PLATFORM: FACEBOOK TIMELINE
USER: TYLER JORDAN (Structural Engineer)
STATUS: UPLOADED VIA STARLINK (Mobile Connection - Low Bandwidth)
BATTERY: 9% (Critical - Saving Mode)
DATE: TUESDAY. DAY 37 POST-EVENT (03:00 AM).
LOCATION: NJIRO ESTATE (Residential District A), ARUSHA
[Post Visibility: Public]
I used to think the end of the world would be loud. I grew up on Hollywood movies; I expected air raid sirens, explosions, and the screaming of fighter jets. But out here, in the wealthy suburbs of Arusha, the apocalypse is terrifyingly quiet.
It's a heavy, suffocating silence. It presses against your eardrums like the humidity before a storm. It is broken only by the sound of the wind in the Jacaranda trees and your own terrified breathing.
We have been moving for six hours. We haven't made it to Nayla's Safe House. We haven't even made it out of this damn neighborhood.
THE CRAWLSPACE
We spent the first four hours of the night hiding under the foundation of a stranger's mansion. It was a massive, walled compound—probably belonged to a government minister or a wealthy expat before the world fell apart. Now, the crawlspace beneath the servant's quarters was a tomb of red dust, spiders, and darkness.
Nayla slept. I don't know how she does it. She curled up on a pile of discarded insulation foam like a cat and just... shut down. Her breathing was so shallow I had to check twice to make sure she was alive.
I lay there, staring at the rotting timber beams above my head, listening to the floorboards creak.
The Simba were inside the house above us.
I could hear their footsteps—dragging, shuffling, occasionally breaking into a trot. I heard furniture being overturned. I heard glass breaking. They weren't eating; they were pacing.
To keep my sanity, I tried to fix the equipment. I stripped down the nail gun in the dark, using touch alone. I checked the pressure seal on the portable compressor tank clipped to my belt. It was holding air, but the regulator was dented.
I'm a structural engineer with a master's degree, armed with a DeWalt framing nailer, hiding in the dirt from an army of dead things. The irony isn't lost on me. I fix things. I build things. But I can't fix this.
When Nayla woke up, she didn't stretch or yawn. Her eyes just snapped open in the gloom, reflecting the tiny sliver of moonlight coming through the vent.
"We have to move," she whispered, her voice barely a breath. "The patrols will be thinner at 3:00 AM."
"Patrols?" I asked, wiping a spiderweb from my face. "You mean the Simba?"
"No," she said, her expression darkening. "I mean the living."
THE GOLDEN CAGE
Leaving the crawlspace was harder than entering. My muscles had seized up from the cold dampness of the earth. My head, still throbbing from where Nayla had cracked me with the soup can yesterday, felt like it was detached from my body, floating a few inches to the left.
We crept through the backyard. The moon was full—too bright. It illuminated the manicured lawns, the empty swimming pools filled with black leaves, and the high security walls topped with electric fencing that no longer hummed.
This is Njiro. It's where the money lives. High walls, heavy gates, and bougainvillea hedges. It looked like a normal Tuesday night, except for the bodies.
They were everywhere. Gardeners. Guards. Maids. Some were torn apart, skeletons bleached white by the sun. Others were "Sleepers"—zombies that had collapsed from exhaustion or hunger, lying in the tall ornamental grass like landmines, waiting for a sound to wake them up.
"Step where I step," Nayla commanded. She moved barefoot, silent as a ghost. I followed in my heavy work boots, wincing every time gravel crunched under my heel.
We hopped a perimeter fence, cutting through a dried-out drainage canal. We were making good time. I was starting to think we might actually make it to the Industrial District by sunrise.
Then, we saw the lights.
They appeared at the top of the hill—blinding white LED floodlights cutting through the darkness like knives. The sound followed a second later: the deep, guttural rumble of diesel engines.
"Chini!" (Down!) Nayla shoved me into a thick hedge of thorny acacia.
We crouched in the dirt, thorns digging into my arms, watching the road.
Three vehicles rolled slowly past us. They weren't military Humvees. They were Safari Land Cruisers—the big, beige Toyota trucks used for tourists. But they had been modified for a different kind of game.
