The night air was cool on my skin, only emphasized by the wind whipping through the back alley. Because I noticed the cold meant the civilians would be shivering from it inside ten minutes. The September night air was cooler than a few nights ago, and I hoped it didn’t mean winter would be coming sooner than usual.

I stepped free of the shelter of the wall, peering both ways down the alley. After everyone had followed me, we made our way as a group down the alley, in the opposite direction from Regis’ watchdog, then pressed on to get away from the apartment complex. I kept my strides short so that the women carrying the little ones would be able to keep up.

One mile. If we could make it just one mile in the dark, we could find a place to hole up for the rest of the night, then leave in the morning. I checked the road, but nothing stood out to my mana sight. Cars lined each side of the residential road, left to their own. Again, I couldn’t help but wonder about bodies. At the start of this mess, we’d found bodies frequently, even in remote areas. Now, it was like every corpse had disappeared.

We made it one block before something decided we looked tasty. I could see it coming, the core of the monster shining with a dim, quartz light. The creature made steady, if not rapid, progress over the ground toward us. It was ten feet long, and I expected to see a snake come slithering out of the darkness toward us. The creature that crawled on the ground, however, was not a snake. It had legs. Many legs. They splayed out on either side of the body, moving in an undulating rhythm as the legs propelled the body forward.

One of the women behind me shrieked, and her terror only seemed to increase the centipede’s speed as it came toward us.

I heard the crossbow twang and a meaty impact. The centipede didn’t stop its forward motion, however.

“Back,” I shouted to the women and children, more of whom had taken up the terrified cry of the first. I stepped forward to accept the rush of the creature, which reared its head back to lunge at me. The thing was slow, however. It couldn’t have moved faster than a toddler, and my reflexes were far past that now. The head came forward, driving at my leg. The thing probably wanted to bite me on the leg and inject its venom. I side-stepped the head as it came down, and brought my sword down on its back, decapitating the thing.

To my surprise, it continued moving forward. It blindly rushed at the line of women and children, and I had so generously moved out of its way. Green blood glowed phosphorescent everywhere it flew, which included my own pant legs. The centipede left a trail of the ichor behind it as it crawled forward.

Carter was faster to react than me. She lunged forward with her rebar spear, putting as much force behind the thrust as possible. However, the soft underbelly of the centipede accepted the thrust, and the forward momentum of the creature continued. She stumbled, caught off-guard by the success of the thrust, and the centipede bowled into her, and on top of her. I brought my sword down again on the back of the thing, severing yet another section of the creature into two parts. Both pieces continued wriggling in their forward movement. Thankfully, the legs were not dangerous on their own. The first thing they connected with, the legs latched on and held fast. So two halves of a ten-foot centipede crawled their way onto Carter and held on.

“Andy!” I called. I made shallow cuts into the back of one of the centipedes until I could expose the core. “Grab it!”

He didn’t wait for further instructions, thrusting his arm into the gap I’d made until his hand touched the core. Immediately, the two halves of the body stopped wriggling, and the green-blue mana flowed into Andy.

I stooped to help Carter out from under the corpse. She was covered in the stuff. She’d gotten her hands up to protect her face, but even that wasn’t completely free of the phosphorous blood.

“This is disgusting,” she said. “Chavez, next time, you get to take on the disgusting insect with glowing blood that still moves after it’s dead.”

“Pass,” he said. “I’ll stick with zombies.”

“Andy, you want the next one?” She asked my friend instead.

“Can I have the core?”

“Hell yeah,” she promised.

“Cool,” he said. “I’ll get the next one.”

“Wait, what happened to the core for this one?” She looked around.

“Oh, Andy got that one too.” Chavez laughed at her outraged expression.

“Oh, screw you two. I hold off the giant centipede, and all I got was covered in blood.”

“Cut the shit,” I growled. “We didn’t make it a hundred yards, we’re screaming in the neighborhood, and we’re glowing like a goddamn lava lamp. Let’s get the civvies out of here before Regis’ goon figures out what’s going on and comes looking for us. Hell, maybe something worse heard us too.”

