Man this one took a while to update huh? Anyways!
Leave a comment if you want more!
_______
The sun had long dipped beneath the horizon, casting the farm in a blanket of pale moonlight through the darkness.
Crickets chirped, wind rustled through the trees, and from the outside, the St. Johns' property looked like a peaceful, idyllic holdover from a world long gone.
…If you ignore the rotting corpses getting electrocuted and the smell of burning rotting flesh, that is.
But inside the minds of those who lived there, something about tonight felt off.
Brenda, the current head of the family, stood at the kitchen window, drying her hands with a dish towel as she watched the last of the day's smoke coil lazily from the chimney.
She'd just finished boiling down the last of the potatoes and had lit a few candles along the countertops, humming a lullaby low under her breath.
But unexpectedly, she paused, her brow furrowed.
The wind had carried something, a faint creak… a crunch from behind her. Maybe the house doors are settling? Or one of her sons?
She set the towel down slowly, eyes narrowing as she turned around at the unlit room behind her.
The shadows didn't move, but they felt… denser somehow, as if they were hiding something in the darkness.
"Danny…?" she called out softly. "Andrew? Is that one of you boys?"
She waited but received the expected.
Silence.
"…It's just the wind, Brenda. Been through worse, don't start jumpin' at nothing." She exhaled and shook her head, trying to shake off the chills.
While their mother was trying to calm herself down.
Out in the back pasture, Danny walked along the split fence line, dragging a length of rope behind him that was leading their one and only cow.
He was whistling at first, easy and cheerful at the thought of what tonight's dinner was going to be… until he caught sight of movement in the corner of his eye.
He quickly turned, heart pounding, Maybelle lazily stopping beside him.
In the place he thought he saw someone watching, there was nothing but trees and their leaves rustling with the breeze.
Still, he squinted into the tree line, hand instinctively moving toward the small knife tucked in his belt.
He could swear he just saw a figure behind one of the trees, watching him...
Danny turned and quickly made his way back toward Maybelle's barn, picking up the pace so that he could finish his chores as fast as possible. He tugged at Maybelle's rope to make her move faster, finding her moving too slow for his taste.
Reaching the barn, he opened the doors and led the cow in; the feeling of being watched never leaving him, even as he slammed the doors closed behind him.
"Don't slam the door like that, you idiot! We don't want more of those freaks coming to us! We're running low on fuel as it is!"
His older brother, Andrew, was in the barn, hammering a board back into place near the livestock pen.
"Don't tell me what to do!" Danny snapped back, closing Maybelle's gate while doing so.
His older brother walked up to him and was about to argu–
But his brother stopped and spun around, hay scattering underfoot, looking around as if he had heard something… but the barn was empty.
The back door, though, was slightly ajar.
"What's the matter?" Danny asked, looking around as well despite not knowing why.
The youngest member of the St. Johns waited for an answer, but received nothing but an angry side eye before he was ignored in favor of looking around the barn.
After a minute or two of heavy silence, Danny watched as Andrew muttered to himself about swearing he heard something. He went to lock the back door of the barn, approaching it slowly, and shut it tight, sliding the bolt home.
His older brother looked up, eyes scanned the beams above, but all he saw was dust and silence.
"...Nothing. Come on, Mama's probably getting irritated at how long we're taking with the chores." Andrew said before quickly walking out of the barn and leaving him alone with their only cow.
"Hey! Don't just leave without me, ya dick!"
Danny left the barn in a hurry, scrambling after his brother, not wanting to be left alone.
______
The family reunited in the kitchen, the air thick with the smell of herbs, firewood, and something far heavier beneath it all. The table had been set. Plates cleaned. Knives lay out.
Brenda gave her sons a quick once-over as they entered.
"You boys alright?" she asked, stirring the pot on the stove. "You look spooked by something."
"Yeah," Danny muttered. "Just… quiet out there."
"We finished up fast," Andrew added, nodding his head. "No need to linger tonight."
Brenda nodded approvingly and wiped her hands. "Good, now go wash up. We'll be eating soon."
Then her gaze shifted to Andrew.
"Oh, and sugar? Check our meat supply, will you? Make sure it hasn't spoiled, and grab me a piece, I'm making your favorite~"
Andrew gave a curt nod, a smile on his face, and turned to head upstairs.
