The discovery of the Mormon Bank of Detroit was more than a mere waypoint; it was a grim affirmation, a single, solid fact in a sea of ruin. According to the fading lines on their pre-Collapse map, it meant they had trudged, clawed, and fought their way through roughly sixty percent of their hellish journey. The cost, in a purely material sense, felt almost laughably minimal. A handful of precious .30-06 rounds for the Garands expended, a score of arrows shattered beyond recovery. The only true loss was a man—one of the volunteers. His death had not come in the heat of battle, a warrior's end, but in the deceptive calm of the aftermath. As he leaned over a twitching corpse to retrieve an arrow, the thing—which had been playing possum with a predator's patience—exploded upwards. There was a wet, tearing sound, and half the man's skull was gone before anyone could even shout a warning. A sniper's bullet turned the creature's own head to pulp a second later, but the damage was done. The lesson was etched in gore: in this city, death was a patient trickster. From then on, every fallen body was met with a savage, ritualistic stabbing from multiple spear points before anyone dared approach, the sound of steel on rotting flesh a new, grim rhythm to their advance.
Their eyes in the sky was a heavily modified DJI drone, its humming a persistent, mechanical dragonfly hovering above the convoy. In a world where the GPS constellations had long since gone dark, it relied on visual positioning, its camera feeding a shaky, monochrome view of the nightmarish landscape to a tablet held by a lookout. Without the specialized modifications Michael had procured, it would have been limited to a pitiful five-meter altitude, useless. Now, it gave them a precious few hundred meters of foresight, revealing the twists and turns of the corpse-choked streets.
Guided by this mechanical sentinel, the convoy navigated two more intersections, the ruins pressing closer, the sense of a tightening noose almost palpable. With each step deeper into the city's rotten heart, the frequency of attacks increased. The sporadic, economical crackof a Garand rifle, which had been an occasional punctuation to the silence, now became a more regular staccato. The snipers, Richard and Zhang TieZhu, were earning their keep, their shots precise and deadly, thinning the ranks of the shambling, screeching things that lurched from broken storefronts and collapsed tenements.
Then, the drone operator's voice, usually a flat monotone, sharpened with a new urgency over the radio. "Contact! Multiple contacts! Right flank, one o'clock! Thirteen hostiles, moving fast! ETA one minute!"
Thirteen.The number hung in the static-charged air. It was the largest single group they had faced. The line of spearmen on the right flank tightened their grips, knuckles white on the cold, rough steel of their rebar pikes. This was a number that could overwhelm them.
Michael's voice cut through the tension, calm but firm. "Onyile. Light them up."
On the right flank, the big man nodded to his squad of a dozen fighters. The response was a series of metallic clacksand chunksas bolts were worked, chambers checked. They raised their rifles, a mix of battered but functional assault weapons, their barrels seeking targets in the rubble-choked street.
The creatures came not as a disorganized mob, but with a terrifying, predatory coordination. They moved on all fours, their movements a grotesque parody of a wolf pack, scrambling over piles of debris with an unnatural, scuttling grace. Eight hundred meters. Seven-fifty. They closed the distance with horrifying speed.
Then, a different sound cut through the air—not the sharp bark of an assault rifle, but the deeper, more resonant BOOMof a dedicated sniper rifle. Richard, the half-elf, had fired. Through his binoculars, Michael saw the lead creature's head snap sideways, a grotesque flower of black blood and bone erupting from its cheek. The 7.62x54mmR round from the Russian Dragunov didn't just wound; it obliterated. The creature's lower jaw and a significant portion of its face vanished.
Yet, impossibly, it did not fall. It staggered, a headless thing of pure instinct, still propelling itself forward on ruined limbs.
A second BOOM, almost on the heels of the first. Zhang TieZhu, from his perch, had taken the follow-up shot. The top of the thing's skull seemed to lift off like a pot lid, and it finally crashed to the ground in a twitching heap.
Richard, far from annoyed, flashed a grin and a thumbs-up towards Zhang's position. A lethal competition was born. Over the next five hundred meters, the two sniper rifles spoke in a grim duet. Boom. A sprinter collapsed, a hole punched clean through its chest. Boom. Another stumbled, its knee exploding into pulp. By the time the pack had closed to three hundred meters, four of the thirteen were down, felled by shots of chilling, economical precision.
"Conserve ammo! Three-round bursts! Fire!" Onyile bellowed, his voice raw.
The stuttering roar of controlled automatic fire shattered the city's deep silence, a sound it likely hadn't heard in decades. Muzzle flashes lit the perpetual gloom. The remaining nine Infected were punched backwards, their bodies jerking as rounds tore into them. They slowed, bleeding from multiple wounds, but their charge, driven by a mindless hunger, continued.
One hundred meters.
"Loose!" an archer captain yelled.
A cloud of arrows hissed skyward, then descended in a deadly arc. Two of the creatures went down, pin-cushioned. A following volley of spinning hand-axes, thrown with desperate strength, thudded into two more. They collapsed, twitching.
One remained. A single, blood-slicked horror, one arm hanging by a thread of tendon, burst through the final gap. It launched itself at the wall of spears.
Seven reinforced steel pikes met its charge. The points slammed into its torso with a wet, crunching impact. The force drove the spearmen back a step, their boots scraping on the debris, but they held, gritting their teeth. The creature was hoisted into the air, impaled, a grotesque trophy.
In its death throes, its one good arm lashed out, claws extended. The target was a spearman on the end of the line. The man panicked, let go of his pike, and stumbled back, raising his left arm in a futile block. Strapped to his forearm was a crude buckler—a piece of plywood armored with a bent sheet of metal that once read 'NO PARKING ANY TIME'.
The claws shredded the plywood and tore through the metal as if it were paper. The man screamed as deep gouges were torn into his forearm, the limb dropping, useless, to his side.
Simultaneously, arrows from the second line thudded into the pinned creature, one punching clean through its neck. Its final spasms ceased. It hung limp.
Silence descended, broken only by the wounded man's choked sobs. The coppery stench of blood filled the air.
Michael keyed his radio, his voice flat. "Medics. Get him into a sealed vehicle. Clean the wounds. Tape the suit." The order was brutally pragmatic. There was no time for comfort.
Before the medics could even move, the drone operator's voice returned, tighter now. "Multiple contacts. Five o'clock, nine hostiles. Also, two o'clock, upper floors of the half-collapsed tower… estimating ten more. They're converging."
Michael felt no surprise, only a cold confirmation. The gunfire was a dinner bell, ringing through the canyons of the dead city. He had known this moment would come. The relatively quiet infiltration was over. From here on out, it would be a blunt, brutal fight, a war of attrition measured in blood and bullets. They had announced their presence with the roar of gunpowder, and the city was answering the call.
But they were close. The university was near. He could feel it. The final leg would not be a trek, but a battle—a red, tooth-and-nail battle to carve their way to salvation, one bloody meter at a time.