Chapter 38: The Zombies

The Appalachian sky had turned the color of bruised meat.

On the jagged northern face of Mount Washington, six thousand feet above what used to be the state of New Hampshire, four surviving candidates were huddled inside a shallow granite crevice. They had spent four months surviving the rain by anchoring heavy poly-tarps to the stone with climbing pitons, drinking runoff filtered through charcoal tablets, and eating freeze-dried emergency rations until their gums bled from scurvy.

They thought the hard part was over.

When the rain had stopped three days ago, they had actually wept with relief. A candidate named Jack—formerly a middleweight MMA fighter who had awakened an S-rank kinetic-hardening talent—had dropped to his knees on the sodden gravel and kissed the freezing stone.

Now, Jack was flat on his stomach at the mouth of the crevice, his knuckles white around the grip of an aluminum-shafted hunting spear. His eyes were wide, bloodshot, and frantic.

"They’re coming up the ravine," Jack whispered, his voice trembling so hard the words slurred. "They aren’t stopping. The fire didn’t even slow them down."

Behind him, a young woman named Sarah sat curled against the damp rock wall, her hands glowing with a faint, flickering red aura. She was a pyromancer, Candidate #142. Three hours ago, when the first wave of swollen, gray-skinned horrors had emerged from the flooded notch below, she had cast a three-hundred-foot wall of flame across the narrow trail.

It hadn’t mattered.

The infected had charged straight through the blaze. The pathogen that had saturated their dead tissues during months of sub-aquatic decay had altered their biology completely. The fire burned their rotten clothes and charred the surface of their bloated skin, but they felt no agony, suffered no shock, and needed no oxygen. Flaming corpses had clambered over the burning rocks like rabid baboons, their blackened jaws snapping, trailing greasy black smoke until their sheer numbers smothered the flames.

"How many?" Sarah croaked. Her throat was raw, parched from overusing her mana. "Jack, how many are left?"

"Thousands," Jack breathed, his face drained of all color. "The entire valley... every town that drowned down in Conway, every camp along the highway... they’re all coming up the ridge. They can smell us. The second your mana flared, they turned toward the summit."

A wet, scraping sound echoed from the rocks directly beneath their ledge.

Scritch. Scritch.

It wasn’t the slow, clumsy shuffle of classic horror fiction. It was the rapid, skittering scramble of claws on stone.

A corpse crested the edge of the rim.

Its limbs were grotesquely elongated, the joints swollen from months of water immersion. Its skin was mottled gray, sloughing off in wet ribbons, but the fingers digging into the granite were tipped with black, hardened bone. Its jaw unhinged with a wet, sickening pop, revealing rows of jagged teeth that clicked together like shears.

"Die!"

Jack thrust forward with all his strength, activating his kinetic reinforcement. The steel spear tip punched through the creature’s forehead with a sound like a splitting watermelon.

Gray fluid and black ichor erupted from the wound. The creature jerked violently, but its dead hands didn’t let go of the ledge. Instead, it reached out with unnatural speed, its blackened fingers wrapping around the shaft of the spear and pulling Jack forward with monstrous, hydraulic force.

"Jack!" Sarah screamed.

Before Jack could release his grip, another three bodies vaulted over the rock face. They didn’t bother using weapons. They threw themselves as a pack, slamming Jack against the gravel in a flurry of rotten limbs and snapping teeth. Jack’s kinetic shield flared gold, deflecting the first few bites, but the sheer kinetic mass of fifty more corpses pouring over the rim crushed his ribs with an audible crack.

"Help me—" Jack shrieked, his golden armor shattering into glowing shards.

Sarah raised her trembling hands, but before she could ignite another spark, the sky above the mountain whistled.

It wasn’t an artillery shell.

It was a mutated candidate.

A massive shadow descended from the fog above, slamming down directly into the center of the camp. The impact shattered the granite ledge, throwing two survivors straight off the three-thousand-foot drop into the misty abyss.

Sarah looked up, her breath freezing in her chest.

Standing before her was Candidate #082, formerly known as [Goliath]. The man had possessed a titan-shift ability before drowning in the lower valleys during week three. Now, his corpse stood twelve feet tall, his flesh a mosaic of bloated muscle, swollen blue veins, and jagged plates of calcified necrotic bone. His eyes burned with a dull, milky-white luminescence.

The beast didn’t roar. It simply reached down with a hand the size of an engine block, closed its fist around Sarah’s torso, and squeezed.

Sarah’s vision faded into red darkness, her phone falling from her limp fingers and skittering across the blood-soaked gravel.

On the cracked glass of the screen, the [World Chat] was scrolling at terrifying speed:

— [FrostBite]: They breached the cave in Colorado! The altitude doesn’t freeze them! Their blood is like black antifreeze!

— [GaleRunner]: I have no more arrows. My fingers are swollen with the infection. Just from getting scratched by their fingernails... my skin is turning gray...

— [IronSeeker]: Is anyone alive in Europe?! The Alps are completely covered! Millions of them are swarming the peaks!

Then came the red system notification:

[Trial Alert: Candidate Elimination Confirmed.]

