Xenon learned quickly that running was not the same as surviving.
The first few days blurred together in a haze of aching muscles, half-healed wounds, and a gnawing hunger that never truly went away. He slept wherever exhaustion overtook him—inside abandoned buses, behind toppled fences, beneath stairwells that reeked of urine and decay. Sometimes he dreamed of his old room, of a world where silence didn't mean danger. Other times, he didn't dream at all.
By the end of the first week, the smell became impossible to ignore.
Death had a presence now.
It hung in the air like a permanent fog—sweet, rotting, and thick enough to coat the back of his throat. Bodies lay where they had fallen: slumped over steering wheels, piled in alleyways, tangled together on sidewalks where people had collapsed mid-run. No one buried the dead anymore. There were too many. Far too many.
News broadcasts—when he managed to power a device—spoke in numbers too large to comprehend.
Eight hundred million. Nine hundred million. One billion.
The world crossed the mark quietly. No announcement. No moment of silence. Just another day of screaming sirens that never came and governments that spoke from underground bunkers, issuing mandates no one could enforce.
SETTLEMENT CAMPS ARE MANDATORY. REPORT FOR SCREENING. NON-COMPLIANCE WILL BE CONSIDERED A THREAT.
Xenon ignored every single one.
He saw the camps from a distance once—fenced-off zones patrolled by armed drones and overstretched soldiers. Rows of tents packed so tightly together they looked like mass graves waiting to happen. People coughed openly. Children cried without tears. The air around the camps smelled worse than the streets.
If this virus thrived on closeness, then those camps were feeding it.
So Xenon became something else.
A scavenger.
He moved through the dead city like a ghost, favoring dawn and dusk when visibility was poor and movement harder to spot. He learned how to pry open doors without shattering glass. Which neighborhoods had already been stripped bare. Which malls still had backup generators humming faintly beneath their floors.
Food became currency. Canned goods, sealed water bottles, painkillers. He avoided anything fresh—it spoiled too quickly, and he'd already vomited violently after eating something that had gone bad without looking it.
Weeks passed.
And with each passing day, his body betrayed him a little more.
It started with a cough.
Dry at first, then wet. Sometimes streaked with red. His chest burned when he ran now, lungs screaming for air that felt thinner every day. His vision blurred at the edges when he stood too fast, and there were moments—brief, terrifying moments—when the world tilted and he had to grip a wall just to stay upright.
Still, he scavenged.
Because stopping meant starving. And starving meant dying faster.
The mall loomed ahead like a concrete carcass picked clean by time.
Xenon crouched behind an overturned delivery truck across the street, studying the entrance. The glass doors had already been smashed. No lights inside. No movement that he could see.
"Perfect," he muttered, though nothing felt perfect anymore.
He slipped inside through a side entrance, boots crunching softly over broken tiles. The smell hit him immediately—mold, rot, and something older. He pulled his scarf higher over his nose and moved quickly, heading for a convenience store near the central atrium.
That was when he heard voices.
Xenon froze.
"…told you it'd be empty," one voice said, rough and familiar. "Yeah? Then why don't you shut up and keep watch?"
His stomach sank.
He recognized them.
Two of the three.
The bullies who had made his life hell before the world ended. Bigger now, leaner in a desperate way, armed with scavenged knives and a rusted crowbar. The third—he remembered hearing—had died early. Fever took him in three days.
Funny how the virus chose.
Some died almost immediately while some begged for death.
Xenon backed away slowly, but his foot nudged a fallen can.
The sound echoed.
"Hey," one of them snapped, spinning around. "You hear that?"
Too late.
They saw him.
"Well, look who survived," the taller one sneered, eyes narrowing. "Didn't think you had it in you."
Xenon bolted.
They chased him through the mall, footsteps slapping against tile, shouts bouncing off dead storefronts. He ducked into the convenience store, grabbing whatever he could—energy bars, bottled water—before one of them tackled him into a shelf.
Pain exploded through his ribs.
"Thought you could steal our haul?" the shorter one growled, punching him hard in the stomach.
Xenon gasped, bile burning his throat. He kicked out blindly, catching someone in the knee. The man screamed, stumbling back.
Then—
"DROP IT."
A rifle clicked.
All three of them froze.
A man stood at the store entrance, rifle raised, eyes wild with exhaustion and fury. He looked older than Xenon remembered him being—grayer, thinner, but steady.
"This is my store," the man said. "You want to rob it, you go through me."
No one moved.
Then a sound came from below.
A thud.
A wet, dragging noise.
The store owner's face drained of color.
"No…" he whispered.
The basement door creaked open.
His wife emerged.
What she had been was gone.
Her skin hung loose and gray, eyes clouded over, jaw unhinged and dripping blackened saliva. Her movements were jerky, wrong, driven by something that had no memory of love or restraint.
She lunged.
The nearest bully didn't even have time to scream before she tore into his throat, blood spraying the shelves in thick arcs. The second tried to run—she caught him by the leg, dragging him down and biting deep, ripping flesh like paper.
The store owner raised his rifle, hands shaking.
"Honey—"
She was on him in seconds.
The sound that followed was…
indescribable.
Xenon was as shocked has all of the other witnesses who were now dead. He knew the world was literally turning upside down but he did not expected to see a creature out of a horror movie stare him dead in the eye.
A creature he could only define as a zombie.
Xenon ran.
He didn't look back.
He didn't stop running until his lungs felt like they were tearing themselves apart. He collapsed into an alley near his hideout, coughing violently, hands slick with blood that wasn't all his.
His vision swam.
His body burned.
Something was very wrong.
He staggered inside his hideout—an abandoned apartment with boarded windows—and collapsed against the wall. Every breath felt shallow, painful. His skin burned with fever, chills wracking him violently.
He knew.
The virus.
It seemed it had finally gotten ahold of him. Before he knew it, breathing became impossible. He was dying and despite knowing this was a possible outcome, there was nothing that could have prepared him for the pain. The feeling.
All of the dreams he had never gotten to achieve. His goal to matter in life all down the drain. He did not realize when tears began to trickle down his eyes.
He finally gave up on movement when it became to painful lying still was a better alternative.
Moments later his body was lifeless.
After what felt like a lifetime of darkness, a faint blue light appeared out of nowhere.
[SYSTEM INITIALIZATION COMPLETE]
WIELDER STATUS: STABILIZING
ANOMALY DETECTED