"How long has it been again?" Cecil asked. They had been on the road for almost two days now, and there still wasn't any sign of a nearby town.
"Will you just shut it, Cecil!" Ellie screamed, her patience worn paper-thin by the endless stretch of cracked asphalt and the low, droning hum of the engine.
Jake let out a sigh, tuning out the bickering behind him. He turned toward the bus window, watching the dead world roll lazily by. Burnt-out gas stations. Fields gone wild. The occasional skeleton of a house with its roof caved in. He'd seen it all a hundred times over the last two days, and none of it had done anything to shake the boredom sitting heavy in his chest.
"It's been too damn quiet," he muttered, scanning the tree line, the ditches, the husks of abandoned cars scattered along the shoulder — nothing. Not a single undead in sight. Not even the distant moan they usually heard carried on the wind. He frowned, drumming his fingers against the glass. Ever since Stratum 25, he hadn't gotten a single chance to try out Deadly Gaze, the new skill he'd picked up. Figured he'd get some kind of test run by now, but the world outside just refused to cooperate.
He let out another sigh, about to lean back into his seat and close his eyes for a bit, when the bus lurched hard and screeched to a stop, throwing everyone forward against their seatbelts.
"What the hell—" Cecil yelped, grabbing the seat in front of her.
Jim came walking down the aisle from the front of the bus, wiping his hands on his jacket, his expression tight and unreadable in the way it always got when something was wrong. Jake had learned to read that face over the last few weeks — it was the face of a man doing math he didn't like the answer to.
"It can't go any further," Jim said, stopping near the middle of the bus so everyone could hear him. "Road's completely blocked. Cars, all bunched up, some of them flipped. We're not driving through that."
The bus went quiet — the kind of quiet that presses on the ears after all that yelling, thick and sudden. Jake unbuckled and stood, craning his neck to look through the windshield. Ahead, a wall of dead vehicles stretched clean across the road: doors hanging open, windows shattered, a delivery truck on its side blocking what would've been the shoulder lane too. It didn't look like a normal pileup. It looked deliberate, like something had shoved the cars together on purpose and left them there to rot.
"That's not a traffic jam," Jake said slowly, eyes narrowing. "That's a wall."
Cecil leaned over the back of her seat to get a look, her easy grin faltering for just a second before she forced it back into place. "Well, that's ominous."
"Understatement of the year," Ellie muttered, arms crossed, though the irritation from a minute ago had already drained out of her voice, replaced by something more careful.
Jim rubbed the back of his neck, glancing toward the front doors of the bus like he was already calculating the walk. "We'll have to go on foot from here. I know it's not ideal, but there's no way around without doubling back, and we don't have the fuel for that."
"On foot," Cecil repeated, less than thrilled. "Through zombie territory. Great. Fantastic. Love that for us."
"There haven't been any zombies in two days," Jake pointed out, and something in his voice came out almost disappointed rather than relieved, which earned him a sideways look from Ellie.
"Would you stop sounding bummed about that," she said. "Some of us would like to keep NOT getting eaten."
Jake shrugged, a small, crooked grin tugging at the corner of his mouth. "I'm just saying. Two days of nothing is weird. Things are never just quiet for no reason."
"Grab only what you can carry," Jake ordered, already moving toward the front of the bus without waiting to see who was listening.
Cecil groaned dramatically, flopping back into her seat like the idea of walking had personally wounded her. "This is why I wanted to learn to drive before the world ended. Nobody listens to sixteen-year-olds about their priorities."
"You'd have crashed us into that wall on purpose," Ellie said flatly, already unbuckling and reaching for her bag.
"Probably," Cecil admitted without shame, grinning.
Jim didn't argue, didn't even hesitate — just moved to check the med kit, quiet and efficient, the same way he'd learned to do most things these days. There'd been a time, not that long ago, when giving orders would've been his job. Old habits like that didn't disappear so much as get buried, and Jim had gotten good at burying things.
