The world did not die with a whimper; it died with a low, agonizing hum—the sound of millions of Lázaro-9 spores vibrating in the stagnant air of dead malls and hollowed-out hospitals. Outside, the gray rain washed the soot of the old world into the gutters, while inside the shell of a "FreshMart," William Carter moved like a shadow among shadows. Behind him, the ghost of his group lingered in his mind: Tom, who was currently barricading their temporary nest; Elias, who was low on antiseptics; and young Leo, whose leg was weeping infection through a filthy rag. The urgency of finding sterile bandages for the boy was a dull ache in William’s chest, sharper than the hunger gnawing at his stomach. He signaled the perimeter with a sharp, bird-like whistle to no one, his boots crunching on spilled cereal and broken glass as he drifted toward the pharmacy aisle at the back.

The sound was subtle—a soft, rhythmic scrape of metal against a plastic shelf. It wasn't the erratic twitching of an Errant or the frozen silence of a Preso. It was deliberate. William’s pulse didn't spike; it flattened into a cold, lethal line. He rounded the corner of Aisle 4, his handgun raised and leveled before his eyes could even process the target. Ten feet away, a woman stood clutching a crate of canned peaches. Her skin was the color of parchment, her hair matted with the dust of the ruins, but it was the protrusion beneath her oversized, stained coat that made William’s internal clock skip a beat.

She was pregnant. At least seven months, by the look of the heavy swell of her abdomen.

In a blurred reflex born of a decade of paranoia, she dropped the crate—the cans thudding heavily on the linoleum—and whipped a rusted revolver from her waistband. Her aim was shaky but centered on his chest. William’s finger tightened on his trigger, his sights aligned perfectly between her weary, bloodshot eyes.

"Drop it," William’s voice was a jagged rasp, barely louder than the wind outside. He didn't lower his weapon. In this world, a womb wasn't a miracle; it was a dinner bell for things that hunted by scent. To him, the sight of her wasn't a reason for pity—it was a complication that smelled like death.

{{user}} didn't drop the gun. Her knuckles were white, her chest heaving with shallow, terrified breaths that whistled in the silence of the market. She looked at William not as a savior, but as just another predator in a world of wolves. Her finger twitched on the trigger. She was thirty, perhaps, but the lines around her mouth made her look a century old.

"I need the gauze," William muttered, his gaze flicking momentarily to the bandages stuffed into her side pocket before returning to her eyes. He saw the desperation there—a raw, animalistic need to protect the life inside her. It made her dangerous. A cornered animal with nothing to lose is a faster shot than a man with a group to return to.

{{user}} shifted her weight, a low groan escaping her lips as the weight of the child seemed to pull at her spine. She didn't speak. She couldn't. The Lázaro-9 often took the voice first in the early stages of stress, or perhaps she simply had nothing left to say to a man pointing a barrel at her unborn child.

William felt a flicker of something—not mercy, but a grim recognition. He thought of Sarah's empty room. He thought of Leo’s fever. If he killed her, he got the bandages. If he lowered his gun, he risked Tom becoming a widower of a best friend.

"The boy is dying," William said, his voice softening just enough to lose its lethal edge, though his aim remained true. "Give me half the roll. You keep the rest. You fire that thing, and every Murmurante within six blocks will be through those glass doors before you can re-cock the hammer."

He watched her eyes. {{user}} looked at the exit, then back at the grim, bearded man before her. She didn't lower the revolver, but the barrel dipped an inch. It was a silent, agonizing negotiation in a grocery store that had become a tomb. He waited, his thumb hovering over the safety.