Christine's Appleby House, Forest Park, Clayton County, Georgia. Saturday, October 19th, 2019. 18:00

Sara had a productive day. She worked like a bee, with almost no breaks just to keep her mind from remembering yesterday. She rather failed it, but her body kept working nonetheless.

She went around Christine's neighborhood, looting the houses and carrying stuff back. She disassembled and removed all the furniture in the boys' second-floor bedrooms, using the two chambers as her warehouse. She blocked the windows with shelves and wooden boards, then sorted everything inside. The girl expanded the list of items she was gathering. She stuck a sheet of paper with a label for each pile. food, clothes, trinkets, personal hygiene, and cleaning products. On the shelves, she had boxes with electronics and jewelry. In Christine's former bedroom, her prized collection of trinkets like Graham Cobbler's 11x11 Rubik's cube, Joseph's Spiderman, Christine's notepad, Rudy's nametag, and a few others, along with her mom's photo and Verachiel's feather.

She had enough food to last for five months if she rationed it. More than enough to last through winter. The variety wasn't so good and it didn't have as much protein as she liked. Water was a problem but she assumed she'd need to set up a few rain catchers like in that stranded in a raft game she saw once. A drum and a tarp. Gather rainwater and then boil it.

Christine's neighbors were all relatively wealthy and fond of fireplaces. She had a lot of firewood but no idea how long that much was supposed to last. Her best bet was to layer a lot of clothing and use the fireplace sparingly.

Satisfied, the girl locked the rooms and went downstairs to the dining table. A map of Forest Park and surrounding areas took it all. Black X's marked the places she already looted, and chess pieces showed where she knew the other survivors were. She was amazed they hadn't yet gone through all the houses and apartment buildings looting everything. In fact, she found no trace of other survivors after the Necropolis King died, save for yesterday.

If she had a dozen helpers, she would've looted Forest Park clean by now.

What Sara didn't know was that most survivors didn't have half of her motivation. They spent most of their days mourning and lazying around. They had more food at the military base than they could eat before it all spoiled, without counting the bland MREs which would last forever. Fort Gillem hosted more than two thousand people during normal times and had a lot of supplies. Save for a handful of proactive people doing all the heavy lifting, the survivors weren't interested in looting or doing any work at all.

"I need to gather more firewood tomorrow," she penned down on a notepad. She knew which houses had fireplaces but had left that job for later. "Maybe I'll use Graham's truck to get the firewood. I bet he would like that."

Abby called.

"Yes?"

More black stuff. Sara couldn't wait. Not. But she had decided to believe in Abby.

"Sure. I'm going to sleep in the second house down the street. People died in it but there's a clean bedroom there."

She looked at the map. Before the Apocalypse, they used to get groceries from the supermarket near Forest Park's graveyard. It was too close to the blast site. It should be in ruins now after they blew a building with the SWAT van.

Her eyes drifted south. "There's Costco south of I-75. That means crossing the highway. And that's past the university, it's their territory."

"I'll need to go on a bicycle. A car would make too much noise."

She finished her tasks for the day and went to sleep.

*

*

Christine Appleby 's House, Forest Park, Clayton County, Georgia. Sunday, October 20th, 2019. 4:00

The girl woke up in the dark. In more than one sense. The impurity purging session was as bad as the others. Sara woke up covered in smelly black stuff. She could swear she smelled the food she ate on it and told Abby about it.

She felt like she'd been used as a punching bag by a dozen heavyweight boxers, then did eight hours of CrossFit. Every muscle in her body hurt and she couldn't move even to protest or groan.

But she could actually feel something moving inside of her body. It was like someone was pulling an ice cube inside her muscles. It soothed her aches as it went.

"Fix... my... face too," she grunted.

"Gimme."

Her head pounded as she tried to concentrate. Remembering the feeling of the Mana Infusion Skill also brought Phillip's death to mind. Her focus faltered.

