The warehouse smelled of rust and oil, the kind of place where machines once lived and men worked for paychecks. Now it was a fortress, a workshop, and a lifeline all at once. Michael pulled the heavy sliding door shut and let the clang echo through the silence. The dawn light bleeding through high windows threw long, fractured shadows across the concrete floor.
This wasn't another scavenging day. This wasn't ration duty or fence-patching. Today, they would build.
The group was small two dozen in all. Soldiers stripped of command, scavengers with blistered hands, a medic who once stitched up bar fights in Houston's back alleys. And Sarah and Lena, standing shoulder to shoulder with the others, pretending the weight of what was happening didn't terrify them.
No one spoke at first. The quiet buzzed like static, thick with nerves and anticipation. Michael broke it with his voice steady, practical, nothing dramatic.
"We don't win this by waiting behind walls," he said. "We win this by turning scraps into weapons. If you can swing a hammer, hold a torch, strip an engine today, you fight. Not with your fists. With your hands."
That was enough. The group split into four teams, each peeling off toward the piles of junk and salvage that had been stacked and sorted over weeks of quiet preparation gathering the Bones.
Kyle Crane took point at the automotive scrap. He barked orders like a foreman, pulling battery packs and copper coils from a gutted sedan, coiling wires into neat bundles. His hands were quick, practiced, as if muscle memory guided him through a thousand unseen rehearsals.
Alice Sullivan ran the machine shop. She stripped down old lawnmower engines with surgical focus, tossing bearings, belts, and blades into crates. She barely looked up, though once she caught Michael's eye and gave him the kind of smile that said she'd been waiting her whole life for this: a reason for her knowledge to matter.
Sarah and Lena handled the timber and nails. They dragged planks from a collapsed shed, their hands shaking with fatigue, then steadied themselves as they hammered eight-inch nails through the wood at careful angles. Sweat streaked their faces, but Sarah laughed once when Lena smashed her thumb and swore like a sailor. The sound raw, normal made others grin for a second before the grimness settled back in.
The medic, Torres, coordinated the farm storage. He collected car springs, brake drums, anything heavy that could become a weapon head or counterweight. He muttered to himself about leverage and fracture points, knowledge dragged from another life.
By midmorning, the floor was littered with the bones of the old world, waiting to be reforged blueprints on Steel.
Michael hunched over a battered steel table in the warehouse's center. Kyle and Alice joined him, laying out sketches on scavenged cardboard and old ledger paper.
The "blueprints" were rough, hand-drawn with charcoal stubs, but they carried the DNA of something dangerous and new. Five weapons, all ugly, all born of desperation.
Electric Prod: copper wound tight around a pipe, powered by a car battery. Short, brutal shocks enough to drop a Runner, maybe buy seconds of survival.
Nailboard: crude planks bristling with angled nails, meant to slow and trap infected feet. A trap, not a weapon, but in war, seconds mattered.
Fire Axe: salvaged axe heads welded to steel pipe handles, wrapped in tape for grip. Simple. Effective. Heavy enough to split wood or skull.
Improvised Chainsaw: a scavenged two-stroke engine wired to spin a circular saw blade. Loud, dangerous, unreliable but devastating if it held together.
Grapnel Launcher: a PVC barrel fitted with a spring piston, capable of firing a makeshift harpoon tied to climbing cord. A way over walls, or into places no one else could reach.
Michael studied them, his jaw tight. "None of these are perfect," he said. "Some will break the first time. Some will kill the user if you're careless. But that's the point we're not careful anymore. We're desperate."
Sparks and Sweat The warehouse transformed into a forge.
Alice bent copper coils around pipes, soldering leads to a scavenged car battery. Sparks hissed, her face lit with the blue-white glow. She wrapped leather around the handle, passed it to Kyle. He pressed the trigger. A sharp crack and a three-inch arc of electricity jumped between contacts. The room went still.
"Jesus," Torres muttered.
"Not Jesus," Kyle said, handing it back to Alice. "But it'll save a life."
Sarah and Lena tested their nailboards, hammering them into the dirt outside. When a mannequin dummy was shoved forward, the nails snagged its legs, stopping it dead. The sisters cheered, high-fiving through grime and blood.
The Fire Axe came together under Michael's watch. He ground one rusted axe head until it gleamed silver again, then welded it onto a steel pipe. He swung it in a test arc, the weight perfect, the cut clean. A hush fell as the blade bit through a pallet in one swing. He didn't smile just nodded. "Balanced."
The chainsaw was chaos. Alice yanked a cord and the engine screamed to life, the blade spinning in a blur. The crowd backed away as it chewed through a wooden beam, sparks flying. Michael shut it down quick. "One mistake with this thing," he told them, "and you lose a hand before the infected even touch you. Respect it."
Finally, the Grapnel Launcher. Michael loaded the spring piston, braced himself, and fired. The harpoon shot across the yard, slamming into a wall and embedding deep. He pulled on the cord it held. Scouts scrambled up, laughing in disbelief.
For a moment, it felt like they weren't just surviving. They were fighting back blood and Training.
By afternoon, the warehouse yard had become a proving ground. Targets made of stacked tires, mannequins stuffed with rags, doors propped up to mimic barricades.
Sarah jabbed the Electric Prod at a dummy, flinching at the crackle of electricity but steadying her grip the second time. Lena swung a Fire Axe, the blow rattling her arms but leaving a clean mark.
Kyle demonstrated the nailboards, dragging a dummy across until the nails pinned it down. Recruits learned to flank, moving in pairs, one distracting while the other struck.
Alice revved the chainsaw again, teaching careful arcs, not wild swings. "You don't fight the horde head-on," she shouted over the roar. "You carve a path. Quick. Clean. Get out before they swarm."
Michael oversaw it all, correcting grips, forcing people to breathe between strikes, drilling into them the truth: these weapons were fragile, like they were. One mistake meant death. But together, they had teeth now.
The yard rang with effort grunts, curses, laughter when someone fell, silence when someone succeeded.
By dusk, muscles shook with exhaustion. Sweat stained shirts. Hands bled. But no one wanted to stop firelight.
When night fell, they gathered around a brazier in the warehouse's heart. The weapons lay in piles at their feet, crude silhouettes against the firelight.
Michael stood, his hand resting on the haft of the Fire Axe. His voice was calm, low, cutting through the crackle of burning wood.
"These tools aren't magic. They're not going to save us by themselves. They're dangerous to the infected, to you, to anyone standing in the wrong place at the wrong time. But they're ours. Made by our hands. That's what matters."
He looked at Sarah, at Lena, at Kyle and Alice and Torres. At the teenagers who'd never swung a blade before today, at the old man whose fingers shook too much to hold a hammer steady.
"You train in pairs. You cover each other. You don't fight alone. And you never ever forget that the simplest nail, the dullest blade, can still mean the difference between dying and walking out alive."
The silence was heavy. Then Torres, sweat still dripping down his face, stepped forward. His voice cracked but carried. "We're ready."
A murmur of agreement spread. Nods. Eyes fierce, tired, afraid but willing.
Michael felt the Fire Axe's weight in his hand. Solid. Real. He thought of the walls groaning at night, of the distant cries that never stopped. He thought of Sarah, asleep upstairs, and the others who trusted him not because he wanted it, but because the world had forced it on him.
"Tomorrow," he said quietly, "we break our first wall."
The fire popped. The faces around him glowed in its light hard, scarred, alive. They were no army. But for the first time in years, they had weapons that belonged to them.
The warehouse stood behind them, brimful with makeshift steel, gasoline, and desperate hope.
An arsenal born not of science fiction or miracles, but of grit, scars, and the refusal to die quietly.