“HELP!!!”

I jolted awake, gasping, heart hammering as the remnants of the nightmare clung to me—shuffling, rotting things, moving in erratic spasms, Benjamin’s butterfly knife already halfway through an arching slash against the empty air.

It took me a moment, a long confusing second, to pull myself together, eyes scanning every corner, every shadow, cold sweat dripping down my neck. My pulse thudded in my ears, waiting for the sound of gnashing teeth and the feel of something clawing at me from the darkness.

But there was nothing. Just the faint, unsettling shuffle outside the door.

And then…

“HELP ME PLEASE!!!”

I sprang from the bed, feet hitting the floor before my mind had fully caught up, bolting for the window. The scream—that desperate, blood-curdling scream I’d thought was a part of my nightmare—had been real. And coming from outside. From a young girl.

Four foot nothing, looking like she’d weigh 80 pounds soaking wet, whipcord thin frame obvious even under the oversized button-up shirt she wore, the girl was running for her life across the clearing between building and woods. Pale-skinned and wide-eyed, she ran for all her worth, trying to maintain distance from a mob of the dead. Twitching, contorting and clicking— a mass of decay and hunger dragging itself toward her with mindless determination.

“Fuck,” I muttered under my breath.

As if it wasn't bad enough, I noticed the second group emerging from the other side of the clearing, cutting off her escape. In the next instant, she saw them too. Her feet slipped on the wet grass, but she recovered just in time to make for the woods.

And then, more of them. They crawled out of the trees like animals drawn to fresh meat, the mob growing larger by the second.

She was done. No chance. Surrounded. The thought hit me like a punch to the gut. “She’s dead. She’s as good as dead”.

No. What was I saying?

She wasn’t dead. Not yet. But she would be soon, if I didn’t do anything.

This wasn’t like Benjamin, or that poor girl ripped to shreds in the classroom, before I had even had a chance to intervene. But this one still had a chance. But only if I acted now.

Only if I did the right thing.

I turned and ran to the bed, grabbing the makeshift rope I’d tied together from discarded clothes, and bolted back to the window, heart pounding a mile a minute, ready to call out.

And the words caught in my throat.

I stood there, frozen for a split second, staring out at the girl. My hand tightened around the rope, ready to throw it over the windowsill, to give her a chance, a lifeline. And the words simply wouldn’t come out, grappling with the pull between doing something, anything, and the reality of what was really at stake.

The right thing.

It tasted hollow in my mouth. The entire ideea. Even before this hell, I’d always seen it as a self-aggrandizing concept that had very little value in the real world. In my world.

I’d never been an outright scumbag, but not no hero either. Kept my head down, done my best to hurt no one and made it a point to keep to my own things, if only to stick it to the cavalcade of social workers that had expected me to become just another crackhead or statistic.

For all the fat lot of good it had done me, what with being targeted by Andreas and his ilk, I had lived my life more or less, doing the right thing. Or, at the very least, actively not doing the wrong thing.

But now, more than ever, what did the right thing even mean?

To save her? To yell out and pull her up in my safe-house, throwing myself into the jaws of whatever the hell these things were just to feel good about some broken sense of duty? To charge in like a hero, only to get my guts spilled open and left to rot alongside her?

This wasn’t like in the movies where the good guy always made it out with a triumphant look and a few bruises to show for it.

Not in the real world.

The good guy didn’t survive. They died shitting themselves in a ditch.

I didn’t even know this girl. I didn’t owe her anything. She was a stranger, soon to be just another casualty in a world that had already claimed hundreds. If not thousands. If not even more.

Doing the right thing here, it’d just draw attention and unnecessary risk to myself.

No.

This was the kind of shit heroes in stories did. And I wasn’t a hero. Just a survivor.

Just a bastard with a few rules…

Just…

“JUST DO IT, ASSHOLE!” my own voice roared in my mind, giving sound to a growing disgust at my own hesitation, as I flung the improvised lifeline over the windowsill and roared.

“Over here kid!”

Her head snapped up the moment I threw the rope out the window, and our eyes locked for an instant—a fleeting moment where everything else seemed to fall away, replaced only with the fear and desperation I could see in her. The want to survive.

The makeshift rope uncoiled like a serpent as I wrapped the other end across my forearm. Already the office metal door had begun to rattle, the corpses just outside starting their rabid, mindless assault, throwing themselves against it, drawn by the sounds I’d made.

Shit.

I pushed it out of my mind, grinding my teeth against the second-thoughts already taking shape in the back of my head. The girl was already moving, ducking and weaving between the clawing arms of the dead, small frame darting through the gaps like a ghost.

“Come on, come on,” I muttered under my breath, watching her. My pulse was a drumbeat in my ears, each second dragging on frustratingly as I waited for her to make the leap.

Then she did.