The mana inside her felt cold, but the mana she Infused into the knife felt hot, burning even. "Why mana can feel both cold and hot?" She managed to ask.

Following Abby's instructions, Sara struggled to drag the cold mana along the channel she burst open to Infuse the knife. It soothed the ache she endured the previous day.

"Is the mana healing my channel?"

"Isn't that better?"

"That's not what I read in the cultivation novels."

"Fair. I'm hoping to fall unconscious again. Can you keep up the mana circulation?"

She didn't reply and rested on the bed, soaked in the black oily stuff as Abby fixed her muscles' spiritual damage. If she had to explain the feeling of having the muscles cleaned, it was like having one's veins scrubbed from the inside with steel wool.

*

*

Morrow Tourist Center. Morrow, Clayton County, Georgia. Sunday, October 20th, 2019. 8:00

Sunrise came late, a sign that Winter was, indeed, coming. Though the temperature remained comfortable like late summer. Maybe it was the effect of all the heat from Hell dumped on the planet. Maybe it was altered weather caused by the meteor shower. Maybe it was another sign everything was fucked up.

Sara didn't care. She had other pressing matters on her mind. Her task for today was to secure water, food, and a source of supplies. She aimed at Cosco in southern Morrow. She needed to cross I-75 for that, though. After making sure she had everything she needed for a whole day away from her main supply stash, she set out on a borrowed mountain bike.

Fifteen minutes later, Sara was already near the interstate overpass, trying to find a way across. it didn't look good. She climbed on the public building's roof to get a good look at her surroundings.

The overpass was cluttered with crashed vehicles, and so was the interstate in both ways, as far as the eye could see. It seemed to have more vehicles than possible. Since the cars and trucks crashed and piled up, where were the open spaces? Surely the cars weren't following each other that closely. Yet she couldn't see a gap in the conga line of twisted metal and broken glass. Every lane as far as the eye could see was crowded with crashed cars. And the dead moving about.

Another mystery. If the cars crashed so closely to one another as to leave no gap between them, how did the dead come out of the vehicles they died in?

Just looking at the interstate gave her goosebumps. Her instincts screamed at her to run away.

"What's that? This creepy feeling coming from the highway?"

"I can, but how? Why can I feel it?" She whimpered.

"Can they get out of there?"

"Sara!" She heard an undead far away call her name. It came from the interstate. She shuddered.

"That's too creepy. It's like they know I'm here."

She thought about asking why again, but the fairy was not forthcoming with information. Abby would probably answer with the same vague stuff from before. She hated being on a "need to know" basis.

"Mission failed," Sara sighed. "I'm not crossing that. Even if I do, how am I supposed to bring the supplies back? I can't drive a car through the blockade!" She pointed at the overpass and gasped at what she found.

She found something nobody liked to find. Nobody sane, that is. Dead bodies without burn marks, two or three days old. Dead survivors who apparently died to wraiths, by the deep cuts in their flesh. She also spotted some burnt bodies with gunshot wounds and blown heads.

"Explain it to me, Abby. What am I seeing? Why does the pileup of cars seem endless?"

"Can we fix it?"

Humming in agreement, Sara took her binoculars and checked the other side. The commercial buildings and the shopping mall seemed to be intact, but half a mile south, a bit past the mall, everything was destroyed by meteorites. Double or triple so since the meteorites that should strike their area was pushed to the sides by Verachiel.

She spent some time watching the dead move about and found no pattern to their movements.

"I think I can try to run past them. They don't seem too fast."

She slowly but deliberately crawled to take cover against the ridge of the tourist center's roof. With the binoculars, she quickly found them. A group of about a dozen people, armed with shotguns and a few AR-15 rifles. She slowly ducked under the roof. No sudden movements. Those drew too much attention.

They approached the overpass and climbed on the back of a truck trailer. They were talking boisterously to one another but she couldn't understand what they were saying this far. It seemed like they were taunting the shambling dead and getting themselves psyched for what was to come.

