“Remember, Io. Lies leave the mouth. Your prayer comes from the heart. Make a prayer once every rising of the sun. But do not worship those that reign in the sky. Bring your wishes upon the gods that live with man. They greet the same day as all the faithful. For they who look down from the heavens have abandoned us all.”

----------------------------------------

There were undead everywhere.

When the need to pass through a dangerous corridor with a dense population of undead arose, their normal course of action was limited to a few choices. Primarily, they preferred diversion tactics. It was easy enough to create a noise elsewhere to make the undead go away. Glass bottles were perfect for it. However, it wouldn’t work when the ceiling was a measly forty centimeters above their heads. It would sooner hit something on the head before traveling far. The ensuing noise would then attract all the nearby undead at an undesirable place, which would only increase their problems. The second, less efficient option was to slowly dispatch the undead in their way, piecemeal. It was extremely time-consuming and required a level of precision that none of them were confident of being able to maintain under pressure.

There was another, safer option, which was to find an alternative route. But their circumstances at the time made that plan much less appealing. In fact, all three options were unnecessary despite the dense number of undead on their path.

“So, how was your first night with a young, beautiful maiden?”

They didn’t even have to keep quiet.

“Did she attend to your every need during the night? For sure she must have made you feel young again, hmm?”

“... Nothing happened. What are you talking about?”

“Don’t be shy. Tell us all about it.”

While there were undead every which way they looked, all of them were in a state of severe dismemberment. Many of them were headless, while a good portion of them had their limbs removed from their bodies. There were also other ways they were dismantled, but the vast majority of them fell in the former two categories. Upon closer inspection, their predicament looked to have been caused by a sharp weapon. It didn’t take more than two brain cells to rub in order to figure out who caused all the carnage.

“I just went to sleep after I talked to her. That’s it,” Evan declared as he walked with a limp. The bad ankle had started acting up again during their descent to the sewers. It was annoying, and the pain was gradually becoming worse, but it wasn’t anything he couldn’t bear.

Violet thrust her sledgehammer three times in quick succession, downing an overweight undead. She then crushed both of its knees to prevent it from moving around.

While most of the undead had already been effectively incapacitated, there were still some which were attracted by the commotion they were causing. Evan had argued that it would be prudent of them to maintain silence during their march, but Violet insisted on a gut feeling that it was no longer necessary. So far, she was right.

“That’s boring. It was your chance to woo her with your manly charms.”

“Frank would do a much better job at that than me.”

“Doesn’t matter. Any man would love to bed someone as sexy as her, yeah?”

She laughed – loudly. Her reckless actions attracted two undead to come out from the side channels, which she dispatched quickly.

Io had made it hard for Evan to make an example out of the circumstances to shut Violet up.

On the side, Frank followed wordlessly, keeping the flashlight mounted underneath his rifle behind them.

Evan was in charge of illuminating the path ahead. Violet had her own flashlight as well. It was all thanks to Frank who had dug up two of them in working condition underneath a pile of debris back where they had stayed the night. The best part was that both flashlights were crank-charged. How convenient was that?

They were thankful to the two corpses at that place who owned those items.

“But damn, that Io really went to town with these guys.”

Violet kicked the head of a female zombie and sent it flying several meters ahead. The stump on its neck was made by an impossibly clean cut. It was absurd to even think about the sharpness of the weapon and the strength of the user required to re-enact it through flesh and bone.

“If she had used that sword since the start, then she wouldn’t have wasted all those blades yesterday,”

He recalled the night before. The weapon looked like an excellent work of art, but seeing the carnage that it had wrought made him feel like it was far beyond that.

“Hmm, dunno. Maybe she thought they were heavy and wanted to get rid of them?”

Violet’s impulsive, probably thoughtless response slightly annoyed Evan, but he had to admit that it didn’t seem too far out of the question.

Lacking the proper mindset to dwell on more important issues due to his pained ankle, Evan continued to drift around the matter until a hand cupped his mouth in a tight grip. He looked forward and saw Violet hugging the wall while peeking around a corner. She had her other hand raised with her index finger up, signaling them to be quiet. Frank, who had been walking backwards to guard their rear, stopped at a distance away.

