Sun burned Anya’s pale cheeks through the visor of her mask. Lack of melatonin didn’t pay off during bright afternoons. The square had a convenient promenade on the first floor of the buildings around and, luckily for her, it was free of walking mycoids—an ideal spot for a lookout. She set up her sniper rifle on the minimalist railing. From this viewpoint, she could see the whole city square.

Teenagers from the bunker had a good idea about the previous life outside, but some of it seemed surreal. Anya’s memories were blurred with childhood outlook, when most of the importance was put on ice cream stands, aqua parks, and weekends at grandma’s. She was only nine when everything in her life turned upside down.

She scoured the empty buildings with her scope. The Headland, called so because it was sticking high up above the coast underneath, had a particular theme to it. Inspiration with natural elements was intertwined within every city block. Since it was the very top level of Apilos, the architects were set on building it a crown it truly deserved; a giant, living monument to wilderness which was mostly lost with societal development and world globalization.

And now, after just several years, it all faded behind fungi matter and crackled apart. The living green walls were mostly overrun with weeds and small birches. Public areas, designed with high ceilings, bending, root-like curves, ovals, and optical illusions, widening the enclosed spaces, shrank to half the size because of the piled up rubbish and variety of dead things. Although it was sometimes hard to tell a museum from an office building, the city was still a large-scale project, so even in this condition everyone could tell that every building, every sidewalk, every angle had its purpose and place. Some would maybe say it finally lives its true, wild potential.

As she watched the lifeless oval square, a vague feeling of familiarity poured over her—the scent of fresh bread and bitter coffee her mom used to drink after lunch. Or she thought she did. With the fungus overgrowing most of the areas, Anya often wondered if her deja vus were triggered by the fungi patterns or if she really visited some of these places during the ‘before’ times.

On the opposite side of the small square above one of the store entrances hung a big green cross and the target of today’s run. Down on the pavement were remnants of dried up human bodies, partially ingrown in the woody piles of amorphous, cinnamon brown matter; a scene that didn’t phase them anymore. Among them, she found the moving targets easily.

Quinn and Maya slowly crept through an open arcade below the promenade. The plan was to take what they could gather, and make a run for the shelter before their air filters clogged up. Just the usual. The Summit district was pretty far from the dump. Not as far as the Forest, but it was the most southeastern part of the city. This was the highest part of Apolis, the sea’s edge, where people used to travel to see the ocean and relax on fake, chlorine beaches built hundreds of meters above sea level.

All three of them had black, head-to-toe Runner suits with only three electricity-powered devices—face masks checking their filter clogging, simple walkie talkies, and guns equipped with discharge ammo. The uniform circuit was powered by breathing and had the voltage of a calculator; the fungus didn’t notice so little; it could notice energy of the guns, but they were only switched on when needed.

“Anya, tell me what you’ve got,” crackled through her helmet radio.

One walker limped across the trashy square, silent and slow, with no obvious goal. His left leg was thicker, swollen with fungal tissue, too heavy to pull up and partly ground off from being pulled behind him.

“I’m counting seven mycoids total. Only three are on the way to the shop,” she replied while she scanned the area. “One is hobbling in your direction from your right but you should be fine behind the Flare 5i, and the other two are cut off by trash far away on the eastern side.”

Quinn sighed. “Flare 5i, that’s the black or the blue car?”

“Blue.”

“Nerd,” said Maya.

“It’s not my fault that you don’t read the culture manuals,” Anya said, referring to manuals describing and explaining modern technology before the pandemic that were specially written for the younger runners to get better knowledge of things they might encounter.

“We do, but you’re the only one who bothers to remember all the details…”

Quinn continued forward with Maya right behind him. They approached the parked cars from the left and moved to the open square away from silent danger behind corners and shadows that the arcade could be hiding.

“Wow,” Anya chuckled. “You just admitted that I’m better than you.”

Maya smiled. “Right, what part of ‘look at my gym test scores and then count how much time it takes to scroll all the way down to yours’ do you struggle with?”