He climbed the creaking staircase and stepped into the small hallway lit by a single lantern hanging from a rusty nail. At the end of the corridor sat a heavy wooden door. He unlocked it, stepped inside…
And the smell hit him.
Blood, fear, and piss.
The attic was dim and cramped, shadows clinging to every corner. And in the middle of the room, tied to pipes, their mouths gagged with torn fabric, were three people.
One old man sobbed into the dirty floorboards, his leg missing from the knee down, the stump wrapped in a blood-soaked rag that hadn't been changed in days. A woman clung to the corner, shaking violently, eyes wide as saucers. The third, a teenager, shivered silently, his eyes locked on Andrew as if pleading for mercy he knew would never come.
All three of them flinched when Andrew stepped into the light.
Andrew tilted his head, emotionless as he checked the old man's leg before checking the rest of the meat. He ignored their cries and their pleading looks, begging him to let them go. His stomach was rumbling and it's been a while since he had meat.
"Still fresh," Andrew muttered to himself, the words carrying no more emotion than if he were checking meat at a butcher shop.
He crouched beside the old man again, pressing his fingers into the soaked bandage around the stump. The flesh beneath was warm and pliant, usable. His stomach gave a low, approving rumble at the thought, it had been too long since they'd had proper meat.
The old man began to sob harder at the touch, a weak, broken sound that scraped across the wooden boards. Andrew stood, wiping his hand on his pants, and reached for the hooked blade resting against the wall.
That was when the crying suddenly faded.
The silence that followed felt wrong.
Andrew frowned faintly, fingers still wrapped around the tool. They weren't the quiet type, fear made people loud after all.
Slowly, he became aware that none of them were looking at him anymore.
The woman in the corner had gone rigid, her back pressed hard against the wall, her eyes wide and petrified, but not focused on him. The teenager's chest rose and fell in quick, shallow bursts behind his gag, his gaze locked somewhere over Andrew's shoulder. Even the old man, who had been reduced to pathetic whimpering moments ago, now stared in frozen silence.
Andrew felt something tighten low in his gut.
The attic had always smelled of blood and damp wood, of fear soaked into old beams, but now the air felt different… Colder.
The lantern hanging from the rusty nail flickered suddenly, its flame bending sideways as if disturbed by movement.
Andrew swallowed.
"…What the fuck are you looking at?" he muttered, irritation covering the thin edge of unease creeping up his spine.
The woman began shaking her head, tears streaming freely down her face. The teenager made a muffled sound behind his gag, something between a warning and a prayer.
And then Andrew felt it… An inhuman presence of something behind him.
Close enough that he should have heard it breathe.
Close enough that he should have felt footsteps on the boards.
But there had been nothing.
Slowly, too slowly, Andrew began to turn.
The first thing he saw was a shape. It was standing tall, motionless, standing in the dim edge of lantern light.
The second thing he noticed nearly made him piss his pants.
The light shifted again, and the object's surface caught it just enough to reveal texture, dark, ridged, curved.
It looked carved, sculpted, almost organic in its design.
The elongated snout of a dragon stretched forward, its teeth etched into the jawline, ridges sweeping back like horns. The surface swallowed the lantern's glow instead of reflecting it, black as midnight bone. Thin, faint green lines traced along the grooves, subtle and unnatural, like veins beneath stone.
The eye sockets were hollow.
Empty.
Andrew couldn't see the eyes behind them, but he could feel them.
Watching him… Measuring him.
In that suspended second, something ancient and instinctive stirred in his chest, back when his ancestors had nothing but skin and their bare hands to go up against the world. When they were nothing but mere prey to those better suited to hunt.
He was no longer the most dangerous thing in this room and everyone in that room knew that.
His mouth opened, the blade lifting slightly, as his heated pounded against his chest like a drum. But unfortunately for him, he never got a word out or the chance to attack like the cornered rat that he was.
The figure moved faster than he could ever hope to react.
A gloved fist shot forward, controlled and deliberate, and collided with Andrew's jaw with a crack that echoed off the beams above. Pain exploded through his skull in a blinding flash of white. His vision fractured, the lantern spinning into a streak of light as his head snapped violently to the side.
