Apocalypse Ground Zero: Refusing To Leave Home

Zhenlan’s expression made it clear that he had also noticed that the big ugly thing in front of us was healing itself.

The creature pulled itself forward on six arms. Its lower body dragged through the broken floor behind it, wrapped in chains and pieces of concrete from the tunnel.

And one of those chains still had a man attached.

He hung from the end by both wrists, his feet scraping over the rubble while he screamed my name.

I recognized the thread immediately.

He was one of the two marked people I had felt moving on the road. Gu Han hadn’t sent him toward another shelter. He had dragged him into the tunnel and left him there as bait.

The creature had followed him back.

I looked at Gu Han. "You put people inside the tunnel."

He followed my gaze toward the man attached to the chain. "It was the only way to confirm what lived there."

For a few seconds, I genuinely had nothing to say. His answer wasn’t complicated. It was simply so fucking stupid that my brain needed time to climb over it.

"You fed people to it because you were curious?" I demanded, incredulously.

"They were already infected," Gu Han snapped back like that was all the reason he needed. I wasn’t the most sentimental of people, but that was cruel even for me.

"And now it’s standing in your living room," I snapped right back.

Gu Han looked around at the ruined houses, burning vehicles, and zombies pouring through the barricades before pointing at me with his free hand. "This only happened because you opened the doors."

There it was.

I almost respected how committed he was to never being responsible for anything.

Almost.

The creature lunged toward us, but Chenghai met it before it reached the road. He caught one of its larger arms and planted both feet against the pavement. The limb stopped, although the rest of the creature continued stretching toward him until Zhenlan cut a second arm away with lightning.

The severed limb hit the ground and kept crawling.

"No," I said, because absolutely not.

My roots burst through the pavement and wrapped around it. The mouths beneath the soil opened and tore the arm apart before it could reach anyone.

Rot, old blood, and green power flooded through the roots.

There were too many cores inside it.

Dozens.

Some were weak, while others burned brightly enough that I could feel them through layers of dead flesh. They weren’t spread randomly through one evolved zombie. Each core belonged to a different body that had been forced into the whole.

The creature wasn’t one evolved zombie. It was a pile of them, with dozens of green cores trapped inside bodies that had somehow been pressed together and kept alive.

I had no idea what the fuck it was.

The tether reacted to it, but that didn’t mean the Devourer had made it. The tether reacted to every bitten person beneath the street too, and none of them had twelve arms or other people’s faces growing out of their backs.

Whatever had happened inside those tunnels, Gu Han had poked it with human bait until it followed him home.

Because he was a moron like that.

The creature’s sealed eyes split open. Dark green light filled the cracks as the tether inside my calf pulled hard enough to blur my vision.

Zhenlan caught my shoulders and steadied me without blocking my view. "Rouxi?"

"I have no idea what the fuck it is," I admitted. "But it’s full of green cores."

Chenghai continued holding the creature’s largest arm away from us, his boots grinding against the pavement as it tried to drag him closer. "Can you kill it?"

"Probably," I replied, cocking my head to the side.

That was close enough.

I drove my roots beneath the creature, forcing them through every crack in the road and between the chains hanging from its body. They pushed into the gaps between the fused corpses until they reached the green cores buried inside.

Then they bit down.

The creature screamed through every mouth at once, shattering the remaining windows along the street. Zombies climbing over the barricades turned toward the sound, but Lingyun spread a wall of fire across the road before they could reach the yard.

Yuche ripped metal from the ruined trucks and drove it through the creature’s lower body, pinning it against the remains of the house. Chenghai forced the largest arm against the pavement while Zhenlan sent lightning through the sections my roots had opened, cracking several exposed cores.

The creature convulsed hard enough to shake the road.

Green power flooded through my roots as they pulled. There was so much of it that the plants beneath the cul-de-sac swelled against the pavement, splitting the road as new vines forced their way into the open. They wrapped around the creature’s remaining limbs and tore at whatever parts continued moving.

The fused bodies began coming apart, and let’s face it, nothing involving that many corpses was ever going to be neat.

Gu Han watched it die and finally realized that no one was watching him.

He ran toward the open basement entrance, probably thinking the tunnel still offered him an escape route. Maybe he planned to hide behind the prisoners and wait for us to finish cleaning up the mess he had made.

Either way, he only made it three steps before my roots wrapped around his ankles.

Gu Han hit the road face-first. His fingernails scraped against the pavement as I dragged him backward, leaving thin bloody lines behind him.

"Let me go!" he shouted.

"No."

"You need me! I know the tunnels and the settlements. I can give you supplies, routes, people—"

"I already have food."

"Then take the settlement!"

"I don’t want it."

His face twisted because, even now, he couldn’t understand that answer. "You can’t keep wasting everything!"

There it was again.

My food was wasted because he didn’t own it. My house was wasted because I refused to fill it with strangers. My men were wasted because they chose to stay with me instead of standing behind him while he pretended to be important.

Even my no had been wasted because he had never believed it counted.

I walked closer while the roots rolled him onto his back and tightened around his legs. "You know what your problem is?"

Gu Han stared up at me, breathing hard as the roots climbed over his waist. I didn’t wait for him to answer because I had already wasted enough time listening to him.

"You thought I was negotiating. I told you no before the apocalypse, and I told you no after it. Somehow, you kept hearing ’try again later.’"

"You’re killing people by refusing to cooperate," he spat.

"No. You killed people because you couldn’t stand being told to fuck off."

Behind me, the creature screamed as Zhenlan’s lightning cracked the last large core. My plants tore it free, sending another rush of green power through the roots, and Gu Han turned his head toward the sound.

That was the last thing he saw before the roots wrapped around his throat and dragged him beneath the broken road.

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