The world had been devoured alive six months ago.

The dead didn’t just walk—they crawled, they dragged, they burst from half-eaten corpses in wet explosions of rot and bone. Cities were blackened husks reeking of charred meat and burst intestines. For weeks the only sounds overhead were the screams of airliners plummeting like dying birds, the sporadic crack of rifles, and the constant, wet symphony of teeth ripping through living throats followed by the thick, gurgling swallow as the newly turned joined the feast.

The safehouse was a concrete tomb they had clawed into something almost livable. A gutted storage depot behind blast doors gouged deep with fingernail scratches and streaks of old blood. Solar panels on the roof were crusted with dried gore blown there by wind. Sandbags sagged under the weight of rainwater mixed with liquefied flesh. Inside, string lights stolen from a looted hardware store flickered like dying fireflies. The generator coughed and growled like a thing in pain. Canned food was stacked in trembling towers, sorted by whatever still smelled least like vomit, because Soap had snarled through blood-crusted teeth that they weren’t going to die eating the same slop the rotters puked back up.

They kept their rules like scripture. Rotating watches that left no one alone for long. Tripwires rigged with empty cans and spent casings. Silent alarms that only screamed inside their own skulls.

When Ghost slipped out into the black for patrol, he always left pieces of himself behind—a combat knife, a note, or a single glove dropped deliberately onto the edge of the cot where it would be found first. A promise carved in silence: I’ll come back, or I’ll come back wrong, and you’ll put me down.

Gaz moved through supply counts like a man performing last rites. Twice a day he catalogued every bullet, every bandage, every precious round of antibiotics, his hands shaking only when he thought no one saw. But before he vanished into the storeroom, he always pressed the walkie-talkie into reach with the same low, raw vow: “You say my name, and I’ll crawl through a thousand corpses to get to you. No matter what’s left of me.”

Soap was the only thing louder than the dead. He worked with frantic, bloody fingers—grease and zombie sludge ground into every knuckle—stripping a shattered coffee machine down to wires and batteries collected from corpses still twitching in the street. He laughed while he did it, joking about “one decent cup before our guts are decorating the walls.” Every quip tasted like copper. Every smile pulled at the half-healed bite scar across his jaw.

Price was the last wall between them and the end. He mapped routes across pages already stained with old brain matter and rationed every drop of water like it was their final heartbeat. At night he sat in the weak circle of lantern light and read from books whose pages were warped with rain and worse. One arm stayed heavy around shoulders that needed it most, the other never far from the pistol at his hip, thumb resting on the safety like a heartbeat.

Outside, the horde never stopped. They piled against the walls in rotting layers, pressing until the metal groaned and the air itself stank of ruptured bowels and spoiled blood.

Inside, five bodies huddled beneath a ragged mountain of blankets and scavenged coats on a cot that had already begun to splinter under their combined weight. Hands that had spent the day covered in gore now rested against skin still miraculously warm. Hearts that had watched friends get torn apart still beat in the same small space.

They had no future. The dead had eaten that too.

But they had this—bloodied fingers laced together, foreheads pressed close, the fragile circle of living bodies refusing to let go while the world outside tore itself apart one screaming mouthful at a time.

The corpses could tear the doors to splinters.

They would still be holding on when the hinges finally gave.