The armored vehicle came up the switchbacks and the villas came into view — stacked in tiers on the hillside, spaced wide for privacy, looking down over the whole city.
Whoever lived up here had money, or had the kind of job that money visits.
I sent the dogs out first. No point claiming ground with people standing on it.
"Diamond, Club — the left side."
"Chip, Bluff — south."
"Dealer, River — uphill."
"Flush, Two-Legs — hold here. Somebody shows up, bark."
Bark.
Eight dogs broke off and went to work.
I took my time with the sign.
PRIVATE PROPERTY. TRESPASSERS DIE.
No mention of dogs this time. This was outer territory — I wouldn't be here most days, and I didn't have the animals to spare for a permanent watch.
A sign, then. Plus the rule that anything crossing it dies.
The dogs came back as I drove the post in. No system chime.
I looked at the ten houses. Of course. I'd have to clear them one at a time.
Four dogs stayed outside. I took the others and started at number one.
Number one had never sold. Original lock on the door — I dug a length of wire out of storage and had it open in under a minute.
Spend long enough at the end of the world and you pick up every skill there is.
Inside: bare concrete. Not even drywall.
I walked it top to bottom, then scratched an A into the mailbox by the gate.
A map unfolded behind my eyes.
Ding — territory expanded: 500 square feet. Reward: 100 points.
I smiled at nothing.
That's more like it.
I worked my way down the row. Nine houses, and only two of them had ever been finished — the rest were shells.
No people. Not one.
Eight villas claimed.
At number nine, there was a car in the front garden.
I touched the dust on the window. Not thick. Whoever was inside hadn't been parked long.
Every curtain in the house was closed.
I knocked. Rang the bell.
The sound went around that empty hillside and came back. Nothing answered.
I got the wire out again — and this time, when I touched the lock, I felt it.
Bolted from the inside.
So. Somebody was home.
Either alive, or one of the turned.
Then the wire shivered in my fingers. Somebody on the other side was working the lock.
Alive.
I stood there a second.
Empty houses, or houses whose owners were gone — I'd take those without blinking.
But there was somebody in this one. Somebody breathing.
My hand came off the door.
Out here every law is dead and every appetite gets to eat. If you're strong enough, you can take what you want from whoever's weaker and nobody writes it down.
I still can't do it.
I'll say this for myself: I'm the floor of human decency. I can kill without losing sleep.
But I'm not a sadist, and I'm not petty.
My cruelty has a trigger, and the trigger is somebody touching what's mine.
If a stranger put a foot on ground I'd claimed, I'd bury them.
But breaking into somebody's house, driving them out, taking their roof — that's not the same thing.
This page is a scraped copy of a chapter its author posts elsewhere. They have not licensed it to anyone here.
So I let them be.
And then the door opened a hand's width behind me.
A man with three days of stubble, wire-rim glasses, and the hollowed look of somebody who hasn't eaten properly in a long time.
Behind him, a woman with the same look.
And at his knee, a girl of five or six, peeking around his leg.
Her parents pushed her straight back behind them. New chapters come out on g.com first.
Bark. Bark. Bark. The dogs went off at the doorway.
"Quiet."
I looked the man over once. Then I gave him the terms.
"Everything except this house is mine. Don't go in. If you do, I kill you."
I turned and walked for number ten.
"Don't!" The man's voice came out loud and cracked. "There are things in there — they eat people!"
I stopped.
"You know that?"
"I saw it." He swallowed. "Number ten was having a party. A whole crowd of kids, all night, loud music. Then around dawn the screaming started, and a bunch of them came running out bleeding — and none of them got far. They got taken down and bitten right there in the yard."
"And the ones who ran out were the slow ones," he said. "The rest never came out at all."
"And you?" I said. "What were you doing?"
"Hiding." He said it plainly. "Door locked, curtains shut, not a sound. We've stayed in since."
My eyes went from his face to the door to the dried blood still on the pavement outside.
"And you've had supplies this whole time."
His mouth closed. He had a dry, cracked lip and no intention of telling me anything.
Fair enough. Nobody talks about food out here. He doesn't trust me and I don't trust him.
He went quiet, so I took the dogs and walked.
I felt him want to say something else. He didn't.
"Who was that?" his wife whispered.
"Don't know." He watched my back. "But she's got supplies."
He could see it — the color in my face, the way I moved, clean clothes. Even the dogs had coats like brushed leather.
Nobody looked like that two weeks in without a pantry behind them.
"Can we ask her for food? Later?"
"Dad. I'm hungry." The girl had hold of his leg.
Something changed in his eyes. He held out his hand, and a green light gathered in the palm — and the potted shrub beside the door came alive, branches bending toward him like they'd heard their name.