Jake grabbed his own pack from under the seat, slinging it over his shoulder in one smooth motion. His eyes drifted toward Jim for just a second, watching him work. Jake remembered him from before — barely, a blur of whistle blasts and drills and a gym that smelled like rubber mats — back when Jake had still been one of his students, back before he'd quietly dropped out of the program months before everything went to hell. He hadn't been there for what happened after. Hadn't seen it. But he didn't need to have seen it to know something had happened; he'd noticed it the first week they'd all ended up traveling together, the way Jim's hands would go still mid-sentence sometimes, the way his eyes would linger too long on nothing at all. Jake had good instincts. Always had. It didn't take much to read the shape of a wound even when nobody said what caused it.
Ellie knew, actually knew, because she'd been there — one of the ones who made it out, though she never once brought it up, not even when it was just her and Jake talking quietly at the back of the bus during the long stretches of nothing. Cecil, though, had no idea. She'd fallen in with their group only a few weeks back, cheerful and loud and blissfully unaware of the weight Jim carried around like a stone in his chest. Jake figured that was probably for the best. Some things weren't his to tell.
"You gonna stare at him or help me with the bags?" Cecil's voice cut through his thoughts, and Jake blinked, turning to find her already hauling two packs off the overhead rack, struggling under the weight of one clearly not meant for someone her size.
"Just toss it aside"Jake responded
"I'm stronger than I look," Cecil huffed,
"Do whatever you want then....but don't slow us down" He warned.
Ellie moved past them toward the front, checking the strap on her own bag, then glancing back over her shoulder at Jake. "You get a good look outside?"
"Wall of cars. Maybe twenty, thirty deep. Some of them flipped," Jake said. "Doesn't look natural."
"Nothing ever does anymore," Ellie muttered.
Jake reached the front doors first and eased them open himself, the hydraulics groaning in tired protest. Warm, stale air rolled into the bus, carrying with it the faint smell of rust and dust and something vaguely sweet underneath that nobody wanted to think too hard about. He didn't wait for anyone's opinion on the matter. He stepped down onto the road, boots hitting cracked asphalt still warm from the afternoon sun, and just kept walking.
Behind him, Jim hesitated for half a second at the doors before following, falling into step without a word. There'd been a time when Jim might have taken point himself, might have laid out a plan and asked for input before moving. That time had passed somewhere along the way, quietly, without anyone deciding it out loud. Jake called the shots now. He'd earned it, one right decision after another, until asking him to explain himself started to feel less like caution and more like wasted time.
Jake scanned the wreckage ahead — the wall of wrecked cars throwing long shadows across the road, metal groaning faintly as it settled under its own weight — then the tree line flanking either side, then the rooftops of a cluster of buildings visible past the wreck. A gas station, maybe, or a diner. Hard to tell from this distance.
Still nothing moving. Still no groaning, no shuffling, no telltale stumble of a rotted body dragging itself across pavement.
That itch at the back of his neck hadn't gone away. If anything, it had gotten worse.
"Two days of quiet," he said, low and even, more statement than thought, "and now this."
Nobody asked him to explain. Nobody asked if he was sure. That wasn't how it worked with Jake anymore — there'd been a version of him once, weeks and stratums ago, who might have turned that thought into a question, left room for Jim or Ellie to weigh in. That version was gone now, worn down somewhere between one skill unlock and the next, replaced by something quieter and colder that didn't waste breath on things that didn't need saying twice.
"Something cleared this road on purpose," Jake said, already moving toward the wreckage, not bothering to look back to see if they were following. "And it wasn't people."
Behind him, Cecil's easy smile finally slipped for real this time. "Okay, now I'm scared."
"Good." Jake didn't slow his pace, didn't turn around. "Means you're paying attention."
Jim exchanged a brief look with Ellie — the kind of look that said neither of them liked it, and neither of them was going to say so out loud. There was no vote to take, no discussion to have. Jake had made his rule clear enough times without ever needing to say it outright: follow him, or don't. He wasn't going to stop and wait for anyone who picked the second option.
Ellie fell into step a pace behind him without hesitation. After a beat, so did Jim, and then Cecil, jogging a little to catch up, her earlier complaints swallowed down into silence as she fell in line with the rest of them, boots crunching over broken glass scattered from the nearest wrecked car.
Jake didn't look back to check if they were coming. He already knew they would be.