Shivansh stood at the edge of the window, one hand gently parting the blackout curtain. The world outside looked still too still. Not peaceful. Not sleepy. Just... wrong.
The courtyard, usually humming with life by now, was deserted. No kids riding bicycles. No retired men gossiping in slippers. The stray dog that used to bark at pigeons was nowhere to be seen. Instead, near the swing set, a shape swayed slowly an infected, half-bent, its shirt soaked in dried blood, limping as if dragged by its own shadow.
Another one stood slumped by the main lane divider, twitching intermittently like a broken puppet. And near Tower B's stairwell door, a third figure scratched gently at the metal with one bloodied palm, its head jerking with every movement.
There was no screaming now. That had passed. What remained was the scent of something terrible something burnt and metallic drifting on warm morning wind, filtered through busted vents and broken mesh windows.
Shivansh let the curtain fall back.
"Maa…" he whispered, his voice low, his mind still catching up to what his eyes had seen.
Ankita entered with a forced calm; her fingers still damp from washing baby clothes for Kavita. "Did you check again?"
He nodded. "They're everywhere. More than before. Some of them look... fresh."
Vedant sat against the living room wall, hugging his knees. His eyes darted between his brother and the front door. "Are they coming here?"
"No," Shivansh said. "Not yet. They're scattered. Walking like they're lost."
He unlocked his phone. The apartment group chat had exploded dozens of unread messages, but most were from last night. Now, the silence in the chat was almost worse. Many names had gone dark.
Zoya: "Still in my flat. Door bolted. I saw Rinku last night getting bit by Manoj. He… changed."
Parth: "Locked inside Tower A. Don't open for anyone. Blood all over the stairwell."
Shradha Pandey: "Heard footsteps outside my flat just now. Crawling."
Mukul: "Sending drone up soon. Will share footage."
Shivansh scrolled slowly. Fifty to seventy flats had gone completely silent no replies, no calls, no online status. Some were the homes of familiar aunties, colony kids, and milk delivery boys who had waved at him just two days ago.
He peeked through the peephole. The corridor remained quiet, but the tension in his chest didn't ease.
"Start gathering things," he said suddenly. "Anything we can push in front of the door. More than this."
Ankita looked up. "You think they'll try to get in?"
"I think eventually, yeah." He picked up the old side table and dragged it across the marble. "We can't assume we're safe just because they're not here yet."
As he jammed a second chair beneath the handle, another sound echoed a faint metallic drag, from somewhere below their tower. Like nails across a tin sheet.
Then, from above a scream. Short. Shrill. And abruptly cut off.
Ankita froze. Vedant stood. No one breathed.
Shivansh grabbed his phone again. The screen lit up with a new message.
Mukul: "Drone is up. I see 10-15 infected between gym and main block. At least 10 more crawling near Tower D. 3-4 are trying to climb the balcony grills."
Shivansh tightened his jaw. This wasn't a passing infection anymore. It had taken root inside their home, crept silently through halls, and now bloomed across towers.
He turned back toward the room and said quietly, "The whole place is compromised."
They were no longer living in an apartment. They were trapped in a feeding ground. The whole place is compromised.
That sentence echoed in Shivansh's mind like the final line of a funeral prayer. He closed the curtain slowly, careful not to draw attention. The day outside was beginning to warm, but the air inside felt colder, heavier. Like the weight of every silent room in the complex had settled on their floor.
Behind him, Ankita quietly lit a diya in the corner of the kitchen and stood in prayer, lips murmuring a trembling mantra. Vedant sat on the floor near the main door, back pressed against the shoe rack they'd barricaded. He was clutching the remote like it could protect him.
Shivansh looked at his phone again. WhatsApp had loaded now just barely. The group chat, once filled with recipe forwards and neighborly complaints, had become a lifeline.
A new message arrived.
Mukul Sehrawat:"Drone cam feed saved. Signal's bad. Sending now. See what you can."
He clicked the video and held his breath.
The footage was jittery, distorted at first. Then it steadied. Mukul's drone, hovering high above the towers, panned slowly across the society courtyard. Below, a twisted scene unfolded. Near Tower C, two figures stumbled across the parking area one crawling with a dislocated leg, another circling the broken gate repeatedly. At the gym entrance, something or someone was slamming their fists against the glass wall, their reflection smeared in blood.
And then, the most chilling part: a child-sized body near the compound wall, half-covered with a bicycle. Shivansh paused the video before it finished. He didn't need to see more.
He wiped his palm on his shorts and checked the chat again. More names were active now. More survivors were responding.
Zoya Siddiqui:"I think they react to curtains moving. I pulled mine, and one turned toward my flat and stayed for a full two minutes. Just watching."
Parth Malhotra:"So what do we call them? Infected? Biters? Walkers?"
The pause that followed felt longer than necessary.
Vedant, still curled up, spoke without looking up. "Call them what they are. Zombies."
