After taking the guards' extra ammunition, I finally loaded Kossa's pistol and Betty with a full mag; eight and seventeen rounds, respectively. I felt a little better having more ammunition before leaving the building, unsure whether the vectors were already inside the mall, but it wouldn't hurt to be more prepared. A picture slipped out of one of the dead guard's jacket, Daniel, and I caught a glimpse of four smiling faces, him standing in front of the Disneyland entrance in Anaheim with a woman and two children, which I presumed to be his family. I frowned, putting the picture back inside his pocket.

I felt a tap on my shoulder, turned around to find Logan standing over me. "We have a situation. Er, kind of."

"What about?" I asked.

Logan gestured for me to come along, and he led me down to a hall, stopping two doors down. "I think someone's inside the room. I heard shouting earlier, and I thought they're vectors, but I'm pretty sure they're human," he said.

I hesitated for a moment, took out my gun. I didn't know whether to shout or knock, but I ended up doing the latter. It didn't take long to hear not one but several voices inside.

"Please," the voice shouted. "Let us out!"

Peter and Charlie walked over to us. "That's the other prisoners," Charlie said.

"You said there's more than fifty of them?"

"Yeah. The troublesome ones get sent here, sometimes, to, um, re-educate them. The others are in another special building."

I tried to think about what to do with them. For a second, I thought about leaving them there, but then my gut twisted violently, and I knew I couldn't go through with it. There, I made up my mind. I picked up the keys I had seen from Daniel's belt, walked back to the door, and unlocked it.

"I need you all to stand back, okay? No funny business," I said.

Peter tugged at my arm. "Bren, what are you doing? We don't have time for this."

"I can't leave them in there. Besides, we have the keys now."

"They're dead weight."

Logan was about to intervene, but I gestured for him to stop. "They're not going with us, but I sure as hell am gonna give them a fighting chance. It's the least we could do."

I could tell by the look Peter gave me that he wanted to argue more, but he decided against it. He took a step back and equipped his rifle, and Logan did the same beside me. I opened the door.

I aimed my flashlight. Four black men stood by the far wall in a dark room, their faces sunken, stares blank and curious, white armbands wrapped around their biceps as they shrank away from the light. Only one stood his ground, a man who looked like in his late forties, studying me. He must've thought I was not a threat because his shoulders relaxed, whispered something to his companions that I couldn't hear, and they also calmed down. I caught a whiff of sewage to my right, turned, and found a bucket halfway-filled with pee and fecal matter, covered (and failing at that) by a single, flimsy sheet.

"We heard what you did. Though at first one of them did...something to the others," the man said, and something in his voice told me that it happened often than I could imagine. "Are they dead?"

"Yes. Well, the guards in this building anyway."

The man looked me up and down. "Are you here to help us?"

"We're here looking for our friends."

"Ah. The three that came yesterday."

"You know them?"

"No. Didn't have the time. We can come with you if you help us free the others and take down the Alphas."

"You're not coming with us. As for the Alphas, they're already dealing with a large horde of infected. A big one. Something they might not survive from."

"Something tells me that's your doing?"

I didn't answer that. "Look, I advise you not to head for the northwest gates. Take east or south and get out of here. And you can have these." I threw the keys to him, and he caught it midair. "You can free the others yourself."

"But we don't have any weapons!" One of the men cried out.

I looked around and realized he was right. They certainly couldn't run from the Alphas, much less the horde, armed only with kitchen knives and broom handles. I pulled out Kossa's pistol from the back of my waistband and handed the gun to the older man. It wasn't much, but it would still make anyone think twice once fired. "Here. Take it."

"Thanks. This will help. I know where their armory is, so maybe we can raid that once I free the others," he said.

"But that's heavily guarded," Charlie said, "and it's in the middle of the plaza."

"He's one of them," one of the men spat and made a move toward the kid.

I blocked their path. "No, he's with me now! He helped us get in," I said.

The other man ignored me. "Out of the way!"

