The light had started to fade on the streets as the sky darkened rather rapidly, daytime engaged in a losing battle with twilight. By the time the clock hit seven, the day was gone and darkness fell onto the streets, Darkness meant one thing now: chaos. Nighttime was when humans truly plummeted to the bottom of the food chain as the Fleshers poured out onto the streets, scouring for their next meal.

  Leo scrambled off the couch as soon as he spotted the first of the Fleshers pour onto the streets, their clothes ripped and blood-stained as they always were, their skin pale and rotten. One of the Fleshers had half its head sawed off and was missing both arms, yet it moved with the others, its movement slightly wobbled. Leo bounded across the room and dimmed the lights within his tiny safehouse, dimming it so low that he could only just barely make out what was around him. Not so low that he was completely blind, and not so bright that it would attract the nasty creatures that had started to patrol the streets.

  As soon as the lights were dimmed, he took an extra precaution by fully shutting all of the blinds within the safehouse and strapped his shotgun around him. The only thing he could do now was wait out the night in here and hope that the Fleshers didn’t pick up on the droning sound of the backup generator in the house’s basement.

  In a world where cell service and WiFi connectivity had long since gone extinct, electricity was the one thing that kept Leo sane. If he’d had to wait out cold, horrifying nights in total darkness, he’d have lost his mind a year ago. Before the apocalypse, going to sleep with the lights on was something he’d never once considered; heck, it would have been impossible for him to sleep with the lights on. Now, he would find no sleep unless there was a source of light around him. Bad things happened in the dark.

  His mind racing as it always did every night, he paced across the room for five minutes before pausing by a window, cracking open the blind and peeking outside at the Fleshers who had grown massively in numbers and were stumbling across the street, simply going past his safehouse. He monitored the Fleshers through the window for almost an hour before moving away from the window and finding comfort in a couch, his head rested on a cushion, memories of his life before the apocalypse flooding through his mind.

  Settling on one positive memory, he shut his eyes and drifted off to sleep.

He was back in college. In his dorm, brilliant rays of sunlight flooding into the rather messy room through the drawn curtains and open windows. There were four beds in the room, each next to a wardrobe and a desk.

He was standing in the middle of the room, a stack of textbooks in his arms, the one at the top labelled: An In-Depth Study of the Theatrical Arts.

The room was empty one second and the next, there were others in here. Three more people, all gathered around a desk, cheering and yelling, their eyes locked onto the screen of a gaming laptop. Leo recognized them. He knew them. They were his friends, his roommates. But they weren’t supposed to be here. Not anymore.

He set his textbooks down on his desk and moved towards them, rather cautiously. “What are you guys doing here?”

One of them glanced up at Leo with a frown on his face, scratching the back of his head. His black hair was curly, the sides shaved and his brown eyes seemed to glimmer in the light of the room. The bottom half of his face was covered in a stubble. He looked taller than Leo remembered him, slightly bigger too.

“You alright, man?” he asked.

“Jordan, this is wrong,” Leo murmured, glancing around the room. “We shouldn’t be here. The school’s gone.”

“What are you talking about, man?” Jordan asked, placing a hand on Leo’s shoulder, staring intently into his eyes. “Rough day in class? Maybe you need a nap?”

Leo brushed Jordan’s hand off his shoulder and took a couple steps backwards, his mind starting to spiral. “What’s happening? Why am I back here? I can’t go through all of this again. Never again.”

Another boy moved towards Leo, one much shorter and thinner than Jordan. His hair was dark and short, he wore rounded glasses over his brown eyes, his face was freckled and unlike Jordan, the bottom half of his face was completely clean.

Israel. Izzy. “Leo, you need to calm down.”

“Izzy?” Leo murmured. “Why are we here?”

Izzy shrugged, looking confused. “It’s been four years and the only answer I can think of is getting a degree. Why else would we be here?”

“Why are you all acting like nothing is wrong?”

“Bob, I think we might need to call the sick bay. Something might be wrong with him,” Jordan said, a fearful expression on his face. “He might be down with the Alpha.”

“What?”

Bob rose onto his feet, a blank expression on his face, his usually brown eyes somewhat cloudy, and he marched towards Leo. “Come with me.”

“No,” Leo growled. “I don’t have the virus. I’m not going anywhere.”

“Your mind isn’t right, buddy. You’re scaring me.”

“You’re dead!” Leo yelled and shut his eyes. “You’re all dead! None of this is right. The school’s gone. I was here when it all happened.”

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“When what happened?” Jordan asked softly. “Open your eyes and talk to us, buddy.”

Leo opened his eyes and felt incredible fear wash over him. There was no sunlight flooding into the room anymore, heck, there was only half a room left. The room looked like an explosive had gone off in it and had been blown in half, with debris across the floor.

Not just debris. Blood too. Body parts.

Jordan, Izzy and Bob were still there, but they were different now. Their skins had lost all color and simply appeared gray now, their eyes completely clouded over, white liquid dropping from their open, blood-stained mouths. All of their clothes were ripped in places and stained in blood, with Jordan missing one hand and seeming completely unfazed by it.

