The bus rattled as it crossed the city limits, Atlanta's skyline looming over them like a graveyard. The air inside the cabin grew heavy when they saw the desolate city ahead of them, but as they continued on the road to the city, Michael saw something ahead of them and the bus slowly came to a halt.
"What the heck is that?" Rick said in a grave tone. He was already out of his seat even before the bus came to a halt and had come towards the front beside Michael.
In the middle of the road ahead of them, lay the wreckage of the cars they had encountered not long ago. The vehicle that was used to block their path before was flipped on its side, its windows shattered, but it wasn't the wreckage that terrified them—it was the remains of people scattered all over the area.
The bodies of the people from before have been chaotically dismantled. Limbs were scattered across the asphalt, and the man with the scar across his nose had been opened up from throat to sternum, his ribcage snapped outward.
While the rest were feeling terrified, Michael stood up and exited the vehicle. Rick and the others first exchanged glances before following after Michael with cautious steps.
"This is no walker encounter.," Andrea whispered, the hairs on her arms standing on end. She raised her rifle while she scanned their surroundings.
"This looks more like the work of a mutant walker, but for not even one of them to be able to fire a shot?" Michael gave a curious tilt of his head, his eyes narrowing as he scanned the area for anything he might have missed. It wasn't that hard for him to be able to figure out what happened here. He already had a couple of encounters with mutated walkers and knew how dangerous they can be when faced with an ordinary person.
'But for them to not even be able to put up a fight? Could it be something that specializes in speed?'
"Looks like it, we weren't too far from them when they left. We would've heard gunshots." Rick put his skills as a former officer and eventually, also came to the same deduction as Michael.
Andrea was looking around the scene with a nauseous face when she suddenly remembered something. "Hey, babe."
"Yeah?" Michael slowly looked over to her. Curious, the others also pricked up their ears while still looking around with vigilance.
Andrea walked towards him while saying. "Do you still remember what Lee told you when you went to get them?"
Michael stared at her for a moment before something clicked in his mind. "It might be, could it be something similar to the one they encountered?"
Glancing at the wreckage with a frown, "It's possible, but Lee and the others managed to take it down when they were only lightly armed, but on the other hand, these guys are far more well equipped than them. So, it might be just as fast, but only stronger and bigger than the one they encountered?"
"We can't rule out the possibility, but we don't have any further information than what we have right now, so it's useless making any assumptions." Michael did not want to make things any more complicated than it already is, so he quickly changed the subject. "I suggest we move on. We'll deal with the danger if we come face to face with it in the future. Let's worry about the trade for now."
Though Michael said those, they still spent the next ten minutes scouring the immediate area, but the surroundings remained eerily silent. There were no tracks leading away, no signs of a struggle beyond the circle of carnage. It was as if the attacker or attackers had dropped from the sky and vanished.
"Come on, we won't find anything here even if we stay here for days. Let's move like Michael said." Rick and Oscar came back after checking the nearby woodland near the road, but liek the others, they also found nothing.
No one said a word, everyone just made their way back towards the bus. Michael did not follow immediately and instead looked at the carnage one more time. He etched the scenes into his memory before turning around to follow the rest.
The bus roared back to life, its engine echoing through the desolate road as they navigated the debris toward the hospital. The mystery of the brutality they saw on the way hung over them like a shroud. Michael kept his hands firm on the steering wheel, his mind kept rewinding the scene they encountered earlier.
'That was really brutal. I thought it was a ferocious animal that mutated that was behind it at first, but the lack of tracks says otherwise. I wonder what kind of monster was able to do that?' Michael lightly tilted his head, and with a helpless sigh, he thought. 'The intended events that's supposed to take place had been thrown into chaos because of my appearance, and now I'm left stumbling in the dark on how to proceed. Now, we're left to deal with unknown dangers that should not even exist. Is this world really trying to get rid of me, or is this just a world that's similar to the show?'
Everyone had become eerily quiet since earlier, it's obvious everyone was disturbed with what they saw and were all lost in their own thoughts.
It took a while longer, but they eventually pulled up to the now once again barricaded entrance of Grady Memorial Hospital. Though some of the aftermath of their battle from the other day is still there, though the streets around the hospital were barely cleaned, the corpses further away from the building were left rotting, causing a foul smell to linger in the air and it made everyone frown even before they arrived.
"My goodness, this is even worse than my own fart." Glenn said while scrunching his nose.
"Bear with it, it will disappear once we head up." Michael said. He picked up one of the wooden boxes and alighted from the bus. Rick and Oscar picked up the remaining two boxes and followed after him, and the others too.
Several minutes earlier.
As the school bus disappeared around the corner toward the hospital's loading bay, the silence of the city returned.
When the school bus entered the city and was making its way towards the hospital.
A certain something from high above the street was attracted by the noise.
From the fourteenth floor of a darkened room in one of the tall buildings in the area, something moved. There was something in the center of a room filled with shattered equipment, scattered books and papers, and bloodied bones of what looks to be human. The figure remained unknown because of the darkness surrounding it, but the two glowing, blood-red eyes were proof of its existence. It blinked slowly, though there was a vast distance between its location and where the bus was, it suddenly started producing a soft, rhythmic sound that broke the silence—a wet, vibrating hiss that sounded like air escaping a punctured lung. It's clear that whatever monster this is can see from vast distances.
It remained in position and didn't move to follow them. Not yet at least. It simply watched, its focus locked onto the bus moving as it wade through the wide street down below.