Logan and Peter both shouted warnings at them, raised their rifles, and aimed the barrels at the four men. Meanwhile, I was calling for them to stop. But then, the older man extended his arm out and grabbed the guy by the collar. "Enough, Caleb. We don't have time for this. Let's grab the others and get the fuck out of here. The demons are coming."

The other man pushed the other's hand off his shoulder, grunted. He glared at Charlie before grabbing the keys from the older man's hand and strode out of the room in a huff, still pissed. "Fine. Whatever." As he walked past Charlie, he bumped him by the shoulder and continued down the hall without looking back.

I started walking toward their stairwell when the older man stopped me. "Hey, kid! I want to say thank you. And good luck finding your friends." Behind him, Caleb was already in the process of opening one of the doors.

"Yeah. You, too."

"I didn't get your name. I'm Elijah."

"Brendan. I go by Bren."

"So...are you him? Are you the Devil Wolf they kept on about?"

I didn't answer, turning around, and continued toward the stairwell door. "I hope you make it all out, man. Stay safe."

"Just wait. If y'all survive this, I guess I'll be seeing you out there. Maybe we can join forces together? The Alphas keep their vehicles on the East. One of my friends works there, fixing their engines. You should head over there. Maybe you'll change your mind and help us out?"

I thought about it for a second, but we might not see each other again. "Yeah, sure."

——

Like hundreds of crackling thunder and fireworks, they reverberated so close my teeth and bones rattled from the sound. The fire had engulfed the Northwest side of the mall, but I had no idea whether the vectors had managed to slip past their defenses. All I knew was that we were no longer safe in the parking lot filled with the infected in a few minutes or less.

There were still hundreds of people in the parking lot, though they weren't running for shelter anymore. They carried with them luggage, boxes, and a bunch of other crap, all heading east. Some were even fighting over scraps I couldn't make out in the darkness, and I was sure I saw a couple of people on the ground, bleeding, either dead already or were still fighting for their lives. One woman ran between the trailers where another woman suddenly jumped out and then started stabbing her on the back as the other screamed. A man in a cowboy hat shot another man on the chest, spat on his corpse, and ran away. A pickup truck sped down the drive lane to my left, too late to notice a man crossing the street. The car ran over the pedestrian, swerved and crashed into a storefront nearby, and hitting two more people inside.

It was chaos. I realized they were turning on each other.

Every man for himself.

I started running when a man suddenly stepped out from a pavilion ahead of us, a box in his arms filled with valuable loot: clothes, food, and weirdly, a golden candlestick. He studied our faces in the dim light.

"Charlie?" He called out. "Is that you?"

Charlie didn't answer. He didn't have to when the man's gaze fell on me. He recognized me instantly, and I did, too, a vague, boyish face in the crowd of hunters from the lake resort. He dropped the box and reached for his holster, but then his head exploded, blood exited at the back of his skull as Peter shot him in the face. He fell back on top of his loot.

"We're not safe out here," Peter said, scanning the lot for other hostiles. He strode toward the body and took his gun from his grip.

I turned to Charlie, mouth gaping by the sight of his friend's death. I had no time to shake him out of it. "Where to now? Is there a safer way to the mattress store?"

It took him a second to answer me. "It's, ah, direct path...if you follow the parking lot and then to the drive lane. There are still a few checkpoints from here to that side of the mall. I doubt the guards are just gonna let us pass. Carl is gonna put up a lot of spuds on the watchtowers to help spot the infected. They'll see us right away," Charlie said.

"So, what do you propose?" I asked.

He pointed up. "We can always use the roof."

——

Charlie led us to the fire escape ladder at the building's side when I realized the vectors had reached the fence.

It wasn't the approaching gunfire getting louder that clued me in, but the unmistakable noise they made when they're bunched up into a large horde: moans and shrieks that a human could never produce from their throats, building up to an unholy crescendo.

And then the screaming started.

They'll buy us time at least, I thought to myself, albeit grim as it was. The Alphas would be our meat shields, keeping the vectors busy by acting as their easy prey. I calculated that we had about five to ten minutes left to spare before the Alphas were completely overwhelmed and the vectors advanced into the main mall. However, I'm basing this off on how fast the Albany walls fell with trained soldiers, so we might have less than I considered.

