Twenty minutes earlier.

122 Mercury safehouse had zero amenities, zero water, and zero electricity. Just next door, 123 Mercury was a functioning base protected by sentry turrets, patrols, and at the least, had power.

James would have prefered functioning plumbing over electricity any day, however. He was playing chess with Aurelia, who was having some trouble remembering the rules. Her favorite piece so far was the knight, not least because of its go-anywhere-the-fuck-it-wants attitude. The rook and bishop were easy enough to understand, too, and the queen, even more so.

But not even a wall of pieces could stop the knight, and she really, really liked that.

“H-hey, pawns can’t do that,” James said. She’d had it murder two diagonal pawns at the same time and moved it one square forward, standing between the tiles of its fallen enemies.

She murmured something in complaint. She hadn’t ever said a coherent word yet, but she understood him just fine.

He hoped she’d speak again, soon, but at least…she was here.

“General alert from Technical Lieutenant Coronel. Kartesian patrol unit inbound,” a synthesized voice said. They didn’t even know there were speakers here. “Proceed to rendezvous at pre-arranged coordinates.”

That was when thunder rolled and a loud crash reached their ears, like a building was falling in on itself in slow motion—because that was exactly what was happening just 2km away.

Aurelia hissed, but she understood the message. She and James stood up—and she picked him up.

“What—”

She kicked open the door.

“Aurelia!”

She started running—inhumanly fast, zipping down the road faster than James could squeak.

“Do you even know where you’re going!?” James shouted.

Aurelia’s heels screeched to a halt.

“It’s the other way!”

She turned around.

“Damn it, I need to be giving directions—”

She unceremoniously dropped him to the ground. He groaned. His side was in pain, and he was sure there was gonna be a long bruise there.

He got up and…saw Aurelia squatting down, presenting her back to him.

“…Really? On your back?” he asked.

She grunted.

“I guess it beats a princess carry.”

Carefully, he got on, and for a moment, he felt like a child again. Aurelia started running, and he felt the wind against his face—and brief wisps of shockwaves from ahead.

“Left!”

Gunfire roared from behind them, followed by more explosions. He was afraid the battle would follow them, but they were far away now, and it soon all turned into a muffled drumming in the distance.

The problem now was that a small horde of Alphas was running after them.

Naturally, running out in the open after such a ruckus roused half the city would result in this odd scene he found himself in. On Aurelia’s part, she didn’t really care. She just kept running, following James’s instructions, ultimately outrunning most of the Alphas.

Most of them.

They ascended ramps, hopped between the roofs of cars and trucks, weaving in and out of side roads and major avenues like the chase scene of a Scooby Doo episode, and still, it looked like the zombies were a diverse enough bunch that a few dozen of them evolved into ridiculously-fast pursuit predators, parkouring around just as well as Aurelia, or even better.

The avenue was two lanes wide, then it became four. The monument was ahead: a granite construct of three women holding up a mausoleum, which held the actual remains of a national hero. Their friends should be waiting there, and maybe then they’ll instantly understand the situation and help fight off this mini-horde.

…but James was afraid that these zombies were just too fast. They could fight it off, sure, but some of them would die.

Or, he and Aurelia could fight off the horde on their own, and James would die, instead. Aurelia wouldn’t like that.

Not like he could convince her to pick that option, then.

They finally left the avenue and crossed the giant roundabout that encircled the green monument grounds.

Aurelia’s feet left asphalt, and they stepped on grass. She sped under the canopies of trees, avoiding bushes and 10-foot heaps of white, charred corpses. Some of the engineering vehicles’ buckets were still biting into the soil. She lept over an eight-foot chasm, where a blue tarp obscured the dead underneath.

They finally cleared the trees and entered the monument park. With clear sightlines, they easily spotted the other scouts, accompanied by Saito and Eliso.

The scouts had been told about Aurelia’s “condition,” but none of them expected to see her giving James a piggyback ride and still managing to sprint at Insane Bolt speeds.

The zombies in-pursuit came into view after them, and all involved paused, parsed, and understood the situation, forming a firing line.

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Aurelia skidded to a stop 50 feet from the group, tossing James their way, turning to face the zombies.

The moment James stopped getting the air beaten out of his lungs from rolling across the ground, he got up and shouted, “Aurelia!” Karlson and Valora rushed to him and dragged him up to his feet, but they, as well as all the others, were paralyzed as to what to do.

Aurelia was 50 feet away. The zombies were going to tear her apart in just a few seconds. They wouldn’t be able to reach her.

Saito and Eliso opened fire. The sight of exploding zombie bits shook the scouts awake.

“Pair up! Close in!” Karlson shouted. “If you’ve got a clean shot, take it!”

Gunfire was loud, Saito and Eliso were reminded, but the scouts were unaffected. They moved in pairs, each pair with some distance between them so there was still manuever room without getting into someone else’s sights.

The lead zombies fell, but not fast enough. Everyone knew the zombies would reach Aurelia soon if—

“Aurelia! Don’t!” James shouted. She had charged into them.

Then she screamed a bloodcurdling scream. That…was Aurelia, right?

She reached forwards, mirroring the zombie in front of her.

They both thought they would come out on top.

Aurelia reached into its neck, forming a knife with her hand—disconnecting neck from body. Her other hand swiped at another zombie like a claw, taking off a limb. Another prey lunged at her, and she welcomed it with both arms, kneeing it in the gut and sending it in an arc over the rest of the zombies’ heads.

The gunfire died down, leaving only the sound of ripping, sprays, and dripping.

…and the sound of reloading. James wrestled with Joseph, managing to point the handgun into the air before it went off several times.

Aurelia cared not for the scuffle behind her.

There was a lot of zombie meat in front of her.

