When the outbreak started, everything fell apart within hours.
Crowds panicked in the streets. Screaming people flooded the sidewalks, trampling each other in their desperation to escape. Gunshots echoed from every direction—police, civilians, soldiers firing blindly into the chaos. The city had descended into hell so quickly that most people didn't even understand what was happening before they were already dead.
Chief Henry Parker, commanding officer of the Chicago Central Precinct, barely had time to process the disaster before it consumed his station. He grabbed whatever officers he could find—maybe twenty, at most—and retreated toward the detention wing, the smaller reinforced building attached to the main complex. It was defensible, with thick walls and barred windows.
None of them had managed to reach the armory.
Their service pistols had been lost or jammed during the initial chaos, and now they were trapped inside a concrete fortress with nothing but batons, broken furniture, and fear. Outside, the moans of the infected created a constant, soul-crushing soundtrack to their captivity.
They couldn't risk opening the cells. Some prisoners had already turned—rotting, snarling creatures that threw themselves against the metal bars with mindless fury. If they opened even one door, the entire detention block could collapse into a bloodbath within minutes.
But what truly terrified the surviving officers wasn't the horde of infected humans shambling outside.
It was the sounds coming from below—the growling, the scratching, the occasional wet snarl of something hungry and vicious.
Almost all the K9 units had been infected.
The police dogs that once served loyally beside their human partners were now monsters—faster, stronger, and far more aggressive than the turned humans outside. The precinct had started with nearly a hundred officers when they first barricaded themselves inside. Half had died within the first twenty-four hours, torn apart by the very animals they used to feed and train.
Some officers couldn't even bring themselves to fight back. They'd served alongside those dogs for years—trusted partners reduced to bloodthirsty beasts in the span of minutes.
Elsewhere across the sprawling precinct complex, small isolated groups of surviving officers had barricaded themselves wherever they could find shelter—offices, locker rooms, evidence storage. Before the fall, Chicago Central had employed nearly a thousand sworn officers. Half had turned on the first night. The rest either died in the chaos or went into hiding, praying desperately for rescue that would never come.
"Officer Miller," whispered a young voice, trembling with barely controlled panic. "What... what are those things outside? They used to be our friends. Our partners. And now they just... bite people. Tear them apart. It doesn't make sense."
ELsa exhaled slowly, adjusting her grip on the rifle she'd managed to salvage from a fallen colleague. It was one of only three functioning firearms they had left.
"They're not people anymore, Jordan," she said flatly, her voice carrying the weight of someone who'd already accepted the truth. "Whatever's inside them now... it took everything human away. All that's left is hunger."
The rookie beside her—Jordan Lee, barely twenty-two years old, his face still soft with the baby fat of youth—looked pale and sick. He'd graduated from the academy only three months ago. His first real assignment had been a routine patrol. Now he was trapped in a horror movie with no script and no escape.
Elsa tried to keep her tone measured and calm, but exhaustion pulled at her like physical weight. The stench of blood, disinfectant, and decay hung thick in the recycled air. Her once-pristine tactical uniform was now stained dark red, the fabric stiff with dried gore.
Behind her, another survivor—Linda Zhao, a civilian tech specialist who'd just transferred to the precinct the week before the outbreak—sat trembling near the barred window. She'd never been combat-trained, never fired a gun outside a range. Now she clutched a broken baton like it was the only thing tethering her to sanity.
If Elsa hadn't saved her twice already in the past two days, Linda would be dead.
"Officer Miller," Jordan said nervously, his eyes drifting toward the rows of cells lining the far wall. "Should we... at least check on the prisoners? Some of them might still be—"
"Hey!" A voice suddenly shouted from one of the cells, rough and desperate. "You can't just leave us in here! We didn't do nothing wrong!"
"Yeah!" another prisoner added, his fist slamming against the bars. "That guy in the corner cell—he's turning! He's turning right now! Let us out before he—"
A wet, guttural snarl cut through the air like a knife.
Something slammed into the bars hard enough to bend the reinforced metal inward. Blood sprayed across the concrete floor in thick arterial spurts.
Jordan flinched backward, nearly dropping his baton.
Elsa raised her rifle smoothly, her finger resting just outside the trigger guard. "We're not opening anything," she said coldly, her eyes never leaving the cells. "They're safer in there. And so are we."
