PLATFORM: FACEBOOK TIMELINE
USER: TYLER JORDAN (Civil Engineer)
STATUS: UPLOADED VIA STARLINK (Connection Fluctuation: High Latency)
BATTERY: 88% (Solar Array Active)
LOCATION: SUPER-MART (Arusha Branch), MANAGER'S OFFICE
I am writing this with a headache that feels like a railroad spike has been driven through my left temple. My vision in my left eye is blurry, a kaleidoscope of grey static and pain. If there are typos in this log, blame the concussion. Or blame Nayla.
Yesterday, I ended my log by telling you I was the King of the Super-Mart. I told you about my fortress. I told you about my clever trap. I was arrogant. And if there is one thing the Apocalypse loves to punish, it is arrogance.
I woke up with the taste of copper in my mouth. Blood.
For a long time—maybe minutes, maybe hours—I floated in that sick, heavy darkness that comes after head trauma. I could hear the hum of the cooling fans on the server rack next to me. I could smell the stale scent of recycled air and old coffee. My brain felt loose in my skull, rattling against the bone with every pulse of my heart.
I tried to reach up to touch my throbbing head, but my hands wouldn't move.
The panic hit me instantly. I jerked my arms, but they were pinned tight against the back of the chair. My ankles were secured to the heavy steel legs of the desk. I was bound in my own office, in the very seat where I used to play god with the security cameras.
I blinked, forcing my eyes to focus. The only light in the room came from the wall of CCTV monitors, casting a cold, blue phantom glow over everything.
And sitting on the edge of the desk, legs swinging idly, was Nayla.
She had cleaned herself up. She was wearing a fresh tactical jacket she must have pulled from the sporting goods aisle—one of the expensive thermal ones I had been saving for winter. On the desk next to her hip was an open can of my peaches—the heavy syrup kind I had been rationing so carefully. She was eating them with my knife.
"You're awake," she said. Her voice wasn't mocking. It was flat. Clinical. Like she was reading a thermometer.
"You hit me," I croaked. My throat felt like it was full of sand and glass. "I gave you food, and you hit me."
"I hit you because you were going to hurt me, Tyler. Or lock me up. I don't do cages." She speared a peach slice, the juice dripping onto the pristine linoleum, and popped it into her mouth. She chewed slowly, watching me. "Besides, I used a can of tomato soup. It distributes the force. If I'd used the pipe, you wouldn't be waking up at all. You'd be twitching on the floor."
"You're welcome," I spat, struggling against the bindings. "How did you get out? I cut those zip ties myself. They were police-grade nylon. Tensile strength of 300 pounds."
Nayla stopped swinging her legs. She leaned forward, the blue light of the monitors illuminating the sharp, predatory angles of her face.
"You're an engineer, right? You look at things and see structures. Walls. Beams. Math."
"I built a fortress," I growled, testing the plastic cutting into my wrists.
"You built a tomb," she corrected. "You looked at the vents and saw air ducts. I looked at them and saw a highway. You secured the roof hatch, but you didn't check the grease trap exhaust in the deli section. It's tight, greasy, and smells like death, but if you dislocate your shoulder—which hurts like hell, by the way—you can slide right through."
I felt a cold pit open in my stomach. The grease trap.
I knew exactly what she was talking about. It was a rectangular vent behind the deep fryers, meant to suck out oil fumes. I had welded the back doors shut, blocked the loading bay with tons of steel, and painted the glass, but I hadn't even thought about the exhaust fans. To me, they were mechanical systems. To a desperate survivor, they were a door.
"And the ties?" I asked, my ego bruising faster than my head.
"I didn't cut them," she said, pulling a bobby pin from her messy hair and tossing it onto the desk. "I shimmied the locking mechanism. You pulled them tight, but not tight enough to stop the blood flow. That gave me wiggle room. You're good at building walls, Tyler, but you're bad at people."
"So what now?" I asked, the fight draining out of me. "You kill me? Take the fortress? Enjoy the peaches until the solar panels fail?"
"I don't want your fortress. This place is a death trap."
"It's safe!" I yelled, my voice cracking. "It's the safest place in the city!"
"Is it?" She stood up, wiping her sticky fingers on her pants. She walked over to the wall of monitors and pointed a slender finger at Screen 4—the camera covering the North parking lot. "Tell me what you see."
I squinted with my good eye. The screen showed the usual nightmare. Wrecked cars, piles of trash, the grey asphalt baking in the relentless sun. And them. The Infected.
"I see zombies," I said. "Same as always. Shamblers. Rotters."
"Look closer," she commanded. "Look at the pattern."
I focused. There were maybe thirty of them visible in that sector. Usually, they milled around aimlessly, bumping into cars, staring at the sky, reacting to wind or birds. Random Brownian motion.