He breathed out and calmed himself. His ankle throbbed slightly, but the sensation was muted by the sudden rise in tension. Violet gestured for him to come forward by raising her chin. She pointed at her eye and then down the corridor. Evan immediately understood what she meant. They switched places without a word and without a sound. As he adjusted his weight against the wall to his back, he slowly leaned over the corner to see—

It was like a garbage heap made of flesh; a misshapen mess of meat, bone and sinew piled high and wide. Mangled limbs and torn faces littered the surface in a surreal imitation of abstract art. Its scale was such that the flashlight could not even encompass its entirety from the distance they were at. Evan felt his stomach churn from simply staring at it.

And it was moving – writhing.

He knew what it was. They called it a Death Pile; a simple name coined due to how it looked like a pile of corpses that killed anything that came into contact with it. According to people who have observed it, a Death Pile wasn’t something that just appears out of thin air. An undead must consume enough flesh to become bloated enough to become one.

It was what others referred to as a “high-tier undead”.

Evan recoiled. Were they supposed to go through it? If he remembered correctly, the best way to dispatch one of those was to burn it, so that was definitely not an option for them at that moment.

Violet patted his back. She pointed down the corridor where they were at. The trail of bodies continued there, not towards the Death Pile. Upon that realization, a hot sigh of relief escaped his chest. With one final look at the monster, they continued on their way.

“That must have been the cleanup crew,” Violet said after they had gained some distance from it. The thing about Death Piles was that they were relatively slow. At most they could move at the same speed as a human walking fast. Though that was already quite an improvement compared to the lumbering pace of a regular undead, it was still something anybody could easily outrun if they didn’t have a broken ankle.

“So, they’re eating themselves now?”

“Remember what White Raven said? Stronger undead are created at places where a lot of them gather over long periods of time. How else could they evolve without eating anything besides each other?”

An unpleasant feeling crept up Evan’s spine as he gave an image to the scenario. Wouldn’t that mean they were at risk of encountering any one of those things from that time onwards?

“Yeah. I heard Djibril Company encountered one a few weeks ago when we stopped over the last main camp. It wasn’t a Death Pile, but much faster. They started calling it a Ghoul. The thing runs faster than humans, apparently.”

“I didn’t hear that. Those kids fought one off?”

“Heard it from others, so it’s all second-hand stuff. And no, they only managed to run away.”

Information was vital to the survival of every group of survivors, so it was considered a common etiquette for every piece of knowledge to be shared between groups at the mobile camps that littered the country. With wisdom and experience shared between more people, less deaths from undead and bandits would happen.

Violet swung her sledgehammer in a high arc, causing the weighted end of it to obliterate the skull of a lone, wandering zombie. The swing nicked the ceiling, causing small pieces of rock and sand to fall on their heads. As she pulled her hammer out of the savaged stump, she looked back towards Frank and motioned for him to take the lead after handing him her Halligan bar.

There were two possible reasons for Violet to do so as someone in charge of taking point. Though considering the situation, he already knew the reason without having to guess.

“Did Io tell you anything?” she whispered. There was none of the fake intimacy she tended to express when they were the only ones talking.

“She said she was looking for family.”

“You believe her?”

Evan smiled slightly, thinking that it was quite funny that Violet was aware of the irony yet still decided to ask regardless.

“Her family sounds absurd, but her story sounds decently reliable.”

He decided to not tell her about the possibility that her father (bastard) had a harem.

“Mmm? I see.”

As expected of her, she quickly picked up on his situation and didn’t question Io’s supposed motives any further.

“Did she... tell you anything more? Or maybe, show you anything else?”

Io had many peculiarities about her which made Evan unsure about Violet’s choice that time. Disregarding her back-story, her physical appearance and quality were very questionable as well. However, Evan bitterly placed his trust in Violet’s instincts. That was why at the end of the day he could still say that he was biased in giving favor to Io.

Regardless of what she looked like.

“Aside from that first night, no.”

There was also no way to deny that their last conversation left him a very positive impression of her.

“Why? Do you doubt your decision after all this time?”

She didn’t respond. It wasn’t as if she had to suddenly shift her attention to an approaching undead. Her head simply hung slightly in thought, until she nodded.

