The convenience store's flickering lights cast jagged shadows across Doleia's face as she froze mid-step.
Her fingers tightened around the pistol's grip—five months of Marc's brutal training had honed her reflexes to razor sharpness.
Before the stranger could blink, Doleia spun with lethal grace, the barrel of her gun coming to rest precisely between wide, terror-dilated pupils.
"Don't shoot! I'm human!" The girl's voice cracked like thin ice, her corncob weapon clattering to the floor. Kernels glistened with something dark, darker than normal blood.
Doleia's gaze raked over the trembling figure: early twenties, a half head shorter, wearing produce-stained jeans and a hoodie that reeked of sweat and fear.
"Step back," she commanded, her voice colder than the refrigerators humming behind them. "Turn around. Slowly."
The girl obeyed with jerky movements, her breath coming in shallow gasps.
Doleia's trained eyes scanned for bite marks—nothing but foreign blood spatter decorating the hoodie like macabre modern art.
Satisfied, she holstered her weapon with deliberate slowness, the leather thigh strap creaking like a warning.
Turning away—a calculated risk—Doleia snatched a protein bar from the shelf. The wrapper crinkled like gunfire in the tense silence.
Behind her, the girl stood frozen, tracking every movement with the intensity of a starving alley cat watching a scrap of meat.
When Doleia moved toward the exit, glass crunching underfoot, the dam broke.
"Please—" The plea exploded like a misfired round. "Take me with you!"
The girl had just finished grocery shopping at the market and was heading home when the world turned upside down.
People on the street suddenly began attacking and biting each other, their movements jerky and unnatural. In sheer panic, she'd bolted into the nearest convenience store for shelter. Now, her only weapon was this half-eaten corn cob - she knew her chances of surviving alone with just this were slim at best.
Doleia, with her guns and armored vehicle, represented a golden opportunity. The odds of making it out alive would skyrocket if she could just tag along.
But Doleia remained unmoved, her fingers continuing to work the lock on the glass door without even glancing back.
She had one mission - get home to her family.
Taking on some random stranger would just slow her down. Besides, the convenience store had plenty of food; this girl wouldn't starve anytime soon.
Seeing Doleia's indifference, the girl's voice turned desperate.
"I won't be a burden! I can protect myself! I-I can cook..." Her initial confidence wavered as Doleia's hand drifted toward the holstered pistol on her thigh.
Then she paused.
Doleia's fingers paused on the door lock. The memory of last night's charcoal-black dinner flashed behind her eyelids—another casualty of her culinary ineptitude. Her jaw tightened.
"Listen, I won't save you if you die," she finally said, throwing open the glass door with more force than necessary.
The engine roared to life as Anne scrambled inside, still gripping her ridiculous corn weapon.
Through the bulletproof windshield, the two headshot zombies lay where Doleia had dropped them, their blood blackening in the afternoon sun like spilled ink.
"Name." Doleia's tone permitted no pleasantries.
"A-Anne."
Common. Easy to remember.
"Can you fight?"
Anne's fingers tightened around the corn cob as she spoke, her voice dropping to a whisper barely audible over the jeep's engine.
"There was... a child." Her thumbnail dug into the yellow kernels, releasing a sweet, grassy scent that clashed violently with the gun oil permeating the vehicle.
Doleia kept her eyes on the shattered storefronts blurring past, but her grip on the steering wheel shifted subtly.
"Maybe seven or eight years old," Anne continued. A tremble crept into her words as the memory replayed behind her eyes.
"His Spider-Man t-shirt was... was clean. Like he'd just put it on that morning." The detail slipped out unbidden, absurd in its ordinariness. Her breath hitched. "Then he turned and his mouth—"
Anne's breath hitched as she relived the moment, her fingers unconsciously tightening around the phantom weight of the corn cob.
"I just—I panicked," she admitted, the words tumbling out in a rush. "Squeezed my eyes shut so tight I saw stars, and just... swung."
