Chapter 2 : First Blood
Colorado Rockies — January 12, 2020, Early Morning
Fifty feet from the cabin, the forest closed around him like a fist.
The trees were old-growth pines, thick-trunked and packed tight, their canopy blocking most of the gray morning light. Snow covered everything beneath them in uneven drifts—knee-high in the open spaces, thigh-deep where the wind had sculpted it against fallen logs and boulders. Marcus moved through it in a crouch that was half caution, half necessity, because standing upright meant catching branches with his face.
The Clicker's tracks led northwest. He was heading southeast. That was the extent of his plan.
Some coordinator you are. "Head in the opposite direction from the monster" isn't exactly an evacuation protocol.
He'd covered maybe a quarter-mile when the silence started to bother him. Not the absence of sound—he could hear the wind, the creak of branches, the soft compression of snow under his boots. It was the absence of the right sounds. No birds. No small animals rustling in the underbrush. Nothing alive that wasn't fungus or him.
The System's threat indicator pulsed once, a faint amber at the edge of his vision.
[THREAT PROXIMITY: 200M — DIRECTION: EAST]
Marcus stopped. The hunting knife came up. East was to his left, beyond a dense stand of pines and a shallow ravine choked with dead brush.
He dropped lower, put his back against a tree trunk, and waited.
Two hundred meters. That's two football fields. If it's a Clicker, it won't know I'm here unless I make noise. If it's a Runner—
Runners were different. Stage one infected. Still had their eyes. Could see, could sprint, could scream loud enough to draw every other infected in a half-mile radius. Faster than a Clicker but weaker, less armored. The early stages of Cordyceps hadn't yet replaced enough tissue to make them tanks.
[THREAT UPDATE: 150M — CLOSING]
Moving toward him. Not directly—the indicator shifted slightly south, suggesting the thing was on a path that would intersect his route. Coincidence, or it had caught his scent, or his sound, or some other sense that seventeen years of fungal evolution had sharpened.
Marcus changed direction. Angled north, moving faster now, sacrificing silence for distance. The snow betrayed him with every step—crunch, crunch, crunch—a metronome counting down to contact.
[THREAT UPDATE: 100M — CLOSING FAST]
Sprinting. Whatever it was, it had locked on.
He broke through the treeline into a small clearing, maybe thirty feet across, and spun to face the direction of approach. Knife forward. Feet planted. The way they'd taught him in combatives—not the pretty martial arts version, the ugly one that started with "put something sharp between you and the threat."
The thing came through the pines at a dead run.
A woman. Or what had been one. Late twenties, early thirties. Hiker's jacket, the waterproof kind with reflective strips, now stained dark and split at the seams by fungal filaments threading up from the collar. Her face was still mostly human—eyes wide and wild, mouth open, a sound coming from her throat that was half-scream and half-something that had never come from a human mouth before.
Runner. Stage one. Recent.
She covered the distance between the treeline and Marcus in less than three seconds.
His body moved before his brain finished cataloging the threat. Sidestep left—her momentum carried her past his right side. His left hand caught the back of her jacket. His right drove the hunting knife into the side of her neck, below the ear, angling inward.
The blade hit resistance. Muscle, then something harder—the spine. He twisted. The Runner's legs buckled. She went down face-first in the snow, and Marcus went with her, riding the fall, keeping the knife in, driving it deeper with his weight.
Hot. Her blood was hot. It hit his hands and forearms in a rush that steamed in the January air, and for a moment the warmth was so startling against the cold that his grip almost loosened.
The Runner thrashed. One arm swung back and caught his shoulder—not hard, but the fingers clawed at his jacket and the strength behind them was wrong, too much, more than a person that size should have. He pressed down harder. The knife scraped bone. The thrashing weakened, stuttered, and stopped.
Silence.
Marcus stayed on top of her for ten seconds. Twenty. Counting. Waiting for the body to move again because in every horror story he'd ever consumed, the body always moved again.
It didn't.
The System chimed. Clean, neutral, indifferent to the blood cooling on his hands.
[RUNNER ELIMINATED]
[+5 SP | +5 XP]
[SP: 5 | XP: 5/1,000]
Five points. One kill. He pulled the knife free with a wet sound that would live in his memory for a long time and sat back in the snow.
His hands were shaking. Blood—her blood—ran down the knife blade and dripped from the guard onto his wrist. The steam rising from it curled in the morning air.
Five points. A food ration costs five points. One human life, converted to currency, buys one day of eating.
The math was obscene. And it was the math that would keep him alive.
He wiped the blade on the snow, then on his pants, and sheathed it. Then he looked at the body.
She'd been a hiker. The jacket was high-end—the kind sold at REI or Patagonia, built for weekend warriors hitting the trails. The boots were good too, Merrell, better than the pinching pair he was wearing. Her hair was matted with fungal growth at the temples, thin tendrils of white spreading across the scalp, but the rest of her looked... recent. Weeks, maybe. Months at most.
A wedding ring on her left hand. Gold. Simple.
Marcus closed her eyes. The lids were cold under his fingertips.
He didn't know why it mattered. She'd been gone before he killed her—the Cordyceps had seen to that. Whatever she'd been, whoever had put that ring on her finger, that person had ended weeks ago in a scream and a fever and a loss of self that no one came back from.
But he closed her eyes anyway. Because he could. Because someone should.
Then he searched her pockets. Practical won over sentimental in about four seconds—the medic's triage instinct, the emergency coordinator's resource assessment, the new brutal arithmetic of a world where the dead didn't need granola bars but the living did.
Right jacket pocket: a granola bar, Nature Valley, still sealed. Left pocket: a folded piece of paper. He opened it with numb fingers. A trail map. Pikes Peak region, Colorado. Trails marked in red, campsites marked with triangles, and in the lower right corner, a small town circled in faded marker. Someone—maybe her, maybe someone before her—had drawn an X through the town and written one word beside it: OVERRUN.
Marcus studied the map. The terrain matched what he could see—mountain ridges to the north and west, a valley running southeast. The town was roughly twelve miles from his best guess of his current position.
Twelve miles in deep snow, exhausted, on one granola bar and half a bottle of water. With no guarantee the town wasn't crawling with infected.
[MAP ACQUIRED: COLORADO TRAIL SYSTEM — REGIONAL]
[NAVIGATION ASSIST: BASIC — AVAILABLE AT SYSTEM LEVEL 1]
A faint overlay appeared on the map in his mind—distance markers, terrain difficulty estimates, a dotted line suggesting the most efficient route southeast. Basic, but functional.
Marcus ate half the granola bar. The oats and honey tasted like the best thing he'd ever put in his mouth, and for three seconds—just three—the cold and the blood and the dead woman at his feet and the impossible situation he'd woken into didn't matter. Just sugar and grain and the simple animal pleasure of eating.
He saved the other half. Wrapped it back in the foil. Tucked it in the jacket's inside pocket alongside the matches and water.
Then he stood, checked the treeline in every direction, and oriented southeast.
The map showed a town twelve miles away, marked OVERRUN in a dead woman's handwriting.
He started walking.
Want more? The story continues on Patreon!
If you can't wait for the weekly release, you can grab +10, +15, or +20 chapters ahead of time on my Patreon page. Your support helps me keep this System running!
Read ahead here: [ patreon.com/system_enjoyer ]