Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 3:15 PM
Countdown to Extraction: 59 Hours, 26 Minutes Remaining
No one moved.
Mari could hear her own heartbeat pounding in her ears, a violent, erratic drumming that was loud enough she was absolutely certain it would give them away. The rough wood of the rotting pallets pressed sharply into her spine, splinters biting through her heavy coat. Ethan was half-collapsed beside her, his weight heavy and fundamentally wrong. His breathing was shallow, forced entirely through fiercely clenched teeth. She kept her hand braced firmly against his side, feeling the slick, hot wetness spreading rapidly beneath her fingers, desperately trying to judge the severity of the arterial spray without looking down.
Across from them in the suffocating pocket of dark, Cherry stood completely frozen.
She wasn't poised. She wasn't ready to strike.
She was just frozen.
The small switchblade trembled violently in her hand, the steel catching faint, bruised reflections from the distant fires burning somewhere beyond the parking lot. Tears slid silently down her cheeks, cutting clean, wet tracks through the thick ash and grime on her face. She shook so hard Mari could physically hear her teeth chattering—her shoulders hitching, her knees barely holding her weight, her chest fluttering with terrified, shallow breaths she didn't seem able to slow down.
They were all breathing entirely too loud.
They were all entirely too close.
And the mechanics were still eating.
The sound carried through the toxic smoke—wet, rhythmic, and deeply obscene. Heavy jaws snapping. Thick bones cracking. Something tore loose with a sickening, ripping noise that made Mari's stomach violently flip, threatening to empty right there on the concrete. Darius's massive body was being reduced piece by piece not ten feet away, hidden only by the curve of abandoned cars and the deep, unnatural shadows.
The smell was already spreading rapidly—the heavy, copper tang of fresh blood, opened organs, and that sickly sweet rot that clung to the back of the throat and made every breath feel utterly contaminated.
If any one of them moved wrong—
If Cherry cried out.
If Ethan groaned through the pain.
If Mari shifted her weight too fast against the pallets—
The horde would instantly peel off what was left of the prison heavy and come straight for them.
This is exactly why you can't trust anyone, Mari thought grimly, her grip tightening on the handle of Justin's hunting knife. Not when fear gets this sharp. Not when survival is a zero-sum game.
Cherry's wide, bloodshot eyes flicked between Mari and Ethan, darting, wild, and unpredictable. She was terrified of the dead. She was terrified of them. She was terrified of what would happen if she stayed in the shadows—and completely petrified of what would happen if she ran into the smoke. Her grip tightened on the switchblade, then loosened, then tightened again.
Mari didn't lower her heavy blade.
She didn't raise it either.
She just watched the girl.
Ethan's breath stuttered once, a wet catch in his chest, and Mari pressed her forehead briefly against his shoulder, a silent, desperate warning. He nodded almost imperceptibly, his jaw locked tight, his eyes glassy with pain and the fading edge of combat adrenaline. His skin felt clammy beneath her palm. Entirely too cold. The blood loss was real, and it was accelerating. They couldn't stay in this pocket much longer.
But they couldn't leave yet.
The mechanics weren't done eating.
Then, a new sound cut sharply through the feeding noises.
Footsteps.
Fast. Heavy. Multiple.
Mari's head snapped up just enough to see movement at the far end of the smoke-filled lot. A group—five, maybe six people—burst frantically from between the rows of abandoned cars. They were running hard, pure panic entirely obvious in the way they kept looking back over their shoulders instead of watching where they were going. One woman was crying openly, her sobs echoing in the ash. A man shouted for someone to hurry the fuck up. Another man carried a small child who looked entirely too limp, its arms dangling uselessly over his shoulder.
They were running blind.
They didn't see the bodies.
They didn't see the grey, rotting figures crouched low in the dark, their backs rounded, their faces buried deeply in Darius's ruined chest cavity.
They ran straight toward the feeding ground.
Mari's chest tightened painfully.
No. No, no—
One of the men leading the group skidded sideways, his sneakers completely losing traction on the blood-slick pavement. He slammed shoulder-first into the hood of a parked, late-model sedan.
The car alarm screamed to life.
The sound was absolutely deafening.
It was high-pitched. Piercing. Relentless.
It was a dinner bell for the entire goddamn city.
The effect was instantaneous.
Heads snapped up all across the parking lot—some still chewing chunks of meat, others lifting from the deep shadows where Mari hadn't even known they were hiding. They crawled out from under parked cars. They shattered the glass from inside wrecked vehicles. Half-decapitated bodies dragged themselves forward on bare elbows, their jaws opening and closing soundlessly. Others surged upright and ran, their limbs jerky but terrifyingly fast, drawn to the blaring noise like moths to a flame.
The group that had triggered the alarm realized their lethal mistake all at once.
Screaming erupted.
The man holding the child was tackled from behind. The kid was dropped hard onto the pavement.
Mari watched in absolute, paralyzing horror as a woman turned back for the crying child and was intercepted mid-step, both of them going down violently under a surging swarm of grey hands. The man who had hit the car tried to scramble onto the hood to escape, slipping in Darius's blood. His boots scrabbled uselessly against the metal as shattered teeth sank deeply into his calf, dragging him backward onto the asphalt.
Another person bolted in the opposite direction, only to be tackled by a figure that had been lying completely flat under a delivery truck, rising up like a nightmare born directly from the pavement.
The sound in the lot changed.
It shifted instantly from a methodical feeding into a blind, violent frenzy.
