Max could hear that thing moving around the place, searching. It was almost as if it was dragging its feet.
The first thing that struck him was the smell of rotten meat. It reminded Max of that time when the lights went out in his house during the night, and the beef in the refrigerator went bad.
A small sense of dread washed over him, as this would not be a common encounter. Man-made horrors were common, and if he could find one, a Black Goat facility was the safest bet.
The man moved just a little to see what it was as it walked past his hiding spot. He needed to confirm his suspicion.
It was an adult male with gray, rotten skin and a half-bald head, wearing a white office shirt that now had this dirty yellow look. Red saliva poured out of his open mouth, and empty eyes moved around erratically. Finally, there was a huge bite mark on his left arm.
("Oh, a zombie . . . right?") The media he had consumed did not prepare him for the smell.
There was only one tool for this job that Max could use: hysterical strength.
A biological phenomenon where people did amazing feats of strength in near-death situations. A woman could lift a car, and even a person in Quebec fought a polar bear with their fists and survived to tell the story, even if the reality of this effect was misunderstood, to say the least.
If you were already trained to use all your muscular power like a professional weightlifter, the boons would be minimal, to say the least. However, for a lanky man like Max, the removal of pain allowed him to skip all that hard work and reap the reward directly, even if that would give him multiple muscle tears.
There it was, where his regeneration kicked in, allowing him to completely suppress this secondary effect.
He grabbed the paperweight with both hands and struck the back of the head with enough force to make the zombie fall to the ground.
The zombie tried to quickly turn around, showing that it still had some energy left, but the impact of the first attack had left it stunned. It was not enough to kill it, but the next barrage of attacks was.
Strike after strike, sinking that piece of rock deeper and deeper into the monster skull until eventually it cracked and the hard bone gave way to something extremely soft.
With the zombie dead now, the man calmed his breath as he felt his heart pounding so much that his head seemed to be about to blow up.
A few seconds later, his power had at least placed his circulatory system out of the red zone, but the muscle tears in his arms would take a few minutes to completely heal.
Max even dropped the paperweight, not because he wanted it, but because his arms could not exert the amount of strength necessary to hold it. They were flopping around like the dick of an old man trying to get an erection but only getting half-mast.
("First kill . . . not bad . . . I can get used to this.") There was not an ounce of guilt or fear in his mind; after the war he had just survived, his mind was forced to grow cold in order to cope with reality.
Things sometimes were like this: kill or be killed, and if there was one thing that Max didn't want, it was dying after all the hard work that he had put into saving the world. He would get his vacations no matter what.
If he had gotten his powers before the Apostles, it was sure that they would have trained him for months on how not to use his biomancy to kill other people, and it was his responsibility as a hero for the safety of the criminal as much as his own. It was just something made to keep the population of civilians happy with their local superhuman demigods that could easily kill them if pushed to the extreme.
There was another big problem, as Max's sweaty body was now covered in gore as he took refuge back in his previous hidden spot. The super could sense the virus on it.
[New biological material, would you like to analyze it?]
Max got the notification from his Guideline and hesitated for a second. Then he decided to proceed.
It was a horrible sensation; his powers tried to convey the information about it, but it was like gazing into the sun. He avoided looking too deeply into that data; he just knew that the infection was inside him, so he kept it outside his body until it died from contact with the air. Even the one that managed to get inside by his mouth and small micro cuts on his fingers from the bone fragments was destroyed by his power, but was not able to give much information about this, hitting the black box with a hammer instead of checking what was inside.
[Analysis failed]
(Maybe if I tried again.) He thought while looking around and checking that there was nothing sneaking behind him.
There were some minutes left until his arms fully healed, so he had time for this small side project.
Max could not heal it technically; the only way he was immune to it was by using his power to destroy the infection. However, if the man found himself in a situation where his power was nullified for some reason, he lacked the proper perk to face this disease. After all, mutations were just biological structures that existed, created by his power but not his power itself.
(Let's give it another try.) The man thought inside his head, using one of his own blood cells as a guinea pig.
The virus went and infected it as it should normally do, and then the cell became a black box, just like the virus.
There was an instinctive fear when looking inside it. It worked as a normal cell, at least in this case, but with the exception that it began to birth more strands of that plague constantly.
[Analysis failed]
(Come on! Just a little more.) Max muttered to himself, clenching his teeth and overpowering the sensation of dread growing in the back of his head.
It was big, bigger than anything the boy could have imagined. A deep abyss, something so immense that the human was not meant to comprehend what his power was trying to say to him.
A sense of de-personalization struck the man, as if he were no longer himself, and his conscience was a third party controlling his body. Then there was a sharp spike of pain stabbing his brain from all directions.
[Analysis failed]
Max managed to reduce the scream to a groan as he rubbed his forehead, trying to relieve some of the pressure.
The Compass, a physical manifestation of the Guideline inside the super brain the size of an olive, was a tumor that basically held his power. When the super pushed their power too much, it would give a recoil like this.
("This must be a . . . a super grade plague. That would explain why my power can't be cured or even analyzed. This thing was created not to be healed with a Guideline.")
The current solution was easy: just smash those cells with his power without looking inside. The man couldn't heal infected people, but at least he was safe.
Before leaving the corpse behind, Max took down the zombie's pants and belt. Tie both leg ends together, folding to the top, then securing them to the belt around the pants' waist. An easy way to get an improvised backpack.
He could go the kangaroo bag route with his own skin, but this was faster.
Now, Max began to move around. He needed to find resources like food and water, weapons, and, most importantly, other people who didn't want to eat him.
The man slowly opened the door outside the office room and found the installation corridors, and got an important clue. There was not a single window.
("So I am underground, great,") Max thought. At least he knew that this was not a normal office building.
The big metallic doors that cut the corridors in half, the lack of proper decoration apart from just the absolutely necessary, and the fact that this was a Black Goat facility supported this theory. It was something that made the idea of getting out of here even harder.
As Max began to explore this place, he managed to hear something strange from a hallway a few dozen meters away from his current position.
With precaution, he began to walk slowly to the source of that sound. It seemed that there was only one thing moving, so it wasn't a horde of monsters. At worst, it was another lonely zombie, and at best, another survivor.
He forgot the third case and the truly worst scenario: some survivors could be worse than zombies themselves.