Come to Me
“Kaaagh!”
Crack!
“Ah, fuck.”
Another zombie’s skull split open under my axe, same as every other day. A full year in and these bastards still showed no sign of thinning out. What, were the zombies scared of survivors surviving? I glared down at the one I’d just cleft in half, pouring all my spite into the look, but nothing changed.
“Grrraaah…”
They still shuffled through the apartment hallway. I was still just splitting the heads of the ones that found me. If this was how it was going to be, the least the universe could do was hand me a status window or some kind of cheat. Congratulations on surviving one year! Shout “Status Window” to claim your reward!
With that pathetic hope, I’d become the kind of lunatic who started every morning by yelling Status Window the second I woke up, just in case.
“Emotional bonding with a pretty-girl zombie at night, physical bonding with ugly bastards by day. What a life.”
I said it like a joke, but I was surprisingly free under the circumstances. Before society fully collapsed, being broke and missing an arm had meant living under constant stares and a thousand little discomforts. Now the world had flipped so hard that simply holding a weapon earned you automatic manners and respect. Aside from the whole life-and-death thing, it didn’t feel half bad.
Yeah, no. That’s bullshit.
I shook my head, arguing with myself. No matter how fucked the world got, a life where your neck stayed safely attached was still better. “This is fine” my ass.
I lifted the axe again and started down the long corridor. Rough footsteps scraped out of a wrecked doorway—heavy ones, the kind that didn’t even try to hide the noise, scraping metal against walls and doors as they came.
“Guuuuh…”
“Hah…”
The first thing I saw was a pair of thighs stretched tight as cables. Whoever this guy had been, he’d packed so much muscle into himself that even as a zombie the blue veins still bulged under the skin like angry ropes. The wreckage of wooden scraps still clung to his shoulders and arms, but against that mountain of meat you could barely see them.
Walkers were annoying. Runners were worse. And then there were these—the ones who’d gone under already armed, or the crazy sons of bitches who’d sewn artificial muscle into their own bodies.
“Doesn’t look like you’ve been undead long…”
Looking at the muscle, he might’ve been one of the Gym guys… I didn’t expect an answer, and of course I didn’t get one. The second he heard my voice he came pounding toward me. Great. Leg day paid off—the bastard was fast as hell.
“KYAAAAH!!”
As if running weren’t enough, he launched himself at me in a full leap. So that was how far those legs could take him. Even while ducking, I couldn’t help admiring the distance.
“Kiiiek!”
I was on the fourth floor of an apartment block—long hallway, four units to a side. I’d picked the place for the narrow corridors. That was looking like a mistake now. Not that anyone could’ve predicted this.
“Kahaaak!”
“Does better muscle make your voice better too? What are you, a solo opera singer?”
Dragging this out wouldn’t help. The more this thing raged, the more aggro it would pull from everything else in the building. Walkers alone I could handle. The second runners mixed in, the math changed. Taking a muscle zombie and runners at the same time was way too dangerous.
Crack!
So I started with the annoying part. The one-trick pony charged me again, and I ducked the same way I had before—then drove the axe into his thigh and twisted my whole body into the weight.
Riiip—! Splat!
“Krrrrgh… uuuugh…!!”
The blade tore clean through one thigh. His right leg hung in shreds. The muscle-bound heap hit the floor, rolled, and still came after me without even seeming to register that he’d been hurt, dragging the ruined leg behind him.
“Come to me is always right.”
The invincible strategy that had never once failed me against zombies. Giving a zombie the first move didn’t always put you ahead—but against the ones that just charged like idiots, with no ambush and no sudden variables, pure one-on-one, it always worked.
“KYAAAK!”
Even with one leg shredded, that stupid mass of muscle still closed the distance fast. I took one step back to match his approach and brought the axe down.
Slash!
“Krrrk!”
“Son of a—”
Not the clean crack of a skull splitting. Just the wet sound of flesh parting. Instinct or luck, he threw a hand up in time with my swing and took the blow on his palm instead of his head. The edge ripped through his hand and carved into the thick muscle of his arm, but that wasn’t enough to stop a zombie. His gaping mouth was already closing in.
“Sh—kh…!”
“Kyahak, kak…!”
I jammed my right arm under his throat and shoved, keeping those teeth off my shoulder—but the raw power rolling out of that mountain of muscle was crushing me by the second. It was only a matter of time.
“Ah, fuck… you’re heavy as hell…!”
Thud—!
I managed to get a foot between us and shoved with everything I had. The zombie toppled backward. As he went, I wrenched the axe free from his arm. Before he could get up I threw myself on top of him, turned the axe sideways, and put my whole body into a chop aimed at his neck.