It was another three-story climb up the side, Charlie leading the front while Peter protected our tail. We reached the top, and Charlie headed northwest right away without waiting for the others.

"Carl hates it when people smoke around him, so some of his men sneak up here for a cig. The rooftop doors are locked from the inside, so we can't use it to go down," he said.

"And I'm guessing we're gonna use another ladder there? It'll be too dangerous with the vectors nearby."

Charlie shook his head and grinned sheepishly. "We don't have to scale any ladders at all. There's a skylight above the back warehouses. We can use that to go down into the third floor since there are office spaces there. Carl might have kept your friends in one of them."

"Okay. Lead the way."

The Alphas had used the roof as another living area. Since the surface was flat, they had built a small greenhouse, water towers, solar panels, and a bunch of tents, though all of them were now abandoned; the people fled inside, leaving most of their stuff scattered all over the gravel-covered floor. Still, I readied my gun, expecting trouble to pop out from one of the shacks.

"How far?" I asked.

"Beyond those HVAC units ahead. We'll just do a turn here, and...there it is!" Charlie pointed to the skylight windows.

It was an opaque, rectangular-domed skylight with little metal handles hidden under the rim to open the glass panels. Peter quickly swept the area in case there were Alphas positioned nearby, and a couple of minutes later, he gave out the all-clear. Logan walked over to the rooftop door, and as Charlie said, it was locked from the inside.

"Bren! Uh...You should come and see this shit!" Peter shouted from the edge.

Logan and I shared a look of confusion and walked over to where Peter was, crouched behind the low safety guardrails. The roof overlooked the northwest gates sitting at about two hundred feet ahead, connected to a roundabout that led to a small parking lot littered with traffic barriers wrapped in barb wires, chain-linked fences, and two watchtowers. Hundreds of armed Alphas stood up the construction scaffolding lining along the borders. The gate itself was already blocked and stacked by vehicles, odd furniture, and just about any heavy object the Alphas could throw at it to stop the horde ahead.

Beyond those gates, thousands of vectors were clamoring to get inside. The Alphas kept on shooting at them, but their bullets would run out eventually. It made my skin crawl just seeing them all pile up over the dead vectors, slowly forming a rampart to the top of the wall. It looked like they only had six feet left to go.

Logan gasped beside me. "Holy shit. That's a lot of them."

"Yeah...I think that's not gonna hold," Peter said.

I gave him a dirty glare. "Ya think? They're gonna just climb up that hill of bodies and walk right in like it's Christmas!"

"Hey, guys!" Charlie called out behind us. "Found the opening!"

Charlie opened up the last glass panel on the far end of the skylight by removing it altogether, unscrewing the plastic hinges with his bare hands. He placed the glass panel on the gravel.

"Is that it?" Logan asked.

"Uh-huh. A week ago, we opened these up to let some fresh air in after...Carl got carried away with a prisoner, and I was assigned to do them. This part right here opens directly below the third floor. The rest overlaps beyond the railing. I wouldn't go down that way unless you want a one-way ticket to the first floor."

The hole directly led down to the third floor, as Charlie described. However, the railing was right beside it. If we jumped down, one of us could easily make a mistake, missed the landing, hit the railing a couple of inches to the right, and then fell to the ground floor (with minor fractures, if we're lucky).

"Um. Who's going down first?" I asked around.

Logan quickly put his finger on his nose. "Yikes, not it."

Peter did the same. "Uh—Not me."

I sighed. "Seriously? Fucking hell. Alright."

I looked down the hole again, about a twelve-foot drop, debating whether I should just jump in and hoped for the best. I already experienced what it felt like having a bullet on the leg, which left me bedridden for weeks. If I missed, I'd break more than my legs. I am not looking forward to spending a whole month or two on a fucking bed again.

I walked back to where the Alphas had camped and found what I was looking for. Next to the solar panels was a clothesline, which hanged freshly-washed bedsheets and linens. From the summer heat, they had dried clean. I took a few of the bedsheets and tied them together into knots using the corners, making sure they were long enough before I secured the rope on the sturdy HVAC unit for support. Once I was done, I threw it down the hole.