All the women fell silent at my words. Some of the infants still cried, but most of the children were just staring at the giant body of the centipede in fascination. My team looked properly chagrined.

“Form up,” I ordered. “We move in thirty seconds.”

Bragg was already in position, but the three others hopped to, ushering the party back into its loose group. I counted slowly to thirty seconds before I moved out. Anyone not ready could stay behind.

The centipede creature had killed most everything in its area because we didn’t encounter any signs of life for another five blocks. They were short blocks, less than a football field in length each, so I guessed we still had only made it a third of the way to my goal of one mile. Already, some of the women who were carrying the older children began to complain about their heavy loads.

The next sign of life came with the attention of a dozen or so rats. Enormous rats moved more like wolves as they ran through the streets. They didn’t engage with our party, however. As soon as they were within twenty feet, they pulled, they disengaged from their charge and moved away into the darkness until they were even out of my mana sight.

Finally, came the flies. Normally, when I think of a cloud of flies, I imagine a group of insects flying around together in groups of bugs that could all fit within my wingspan. When the bugs are more the size of a kitten, that becomes a much bigger issue. Thankfully, with their increased size, the bugs were easier to hit with a swinging sword. Chavez loosed several shotgun rounds into the midst of the flying creatures, sending them scattering ten at a time. Once they were on top of us, I cut them down with my sword, Carter with her spear, and the rest of my team attacked with the butts of their weapons. Andy opted for his combat knife, stabbing it deep into any of the flying creatures that came in range.

At a distance, the creatures looked like regular flies, but up close there were some distinct differences. First, they weren’t nearly as dark as a regular fly, though what a regular fly looked like now I couldn’t say. These had bright red eyes which almost glowed in the dark. Their bodies shimmered in the dark against the light from their eyes, as if their skin was metallic instead of a carapace. That must have been the case because my sword enjoyed pulling the silver mana from their bodies each time it could cut into a core. Not all the large flies had cores, however, and these died quickly to any simple bludgeoning attack, whether from a piece of rebar, or the butt of a rifle. Chavez’s crossbow was practically useless, but the big man made up for it with his large fists.

Try as we might, we couldn’t keep the flies entirely away from the civilians, though no one was severely injured. The flies would tear at a person’s skin with their long legs until they drew blood, then seemed to lose interest in their prey and move away.

“I guess we’re not their natural prey,” I said after the last of the flies was dead or leaving in disinterest. If they continued to attack, none of the civvies would have made it out alive. I casually wiped a line of blood from my forearm. The scratch was mild and already closing.

“Move out,” I said after everyone had caught their breath.

“Give us another moment,” the young woman said. I realized I still hadn’t caught her name. Susan. I was going to call her Susan until I knew her actual name.

“We haven’t moved nearly far enough,” I said. “And now we smell like blood to any predator out there.”

“He’s right,” Andy agreed. “We’re sitting ducks out here. We have to move away from this location and find another place to hole up. The longer we wait here, the more likely we’ll lose someone.”

There were general grumbles of dissatisfaction, though the only outright disagreement came from the kids, who didn’t get a vote anyway. We got moving again, though at a much slower pace.

The final three blocks went by at a snail’s pace. Everyone, even my team, was dragging their feet. When Chavez complained about his leg, I knew it was bad. He’d been through another kind of hell this last week, and I couldn’t recall him complaining once.

“We have to stop,” Andy spoke in a low-pitched voice. “We’re tired and hurt. We need to get these wounds cleaned before they get infected.”

“Fine,” I said. “We’ll get set up inside. We can use some of that water and bandages we got at the hospital. I’m surprised though.”

“About what?”

“The wounds weren’t deep and didn’t bleed all that much,” I shrugged. “I’m just surprised we’re having as much difficulty as we are.”

