PLATFORM: FACEBOOK TIMELINE
USER: TYLER JORDAN
STATUS: UPLOADED VIA BATCH (Cached at 04:15 AM, Uploaded 07:30 AM)
BATTERY: 28%
LOCATION: ARUSHA MUNICIPAL STORM DRAINS (Sector: Industrial Zone)
DATE: TUESDAY. DAY 37.
[Post Visibility: Public]
We are underground.
I am thumbing this onto the screen with the brightness turned down to the lowest setting, huddled on a slick concrete ledge inside the municipal storm drain system. Above us, the city of Arusha is waking up—or whatever passes for waking up now that the Simba run the streets. Below us, a river of black, fetid water rushes by, carrying the trash of a dead civilization toward the plains.
The smell down here is physical. It's a thick, heavy blanket of sewage, rotting vegetable matter, and rusted iron. It tastes like copper penny on the back of my tongue. Every time I take a breath, I feel like I'm inhaling the decay of the entire world.
We have been walking for three hours. The adrenaline from the park—the gunshot, the scream, the man I killed—has faded, leaving behind a cold, shaking exhaustion.
THE WEIGHT OF THE NAIL
We stopped to rest in a junction chamber where two feeder pipes connect. It's a cathedral of stained concrete, dripping with condensation.
Nayla sat down against the curved wall, pulling her knees to her chest. She looked small in the darkness. She was holding the rusted revolver we took from the looter I killed. She popped the cylinder open, spun it, and clicked it shut.
Click-clack.
She did it again. Click-clack.
"You're going to strip the mechanism," I whispered, the sound echoing too loudly in the pipe.
She looked up. Her face was smeared with mud, and her jaw was swelling—a deep purple bruise bloom where the man had pistol-whipped her.
"I need to keep my hands busy, Tyler," she said, her voice hollow. "If I stop moving, the ghosts catch up."
I sat down next to her. The concrete was freezing, leaching the heat from my bones. I looked at the nail gun clipped to my belt. It's a DeWalt framing nailer, modified to run off a portable compressed air tank. It's a tool for building houses. Tonight, I used it to end a life.
"I didn't hesitate," I said quietly. It was a confession I needed to make. "When he pointed that gun at you... I didn't think about it. I just calculated the trajectory. Center mass. trigger pull. recoil."
"He was going to kill me," Nayla said.
"He was human," I countered. "He was scared. Maybe hungry. And I put three inches of steel into his throat like he was a piece of 2x4 lumber."
"You saved me," she said, turning to face me. "Don't analyze it, Engineer. You did the math. One of us lives, or none of us live. You balanced the equation."
"Is that how you slept at night?" I asked. "At the hospital?"
She flinched. I regretted the question immediately, but it was out there now, hanging in the damp air.
"At Mount Meru?" She stared into the dark rushing water. "No. I didn't sleep. You have to understand... Arusha is the gateway to the parks. The Serengeti. Ngorongoro. When the infection started, it didn't come from the city. It came from the bush. Tourists came in with bites. Safari guides came in with fevers."
She took a shaky breath. "We filled the wards in twelve hours. Then the hallways. Then the parking lot. I was Head of Triage. I had a marker pen and a stack of colored tags. Green for walking. Yellow for urgent. Black for... expectant."
"Expectant?"
"Dead," she whispered. "Waiting to die. On the second day, we ran out of painkillers. On the third day, the generator died. I had mothers begging me to save their babies. I had to look at a child with a fever of 40 degrees and a bite mark on his arm, and I had to draw a black 'X' on his forehead. I wasn't a nurse, Tyler. I was the Angel of Death."
She looked at me, her eyes wet. "So don't talk to me about killing one bad man in a park. You killed a predator. I killed the innocent."
I reached out and took her hand. Her skin was rough, calloused, but warm. We sat there in the dark, two murderers holding hands, trying to convince ourselves we were still the good guys.
THE ANOMALY
"We need to move," Nayla said after a while, standing up and wiping her eyes. "The water is rising. If it rains up in the hills, this pipe becomes a pressurized drowning chamber."
She was right. The water level had crept up an inch while we sat there.
We moved deeper into the system, heading East toward the Industrial Area. The pipe widened. The sound of the water changed from a splash to a deep, guttural roar.
As an engineer, I listen to flow. Water tells a story. And the story this water was telling didn't make sense.
"Hold on," I said, stopping. I shined my flashlight ahead.
The tunnel we were in was a main artery—twelve feet wide. It should have been half-full of water rushing toward the treatment plant.
But the water was backing up. It was swirling, deep and angry, churning against something in the darkness ahead.
"It's blocked," Nayla hissed. "Debris?"
"No," I said, walking closer to the edge of the water. "Debris is chaotic. Debris lets water filter through. This is... solid."
We waded forward. The water rose to my thighs, cold and heavy. The smell got worse—a concentrated stench of rot that made my eyes water.
Then, the beam of my light hit the blockage.