The pop-up roofs were removed, replaced by gunner nests. The windows were covered with welded rebar cages. The massive bull bars were reinforced with steel piping, sharpened into spikes to ram through crowds.
On the side of the lead truck, spray-painted in jagged red letters over the "Serengeti Safari" logo, was a symbol: A skull with a gear crank through the eye socket.
"Who are they?" I whispered.
"The Vultures," Nayla hissed. She looked genuinely afraid—a look I hadn't seen on her even when we were surrounded at the Super-Mart. "They run the supply lines in the North District. They don't scavenge buildings, Engineer. They scavenge people."
THE AMBUSH
The convoy didn't pass us. They stopped.
The lead truck idled in front of a two-story villa across the street—a house that looked boarded up and secure. A man jumped out of the passenger seat. He was huge, wearing makeshift armor made from sliced-up car tires and road signs. He held a megaphone.
I expected him to shout a warning. Instead, he raised a flare gun and fired.
THUMP. HISS.
The red flare smashed through the second-story window of the villa. Inside, a red glow bloomed, followed instantly by screams.
"Moto!" (Fire!) a woman's voice shrieked from inside the house.
"Flush 'em out!" the man with the megaphone yelled in Swahili. "Don't let them burn! We need the labor!"
The Vultures laughed. Six men jumped out of the trucks, carrying baseball bats, rungus (heavy wooden clubs), and machetes. They surrounded the front door.
I watched in horror as the heavy mahogany door of the house burst open. A family—an Indian father, a mother, and a teenage boy—stumbled out, coughing from the smoke.
"Please!" the father yelled, holding his hands up. "We have food! Take the rice! Take the generator!"
The man with the megaphone walked up to the father. He didn't ask for the food. He swung a heavy pipe wrench and smashed the father's knee.
The sound of the bone breaking was louder than the engine. The man collapsed, screaming.
"We don't want the rice, Patel," the leader laughed. "We want the desperate. Desperate people work harder."
I started to stand up, my hand going to the nail gun. "We have to help them."
Nayla grabbed my belt and yanked me back down hard. She pinned me to the dirt. "Are you insane? Look at them. They have numbers, armor, and trucks. You have a nail gun and a concussion."
"We can't just watch!"
"Yes, we can," she said coldly. Her eyes were hard as flint. "If you fire that nail gun, you miss. Then they find us. Then they kill me and make you a slave. Is that what you want?"
I looked at the scene. The Vultures were zip-tying the family. They were throwing them into the back of the Land Cruiser like luggage. It was efficient. Brutal. Industrial.
I gripped the nail gun until my knuckles turned white, but I stayed down. I watched them take the family. I watched them loot the house. I watched them drive away, leaving the front door open for the Simba to claim whatever was left.
I hated the Alpha for taking my fortress. But these men? These men were worse. The Alpha is a predator. The Vultures are parasites.
THE DETOUR
"We can't go North," Nayla said after the taillights faded into the dust. "That convoy is heading toward the main Arusha-Moshi road. If we follow your route to my Safe House, we walk right into their territory."
"So what's the plan?" I asked, feeling sick to my stomach. The image of the father's shattered leg kept playing in my mind. "We can't go back to the Super-Mart. We can't go North."
"We go East," she said, pointing toward a dark wall of trees at the edge of the estate. "Through the old Coffee Estate. It cuts behind the residential zone and comes out near the Industrial District."
"The coffee fields?" I looked at the trees. They were dense, shadowy, overgrown. "That's suicide. No cover. No walls. Just bush."
"It's the bush or the Vultures," she said, already moving.
We entered the abandoned plantation. The coffee bushes had grown wild, creating a maze of dark, waxy leaves. The air smelled of wet earth and rotting berries.
We hadn't gone a hundred yards when I heard it.
KRRK.
It wasn't a zombie shuffle. It was a crisp, deliberate step on a dry twig.
Nayla froze. She held up a fist. We stood statue-still in the middle of the overgrown path.
"Scout," she mouthed.
From the shadows of a large Jacaranda tree, a figure emerged. It wasn't a Vulture. It was a straggler—a looter, maybe, operating solo. He was skinny, shaking, wearing a hoodie. He held a rusted revolver.
