A jolt of weightlessness, and Bryan's feet slammed into solid concrete with a sharp crack.
The drop wasn't nearly as deep as it looked—six meters at most from the opening above. Easy enough to handle, though anyone with claustrophobia or a fear of heights might disagree.
He straightened up slowly, shaking the numbness out of his legs. Ahead, at the far end of the passage, firelight flickered. That was his path forward.
"You alright down there?" Jeffrey's head appeared in the opening above, his voice echoing off the walls.
Bryan tilted his head back. "I'm fine! Close it up!"
"Got it!"
Jeffrey withdrew. Scraping sounds followed—furniture being dragged back into place—and the square of light overhead vanished, swallowed by darkness.
Flashlight out, Bryan illuminated the tunnel ahead. The passage was clearly man-made, carved straight through the earth and reinforced with timber supports like a mining shaft.
He followed it to the source of the light: a buried, half-destroyed basement that the smugglers had stumbled upon while digging their route to the outside. They'd repurposed it as a way station and supply relay point.
A campfire crackled in the center. Beside it sat a round-bellied man, completely absorbed in a comic book. A workbench against the far wall held another towering stack of comics.
Bryan walked up, somewhat bemused. He glanced around the space. "Donn, isn't this post supposed to rotate? How come every time I come through here, it's always you?"
"Dude—do you have to walk so quietly? Nearly gave me a heart attack."
Donn flinched at the sound of his name, yanking his attention from the page. Seeing it was Bryan, he sagged with relief.
He patted his chest to calm his racing heart, then answered the question. "You know I'm a coward. Nobody else wants this gig anyway—stuck underground doing nothing. But hey, the food comes to me, I've got my reading material... I volunteered. Easy life."
"You're something else." Bryan shook his head, gesturing at the oppressive darkness surrounding them. "How do you stand being down here all the time?"
"Oh, it's fine. I was a professional shut-in before the world ended." Donn said it with genuine pride, rubbing his belly. He pointed toward the workbench. "Drawer's got a few pistols, and there are gas masks hanging on the side. Take whatever you need. When you get to the other end, just drop everything in the storage locker."
"Got it."
Bryan opened the drawer, selected a higher-caliber pistol and a gas mask, then climbed the platform at the far end of the room, ascending via a makeshift ladder.
He glanced down at Donn, who had already buried his nose back in his comic. Bryan didn't linger. Flashlight forward, he moved on.
...
Several hundred meters outside the QZ walls.
Weeds and creeping vegetation had reclaimed the pavement. Not a single Infected in sight. In the early days, when hordes had besieged the Quarantine Zone, FEDRA had carpet-bombed the surrounding area repeatedly over the course of five years.
Once internal threats were largely contained, soldiers had been deployed to systematically clear Infected from the QZ's perimeter. The smugglers, needing safe corridors between the interior and exterior, had done their own rounds as well. The surface was about as clean as it was going to get.
Plenty of Infected still lurked inside buildings and underground, of course. But since they stayed put and didn't interfere with operations, neither FEDRA nor the smugglers saw any reason to go rooting them out.
Inside an abandoned restaurant, the sound of scraping wood broke the silence. A floor panel shifted, sliding sideways to reveal a hand-dug opening. Bryan hauled himself through, brushed himself off, and dragged the panel back into place.
He patted the dust from his clothes, scanned his surroundings, and headed for the exit.
Outside, shafts of sunlight pierced the canopy of overgrown trees. Bryan located an aluminum extension ladder lying on the ground, propped it against the blown-out wall of a nearby apartment building, and climbed to the second floor. Once up, he kicked the ladder away and continued deeper into the structure.
Moving swiftly through the decaying hallways, Bryan maintained constant vigilance. This route saw regular foot traffic, but stray Infected occasionally wandered in, catching unsuspecting smugglers off guard.
Half an hour of nonstop walking brought him to a familiar landmark: the bombed-out city hall across the street. He was roughly halfway. Another kilometer ahead lay the QZ's main gate—but he couldn't travel along the surface or through the upper floors near there without being spotted. That would be suicide.
He descended via a fire escape and sprinted into the city hall building. A tattered American flag hung limply in the atrium. He barely glanced at it before ducking into a stairwell, heading underground.
Unlike the hand-carved tunnels inside the QZ, the exterior passages were a product of the bombings themselves. The sustained shelling hadn't just leveled buildings—it had cracked open basements and underground spaces, collapsing walls between adjacent structures. The result was an ant-colony network of interconnected subterranean passages, and the smugglers had mapped and exploited every inch of it.
Bryan followed the dark corridors, flashlight strapped to his backpack strap to keep his hands free.
Rounding a corner, he abruptly stopped. The air ahead had turned hazy, thick with floating particles that caught the light like dust motes—except these weren't dust.
He jerked backward several steps, brow furrowed, and muttered, "Spores... Why are there Infected here?"
He knew this stretch well. Just ahead and to the left, a crawl-space opening in the floor led down to an underground shopping mall—his intended route through. But the air was saturated with Cordyceps spores, which meant Infected remains had been here for at least two weeks. Long enough for the fungal growth to reach this density.
Of all the days to come through here.
Bryan stifled a curse. Rare as his trips through this passage were, he'd managed to hit the jackpot. But turning back wasn't an option—Norsen had only established this one route. The alternate path circled the entire QZ perimeter, a journey that would take a full day.
He pulled out the gas mask. Standard equipment for anyone operating outside—he'd been carrying it out of habit, not expecting to actually need it. He checked the filter, confirmed it was functional, and pulled it on, sealing it tight over his face.
Then he drew the pistol and his knife. Crouching low, he crept forward, located the crawl-space opening in the wall, dropped flat, and wriggled through.
The spore concentration on the other side was even worse. Visibility dropped to three or four meters. And threading through the haze came a sound that made his blood run cold:
Hisssss...
Stalkers.
Bryan's movements slowed to a crawl. Every footfall was placed with surgical care. In this environment—blind, alone, underground—getting jumped by Infected was a death sentence.
It took several agonizing minutes to clear the crawl space. Once through, he swept his surroundings and adjusted the gas mask, which he'd never quite gotten comfortable with. The thing killed his peripheral vision. With teammates, that was manageable. Alone, his flanks became dead zones—he'd have to rely entirely on hearing.
Uncomfortable or not, there was no choice. In a spore-saturated space like this, going without a mask was functionally identical to suicide.
...
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