bleeds when a million dead citizens come knocking on the front door."

"Sir," Mercer’s voice came through the speaker. "The perimeter sensors along our island shelf have triggered several passive sonar contacts."

Julius raised an eyebrow. "Our island? Did some of them drift out this far?"

"Yes, sir. North Atlantic swells carried a drift cluster from the drowned coastal cities of Ireland and Scotland. Approximately eight thousand infected carcasses are caught in the outer currents, drifting toward our southern sea wall."

Julius pressed the video selector on his desk.

The panoramic display switched to an external camera mounted eighty meters above the southern cliff face of St. Jude’s Spire.

Down in the churning gray-black water of the Atlantic, thousands of pale, waterlogged corpses were bobbing in the foam. They had caught the scent of the living, or perhaps sensed the thermal radiation of the facility, and were thrashing against the waves, paddling furiously toward the base of the island.

The scene looked apocalyptic. An army of drowned dead, jaws snapping, milky eyes fixed upward on the black basalt fortress.

Julius watched them for three seconds, completely unimpressed.

St. Jude’s Spire had not been built on a sandy beach. It was a volcanic pinnacle rising straight out of an abyssal ocean trench. The cliffs were vertical walls of natural basalt, reinforced by five-foot-thick plates of marine-grade stainless steel that extended forty feet beneath the low-tide line.

A group of fifty ghouls threw themselves against the rock, trying to dig their fingers into the stone.

They found nothing to hold. The surface had been polished smooth by high-pressure diamond grinders during construction to prevent salt buildup and barnacle infestation. There were no crevices, no ledges, and no handholds.

A massive, twenty-foot Atlantic swell rose behind them like a dark wall.

The wave crashed over the rocks with the weight of a freight train. The crushing hydraulic force smashed the infected against the basalt, breaking their rotten spines and pulverizing their heads into liquid pulp before the retreating tide sucked them into the three-hundred-meter deep trench below.

Not a single ghoul climbed higher than four feet above sea level.

"They don’t even trigger the active turrets," Julius said, shaking his head with a slight smirk. "The ocean itself is doing the housekeeping. Mercer, keep the kinetic defense systems on passive standby. No need to waste tungsten rounds on drifting garbage."

"Understood, Mr. Vance," Mercer replied. "Our perimeter remains completely sterile."

Julius settled back into his seat. He pulled his smartphone from his robe pocket and opened the system interface.

The world outside was screaming, and the World Chat was turning into an endless casualty list.