But today... they were still.
They were standing in a jagged line. It wasn't a perfect military formation, but it was deliberate. They were spaced out, about ten feet apart, facing the store. They weren't swaying. They weren't twitching. They were just watching.
"They stopped moving at dawn," Nayla said softly. "They haven't twitched in six hours. They aren't roaming anymore, Tyler. They're waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"A signal."
She turned back to me, her face grim. "I've been out there. I've survived in the streets while you were playing Minecraft in here. These things... the Smart Ones... they have a hierarchy. There are Alphas. When the Alphas show up, the drones stop feeding and start hunting."
"Alphas?" I scoffed, trying to rationalize it. "That's sci-fi garbage. It's a virus. It degrades the brain stem. It doesn't create generals."
"You saw the little girl," she said.
The words stopped me cold. "How do you know about that?"
"I checked your browser history on the laptop while you were out. You watched that clip fifty times. You saw how they used her as bait. You saw how they waited. That wasn't instinct, Tyler. That was a play. And now? They're running a play on you."
She pulled a knife from her belt—my hunting knife—and walked behind the desk. I tensed, expecting the blade to slide across my throat. Instead, I heard the zip of plastic being cut.
My hands fell free. The rush of blood back into my fingers was agonizing.
I rubbed my wrists, staring at her in shock. "Why?"
"Because an Alpha is coming," she said, tossing the cut zip ties onto the floor. "And when it gets here, your painted glass and your stacks of soup cans aren't going to mean a damn thing. I need a gun, and you need someone who knows how they think. We're partners now."
"I didn't agree to that," I said, standing up on shaky legs. The room spun, but I grabbed the desk for support.
"You don't have a choice."
She tossed me a bottle of water. I drank it in one go, the cool liquid soothing the fire in my throat. My head was still spinning, but the adrenaline was starting to kick in. The engineer in me was waking up. If there was a breach point—the grease trap—it needed to be fixed.
"Okay," I said, wiping my mouth. "Assume I believe you. Assume there is an 'Alpha.' What's the plan? We bunker down in the Inner Sanctum?"
Nayla shook her head. "If we stay in the center, we're blind. We need to reinforce the weak points before they hit. And we need to close that grease trap I crawled through, or we'll have guests for dinner."
THE PATCH JOB
We spent the next four hours working in a silence that was heavier than the shelves I'd moved. I hate to admit it, but she was right. My fortress had holes.
We went to the deli kitchen first. The smell was atrocious—a mix of rancid fryer oil and the rotting meat from the unpowered freezers nearby.
The grease trap exhaust was a metal box set into the wall, about two feet wide. The exterior grate had been unscrewed from the outside. I could see daylight through the oily tunnel. It was slick with black sludge. The idea of her crawling through that, dislocating her shoulder to fit, made me look at her differently. She wasn't just a survivor; she was desperate enough to do anything.
"I can't weld it," I said, examining the metal. "I don't have the acetylene."
"Block it," she said, watching the opening with a shotgun propped on her hip. "Heavy stuff."
I found a commercial dough mixer in the bakery section. It was cast iron, bolted to a heavy stand. I used a dolly to drag it into the deli, groaning with the effort. I slammed it against the wall, covering the vent opening. Then, for good measure, I dragged a deep fryer in front of that.
"Subtle," Nayla noted, her eyes scanning the ceiling tiles.
"Physics," I countered. "Friction and mass."
As we worked, I watched her. She moved with a frightening economy of motion. She didn't waste energy. When she walked down the aisles, she stayed close to the shelves, constantly checking her blind spots. She walked silently on the balls of her feet. She was a predator in a tactical jacket.
"Where are you from?" I asked as we moved to the front of the store to check the main barricade.
"Does it matter?" she replied, not looking at me.
"It matters if I'm trusting you with my back."
She paused, checking the load on the shotgun she had taken from my armory. "I was a nurse. St. Mary's Hospital."
I stared at her. "You were a nurse?"
"Trauma ward," she said. "I saw Patient Zero in my city. A homeless man. He bit a cop's nose off in the triage waiting room. I saw what happens when you try to treat them. I learned quickly that you don't save everyone. Sometimes, you just stop the bleeding."
She looked at me, her eyes hard and devoid of the empathy I expected from a healer. "Right now, Tyler, you're bleeding. I'm just the tourniquet."
We reached the front of the store. My wall of shelves was still intact. The white paint on the glass glowed in the afternoon sun, hiding the horrors outside. But as we stood there, a sound cut through the silence.
Thud.
It came from the glass.
Thud.
"Get down," Nayla hissed, dragging me behind a checkout counter.