[Candidate #142 (Sarah) has been eliminated.]

[Candidate #209 (Jack) has been eliminated.]

[Current Candidates Remaining: 119 / 500.]

Chapter 37: The Sanctuary in the Abyssal Blue

Six thousand miles to the east, four hundred meters beneath the surface of the North Atlantic Ocean, the world was composed of deep velvet carpets, warm cedar scents, and the steady, reassuring thrum of a closed-loop nuclear reactor.

Julius Vance sat in an oversized leather recliner in his private study on Level 1 of St. Jude’s Spire.

On the polished mahogany table beside him rested an antique silver tray bearing a plate of thinly shaved smoked prosciutto, aged Manchego cheese, and a bowl of sweet green olives harvested less than two hours ago from Clara Chen’s indoor orchards. In his hand, he held a crystal tumbler filled with single-malt scotch, the ice clinking softly against the glass as he rotated his wrist.

Before him, the study’s wall display was running six live satellite feeds.

Feed One: The Rocky Mountains. A desperate group of five players was trapped on a radio tower, surrounded by a swirling sea of hundreds of thousands of gray, sprinting dead. As Julius watched, the steel tower groaned under the weight of the climbing corpses, buckled at the base, and toppled into the horde.

Feed Three: The Andes. A surviving earth-manipulator tried to build a stone fortress on a plateau, only for two mutated candidates wielding necrotic corrosive acid to melt through the rock wall in under ninety seconds.

Julius took a slow sip of his scotch, the rich, smoky peat warming his throat.

"Mercer," Julius said into the desk comms, not taking his eyes off the slaughter on the screen.

"Sir?" Colonel Mercer’s voice replied through the fiber-optic speaker.

"What is the status of our perimeter sensors?"

"Completely clear, Mr. Vance," Mercer replied in his standard, unbothered cadence. "Our automated surface hydrophones detected a small pod of infected drifting in the Gulf Stream about fifty nautical miles west of our outer shelf. The prevailing current carried them south toward the mid-Atlantic ridge. None made contact with our basalt shelf."

"And the atmosphere scrubbers?"

"Running at peak efficiency, sir. Chief Santos verified that the air intakes atop the pinnacle are operating through five stages of electrostatic precipitation, carbon filtration, and high-intensity ultraviolet irradiation. Even if airborne pathogens from the mainland manage to drift across two thousand miles of open ocean, not a single microbe could survive the scrubbers."

Mercer paused, a faint chuckle coming through the line.

"To be frank, sir, the air inside this fortress is currently cleaner than the air in Zurich before the apocalypse started."

"Keep it that way," Julius said with a soft smile. "Tell Marcus that the Manchego was excellent, but see if he can age the next wheel with a bit more rind."

"I will relay the message, Mr. Vance."

Julius set his drink down and picked up his smartphone.

The screen was a graveyard.

The [World Chat], which had once been filled with hundreds of arrogant metahumans boasting about their dragon bloodlines, celestial swords, and nuclear arsenals, was reduced to a few flickering, broken whispers:

— [SandStorm]: Water gone. Ammo gone. Bleeding from my stomach. If anyone reads this... don’t bother fighting. Just take the cyanide.

[Candidate #088 (SandStorm) has been eliminated.]

— [IronSeeker]: I can hear them outside the vault door. They’re chewing through the rubber seals. The smell... God, the smell is coming through the vents.

[Candidate #052 (IronSeeker) has been eliminated.]

The candidate counter at the top of the interface dropped again with a soft, mechanical pulse:

[Current Candidates Remaining: 98 / 500.]

In less than seventy-two hours since Phase Two began, more than seventy candidates had been butchered across the continents.

They had spent two years sharpening swords, training their bodies to run faster, and plotting how they would dominate the new world. But human bodies got tired. Mana pools ran dry. Ammunition ran out.

Against an entire planet of four billion drowned, mutated corpses that felt neither cold nor fear, individual martial power was nothing more than a joke.

A player could kill a hundred zombies. He could kill a thousand.

He could not kill ten million.

Julius scrolled down to his private messaging tab.

Arthur Vance—Malakor—had sent no more threats. The man was still buried inside Raven Rock, his mind-reading ability completely useless against mindless, rotting flesh, fighting a losing war of attrition as the groundwater beneath his mountain turned into poison and the dead climbed over his perimeter fences.

Julius didn’t even bother to check Arthur’s status. The outcome was already written in the ledgers of basic logistics. When your intake water is toxic and your ammunition is finite, your expiration date is just simple mathematics.

Julius unlocked his personal media library on the side console, pulling up an old documentary about architectural history.

He reclined the leather seat back a few degrees, took another slice of prosciutto, and folded his hands across his stomach.

Above him, the Atlantic Ocean stretched for thousands of miles, cold, dark, and utterly impassable.

On the continents, gods and heroes were being eaten alive in the mud.

Down here, the lights were warm, the air was sweet, and the scotch was eighteen years old.

Julius closed his eyes, listening to the gentle hum of the ventilation, perfectly content to let the world finish destroying itself.