PLATFORM: FACEBOOK TIMELINE
USER: TYLER JORDAN
STATUS: ONLINE via Starlink (High Altitude Connection)
BATTERY: 4% (CRITICAL) -> CHARGING
DATE: TUESDAY. DAY 37 POST-EVENT.
LOCATION: OLD INDUSTRIAL DISTRICT (Sector 4 - Crane Cab 3)
[Post Visibility: Public]
We emerged from the ground like ghosts, covered in slime and smelling of a death so old it felt prehistoric.
The climb out of the storm drain was the hardest physical thing I have ever done. The iron ladder rungs were slick with algae and rot. My fingers, numb from the freezing water, struggled to grip the rusted metal. Every muscle in my body screamed in protest, begging me to just let go and fall back into the dark.
But I didn't. I pushed the heavy manhole cover up, straining until my vision spotted with white light. It scraped against the asphalt—a harsh, grinding sound that announced our arrival to the world—and flipped over.
We crawled out into the "Rust Belt."
This part of the city had been dead long before the zombies showed up. It was a graveyard of American industry. Skeletal smokestacks rose into the grey sky like broken fingers. Collapsed warehouses, their roofs caved in decades ago, sat like rotting carcasses. Mountains of scrap metal, twisted and sharp, created a jagged horizon of orange oxidation.
The sun was coming up. The light was weak, filtering through the morning mist, but after hours in the pitch-black sewers, it felt blinding. It burned my retinas.
Nayla stumbled as her boots hit the gravel. She fell to her knees, gasping for air. She looked terrible. The muck from the sewer coated her hair and clothes, turning her into a statue of filth. But it was her face that scared me.
She winced, touching her jaw with a trembling hand. The side of her face was swollen, distorting her features. It was bruising a deep, angry purple where the looter in the park had pistol-whipped her.
"Let me see," I said, my voice rasping.
"It's fine," she muttered, trying to push herself up. She failed and slumped back down.
"Nayla, stop being tough for a second," I said, kneeling beside her. "Let me look."
She hesitated, then turned her face toward the light. I gently touched her jawline. Her skin was hot—too hot. Fever hot.
"It's not broken," I said, my fingers probing the bone structure. I'm not a doctor, but I know stress fractures. The bone felt intact. "But the cut from the sight of the gun... it's deep. And with this sewer water? It's going to get infected fast."
She looked at me, her eyes glassy. "There's a triage center," she whispered, pointing a shaking finger toward a massive warehouse about two hundred yards away. It had a faded, peeling FEMA cross painted on the corrugated metal siding. "From the early days. When the National Guard tried to hold the factories."
"That was five weeks ago," I said. "It'll be looted."
"Maybe," she said. "Maybe not. People ran from this place. Nobody runs toward the factories."
THE GHOSTS OF FEMA
We moved through the maze of dormant machinery to reach the warehouse. The silence here was different than the suburbs. In the suburbs, the silence felt heavy, like it was waiting to be broken. Here, the silence felt permanent. Like the world had simply stopped turning.
We pushed open the side door of the warehouse. It groaned on rusted hinges.
Inside, it was a snapshot of panic. Cots were overturned. IV poles lay scattered on the floor like pick-up sticks. There were dried bloodstains on the concrete, brown and flaking. But Nayla was right—it hadn't been fully scavenged. It looked like the people here had fled in the middle of treatment, leaving everything behind in a desperate bid to escape a breach.
Nayla collapsed onto a dusty plastic chair. "Check the yellow bins," she directed. "Biohazard disposal. Sometimes... sometimes we threw the good stuff in there to hide it from the looters."
I walked over to a yellow bin in the corner. I kicked the lid off. Inside, amidst bloody gauze and empty syringes, was a sealed plastic bag.
I pulled it out. It was a tactical first-aid kit.
"Jackpot," I whispered.
I brought it back to her. I opened the kit and found a treasure trove: antiseptic scrub, sealed gauze, antibiotic ointment, and a bottle of high-strength ibuprofen.
"This is going to sting," I warned her, soaking a piece of gauze in the antiseptic.
"Just do it," she said, closing her eyes.
I cleaned the wound. She didn't scream, but her hand gripped my wrist so hard her fingernails dug into my skin. I watched her face—the way she gritted her teeth, the way a single tear escaped her eye and cut a clean track through the dirt on her cheek.
For a moment, the apocalypse faded. We weren't a Civil Engineer and a Nurse fighting off the undead. We were just two humans, battered and broken, trying to fix each other.
"You have good hands," she murmured as I applied the ointment and taped the bandage in place. "Steady."
