PLATFORM: FACEBOOK TIMELINE
USER: TYLER JORDAN (Structural Engineer)
STATUS: UPLOADED VIA STARLINK (Signal Intermittent - Mesh Network Detected)
BATTERY: 11% (Critical)
DATE: WEDNESDAY. DAY 38 POST-EVENT (PRE-DAWN).
LOCATION: OLD MOSHI ROAD (Kilometer 12 Marker), ARUSHA HINTERLANDS
[Post Visibility: Public]
We are off the map.
The paved roads of the city ended ten miles ago. The streetlights—even the broken ones—are a distant memory. We are deep in the hinterlands now, the sprawling rural expanse that lies between the city of Arusha and the slopes of Mount Kilimanjaro.
For the last hour, the only sound in the world was the screaming engine of the stolen boda-boda motorcycle. I drove it like I was trying to outrun a demon. I kept the throttle pinned, the tires slipping on the loose gravel, kicking up a rooster tail of red dust that choked the moonlight.
Nayla clung to my back, her arms wrapped tight around my waist. I could feel her shivering against me. I don't know if it was from the cold wind rushing past us or the horror of what we saw on the bridge.
The image is burned into my retinas. The livestock truck. The exchange. The Vultures selling human beings like cattle, and the Alphas paying in lithium batteries. It loops in my head, over and over.
We aren't fighting a virus. We aren't fighting nature. We are fighting a supply chain.
Then, the bike died.
It didn't explode. It didn't crash. It just coughed—a dry, sputtering heave—and the engine cut out. The silence that followed was louder than the noise.
We rolled to a stop on a dirt path lined with tall banana trees. The front wheel wobbled in the soft sand, and I let the bike tip over. I didn't have the strength to hold it up.
We collapsed into the ditch. The adrenaline that had fueled our escape from the bridge evaporated, leaving behind a crushing weight of exhaustion and pain.
My chest is on fire. The sentry under the bridge—the oil-slicked creature—raked me with its claws. My shirt is shredded. My skin is torn. I can feel the blood drying sticky and tight against my ribs.
"We have to move," Nayla whispered. She was already standing, scanning the dark wall of banana leaves. "The Vultures have trucks. They will follow the tire tracks."
"I can't," I wheezed. "I need a minute."
"You don't have a minute, Engineer," she said, grabbing my arm. "If they catch us, we go into the truck. Do you want to see where the truck goes?"
That got me up.
THE GREEN MAZE
We left the road and pushed into the plantation.
This is the "Green Belt" of the region. It's a maze of banana trees, coffee bushes, and maize fields. In the daylight, it is lush and green. At night, under the pale light of a waning moon, it is a claustrophobic nightmare.
The banana leaves look like ragged ghosts. The maize stalks rustle like dry bones.
We walked for two hours. Every shadow looked like a Simba. Every snap of a twig sounded like a Vulture boot.
"Where are we going?" I asked. My voice was weak. The pain in my chest was throbbing in time with my heartbeat.
"There is a Mission Clinic near the old quarry," Nayla said, leading the way. She walked with the confidence of someone who knows the land. "It's run by the Sisters of Mary. It's secluded. Solar power. Water tank."
"Is it safe?"
"Nowhere is safe," she said. "But it might be empty."
We stumbled out of the maize field and saw it.
It was a small compound surrounded by a bougainvillea hedge. A single-story white building with a red tin roof. A wooden cross stood in the courtyard.
It looked peaceful. Abandoned.
But as an engineer, I look for signs of life. I look for patterns.
"Wait," I hissed, pulling Nayla down behind a water cistern.
"What?"
"Look at the roof," I pointed.
The solar panels on the roof of the clinic weren't dusty. They were clean. And there was a wire—a thick, black industrial cable—running from the panels, down the side of the building, and into a window that had been boarded up from the inside.
"Someone is home," I whispered.
"Or someone was home," Nayla said. "The panels are clean because someone maintains them. Maybe the Sisters are still alive."
"Or maybe the new owners moved in."
We watched the building for twenty minutes. No movement. No light. No sound.
"I need bandages," I said, looking at my chest. "And I need antibiotics. If this claw wound gets infected, I'm dead anyway."
"Okay," Nayla said, checking the revolver. She spun the cylinder. One bullet. "We breach. Quietly."
