As Rix pedaled over the shattered asphalt, the destruction only worsened. Cars were scattered across the road—some flipped, others compressed into unrecognizable heaps of twisted metal.
He passed a sights that made his throat tighten.
A school bus lay crushed beneath a fallen chunk of masonry, its sides split open like a tin can. The bodies inside were mangled beyond recognition, and a dozen zombies had already gathered around the wreckage, huddled in a frenzied circle.
Rix tightened his grip on the handlebars, forced his gaze straight ahead, and kept pedaling.
Further down the avenue, a few survivors were trying to run. Most were cut down within seconds, dragged to the ground before they made it fifty yards. A man in a sedan tried to start his engine, but the loud, sputtering ignition only drew every dead thing within earshot. They swarmed the vehicle in seconds, tearing at the rubber seals and pounding on the glass while the driver screamed inside.
From a distance, Rix looked unnaturally calm. To anyone watching from a window, he might have seemed fearless—a guy casually coasting through the end of the world.
In reality, he was terrified. His hands were shaking so hard he could barely keep the front wheel straight.
Still, as he wove around a stalled delivery truck, he had to admit the bike was the only reason he was still breathing.
He leaned forward and patted the metal frame. "I always said you were my best investment, didn't I?"
If the bike had a voice, it probably would have reminded him of every time he'd complained about a flat tire or skipped oiling the chain.
The advantage of the bicycle was obvious: silence. The faint, rhythmic rattle of his chain vanished into the ambient noise of a collapsing city. While every running engine acted as a beacon for the horde, Rix drifted past unnoticed.
The disadvantage was just as clear: he was completely exposed.
A car offered a shell. It gave a driver a few extra seconds behind metal and safety glass. On the bike, there was nothing between his skin and the dead but six inches of air. If one of them lunged, he couldn't roll up a window.
He had to watch everything.
Fear made Rix hyper-alert, his brain working frantically to make sense of what he was seeing.
First: these things weren't like the slow, fragile zombies from old movies. They were heavy, dense, and unnaturally sturdy. When he'd kicked that student in the face earlier, the blow should have dropped him. Instead, the corpse had barely lost its balance.
Or maybe I'm just weak, Rix thought bitterly. Fuck... I should've actually gone to the gym with Jake.
Second: they responded to sound and movement, but their tracking wasn't perfect.
He proved this to himself a moment later. An abandoned sedan stood near the curb, its engine idling in park. A cluster of zombies had swarmed it, biting at the side mirrors and pounding on the hood as if the machine itself were alive. One was gnawing uselessly on the front tire; another was bashing its face against the windshield.
As Rix glided past, the one biting the windshield paused.
It turned its head.
Its clouded eyes locked directly onto Rix.
For a fraction of a second, neither of them moved.
Rix felt a cold, sharp dread settle in his chest. The creature dropped from the hood, its jaw working silently, and started moving toward the road. It wasn't sprinting, but its stride was unnaturally long and rigid.
"Shit," Rix hissed.
His careful observations evaporated. He stood up on the pedals, driving his weight down to force the bike into a sprint. "Get away from me, you bastard..."
The noise of his sudden acceleration drew another glance.
Then another.
One became three. Three became six. Within seconds, a dozen dead figures had turned away from the stalled cars and joined the chase.
Rix cast a quick glance over his shoulder to check the distance—a mistake.
The front tire clipped a jagged piece of masonry hidden in the dust. The handlebars whipped sideways, tearing out of his grip, and Rix went flying over the frame. He hit the asphalt hard, rolling twice before slamming into the curb.
"Ah—fuck!" Skin scraped off his forearm, stinging wildly, but panic cut through the pain before it could set in.
He scrambled onto his hands and knees, lunged for the downed bicycle, and hauled it upright. The chain whined as he threw his leg over the seat and stomped the pedal down, his heart pounding against his ribs.
The closest corpse was barely ten yards away, its fingers reaching for his rear wheel.
A second slower, and he would have been on the ground beneath them.
Rix wove frantically through the wreckage, using every narrow gap between stalled cars to break their line of sight. But the noise of the chase was gathering more of them. The trail behind him kept growing.
Twenty. Thirty.
It was turning into a parade.
"Fuck you! Fuck all of you!" he wheezed, his thighs burning as he pushed the pedals down again and again.
He couldn't lead this back to his house. If he stopped at his front door with forty dead bodies behind him, he was dead anyway.
Assuming the house was even there.
It was a gamble. For all he knew, a meteor had dropped straight through his living room ceiling. But it was the only destination he had left.
His breathing came in ragged, shallow gasps, his vision narrowing at the edges as exhaustion set in.
Then, through the haze of smoke drifting across the road, he saw it.
Four hundred yards out. A distinct, two-story structure sitting slightly off the main street. The roof was intact. The front wall was standing.
"Come on..." A strange, desperate wave of relief washed over him. "Just a little bit..."
Something struck his front wheel from the side.
A body slammed low into the frame with the precise, heavy impact of a rugby tackle. The bike's front end whipped violently to the right, the frame sliding sideways across the pavement.
Rix was thrown clear, airborne for a brief, weightless second.
