The girl was shaking. Convulsive shudders that made her teeth click together. Tears streamed down her face but the expression beneath them wasn't grief. It was rage.
"That was my husband," she said again. "That was Danny."
I stood there with a chef's knife dripping black fluid and a stockpot on my head and absolutely no idea what to say.
This had never happened in Z Royal Defense. There were no NPCs who screamed at you. There were hostiles with health bars and loot tables, and when you put them down, you got your bonus salvage and moved on.
This isn't a game.
"Hey," I said. The way you'd talk to a cornered dog. "I need you to listen to me—"
"Don't you touch me!"
I hadn't moved. I was standing six feet away, knife at my side, both hands visible. She scrambled backward anyway, pressing herself so hard into the corner that the drywall creaked behind her shoulders. Her fingers clawed at the carpet.
"I'm not going to touch you," I said. "Okay? I'm just—"
"You stabbed him in the head."
"He wasn't your husband anymore."
Her face twisted. "Don't you say that."
"He lost his wave." I didn't know if she'd understand the terminology. But I tried. "That's not... Danny. That's one of them."
She stared at me.
"He was reaching for me," she whispered. "He was trying to reach me."
"He was trying to eat you."
I took a breath. Looked at the body on the floor. A man in a white t-shirt, mid-thirties, maybe. Wedding ring still on his left hand. His face was ruined where the knife had gone through, but I could tell he'd been handsome once. Strong jaw. Broad shoulders. The kind of guy who looked good in photos.
There was nothing I could do for her. I wasn't a therapist. I wasn't a counselor. I wasn't even a particularly empathetic person on a good day.
I recognized her, I realized. Not her name, but the face. I'd seen her in the elevator a dozen times. Always in gym clothes. Perfect ponytail. Full makeup even at seven in the morning. Phone out, filming herself, or scrolling through something.
I'd found her annoying, honestly. The way she stood in the elevator, taking up the center, angling her phone for selfies in the mirror while the rest of us squeezed past her. The way she talked on speakerphone in the hallway at midnight. The way she left Amazon boxes stacked outside her door for days.
The kind of low-grade irritation that neighbors generate just by existing too close to you. None of it mattered now.
She was on the floor of her bedroom with a dead husband and a world that had ended, and I was standing over her with a kitchen knife and a pot on my head, and there was nothing I could offer her that would make any of this less terrible.
"You should barricade the door. Push the couch, the dresser, whatever you can move. Stay inside and stay quiet."
She didn't answer. She was staring at Danny's body.
I backed out of the bedroom. Closed the door behind me as gently as I could. Stood in the ruined living room, the three bodies from the turret still leaking across the hardwood, the shattered coffee table glittering with fragments of tempered glass.
Not your wave. Not your problem.
I stepped out into the hallway and waited.
The bonus notification should have appeared.
Nothing.
I stood in the amber-lit hallway and stared at the empty air where the blue box should have been.
Why not?
The answer came a second later.
Someone else nearby still has an active wave.
Which meant more zombies. The system wasn't telling me who or where, just that the radius hadn't cleared.
A gunshot split the air.
It came from below. One floor down, maybe two. The kind of deep, heavy boom that said shotgun or large-caliber revolver, not a pistol's bark.
I froze with one foot pointed toward the stairwell.
Go or stay?
Going down meant walking into someone else's fight. Someone with a gun.
I didn't know who was shooting. I didn't know what they were shooting at. I didn't know if they could tell the difference between a zombie and a man with a pot on his head.
If I walked into a firefight and the shooter panicked, I'd eat a round before they realized I was alive. And even if they didn't shoot me, even if I cleared their zombies and saved their life, the interaction afterward could go sideways. Not everyone would be grateful. The woman upstairs had wanted to claw my eyes out for saving her.
People with guns and no information were the most dangerous things in any survival scenario.
Another shot boomed through the floor. Then a third, in rapid succession.
Whoever that is, they're handling it.
The shots were controlled. Not panic fire, not wild spraying. Whoever was down there was aiming, acquiring targets, firing with purpose. They didn't need my help.
I looked up.
Five floors above me. Sixteen through twenty. The top of the building.
Going up was safer.
In Z Royal Defense, elevation was one of the single most valuable strategic assets an Engineer could control. The higher you built your fortress, the fewer approach vectors the waves could use. Stairwells became chokepoints. Elevator shafts became kill corridors. And every floor you held above the ground level was a floor the horde had to fight through to reach you.
I went up.
The stairwell was dim, lit only by the emergency strips.
I climbed with the knife leading, my left hand pressing the stockpot against my skull, my back to the wall.
Sixteenth floor.
The fire door was intact but unlocked. I eased it open and peered down the corridor.
Three apartment doors stood open. From here I could see into the nearest one, the entryway at least, and what I saw made my stomach clench even though I'd already killed ten zombies with my own hands in the last twenty minutes.
A body lay half-in, half-out of the doorway. An older man, sixties maybe, in a bathrobe. He'd been opened from throat to pelvis. His insides weren't inside anymore. They trailed across the threshold like wet laundry dragged from a basket. The carpet was soaked so thoroughly that it squelched under my shoe when I stepped past.
I checked each open apartment. Quick glances. Just enough to confirm no movement.
The second apartment was worse. Multiple bodies. The walls were painted in dark arterial spray that had already dried to a tacky brown crust.
The third was empty. Door open, lights off, no bodies. Someone had left or been taken. Their TV was still on, cycling through a "NO SIGNAL" screen that cast a cold blue flicker across the abandoned room.
I didn't linger. The remaining apartments had their doors shut. If people were alive behind them, they were smart enough to stay quiet. I wasn't going to knock.