He saw us. He raised the gun.
"Mifuko," he croaked in Raspy Swahili. Bags. "Drop the bags."
"We don't have anything," I said, holding up my empty hands.
"Liars!" he shouted. His voice cracked. He was shaking—a teja (addict) going through withdrawal. "Drop the bags or I drop the girl!"
He pointed the gun at Nayla.
In the movies, the heroes have a plan. In reality, panic takes over.
Nayla didn't drop her bag. She threw it. She hurled her backpack straight at his face.
The gunman flinched. BANG.
The gunshot was deafening in the silent plantation. The bullet went wild, hitting a tree next to my head. Bark exploded into my face.
Nayla charged him. She's fast, but he was desperate. He pistol-whipped her, catching her in the jaw. She went down hard.
He stood over her, raising the gun for a kill shot.
"No!" I screamed.
I didn't think. I raised the nail gun. I didn't aim for the head. I just pointed at his center mass and squeezed the trigger.
PFFT-THWIP.
The pneumatic hiss was followed by the wet thud of impact.
The 3-inch framing nail hit him in the shoulder. He screamed, spinning around to face me.
THWIP. THWIP.
I fired twice more. One nail hit his stomach. The other hit his throat.
He gurgled, dropping the gun. He grabbed his neck, blood spurting between his fingers. He fell to his knees, staring at me with wide, shocked eyes. Then he face-planted into the mulch.
I stood there, panting, the nail gun shaking in my hand. I had just killed a man. Not a zombie. A human being.
Nayla scrambled up, spitting blood. She grabbed her pack and snatched the dead man's revolver.
"Move!" she yelled, grabbing my shirt. "The gunshot!"
THE SWARM
The plantation was no longer silent.
The gunshot had rung out like a dinner bell against the foothills of Mount Meru. From the woods, from the abandoned worker shacks, from the nearby houses—the groans began.
"Run!" Nayla sprinted toward the treeline.
We ran blindly into the coffee bushes. Branches whipped my face. Brambles tore at my jeans. Behind us, the shuffling sounds turned into thundering footsteps. The runners were coming.
We crashed through a line of bushes and tumbled down a steep embankment. We slid through mud and rocks, landing in a concrete drainage ditch—one of the massive storm channels built for the monsoon season.
"In there!" Nayla pointed to a massive culvert pipe. It was dark, smelling of sewage and rot.
"I am not going in there," I gasped, looking at the black water.
At the top of the ravine, silhouettes appeared against the moonlight. Simba. Dozens of them. They were sniffing the air. One of them let out a screech.
"Go!" I yelled, pushing her.
We scrambled into the pipe just as the first zombie tumbled down the hill. We ran deeper into the tunnel, the water rising to our ankles. We didn't stop until the light of the moon was a tiny dot behind us.
THE DEAD END
We have been sitting in this drain for an hour. It smells like chemical runoff and death.
Nayla is checking the revolver. "Two bullets," she muttered. "Better than nothing."
"I killed him," I said, staring at my hands. They were covered in mud, but I felt like they were stained red. "I didn't hesitate."
"You saved me," she said. She looked at me, and for the first time, her guard dropped. Her jaw was bruising purple. "Asante, Tyler. Thank you."
"We're lost," I said. "We're miles off course. We're in a sewer. And The Vultures are patrolling the streets."
"We aren't lost," she said, leaning back against the curved concrete wall. "This drain flows East. It comes out at the Old Textile Mill in the Industrial Zone."
"The Textile Mill?" I asked. "That place has been abandoned for twenty years."
"Exactly," she smiled grimly. "No Vultures. No Alphas. Just ghosts."
I checked my phone battery. 9%.
I don't know if we can make it to the Mill. I don't know if the storm drain is clear or if we're walking into a nest of them. But we can't go back.
The suburbs aren't safe. The humans are hunting us. The dead are hunting us.
I miss my fortress. I miss my walls.
But Nayla was right. Walls make you soft. Out here, you have to be hard. I looked at the nail gun. I pulled the nail strip out. Five nails left.
Five nails. Two bullets. Two people.
We keep moving.
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