The quarantine zone was gone.
It hadn't collapsed in pieces the way people used to whisper about in the dark, but all at once, like a dam bursting. One moment the fences held, the next they were gone. Soldiers were swallowed in the tide, guns rattled uselessly until they were drowned by screams, and fire consumed the city in a haze of smoke and chaos. Michael and his group had pushed their way out through the eastern corridor as the world behind them folded in on itself. By the time they stumbled free, the city was nothing but echoes gunfire snapping, towers of smoke rolling skyward, and the sickly-sweet smell of burning bodies.
They didn't look back. None of them did.
For days they moved without rest, cutting away from highways and main roads where survivors and the infected both prowled. Michael guided them through broken service roads, half-buried culverts, and patches of overgrown woodland where silence was their only protection. Twice they almost stumbled into other survivor groups, ragged men and women bickering over scraps, but Michael pulled his people away each time. Hunger gnawed at them, thirst pressed sharp against their throats, but he refused to gamble on strangers. Trust, he had learned long ago, was the quickest way to die.
Every night when they made camp, Sarah would ask the same thing. "Why aren't we following the others? They all said west. They said the Fireflies were there."
Michael would sit by the meager fire, jaw clenched, eyes locked on the shifting embers. He'd let silence stretch until it grew heavy, then answer in his flat soldier's tone. "Because I've seen what happens when you put your faith in banners instead of walls."
Sarah would fall quiet after that, though Lena sometimes tried to press him further. "You don't trust them?" she asked one night, her voice hushed but edged with something that sounded like hope.
"I don't trust anyone who tells you salvation comes if you just walk far enough," Michael muttered. Kyle, who had been sharpening a jagged length of rebar into a makeshift spear, gave a humorless chuckle. "Sounds like every war I ever fought in. Change the flag, change the speech, but the hole you're buried in is always the same." Alice said nothing, only listened, her sharp eyes glinting in the dark.
On the morning of the fourth day, while the others were still packing up camp, Michael felt the system stir. The ghostly script etched itself into his vision with an almost mocking calm. Directive Update: Quarantine structures compromised. Firefly authority detected. Sanctuary Protocol unlocked. Blueprints available: Barricades. Filtration. Defense perimeters.
Michael narrowed his eyes, muttering under his breath. "Convenient timing."
But as always, he kept the knowledge to himself. To the others, his foresight was just soldier's instinct, tricks learned in long deployments. No one needed to know that his instincts came from somewhere else something he still didn't understand but could no longer deny.
It was on the sixth day that the road curved out of the hills and their future appeared before them. The river cut deep through the valley, glinting silver in the fading light. And spanning its width, rising tall and stubborn against the bite of time, was the dam.
The sheer wall of concrete loomed like the ribs of a long-dead giant. Moss clung to its weathered face, and cracks spidered through its surface, but it still stood. The sight of it struck the group into silence. Kyle let out a low whistle. "Holy shit." Alice's lips parted, a rare softness brushing her face. "It's still standing."
Michael felt something shift in his chest. His soldier's eye scanned every line the vantage points, the chokeholds, the thick walls. He saw more than a ruin. He saw a fortress, a water source, maybe even power if luck was on their side. He saw possibility.
"This," he said quietly, "is where we stop running."
It took them hours to find a way inside. The main entrances were sealed with heavy steel doors and padlocks rusted stiff. The chain-link fences around the perimeter sagged in places but offered no clear way through. It wasn't until Michael led them along a cracked service road that they discovered a collapsed drainage tunnel. The air reeked of mold and stagnant water, but it was passable. One by one, they crawled through, their flashlights carving pale tunnels of light in the dark.
The silence inside was suffocating, broken only by the drip of unseen water. Their boots echoed against damp concrete. Twice they heard scuttling, rats or maybe something worse, but nothing came. Then their beams swept across a figure slumped in the turbine chamber.
At first glance, it was a corpse in a rotted worker's jumpsuit. Then it twitched. Its head turned, and the light caught the pale fungal ridges that had bloomed across its skull. A Clicker.
Sarah stiffened, Lena's breath caught in her throat, but Michael only raised a hand for calm and drew his knife. The fight was quick and merciless. The blade slid under the jaw, severing the spine in one practiced thrust. The body crumpled to the floor with no sound but the wet slump of rot.
"Not the last one in here," Michael said. "Stay sharp."
They weren't. In the end, they found three more. Two Runners lurked in the control room, their movements jerky and twitching, and another Clicker had fused itself into a chair, fungus rooting into the metal like some grotesque throne. Each fight tested them Kyle's spear thrusts, Alice's steady aim, Lena's frantic swings with her crowbar but together they survived. By the time the last body hit the floor, sweat drenched them, lungs burned, but the dam was theirs.
That night, they barricaded entrances with overturned desks, chained shut the maintenance doors, and made camp in the offices. Sarah ran her hand across the dusty control panels, her voice breathless with wonder. "Could this… could this still work?"
Michael's eyes traced the turbines. Some were rusted, but a few remained intact. The system's ghostly schematics flickered at the edge of his sight: filtration units, power nodes, fallback positions. Not impossible. Not yet.
"It could," he said finally. "With time. With work."
Around the fire they built in the generator hall, shadows leapt high against the concrete. Kyle sat cross-legged, carefully cleaning his weapon. Alice leaned against the wall, eyes half-shut but alert. Sarah and Lena huddled near the flames, whispering about safety, about how maybe they could stop running, maybe even plant something again.
Michael broke the silence. His voice was steady, but beneath it lay the steel of command. "Listen. The Fireflies won't save us. No one's coming with food trucks or medicine. What we build here, with our own hands, that's all there is."
Nobody argued. Even Sarah, who had once clung to every rumor of salvation, only nodded.
Michael rested his hand on the haft of his axe, the steel cool against his palm. His gaze swept across them, each one weary and afraid but still standing. "We'll make this place hold. Stone by stone. Blade by blade."
The fire crackled. The river roared beyond the walls. And in the corner of his vision, the system glowed with quiet certainty. Sanctuary Progress: 1%.
For the first time in years, Michael felt something dangerous stir inside him. Hope.