Chapter 2

I woke with my first instinct being relief.

The pain was still there, but not the kind that spreads and grows after something tears you open—more like a dull heat pressed deep into the bone.

I could feel my chest rising and falling. I could hear wind scraping past my ears. I could smell gasoline mixed with dust.

I was alive—at least, that’s what I thought.

Then the rasp of metal on metal dragged me back into reality.

A rough chain cinched my neck, one end locked to steel bars bolted along the edge of a truck bed.

When I opened my eyes, I saw thick, badly welded bars rising from all four sides of the bed, then cross-braced overhead—an improvised cage, thrown together fast.

It wasn’t a sealed compartment. Wind, grit, even rain could push through the gaps.

The vehicle wasn’t moving. We’d stopped, maybe for repairs or a break.

Outside the cage, someone laughed—loud, careless laughter, the kind you hear when people are placing bets.

It wasn’t just one vehicle. A whole convoy sat in front of and behind us—modified pickups and cargo trucks with crude black-flag markings sprayed across their doors. Mud and dried blood were worked into the paint. A machine gun sat on one roof, its barrel swaying with the suspension as if it could swing onto anything that got too close.

I knew these people.

The base called them warlords. In truth, they were closer to raiders.

Before the outbreak, they were the city’s least restrained crowd: thieves, smugglers, underground fighters—men who lived on the edge of rules. After everything collapsed, it was like someone had cut their leash.

They didn’t have to dodge police anymore. They didn’t have to pretend to be decent. Looting became “survival,” and murder became “necessary.” They treated the apocalypse like a stage, and the messier it got, the better it was for them.

They lived by taking.

If anyone didn’t want this world to be fixed, it would be people like them.

When they talked, I caught words like “camp,” “corpse pen,” and “the pit tonight,” said as casually as if they were planning dinner.

I looked down at my hands.

My knuckles were pale, the skin drained of color, like it had been soaked in cold water for days. Blue veins stood out on the backs of my hands, but the warmth and spring of living flesh was gone.

I pinched the inside of my wrist with a fingernail. The pain arrived late, muffled—like it had to travel through a thick layer of cloth.

I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The air I exhaled was cold.

I drew in a slow breath. My chest didn’t expand the way it used to. It felt like a mechanical motion, something running on minimal power.

I didn’t need any more proof.

After the bite, I had mutated.

But I was thinking.

I could break the scene in front of me into details. I could read the convoy’s formation.

I hadn’t fallen into that mindless frenzy that left nothing but instinct. The unfinished serum hadn’t turned me back into human—but it had protected the one thing that mattered most.

My consciousness.

And with my mind intact, I could keep working. I could keep researching.

The last stabilizing chain in the serum—the final sequence I’d been trying to complete—I still remembered every step.

They could steal the lab equipment. They could tamper with the data.

But the method was still in my head.

A dragging sound came from the far side of the truck bed.

Two raiders hauled a half-dead man up to the tailgate and shoved him toward my cage like a sack of trash.

His lips were purple. A clear bite mark sat on his shoulder, the edges already darkening and stiffening. He tried to scream, but only a wet, broken breath came out.

My body flinched backward on instinct, and then the thought caught up with the movement.

I was a zombie now, too. I didn’t need to fear an infected man.

Someone said lazily, “Just toss him in. He’ll get up and start biting on his own in a minute.”

I understood what they were doing. To them, zombies were resources. They collected them, penned them, used them for entertainment—or for sabotage, turning them loose to make chaos.

To these people, the infected were like firewood. Like fuel. Like expendable ammunition you could throw forward.

I watched the man collapse at my feet. His body twitched twice, then went still.

No one checked his breathing. No one treated him like a person.

That explained why I was still here.

They didn’t know I still had my mind. They saw a man who’d been bitten and would turn any minute. Bringing me back was cheaper than putting a bullet in my head on the spot.

One of them looked at me for a couple of seconds, as if something about my face clicked.

He lifted his boot and kicked the bars. The impact rang out, harsh and ugly.

“Well, look at this,” he said, putting on a loud, teasing tone. “A Lighthouse Base lab boy. I’ve seen that face. You people look real important when you’re wearing those white coats.”

I played the part, lunging at the bars with a hoarse, animal sound, reaching for him and coming up short.

He snorted, already bored, and turned as if to walk away.

Then another raider spoke up beside him, casual as if he were reminding someone about a grocery list.

“Isn’t he the one Victor paid us to make sure gets cleaned up? We’re really just leaving him like this?”

Victor.

The name drove into my head like a cold nail.

I kept my arm stretched through the bars, kept snarling, kept acting like an animal.

“What’s the problem?” the first man laughed. “He’s already a zombie. You think he’s gonna call for help?”

That was enough.

Victor had ties to these people. And the horde we ran into—maybe it hadn’t been an accident at all.

That route we’d “cleared” and marked safe—why had it filled with bodies so fast? Why had the extraction point been blocked at exactly the wrong moment? Why had the driver died outside the vehicle? Why had Victor’s “asthma” flared up so perfectly, right when I was about to reach the truck?

I’d been uneasy about the lab for weeks, a feeling I couldn’t justify with evidence. Now the feeling had teeth.

I forced every detail down, locked it away.

Not yet.

I didn’t need rage. I needed a way out—out of the cage, out of this convoy, out of their camp.

The convoy started moving again as the light faded.

On both sides of the road, scrap-metal watch posts appeared, patched together with sheet iron and planks. In the distance, smoke from campfires climbed into the sky.

We turned into a camp built inside an abandoned construction site. Barbed wire ringed the perimeter. A crude warning sign hung crooked on the fence.

Inside were stacked shipping containers turned into housing, oil drums turned into stoves, and a pit dug into the ground. Wooden stakes and cheap string lights ringed it, like a makeshift arena.

The smell of blood was thicker here, layered with rot and sweat. It tightened around my throat like an invisible strap.

When the truck stopped, someone dropped the tailgate. I rushed forward the way a zombie would.

A second later, the chain at my neck snapped tight, yanking me back.

I staggered on purpose. The raiders laughed. Someone jabbed my shoulder with a stick like they were testing meat.

They shoved me into one of a row of iron cages.

The door slammed shut with a heavy clang, the lock catching.

In the cage beside mine, a few low-level zombies hammered the bars, rasping wet breaths through ruined throats. Farther down, other cages held living captives—men and women with blank eyes, rope marks around their wrists.

The way they looked at me was fear mixed with resignation, as if they’d already accepted they’d be dead by morning.

Outside, people lit lamps. People rolled out alcohol. People dragged chairs toward the pit.

This wasn’t their main base, but it didn’t need to be. It was enough to sort their “stock,” enough to rob and entertain themselves, enough to treat the apocalypse like a game.

And right now, I didn’t need to charge the bars.

I needed to wait—for the moment I could tear the whole situation open in one clean move.