A tide of red to crash over them, the millions against the hundreds, with less bullets than they had names, and less time to spend the same. They had four years to prepare for death—plus or minus.

James slammed the laptop case shut. It was black, bulky, and protected by the president’s birthday for a password. They had pulled it from a limousine wreck, initially hoping that it would just have a handgun and two spare magazines. Never in his imagination did he think it would prophesize the return of millions of zombies that he and the other survivors had only once experienced at the height of the Outbreak.

Footsteps came rushing in. He got to his feet and jumped back, pointing a spear towards the doorway.

“Oy! James! Are you done yet!” his friend shouted. He skidded to a stop in front of the door. Once James realized it was just him, he raised his spear. “Karl?”

He ignored James and hurried to come in and close the door, clicking and clacking all the locks and bolts shut. Just then, something slammed against the door. Karlson braced against it. “Help me here!”

James got to pushing the bed frame against the door. The slamming didn’t stop.

The bolts and locks broke. Karlson was knocked back, but James managed to brace the bed frame against the door before it fully opened. Hands tried to pry their way through the slight gap in the door. The bed frame was inching backwards. They were winning.

Karlson scrambled to his feet and helped James with pushing the frame. “I got this!” Karl said. James nodded and picked up his spear again. On the end of the spear was a semicircular, pizza cutter-like blade—and that’s what they called it. It was thick, cut from a piece of flatbar, and the edge took a whole 3 days to file down. By no means was it even sharp enough to be a box cutter.

Sharpness wasn’t needed. In one thrust, James lopped off the fingers trying to pry their way through the gap in the door. He felt the blade crunch through finger bones. That stopped the attackers from grasping at the door, but their limbs remained wedged between the door and the frame. James jumped onto the bed then to the other side, aiming his spear through the gap. In seven strikes and a door kick from Karlson, they managed to shut the door for good.

“That was a close one, huh—”

James was interrupted by a loud crash. Through the dust, a bloodied, bone-encrusted fist had appeared through the door.

It was one of those. They made a dash for the window. James tried to get a proper hold of the laptop case so he wouldn’t lose it in the river. Karlson saw this fatal waste of time and ripped the hardcase from James’ hands and chucked the whole thing out the window.

Before James could waste a second to complain, Karlson kicked him out the window as well. As James’ airborne complaints disappeared into a loud splash, Karlson himself followed suit. His feet left the ledge, and soon as they did, there was a crash. The door burst open. An angry, hypertensive fiend chased him out the window. They all splashed into the river below.

Those things couldn’t swim.

***

They had nearly drowned. After leaving most of their weapons and equipment to the riverbed, they swam for an embankment and got washed up some 300 meters west along Pasig River. The current had separated them, but not by far. James walked along the gravel embankment and found Karlson bashing a zombie’s head in with a rock. All that James had left was a knife and a bloodied stick—and it wasn’t his blood.

All things considered, they were only set back materially. There was a nearby safehouse where they could restock on half-decent equipment and enough rations to limp the rest of the way back to Diliman.

After improving James’s stick with a rock, and improving Karlson’s rock with a stick, the stone mace-wielding scouts set out for the safehouse. It was a somewhat casual stroll as they only had to kill three zombies on the way there.

They found their reprieve in an old maintenance room in one of the smaller apartment buildings. The food and materials they’d left here should be enough to last them the trip back in the morning.

This mission was the farthest they had gone to scout for food. The prophetic laptop was the least of their aims. In the space of 10 minutes, it had become too important to lose—and then they lost it.

“Screw me silly,” James remarked, exasperated and exhausted.

“No, sorry. I’m straight.”

“Yeah, you straight up offed the laptop, you piece of shit!”

“Was it really that important?”

James had no choice but to tell Karlson all about the simulation, and about what he had seen. All of the zombies that they saw migrating out of Metro Manila 9 months ago would be coming back in 4 years.

“No way, dude,” Karlson remarked.

“Are you genuinely surprised? I can’t tell.”

“I am, I am!” Karlson laughed. “But damn, man, wouldn’t we need a lot of concrete to handle that?”

“Or plywood.” “Plywood, huh.”

The two shared a laugh. “That’s— pretty bad,” Karlson said. “Yeah.”

Bad situations called for bad jokes. This one only warranted one for now. What truly bothered James was that they were the only two survivors, possibly in the whole of the NCR, who knew of this. The scale was simply just beyond them to address. The two of them believed the simulation well enough—well, Karlson believed in James, who believed in the simulation.

Still, uncertainty floated around the room. The question wasn’t whether the simulation was consistent with observed zombie behavior—it was—but it was more of whether they’re right to assume that those were all the behaviors that there were: Zombies seek shelter. Zombies have herd behavior. Zombies target anything meaty and alive. Zombies are, for all intents and purposes, perpetual energy machines.