His body hit the floor hard, air tearing from his lungs in a broken gasp. The blade clattered uselessly across the ground, skidding into the shadows.
He tasted blood instantly from his broken jaw, the pain being the only thing keeping him conscious.
The world rang in his ear as he struggled to pull himself up.
Through blurred vision and swelling darkness, Andrew saw boots step into view beside his face; then another pair, then another, and another. Until there were now four of them inside the room looking down at him with those horrible masks.
"W-Who the fuck are you p-people?!" He gasped out while trying to desperately crawl away from the monsters.
But the punch did more damage than he thought as his body collapsed, unable to move.
The one who destroyed his jaw loomed over him as his consciousness slipped, its hollow gaze fixed and unblinking.
And that was the last thing he would ever see as the masked man raised its boot to his head…
And stomped down.
______
Downstairs, the kitchen clock ticked softly against the wall, each second stretching longer than the last.
Brenda stirred the pot again, though it didn't need stirring. The potatoes were done, the herbs had settled, and the candles burned steadily. She glanced toward the staircase, expecting to hear Andrew's boots on the steps.
But nothing came, and there was no sight or sound of her son coming down stairs..
Danny shifted in his chair at the table, picking at a splinter in the wood.
"He's takin' his sweet time," he muttered with annoyance. "What's he doin', inspectin' every damn inch?"
Brenda forced a small smile, though she couldn't help but agree. "He's thorough, that's all. You know how your brother is."
Another tick passed, then another, and then another.
Danny's knee began bouncing beneath the table. "I'll go—"
Before he could finish, a sound cut clean through the stillness.
Knock.
A single knock echoed through the house, not frantic, not desperate, but measured as if it was normal to knock on a door during a fucking apocalypse where dead bodies now walked and devoured the living.
Both of them froze.
The mother and son's head turned slowly toward the front door, thinking they simply heard wrong and that it was just the wind playing tricks...
Another knock followed with three steady raps against wood.
Danny swallowed. "You think it's a-?"
"A survivor," Brenda whispered, already rising from her chair. "Has to be, the only thing that makes sense."
They'd done this many times before, someone wandering, hungry, desperate, and in need of a warm smile and a nice, warm, meal.
The routine was muscle memory now.
But never did they have a survivor simply walk up to their door steps and knock before.
Brenda's face softened into practiced warmth as she smoothed her apron.
"Get everything ready," she said quietly, motioning for her son to go get the 'tools'.
Danny nodded, the nervous edge in his eyes quickly hardening into something colder. He stood and moved toward the cabinet where their tools were kept, fingers brushing over metal with familiarity.
Brenda walked toward the door and she adjusted her expression one last time before unlatching it, a warm motherly smile now on her face.
"Well now, dear, what brings you ou-"
Her warm fake welcome died in her throat.
Towering over her in the moonlight stood a figure dressed in dark gear, broad shoulders filling the doorway…
And a dragon skull staring down at her with hollow eyes that reflected nothing back but darkness.
Her breath left her in a shallow gasp, and for a split second she couldn't move, couldn't even think.
She drew breath to scream, but unfortunately for her, a gloved hand painfully clamped over her mouth from behind. Shutting her up as all she could let out was a pitifully muffled scream.
Brenda's eyes bulged in shock as her back collided with a solid chest she hadn't heard approaching. Another arm wrapped around her waist, pinning her arms to her sides with brutal efficiency.
She tried to bite, tried to claw, her nails scraped uselessly against thick fabric.
The masked figure at the doorway stepped forward as she was forcefully dragged backward into her own home, boots silent against the floorboards.
Her heels scraped against the wood. The candles flickered violently as she kicked, struggling with everything she had, praying that her son would make it in time to save her.
She tried to scream his name against the palm sealing her mouth, her prayers frantic and desperate inside her skull.
They pulled her fully inside, the door shutting with a quiet click behind them.
She twisted her head to where her son should be, hope still there that Danny would come and fucking shoot these fuckers and—
Her heart stopped.
Danny stood near the cabinet where the tools were kept.
Except he wasn't standing anymore.
Two more masked figures had him pinned.
One held his arms wrenched painfully behind his back. The other pressed him face-first against the table, a blade kicked far out of reach across the floor.
