The rain hadn't stopped in seventy-three hours.
Not that you could call it rain. Not anymore. Real rain didn't melt flesh. Real rain didn't leave craters in asphalt or turn the air into something that tasted like batteries and regret.
Mike pressed his back against the industrial dryer, listening to the drip of acid sludge eating away at the Laundri-Mat's roof. Somewhere outside, a shambler dragged its liquefying corpse across the street. The sound was wet. Squelching. Wrong. The kind of wrong that lived in your nightmare. But this was real.
"Mike." Brenda's whisper cut through the dark. "How much food do we have?"
"Enough." He didn't know. He never knew. He was a plumber. He fixed pipes. He wasn't supposed to be the guy who decided who lived and died in a post-apocalyptic hellscape. "Just stay low."
Tim was doing that thing again, the thing where he clutched his screwdriver and muttered to himself. College dropout. Nineteen years old. Hadn't shaved in two weeks. "I'm gonna do it," Tim muttered, eyes wide and trembling. "If anything comes through that door, I'm gonna stab it."
"You'll get us killed," Brenda hissed.
"You don't know that."
"I know you've never stabbed anything in your life."
"I stabbed a bagel once."
"That's not—" "Listen." Mike cut her off with a raised hand.
The Shamblers had gone quiet. Not the normal quiet. Not the "We spotted a human and left" quiet. This was the quiet before something else happened. The kind of quiet that made the hairs on Mike's arms stand up. Then the door opened.
It wasn't smashed or broken. Nor was it torn off its hinges by claws the size of garden shears. It was opened. Someone had turned the knob. A figure stepped inside.
The man, Arthur (though Mike didn't know that yet), wore a cream-colored sweater vest over a pressed button-down. Khakis. Loafers. In a world where most people wore garbage bags for shoes. His clothes were clean. Not "found a working washing machine" clean. Immaculate. Like he'd just stepped out of a catalog from three years ago, before the sky turned angry and the dead started walking.
And the Shamblers? The Shamblers outside weren't moving. Mike realized, with growing horror, that they weren't able to move. Something was holding them in place. Something that stretched from the darkness like a hungry predator that just just spotted prey.
"Don't move," Mike breathed. "Don't even breathe."
Arthur walked past the broken windows, past the overturned drying machines, heading straight for the back wall. His footsteps made no sound. Not on the broken glass. Not on the wet floor. Nothing.
"Mike," Brenda whispered, her voice barely a vibration. "Look at his shadow."
Mike looked.
The stranger's shadow wasn't following the light from the window. It was moving on its own. Reaching. Stretching toward the back door where two Shamblers had been trying to sneak in. The shadow wrapped around them silently and pulled. Just... pulled them into the floor. Like they were drowning in concrete.
One second they were there.
The next: gone.
Arthur didn't notice. He was opening dryer number four.
"Is he looking for loot?" Tim's voice cracked. "Is he looking for us? Mike, if he finds us, I'm stabbing him. I swear to God, I'll do it."
"Tim, put the screwdriver down." Mike's voice was calm, even though his insides were screaming. "You'll just make him mad."
"Mad? Mad? Mike, his shadow just ate two zombies!"
"We stay quiet. We stay still. Maybe he leaves."
Arthur's head tilted. He was staring into the dryer like it held the secrets of the universe.
"I could have sworn I left that blue Argyle sock in dryer number four, Arthur thought. People really should be more careful with their laundry. And why is it so dark in here? This place really went to crap after the new owner took over the place. What was his name? Gary? Anyway, he really needs to pay the electric bill."
Arthur stepped closer to the survivors' hiding spot.
Brenda gasped.
It was small. Barely a sound. But in the silence of that dead laundromat, it might as well have been a gunshot. She jerked backward, her elbow hitting a bottle of detergent. The plastic bottle wobbled, tipped, and crashed to the floor with a sound akin to thunder.
This is it, Mike thought. This is how we die. Brought down by Tide. Liquid Tide.
Arthur's head turned.
"Oh," he said, pleasantly surprised. "There are people here?"
He strolled toward the back of the room. To the survivors, he was a looming silhouette of doom, a god wearing a sweater vest, a monster who wore loafers. To Arthur, he was just walking over to say hello to some neighbors.
