Apocalypse Ground Zero: Refusing To Leave Home

Gu Han hadn’t brought us into the basement because he was caught. He thought this place proved he had found something useful. He thought I would look at twelve starving people chained under houses and see a tool I had been wasting.

"You want me to run your zombie delivery service," I said, making sure that I was understanding everything. I might not have finished high school, but that didn’t mean I was dumb.

Or at least not... ’let’s try to manipulate zombies instead of killing them, dumb’.

"You could make it precise," Gu Han pressed.

"Fuck you." Yeah, I said it. What was he going to do about it?

His face changed.

Apparently, that wasn’t the answer he had prepared for. "You’re allowing emotion to interfere with survival," he said after a minute like I was some hysterical, fainting female that couldn’t handle anything without crying or running to her man.

I looked at the four men around me and couldn’t help but smirk. I might not be running to them, but that didn’t mean they wouldn’t kill for me.

"No. I’m allowing the fact that I hate you to interfere with this conversation," I replied, not caring that Gu Han and his men had guns.

As if to support my decision, Chenghai’s hand moved against my back, steady and warm.

Zhenlan kept his attention on Gu Han, lightning moving beneath his skin.

Yuche opened another door, revealing a man chained by both ankles. He looked toward me and began crying without making any sound.

I was done looking at Gu Han’s collection through little openings.

"Open all of them," I told Yuche.

Gu Han took another step down. "That would be dangerous."

"So is talking to me, and yet, you keep doing it," I snapped back. Seriously, I was done.

Yuche lifted his hand and metal answered throughout the underground structure.

The first door tore away from its frame. Then another. Locks snapped beneath the houses on both sides of the street, and heavy doors crashed onto concrete floors.

The sound rolled through the entire cul-de-sac.

Above us, people started shouting as the hidden basement entrances ripped open inside their homes.

The marked survivors reacted immediately.

Some screamed.

Some tried to crawl into the hallway.

Others only lifted their heads and stared toward wherever they felt me standing.

My roots reached every open room.

Twelve threads flared through my scar.

For one second, I could feel all of them separately.

The woman with the broken leg.

The man barely breathing on the floor.

Two people beneath the house across the street.

Someone being moved through the tunnel farther east.

Then something huge beneath the city noticed that every door had opened at once.

The pressure didn’t come from the basement.

It came from much farther away, travelling back through the marked survivors and into the roots I had spread between them.

The woman in front of us jerked against the metal holding her.

Every person beneath the houses screamed at the same time.

I tried to pull my roots back.

The threads tightened first.

Then they all pulled from both sides.

The force of it drove straight through my calf and up the back of my leg, dragging hard enough that my knee gave out beneath me. Chenghai caught me around the middle before I hit the concrete, but the basement had already disappeared behind a rush of streets, houses, and dead things turning in the same direction.

The woman in the first room jerked against the chain around her waist. Farther down the hallway, someone screamed until their voice cracked. Metal doors shook inside the other houses as the people behind them fought restraints they probably couldn’t even see anymore.

The thing beneath the city had found them.

Worse, it had found me through them.

My roots tightened inside the walls, but pulling them back didn’t close anything. The threads had become stretched lines running in both directions, with the people beneath the houses trapped in the middle.

I tried to tear my hand away from the concrete.

Zhenlan caught my wrist and yanked it back.

The basement slammed into place around me again. The pain inside my scar remained, and the threads stayed bright enough that I could feel every marked person beneath the cul-de-sac.

"That didn’t close it," I said.

Chenghai lifted me away from the wall while Zhenlan moved between us and the stairs. Lightning spread over his hands, filling the hallway with sharp white flashes that made the broken doors look even worse.

A gun fired from the house above us.

The bullet struck the concrete beside the stairs and sprayed chips across the floor. Chenghai turned before they reached me, taking the worst of it across his back while Zhenlan sent lightning through the doorway.

Someone shouted upstairs. A weapon hit the floor, followed by a body.

Yuche lifted one hand.

Every loose piece of metal inside the house answered him. Guns tore free upstairs, ripping through doorframes and dragging men off balance before flying down the stairwell. Magazines, knives, loose ammunition, and several pieces of body armor twisted together in the air.

Yuche crushed the entire mess into a solid lump and drove it into the wall. "Upstairs," he grunted.

Chenghai didn’t need to be told twice. He carried me toward the steps while Zhenlan stayed behind us, covering the hallway as the marked people kept screaming from their rooms.

The closer we got to the main floor, the louder the noise outside became.

Glass shattered as something heavy slammed into the front wall and then I smelled burning rot.

Lingyun stood near the front entrance with his injured side angled away from the door. Fire covered one hand while the other remained pressed firmly over the vest around his ribs.

A zombie burned on the living-room floor.

Yuche came up behind Zhenlan and stopped when he saw him. His expression hardened as he looked from the corpse to the dark stain spreading beneath Lingyun’s vest.

Lingyun noticed and pointed at the body. "That one came inside."

Yuche sent a strip of metal across the room. It wrapped around the front-door handle and pulled it shut before anything else could reach the opening.

"You stay behind the wall," he told Lingyun. "Use the windows if you have to burn something."

Lingyun glanced toward the door, clearly deciding whether that instruction had enough room for creative interpretation.

Yuche looked at him once and Lingyun moved behind the remaining section of wall.

Good. That was handled.

Chenghai carried me through the back of the house instead of using the front entrance. Zhenlan blasted the boards from the kitchen window, and we climbed through into the narrow yard behind it.

The clean little settlement Gu Han had shown us was already gone.

Zombies packed the road outside the northern barricade, pushing through every opening and climbing over the bodies that had fallen ahead of them. More appeared between houses, broke through fences, and dragged themselves across yards that had been empty when we arrived.

And they weren’t wandering.

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