Doleia's grip on the steering wheel didn't change, but the muscle along her jawline twitched—a barely perceptible tell Anne missed entirely.
"And when I looked..." Anne's voice gained a fragile thread of pride, "he was down. Like really down."
Her hands sketched a vague arc in the air, recreating the swing. The motion made her biceps flex—experiences of hauling heavy stock pots in restaurant kitchens had left their mark.
A beat of silence. Then, with the hesitant smile of someone testing newfound strength: "Maybe I've got some natural talent?"
Doleia's knuckles whitened on the wheel—luck wasn't armor, and survivors who believed otherwise ended as statistics.
The pistol from Marc materialized in Doleia's hand as they merged onto the abandoned highway.
"Can you shoot?"
The deafening silence answered for her.
"I can learn!" Anne blurted with desperate conviction.
Without looking, Doleia tossed her pistol—the custom with an engraved initial 'D'—into the backseat. Anne caught it with surprising grace, her fingers, accustomed to wielding heavy cookware, tracing the lettering with reverent confusion.
"D... ?"
"My initial."
"But your real name's—"
The glove compartment slammed shut like a guillotine blade. Some things weren't for sharing.
"Just... Call me D."
Anne didn't go further and start examining the weapon with trembling hands, the steel heavier than she'd imagined.
Then, as if suddenly realizing something, Anne asked, "Then what will you use?"
Doleia reached into the hidden compartment behind the handbrake and pulled out a slightly larger pistol. This was the one she'd won months ago in a fight with Vinn at the black market.
These two handguns were her favorites among all her firearms - the ones that fit her hands best.
Turning her face slightly to the left, Doleia issued a warning to the girl in the backseat: "Don't damage or lose it. Or I'll kill you."
The girl immediately nodded vigorously, not daring to imagine how painful it would be if the gun currently in Doleia's hand were to be fired at her.
When she accidentally disengaged the safety, Doleia's voice cut through the tension:
"Thumb switch on the side. Finger stays off the trigger until you're ready to kill something."
The pistol suddenly felt alive in Anne's grip—a coiled serpent waiting to strike. She swallowed hard, watching power lines whip past like skeletal fingers scraping the blood-orange sky.
The jeep ate up miles of broken highway, each rotation of the tires carrying them deeper into the apocalypse.
-----
The road ahead was blocked—a school bus lay overturned like a dead dinasour, its underbelly exposed to the twilight sky. A dozen figures hunched around it, their movements disturbingly synchronized as they pawed at the metal carcass.
Doleia's foot hovered between brake and accelerator for one calculated second before wrenching the wheel left.
Gravel sprayed as the jeep veered onto a narrow service road, the detour adding twenty cursed minutes to their journey.
Against the steering wheel, her grip was so tight the leather groaned in protest. The accelerator pedal had become an extension of her rage—floored without mercy, as if she could outrun the creeping dread pooling in her stomach.
"I should've brought them to the shelter sooner..."
The thought circled like a vulture in Doleia's head.
"Finished the base two weeks early and still failed them."
A hot tear breached her defenses, carving a path through road dust and gunpowder residue on her cheek.
She swiped at it with her sleeve—a soldier's rough gesture that left the fabric damp and her vision clear.
The road blurred anyway, haunted by memories of another life: her father transforming into a monster, craving for her flesh just like the others.
The voicemail played on loop in her skull:
"Doleia... Back home..."
Two syllables. An eternity of ambiguity. What did he meant?
Run away? Or come home?
The not-knowing was a live wire in her chest.
Somewhere behind her, Anne sat frozen, wisely silent as Doleia took a turn too fast, the jeep's tires skittering across asphalt gone wild with cracks and weeds.
Every wasted minute was a knife twist. Every detour sign might as well have read: YOUR FAULT.
The thought in her mind turns heavier with each mile.