Shivansh looked at his brother. His face was still streaked with dried tears, but his eyes were cold and sure.
No one in the chat argued.
Rekha Sethi:"We've blocked the stairwell door in Tower B. Six of us here. One old man died at the lift lobby. Not opening that side again."
Shradha Pandey:"I haven't moved since sunrise. I can hear crawling outside my flat. Don't know who it is. Maybe Mrs. Sinha. She was bitten yesterday."
Dinesh Chauhan:"Still hiding near service duct. Blood on both walls now. If I don't get out, someone tell my son"
The message ended mid-sentence.
Shivansh felt his stomach drop.
He tapped the reply box and typed slowly:
Shivansh Sharma:"We need a record. Everyone who's alive send your flat number. We map it, floor by floor. We survive together."
It began as a trickle.
Zoya:C-402
Parth:A-201
Shradha:C-702
Rekha & Anil:B-301
Mukul:D-602
Kavita (with baby):A-103
Mrs. Gurleen:B-401
Imran & Shahida Qureshi:A-501
Nakul & Roshni Verma:A-302
Ten flats.
Ten scattered islands of life in a sea that was already red.
Shivansh's fingers hovered for a moment before typing again:
Shivansh Sharma:A-603. With my mom and brother. We're safe for now. Barricaded.
Lock your doors. Block your stairs. Don't open unless, you're sure. No hero moves.
A moment later, Aarav's name appeared.
Aarav Kapoor:"Mitali is here. She hasn't spoken since yesterday. She just keeps looking at the wall. I'm trying."
Shivansh leaned back, eyes closed for a moment. That line hit differently. The horror wasn't just outside anymore it was in their minds, in their hearts, in every shaking hand and hushed voice behind those locked doors.
For a few minutes, the chat went silent again. But not the world.
Outside, a muffled thud echoed from Tower C. Then a wet, dragging sound. Somewhere distant, a woman's voice cried out. Not screaming. Sobbing. A single sound of heartbreak cutting through marble, iron, and flesh.
Shivansh locked his phone and stood up. He looked around the flat his home and saw it for what it had become: a cell, a bunker, a waiting room between survival and collapse.
At least now… they weren't alone.
They were still connected. Still speaking. Still trying.
And for the first time since the night had bled into morning, that was enough. It began with a creak.
Somewhere around 8:20 AM, on the fifth floor of Tower A, the quiet was broken by the soft, cautious sound of a door unlocking. A click. Then a groan of rusted hinges.
Imran Qureshi peered through the peephole from A-502, shotgun already loaded. He saw the old man from Flat 501 Mr. Suresh Lal step into the hallway. Shirt buttoned to the top, slippers dragging, his hands wringing together like he hadn't slept. His voice cracked as he called out down the stairwell, "Ravi? Beta? Are you there?"
Shivansh heard it too, from inside A-603. He tensed.
The night before, word had gone around that Mr. Suresh's son Ravi Lal had come home late, covered in blood. Said he'd fallen. Scraped himself trying to help someone near the guard booth. He'd laughed it off. Locked his door. Told his father to let him sleep.
Now, silence.
Until Mr. Suresh turned and saw his son collapsed outside the lift, just a few feet from the flat.
He rushed to him. "Ravi!"
From different towers, a few residents peered through balcony grills. Others stared from behind glass doors. Watching. Not helping.
The man crouched, shaking his son's shoulder.
That's when Ravi opened his eyes.
Wide. Pale. Unfocused.
His mouth fell open. His body jerked.
"Beta? What's" Suresh barely got the words out before Ravi lunged.
It was like a puppet snapping upright shoulders cracked, spine twisting unnaturally. His jaw unhinged wider than it should. And he bit into his father's throat, hard and fast, like a starving animal.
Screams ripped through the corridor.
Imran flung his door shut. From other floors, kids began crying. One woman yelled, "Lock your doors!" followed by the sound of multiple bolts sliding into place, furniture scraping across tiles.
Shivansh sprinted to the peephole and looked down the hall. "Oh god…"
The hallway echoed with Suresh's gurgling. Blood sprayed the wall behind him like a fan. Ravi snarled and shoved his father down, still gnawing. The older man's hands flailed weakly then stopped.
Ankita covered Vedant's ears.
"They can hear us," Shivansh muttered. "They can smell. See movement. But the bodies are broken look at how he walks. Unbalanced. The joints are"
"Shivansh!" Ankita cried, pulling him back from the door.
He stumbled backward, heart pounding. "He turned in minutes," he whispered. "Not hours. Not overnight. Just… minutes."
They heard it too a huffing, guttural sound. Ravi now fully gone rising to his feet, sniffing the hallway, turning his head toward a sobbing noise from the stairwell. The moment he heard it he charged. Limping, but fast.
Shivansh slammed another wooden chair against the front door. "Reinforce everything. Now."
Down on the first floor, Kavita's call came through. Ankita picked it up on speaker.
