"Three."
They shoved the cabinet aside. The door swung open.
An infected was already there, waiting. It lunged.
Taj's hammer caught it mid-leap, cracking its jaw sideways with a wet crunch. The thing dropped, twitching. Another one stumbled through the doorway. Samir's pipe came down in a brutal arc. Skull met steel. The sound echoed.
A third one lunged at Reyan.
He stabbed out with his knife, but his hand was shaking too hard. The blade glanced off its shoulder, barely scratching. It grabbed for him, fingers like claws, nails broken and black. Reyan saw his death in those milky eyes.
Then Samir's pipe came down. Once. Twice. Three times. The infected collapsed in a heap.
"I said don't stop!" Samir shouted, already moving.
They ran.
The hallway was hell. Flickering emergency lights painted everything red. Bodies on the floor — some still, some twitching, some standing. Blood streaked the walls in handprints and smears. The smell hit them like a wall — rot and copper and something worse, something sweet and wrong that stuck in their throats.
They fought through it. Every floor brought more. A man in a security uniform. A woman still clutching a grocery bag. A teenager with headphones tangled around his neck.
Reyan stopped thinking. Just moved. Stabbed. Dodged. Ran.
By the time they hit the lobby, his arms were screaming and his shirt was soaked through with sweat and blood that wasn't his.
The main doors were shattered. Glass crunched under their feet. Outside, dozens of infected shuffled between abandoned cars and corpses sprawled across the street. Some standing. Some feeding. All too close.
They crept toward the side exit, staying low, staying quiet.
Then a scream split the air.
High-pitched. Piercing. Inhuman.
Every infected turned at once.
"RUN!"
They bolted into daylight. Feet pounding asphalt. The world blurred around them — overturned cars, shattered windows, smoke rising from somewhere distant.
Behind them, the horde poured out of the building. And at the front, leading them, was the screamer — a woman, or what used to be a woman, her jaw hanging loose, throat exposed, letting out that awful wail over and over.
"They're calling each other!" Taj gasped between breaths.
"Talk later, RUN NOW!" Samir yelled.
They cut through alleys. Climbed chain-link fences that rattled and shook. Fought off anything that moved. More blood. More screaming. The city had become a maze of death, and they were rats trying to find a way out.
Reyan's apartment building was three kilometers away.
It might as well have been on another planet.
They fought for every block.
A woman in a torn sari lunged from a doorway, fingers clawing. Taj's hammer found her temple. She dropped without a sound.
An old man with black veins crawling across his face like spider webs grabbed Samir's arm. Samir jerked back, swung hard. His pipe shattered the man's skull. The body crumpled.
Then came the child.
No more than eight years old. Wearing a school uniform, backpack still strapped to his shoulders. Eyes white and dead. Mouth open, teeth bared.
He came at Reyan, fast and low.
Reyan froze.
The knife hung useless in his hand. His arm wouldn't move. His brain screamed at him to do something, anything, but all he could see was his own daughter. Her smile. Her laugh. The way she called him Papa.
"Reyan, MOVE!"
Samir grabbed him, yanked him sideways. Taj stepped in, hammer already swinging.
The sound it made would haunt Reyan forever.
They kept moving.
"Don't look at them," Samir said, breathing hard. "Don't think of them as people. They're not anymore."
But Reyan couldn't help it.
Every face was someone's father. Someone's daughter. Someone's friend. Every corpse was a promise broken, a life ended, a family destroyed. How many of them had families waiting? How many had made promises they'd never keep?
When they finally reached Reyan's apartment building, all three of them were drenched in blood and silence.
They stood across the street, catching their breath, staring up at it.
Reyan had lived here for five years. He knew every brick, every window, every crack in the pavement where his daughter had once tripped and scraped her knee. The lobby doors hung open now, glass shattered across the entrance. Inside, through the broken windows, he could see movement.
His hands wouldn't stop shaking.
Later — much later, if there even was a later — Reyan would still see that child's face. Eight years old. Same age his daughter would be next year. Taj had done what needed doing. What Reyan couldn't. He should be grateful.
Instead, he just felt hollow.
"Fifth floor," Reyan said quietly. "Wing B."
Samir looked at him. Nodded. "Then let's get your family."
They pushed through the lobby.
More corpses. More familiar faces.
Ramesh, the security guard who always snuck his daughter extra toffees. Mr. Kapoor from 3A who complained about noise but always smiled when he saw Reyan's daughter in the elevator. Mrs. Sharma who baked cookies every Sunday.
Some of them still moved.
Reyan stopped seeing their faces after a while. Just targets. Just obstacles. Just things in the way.
They climbed. Fourth floor. The stairwell was dark, lit only by emergency lights that flickered and hummed. Blood on the handrails. Drag marks on the walls.
By the time they reached the fourth-floor landing, Reyan's arms were numb from swinging. His mind was numb from killing.
Then he saw her.