“I’m surprised you can read the rankings since you can’t read the car model on its trunk when it’s right in front of you.”

“Stop playing, you’ll attract the walker,” Quinn shut down their little game with a resolute whisper.

Maya checked the vehicles and had to admit their loss. “Fine, you got me…”

The blue car was parked at the square’s perimeter and just across the pharmacy. A heap of wooden matter bound the vehicle to the ground. Polypore-shaped mushroom caps protruded from the sides, and old, black spores smudged the smooth sandstone pavement below them.

Quinn turned his head to check if the walking mycoid hadn’t noticed them yet. At that moment, something hard and dry wrapped itself around his ankle. He swallowed his heart back to its designated place and looked at his foot. Wooden, cinnamon brown remainder of a hand clenched his boot, slowly pulling him towards the mushroom pile.

“Fuck, oh fuck, no, no, no…” He tried to pull his foot back, but the grasp was too strong and firm.

“What?” Anya circled back to them from watching the store entrance, but whatever was happening was hidden behind the car.

“It’s a breather!” Maya acted quickly.

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Thwack! They lifted their machete and brought it down again. The blade hit the sandstone with a creak and severed the arm with an almost clean cut. Maya then got up and pulled Quinn back a few meters away from the breather’s reach.

The fungal wood cracked as the creature pulled itself towards them. Maya took out their silenced pistol and shot it with a mild discharge, they then turned around and shot the walker—two quiet bullets right in the head, buzzing slightly. The bodies twitched for a moment, as their cerebral hyphae burned from the electric shock, and fell on the ground, unmoving.

“Pristine moves, Maya!” Anya cheered them on from afar while Quinn worked on slowing down his breathing to save filters.

“Yeah, thanks,” he pat Maya on their back and bent down to peel off mycoid fingers still clenched around his ankle. “Breathers always freak me out.”

“I got you.” They waited until he got up. “Let’s get going so we can get out of here.”

With a nod, Quinn looked around if the noise hadn’t lure in any other walkers.

“All still clear,” Anya said. “I don’t have vision inside the store, though, so be careful.”

The two walked up to the outside of the arches. Each stood behind one of the columns and peeked out to see what’s inside. The shop seemed dark, untouched. The entrance was made out of milky glass, and shop windows had the same white backgrounds like all the other shops around here, so detailed inspection was impossible.

“Looks good as new and the arcade is clear, too,” whispered Quinn and gestured a few signs with Maya.

“Copy,” Anya confirmed.

“Breaking the door in ten, nine,...” He started to count down.

Maya reached back to a side pocket of their backpack and took out metal enforced gloves. They had metal spikes on each knuckle to make breaking glass easier. The entrance doors were usually locked and, more often than not, firmly stuck in place by the fungus that fed off the automatic door system. This was usually the fastest way inside.

With four quick punches they broke the glass in a large rectangular shape, creating a spiderweb of broken pieces that still stuck to each other with a protective membrane. The walker noticed the ruckus and stopped before it very slowly turned towards the pair. Maya took out a large knife and cut a hole in the plastic film. The glass fell inwards with more shattering noises, but now there was a hole big enough for them to enter.

“You’ve got about three and a half minutes before they start gathering,” Anya quickly did the math.

Maya and Quinn rushed into the store with backpacks already wide open. After almost a whole year of raiding pharmacies, they knew whereabouts to look for antibiotics, fever medicine, disinfection, sterile material, and everything else needed at the shelter. This was a routine robbery.

With blood beating in their ears, pumped with adrenaline, it took the pair a second too late to notice the unusual vibrations.

“Three minutes,” Anya said.

The dusty cough syrup flasks jingled on the shelves, once, twice. With a big boom, the inner wall shook. The two stopped. Quinn was in the back room, looking for prescription medicine, when another heavy blow resonated through the shop. The shelves at the far side rattled and with a loud clang were launched forward, crashing on others. Boxes slid down the shelves, glass clattered; Maya managed to hide below an overturned rack while drugs rained down on her like Christmas in a retirement home. The air was filled with clouds of dust, cutting their vision.

