Ethan stood frozen in the camping equipment aisle, his chest still heaving from the adrenaline of his first kill.
The female zombie lay at his feet, her skull crushed, her body finally still.
But the silence didn't last.
Grrrrrraaaaahhhhh…
The sound made his blood run cold.
Guttural growls—deep, wet, inhuman—were growing louder from somewhere deeper in the store. Multiple voices, if they could even be called that. More like the sounds animals made when feeding, mixed with something worse. Something that had once been human but had forgotten how to be.
The zombies had noticed his presence.
Shit.
Ethan's eyes darted around the store, cataloging his surroundings with the sharp awareness of someone who'd grown up fighting to survive. His mind raced through options, escape routes, potential weapons.
There was no time to think. No time to plan carefully or weigh his choices.
Years of pent-up aggression—born from abandonment, poverty, and a life spent on the edge—combined with street-bred calm kicked in. This wasn't his first dangerous situation. He'd been in plenty of fights before, faced down men twice his size in back alleys, learned to keep his head when violence erupted around him.
This was just… different.
Different, but not impossible.
His eyes landed on the camping equipment display near the checkout counter. Among the sleeping bags and portable stoves, one item caught his attention immediately.
A folding military shovel.
Ethan grabbed it, his fingers wrapping around the handle as he tested its weight. It was an imitation tool—the kind sold to weekend campers who wanted to feel tactical, not actual military surplus. Mass-produced in some factory overseas, probably made of inferior steel.
But it was solid enough.
The head was reinforced, the edge sharpened for digging through hard soil. The handle had a decent grip. And most importantly, it was a hell of a lot better than his bare hands.
Ethan unfolded the shovel with a metallic click, locking it into position. The weight felt good in his hands—balanced, substantial. A real weapon.
"Come on, then," he muttered through clenched teeth, his voice low and dangerous. His knuckles whitened as he gripped the handle tight.
The shambling footsteps grew closer.
And then she appeared.
Another zombie—a woman, probably in her thirties when she'd been alive. Now she was something else entirely. Her flesh was pale and torn, hanging in strips from her arms where she'd probably clawed at herself in her final moments of humanity. Her clothes were shredded and stained with bodily fluids. And her eyes—those dead, glazed eyes—fixed on him with mindless hunger.
She didn't hesitate.
Didn't pause.
Didn't show any hint of the person she'd once been.
She just lunged.
Her mouth opened impossibly wide, revealing broken teeth stained with blood. Her hands reached out, fingers curled into claws, nails black with gore.
But Ethan was faster.
Before she could reach him, he swung the shovel with all his strength, putting every ounce of his one hundred and eighty pounds behind the blow.
CRACK!
The metal edge slammed into her skull with a sickening crunch that echoed through the store. The impact sent vibrations up Ethan's arms, making his shoulders ache.
Bone splintered under the force—he could feel it give way, could hear the wet cracking sound of a skull breaking.
But it wasn't enough.
Not nearly enough.
The zombie's head snapped to the side from the impact, but she didn't fall. Didn't stop. Her jaw still snapped open and closed mechanically, teeth clattering together with each bite. She shrieked—a horrible, inhuman sound that was part animal, part something worse—and reached for him again.
These things don't feel pain, Ethan realized with cold clarity. You have to destroy the brain completely.
"Stay down!"
He kicked her backward with all his strength, his foot connecting with her chest. She stumbled, giving him just enough space to rip the shovel free from where it had lodged in her skull.
Gore dripped from the blade—dark, congealed blood mixed with gray brain matter.
Ethan didn't give her time to recover.
He brought the shovel down again.
THUD!
Once.
CRACK!
Twice.
SPLAT!
A third time, the blade driving deep into what remained of her skull.
On the third strike, her head burst apart like a crushed melon, fragments of bone and brain matter exploding outward in a grotesque spray. Blood and rotten flesh splattered across the floor, across the nearby merchandise, across Ethan's shoes and pants.
The smell hit him immediately—a foul, fishy stench mixed with the copper tang of blood and something else. Something rotten and organic that made his stomach turn and his eyes water.
The smell of death.
The smell of decay.
The zombie finally collapsed, her body hitting the ground with a wet thump. She twitched once—a final, meaningless spasm of dead nerves—and then went still.
Completely still.
Ethan stood over her corpse, his chest heaving with exertion. His breath came in short, sharp gasps. Sweat dripped down his forehead, stinging his eyes.
But his hands didn't shake.
Not even a little.
He'd seen blood before—street fights where noses broke and teeth flew, desperate nights when hungry men fought over scraps, close calls where knives came out and someone didn't walk away. Violence wasn't new to him. Death wasn't new to him.
Fear was something he'd already made peace with a long time ago.
You do what you have to do to survive, he thought, staring down at what had once been a woman. A person. Someone's daughter, maybe someone's mother. And you don't apologize for it.
He stared down at the mangled corpse for a long moment, his expression unreadable.
"Guess you die the same way as in the movies," he muttered grimly, his voice rough.
Finding a torn T-shirt on a nearby display rack, he wiped the shovel clean, dragging the fabric across the blade until most of the gore came off. The shirt came away stained dark red and gray.
He tossed it aside.
After a long breath, Ethan steadied himself. The adrenaline that had been coursing through his veins—making his heart pound, making his muscles tense and ready—slowly gave way to something else.
An eerie calm.
A cold, calculating clarity.
And beneath that, strangely, unexpectedly… a pulse of excitement.
Not joy, exactly. Not happiness at what he'd just done.
But something primal. Something that had been buried deep inside him for years, forced down by the need to be civilized, to follow society's rules, to be the responsible older brother.
This was survival in its rawest form. Kill or be killed. Fight or die.
And some dark part of him—a part he'd never acknowledged before—found it… liberating.
I'm good at this, he realized with a start. I'm actually good at killing these things.
The thought should have disturbed him.
It didn't.
"Emily…"
His voice softened immediately, the hardness in his expression melting away as he spoke his sister's name. His jaw tightened, his eyes growing distant as he thought of her.
If everyone else in this damned world died, so be it.
Let Chicago burn.
Let the entire country fall.
Let civilization collapse into dust and ashes.
None of it mattered.
But his sister—the only person who had ever given him a reason to live, the only one who had ever looked at him with genuine love and trust—she could not be one of them.