Seventeenth floor. Similar. Two open doors, both containing scenes I didn't look at for longer than I had to.
Eighteenth floor. All doors closed. Dead silence.
Nineteenth floor. The fire door here was dented inward.
Empty. But the floor had marks of something with claws, something was dragging itself down the corridor. The marks led to a closed apartment door that had deep scratches around the handle. Whatever had made them hadn't gotten in.
Good.
Twentieth floor. The top.
I shouldered through the fire door and immediately pressed myself flat against the wall.
The corridor here was different from the floors below. The top floor of the building had been renovated at some point. It had wider hallways, better lighting fixtures, faux-marble tile instead of carpet. Penthouse-adjacent, if you were generous with the term. The apartments up here cost three times what mine did. I'd never been to this floor.
Something hit the far wall.
I ducked.
A walker came cartwheeling down the corridor, ragdolling off the floor and the wall in a tumble of flailing gray limbs. It bounced off the tile six feet in front of me.
It had been thrown.
The thing was trying to get its legs under it, scrabbling at the tile with broken fingernails, that dislocated jaw swinging like a pendulum beneath its face.
I didn't wait for it to recover.
The chef's knife came down. The blade punched through the crown of the skull with a wet crunch. The zombie's body went rigid and then fell completely slack.
I ripped the knife free. Wiped the blade on my thigh. My heart was hammering so hard I could feel it in my ears.
I looked down the corridor. Thirty feet away, the last apartment on the left had its door open. Light spilled from inside, warm and yellow, actual lamplight, as if whoever lived there had battery-powered backups. And from inside came sounds.
I moved down the corridor.
The apartment door was a heavy one, solid oak, reinforced frame. It stood wide open, and through it I could see into a large, well-furnished living room.
Two zombies. Both standing. Both focused on the same target.
A man. Wide. He stood maybe five-eight but he was built like a barrel, thick through the chest and gut. Shaved head, dark beard, wearing sweatpants and a sleeveless shirt that was torn at the collar and soaked with sweat. In his right hand he held a claw hammer, the kind you'd buy at a hardware store.
The hammer was black with gore.
He had the two zombies at arm's length, keeping them in front of him with short, chopping swings of the hammer. Each swing drove them back a step. His face flushed crimson beneath the beard. He was exhausted. Close to done.
Behind him, crouched in the hallway that led to the bedrooms, a woman. Mid-thirties, maybe. She had her arms wrapped around two children, pulling them against her body, shielding them with herself.
Two girls. Young. Five or six at most. They were pressed into their mother's sides, faces buried in her shirt. One of them was sobbing.
The man swung the hammer and caught the nearest zombie across the shoulder. The impact was solid. I heard bone crack. The zombie staggered sideways, its arm dropping to its side at an unnatural angle, but it didn't go down. Its head snapped back toward the man and it lunged, mouth gaping.
The second zombie circled left, trying to flank.
The man saw it. He pivoted, putting himself between both of them and his family, but the movement left his back to the first zombie for a half-second and it surged forward. Its hands found his shirt, gripped, pulled. He twisted, threw an elbow that connected with its face, and stumbled backward into the hallway entrance.
The woman screamed.
I was already in the doorway.
I caught the man's eyes. He saw me — a stranger in a canvas jacket with a pot on his head and a kitchen knife — and his expression cycled through confusion and hostility in the span of a heartbeat.
I pressed my index finger to my lips.
Quiet.
His mouth closed. His eyes narrowed. He gave me the smallest nod I'd ever seen.
I closed the distance.
The flanking zombie had its back to me. It was focused entirely on the man, crowding toward him, arms outstretched, fingers grasping at the air between them.
Three steps. Two. One.
I drove the knife into the back of its head.
The blade sank deep. I felt the crunch of bone, then the softer give of what lay beneath. The zombie's arms dropped. Its legs buckled. It folded in on itself and collapsed to the floor.
The man swung the hammer in a short, vicious arc. The claw end caught it above the ear, punching through the temporal bone with a sound like a clay pot shattering. The zombie's head snapped sideways. Its knees gave.
The man ripped the hammer free with a grunt and stood over the body, chest heaving, sweat pouring down his face and into his beard. He looked at the two bodies on the floor. Then at me.
The notification wasn't mine. It flickered at the edge of my vision, a secondary feed, dimmer than my own prompts.
For a long moment, neither of us moved. The only sounds were his breathing, the muffled crying of the little girl pressed into her mother's chest, and the distant wail of sirens somewhere far below.
Then the man lowered the hammer. He straightened up to his full height, which put his eyes about level with my chin.
He extended his free hand.
"Marco," he said. His voice was rough, scraped raw from exertion, but steady. "Marco Reeds."
I shifted the knife to my left hand and took his.
"Scott."
"Scott." He repeated my name. His eyes were dark brown, almost black, and they held mine without flinching. "You came in here and killed that thing. You didn't have to."
"Didn't cost me anything."
"No." He shook his head once. "It was a lot. Every door I passed on the way up here was shut. Nobody came out. Nobody helped."
He let go of my hand. Glanced back at his wife and daughters. The woman met his gaze and something passed between them, wordless, the kind of communication that only years of marriage could build.
Marco turned back to me.
"Thank you," he said.
I stood there and felt something shift inside my chest.
Two people saved. Two completely opposite reactions.
No formula. You save them. You roll the dice.
The woman downstairs had seen her husband in that zombie. In her mind, I hadn't rescued her. I'd murdered the man she loved right in front of her.
Marco had seen the zombie for what it was. A threat. An obstacle between his family and survival.
Marco wiped the hammer on his sweatpants. He looked at the bodies on his floor, then at the open front door, then back at me.
"You know what's happening out there?"