“Quinn!” They whispered into the radio. “You ok?”

“Uh, I think so, you?”

“What’s happening, was there an explosion?” Anya’s voice crackled in their ears.

Something didn’t feel right to Maya. It couldn’t be an explosion so suddenly, they didn’t damage anything. The ruckus seemed to calm down for now, but there was an underlying, stable noise they couldn’t identify.

A shadow moved to the side of their eye. Maya unbuckled their pistol but quickly noticed the dusted helmet of their team member. Crouched, Quinn tried to avoid the sharp fragments of trashed medicine to avoid cutting his uniform.

He stopped after the first heavy steps at the back of the room. They were irregular but slow. Broken glass jingled fifty melodies of ‘get the fuck out of here’ with each thump of the unknown feet. The two looked at each other, their eyes mirroring only one thought: During over a hundred similar runs, up until now, they have not come across something that would tear down concrete walls like an old spiderweb.

Slowly and quietly, Quinn freed his pistol from the holster. He adjusted a small turning button at the side to amp the power, and showed a few quick gestures to Maya. They nodded.

The pistol’s battery meter went up. When the lights flicked on all five charging levels, and the gun let out a relieving sigh, he raised his arms, aimed at one of the top shelves that withstood the blast and fired.

The two immediately sprung up towards the exit, jumping over bent shelves and paper rubbish. The bullet hit the metal with high-pitched squealing. It lit up blue, and small bolts of lightning started dancing around it.

A loud, guttural roar from the middle of the pharmacy lifted up their feet even higher.

“RUN!” Quinn screamed into the radio when they both emerged from the store. They were by no means Olympic athletes, but that kind of speed might earn them front places at the qualifications.

Anya watched them through her scope. “What? What happened?”

“RUN, ANYA!”

Quinn and Maya were almost on her side of the square when she looked back at the pharmacy exit. Something blocked her view. A mountain of fungus with a gorilla-like build but triple the size. It leaned on two club-like arms the width of her body. Its eyes were tiny beads buried in a deformed, shapeless head. There was no skin, only bits of bricks and concrete glued to its body.

“What the hell is that?” She said, unable to look away.

“For fuck’s sake, Anya, RUN! THAT’S AN ORDER!” Quinn’s mic glitched from the loudness.

Like a snap of a finger right in her face, the sound of authority woke her up from the trance. Before she swung the rifle over her shoulder, she fired two discharge bullets right at the beast’s chest. The rifle was also equipped with a silencer, but the gunshots still echoed in the square’s oval architecture.

She definitely hit it. It stood there, twitching and frozen in time for now.

Quinn and Maya were already waiting for her under the stairs to the promenade, hands on their knees, and coughing their souls out.

“Good you never miss,” Quinn watched the gigantic creature.

Anya’s rifle had much stronger charges than their pistols. Luckily, she charged it up when she heard the commotion. The beast’s fungus is most likely fried to ash by now, though it still stands upright because of its weight.

“We should get out of here, I’m sure walkers are gathering already.” Anya strapped on her backpack tight.

Quinn raised his palm in her face. “Damn it, woman, a sec.”

She laughed.

Maya tapped her on the arm frantically.

“What?” Anya followed their gaze back at the pharmacy. “You gotta be shitting me.”

The fungahl stopped twitching, but instead of falling over, it stared right at them. Its eyes shined blue, the same blue shade of their discharge bullets.

It let out another roar, louder than before. The sound jumped from one side of the square to the other and lingered for a moment too long.

Figures appeared in the connecting streets, they emerged from restaurants and other building exits, some fell down from the windows and stood back up.

“We gotta go,” Anya said, stumbling over her words.

“Y-yeah, no shit,” Maya turned around, grabbed Quinn by the elbow and ran.

Anya followed right behind them.