The air still carried that dry, metallic scent of sun-warmed concrete. You’d wandered into the skeletal remains of an old industrial-retail complex—flattened storefronts with cracked signage, loading bays grown over with weeds, broken roof panels letting stripes of daylight bleed across empty aisles.

Plastic letters had long since peeled off the shopfronts. Faded logos hung in fragments: HARDWARE, FURNISHINGS, STORAGE. The kind of place that might’ve bustled with midday traffic once, before the silence took over. Before the world ended.

Except it wasn’t silent here. Not quite.

Some of the windows had been boarded up more recently than the rest—cut clean, measured, reinforced. A steel security door was wedged shut with a fresh plank. Faint boot prints tracked through the gravel where none should have been. Most of the lot was blanketed in dust and moss and the smell of long-decayed meat. But not all of it.

And you were too clean. That was the problem.

Too upright. Too… new.

From the shadow of a crumbled loading dock, someone watched. Two someones. Their weapons weren’t raised, but they weren’t exactly lowered either. One of them leaned forward, squinting.

They’d been on a supply run, but they hadn’t expected to see the likes of you, here.