novelraw Chapter 374: A Strategic Retreat
Chapter 374: A Strategic Retreat
The noise dropped fast.
Engines that had survived idled once, then cut out completely.
The fire from the nearest truck slowed as Zubair pulled it back. Ice kept spreading on its own, thin now, just enough to harden the blood on the street. The smoke hung low, obscuring everyone’s vision until there were only a few feet of visibility.
And still, the five of them stood in the middle of all the chaos, barely breathing hard.
Alexei watched the edges.
The main force had broken. The Saint Eaters who could still think had run. The ones trapped under trucks were burning. The ones who had slipped on the ice lay still.
For a moment, it looked like everything was done.
Then a body twitched.
Alexei turned toward it. It was a man from the first wave, jacket torn, throat shot out. He should have stayed down. Instead, his back arched and his fingers clawed at the pavement.
"Movement to the right," Alexei announced, his eyes never leaving the man in front of him.
Elias looked up from Zubair’s arm. "Already?"
"More movement to the left of the diner."
Another body twitched near the rail line. Then another by the fallen bikes. Shoulders jerked. Legs straightened. Jaws opened and closed without sound.
Lachlan, still huge and blue, wiped blood off his mouth with the back of his hand. "Are you seeing that too?"
"Yes," Alexei grunted, nodding his head just once.
Sera turned slowly, her eyes clearing from black to allow just a hint of white to them. Her skin was still torn in places, but her body was knitting back together fast. "They turned fast."
"I guess the dead don’t say dead in today’s day and age," Elias replied. "It’s fascinating, because they weren’t even bitten by any zombies."
Sera hummed and Alexei didn’t bother to correct the medic. It wasn’t that there weren’t any zombies around, it was just that Elias hadn’t quite worked things out in his head yet.
But he would learn.
Or he wouldn’t.
Alexei didn’t really care anymore.
The first corpse rolled onto hands and knees. Its head lifted. Eyes were gray, unfocused. It sniffed.
It was a stupid zombie—no weapons, no plan. Just a gnawing hunger that demanded flesh and brains to satisfy.
It pushed off the ground and started toward the five of them.
Alexei stepped forward and exhaled. Frost hit it in the chest. The thing slowed but didn’t stop. It was already dead; cold didn’t shock it.
It looked up at him.
Then it froze in place.
Not from ice so much as from instinct.
A second one got up near the truck Sera had bent. It hissed and took two steps. Its head turned toward her. Its whole body stiffened. It made a sound like a whine.
Sera raised a brow. "Go on," she said. "Try it. Should we see who has the bigger teeth?"
The zombie backed up.
Lachlan snorted. "Yeah. That’s what I thought."
More of the bodies that had fallen in the last two minutes started to rise. Not all—only the ones with enough left in them to move. Some crawled with broken spines. Some dragged legs. One had no lower jaw and still tried to bite.
They all did the same thing.
They looked at Sera first.
Then at Lachlan.
Then at Alexei.
Then at Zubair’s fire.
Elias stepped forward to test it. One zombie was coming low. He lifted his boot to stomp its skull.
"Wait," Alexei said.
He wanted to see.
The zombie snarled up at Elias, teeth bared. Then Sera shifted her weight, just a little, like a predator about to move.
The zombie turned away from Elias and bolted.
It didn’t run at them.
It ran past, straight for the gap in the burning trucks.
Three more did the same. One stepped onto the ice, slipped, got up, and kept going. They chose the path away from the five every time.
Sera watched them go, mouth twisting. "I guess it’s true," she said. "Even rats will escape a sinking ship."
Lachlan grinned, teeth still too long. "Does that mean we’re the ship?"
"We’re the ocean," she said. "They know better then to test us."
Alexei tracked the runners. None of them looked back. They scrambled over bodies, under half-burned bikes, through smashed windows.
A few jumped through doors of houses lining the main street, choosing dark over open ground.
"Do we let them go?" Elias asked.
"They’ll tell everyone what happened here," Zubair mused. "I don’t know if that is a good thing or a bad thing."
"They were going to spread it anyway," Sera said. "This town is done."
She wasn’t wrong. The street was covered in blood. Every place a man had fallen was a place a zombie could grow. Even the ones that had burned might come back slow. The place wouldn’t be safe again.
One of the crawlers didn’t run. It was slower, more damaged. It dragged itself toward Lachlan, mouth open.
Lachlan stepped on its head and crushed it. Bone and gray fluid spread on the ice.
"That one didn’t get the memo," he said.
"That one couldn’t smell," Elias said. "They have to smell us just like any other animal."
Another one rose farther back, by the old church steeple. It looked around, slow, like it was waiting for orders.
Then its gaze hit Sera across the whole street. Even at that distance, it dropped to all fours and ran the other way.
Alexei breathed frost again, slower now. His skin was still blue, bones still clear under it, but the pressure in his chest was lower. He looked at Sera. "They ranked you first."
"They should," she said. "I bite back."
Psycho hummed in his skull, pleased. We do not waste energy on lesser things.
Zubair shook out his arm, winced, and let Elias look at it again. "We move before the smart ones hear this," he said. "Noise will carry."
"Agreed," Alexei said.
He looked down the main road, past the bent highway sign. In the distance, away from the town, he could see some of the stupid zombies already breaking into the fields and tree lines. They moved fast. Faster than the living men had moved.
Lachlan shifted his shoulders. The blue skin began to fade in patches, muscle shrinking a little. He was still bigger than normal. "You want me to go after them?"
"No," Sera said. "Not worth it. They’re not hunting us."
"Yet," Elias said.
Sera shrugged. "They know where they sit. They won’t come back unless someone drags them. And even then, they won’t touch us."
A body near Alexei’s foot jerked.
He looked down. This one had taken a round to the head earlier, but not enough to destroy the brain. The eyes flicked open. The jaw worked. Fingers clawed at the ice, trying to get purchase.
Alexei crouched and put his hand on its face. Ice formed over it. The movement stopped.
"We should clear the ones that can’t run," he said. "So they don’t bite later."
"Fast," Zubair said. He glanced at the burning trucks again. "We don’t know if any of them got a message out."
"Some did," Elias said. "Rourke kept shouting. Someone heard something."
Sera wiped her hands on a dead man’s torn jacket. "I don’t like the idea of running away."
"It’s not running away... it’s a strategic retreat. We are regrouping," snickered Lachlan.
"Same difference."