“Remember when we told you that we found two flashlights from two corpses?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Those corpses were definitely only a few months old; maybe around half a year or less? There were no bite marks on them either. Though, there weren’t any cuts either.”

Her words were cautious and restrained as if she struggled to squeeze every letter out of her mouth.

“You... think Io killed them?”

“Possible. Perhaps they were bandits? They could be innocent scavengers, too. Who knows? Well, we can’t say for sure, so there’s no use in judging. I’m just putting it out there.”

Violet’s story caused Evan’s mind to spin in overdrive.

It... made sense. If it was Io, then he didn’t think beating people to death with her strength was impossible. In fact, he thought that it would be easy for her to do so. But why would she do that?

Maybe self-defense?

In the first place that was only applicable if she had been the one who killed them.

“Oh, by the way,” Violet quipped. “Their hearts were gouged out. At first, we thought it might have been some specialized, high-tier undead, but since those bodies didn’t turn then it’s highly unlikely. I mean, they just became corpses instead of undead. That’s really weird.”

The thing about the apocalypse that differed from many zombie apocalypse flicks he’d seen was that it didn’t actually matter if they were infected; anybody that died became undead. That was why it had become standard practice for their dead to either be cremated immediately or dealt with the same way the undead were; by destroying their heads and limbs. For people to be killed without turning into a zombie was definitely strange.

“... Got any leads?” he asked, despite already knowing her answer.

“Nada.”

She was the type of person who would let her emotions show clearly on her face. The way she had been frowning gave away how much she was at a loss.

But for Evan, it was useless to worry about such a thing when they were in sort of a pickle themselves. Despite their way being mostly clear of enemies, they were still technically surrounded with them.

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“We can worry about that later,” he whispered. Violet acted indignant for a moment before replying that she understood.

They continued the boring trip until they finally caught up with the trail. However, it wasn’t in a way that they hoped to do. Instead of finding Io, they instead found nothing. As in, her tracks have simply gone cold.

“Strange,” Violet murmured. “All the bodies just disappeared, but there’s blood on the floor and walls.”

She illuminated several bloodstains on the floor as she scanned the area for any sort of clues. Though these could also be used to track Io, the issue was that the bloodstains were present in every direction with no particularly noticeable pattern. It wasn’t an unfamiliar sight, as every city also had such stains everywhere.

“And they’re all fresh.”

Evan walked up to her and crouched down, to check if there’s anything she missed. However, there wasn’t anything he could see that differed from Violet’s observations.

“Did she walk straight ahead, or...?”

Another problem was that the trail they were following led to a side channel, which brought them to an intersection between it and a larger, main tunnel that, judging from the rails, had been a subway tunnel in the past. Directly ahead of them was another channel, which Io would have gone into if she proceeded straight. Hence, all three directions were possible.

But just as Evan’s thoughts were able to catch up to those things, he was suddenly pulled back onto a wall.

“Shh...!”

Complete darkness enveloped them once again. He entrusted himself to Violet’s warning and focused on his hearing.

It was only very subtle, but he could definitely pick it up.

“Undead?”

Violet, who had the better flashlight, set hers on the lowest possible brightness and cautiously scanned the surroundings. The air was relatively calm, and there was barely any dust in the air, so the light traveled a decent distance regardless of the dimness. Just in case, she increased the output and scanned all the paths once again, then again with its brightest setting.

“Nothing. Frank?”

“Negative behind.”

“Weird.”

The rotten groaning of the unliving had increased in volume during that few seconds. It sounded like they were coming from a place very close to them. What was even more unsettling was that the noise indicated a large crowd, yet they couldn’t see a single walking corpse.

It wasn’t possible that the zombies were behind a wall. Their cries weren’t muffled at all. Just in case, Violet stuck her Halligan bar onto the track ballast. There wasn’t any undead buried underneath.

Their three flashlights flit across the area in random, panicked paths. Each of their movements was made with the stiff anxiety that death crept ever closer.

At that point they had placed the notion that light attracted undead to the back of their minds. The only thing they were concerned about was identifying the threat as soon as possible. However, despite the combined efforts of three experienced survivors, they couldn’t see anything. Each of their lights illuminated only brick walls, rusted rails, scattered ballast and all sorts of debris.

