Darkness didn’t settle over the street so much as drop on top of it like a sledgehamr.
One second there had still been a thin gray wash clinging to the buildings, enough to separate pavent from curb and broken glass from shadow. The next, it was gone.
The city flattened into black shapes and hard edges, the burned circle around them standing out only because the pavent there still seed to be glowing in the darkness. The streetlights flickered to life, but there wasn’t nearly enough to see more than three feet in front of them.
Ash drifted through the air in slow, weightless spirals, catching against Yuche’s sleeve, Chenghai’s pant leg, the front of Zhenlan’s shirt. The sll of scorched flesh and lted rot sat thick in the back of the throat.
Yuche tightened his grip around Lingyun before the other man’s knees could buckle a second ti. Lingyun’s weight leaned harder into him now, all the rigidity burned out of his fra, his breathing shallow and uneven against Yuche’s shoulder.
His skin felt too warm. Not like a high fever so much as standing in the middle of a volcano warm. Like the heat had gone inward turning his blood to lava instead of cooling off. Yuche could have sworn that the fire was still sitting there, trapped under skin and muscle with nowhere left to go.
He shifted Lingyun higher without ceremony, steadying him with one arm while keeping his body angled toward the street. He ignored the burning sensation, he wouldn’t let go of Lingyun, not even to to stop feeling this type of pain.
Chenghai pald the gun and double checked the number of bullets in it. There was none.
Taking in a deep breath, he froze. The ribs that had been slowing him down all day didn’t seem to hurt anymore. Like soone had snapped their fingers and he was completely healed.
Shaking his head at the thought, he tucked the gun into the back of his pants and looked at where he had last seen the zombies. Only there was nothing there. Zhenlan stepped to his right, the crowbar hanging loose in one hand, his posture deceptively still. He was listening. All of them were.
The city was quieter than it had any right to be.
During the day, the dead never really stopped moving. There was always sothing—moaning in the distance, feet scraping over pavent, bodies knocking into wrecks and doors and one another with no sense of rhythm or timing.
The noise wandered. It bled from one block into another. It made the whole city feel sick and restless, like nothing in it could ever settle.
Now the noise had just stopped. And it shouldn’t be possible.
Yuche lifted his head slightly, his eyes cutting down the nearest street. He couldn’t see far. The dark had swallowed detail whole. Cars had turned into shapes. Storefronts had turned into mouths. Alleys had beco cuts in the city where anything could be waiting. He listened harder, forcing his breathing to slow.
A scrape sounded from sowhere to the left.
Too fast.
Not loud. Just fast.
Zhenlan heard it too. His chin turned a fraction in the sa direction, crowbar lifting an inch. Chenghai didn’t move, his eyes still staring at where the threat had been last.
Then sothing crossed the street ahead of them.
It didn’t drift, it didn’t stumble, and it definitely wasn’t the slow, broken lurch they’d already learned how to read and survive.
Instead, it moved in a blur from one parked car to the next and vanished behind a delivery van before any of them could get a clean look at it.
Yuche felt Lingyun tense against him. "You saw that?" Lingyun’s voice ca out hoarse, thinner than it should have been.
"I don’t know what I saw," Chenghai answered, not taking his eyes off the dark. "But I saw enough to know that we are fucked."
More movent flickered at the edge of the block.
A shape dropped from the hood of a sedan with a speed no daylight zombie should have had. It landed in a crouch that lasted less than a second before it sprang forward again. Another silhouette angled across the far side of the street, head snapping toward them before the body followed.
"They’re different," Zhenlan murmured. "I don’t understand..."
No one argued.
The silence broke all at once.
Moans rose from three directions, lower than before but faster sohow, cut short and threaded together by the sound of feet hitting pavent at a pace that made Yuche’s neck tighten. It was like instead of a random sound... they were... talking to each other...
The dead were coming in hard now, not andering toward noise, not bunching blindly on instinct. They were reacting, adjusting, changing direction mid-motion when the angle demanded it.
The nearest one reached the burned edge first.
It didn’t slow when it hit the blackened pavent. It vaulted the corpse-gray shell of a car tire, caught one hand on the trunk of a sedan, and pushed off it with enough force to clear the hood entirely.
"Car," Chenghai barked, not even sure if the car was still there or if it had been burned like everything else.
"Not like this," Yuche snapped back. "We’d be back in the sa position as before... and trapped in a tal casket until the zombies either got in or got bored."
Even if they could get to the SUV, they were too exposed.
Getting Lingyun inside would an opening doors while the dead ca in from multiple sides, and these things were moving too fast to give them the extra second daylight zombies always had. They’d get trapped halfway in, pinned by tal and bodies, and then it would be over.
Chenghai caught the logic imdiately. His jaw tightened once. "Either way, we need to move."
He took the first step and the rest of them shifted with him, not toward the SUV but away from it. Zhenlan moved in close on Chenghai’s right. Yuche dragged Lingyun with him around the rear quarter panel of a burnt out car, cursing under his breath when Lingyun’s legs didn’t answer fast enough.
Now getting supplies didn’t seem like the biggest problem they had ever faced.
The problem was surviving the next thirty seconds.
A zombie hit the front corner of the vehicle, not hard enough to dent it, but with startling speed. It slapped a hand to the hood, pivoted, and ca at Chenghai from the side.
Chenghai didn’t retreat.
He stepped in and drove his fist into its jaw with enough force to turn the whole head sideways.
The body folded, but he was already moving past it, not even glancing down to confirm the kill.
Another reached for him from the dark. He caught it under the throat and shoved. The dead thing went back three full steps before crashing into a parking ter hard enough to snap the rusted post.
Yuche saw it and filed it away without aning to.
The zombies were fucking stronger. Faster.
They were the predators and the n were the prey.
And Yuche didn’t do well being the prey.
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