The year was 2025, and the world had not just fallen — it had been devoured. What started as scattered reports of unrest in isolated cities became a global cascade, a domino of ruin that no government, no military, no wall could truly withstand. The media called it the Solanum Strain, though survivors just called it what it was: the end. One bite, one scratch, one second of hesitation, and you were gone. The living dead now owned the streets, shambling in endless herds across cracked highways, breaking through husks of once-proud skyscrapers, filling every night with their guttural moans.

For those who survived, every day was the same fight: food, water, shelter… and silence.

Amidst this chaos moved a woman named Elara Veyne. At just 23, she had been forced to grow old in ways that weren’t measured in years but in blood, ash, and scars. Before the collapse she had been nothing more than a college student, studying environmental sciences, dreaming of protecting the world. Now, her only dream was to make it through another dawn.

She had the kind of beauty the world didn’t deserve anymore—sharp green eyes that burned with stubborn fire, tangled chestnut hair falling uneven around her shoulders, and skin marked by faint lines of soot, scratches, and survival. A leather jacket—once her father’s—hung from her frame, patched in places with whatever fabric she’d scavenged. Beneath it, a simple black tank, torn cargo pants tucked into muddy boots, and a hunting knife strapped to her thigh. A battered rifle was slung across her back, its wood scarred and steel rusting, but it still fired when it needed to.

The ruins of the city whispered around her as she moved through them. Cars, burned and blackened, lay overturned in the streets, while vines and weeds climbed over storefronts as if nature was reclaiming the bones of civilization. Somewhere in the distance, the echo of a herd could be heard—low, unending, like thunder that never ceased.

Elara crouched beside a broken newsstand, flipping through yellowing pages of a half-destroyed notebook she carried. Lists of names, places, notes about which routes were safe and which weren’t. She muttered to herself quietly, her voice carrying the tone of someone who had been alone far too long.

“Three days since I saw another living person… Maybe longer. Hard to keep track. Supplies down to… two cans of beans, half a bottle of water. Not good. Not good at all.”

She closed the book with a snap and looked out into the empty street. Her green eyes narrowed, scanning the shadows between broken lampposts. The world was too quiet. Quiet was never safe.

Her stomach twisted at the thought of food, but hunger wasn’t the only thing gnawing at her. Loneliness was worse than the dead sometimes. People were meant to live together, to fight together, and Elara knew she was one unlucky moment away from becoming another forgotten corpse. She had started to wonder if she’d ever hear another voice again.

As she adjusted her rifle strap, a sudden noise froze her in place. Not the dragging feet of the infected. Not their hollow growls. This was something else—lighter, hesitant… human. She spun, heart pounding, gripping her knife as her eyes darted toward a collapsed building to her left. The sun was dipping low, painting the ruined street in blood-orange light, and shadows played tricks on her vision.

“...Hello?” she called out softly, her voice edged with both suspicion and desperate hope. “I know someone’s there. Don’t bother hiding—I heard you.”

Her pulse hammered as she took a careful step closer, her boots crunching over broken glass. The silence stretched long enough that she wondered if she’d imagined it. But then, there—a silhouette shifting among the rubble, just out of reach of the fading light.

Elara’s breath caught in her throat. For days, she’d dreamed of finding someone, anyone who wasn’t trying to tear her apart. But reality wasn’t so simple. In this world, strangers could be as dangerous as the dead. Trust could kill faster than a bite.