Fellow procrastinators, he thought. Doing laundry at this hour? Brave souls. He peeked over the washing machine. "Hello there!" Arthur's smile was warm. Genuine. "Doing a late load? I'm just looking for a sock. Blue, diamonds inked on it, very sentimental."
Tim's composure broke.
"PLEASE DON'T EAT MY BRAIN!" Tim shrieked, holding up his screwdriver with trembling hands. "I HAVE DEBT! MY BRAIN IS LOW QUALITY! I FAILED INTRO TO ECONOMICS TWICE!"
Arthur blinked.
"Eat your... goodness, no!" He laughed. Actually laughed. It was a nice laugh. Fatherly. "I just had a sandwich. Roast beef. Very satisfying." He tilted his head, studying Tim with genuine concern. "Although, you do look a bit peaked. Are you all hiding from the rain? It is a bit of a downpour, isn't it?"
Brenda stared at him.
The rain.
He called it rain.
"The... the rain?" Brenda's voice came out as a croak. "You mean the acid falling from the sky that's melting the asphalt?"
Arthur chuckled. Actually chuckled. "Acid? You young people and your exaggerations. It's just a bit of hard water. My skin feels fine!" He held up his hands. They were smooth. Unblemished. The hands of a man, no, a thing who had never known a day of suffering in this broken world.
Mike noticed something else: Arthur wasn't standing in the shadows.
The shadows were gathered around him. Like bodyguards.
"Sir..." Mike's voice trembled. He hated that he trembled. But he couldn't stop it. "We haven't seen a sock. We haven't seen anything. We're just... staying out of the way."
Arthur's expression softened. "Well, you shouldn't sit on this cold floor. You'll catch a cold!" He reached into his grocery bag (where did that come from?) and pulled out a package. "Here, have some of these. I bought too many." He said, handing Brenda a pack of Double-Stuffed Reroes®. (No that's not a typo)
Brenda's brain stopped working.
She turned the package over in her hands. It was pristine. The packaging hadn't faded. The cookies inside hadn't crumbled. This brand hadn't been manufactured in three years. The factory that made them was a crater now, along with half the city.
Where did he get these?
Was he a time traveler?
Was this a bribe for her soul?
"Th-thank you," Brenda whispered. "Your Majesty"
Arthur laughed again. That warm, genuine laugh. "Majesty? Oh, you're a riot! I'm just Arthur. Just plain old Arthur." He straightened his sweater vest. "Well, I'll leave you to do your laundry. If you see that sock, let me know! Blue Argyle. Very distinctive."
He walked toward the front door.
A zombie lunged from the doorway.
It was a big one. A Ravager, the kind that could punch through concrete, the kind that had killed twelve people in Mike's neighborhood alone. Its jaws were open wide enough to swallow a man's head.
Arthur didn't see it.
But his shadow did.
Before the zombie could touch Arthur, something emerged from behind the stranger. A darkness within the darkness. It grabbed the Ravager, and with a sound like a hydraulic press, crushed it. The monster folded in on itself. Bones snapping, flesh compressing, until it was the size of a die. A perfect cube of meat and bone and nothing.
The shadow tossed the cube into a trash can.
Arthur didn't notice.
"Someone really needs to clean up these mannequins," Arthur said, stepping over the pile of dead zombies that used to be a street-blocking horde. "Such a tripping hazard!"
The door closed behind him.
Silence.
Then Tim spoke. "Did he... did he just turn a Ravager into a rubriks cube?"
Mike stared at the door. At the trash can. At the cube of compressed monster meat sitting on top of the garbage like a paperweight.
"He gave us Oreos, Tim." Mike's voice was hollow. "He gave us Double-Stuffed Oreos."
Brenda clutched the package to her chest like a holy relic. Her eyes were wide. Her hands were steady for the first time in weeks.
Outside, they could hear Arthur whistling. Mr. Sandman. The melody drifted through the broken windows, light and cheerful.
"What a nice group of kids," Arthur said to himself, walking down the melting street. "So polite. Reminds me of the old neighborhood."
He stepped over a corpse that had been there so long it had fused with the grass growing through the asphalt.
"So polite" he repeated, and kept walking.