She knelt down and plucked out a masticated finger. She gave it a taste—a lick, really—and found it…soothing. With every nibble, every bite, something inside her was welling up, like some sort of life…power? Well, it all tasted like chicken.

Would James taste like chicken, she wondered. She shook off the thought, because James was nice. She would not eat James.

She didn’t even notice she’d finished the finger. There was a whole arm right there, so…she ripped that out and started taking respectable bites out of it.

“A-Aurelia?” James said. She turned around, blood wiped all over her face.

“Mmm?” she replied, still chewing. Quite rude.

James stumbled back. “C-can you speak?”

She gave an annoyed look and gulped. “Yeah, what?”

She looked left and right and only saw the shocked faces of her co-workers. “The fuck you all looking at?”

That was when a tactical nuclear warhead tossed a building up to outer space—marking the start of the Philippine Space Program—and knocking everyone to the ground.

***

Library Uno was still. The whole of Diliman was still.

Even while the sun was high in the sky, and no clouds were in sight, thunder rumbled in the distance. It was like bombing and artillery, sounds which the survivors still remembered. It was all such a distant memory, and it was all so…normal. They continued doing whatever it was they were doing.

It took a brave few mindful souls to get them to realize the severity of the situation and evacute them into the buildings’ basements, reinforced by ribs of steel girders to keep the buildings from collapsing on top of them. Whether or not they actually held up the ceiling remained to be seen.

Troy, himself, was in his office in Library Uno. Privy to the truth of what was going on, he wasn’t bothered by the deep rumbling of buildings crashing down so many kilometers away.

Sweat dripped from his chin. He rested his elbows on the desk, and he rested his forehead on his fists. The ripples from his fellow Lanan did not bode well.

He sighed. The Alliance presence in this city was already such a threat to this extent—

Splash.

Yep. That was it. He was getting out of here.

The door quietly swung open, and in the next breath, four men flooded into the room, and four guns were pointed at him.

“Quietly, please,” Tristan said. He and his men hid their identities behind bandanas and shades, but it didn’t stop Troy from recognizing his voice. His mouth flapped open and closed.

“How—”

“Quietly.”

Tristan gestured to one of his men, and one of them walked up and cuffed and gagged Troy.

They exited into the hallway and hurried through it. All the windows had been closed, but as they neared the back exit, a steel-barred door, a guard patrol rushed through.

For a moment, guns were pointed at each other, but neither side fired a shot.

Until now, not even when Troy’s men marched up to the occupied buildings of Diliman, not a single shot had been fired. It was enough for them to have made their demands, and it was enough for the different Group leaders to have bowed to them.

In an era like this, when there were so few of them left, actual bloodshed was unthinkable.

So, the two sides were content to scamper to the closest bits of cover they could find, guns pointed at each other, and eye contact, unbreaking.

“This ain’t the time!” one of the guards shouted. “Fuckin’ zombies broke through Shuster and Magsaysay Gate!”

With the exception of the western approach, which was blocked off by an expedient chainlink fence, the entire campus was surrounded by an iron fence. Shuster and Magsaysay were two gates opening up to a thoroughfare bordering the campus to the east. Both were constructed of mostly vertical bars, making it appear like the fence, standing at about two meters tall, but its horizontal reinforcements and hinges were thick—more than enough to withstand a ramming attack from a sedan, and more than once had firefighters of the past have trouble getting past those gates after they were closed at night.

Those two gates were broken, now.

Zombies shambled in from the northeast and southeast, their numbers greater than Diliman had ammunition in total. The guards had long since retreated, instead opting to evacuate any survivors they found along the way—good luck to everyone else.

Troy couldn’t feel relieved just yet. Although his “reinforcements” were here, he was still in a bit of a predicament.

“And what’s this guy gonna add, huh? You and everyone else knows what you gotta do, anyway!” Tristan replied, with nothing but an eye and a handgun peeking out from the side of a structural column.

“That’s our leader!” the guard replied. His radio was blaring with panicked reports. “C’mon! They’re fucking almost here!”

Tristant didn’t reply. A firefight seemed inevitable. Trigger fingers tensed up, and they suddenly became aware of just how sweaty they were—just how slippery triggers were.

Splash.

That was when the shockwave of a tactical nuke reached them. It was a resounding boom like a mountain had cracked open. The windows broke with the drumming bang, and their ears bled, and they bled from cuts from the glass flying everywhere. It felt like their lungs and innards were shaken around, and the ground itself shook enough that most of them lost their footing and toppled over. It wouldn’t have been a surprise if the building itself came crashing down, but it held, even if there were a few cracks in hard-to-reach places.

The next few seconds was just a moment of ceasefire and letting the tinnitus pass. Some of them could hear the agitated wails of the incoming horde, which had already reached the edge of the Sunken Garden, trampling over potatoes and young stalks of corn.

Tristan took off his bandana and wiped his face, and the blood from his ears. He and one of the guards, who was on all fours on the floor, looked at each other. They knew each other. The guard was trying to say something, but Tristan couldn’t hear shit.

The guard pointed at the door, his mouth making shapes that looked something like “Close it.” Tristan hobbled over, his head still throbbing, and rested by the edge of the door, watching the horde coming closer.

“Close it!” A muffled shout reached him.

He gripped the bars on the door and allowed himself to fall backwards, finally shutting the thing as he lost his grip and fell on his ass.

The horde finally met the wall of Library Uno, and on the other side of the bars of the door, hands tried to worm their way between the gaps, and their faces showed nothing but the want to kill.

The tinnitus still hadn’t gone, and it hurt like shit. At least for now, Troy’s guards and Tristan’s rebels had to hunker down—and take turns spearing zombies in the face through the window grills, and dump concrete blocks down at them from the second floor.