He caught the vine and closed his fist.
"Let's watch first. Don't be in a hurry."
I was already at number ten.
Wreckage, the way I expected. Door shut, and blood everywhere — the ground, the door, the flower beds.
I walked a full circle around it, reading the layout and the bones of the interior before I went in.
* * *
I'm not weak anymore.
A steel security door is a suggestion.
Clang — and it was open.
The moment it swung, I was flat against one wall and the dogs were against the other.
A roar.
Three of them came out, and they were hungry.
Two women, one man.
The first woman had been beautiful. Even now her face was intact — better preserved than most — and one leg chewed down to bare white bone.
The second one hadn't been so lucky. Half her face was gone, the implant in her nose hanging loose, one eye out of its socket, yellow maggots working in the meat.
The man wore a good suit. Something had opened his chest from sternum to belly, and both hands were already reaching.
The second they caught my scent, they came.
I took the first one out of the air with the shovel. The dogs had the other two before I turned my head.
They're not pets. They're working animals, and they work.
Three thuds. Three down. Fast, clean, no theatrics.
I rapped the door frame with the shovel, listening for anything that answered.
Nothing. Just those three, then.
We went in careful anyway, all of us. Careful costs nothing.
Three floors: two above, one below.
Money everywhere. Marble, custom cabinetry, the kind of light fixtures that cost more than a car.
And a mess. Bottles, plates, plates on the floor, and a pile of wrapped gifts heaped by the door.
I picked one up. Happy 20th Birthday, Marla.
A birthday party. And the guest of honor got the apocalypse instead of cake.
I opened the box. A designer diamond bracelet.
Then the kitchen — I wanted the food.
There wasn't any. Not one can. Whoever lived here had never cooked a meal in her life.
The refrigerator, though, was full of snacks.
I took everything. Imported supplements, imported drinks, imported boxed snacks. Down in the freezer: wagyu and a whole Australian lobster.
Upstairs, the bedrooms had new silk quilts and down comforters. Those went too.
Two floors stripped in under an hour.
I left two dogs on the stairs and took two down to the basement.
The moment I stepped off the last stair, something was wrong.
A low, rolling growl from both dogs. Not aggression — fear.
Like they'd seen something they couldn't explain.
All I got was cold dead air.
I tapped the handrail, listening.
Silence.
I went down one step at a time.
On the last stair — roar, and a wall of spoiled air hit me.
Fast. Faster than anything I'd met in three weeks.
It missed anyway.
Bang. The shovel came down out of nowhere and sent it flying ten feet.
Ten years of killing things teaches you not to learn by getting bitten.
It landed wrong. Everything about it was wrong.
Both arms rotated a hundred and eighty degrees, back to the floor, palms planted — legs folded out to either side like an animal's.
It pushed itself up like a four-legged centipede, hair hanging over most of its face, one gray eye fixed on me through the strands.
The basement lights flickered. It came at me in that impossible posture, and it was fast enough to blur.
One word. Speed-type mutant.
It was in my face before I finished the thought.
The hair parted and the mouth opened — too wide, all the way back — and I saw that it had no tongue. Somebody had bitten her lips clean off.
Two rows of uneven teeth came down at me.
Thud.
It bit something.
The shovel. Straight through the mouth, through the skull, and into the concrete behind it — the whole head pinned to the wall.
The body kept fighting. Hands, feet, everything but the head.
I leaned on the handle.
Crack. Then nothing.
It was fast. I'm faster.
And strong — the shovel had gone an inch into reinforced concrete. Most people couldn't pull it back out.
I worked the blade around inside the skull, pulled it free, and there it was.
A clear stone, yellow-white matter clinging to it. I rinsed it with water from storage and it caught the light.
A core. A zombie core.
I knew what these were. Later, bases would use them as currency — the big ones paid premium, endlessly, for every core they could get.
Last time around I topped out as a squad captain with no ability, so most of it stayed behind a door I couldn't open.
I only knew one thing for certain: this familiar little rock was worth something.
And then the system spoke.
Ding — zombie core detected ×1. New exchange unlocked.
Standard tier-1 core: 100 points. Exchange?
Cores buy points.
An exchange panel opened, with one line at the bottom.
First exchange: one large gift pack. Every 100 cores after that: one gift pack each.
I exchanged it without hesitating. The stone vanished from my palm, and the system started talking.
Ding — reward: 1 hemostatic powder, 1 first-aid pill.
Ding — reward: 1 combat suit.
Ding — reward: 1 pair of combat gloves.
Ding — reward: 1 pair of combat boots.
Ding — reward: 1 revolver.
I stood in that basement grinning at nothing.