By dawn, Casablanca no longer looked like a city. It looked like a wound.
Columns of smoke rose from entire blocks, staining the sky gray-black. Car alarms wailed in the distance, overlapping in a chaotic chorus that never ended. The air was thick with the stench of burning rubber, garbage, and something worse—rot, flesh beginning to turn under the relentless heat.
Soufiane and his cousins crept through the narrow alleys, avoiding the open roads where screams still echoed like ghosts. Soufiane's knife was clenched tight in his hand, the blade still smeared from the night before. His shirt was stiff with dried blood, a reminder of the thing he had killed. A reminder that dawn brought no reprieve—only new terrors.
Their first destination was a small grocery store that clung stubbornly to the corner of a side street. Its glass doors were shattered inward, glittering across the tile floor like shards of ice.
Inside, the shelves had been ransacked. Cardboard boxes lay torn open, their contents gone. A few empty cans rolled aimlessly across the ground whenever the wind pushed through the broken windows. The once-familiar smell of spices and bread was gone, replaced by coppery blood and decay.
Behind the counter slumped the shopkeeper. His throat was a red ruin, eyes open, fixed on nothing. Flies had already found him.
Zak gagged, covering his mouth, stumbling back toward the door.
"Don't look," Anas said firmly, putting a steady hand on his shoulder. His voice was calm, but his jaw was tight. "Take what's left. That's all we can do."
They scavenged quickly. Two bottles of water buried under a fallen rack. A pack of stale bread forgotten in the corner. A handful of canned sardines dented and dusty. Pitiful for four men, but better than empty hands.
"Better than nothing," Nabil muttered, shoving the sardines into his backpack. His voice carried no gratitude, only hunger and frustration.
They turned toward the exit.
That was when the roar of an engine cut through the silence.
A battered pickup truck swerved into the street outside, brakes squealing. Dust and ash rose in its wake. Three men jumped out, their movements sharp, deliberate. Each carried something brutal in hand—a crowbar, a rusted machete, a kitchen knife glinting in the sun.
Their eyes weren't clouded. Their movements weren't the jerky spasms of the infected. These were men. Alive. Human.
"Drop the bag," one of them barked in Darija. His voice was low, heavy with menace.
Soufiane's heart sank. He had been prepared for monsters. He hadn't been prepared for this.
Anas stepped forward, raising a hand carefully. "We don't want trouble," he said. "We'll share. Whatever you need—"
The leader laughed, a harsh, joyless sound. His face was lean, gaunt, but his eyes burned with something feral. "Share? This is survival, cousin. And survival has no friends."
The men advanced, boots crunching on broken glass, weapons gleaming.
Zak shrank back against the wall, muttering prayers under his breath.
Nabil's jaw tightened, his hand twitching toward his backpack as if already imagining the fight.
Anas stood rooted, eyes darting, calculating.
Soufiane felt the knife's weight in his hand, heavier than ever. His pulse thundered in his ears. He remembered his mother's trembling voice on the phone. He remembered Younes, asleep across the sea, unaware of what the world had become overnight.
And now, standing before him, were the first true test of this new world. Not the infected. Not the broken dead. But the living.
Soufiane raised his knife. His cousins braced themselves beside him.
Casablanca burned in the distance, smoke curling into the sky. But the fire was only half the truth.
The city wasn't just burning.
It was eating itself alive.