"It's the engineering," I said quietly. "Precision."
"No," she opened her eyes and looked at me. "It's care. You care, Tyler. You act like you're this cold, logical machine who only cares about walls and supplies. But you aren't."
I sat back on my heels, looking at my dirty hands. "I have to be cold. If I start feeling everything... I'll break. My dad... he was a man who felt everything. He drank to drown it. I promised myself I'd never drown."
"We're all drowning," she said softly. "You just built a better boat."
We sat there for twenty minutes, letting the painkillers kick in, sharing a packet of stale water we found in the kit. It was the first time since the Super-Mart fell that I felt... human.
Then, the noise started.
Clang.
It came from outside. A sharp, metallic sound. Metal hitting metal.
I froze. Nayla's hand went instantly to the revolver in her lap.
Clang... Clang... Clang.
It wasn't the wind. Wind is random. This was rhythmic. It was deliberate.
"Do you hear that?" I whispered.
"Yeah," she said, standing up. The pain in her face was masked by focus now. "That's not a walker. Walkers drag their feet. That's something else."
"Scavengers?" I asked.
"Maybe. Keep your eyes on the high ground."
THE PACK
We moved to the exit, peering through the crack in the door. The sun was fully up now, casting long, sharp shadows across the scrapyard. The rhythmic clanging had stopped, leaving an oppressive silence in its wake.
"I don't see anything," I said.
"They're here," Nayla whispered. "I can feel them."
We stepped out into the open. The air was still.
Then I saw movement on top of a stack of shipping containers to our left.
It was a zombie. But not like the ones I had seen in the parking lot. This one was gaunt, its skin pulled tight over its bones like dried leather. It was wearing the tatters of an orange industrial jumpsuit. It wasn't standing upright; it was crouched on all fours, perched on the edge of the container like a gargoyle.
It didn't screech. It didn't roar. It just watched us, cocking its head to the side in a bird-like twitch.
"Don't run," Nayla hissed, grabbing my arm. Her grip was iron. "If you run, you trigger the chase instinct."
I looked to the right. Another one. Crouched on a rusted bulldozer.
I looked behind us. Two more, standing on the roof of the warehouse we just left.
"A Pack," Nayla said, her voice trembling slightly. "I've heard rumors about them. They hunt in groups. They flank."
"They have us surrounded," I said, raising my nail gun. My hand shook. I had five nails left. There were six of them visible. And these things looked fast.
"No," Nayla observed, her eyes darting around the perimeter, calculating the geometry of the ambush. "Look at the gap. To the North."
She was right. The zombies formed a perfect semi-circle, blocking the South, East, and West. But the path to the North—a wide lane cutting through the scrap piles toward the river—was completely open.
"They aren't attacking," I realized, a cold chill running down my spine that had nothing to do with the sewer water. "They're herding us."
"Like sheep," Nayla whispered.
"Why?"
"I don't know," she said. "But my grandfather used to herd cattle. You leave a gate open so the cows think it's their idea to go through. You never chase them into a corner."
One of the zombies on the container snarled—a wet, clicking sound from the back of its throat—and made a feint, jumping down to the ground.
I flinched. I squeezed the trigger of the nail gun. Thwip.
The nail hit the metal container inches from the zombie's head with a useless ping.
The zombie didn't attack. It just hopped back up onto the container, looking at me with milky, dead eyes. It was mocking me. It was a correction. Get back on the path, sheep.
"We have to break the line," I said. "If they want us to go North, North is death."
"The crane," Nayla pointed.
Towering over the scrapyard was a massive, rusted gantry crane. It ran on rails the length of the yard. The operator's cab was a glass box suspended forty feet in the air.
"If we get up there, we can cross over their heads," she said. "The gantry connects to the other side of the yard."
"Go."
We bolted.
The moment we broke into a run, the silence shattered. The Pack screeched—a sound of pure, predatory frustration. They dropped from their perches and sprinted.
They didn't shamble. They ran on all fours, their limbs moving in a blur of rotting motion. They moved like wolves.
"Faster!" I yelled.
We sprinted toward the crane's support leg. There was a caged safety ladder leading up.
Nayla hit the ladder first. She scrambled up, her boots clanging on the rungs. I was right behind her. I could hear the wet slap of their feet on the gravel behind me. I could hear their breathing—ragged, wet gasps.
I grabbed the ladder rails. A hand grabbed my ankle.
It was cold. The grip was crushing.
I looked down. One of the leather-skinned zombies had lunged, grabbing my boot. Its jaw unhinged, snapping at my calf.