Drawn by the sound and the presence of the living, the undead gathered. From both sides of the interstate they came, climbing the fallen bridges, trying to get closer to the armed people, mostly men.

When a sizeable group of about thirty or forty undead came closer, chaos ensued.

"THIS IS OUR LAND! YOU DO NOT BELONG HERE!" One of them shouted. "KILL THE UNDEAD!"

The survivors unloaded their guns on the undead, aiming at their heads. This close and with the advantage of higher ground, it was like shooting ducks in a barrel.

The frail, burnt, and wounded bodies of the undead didn't take much to be "killed", especially when the shots came from above aimed at the heads. One by one, the undead stopped moving and fell on the crashed vehicles.

Sara stared in shock as only she could see what happened next. For each undead that died, their ghost abandoned the body and floated unfettered. For a brief moment, they were confused, but then it seemed the wraiths had identified their "killers". With a heart-rending wail, the vengeful dead shifted and assumed monstrous forms, with sharp blade-like claws and horrendous faces.

They struck almost at once, falling upon the shooters with sharp shrills, a symphony of doom as the survivors' death screams were added to the mix. As each of the living people expired, a burst of mana and Qi left their bodies, disrupting the incorporeal undead and causing the wraiths near the dying person to dissipate.

Abby reported. Sara felt her skin chill as the mana entered her body.

> You gained 2 points in Prowess.

> You gained 2 points in Adroitness.

> You gained 2 points in Composure.

The four remaining survivors screamed and fired wildly before abandoning their weapons and jumping down from the trailer, running in panic for their lives away from the interstate.

*

*

Morrow Tourist Center. Morrow, Clayton County, Georgia. Sunday, October 20th, 2019. 9:00

Sara didn't move for quite some time. Shocked by the useless waste of life, feeling powerless to stop people from killing each other. Teenagers only bravely save the world in young adult fiction, she decided. Right now, she felt the horrible burden of her task. She felt inept, incapable of acting. Her cowardice before the pilot's wraith led to Phillip's death.

The shambling dead, the few that remained after the bloodbath walked down the ramps and back to the interstate. Their movement looked deliberate.

"Why would they go back down?" She asked Abby.

Sara was suffering from a chronic case of information overload. The constant stress of survival and her encounters with crazy people, both living and dead piled up. The girl basically needed a vacation far from the Apocalypse. Too bad truck-kun was not coming for her. Truck-kun was probably crashed somewhere in that endless pileup.

She tried to focus. "Run that by me again. They grow stronger?"

"Please tell me it takes a long time for that to happen."

"When do you think I'll be strong enough to defeat these creatures?"

Abby retorted with the mental equivalent of a raised eyebrow.

Sara deflated with a big huff. "I know. I suck," she sulked.

How many people would suffer because she was a coward? How many Phillips. She almost wished she had a do-over like in the time loop novels, but it was absurd. No do-overs, the past was immutable.

Fortunately for Sara, the Tourist Center's roof was unusually shaped, slanted to the west with a raised part in the center. She only had to lower down to hide from anyone standing in Jonesboro. Lying flat on the roof, she only listened to the new group of survivors.

Two cars parked. People got off and the doors were slammed shut.

"The sounds of gunfire came from here," a man said.

"Over there, on the roof of that trailer. Dead bodies and fresh blood," a woman's voice.

The trailer was dripping blood last time Sara had the guts to look that way.

"Watch out for anything that moves," Detective Keynes warned. "And for the love of God, don't shoot. If anyone sees anything moving, we'll withdraw and regroup at the hotel back there."

"The roof of this car is shot. The holes are recent," a man said. "It seems like a stray bullet.

"More dead bodies there around the trailer. Burnt people, these are old. But it seems they were moved?" The first woman remarked.

"It's zombies, I told you," another man quipped.