-----
The tires crunched to a stop before the familiar entrance, the sound like teeth grinding against bone. Doleia's hands remained frozen on the steering wheel long after she killed the engine.
The house she'd grown up in stood violated before her.
The front door hung broken from its hinges, swaying slightly in the afternoon breeze like a slack jaw. Blood decorated the whitewashed walls in gruesome brushstrokes—glistening wet under the sun in both dark red and blood red color. A violent spatter arced across the doorframe, the droplets forming a constellation of horror that told of arterial wounds and desperate last stands.
Doleia's breath hitched in her throat.
From the backseat, Anne made a small, strangled noise that went ignored.
Doleia turned to Anne, pretended that she was okay.
"Take the gun with you," she said, her voice low and controlled. "Come."
Her eyes flicked to the rearview mirror, catching Anne's wide-eyed reflection. The girl's fingers trembled where they hovered above the pistol, her breath coming in shallow little gasps that fogged the window beside her.
Doleia didn't blame her fear—only the hesitation. Every second they wasted was a second too long. The car's interior suddenly felt too small, the weight of her supplies pressing in from all sides—medical kits, ammunition, the carefully hoarded antibiotics that could mean life or death.
She couldn't risk it. Not to leave a stranger alone in the car.
The click of the safety disengaging sounded like a thunderclap in the confined space.
Anne jumped at the noise, her fingers curling reflexively around the grip. Too tight—Doleia could see the whites of her knuckles from the front seat. The girl reached for the door handle with the cautious reverence of someone disarming a bomb, easing it open millimeter by millimeter to avoid the telltale creak of hinges.
"This isn't a training exercise," Doleia thought, watching the internal struggle play out across Anne's face. The girl's lips moved soundlessly, rehearsing instructions or perhaps prayers.
A bead of sweat traced a jagged path down Anne's temple as her free hand came up to push the door open fully. The outside air rushed in, carrying with it the coppery tang of blood and something fouler—the unmistakable reek of rotting meat.
Anne froze halfway out the door, the pistol wavering in her unsteady grip. Doleia could practically hear the panicked mantra running through her head:
"I'm not ready for this."
But the apocalypse, Doleia knew, didn't care about readiness.
Mechanically, Doleia's fingers checked the pistol's magazine—fourteen rounds remaining. She tugged her sleeve down over trembling fingers before stepping out, her boots meeting concrete stained rust-red. The coppery stench of carnage washed over her, thick enough to taste at the back of her tongue.
She walked to the back of her car, opened Anne's door fully and dragged her out. She didn't even gave her a second to refuse.
Just as Dole took a step inside the house, a guttural snarl erupted from Doleia's right flank—decaying fingers grazed her jacket sleeve as she pivoted on her heel, the movement fluid as quicksilver.
Her combat boots skidded against the blood-slicked floor as she dropped into a controlled roll, coming up behind the shambling horror with pistol already leveled.
The gunshot cracked through the corpse-laden air like the snap of a bone.
Bang—
The zombie's skull erupted in a spray of blackened viscera, chunks of parietal bone embedding themselves in the wallpaper with wet "thunks". It collapsed like a marionette with its strings cut, the back of its head now a gaping crater oozing thick, coagulated black-colored blood.
Outside, Anne stood frozen, her fingers digging into the pistol's grip hard enough to leave imprints in the steel.
The metallic scent of fresh blood—so much darker than she'd imagined—coated her tongue with each shallow breath.
Even if Doleia hadn't warned her, she'd have clung to this weapon like a holy relic. It was the only solid thing left in a world gone mad.
Doleia didn't waste time admiring her handiwork. Her sharp gaze swept the ravaged living room—overturned furniture, a shattered television screen, but no more immediate threats. Satisfied, she turned to the doorway where Anne stood petrified and jerked her chin upward in a wordless command: "Move."
Anne's feet finally unstuck from the ground, her sneakers making sticky peeling sounds as she crossed the threshold into the house of horrors.