There were no zombies ahead, behind, underneath or around them.

Which meant—

“Fuck...!”

Violet squeezed out a strained profanity as she realized where the sounds were coming from. She beat at Evan’s shoulders frantically, causing him to jump in panic. He felt his blood drain as he realized where Violet was pointing her light.

“God, what the fuck is that?”

He couldn’t help but raise his voice as he followed Violet’s light to the last place he thought to look at:

There were undead on the ceiling. All of them were active, mouthing strangled moans while writhing horribly. There must have been a few hundred of them or so; definitely not a number all of them could fight in such a narrow space. They were so densely-packed that it looked like they had merged. And in fact, they had; what they were seeing were only the upper torsos, heads and arms of the zombies. Above them was just a single mass of rotten flesh that had completely engulfed the area where their lower bodies should have been.

They reached out, downwards, towards them, in what could even be called a lazy fashion. But they could not move. No matter how far they stretched their arms, their bodies could not remove themselves from the ceiling, not from each other.

The sharp taste of bile spread from the back of Evan’s tongue. It helped him recover enough from the shock of seeing it.

“Monster.”

Frank had trained its rifle on it, but didn’t pull the trigger. It was just a precaution. But considering that he had become so used to only pointing his gun at zombies on command, that action showed just how spooked everybody was.

He wanted to run immediately. His knees kept trying to push him away from the scene. Admittedly, some amount of fascination kept him rooted on the spot. But it was only a minute; he snapped out of his reverie faster than the others and looked around. Violet must give the order soon.

“Violet...?!”

There she was, leaning on the wall while cradling her head. Her breaths were ragged. Sticky sweat covered her skin, and drool spilled out of the corner of her mouthpiece. As he cradled her frame, he realized that she was also shivering; her temperature was alarmingly cold despite their multiple layers of clothing. He didn’t even realize that she had dropped her flashlight. The illumination had been replaced by Frank somewhere along the way.

“What happened?!” he heard Frank demand. But he kept silent and focused all of his attention on Violet.

After a few gasps of air, she managed to look up to him and reply with a strained “I’m alright.”

Her arms felt weak as they struggled to pull herself up using his shoulders. Each time she heaved with effort; her body trembled in protest. Evan clearly felt her limp body strain itself apart in an attempt to regain some semblance of strength. The labored breaths that she managed to gasp sapped her energy quickly.

Was she having a panic attack?

“We need to go.”

After achieving the monumental task of placing both of her feet underneath her, she started staggering back down the tunnel without any explanation. None of the men needed one though; they would have wanted to get away regardless of the reason as well.

As much as they wanted to run, Violet’s pace was painfully slow. The obvious solution was to have Evan carry her, but he didn’t. He was conflicted. Her back, hunched in its struggles, looked small, weak, vulnerable. Yet, it still looked far bigger than his.

They looked back. With their lights, they nervously peered through the darkness behind them. They feared to see a wall of undead come down their direction. Thankfully, that wasn’t what they saw. Instead, there was only black so thick that not even their flashlights could penetrate through it. Though they still heard the undead, their noise seemed so far away already despite the short distance they managed to cover.

Violet kept walking, slowly, without any desperate urgency. She simply cradled her trembling body onwards

----------------------------------------

“Ah! I’m brand new again!”

Violet stretched her arms high like she had just woken up from a good night’s sleep. In comparison, the exhausted Evan and Frank looked like they had run a marathon. Evan in particular felt his injured ankle was protesting unpaid overtime.

“That was dangerous. Let’s not go back there again, shall we?”

The contrast was almost comical.

Evan and Frank ran for no more than ten minutes, but the tension had grinded their nerves to dust.

It was the first time they’ve seen such an abomination. Evan himself felt faint just recalling it. The scene was straight out of bad religious writing.

“What the hell was that, anyway?”

Evan’s question was met with Frank’s approval. As one of the group’s representatives, Violet had access to more information than lackeys like them. Though she shared that information with them openly, she didn’t do so proactively. That was why they hoped that Evan’s question would be met with at least a half-reliable explanation of what they had seen.