Andy reached his remaining arm across his body to where a slash in his shirt was. I looked at the area where his wound would be, but all I could really see was a higher concentration of mana in that area.

“Let me look,” I said. I stopped the group, many of whom sat down on the cold sidewalk, right where they were.

I untucked Andy’s shirt and lifted the shirt to look at the long gash. The wound had sealed already, and a light scar was the only sign that something had happened. That couldn’t be right, though. The wound couldn’t have sealed over so quickly and still left pain. I touched the skin above the scar, lightly pressing. Andy hissed in pain at the touch.

“Everyone, get inside now,” I ordered. I pointed to a Comfort Inn less than a block away. “We can make it there.”

Not everyone stood to their feet. Some of them just looked at me with vacant expressions.

“Up. Now.” I growled the words out. The threat, empty as it was, broke through their apathy. I led the group to the front doors. For the briefest moment, I stood waiting in front of the sliding glass doors, waiting for them to open. Every so often I’m surprised at my own idiocy, but years of habit can be hard to break. So, I pried the doors apart with my hands, ushering everyone in before closing the doors behind me. It might be a frail barrier, but the intact glass was still comforting. It also meant there was no wind coming into the building, which was also a great relief from the outside.

I looked around the lobby, hoping that I would find what I was looking for. There, near the back of the lobby, a large door with a familiar sign on it. I ran over to it and didn’t hesitate to cut the door open and kick it in. The scent of chlorine wafted into the room.

“What’s going on, Ward?” Carter called from the lobby.

“Get over here, and I’ll show you. You too, Andy. Bragg and Chavez, watch the door.” I silently prayed that nothing would attack our group now. With the shape the two men were in, there was no way they could put up a serious resistance against any of the creatures we’d seen lately.

“What?” Carter complained. “I’m so tired, can’t we just rest until the morning, and take care of it then?”

“No, it can’t wait,” I said. I grabbed her and Andy by the arm and pulled them over to the shower at the side of the pool deck. “Sit down,” I told her, pointing to the bench along the wall.

“Gladly.” She did as instructed.

“What about me?” Andy asked.

“Take off your shirt and lie down on your left side.”

“I mean, I usually want a bottle of wine first, but okay.” He peeled his top layer of clothing and lay down on the tile.

I brought my full attention back to Andy’s side. I didn’t bother looking with my eyes, since the flesh had already knitted back together. I peered beneath the layer of gray, red, and blue mana, and looked beneath the surface.

There, so small that I would have missed them with a cursory glance. Small dots, smaller than the tip of my pinky, pulsed with mana.

“This is going to hurt,” I said, letting my hand drop to my side.

“What are you going to–“ Andy cut off with a scream as I brought my knife around and cut into his skin, directly where the previous wound had been. His entire body locked up in pain, which was a good thing. It meant he didn’t thrash around while I dug the knife tip in and scooped out the egg sacs.

“Forrest, what the hell?” It was Carter, who seemed to be fully aware again, and she was on her feet.

“Fill that bucket with water from the pool,” I pointed to the bucket on the bench next to where she’d been sitting.

To her credit, she didn’t hesitate to obey, moving faster than I’d seen her manage in the last half hour of the evening. The bucket was back just as Andy had regained his movement.

“Hold him down,” I told her, as I took the bucket out of her hands. “I need to rinse the wound out.”

I messily poured water from the bucket onto Andy’s back. He let out a moan, and pushed against Carter, but she had her bodyweight down on top of him, and he only had one good arm.

The water cleaned out the wound, and I poured over every inch of it with my mana sight before I concluded I had removed every one of the egg sacs. I glanced down at the dozens of the things. Each one was smaller than a grain of rice and perfectly round, with a gelatinous texture, if I had to guess. I didn’t really want to touch it, to be honest.

“What the hell is that?” Carter asked.

“Eggs. When the insects attacked us, I think they planted these under the skin of everyone they scratched. They weren’t trying to kill us, at least not immediately. They were using us as incubators.”

“How many of us?”

“All of you.”