"He's right. Come over here and look at the interstate," Keynes called. "See the undead moving down there?"

"Damn, dude," a second man gaped in surprise. "Just like you said, Keynes!"

"How are the dead moving?" The woman asked.

"I have no idea how, but if you kill one of these, you'll get sliced open. Just like Phillip," Keynes lamented. "The think tank back at HQ thinks they have two forms, zombie and ghost. They are slow in their zombie form and their wounds impair their movement. We decided they are to be avoided. Let me make it clear. Do not engage the undead. Just stay out of their way. The only thing they have in common with movie zombies is that they are slow and dumb."

"I'm going up there," the woman declared with finality and a lot of anger. "I need to see if they are among the dead."

"Take care, Brenda," another woman said.

She heard the metal groan as Brenda climbed the cars. The woman grunted as she jumped and climbed on the trailer.

Sara couldn't breathe. Her heart pounded as she imagined Brenda crossing the overpass. Just who did she want to find so badly?

"Don't toss the bodies!" The first man complained.

"I need to see who's behind the corpses. What do you want me to do?" Brenda shouted, annoyed. "Bury them? Bury all of them?"

"Don't shout," Keynes warned. "You don't want to draw the attention of the... oh, shit."

"Brenda! Get out of there!" The second woman shouted desperately.

"There's only one of them here," Brenda declared, sounding a bit out of herself. "I don't know who these dead people are. Wait, this one..."

"Shut up, everyone," Keynes commanded. "Withdraw!"

"There you are, ASSHOLE!" Brenda lost it. "Go fuck your mom in hell!"

A rifle was discharged, shot after shot striking the metal of the trailer, Sara assumed. Brenda kept screaming angrily and then went silent. She heard the dead shuffling. Approaching Brenda, Sara imagined. Heedless of the danger, the damaged trailer groaned as the woman jumped down.

"Brenda, watch out!" Woman 2 desperately warned.

"Eeeeeeeeeeeeeek!" Brenda screeched. "STAY AWAY!"

"Shit! I'm going in!" The first man said. It was annoying not knowing their names but on the other hand, Sara didn't care.

"Don't kill the zombies!" Keynes ordered.

"Ah! He-Help me!" Brenda begged. "Get off of me! Let go! It hurts! Help!"

Was she being eaten by the zombies? Sara could barely breathe.

"Brenda! Get off of her, you goddamned zombie!" The concerned guy shouted as he ran to the overpass.

"Help me!"

Some confusing noises she didn't figure out what it was. Smacking meat, perhaps? Then bones breaking. At least she imagined it was bones breaking. Unadvised to kill the zombies, the man probably settled for maiming them. Break the arms, and legs, and leave the torso and head intact. Sara thought it sounded like a nice strat—

Shit. She felt a small pulse of mana as the wraith left its corpse.

"AAHHHHHHHHHHHHRGH!" The man screamed, then screamed no longer.

"No! Josh!" Brenda cried. Then she uttered a blood-curling war cry, and a pistol sang the only melody it knew, accompanying the woman's warbling in a duet of death. Then Brenda gurgled her last war cry.

> You gained 2 points In Composure.

The girl bit her lips as she silently sobbed for the loss of life. Josh and Brenda clearly had something for one another.

*

*

Jonesboro Road's overpass on I-75, Morrow, Clayton County, Georgia. Sunday, October 20th, 2019. 9:20

Winston Keynes felt powerless. Strapped to a wheelchair that could only move at a geriatric pace, he could do nothing to keep those two lovers from dying for one another.

"Stay here. Nobody is going on this overpass," he told Patricia. "We cannot help them now."

"What the fuck was that, Keynes?"

"Zombies. Ghosts. I believe they're like Freddy Kruger, from the movies. They're invisible and can cut a person in two like they're made of butter," the cop lamented.

"What do we do now? You heard Brenda. Only one of the guys who ran away was there. The others are still alive."