I screamed and kicked down. My heavy work boot connected with its face. I felt the nose cartilage collapse under my heel. I kicked again, harder. Teeth shattered. The grip loosened.
I scrambled up the rungs, hauling myself up just as the rest of the Pack swarmed the base of the ladder. They leaped at the cage, clawing at the metal, screeching in rage.
We climbed until we reached the catwalk. We collapsed on the metal grating, forty feet in the air, gasping for breath.
Below us, the Pack paced back and forth. They didn't try to climb.
"They aren't built for climbing," Nayla panted, clutching her ribs. "They're runners. Flat ground predators."
THE TRUTH FROM ABOVE
We walked along the rusted catwalk to the operator's cab. It was a small, dusty glass box suspended over the yard. I forced the door open. It smelled of old grease, stale tobacco, and dust.
From this height, the geography of our trap became terrifyingly clear.
I looked North, toward the river. I saw exactly where the Pack had been steering us.
The main bridge crossing the river was still standing. It was heavily barricaded with concrete jersey barriers and razor wire. But it wasn't a military blockade meant to stop the dead.
There were trucks parked on the bridge. Trucks with reinforced bumpers and welded cages over the windows. On the side of the lead truck, I could see the symbol: A red skull with a gear crank through the eye.
The Vultures.
There were men standing on the bridge, looking through binoculars toward the scrapyard. They were waiting.
"The Vultures," I said, pointing through the dirty glass. "They control the bridge."
"They were herding us to them," Nayla whispered, her face draining of color. She slumped against the control panel. "The zombies... they're working with them?"
"Or the humans are feeding them," I said, my mind racing. "It's a symbiosis. Think about it. The Vultures guard the bridge. The zombies herd the strays—people like us—toward the choke point. The Vultures capture us, rob us, or worse... and maybe they give the zombies a cut. Or maybe the Alphas just let the Vultures live as long as they provide a service."
It was a sick ecosystem. And we were just biomass moving through the system.
We are stuck in this cab. We can't go down—the Pack is waiting. We can't go North—the Vultures are waiting.
Then, my phone beeped in my pocket. A low, dying chirp.
I pulled it out. 4% Battery.
"No, no, no," I muttered, tapping the screen. "I need power. If this phone dies, we lose the offline maps. We lose the satellite link. We lose the only way to find your Safe House."
"It's dead, Tyler," Nayla said. "We're trapped in a rusted box."
I looked at the control panel of the crane. It was ancient. Heavy switches, analog dials. Dead, obviously. But industrial equipment is built to last. It's built with redundancies.
"Nayla, give me the knife," I said, my voice steadying.
"What are you doing?"
"I'm an engineer," I said. "This crane runs on a massive diesel generator, which is dead. But the control panel? The emergency brakes? Those run on a 24-volt DC backup circuit. Lead-acid batteries. If they sealed the unit properly..."
I popped the cover off the control panel with the tip of the knife. Underneath was a nest of dusty wires.
"This is 24 volts," I muttered to myself. "My phone needs 5 volts. If I plug it in directly, it explodes."
I looked around the cab. I found a dusty heavy-duty flashlight in the emergency box. I smashed it open and pulled out the resistor coil.
"Okay," I whispered. "Step-down transformer. Crude. Very crude. But it might work."
I stripped the ends of my phone charger cable with the knife. My hands were shaking, but this was familiar territory. This was math. This was circuits. The world outside didn't make sense, but electricity? Electricity follows rules.
I twisted the phone wires around the resistor, then touched them to the contacts behind the emergency stop button on the crane panel.
Spark.
Nayla flinched. "You're going to blow it up."
"Trust me," I said.
I adjusted the connection, scraping away years of corrosion to find clean copper.
Buzz.
My phone screen lit up in the dim cabin. The grey battery icon turned green. A lightning bolt appeared.
CHARGING.
I let out a breath I didn't know I was holding. A hysterical laugh bubbled up in my throat.
"We have power," I said, watching the percentage tick from 4% to 5%. "We are trapped in a glass box above an army of monsters and a bridge of murderers, but I have power."
"What good does that do us?" Nayla asked.
I looked at the massive levers on the crane's control panel. Then I looked down at the Pack pacing below us, and the Vultures waiting on the bridge.
"I'm charging up to 100%," I said. "And while I do that, I'm going to figure out if there is enough juice left in these batteries to release the magnetic brake on the trolley."
"Why?"
I pointed to the massive steel hook block hanging from the crane, suspended directly over the zombies' heads. It weighed at least two tons.
"Because," I said, "I think it's time we dropped the hammer."
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