Apocalypse: My Golden Vision Sees Every Drop

Chapter 5: Millbrook

The Caravan rolled out a little after nine that morning. There was no fixed destination, there never was. That was just how survival worked now.

Stay in one spot too long, and the scent of living people would eventually pull in every infected for miles, along with whatever mutated horrors happened to be roaming nearby.

Between the constant extreme weather, sudden ground collapses, and land and water poisoned past saving, the amount of livable space left in the world had shrunk down to almost nothing.

Moving, constantly moving, scraping by in the gaps between ruins and open wilderness, was the only thing keeping anyone's hope alive at this point.

Route decisions belonged entirely to the leader and his inner circle. Regular members of the Caravan didn't get a vote. Follow along or strike out on your own, that was the extent of anyone's choice.

Jake had no interest in challenging that setup. Not yet, anyway. As long as the Caravan wasn't obviously driving toward disaster, he was content to go with the current.

Besides, if things went sideways, at least the weight of it would be shared.

Since the collapse, actual cities had turned into no-go zones entirely. Even a mid-sized town that used to hold a hundred thousand people was more than a hundred-person caravan could handle, given how many infected and mutated things had settled in.

Small towns and rural stretches were the sweet spot. Thanks to how developed the infrastructure used to be, even skipping the big cities, there was usually enough scattered around to keep a caravan supplied, food, fuel, working vehicles.

Their next stop was a place called Millbrook.

Before everything fell apart, a few thousand people had called it home.

The Caravan didn't roll straight in. They stopped about two miles out instead.

The leader sent a drone ahead to scout, checking infected numbers, watching for anything abnormally dangerous, gauging how much might still be salvageable.

After a half hour of waiting, word started rippling back through the convoy.

"Threat level's low."

A low reading like that was practically a jackpot. It meant no oversized mutations detected, no massive infected swarms, no environment poisoned past the point of usability.

That didn't mean it was risk-free, though. Drones had blind spots, dead zones they simply couldn't see into. No telling what might be waiting behind shuttered windows, under caved-in floors, or curled up in some pitch-black basement.

The whole line of vehicles surged toward Millbrook at once, everyone hitting the gas, nobody wanting to be the one who fell behind.

Good supply runs like this didn't come around often. No one wanted to miss their shot.

Jake stayed tucked in the middle of the pack, not pushing to the front, not lagging at the back.

That had been his approach from the start.

The upside: he'd outlasted most of the people who'd started this journey with him. The downside: his own growth had stayed painfully slow, leaving him sitting somewhere in the middle of the pack, strength-wise, compared to the rest of the Caravan.

The people who'd actually thrived tended to be the ones willing to fight, gamble, and push their luck. The weak had been weeded out early, which meant the survivors left standing were, almost without exception, stronger than everyone else by a wide margin.

The battered outline of the town came into view soon after, broken walls, crumbling buildings, toppled streetlights, the blackened husks of cars scattered along the road. All of it told the same quiet story of collapse and chaos.

Once inside, the Caravan split up without needing to be told, fanning out across different streets.

Infected numbers were thin, at least. Anywhere sunlight reached, the shambling figures were rare.

When someone did stumble across one, the unspoken rule held, no guns if it could be helped. Melee weapons only.

Jake switched his bike to silent electric mode, checked the grenades and pistol at his waist, the fire axe strapped to his back, the knife on his thigh. His crossbow was already loaded and ready. Only then did he start rolling forward at a crawl.

His eyes stayed locked on the buildings lining both sides of the street, watching for anything that might lunge out, and scanning for houses that looked untouched, worth the risk of checking.

Infected hated sunlight. During daylight hours, most of them holed up in dark rooms, basements, stairwells, waiting out the hours until night fell again.

That made daytime scavenging safer, technically. But it also meant every closed door was a potential trap waiting to spring.

Fwip.

The sound barely registered, quick, sharp, gone in an instant.

Inside a half-open house, an infected had just caught his scent, mouth opening to let out its signature shriek, when a crossbow bolt punched straight through its skull first.

One shot, done.

Jake calmly re-strung the crossbow, nocked another bolt, then eased the door open and slipped inside on quiet feet. Once he confirmed nothing else was lurking inside, he finally let his shoulders drop.

The house was old, walls yellowed with age. A faded family photo hung in the main room, an elderly couple surrounded by several younger relatives.

From the state of the place, it was easy enough to piece together. An elderly widow or widower had lived here alone, their spouse long gone before the world even ended. Whatever kids and grandkids were in that photo clearly hadn't been around when everything collapsed.

Confirming the place was clear, Jake headed straight for the kitchen. In the cabinets he found half a bag of dried pasta, half a bag of rice, some cooking oil, a scatter of spices.

There were pots, pans, bedding, clean clothes scattered through the house too, not worthless, just not worth the weight. He grabbed only what mattered most for staying alive.

Back in the main room, he carefully worked the bolt free from the dead thing's skull, wiped the blood off, and slid it back into the quiver.

More than half his bolts were already damaged beyond use. Only about twenty good ones left. He treated each one like it mattered, because it did.

He climbed back on the bike and kept moving toward the next street.

The town sat in dead silence, nothing but the hum of tires against cracked pavement.

As he rounded the corner into a narrow alley, something caught the edge of his vision and made him stop cold.

A faint blue glow, flickering from inside a house up ahead.

His pulse jumped.

That's... an enhancement card?

Excitement flooded through him instantly.

Enhancement cards were a different breed entirely, instead of giving you a tool or a weapon, they upgraded you. Body, reflexes, raw physical capability.

Get enough of them stacked up, and in theory, a person could outclass everyone around them by orders of magnitude. The kind of edge that changed everything.

Jake held his breath, dropped low, and started closing in on the house one careful step at a time.

Something clearly stronger than a normal infected was moving around inside, well over six feet tall, its skin the sickly blue-gray of a corpse days old, but its movements were sharp, controlled. None of the usual stumbling shuffle.

No question about it. This was a high-tier infected, the kind with real potential to keep evolving further.