"We cannot know if they've been bitten. So far no survivor has turned, but we need to be careful. Maybe we're immune to the virus that killed everyone else. Maybe not."

"No!" The woman rejected the idea of leaving them be for now. Her voice trembled with rage, "I'll only rest when I see them dead in front of me. You know what? I'm getting a tractor and I'm going to clear this road. Toss the wreckage down on the interstate, I don't know."

She stormed off and went for the car. Keynes had a bad feeling.

"Patricia, wait," he called as she boarded the vehicle.

"I'm going with her," the other guy said.

Patricia didn't wait. She stomped the gas and screeched the tires as she went on reverse, maneuvered, then headed north on Jonesboro.

"Fuck. Stranded again," Keynes took his radio. "Keynes to base, do you copy?"

A voice came over the radio, "Brett here, detective. What's going on?"

"I am at the intersection of Jonesboro and I-75. The gunshots we heard came from a group of survivors fighting the - I can't believe I'm saying this - undead at the overpass. Brenda went to check if the fugitives were among them, and the 'Zees' caught her. Josh went to help but we lost both of them. Patricia stormed off saying she was getting a tractor to clear the overpass. I don't know where she'll find one."

"Someone told me that Morrow's courthouse was undergoing renovations. There's a tractor there."

Keynes huffed. That was too convenient. "Well, I can't do much if people won't listen to me. Brett, do me a solid and send someone to pick me up, please? I'd rather not be stranded the whole day again."

"Sure thing, detective. Stay put, what's your location?"

"I'll be next to Morrow's Tourist Center, right by the intersection. It seems to have a nice shade. At least my new chair isn't busted."

"I'll fix your old one tomorrow. We'll salvage some car batteries."

"Thanks, Brett. That's all."

"Roger that, detective. Stay safe."

"Brett, one more thing. Tell Hainsworth to warn everyone to stay away from the speedways."

"Will do. Over and out."

Keynes drove his wheelchair to the Tourist Center's parking lot. As he entered, he noticed something. A bicycle that wasn't there the last time he came here. He grinned.

Cupping his hands over his mouth, the cop shouted, "Hey, Sara Atkinson! I know you are hiding here. Let's talk!"

*

*

Morrow Tourist Center. Morrow, Clayton County, Georgia. Sunday, October 20th, 2019. 9:30

Sara groaned in frustration. How did he know her fake name?

"Sara! I know you're there. I spotted your ride," Keynes kept going.

He wouldn't climb on the roof, not on a wheelchair. She was safe and he'd probably go away if she kept quiet. But people were coming, and the building was small. He could surround her and send someone up. She should slink away and go while she had the chance. Would he shoot her in the back? No, probably not. She should go, quietly...

"Sara Atkinson! Senior grade at Terrell Starr High School! I saw your report card. You got really nice grades. Sara Atkinson! Come out and talk!"

The fuckers got her school file. Fire rose from Sara's core and she felt her face wounds burn with anger. Yet before she could rein her mouth, she'd already spoken. She hated that surname and her temper got the best of her.

"THAT'S NOT MY NAME, FUCK IT!" She protested with every ounce of her being. "What do you want? Leave me alone! And stop stealing people's personal information!"

"What's the deal with that, then? A fake name? On your school records?" Keynes sounded suspicious.

She decided to open up a bit because letting the cop weave his suspicions wouldn't help her.

"Yeah. Courtesy of the U.S. Marshals. They don't let you pick your fake surname but at least they let me keep my first name."

"What? The Marshals? Why would they... Oh! You were in witness protection! Damn, that's why that deputy marshal... Oh! You're the safe-picking girl from Seattle! The one in the smuggling case!"

"Yeah. That's me. To hell with witness protection. I doubt that gangster has survived, and he won't be finding his way to Georgia anytime soon. He's probably died of dehydration in maximum security by now."