Danny's eyes were wide, helpless and terrified, begging for his mama. He tried to scream for her to help him through the hand that was covering his mouth before the man holding his head down pulled out a knife.
Brenda went limp for a moment in her captor's grip, unable to comprehend her son about to die in front of her while all she could do was helplessly watch.
Danny's body jerked once.
Just once before the knife went in with a wet, ugly sound that did not belong in a kitchen filled with candlelight and simmering potatoes.
The blade punched through bone with horrifying ease, burying itself to the hilt as if this were routine practice. Danny's eyes went wide in shock, then empty. His body sagged forward against the table, her son's blood spreading across the wood in a slow, dark bloom.
For a moment, the world simply… stopped.
The hand over her mouth loosened slightly, but she didn't take the chance to cry out, she couldn't.
Her mind refused to understand what she was seeing.
Danny was still there. Still leaning against the table. His hair still fell the same way across his forehead, his boots were still scuffed from chores.
Her brain tried to rewrite it.
But reality can't be rewrite with delusion.
Her eyes remained locked on the spreading pool of red beneath him. It crept toward the edge of the table and dripped steadily onto the floorboards, each drop sounding impossibly loud in the suffocating silence.
The masked figure who had killed her son withdrew the knife with a slow, deliberate motion. Blood followed it in a thin arc before pattering onto the floor.
He then stepped toward her.
The dragon mask caught the candlelight as he approached, the carved ridges casting warped shadows across the walls. The hollow eye sockets seemed darker now as it glared at her.
Brenda's gaze never left Danny.
Her son.
Her baby.
His fingers twitched once as gravity finished claiming him, sliding him sideways until his body thudded softly against the floor.
The masked man stopped directly in front of her, close enough that she could smell metal and oil beneath the scent of blood. Close enough that the warmth of her son's life still lingered on the blade he held.
But her eyes remained fixed on Danny's body, staring at him the way she used to watch him sleep as a child, checking to make sure he was breathing.
But he wasn't.
The masked man raised the knife, her son's blood still dripping from the serrated edge, each crimson drop marking another second of her living hell. She closed her eyes, jaw clenched so tight her molars threatened to crack.
This was God's white-hot fury made flesh, the price for her sins finally came due, and all she could do was accept her punishment.
The knife came down and finally ended her miserable life.
_____
Ghost didn't linger on the bodies.
Not because he was cold, or because the sight bothered him, he'd seen worse, done worse, and endured things that would've made most men beg to die.
He didn't linger because time was a resource, and the dead didn't spend it, the living did.
The farmhouse smelled like cooked potatoes, candle wax, and fresh blood. A domestic little tableau, twisted into something grotesque by the way it ended, chairs skewed, a table stained dark, a pot still quietly burbling on the stove like it hadn't gotten the message that the world had moved on.
His men moved through the house like a machine with a heartbeat. Just masked shadows gliding from room to room, confirming, clearing, and collecting without a single word needed to be said between them.
"Upper floor secure," one of them reported through the link. "No additional threats."
"Barn's clear," another followed. "Currently leading the cow out and taking it with us."
Ghost stepped into the kitchen and let his gaze sweep the room once, clinical. He could still feel the fear lingering in the walls, like smoke after a fire.
"Take everything of value," Ghost ordered, voice low.
The looting began.
One unit stripped the kitchen first, pots, pans, knives worth keeping, jars of preserved food, sacks of potatoes, herbs hung to dry. Another moved on the cabinets: medicine bottles, antiseptic, gauze, alcohol, anything that could keep infection from killing people slower than teeth would.
A third team headed for the storage room and came back with armfuls of blankets and winter clothes, ugly, practical layers that mattered when the nights turned mean. They found boots, coats, and gloves. Every ounce of warmth was precious currency when it came to winter.
Ghost walked through the hallway, eyes scanning, cataloging. Tools leaned in corners, a half-crate of nails, thirty feet of rope. Fuel canisters, low, but not empty, an old hunting rifle that had seen too many hands and not enough cleaning, and crossbows that came with a decent amount of arrows.
Outside, the barn doors creaked open with Maybelle letting out a low, confused moo that echoed across the pasture. A pair of clones approached her slowly, hands open, murmuring soft nonsense that wasn't meant to be understood, just meant to be gentle. One of them looped a rope around her with practiced ease.