I stopped dead. My brain refused to process the visual data.
It wasn't a pile of trash. It wasn't a collapsed ceiling.
It was a wall of flesh.
"Oh God," I choked out.
Dozens upon dozens of the infected—the Simba—were piled across the width of the tunnel. But they weren't just a heap of bodies. They were stacked. Interlocked.
The ones at the bottom were lying face down, submerged. The next layer was laid crosswise. Limbs were woven together like wicker. They had created a watertight seal using their own bodies as sandbags.
The pressure of the water was immense, pushing against them, but the wall held. The flow was being violently forced into a smaller, secondary overflow pipe on the left-hand wall.
"They're diverting the river," Nayla whispered, her voice trembling.
"This is impossible," I argued, the rational part of my mind screaming. "The dead don't do civil engineering. They don't understand hydrodynamics. Building a dam takes planning. It takes communication."
"The Alphas do," she said grimly. She pointed to the overflow pipe where the water was blasting through. "Think about it, Tyler. Where are the survivors hiding? The smart ones? The ones who escaped the initial purge?"
"Basements," I realized, the horror dawning on me. "Cellars. Underground parking garages."
"Exactly," she said. "They are flooding the Undercity. They are flushing the rats out of the holes. If you fill the basements with water, the humans have to come up. Up to the street. Up to the hunters."
She turned the flashlight beam onto my face. "We are the rats."
I looked at the dam again. The scale of it was terrifying. This wasn't instinct. This was warfare. They were terraforming the city to hunt us.
"We have to go through the overflow pipe," I said, eyeing the dark, dry-ish tunnel on the left where the water was rushing.
"No," Nayla grabbed my wrist, her grip bruising. "That's exactly where they expect the water to push us. That tunnel is a choke point. It leads straight to a kill box."
"So what's the alternative?" I gestured to the blockage. "The main tunnel is sealed."
"We climb," she said. She raised her light, illuminating the top of the corpse wall. There was a small gap, maybe two feet, between the top layer of bodies and the ceiling of the sewer. "We go over them."
My stomach lurched violently. "You want me to crawl over a wall of... them?"
"Do you want to live to see the sunrise?" she snapped, her nurse's pragmatism taking over. "Or do you want to die down here in the dark?"
THE LIVING MASONRY
She didn't wait for my vote. She waded toward the wall.
I followed, my legs feeling like they were moving through molasses. Up close, the barricade was a nightmare of texture. Soaking wet fabric. Cold, rubbery skin. Tangled hair floating like seaweed.
I reached out to find a handhold. I grabbed a cold, stiff arm sticking out of the pile. It felt like grabbing a raw side of beef.
"Don't look at their faces," Nayla whispered from above me. "Just climb."
I put my boot on the back of a corpse wearing a torn mechanic's jumpsuit. The flesh gave way under my weight with a sickening, wet squelch. Gases released from the body, bubbling up through the water. I gagged, tasting bile, but I pulled myself up.
It was a scramble. Slippery. Unstable. Every time I moved, the wall shifted slightly, groaning under the water pressure.
I hauled myself up to the top layer. I was lying flat on my stomach, crawling through the narrow gap between the bodies and the concrete ceiling.
I paused to catch my breath. My face was inches away from the face of the zombie that made up the top row of the dam.
It was a young woman. Her hair was matted with slime. Her skin was marble-white, bloated from the water. Her mouth was slack, filled with black sludge.
I thought she was dead. Truly dead.
And then, her eyes snapped open.
They weren't cloudy. They were bright, piercing yellow.
I froze. My heart stopped beating. I waited for the bite. I waited for the screech.
But she didn't attack.
She didn't move her jaw. She didn't reach for me. She simply shifted her yellow eyes, tracking me as I crawled over her.
She was alive.
She wasn't a corpse; she was a sentry. She was voluntarily holding her breath, holding her place in the wall, suffering the weight of the water and the other bodies for the sake of the design.
She was a living brick in a wall of death.
The intelligence in her eyes was terrifying. She knew what she was doing. She knew I was there. But her orders were to hold the line, not to break formation.
"Move!" I gasped, scrambling frantically, digging my elbows into her back to propel myself forward.
I threw myself down the other side of the dam, splashing into the shallow, filthy water on the far side. I grabbed Nayla's arm and yanked her forward.
"Run!" I wheezed. "Run!"
We sprinted through the darkness, our boots slapping against the wet concrete. We didn't stop until my lungs burned like fire and the sound of the rushing water faded into the distance.
We found a maintenance ladder a mile down the line. We climbed up, pushing open a heavy iron grate, and collapsed onto the gravel of the Industrial District.
The air smelled of rust and diesel, but to me, it smelled like freedom.
I lay on my back, looking up at the smoggy stars. I scraped the slime off my hands, rubbing them raw against the rocks, but the feeling wouldn't go away.
They aren't just monsters. They are engineers. They are soldiers. And they are building a new world out of our bones.
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