“Just die already…”
“Kaaagh…! Krrrr…!!”
The freshly turned ones always made that sound—blood still thin enough to bubble and boil in their throats. The axe bit into his neck, but his arm got in the way and stopped it short of a clean cut.
“Krrrk…! Khyaaak!”
He thrashed, trying to shove the axe off. More accurately he was thrashing to infect me, but the result was the same either way.
Wham!
I raised my right arm and drove the iron plate on my forearm down onto the back of the axe like a hammer driving a nail. I felt the plate dent and buckle and didn’t care. I kept slamming.
Thud! Wham!
“Kark… krrrrrk…!!”
As if he could feel the blade sinking deeper, his good arm clamped onto my shoulder. Whether he was trying to push me off or just thrashing in pain, he gripped hard enough to tear the joint—but the pain was secondary. I put more weight into the axe.
“Die… already…!!”
CRACK!!
At last the edge hit something solid, and the hand crushing my shoulder went slack. I didn’t relax until I’d completely severed his spine. Only then did I haul myself up, gasping.
“…Hah… that was seriously fucking rough.”
Part of me wanted to just leave and run, but things like him were too likely to turn into a Mutant if you left them. I couldn’t be sure, but better safe than sorry. Anything with a real chance of mutating, you killed on the spot.
Mutants were that dangerous.
“This bastard was wearing a backpack.”
I gave the muscle zombie’s head an extra kick for good measure, then cut the pack straps with the axe and pulled it free. Flipping the body over to get the bag properly would have been smarter, but I’d burned too much energy already. Couldn’t be bothered.
“…Heavy?”
Normally, when people ran in groups, the unspoken rule was that if one of them got infected the rest stripped him of everything useful—or put him down clean. This muscle-head’s pack was suspiciously weighty.
“…Was he solo?”
Solo survivors like me were rare. Most of the artificial-muscle types came out of the Gym or somewhere like it. Maybe he’d been based in this apartment.
“I’ll check the gear later.”
I took the bag and headed for the doorway he’d burst out of. If this had been his base, there might be more worth taking. Instead—
“What the hell…”
No supplies. Not even another zombie. Just three ordinary human corpses cooling against the floor and wall, already going stiff.
Blood spattered across the room. The bodies were cleanly cut and stabbed—blade work, neat and thorough. I’d long since passed the stage of flinching at murder or making a fuss over death. If anything, the cold clarity let me see how wrong the scene felt.
“Some kind of dispute?”
Survivor groups ran into each other and clashed all the time. But for a fight, the victims showed almost no signs of a real struggle. Or the marks were so faint I couldn’t read them.
“Nothing.”
I opened the bag on the off chance the muscle zombie had done this while he was still alive, but there was no bloody knife. Just water, canned food, some potatoes—and then…
“What is this, a radio?”
A jet-black walkie-talkie, looking brand new, was tucked into a compartment deliberately built into the bottom of the bag.
“Yeah, this doesn’t feel right.”
My gut twisted—the kind of bad feeling you only earn after a year of surviving. The sense that something big was about to swallow me whole. If I dropped the bag and walked right now, could I still get clear? Whether this was a group war or just survivors killing each other, getting tangled in it never ended well. Every nerve I had was screaming that.
“Shame, but…”
In the end I transferred only the water and food, then tossed the empty bag—radio still inside—onto one of the corpses. Whatever that radio connected to, if it was tied to this scene, I wanted nothing to do with it.
“…Haa. Huh?”
“Hm?”
I left the room, took the stairs opposite the ones I’d come up, and was heading outside when three men came the other way and we nearly walked into each other.
“…Axe-Hand?”
Ah, shit. One of them looked me over carefully, eyes landing on the axe fixed to my left arm, and muttered the nickname. Between the solo act and the axe on my stump, pinning me down wasn’t hard—but hearing the name out loud still made a string of curses rise in my throat.
“Here to scavenge?”
“You too?”
“Something like that.”
Three men. The one in the middle was the biggest, but the one doing the talking stood on the left—cap pulled low, black cloth over his mouth with a white X painted across it. What the hell was that, a gimmick?
“…We go our separate ways.”
That was how most survivor meetings went. Too many low-IQ types had died learning that fighting over a scrap of loot wasn’t worth risking your life when you could just walk around each other. Making it this far meant you’d already learned that lesson. I nodded and was stepping past them with clear distance when—
“Hold up.”
The big one in the middle stopped me with a word.
“You happen to see a guy with artificial muscle? Him and his people. Big thighs, especially.”