Keynes chortled. "You did this nation a good service, Sara. You have my respect. Well met, Miss. What are you doing out here?"

"The same as you, apparently. I came to watch the fireworks," she lied. "I'll be gone now if you don't mind."

"Actually, I do mind. I have a few questions," Keynes chuckled.

"Is the sky blue?" She rolled her eyes. "Your friends just died, how can you laugh?"

"I guess all of us are a bit less sane after the world went to shit. Some more than others."

"You're preaching to the choir."

"Don't you feel lonely, Sara? Don't you want someone to talk to?"

"I talk to a lot of people almost every day. And I talk to you. Honestly, every time I talk to you I get the wish to spend a week in solitude just to cleanse my ears."

"I take you still hate me. I can apologize for trying to rescue you out of that warzone by force as much as you want."

The girl thought the cop knew exactly what to say to her for maximum annoyance. Sara tried to control her nerves. She wasn't developing social anxiety, she told herself. No. Not at all. She was just overwhelmed with everything that happened since the world went to shit. Yeah, that's it.

"I'm coming down. But I swear that if you have a gun in your hand I'm going to be angry at you forever."

"I'll keep my hands in the air if that keeps you comfortable, scout's honor."

Sara jumped down from the roof, steadied herself, and went to the corner of the building to peek. Truly enough, the cop was reaching for the sky with all his might. She walked out.

"Detective Keynes."

"Well met, Sara A—"

She glowered fiercely and grumbled for him to silence. The girl didn't have the power to shoot eye lasers but if she did, she'd have bored a hole through the cop and into the Earth's crust all the way to Europe.

"Sara. No last name," she stated with finality. "Fuck last names."

The cop chuckled, "This is still America. You have the right to be called whatever you want. Nice to meet you, Sara. I'm detective Winston Keynes of Forest Park P.D.," he introduced himself formally. "Those wounds are from the explosion, right? How are you doing?"

She instinctively raised a hand to cover the bandages on her face. "Do not concern yourself with my health," the girl hissed. "I'll be fine."

"I think I saw you around a few times."

"It's a small town," she shrugged. "More trees than people, even before the world went to shit. So, what happens now?"

He grinned, "You tell me. My arms are getting a bit tired." Keynes' eyes wandered to her belt. "Do you know how to use that thing?" He was probably talking about her pistol. Sara didn't, but she was unwilling to let him know. "I bet not. I doubt you trained with a firearm before Apocalypse, and someone would've heard you shooting if you trained after that. But then again, you were a juvenile criminal."

"Dude, don't talk about what you don't know. I have a clean slate and no judicial debts with the government that no longer exists. I just had... terrible luck. A girl has to survive. In your jurisdiction, detective," she oozed sarcasm at the last word, "I am as innocent as the day is long."

"Fair enough. What about the gun? Do you know how to use it?"

"It's just a deterrent," she answered noncommittally. "But as you said, this is still America and I am exercising my second amendment rights."

"Fair enough. I can train you if you want. We got a shooting range."

Kindness was Sara's weak point. She was used to being trampled on, scorned, despised. But the cop's honest offer hurt her in ways she didn't understand.

"it's stupid, isn't it?" She frowned and relented. "Carrying a gun like that?"

"If you asked that to me last month, I would say yes. I would force you to surrender that firearm. Now?" He glanced at the overpass. "So long you are not trying to harm other people—"

"I'm not," she vehemently protested.

"Then keep it. But you should learn how to use that. Or you're going to hurt yourself."

Sara wasn't invulnerable and she had a lot of weak points. The emotional ones were myriad.

"I lied. I didn't come for the shooting, I came to try and get to Costco. I need some supplies."

They heard a heavy engine thrumming. Sara's head craned as she saw a huge yellow tractor plow down on Jonesboro. Keynes spun his chair to watch too. "Well, it seems it's your lucky day."

This time she kept her mouth shut. In Sara's book, no days were lucky.