We crouched in the shadows. The sound came again, rhythmic and heavy. It wasn't the frantic scratching of a mindless ghoul. It was a slow, deliberate knock.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
"They're testing the glass," I whispered, my heart hammering against my ribs. "Checking for integrity."
"No," Nayla whispered back. "They're knocking."
My blood ran cold. "Knocking? Why would they knock?"
"To see if anyone answers."
Suddenly, a screech ripped through the air—loud, high-pitched, and piercing. It sounded like metal grinding on metal. It came from outside, amplified by the acoustics of the empty street. It vibrated in my teeth.
"That's the signal," Nayla said, gripping her shotgun so hard her knuckles turned white.
On the CCTV monitor mounted above the checkout lane, I saw it happen.
The line of zombies in the parking lot began to move. But they didn't run at the doors. They ran at the cars.
"What are they doing?" I asked, watching the grainy footage in horror.
Two of the larger zombies—massive things wearing tattered construction vests, their biceps swollen with necrotic fluid—grabbed the bumper of a small hatchback. They groaned, black veins popping against grey skin. They lifted the car onto its side.
Then, they started pushing.
They were using the car as a shield. A mobile battering ram.
"They're smart," I breathed, the reality finally crashing down on me. "They know about the glass. They know I have guns. They're bringing cover."
"They're breaching," Nayla yelled, racking the slide of her shotgun. "Move! Back to the Inner Circle!"
THE COLLAPSE
We scrambled back toward the center of the store just as the world exploded.
The sound of the hatchback hitting the glass facade was deafening. It sounded like a bomb going off. The tempered glass shattered, screaming as it gave way. The heavy steel shelves I had stacked swayed, metal screeching against metal.
They held. For a second.
Then came the second impact. Another car.
CRASH.
The shelves groaned and tipped. Cans of soup and bags of flour rained down like shrapnel. A cloud of white dust exploded into the air, blinding us.
Through the dust, I saw silhouettes. Dozens of them. They weren't roaring. They were silent. They poured over the toppled shelves like a flood of grey water.
"Fire!" Nayla screamed.
I raised my AR-15 and pulled the trigger. The recoil dug into my bruised shoulder. Bang-bang-bang!
I saw a zombie in a business suit drop, its head misting red. Nayla's shotgun boomed next to me, blowing a hole through a massive infected wearing a football jersey. But there were too many. They weren't fighting each other to get in; they were flowing around obstacles.
"Fall back!" I yelled. "We can't hold the floor!"
We sprinted toward my "Safe Zone"—the fortress of water pallets in the center of the store. We vaulted over the wall of Aquafina cases and dropped inside.
I grabbed the remote for the heavy steel shutters I had installed on the pharmacy cage (my sleeping quarters). "Get inside the cage!"
Nayla dove into the pharmacy. I followed, hitting the button. The metal gate rattled down, locking into the floor with a heavy clank just as the first zombie reached the water pallet wall.
We were safe inside the cage, but the store... the store was theirs.
I stood there, chest heaving, listening to the sound of hundreds of feet shuffling on the linoleum outside our cage. The smell of rot washed over us, overpowering the smell of the paint.
I looked at the monitors on the pharmacy wall.
The store was swarming. They were tearing apart the shelves. They were destroying the food. It wasn't hunger; it was malice. They were dismantling my home.
And then, I saw him.
On Screen 2, standing by the ruined entrance, was a figure. He wasn't running. He was walking slowly, hands clasped behind his back. He wore a tattered, blood-stained paramedic uniform. Half his face was gone, revealing the teeth beneath the cheek, but the other half was terrifyingly composed.
He walked through the chaos like a general inspecting his troops. Other zombies stepped out of his way.
He stopped in the middle of the aisle and looked up. He looked right at the camera lens.
His eyes weren't milky white like the others. They were bright, piercing yellow. And he was smiling. A twisted, knowing grin.
"That's him," Nayla whispered, standing beside me. She was trembling. "That's the Alpha."
The Alpha raised a hand and pointed. Not at the camera. Not at the cage.
He pointed at the ceiling.
"Why is he pointing up?" I asked.
Then I heard it.
The sound of footsteps above us. Heavy, thumping footsteps on the corrugated metal roof.
"They aren't just inside," Nayla said, her voice barely a whisper. "They're on the roof. They're going for the skylights."
I looked up at the ceiling of my pharmacy cage. I realized with a sick, sinking dread that while the walls were steel, the roof of the pharmacy was just drop-ceiling tiles and thin plaster.
My fortress was designed to keep people out. It wasn't designed to keep the sky out.
We weren't in a bunker anymore. We were in a can. And on the monitor, the Alpha's smile widened as the first tile above our heads began to crack.