As he spun, his eyes caught the thing that had hit him: a corpse wearing a dirt-caked, yellow sports jersey, rolling across the road alongside the bike.
Is that a fucking jersey?!
Rix hit the asphalt shoulder-first, sliding several feet before crashing into the driver's side door of a parked SUV. The impact knocked the wind out of his lungs, leaving him gasping on his side, a thick, metallic taste filling his mouth.
He forced his eyes open and looked back.
The main group was less than fifteen yards away.
The bike was lying too far out in the open, its front wheel bent into an oval. The jersey-wearing zombie was already scrambling back up, remarkably agile, its eyes locked on him as it lunged forward again.
Rix couldn't stand properly. Using the side of the SUV for leverage, he dragged himself to the left just as the creature threw its weight forward. It missed him by inches, its head slamming through the SUV's open window and getting stuck against the interior frame.
Rix didn't look back. He shoved himself off the side of the car and broke into a limping run down the center of the street.
Four hundred yards.
He took ten steps before his legs froze.
Ahead, where the street narrowed near the residential turn, another crowd of dead had gathered around a overturned delivery van. At the sound of his footsteps, dozens of heads snapped toward him at once.
Behind him, the horde was closing the gap. In front of him, the path was blocked.
Rix stopped. His chest heaved, his lungs burning, his hands limp at his sides.
There was nowhere left to run.
A strange, quiet realization settled over him, washing away the panic. A faint, bitter smile tugged at the corner of his mouth.
"Hah... so this is it?" he whispered, his voice barely audible over the scraping of feet on asphalt. "Karma's a real bitch, huh?"
He looked at the dead closing in from both directions.
"Guess that's what I get for leaving Noel under that wall... and ignoring the professor."
His eyes drifted down to the debris near his feet. Half-buried under a piece of shattered glass lay a two-foot length of rusted steel rebar.
Rix reached down, his fingers wrapping around the cold metal. He brought it up, gripping it with both hands until his knuckles turned white.
"Fine. But I'm taking at least one of you with me."
A shadow crossed his peripheral vision. Before he could turn his head, a heavy weight crashed into his shoulder from behind. Teeth tore through his hoodie, sinking deep into the muscle above his collarbone.
"AAAAHH! GET OFF!"
Pain exploded through his upper body. Rix roared, twisting his body violently to fling the creature off, and swung the rebar with everything he had left. The metal hit something hard with a dull thud, but another figure slammed into his side, knocking him off balance.
He fell to his knees. A second pair of jaws clamped onto his calf, tearing through his jeans into the meat underneath.
Rix shrieked, tears springing to his eyes as the pain tore through his nerves. He tried to raise the rod again, but a hand grabbed his forearm, twisting his wrist until the bone gave a sickening crack. The steel bar clattered onto the pavement.
"Ah... please..." he gasped, his voice breaking. "Someone... help..."
The horde collapsed over him.
Weight pressed down on his chest, pinning him flat against the road. A heavy set of teeth clamped onto his thigh, pulling sideways until the tissue gave way.
"AAAAAHHHHHHH!"
His vision blurred into a smear of gray, red, and blue sky. He could feel skin tearing from his chest, cold air hitting the open wounds before the dull, thumping agony drowned out every other sense.
"Mother... Dad... Siya..." he choked out, blood pooling in his throat, making his breath bubble. "Please... anyone..."
He tried to crawl, his left arm dragging across the gravel, but the weight over his lower body was absolute. A face with half its skin missing leaned down, its jaws opening wide over his neck.
Rix's eyes rolled back. The agony faded into a cold, heavy numbness.
As the world dissolved into dark red shadows, flashes of light passed behind his eyelids—a sunny kitchen, his sister laughing on the couch, his father sitting at the table, his mother calling his name.
The tears on his face mixed with the dirt on the road.
I don't want to die...
Then, inside the dark silence of his mind, a sound echoed.
DING~
It was a sharp, crystalline chime, ringing clearly above the noise of the street. It didn't come from the air around him; it vibrated inside his skull, perfectly clear, perfectly cold.
Every living person left on the planet heard it at the exact same instant.
But Rix's heart had already given its final, weak spasm. His head fell back against the asphalt, his eyes glassy and unmoving.
The light went out.
He was gone before the words began to form in the quiet of his mind.
DING~
A line of glowing, pale text manifested against the darkness, flickering like light on water.
⛧ [INITIATING GLOBAL BROADCAST] ⛧
[System Channel: Prithvi Mandala – Planet Designation: Earth]
Source: Core Seal of Prithvi-Lok – Unsealed After 432,000 Earth Cycles
⛧ THE TRIAL OF KALI YUGA HAS BEGUN ⛧
The Dharma Wheel lies in ruin.
❖ The Four Sacred Yugas have withered into ash: Satya, Treta, Dvapara, and Kali, consumed by time's hunger.
❖ And now… a new epoch emerges from their remains.
❖ Now dawns the Fifth—the Unspoken Yuga…
→ The Age of Rot.
[System Activation: Universal Evolution Protocol]
All sapient lifeforms are now subjected to the Trial.
Those unable to resonate with the Etheric Flow (Prana) will be Dehumanified.
All hail the Blight.
Let the Apocalypse descend.