As soon as she jumped for the rope and the first tug of her weight jolted against my arms, I pulled for all my worth, lifting the petite girl up the building as if she was a feather. To her credit, she did not just wait, pushing with her feet against the wall, climbing herself up to safety.

The moment her head peeked over the windowsill, I swung my arm around her waist, wrapping it around her back and under her armpit, and swung her inside the office, sprawling the little thing onto the floor.

There was no time to apologize, no time to ask if she was okay. I could already hear the scrape of the dead’s claws on the door frame, the unmistakable sound of bolts being pushed out of the bore holes, and rushed to the door, slamming my shoulder into the metal cabinet stacked against it, shoving with all my strength to keep the damn thing from giving way.

The small smack was all the warning I got of the girl joining me in pushing against the barricade adding her own, negligible, weight to the effort of preventing the ravenous horde from flooding into our little safe-house.

With a curt nod, barely looking at her, I turned my focus entirely to the door. The press from the other side was growing stronger, more frantic, the constant thuds and rattles of the corpses against it vibrating through my bones, and all I could do is push harder, gritting my teeth, my entire body straining to hold the barricade from collapsing.

Long seconds stretched into what felt like hours. The weight of our struggle was unbearable—our bodies locked in a silent, gritted effort, trying to hold back the flood of death. I could feel the muscles in my legs and arms burning, breath bloating my lungs from the sustained effort, but we couldn’t give in. To stop, to relax, to hesitate, all lead to one outcome. Death.

Then, finally, the pressure began to ease.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

For all that the corpses were a relentless tide, they were just that. Corpses. Meat suits worn by mindless, blind and bloated aberrations. Lacking in reason. And object permanence.

The frantic pounding slowed, and the weight of their bodies against the door became less and less, as if they were wandering aimlessly, drawn away by the simple fact that no more noise was coming from the inside. Within minutes, the cacophony had dulled into nothing more than the occasional scrape. Within a minute more, even that stopped.

I exhaled in a long, shaky breath and let my body slide against the cabinet, breath raking my throat in deep, exhausted gasps. We’d held. We were still alive.

Every muscle in my body ached from almost ten minutes of tug-of-war, but the barricade had held.

A shuffle in front of me made my eyes snap open.

The girl was crouched down, her knees drawn to her chest, watching me with a wide-eyed look. She tilted her head slightly, as if trying to figure me out, her face softening in a mix of confusion and relief.

For a moment, neither of us spoke. I was too winded, too overwhelmed to say anything, and she… well, I wasn’t sure what she was thinking.

She broke the silence first, voice small and hesitant. "You—" she started,in a voice as thin as a whisper and sweet as honey, "thank you."

I didn’t have an answer for that. No real words to offer.

Instead, I just nodded, trying to catch my breath, still processing what had just happened. How close we had been. How close I had been to just letting her die out there.

“Don’t… don’t thank me…” the words, ragged and hoarse with exhaustion, spewed out of me.

So close, I realized I’d been wrong about her. From the window, with my miopic vision and the distance working against me, I’d assumed she was a kid. A high-school freshman, even. The way she’d moved, her small frame—it all added up in my head as a child’s frantic escape. But now that she was here, up close, there was no mistaking it.

This was no little girl, but a grown woman.

A petite woman to be certain, but there was no denying her femininity or her absolutely stunning beauty. Everything from her large almond eyes to curve of her cheekbones was absolute perfection,as if carved from marble, a masterpiece, all delicate angles and sharp contrasts. It was like someone had decided that beauty should be unshakable, unaltered, and had shaped her into that ideal.

But what struck me most was her pale skin.

Now, I’m a pale guy myself, who’d taken more than his fair share of graveyard shifts on the construction site and who otherwise spent an unhealthy amount of time indoors and away from the tan-giving sun.

But her?

She was something else. Her skin was so white it almost glowed, an ivory hue that seemed unnatural, like it had been drained of all warmth.

Poor girl. Looked like she hadn’t seen sunlight in ages, and I couldn’t help but think it was more than just the lack of time outdoors. The terror she’d been through—running for her life, alone, from those things—had drained her, had made her seem even more fragile than her size suggested. Fear had carved itself into her skin, turning her almost translucent, like she was more ghost than flesh.

But wasn’t it still a bit too much?

My mind went back to that comparison to ivory. It seemed a little too… correct.

“We… I thank… you, for your help, good… sir” she spoke in her wisp of a voice.

“Y-yeah kid. Sure. No worries” I mumbled back. For whatever reason a growing eerie feeling was spreading through me, almost like the feeling I’d get when watching those thalassophobia videos on the internet.

Not quite fear. Apprehension?

I shook my head, trying to clear the fog of adrenaline still clouding my thoughts. My heart was still pounding, muscles still locked in the aftershock of the struggle, but I forced myself to focus.