“Leo, talk to us,” Jordan spoke, a cruel grin spreading across his face.

“Come to us,” Bob whispered. “Join us.”

“You can be like us,” Izzy smiled. “Stop fighting. Stop suffering.”

Jordan smiled. “We’re your friends, aren’t we?”

“I won’t become one of you,” Leo growled. “You took everything from me.”

Jordan sighed sadly and took one step towards Leo. “I was afraid you would say that. I’m sorry it had to come to this.” He glanced at Izzy and Bob, both of whom now had evil smiles across their faces. “Kill him.”

A screeching sound came as their faces twisted, becoming deformed, their eyeballs bulging out of their sockets, fangs growing from their mouths as they all charged at Leo.

“NO!”

  Leo bolted out of the couch, his heart pounding violently against his chest like it was trying to escape captivity. He was completely drenched in sweat, his shirt sticking to his skin. For three minutes, he stood, taking deep breaths and trying to calm himself down after the nightmare he’d had.

  As soon as he was calm, he glanced at the wristwatch around his right wrist [which was where he preferred to wear his watch]. It was seventeen minutes past six in the morning. There was no electricity which meant the backup generator must have gone out sometime during the night while he was asleep. He moved towards a window and cracked open the blinds, peeking out onto the streets.

  There were traces of dawn in the sky but it was still largely dark out there, although the streets weren’t as crowded with Fleshers anymore. They’d either mostly gone in search of unfortunate prey in the middle of the night or they’d sensed it would soon be daytime again and had started to crawl back into whatever crevice accommodated them during the day.

  As soon as the sun was up, Leo would be on the move again. In search of supplies: more food, more water, more gasoline for the generator and most importantly, more bullets. Definitely more bullets.

  He’d only dropped back into the couch where he’d slept when he heard it. The groans. The scratching sounds.

  He hurried onto his feet and aimed the shotgun at the door, prepared to empty a shell into whatever braindead entity was trying to have him for breakfast. The groans grew louder, as did the scratching.

  Leo listened to them, using a skill he’d been forced to pick up as a result of the apocalypse. After ten seconds of focusing on the sounds they made, his eyes widened in terror. There were seven of them just past the front door, all trying to get into the house.

  He’d learned to calculate the number of threats around him by focusing on sound and noise. A necessary skill for the sort of world he now lived in. Not that he would refer to any of this as living: it was more like dying really slowly.

  The only reason the Fleshers hadn’t gotten in was because they weren’t in a frenzy. They weren’t entirely sure that there was food waiting for them past the door. If they confirmed a human presence within the house, the door would be down in less than ten seconds. They could be frighteningly strong when they needed to be.

  The same applied to Leo.

  Remaining calm, he walked into the kitchen where he opened up a cabinet and pulled out the small can of gasoline he’d kept stored there. He had two options: the first was to douse himself in it to mask his human scent but that seemed like an awful risk and he didn’t particularly like the smell of gasoline; the second was to set the motherfuckers ablaze. He liked the second option much more.

  Without hesitation, he opened up the can and moved towards the front door and started to pour down a trail of gasoline leading to the window in the kitchen which would be his escape route. As soon as the can was empty, he hurled it at a wall with force, hoping to create a noise loud enough to make the Fleshers frenzied.

  They didn’t seem to care much about it.

  “Hey, guys!” Leo yelled. “Breakfast?!”

  That did it. The groans turned into growling sounds and the scratching turned into pounding and just as he’d expected, the door came down in six seconds. The Fleshers poured into the house and immediately, Leo fired at the trail of gasoline, igniting it.

  He ran for the kitchen window, leaping right through it, shattering the window with his body and dropping to the wet ground outside. Hurriedly, he pushed himself onto his feet, the sticky liquid on the ground staining his hands. With a disgusted groan, he wiped his hands with his jeans and stared at his old safehouse which was now ablaze.

  Fire took a long time to kill Fleshers, but eventually, it would. They weren’t smart enough to try to run and put out the flames. They probably couldn’t even feel themselves burning.

  The only thing they felt was a hunger for blood and flesh.

  As if on cue, a flaming Flesher dropped to the ground from the window Leo had shattered, growling and crawling towards Leo with speed, unbothered by the fact it was on fire. Leo grunted and kicked the Flesher across the face then jammed his shotgun into the Flesher’s mouth and pulled the trigger, spilling the contents of the Flesher’s brain onto the ground. He grimaced.

  The Flesher stopped moving.

  But the sound of the gunshot had gotten the sort of attention Leo didn’t particularly like. With a grim expression on his face, he sprinted in the direction of an abandoned car on the streets, hoping he’d be able to hotwire it and that it’d have enough charge in the tank to get him a great distance away from here.

  But then, deep down, he knew no great distance would ever be enough.

  Nothing would ever be enough.

  In the end, there would only be one inevitable, unavoidable eventuality.

  Death.