"Easy, girl," he said, voice muffled beneath his mask. "You're comin' with us to a better place."
Maybelle snorted, hooves stamping, but she followed.
Upstairs, Ghost went to check on the victims they saved.
When he stepped through the doorway, the air hit him like a fist, blood and rot and hopelessness. Lantern light revealed three shapes tied to pipes, gaunt and trembling. Their eyes locked onto him with the kind of terror that didn't fade just because the scary masked man had saved them.
Especially when the crushed head of their now dead tormentor was still in the room.
One of Ghost's men was already cutting them free and doing his best to calm them down.
"Hey," the clone murmured, voice low and steady, doing his best to sound as non-threatening as he could. "You're safe. You're safe now."
The woman flinched anyway, shaking so hard her teeth clicked. The teenager's lips were cracked, eyes sunken with exhaustion. The old man looked half-dead already, his face waxy and gray, breaths shallow like he was afraid even air might cost him something.
Ghost watched his men work, not just the mechanics of freeing them, but the way they did it. Slow steady hands that offered a blanket before questions and water in small sips which they drank greedily.
Reassurance repeated, not because it fixed anything, but because it gave the mind something simple to cling to.
One clone crouched, careful not to loom, and spoke softly to the boy. "Can you walk? Nod if you can and if not that's okay. We got you."
The boy nodded once, shaky. Tears slid down his face like his body had been saving them up for the first moment it was allowed.
Ghost turned away before the weight of it settled anywhere it shouldn't.
He reached out through the link.
"Watcher."
"Here."
"School's still secure?"
"Yeah," Watcher answered confidently. "Tense, but stable. We've got a rotation on the doors and windows. No walker movement close."
Ghost nodded to himself as he watched one of his men help the old man up, offering their arm for her to use as support. "We're bringing survivors to them, injured and traumatized. You'll take them straight in, no delays."
"Copy."
He looked over the room again. The victims, no, survivors, huddled together as best they could, shaking beneath blankets that still smelled like someone else's home. One of Ghost's men stayed with them, speaking quietly, like his voice alone could build a wall between them and what they'd just lived through.
Ghost stepped back into the hallway and began issuing orders.
"Unit Echo," he said before ordering. "Split."
Half his men moved immediately, already understanding without needing it spelled out, some to escort the survivors, some to haul supplies, with the supplies split evenly between them.
"Sixty-seven," Ghost called.
"Here."
"You and your unit take the survivors to the school, slow and quiet, with no detours. If they collapse, you carry them. If anything gets in the way, you—" his voice sharpened, "—Take care of it, got it?"
"Understood."
Ghost's gaze shifted to the rest before nodding, satisfied.
"Everyone else, load up and head back to the motel. The Cow comes with us. If you leave something behind, you're on your own to get it back."
A ripple of affirmations moved through the link.
Ghost stood near the porch and watched his men work with the kind of detached pride a craftsman might feel watching a well-made machine run without him before making his way out of the far–
Then he felt it.
Ghost's head tilted slowly upward.
The night sky stretched overhead, wide and indifferent, scattered with stars and thin drifting clouds. Nothing moved that he could see, nothing obvious, nothing loud—
And yet his instincts prickled.
He stared for a long moment, scanning the sky as if expecting something to show itself.
"Something wrong, boss?" one of the clones asked, pausing beside him with a duffel bag slung over his shoulder.
Ghost didn't answer right away.
He just kept looking, searching for something even though he didn't know what he was looking for.
Then he exhaled through his nose and forced the feeling down into a locked box in his chest.
"Nothing," he said finally, though he didn't fully believe it. He lowered his gaze and motioned forward. "Move out."
His men obeyed instantly, melting into the night with their stolen supplies and their rescued survivors, leaving the farm behind like a bad memory.
Ghost walked with them, the uneasy feeling still scratching at the back of his mind.
…
…
…
High above, so high the human eye would never pick it out, something hovered in the cloud cover, silent as a thought.
A small drone, dark and sleek, its lens pointed down at the masked figures moving through the fields.
On its underside, a logo was stamped clean and unmistakable.
UMBRELLA