Unfortunately, that was not the case.

“Sorry, I really have no idea.”

She wasn’t the type to apologize seriously. Being aware of that small fact silenced the two men for a while out of consideration.

“I didn’t even know something like that was possible. It looks like a giant Death Pile glued to the ceiling, yeah?”

“Or multiple of them.”

High-tier undead weren’t exactly rare. At least, not during the last couple of years. The first confirmed sighting was that of a Death Pile over five years before then, and the next one they learned of was sighted an entire year after that. But afterwards they’ve begun hearing about these evolved undead being sighted more and more often, and it was only recently that they learned about the Ghouls. The latter meant that the undead could evolve in more than one way.

“... Can they evolve more than once?”

That question terrified them. Not only that, the fact that none of them could reasonably reject the idea only served to exacerbate their anxiety.

“I think it would be prudent to assume they could. That’ll allow us to plan with better breathing room.”

Violet’s opinion was splendid; as expected of a leader-type person. She glanced at Evan and he nodded in affirmation. They would need to move with much more caution from then on.

But that was only if Violet always took his advice.

A tense silence gripped the team as they digested the details and implications of the event. It was suffocating. They already had a lot of things to worry about at that time, and their problems would only increase thereafter. It was to the point where Evan contemplated the effectiveness of their overall strategy of sending small teams.

“Anyway, that was quite terrifying. A cute girl like me had quite the panic attack,” she suddenly declared laughingly.

It was an attempt at cutting through the depressing air. As expected, an audible groan escaped both men, which elicited a look of dismay from the other party. It was a veiled thread, too. Of course, their groan definitely wasn’t because she had the audacity to call herself cute despite their predicament.

She smiled and placed her mask back on her face.

“Anyway, I don’t think Io went there. It’s just a hunch, but I have a feeling I know where she’s headed.”

“Huh? How?”

“Like I said, it’s just a gut feeling. Besides, if you were a girl, would you seriously consider passing underneath something as horrifying as that?”

As much as Evan hated to admit it, she had a point. Then again, Io wasn’t any average girl either. But Violet’s instincts were magic, so that was as good a reason as any despite having so many counterarguments. Besides, he didn’t want to go back there even if someone told him about a chest of gold buried underneath the ground.

What use did gold have during those times anyway?

The trail of bodies only led to where they encountered that nightmare. Any other choice would need a reliable reason. As to how reliable it needed to be, even Evan couldn’t determine.

Left with no real alternatives, they followed after Violet, who walked with a relaxed gait not unlike one does when having a stroll in the park.

It didn’t take Violet long to take them back near the place where they encountered the monster. It was an intersection of similarly-shaped tunnels with the trail of sliced-up undead corpses turning to the right from where they were. That was the trail they followed up until that point. But instead of following that trail, Violet walked straight through both corners onto a relatively clean corridor.

“Should be here,” she said.

They continued walking in the dark, with only three flashlights to illuminate their way. Surprisingly, despite the state of the path they had gone through before, the following area had no undead. Yes, not a single one, not even a maimed corpse. In fact, at some point, the weathered bricks that they had been walking on had become tiles, and the walls had taken on a kind of sheen that did not look like it had been abandoned for a decade.

“I have a bad feeling about this place.”

There was an oppressive feeling in the air. It was hard to breathe, and the place made Evan and Frank’s skin crawl. Each step they took was full of hesitation. Their instincts rejected the idea of them proceeding further. Gradually, the pressure became comparable to that time when they encountered the giant cluster of undead. But they pushed on regardless.

Because Violet seemed completely unaffected.

She walked with a gait that looked almost like a strut. There was no hesitation to her step whatsoever. Whatever feeling that was making the two men falter, she fed on.

“Is this the right place?” Evan asked, uncertainty tainting his voice.

Violet looked back; her cheeks raised in a smile. “Sure, it is,” she said with a shrug. “A special girl like her needs a special place, right?”

It was difficult to get a read on Violet when she had her face covered by her protective gear. While Evan trusted her too much to admit, there were certain times when her words seemed too farfetched. Of course, she had always been an imprudent woman. But in that case, it didn’t feel like plain recklessness.