The pistol felt alien in her hands, both terrifying and strangely comforting—like holding a live grenade that happened to be on her side.
Doleia was already moving down the hallway, her silhouette backlit by the dying sunlight filtering through bullet holes in the walls. Anne hurried after her, stepping over the twitching fingers of the newly-dead thing on the floor, its death spasms making the pooled blood ripple like a dark mirror.
The master bedroom door hung crookedly from one hinge, its surface gouged with deep scratches that spoke of desperate fingernails. Inside, the king-sized bed was a slaughterhouse tableau: sheets tangled in violent knots, a single bullet hole in the headboard, and a dark stain spreading across the mattress like a grotesque shadow.
The kitchen told its own story. A shattered teacup lay near the fridge, its jagged edges still cradling a few dried tea leaves. The knife block stood conspicuously empty save for a lone butter knife—everything sharp had been taken. Or used.
The master bedroom door hung crookedly from one hinge, its surface gouged with deep scratches that spoke of desperate fingernails. Inside, the king-sized bed was a slaughterhouse tableau: sheets tangled in violent knots, a single bullet hole in the headboard, and a dark stain spreading across the mattress like a grotesque shadow.
The kitchen told its own story. A shattered teacup lay near the fridge, its jagged edges still cradling a few dried tea leaves. The knife block stood conspicuously empty save for a lone butter knife—everything sharp had been taken. Or used.
The kitchen table where they'd shared countless meals lay shattered against the far wall. Blood caked the tiles in the hallway, smeared as if someone had been dragged—
Anne hovered in the doorway, her knuckles white around the pistol grip as Doleia checked the pantry. The shelves stood half-stocked with non-perishables, but the real message was written in the dust—someone had grabbed supplies in a hurry, leaving behind a single can of peaches that rolled forlornly when Doleia nudged it with her toe.
Upstairs, the bathroom mirror was spiderwebbed with cracks, reflecting Doleia's face back at her in jagged fragments. A bloody handprint smeared the sink faucet, the fingers too small to be an adult's. She turned away abruptly.
The basement door was barricaded with a heavy bookshelf. Doleia stood before it for three measured breaths before holstering her pistol and shoving the furniture aside with a screech of wood on concrete.
Darkness yawned below.
Anne made a small noise in her throat as Doleia descended without hesitation, her silhouette swallowed by the gloom.
Then suddenly, there's a sound. Faint. From upstairs.
Her pistol came up in one fluid motion, her body thrumming with sudden, desperate hope. Somewhere behind her, Anne whispered something that might have been a prayer.
Doleia took the stairs two at a time, each step a hammer blow to her already shattered composure. The hallway upstairs stretched before her, doors standing ajar like open wounds.
That sound again.
A whimper.
Human.
Alive.
Doleia's palm hovered over the storeroom doorknob, her calloused fingers trembling almost imperceptibly. The metal felt unnaturally cold beneath her touch, as if the room beyond had leeched all warmth from it. She inhaled sharply—gunpowder, blood, and the musty scent of long-sealed spaces flooding her nostrils.
Then she turned the knob.
The shriek that erupted was primal, a sound that bypassed the ears and went straight to the lizard brain. It clawed at Doleia's eardrums like broken glass—too loud, too sharp, the kind of noise that carried for blocks in the eerie quiet of the apocalypse.
"Damn it." Her teeth clenched.
If any infected were within half a mile, they'd come running now. But the streets outside remained ominously still—no answering snarls, no shuffling footsteps. Either the neighborhood was truly empty, or...
Her pistol came up in a fluid arc as the door swung fully open, revealing—
The woman collapsed in the corner looked like a ghost of her former self—her usually immaculate bun fraying at the edges, damp strands plastered to her sweat-slicked temples. The once-crisp white apron now hung in tatters. Her chest rose and fell in rapid, shallow bursts, as if she'd forgotten how to breathe properly.
Then recognition flashed across her face.