“Why were you out there? Scavenging for supplies?”

The woman leaned forward, chin resting in the palm of her hand, bright hazel eyes never leaving mine, as if goading me into staring into them.

“In a manner of speech, yes… we...I... am dreadfully low on… supplies”

There it was again. Those odd pauses in her speech, the impossible to place accent and, more than anything, that feeling in the back of my head that was screaming at me that something was off. Something I couldn’t exactly place.

“Well, I don’t have much in place of food, but there’s water and medical supplies if you’re hurt…”

And then it clicked, mid-sentence—like a switch had flipped in my brain. The thing that had been nagging at me, just below the surface, finally came to the forefront.

The uncanny valley.

She was perfect.

Unnaturally so. In a way that humans had no right to be. Her face, her posture, the way she moved, the way she spoke—it all had that edge to it. It was all too symmetrical, too flawless, like something trying to act like a human.

A chill ran down my spine as I stared at her, my pulse suddenly picking up again. I had no idea what she was, but I was starting to realize that I wasn’t looking at a person. Or, at a very least, not a human.

The girl tilted her head and her crimson red lips curled up in a smile.

“My my, the glamour has faded far quicker than we would have expected”

Her voice was poison-laced honey, musical and soft but carrying an almost palpable sense of threat. The kind of softness that lured you in, made you trust it, but with the unmistakable danger that lurked just beneath the surface. An ambush predator. A spider.

My instincts kicked in before my mind could catch up. I tried to stand, to put distance between us, but her small hand shot out with alarming speed, wrapping around my left wrist in a grip that felt like steel. With an effortless twist, she turned it over, exposing the veins on my forearm to the dim light of the room, and locking my elbow.

Slowly, deliberately, she raised her other hand, amber eyes tracing the path her fingers motioned along my skin, making lazy, hypnotic circles over the pulse points in my arm. I could feel the burn from her touch, but it wasn’t warmth—it was something cold. A chill that spread through my veins, like a warning.

She spoke again, and this time, the words didn’t feel like they were meant for me. It was as if she was talking for her own benefit, more for the sound of her own voice than any conversation between us.

“Though we suppose ‘tis to be expected. We have traveled the entire day, weakened by the accursed Sun, and we have not fed in so, sooo long…”

Her voice trailed off, and before I could react, she yanked my hand forward with an impossible force, pulling it to her mouth. Her small tongue flicked across my forearm, sending a shock of ice-cold dread through me.

I barely had time to process the sensation before the suffocating malice she exuded hit me like a wave. It wasn’t just her touch; The air around her had thickened, heavy with dark intent.

Every muscle in my body screamed to move. I didn’t think—I acted.

In one swift motion, I launched with a right cross, fist cutting through the air with everything I had. My knuckles connected with her chin with a sickening crack, the sound echoing in the room as her head snapped back.

I felt the impact—heard it—and for a split second, I wondered if I’d broken her jaw, if she was finally going to drop whatever mask she’d been wearing.

But the look in her eyes told me everything. She didn’t stumble. She didn’t flinch. Instead, her gaze went cold, a slow, sharp grin spreading across her face. I was twice her size, three times her weight and, despite my cowardice when it came to Andreas and his crew, I had still grown up in the ghetto, and been in enough scraps to know how to throw a decent punch.

But it had felt like punching a granite boulder. Had sounded much the same.

Then the pain from my fractured knuckles finally hit me and I opened my mouth to scream.

Her hand lashed out like a striking serpent, gripping my mouth with an ironclad force that left no room for struggle. My jaw locked under her touch, the pressure so crushing I could hear the groans and pops of my bones straining against it.

“Enough, peasant,” she murmured, voice cold and impassive in its bite.

“The rotbloods outside this chamber are but starving vermin, clambering about like insects. And we have little patience for such creatures. Nor the inclination to entertain pest control.”

Her lips twisted into a wide grin, this one a perfect, inhuman parody of a smile, little more than a simple snarl. She was showing me. Educating me.

Mouth stretched unnaturally wide, lips curling over blackened gums to expose teeth that were far too sharp and far too long. Canines extended like knives, jagged and gleaming in the dim light, framed by rows of sharpened fangs, like a predator’s maw—ruthless and insatiable.

The skin of her face, so perfect before, now seemed almost translucent, as if the flesh was stretched too tightly over the bones beneath. The veins under her skin pulsed with an unnatural blackness, a faint outline of something foul, something that fed on the life of the world.

Her eyes, once a rich, deep shade, now gleamed like a cat’s stalking in the night, pupils reduced to shining spots of vibrant light, lost in the black sea of her sclera, as her brow deepened, cheekbones sharpened and the orbits sunk in.

“Or willing to tolerate having our supper interrupted” she continued, voice overlayed with a deep, guttural growl.