It was more like she was simply fabricating her words.

Evan felt it more than Frank did; significantly a lot more. He was Violet’s teammate for almost seven years already. They shared a connection only possible between people who have had to face life and death situations multiple times. It was a feeling that was consistently present.

But he had stopped feeling that since a while ago.

He shook his head and focused on his surroundings. The way the corridor was built wasn’t like any kind of sewer he had seen. There wasn’t even a central channel where water could flow. The floor was even and neat, with signs of tiles underneath a thick layer of dirt and grime that had accumulated after years of neglect. The walls themselves also looked smooth. Here and there, Evan could spot the material having peeled from its foundation, exposing a layer of rotted insulation that no humid sewer could have possibly been designed with. Were the walls made of gypsum boards?

“I don’t think we’re in a sewer anymore. Weird, huh?” Violet said to nobody in particular. “The entrance is at the same level as the sewers, but the walls and floor are made with quite a budget. The ceiling, too.”

Evan pointed his flashlight towards the ceiling and quickly understood what she meant. There were sprinklers covered in rust and sludge that dotted the surface above their heads at regular intervals. Between those were metallic vent openings with something he couldn’t describe dangling from it.

“When was the last time we had air conditioning, Evan?”

“Over ten whole years ago?”

“I already completely forgot how it feels,” she laughed. “You know what I miss the most, though? A flushing toilet.”

It was incredible just how a mere two words could elicit sighs of deep, pure longing from two grown men.

“Speaking of which, when did we last see a clean toilet again?”

“Way too long. I think it was three years ago.”

“Huh? Hmm... You mean the porcelain toilet White Raven was trying to sell? No, I mean something mounted on the floor; doesn’t even need to flush.”

Evan paused for a moment to think before he managed to recall that event.

At that time everybody in their group thought that a clean toilet was such an amazing thing to witness that they gawked at the interior of a bathroom for a good three minutes. Crowds of people gathered outside to watch them act like children. The memory made him chuckle.

“Six. That was your gift, right?”

“Your first anniversary of joining the group deserves such a valuable present.”

“If only it could flush...”

She laughed.

“Impossible. That’s something even money can’t buy anymore. Shame we couldn’t take it with us.”

Actually, Evan thought, it would have been weird if they did. There was simply no room for a traveling group of scavengers to carry a toilet. In the first place, he couldn’t imagine doing so even if they could. It was simply nonsensical.

It didn’t have any real value outside of sentimentality.

“What happened to it, anyway?”

“Well, when I heard we can’t bring it with us I smashed it to bits. Better that than leaving it behind for someone else to use, yeah?”

Exasperatingly, Evan thought of how what she did was a very Violet-like thing to do.

“Relaxed yet?”

She stopped and jabbed her elbow to his chest. Since her arm was weighed by the heavy sledgehammer she was holding, it felt more like being hit by one rather than a limb. It caused him to cough up most of the air in his lungs in distress rather than what she implied. Annoyed, he tried to glare at Violet only to notice that she wasn’t even looking at him.

Violet stood stock still. Her flashlight illuminated the corridor that continued so far that its darkness swallowed the light.

Immediately, Evan focused his senses. He tried to focus on any sight, smell or sound that related to the undead.

Seconds passed with nothing out of the ordinary. Frank kept a vigil watch on their rear, but the tension made him divide his attention between it and what was in front of the group.

There was a fear in them that a large group of undead lay in their path. In all likelihood a few stragglers might have followed them from behind as well, which would trap them in a terrible location.

Evan hurriedly tried to think of ways to get out of the tunnel in the worst-case scenario. Considering that they’ve already seen a high-tier undead, as well as an abomination they’ve never seen before, Evan opened himself to every possibility. However, it was impossible to do so given the situation, so all he could do was frustratingly think in circles.

Then, he heard the sound of something hard being dragged on the floor. It was unlike anything they were used to hearing at that point.

The sound was heavy, but slightly muted. Evan attributed it to the relatively smooth surface of the floor.

His imagination ran wild with ideas of new kinds of undead

Saliva pooled inside his mouth. His mind was too preoccupied to bother with ridding himself of spit.

Then, Violet’s jumped.