Mechanics poured in from every direction now—the fast ones sprinting with terrifying, weaponized purpose, the slower ones dragging themselves relentlessly. They all converged entirely on the sudden chaos. The heavy air filled with overlapping screams, wet impacts, the sharp crack of breaking bones, and the sickening crunch of teeth against skulls. Blood sprayed in wide arcs across windshields and pooled in dark, reflective patches on the ground.
Mari couldn't tear her eyes away. It was a massacre.
And that was exactly when Cherry moved.
She didn't run.
She slipped.
Slowly, carefully, using the chaotic distraction like cover, the girl eased backward inch by inch until she melted completely into the shadows between two heavy SUVs. Her wide, terrified eyes never left Mari and Ethan. Apology, survival, and sheer terror were tangled together in her expression. And then she was gone—swallowed whole by the darkness and the noise, another lethal variable permanently removed from the equation.
Mari swore silently into her flannel mask.
Ethan didn't even notice the girl leave at first. He was staring at the slaughter unfolding twenty feet away, his eyes wide, his chest heaving as he fought the biological urge to gasp or shout. Mari followed his gaze and felt something freezing cold settle deep in her gut.
This was infinitely worse than before.
This was the entire grid moving.
Mechanics tripped over one another, slipped in the fresh blood, clawed their way upright again. Some tore into the fallen group of survivors, while others, distracted by the blaring alarm and the sheer density of bodies, began to spread outward—searching.
Hunting.
A sharp shift in the winter wind carried the heavy, metallic scent of Ethan's blood further down the lot.
Mari felt the air change before she saw the reaction.
Several rotting heads lifted at exactly the same time.
Noses flared.
Grey bodies pivoted.
A handful of mechanics broke away from the feeding frenzy and turned directly toward the stack of wooden pallets.
Toward them.
"Shit," Mari breathed, barely a whisper through the fabric.
Ethan swallowed hard, gripping the 9-iron. "We gotta go."
"I know."
They couldn't stay hidden in the pocket. Not with his blood loss, not with the wind actively working against them. If they waited another sixty seconds, they'd be boxed in completely.
Mari tightened her grip on Ethan's heavy coat. "On my count. We move low. Quiet as we can. Follow me."
Ethan nodded once. His face was entirely grey, sweat slicking his hairline despite the cold. He tried to push himself upright and hissed a sharp breath through his teeth as agony lanced through his ribs. Blood dripped steadily onto the pavement now, dark and thick.
One of the fast mechanics broke into a dead sprint toward the pallets.
Another immediately followed.
Mari didn't wait to count to three.
She hauled Ethan up, and they ran.
They darted between the abandoned cars, ducking low as rotting hands slapped at empty air mere inches behind them. Mari felt dirty fingernails brush her heavy coat, snagging the fabric. She twisted violently, slashing blindly behind her. She felt resistance give way as her hunting knife sank deep into soft tissue. A mechanic snarled—not in pain, but in sheer frustration—and lunged again.
They vaulted over the low hood of a Honda Civic, Ethan stumbling but staying upright through sheer, unadulterated operator will. Mari dragged him forward, her heart hammering so hard she thought it might burst through her ribs. The ground was slick with engine oil, ash, and things she entirely refused to look at.
A mechanic lunged from beneath a parked van, grabbing Ethan's ankle.
He went down hard.
Mari screamed, turning instantly. She brought the heavy hunting knife down again and again, burying the steel into the creature's skull until the bone caved and the thing went entirely limp. She hauled Ethan back up, practically carrying him now, his dead weight sagging heavier with every single step.
Behind them, the parking lot was pure, unadulterated hell.
The mechanics tore through the absolute last of the screaming group. The car alarm wailed on, relentless, pulling more dead from the streets, the alleys, and the buildings that had seemed empty just moments before. Grey figures poured from apartment stairwells, from behind dumpsters, from places no one would've ever thought to check.
The wind howled through the lot, whipping loose trash and ash into dark spirals, carrying the scent of fresh blood farther still.
More heads turned.
More bodies ran.
Mari didn't look back again.
She focused on one thing only: putting absolute distance between them and the feeding ground. She navigated the smoke like a ghost, pulling the bleeding medic through the maze of metal.
They ducked around the corner of a heavy brick building, slamming hard into the deep shadows along the side wall. Their lungs were actively burning, their legs screaming in protest. Ethan nearly collapsed entirely, catching himself against the cold brick with a wet, choked sound.
Mari pressed him aggressively into the darkness, her knife raised, listening to the apocalypse.
The main horde surged past the opening seconds later—dozens of bodies rushing blindly toward the blaring car alarm and the scent of the slaughter, missing their hiding spot by less than five feet.
Mari slid down the brick wall beside Ethan, her hands shaking violently now that the immediate adrenaline spike had passed.
He was incredibly pale. Entirely too pale.
Blood soaked his tactical shirt and dripped onto the concrete in a steady, terrifying rhythm.
"We gotta move," Ethan rasped, his eyes struggling to stay focused. "Can't… stop here…"
"I know," Mari said, her voice breaking despite herself. "I know. Just—give me ten seconds."
She ripped the heavy flannel mask off her face. She tore a long strip from the bottom of her own shirt and pressed it as hard as she physically could against his side, trying desperately to pack the wound and slow the bleeding. Ethan groaned loudly but didn't pull away.
Somewhere behind them, the absolute last scream from the parking lot was abruptly cut off.
The world was still ending.
And they were still alive.
For now.
Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 3:35 PM
Countdown to Extraction: 59 Hours, 06 Minutes Remaining