She could hear more scratching from the floor below—claws on concrete, moving in packs. The doors wouldn't hold forever. They all knew it. It was just a question of how long they had before everything fell apart completely.
A few blocks away, Ethan Miller crouched behind the burned-out wreckage of a police cruiser, peering through his scavenged binoculars at the precinct complex.
He'd been observing the station for nearly half an hour, mapping patrol patterns, counting bodies, identifying weak points. The courtyard was crawling with infected—at least a hundred of them shambling aimlessly in loose circles. Among them, he'd spotted half a dozen shapes that moved differently: faster, lower to the ground, limbs jerking with unnatural coordination.
Zombie dogs.
Ethan's jaw tightened at the sight.
He'd fought one before—barely walked away with his life. These things didn't lose much strength when they turned, and their reflexes were brutally fast. One-on-one was manageable with preparation. Six at once would be suicide.
He circled wide, sticking to the alley shadows and avoiding the main streets entirely, until he reached a quieter flank of the complex. Scaling a rusted chain-link fence, he dropped silently into the yard behind a row of abandoned police vehicles.
The scene was pure chaos—smashed windshields, burned tires, deep claw marks gouged into brick walls. Blood painted the asphalt in dark, irregular patterns.
Moving carefully, he climbed the marble steps leading into the main administrative building.
The first floor was eerily still. Blood streaks painted abstract patterns across the walls. He could hear faint scratching somewhere above—slow, irregular, not immediately threatening.
He didn't take the elevator. Too risky. If the power failed mid-ascent, he'd be trapped in a metal coffin. Instead, he took the fire stairs, moving methodically from floor to floor, steel pipe held ready in both hands.
Bodies littered the stairwell. Some old enough to have started decomposing. Others disturbingly fresh.
By the time he reached the seventeenth floor, he spotted the sign he'd been looking for: Chief's Office - Authorized Personnel Only.
He pushed open the heavy door slowly, muscles tensed.
"RAAAHHH!"
A body lunged from behind the door, slamming into him with surprising force. A decayed officer, mouth still wet with fresh blood, eyes glowing with mindless hate.
Ethan twisted his body, braced his legs, and kicked hard—the corpse flew backward into two more infected lurking behind a overturned desk.
He moved instantly. One swing—skull crushed. Two—neck broken. Three—final infected smashed against the wall with a wet crunch before sliding down, leaving a red smear.
Ethan stood still for a moment, breathing steadily, letting his enhanced physique absorb the exertion.
"Three in one office," he muttered, surveying the carnage. "Nice welcoming committee."
He searched the room methodically—papers, drawers, filing cabinets—until he found exactly what he needed: a laminated building schematic tucked inside a disaster response binder. The armory was marked clearly: basement level, northwest wing.
Perfect.
He folded the map and slipped it into his pack, already planning his route.
The building felt wrong now. Too quiet. Too still. As he moved back toward the stairwell, he noticed something disturbing: almost no other infected in the main administrative tower. Just corpses. No signs of living survivors either.
Either everyone had fled... or something had already cleaned house.
By dusk, Ethan reached the rear of the compound.
He could see the reinforced steel doors of the armory from his vantage point—along with a crowd of twenty infected banging mindlessly against them, drawn by some residual memory of human activity.
Too many to fight head-on, even with his enhanced stats.
He slipped a small Bluetooth speaker from his pack and placed it carefully in a broken window frame on the second floor. A tiny red light blinked to life. He scrolled through his phone until he found a song that made him grin darkly.
"Let's see if you guys appreciate classic pop."
He set a three-minute timer and quickly climbed to the roof of the nearby maintenance shed.
Moments later, an upbeat rhythm blasted through the evening air at maximum volume:
"🎵 Tell me why! Ain't nothin' but a heartache— 🎵"
Every infected within a two-block radius turned toward the sound—roaring, stumbling, sprinting with jerky intensity.
As they flooded toward the music like moths to flame, Ethan dropped down silently from the roof, landing in a crouch near the armory's side entrance.
He gripped his weapon tighter, adrenaline singing through his enhanced nervous system.
"Alright," he muttered, eyes narrowing with predatory focus. "Let's find something that bites harder than a steel pipe."
Then he kicked the door open and disappeared into the darkness.
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