THE TRIAGE
We circled to the back door. It was locked, but the wood frame was rotted from the damp climate. I used a flat rock as a pry bar. With a wet crunch, the frame gave way.
We stepped inside.
The smell hit us instantly. But it wasn't the smell of death. It was the smell of ozone. Hot electronics. Solder.
We were in the kitchen area. It had been stripped. The stove was gone. The fridge was gone.
We moved into the main ward.
I stopped dead. Nayla gasped.
The clinic beds had been pushed against the walls. In the center of the room, on the tile floor, was a pile of electronics that would rival a recycling center in Tokyo.
Laptops. Tablets. Phones. Car batteries. Inverters.
They were stripped. The plastic casings had been cracked open. The circuit boards were exposed. Wires ran everywhere, connecting hundreds of devices into a central hub—a massive server rack that looked like it had been ripped out of a bank.
The cables from the solar panels on the roof fed directly into this monstrosity.
"What is this?" Nayla whispered, shining her light over the tangle of wires.
"It's a hive," I said, stepping closer. I touched a heat sink on the server. It was warm. "It's running. It's processing data."
"Who built this?"
I looked at the connections. They were crude but effective. Wires were twisted together and taped. Soldering had been done with intense heat, melting the plastic.
"Not humans," I said, a cold chill running down my spine. "No human engineer would wire a solar inverter directly to a motherboard like this. It's inefficient. It's brute force."
"The Alphas," Nayla said. "Baba John said they wanted the batteries. He said they were building a ladder to Heaven."
"They aren't building a ladder," I said, looking at the screen of a cracked laptop that was cycling through lines of code. "They are building a network."
I leaned in to look at the code. It wasn't C++ or Python. It was gibberish. Symbols I didn't recognize. Patterns that looked like fractals.
"Tyler," Nayla said sharply. "Sit down."
"I need to study this."
"You need to not bleed to death." She shoved me toward one of the empty beds. "Sit."
She rummaged through the glass cabinets on the wall. They had been looted, but the looters had taken the narcotics—the morphine, the oxycodone. They had left the boring stuff.
She came back with a bottle of antiseptic alcohol, a curved needle, and a spool of surgical thread.
"This is going to hurt," she said. "I don't have lidocaine."
"Just do it," I gritted my teeth.
She poured the alcohol over my chest. I screamed. It felt like liquid fire. The world went white for a second.
"Hold still," she ordered. Her hands, usually so steady, were trembling slightly.
She began to stitch. The needle pierced my skin. Tug. Loop. Knot.
"Talk to me," I gasped, trying to focus on anything but the needle. "Tell me why you came back."
"What?" She didn't look up from the wound.
"You said you were safe," I winced. "You were out of the city. Why did you come back to the Super-Mart? Why were you risking your life for a backpack of food?"
She paused. The needle hovered over my skin.
"I wasn't looking for food," she said quietly. "I was looking for patient records."
"Records?"
"My sister," she said. "She was in the ward when the hospital fell. She had the bite. I tagged her Black. I left her to... to wait."
She resumed stitching, faster now. "But when I went back, a week later... the bodies were gone. All the Black tags. Gone. There was no blood. No signs of a struggle. They had been moved."
"Moved where?"
"That's what I've been tracking," she said. "I found tracks leading to the Industrial District. Then to the bridge. I thought... I hoped she was immune. Or that someone had taken her."
She tied off the last knot and snipped the thread with my knife.
"But tonight," she looked at me, her eyes haunted. "Tonight I saw the truck. The livestock truck. Tyler... I think they have her. I think she is stock."
I looked at the pile of humming electronics in the center of the room. The Alphas were trading humans for machines.
"We will find her," I said. It was a promise I wasn't sure I could keep. "If she is alive, we will find her."
THE SIGNAL
Beep.
The sound came from my pocket.
I jumped. Nayla spun around, raising the revolver.
I pulled out my phone. 11% Battery.
But the screen wasn't black. It was glowing.
"I have a signal," I whispered.
"How?" Nayla asked. "The towers are dead. Starlink is overhead, but..."
"It's not Starlink," I said, tapping the screen. "Look at the WiFi."
I showed her. The phone was connected to a network. The SSID wasn't a name. It was a string of coordinates.