There might still yet be a way to harness them as a source of energy, but they haven’t tried.

With only this limited information, they had no choice but to assume that zombies were genuinely dumb enough that an underspec office laptop could simulate their movements. They had to move forward believing that they were going to face the second wave in four years. They had to move forward believing that they would need to achieve kill/death ratios exceeding 10,000:1.

Hopeless they might be—“Drop dead and die”? Unacceptable.

If they had any good choices among bad options, it would be to try to convince Diliman’s survivor community that James wasn’t hallucinating a classified government file. That should’ve just been difficult, if it weren’t for Tristan and his anti-James clique.

The guy makes good contributions to the community, but he couldn’t stand being criticized. Was it an inflated ego? An overall volatile personality? Or maybe some quirk that came with being the son of a politician? Who knew? It didn’t help that he threw his weight around as the leader of the Guard Group. The other Groups always tried to keep to his good side, but they’re all in secret agreement that life would’ve been better if he weren’t so stuck-up.

Securing the cooperation of the Guard Group was a must.

***

The next morning, they traveled 15 kilometers through zombie-infested urban territory, and were arrested the moment they passed the roadblock—ziplocks binding their wrists and all that doodaz. In one mutual glance, they agreed to let things take their course.

The guards took the scenic route, parading the two for all the other survivors to see. They walked under the royal trees of Diliman, each one having their own names. A breeze of clean wind and green greeted them wherever they went. The pavement was pretty with spots of sun, and the asphalt they walked down the middle of was littered with leaves and bits of dead wood.

They treaded upon the Oval Road—a 4.4km roundtrip stretch of three-lane asphalt. To their left were century-old university buildings, from which some clipboard-flippers watched as the two marched on. To the right was the Sunken Garden, from which the gardeners and children shot curious looks from the potato and sunflower gardens. Overlooking the Sunken Garden, wedged between both major sides of the Oval Road, was the Library—all five stories of it starting to cast a long shadow on the Garden.

Even as they were being paraded, they felt the soul of a place that offered more freedom than the city that surrounded them. Even if they were, for the time being, prisoner in their own home. It was an island in a sea of grey—a piece of heaven fallen to earth and surrounded by hell.

Those gardeners that were working in the field at the time looked up to see James and Karlson being paraded on the way to the Library. “Tristan’s throwing away that kind of talent, huh?” “Psst, lower your voice. They’ll hear you.”

The pair was marched up to the side of the Library, then up the stairs, where they waited for the iron fence gate to be opened. The sentry on the other side, armed with a wooden staff in one hand, a shotgun slung over his back, and a key in the other hand, went and opened the gate for them. They marched down the corridor—a view of trees and nature to the left, the Library’s imposing walls on the right, and pillars propping up the ceiling some five stories above.

Had they continued on, they would have reached the twin set of stairs that led back down to street level. But here, they reached the midpoint, and entered the double doors.

The lobby was just as grand—it could probably fit and operate a whole octopus ride. Today, however, it fit a mere kangaroo court: Guard Group vs. Scout Group (2023), and the Scout Group had no right to a defense.

***

The Scout Group had 9 members, including James and Karlson. Meanwhile, there must have been 15 members of the Guard Group in the lobby—only a fraction of their whole strength. There were observers from the other Groups, too: Farming, Technical, Crafting, and Medical.

If those groups had remained armed, this farce never would have happened. They owed James and Karlson, who had helped organize the survivors in the early days.

It couldn’t be helped. The boom in farming meant that they needed a dedicated Guard Group, thus they relinquished all their guns to the guards. The fact that Tristan Clay—of all people—rose to the position of Guard Group Head, and even gathered a small cult following, was just sheer bad luck.

“James Castellano! Scout Group Head, how nice of you to come peacefully,” Tristan greeted. He stood on a box in front of the Scout Group, who were all bound by their hands. Most were quiet, but some were grinding their teeth—from anxiety or anger, whichever it was.

“Tristan? What’s the meaning of this?!” James had decided to play along in the most infuriating way possible. His acting was bad enough that Karlson, the other scouts, and some of the neutral observers held in their amusement. There was no way for him to negotiate his way out of this, so he’d fool around for a bit.

“The court finds you guilty, Castellano!”

“What? For what?!”

“You’ve sown discord between the community’s leaders!” said the guy trying to eliminate his political adversaries to secure his own position. “You are a danger to us all, and must be stopped!”

“No, you,” Karlson replied.

With only those two words, the court was thrown into chaos. The other scouts broke into a cascade of giggles. The guards were fuming, but evidently some of them were trying really hard to pretend they were pissed. The neutral observers had to excuse themselves before they completely lost it. A vein almost popped on Tristan’s forehead.

The entire Scout Group was exiled by sundown.