"Didi, baby Tina won't stop crying. I've shut every window, every vent, everything. Rinku was bit by Manoj last night and it turned him. I think I saw him on Mukul's drone video but he was... he was chasing someone."
Ankita didn't know what to say.
Across the society, trust fractured. A knock at the door could mean rescue or death. No one was opening for anyone now. They had seen it happen with their own eyes.
A man can die and rise in ten minutes.
And if even one of them got in… it could spread again.
From Shivansh's balcony, more infected could now be seen gathering near the gym a herd forming slowly. They dragged their feet, but their heads twitched at every distant sound. One of them growled and the others began turning in its direction, responding like animals to a signal.
They were slow. Rotting. Falling apart. But when sound called them, they became a storm. The wind outside had picked up slightly, carrying with it the faint sound of something flapping a torn banner from a birthday party long forgotten, tangled in a balcony railing. Inside the towers, though, it was suffocatingly still. On the third floor of Tower A, Parth crept through the corridor like a man stepping onto thin ice. Imran followed closely, gripping the rifle he hadn't used in years with both hands, his expression stony. Neither spoke. They reached the emergency stairwell door, the one facing the gym and outer boundary, and Parth slowly eased it open just a crack.
What he saw sent a chill down his spine.
Six maybe seven infected lingered near the gym. One slammed its fists repeatedly against the closed shutter, another crawled on its stomach, leaving a wet smear on the tile. Two more wandered aimlessly along the parked scooters, their movements jerky and disjointed, while a fifth one shirtless and with a caved-in shoulder had already begun scaling the side of a pipe, climbing toward a first-floor balcony like some grotesque insect. Parth shut the door without a word.
"Gate's gone," he said, barely above a whisper.
"They're multiplying," Imran replied grimly. "We don't have time."
Elsewhere in Tower C, Shradha Pandey sat perfectly still in the center of her yoga mat. Her eyes were closed, hands resting gently on her knees. The air was thick and charged. Beneath the chaos, beneath the infection, she could feel it something older, deeper, pulsing through the concrete and steel of the towers. This wasn't just a virus. This was a disturbance, like a thread pulled loose from something sacred.
In A-501, Shahida stood on her toes to reach the peephole. Her Dadu, Imran, had told her to stay inside, no matter what. She watched him now outside, near the stairs, adjusting the rifle against his shoulder, back straight. He looked smaller somehow, and yet more dangerous. She wanted to call out to him but didn't.
Upstairs, Shivansh tried one last time. The phone rang. Once. Twice. Then silence. The screen flashed again: "Papa – Calling…". No response. He opened the emergency radio app he'd downloaded the night before, when the first messages of lockdown had started to circulate. Static filled the speaker. Then, buried within it, a voice crackled through: "…repeat… All South Delhi sectors advised to shelter in place. Avoid open streets… If you have access to barricades, reinforce… Do not attempt to leave… Repeat lock your doors…"
The message ended as quickly as it came.
Shivansh lowered the phone. His jaw tightened.
And then came the sound that made everyone freeze.
A bang.
Solid. Loud. Metallic. It echoed through their corridor like a war drum. The stairwell door on their floor had been hit. Then again. A low growl followed a wet, broken exhale scraping its way through the hallway. Ankita grabbed Vedant and stepped back into the corner, shielding him.
"They've reached us," Shivansh said, voice flat.
He moved quickly now. No panic just purpose. He walked to the bookshelf and pulled out two thick hardcover encyclopedias, the kind nobody had touched in years. He grabbed masking tape from the kitchen drawer and began wrapping them to his forearms, tight and secure. Then he reached for his leather jacket thick, heavy, heat-trapping but tough and zipped it up over his T-shirt. His jeans followed, tugged on quickly and tightened with a belt.
"Vedant," he said, "pass me the cricket bat."
Vedant obeyed without a word, eyes wide. The bat an old SG with scuffed edges and a slightly cracked handle had been a gift from their father years ago. It had survived dozens of matches. It would now have to survive something else.
Ankita stared at her son as he readied himself. "Shivansh, what are you doing?" she asked, her voice shaking.
He checked the tape on his arms and adjusted his grip on the bat. "If they're on our floor, we don't have time to wait for them to break down someone else's door. We need to keep them from reaching anyone else."
"We can't fight them" she whispered. "We're not soldiers."
He met her eyes. Calm. Focused. "I'm not trying to be a soldier. I'm trying to be ready."
She moved forward, placing a hand on his shoulder. "Just wait. We'll hide. They'll pass."
Shivansh shook his head. "There's nowhere to hide. Not anymore."
He stepped to the door, checked the barricade one last time, then removed the top latch. The peephole showed a figure stumbling past the far end of the corridor slouched, groaning, dragging something behind it.
He turned once to look at his mother and brother. Vedant was frozen, eyes locked on the cricket bat. Ankita was crying now, silently.
Shivansh gripped the handle tight.
"Don't open for anyone," he said.
And then he pulled the latch.