Logan let out a whistle. "Ah, that's more like it."

"Kinda wish I took gym class more seriously," I said.

Logan shrugged. "Better late than never, I guess. Uh...ladies first—I mean, youngest first?"

I pushed him away. "Asshole." Technically, I am not the youngest between the four of us (it would be Charlie), and one look at him, I knew he was not going to volunteer. He almost jumped when he heard Logan mentioned for the youngest to go first. Anyway, I wasn't even sure if he should lead without a weapon.

More gunfire erupted, but it didn't come from the gates since it came from behind us.

"Oh, no. Did they get inside already?" Charlie asked worriedly.

I shrugged and strode toward the edge again. Below, half a dozen men just shot up three Alphas hiding behind a stack of crates, riddling them with so many bullets I could feel the hate seeping behind the trigger. I realized the shooters were wearing white armbands around their biceps. I quickly recognized Elijah among the crowd, screaming against the hail of bullets as he fired another volley to two men coming out from a storefront.

"It's the prisoners! They're fighting back!" I said to the others.

A group of freed prisoners led a few women and children out of a building and then helped them climb into the trucks. Three prisoners took over a watchtower ahead, and it didn't take long before they overpowered the sniper inside, took his rifle, and started taking out the Alphas hunkering down across the parking lot. Logan let out a cheer when he watched beside me, and I couldn't help but smile watching these bastards reaped what they sow. The Alphas guarding the checkpoints were screaming on their comms for backup, a squad now moving toward that direction. I did not doubt in my mind that the Alphas were going to lose tonight, fighting a two-front battle.

If I learned anything from Nazi Germany, fighting a two-front war was one of the causes of their inevitable fall. The irony was that these racist fucks were going to taste that same medicine.

"That Elijah dude sure knows how to whip up a frenzy," Peter said, not bothering to hide his amusement.

"Yeah, karma's a bitch," Logan chuckled. He threw both his middle fingers at a group of Alphas running for shelter into the storefront beneath us, which was the mattress store.

I tapped his shoulder. "Come on. Let's go get our friends while everyone's distracted."

I took off my backpack and lowered myself into the hole.

Halfway in, I stopped before I let go of the windowsill, feeling naked and vulnerable for an attack. I would hate it if I got shot in the ass while descending. I studied the corridors, waited for a few seconds, but saw no one—not even a shadow—passing by. I gave it another few seconds anyway to make sure I didn't miss any movements or sounds. It unnerved me how quiet it was below, but then again, most everyone who could fight was probably defending the gates (or hiding, or busy killing each other for supplies).

I continued my slow descent, careful not to make too much noise, eased my breathing, and concentrated on carrying my body weight. I was afraid my muscles would fail me, or the feeling of my spine hitting the top of the railing, cracking it into two, and then would leave me paralyzed. I tried not to imagine the vectors finding my broken body, still alive and barely breathing, yet fully aware of his surroundings, especially when the vectors would proceed to inflict every painful way from their hands.

Suddenly, I felt pressure on the tip of my shoes, found I had touched the laminated floor, and let out a sigh of relief. Logan threw down my backpack, and I caught it.

"Who's next?" I asked.

Logan sighed, hoisted himself into the hole, and lowered down the rope.

——

There were no guards outside the hall, probably too busy defending the walls, fighting against the angry prisoners below, or most likely making a run for it. We checked every room that Charlie thought Carl would keep his prisoners in, found them empty. I was beginning to worry when we ended up in the third hallway with a lone door at the end.

"What's in there?" I whispered.

"That's Carl's office," Charlie said.

I gestured for the others to keep quiet as we snuck toward the door. I gathered at least two people inside the room, basing on the shadows crossing through the gaps underneath the door. Logan and I flanked the door frame, pressing my ears against the wall, and heard two men talking to each other. Another voice popped up—so there's three—and both I and Logan's eyes widened when it dawned on us who the third one was.

"But I need to pee," Yousef said.