[ 03°22'S 36°41'E ]
"It's an open network," I said, my thumb hovering over the browser. "Broadcast range is massive. It must be coming from the server rack."
"What is it broadcasting?"
I opened the browser. It automatically redirected to a single page.
It wasn't a website. It was a map.
A digital map of Arusha and the surrounding area. There were hundreds of red dots moving in real-time.
"Are those..." Nayla pointed to a cluster of dots near the river.
"Zombies," I said. "The Packs. It's tracking them."
"How? They aren't wearing GPS trackers."
"The phones," I realized, looking at the pile of stripped electronics. "People died with their phones in their pockets. The Alphas... they aren't just collecting batteries. They are using the GPS chips in the dead people's phones to track their own army."
I zoomed out on the map.
The red dots were converging. They were moving from the city, from the bridge, from the suburbs. They were all heading North.
They were heading toward a single, pulsing green dot near the Kenyan border.
"What is that?" Nayla asked, pointing to the green dot.
"The destination," I said. "The Hive."
I checked the coordinates of the green dot. Namanga. The border town.
"That's where the truck went," Nayla whispered. "That's where they are taking the people."
Suddenly, the server rack in the center of the room changed its pitch. The hum grew louder. The fans spun up to maximum speed.
The lights on the modems turned from green to red.
"It knows we accessed it," I said, scrambling off the bed. "It's a two-way connection. We just pinged the network."
SCREEEEECH.
The sound came from outside. From the maize field.
It wasn't one scream. It was twenty.
"They found us," Nayla said, grabbing her bag. "The clinic is a node. We just tripped the silent alarm."
THE SIEGE
"The back door!" I yelled.
We ran to the kitchen. Through the broken doorframe, I saw them.
In the moonlight, the banana plantation was moving. The leaves were thrashing. Grey shapes were sprinting through the rows, closing in fast.
"Front door!" Nayla pivoted.
We ran to the front. Through the window, I saw more of them coming over the bougainvillea hedge. They were cutting off the exits.
"We're surrounded," I said. "They aren't herding us this time. They are converging."
"The roof," Nayla said, looking up.
"No," I shook my head, remembering the supermarket. "The roof is soft. They will tear through it."
I looked at the server rack. The massive pile of batteries and wires.
"Nayla," I said, a desperate idea forming in my engineer's brain. "How much pure alcohol is in that cabinet?"
"Three gallons," she said. "Industrial cleaning jugs."
"Grab them."
"Why?"
"We can't fight them," I said, grabbing the wires connecting the solar panels to the battery bank. "And we can't outrun them. But we can send a message."
I stripped the insulation off the main power cables. The spark was bright blue and angry.
"Pour the alcohol on the servers," I ordered. "Soak the batteries."
Nayla understood. She uncapped the jugs and splashed the clear liquid over the pile of electronics. The smell of fumes filled the room.
"What are you doing?" she asked, backing away.
"Thermal runaway," I said. "Lithium batteries burn hot. If I short the main bank into the solar feed, it won't just burn. It will explode."
The scratching started on the walls. The tin roof groaned as weight landed on it.
"They're here," she whispered.
I held the two main cables, one in each hand. The voltage hummed in my palms.
"Open the window," I said. "When I touch these wires, we jump."
"It's a ten-foot drop into the bushes."
"Better than being eaten."
She smashed the glass of the side window with the butt of the revolver.
"Ready?" I shouted over the sound of the roof tearing open.
"Ready!"
I slammed the positive and negative cables together.
CRACK-BOOM.
A blinding arc of plasma exploded from the battery bank. The alcohol ignited instantly in a whoosh of blue flame.
"Go!"
We dove out the window.
We hit the dirt and rolled. Behind us, the clinic turned into a bomb. The lithium cells went into a chain reaction.
BOOM. BOOM. BOOM.
The windows blew out. The roof lifted off. A fireball mushroomed into the night sky, turning the darkness into day.
The blast knocked the approaching Simba off their feet. The ones on the roof were incinerated.
We scrambled into the dense coffee bushes, the heat of the fire burning our backs. We didn't stop. We ran until the light of the burning clinic was just a glow on the horizon.
We are bruised, bleeding, and alone in the bush. But we have a map.
We know where they are going. We know where the truck is.
We are going to Namanga. We are going to the Hive.
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