novelraw Chapter 442: I Was Getting Bored
Chapter 442: I Was Getting Bored
The city thinned faster than Zubair expected.
The concrete jungle faded into long stretches of yellow grass. Houses appeared farther apart. Fences leaned under their own weight as if they, too, had given up on everything. Barns slumped in the distance, their roofs and walls partially collapsed.
Sera was the one to stop walking first.
"I’m done with this," she said simply with a shrug of her shoulders.
Before he could ask, she snapped her fingers, and one of the matte-black trucks popped into existence.
"Get in," she smiled. "I’m not walking anymore."
Zubair took the driver’s seat without asking if she wanted someone else to drive. She climbed into the passenger side and pulled her hair over one shoulder. Lachlan, Alexei, and Aerenyx piled into the back seat as Luci hopped into the truck bed with a single thud of approval.
Zubair started the engine.
The sound broke the stillness like a pulse returning to a dead limb.
They drove until the city was nothing but a memory behind them.
Heat shimmered above the road in slow pulses. Dust climbed into the air and clung to the windshield. The sky stretched wide and open, unprotected and harsh as tumbleweeds rolled across the road like debris with nowhere left to settle.
Sera leaned her elbow against the window. Her creature stretched under her skin with lazy satisfaction, enjoying the emptiness and the quiet dominance of being the only predators for miles.
Alexei rolled the window down an inch as Psycho stirred with the wind, calculating how far a bullet would travel in this open land and just how far the blood would spread from the impact.
Lachlan rubbed the back of his neck. "This whole side of the region looks abandoned."
"Not abandoned," Zubair replied. "Avoided... dead... there is a lot of things that could happen at the end of the world to make it look like this."
He wasn’t guessing at that. Everything around them screamed ’death’. There were no footprints near the shoulders, no tire tracks except for very old ones that were practically fossilized in the mud, there was no movement on the distant porches.
Nothing around there suggested that life wanted to be found.
Aerenyx studied the empty fields. "This land belongs to no one," he said.
Sera shook her head with a scoff. "This land belongs to everyone who decided to claim it. Just because we don’t see anyone, that doesn’t mean that they don’t see us. After all, the streets when we first crossed the border into this Region were empty, too."
Zubair didn’t answer. Her creature pressed through her chest with faint humor. Stubborn humans. They cling to dirt as if it can save them.
They drove another hour.
Then another.
The cattle fields appeared first—wide pastures full of silent cows standing motionless in the heat. They didn’t graze. They didn’t move much. They simply existed under the sun, their ribs showing through their hides. Flies swarmed their faces, but none brushed the insects away.
Lachlan frowned. "They’re too still. Is it possible that there is now zombie cows? Is that a thing?!?"
Alexei watched one blink slowly, unnaturally. "I’d go with sedatives before I went with zombie cows," he scoffed. "They look like they are drugged."
Aerenyx’s expression tightened. "Humans drug their livestock because they fear their own dead more than they want to eat."
Sera didn’t comment as Zubair slowed the truck.
A long fence line stretched ahead, topped with razor wire that glinted beneath the sun. The road dead-ended into a barricade of stacked farm vehicles welded together. There was no CDC signage and no official guards. But movement flickered between the gaps.
He didn’t like the way it felt.
"I see them," Alexei murmured as ice started to cover his hands.
Sera sat up straighter. "I want to see."
Zubair rolled the truck to a slow stop forty feet from the barricade.
A man stepped into view. He was clearly a civilian with a rifle resting easy in his hands, his shoulders relaxed in a way that she hadn’t seen in a really, really long time.
Another figure appeared on top of a tractor roof, a scoped rifle tracking them from a higher angle.
A third leaned against the side of a rusted pickup, cigarette hanging from his lips. He didn’t move the cigarette when he spoke.
"This is private land."
Zubair killed the engine and raised an eyebrow to see what Sera wanted to do next.
Sera pushed the door open and stepped out with the slow, unhurried confidence of someone who had never once been intimidated by a rifle in her life.
Her creature rose instantly, pressing heat through her skin, interested in how these humans thought they could claim anything when it was there.
The man with the cigarette lowered it enough to flick ash to the ground.
"You’re not from this district," he said.
Sera didn’t answer so much as smile at him.
Aerenyx got out next, his posture calm but his eyes sharp. Lachlan emerged with an easy grin that wasn’t actually amused and Alexei stayed beside the truck long enough to assess every angle of threat.
The man with the rifle spoke again. "CDC got no authority out here. Military sure as hell doesn’t. We don’t want any trouble and we don’t want any company."
Zubair stepped around the front of the truck and came up beside Sera. "If you don’t want trouble, then you shouldn’t be pointing your rifles at us."
A ripple passed through the group. It wasn’t fear, not yet, but recognition that someone had spoken who wasn’t bluffing.
Another man stepped forward from behind the barricade. Older. Harder. His face was sunburned and lined, his eyes clear despite the heat.
"You smell like the city," he said. "And your girl is too stupid to be scared of anything. That means you’re either trouble or too dumb to understand the rules out here."
Sera’s creature laughed inside her, warm and pleased. He thinks rules matter.
Sera tilted her head. "We’re passing through."
"That so?" the old man asked.
"Yes," Zubair answered.
"We don’t babysit strangers."
"We don’t need babysitting," Lachlan replied with a bright smile.
The old man glanced at him, unimpressed. "Son, everything out here wants you dead and you all look too city-like to survive by yourselves. You will be killed in a matter of hours if you ain’t smart."
Aerenyx raised a brow. "Everything out here is welcome to try."
The rifleman on the tractor adjusted his aim slightly.
Alexei’s creature surged upward in a flash of hunger. One heartbeat. Freeze the barrel. Snap the bones. They won’t even be able to scream to warn the others.
Alexei breathed once, slow.
Sera stepped forward one more pace.
"My people won’t start anything," she said. "But if something here thinks it owns the road, I’ll walk through it."
The wind stirred the dust at her feet but nothing else around her moved.
The old man finally lifted a hand, signaling the rifleman to lower his weapon.
"You’re not CDC," he said. "And you’re not running from anything." His eyes narrowed. "But your eyes say you’ve seen more dead than we have."
Sera did not deny it.
The cigarette man exhaled smoke through his nose. "Maybe you pass through. One road. No stops. No wandering. No opening gates. You keep driving until you’re out of our stretch."
Zubair nodded once. "That’s all we want."
The old man stepped closer.
"You see anything on this land that shouldn’t be breathing, you kill it." He pointed at Sera. "Even if it is only of your own."
Her creature purred under her ribs, more entertained than offended at the old man.
Sera’s answer was simple. "If it shouldn’t be breathing, it won’t be."
The old man held her gaze a long moment.
Then he stepped back and slapped the side of the barricade twice.
"Open the lane."
The welded farm vehicles shifted on hidden hinges. A narrow path opened, barely wide enough for their truck.
Zubair waited for Sera’s nod before walking back to the driver’s side.
She didn’t look away from the homestead group.
The barricade closed behind them with a grinding, metallic finality that told him the homestead wasn’t scared of outsiders... but they weren’t welcoming them, either.
Luci’s tail thumped once against the truck bed. He lifted his head to scent the air, ears pricked.
Zubair tightened his grip on the wheel.
"This part of Region T," he said quietly, "doesn’t belong to the CDC."
Alexei watched the passing fields. "No. This part belongs to something else."
Sera leaned back in her seat, eyes half-closed.
"Good," she said. "I was getting bored."