DEAD CITY: A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE

CHAPTER 2 ~ THE SYSTEM WAKES UP

Riccardo kept the chain lock firmly secured on the door.

"Who are you?" he called through the door with his bat raised and his back pressed against the wall beside the frame. He knew to never stand directly in front of a door because he had learned that lesson from every horror movie he had ever watched, and it appeared that today was the day that specific education finally paid off.

"My name is Amanda Cruz, and I am begging you to help me because I live on the sixteenth floor, but I came down the stairs, and there are three of them on this floor right now, so please just open the door."

"Are you bitten?" he asked sharply.

There was a heavy pause before she asked, "What did you say?"

"Are you bitten?" he asked again, enunciating each word clearly as if she were hard of hearing. "It is not a complicated question, so I just need a yes or no answer."

"No, I am absolutely not bitten, and I am completely fine, but I just need somewhere safe to wait until this is over."

"How do I know that you are telling the truth?"

"You know I am fine because I am talking to you in full sentences and I am not actively trying to eat your door." Her voice cracked on the last word just as a wet and dragging sound echoed from somewhere down the hallway, which was immediately followed by something that had once been a human voice producing a noise that was absolutely no longer human.

Riccardo finally unlatched the chain and pulled the heavy door open.

The woman was perhaps twenty-five years old and wearing typical office clothes that consisted of a pencil skirt and a blouse, though she was missing one heel. She darted inside and had the door shut behind her before he had fully registered that she was moving, swiftly turning the deadbolt and the chain lock before standing there with her back against the door and breathing heavily as if she had just run up ten flights of stairs.

Riccardo quickly realized that she probably had actually run down that many flights of stairs to escape.

"Thank you so much," she gasped in relief. "Oh my God, thank you for letting me in."

"Do not thank me just yet," he warned while keeping the bat raised and moving his eyes carefully over her to check for injuries. She appeared to be physically unharmed despite having wild hair, destroyed mascara, and shaking hands, and since he could not see any visible wounds, he started to lower the bat.

It was at that exact moment that he saw her left arm.

She had deliberately pulled the sleeve of her blouse down, but the fabric sat incorrectly against her forearm by appearing bunched up and tugged suspiciously low. Barely hidden underneath that fabric was the dark crescent edge of a severe bruise that was absolutely not shaped like any normal bruise a door or a fall would ever make.

His baseball bat immediately came right back up to a defensive position.

"Pull up your sleeve right now," he demanded quietly.

Her eyes went wide with panic as she stammered, "It is nothing serious because I simply hit my arm on the staircase railing."

"Amanda," he stated with a completely flat and uncompromising voice. "You need to pull up your sleeve immediately."

She stared at him for a long and tense moment before something shifted in her expression that was not exactly guilt, but rather a profound sense of exhaustion. She looked exactly like someone who had been running from a terrible truth and simply did not have the energy to keep running anymore, and she finally complied by pulling up the sleeve.

The bite mark was incredibly ugly and deep with a distinct semicircular pattern, and it was already turning the surrounding skin into a mottled grayish-purple color. The horrific wound looked as though it was perhaps twenty minutes old, or possibly even less than that.

Riccardo immediately took three cautious steps backward and ordered her to get out.

"Please do not make me leave," she begged.

"You need to get out of my apartment right now," he repeated firmly.

"I know exactly what this looks like, but I promise that I feel completely fine and normal." She abruptly stopped speaking and pressed her trembling fingers to her temple, wincing violently as if someone had just driven a steel spike directly through her skull. "I just need a minute to rest, and I just need to sit down and catch my breath."

"You really need to leave," he insisted, though his voice broke slightly on the words and he instantly hated himself for showing that weakness. "I am genuinely sorry that this happened to you, but you absolutely have to go."

Instead of leaving, she suddenly dropped down heavily onto one knee.

The terrible sound she made was no longer an expression of human pain, but rather a much lower, guttural noise that vibrated deep in the back of her throat and created a bizarre frequency that Riccardo felt echoing in his back teeth rather than hearing it with his ears. Her free hand slammed against the floor with her fingers splaying out wildly while the skin along her bitten forearm began visibly moving, and the veins beneath the surface turned a sickening dark color before branching out like jagged cracks spreading rapidly through solid ice.

"Oh no," Riccardo muttered in mounting horror. "Oh no, this cannot be happening."

She slowly lifted her head and looked directly up at him.

Her eyes were now completely white with the irises entirely gone, leaving nothing but blank and pale ovals set into a face that was no longer capable of arranging itself into any recognizable human expressions. Her jaw suddenly unhinged slightly by dropping far too low and in the wrong direction, and she let out a piercing scream that was not actually a scream at all, but rather an amplification of that terrible vibrating frequency that was now loud enough to violently rattle the window glass.

Without any further warning, the creature lunged directly at him.

She crossed the entire distance between them in one explosive movement, but Riccardo miraculously got his wooden bat up just in time to catch her viciously across the shoulder and spin her sideways into the kitchen counter. Dirty dishes crashed loudly to the floor as she hit the linoleum, but she twisted her body unnaturally and was back up on her feet before he had even finished the follow-through of his defensive swing. She was moving with the exact same terrifying and jerky speed he had watched from his window earlier, combining an impossible velocity with a human body that seemed to be driven by an entirely inhuman engine.

"Okay, I see how it is," he panicked as he backed frantically into the kitchen space, grabbed the heavy wooden knife block resting on the counter, and yanked out the absolute biggest chef's knife he could find. "Okay, I guess we are really doing this right now."

She came flying at him again, but he desperately sidestepped her charge, drove a brutal elbow directly into her back, and then grabbed a heavy wooden chair from his tiny kitchen table to swing it at her with both of his hands. The makeshift weapon connected squarely with her skull with a sickening crack that absolutely should have put any normal person down for good. However, she merely staggered for a moment, shook her head to clear the impact, and turned right back toward him with those terrifying white eyes tracking his every movement like a deadly machine recalibrating its target.

"Why will you not just stay down and die?" he screamed at the monster.

She ignored his question and brutally tackled him to the floor.

Over a hundred and fifty pounds of reanimated and aggressive office worker hit his center mass and took him straight down to the hard floor, causing his head to bounce off the kitchen tiles with enough force to completely gray out his vision for two terrifying seconds. Her cold hands immediately closed tightly around his throat to choke him. Her ruined face was hovering a mere six inches from his own face with that broken jaw still working incorrectly, and a horrifying sound began building deep in her chest that sounded exactly like a mechanical engine revving up to unleash something catastrophic.

He thought with remarkable and chilling clarity that this was exactly how he was going to die. He was about to be strangled to death by his infected neighbor on his own kitchen floor before he had even managed to eat his morning breakfast.

Fortunately, his right hand was still gripping the handle of the large kitchen knife.

He did not even bother to think about the moral implications before he forcefully drove the sharp steel blade upward into her body.

He stabbed her once, then twice, and then four and six times before he completely lost count of his desperate strikes. He simply kept plunging the knife into her torso until her choking hands finally went slack, the heavy weight pressing down on his chest stopped moving entirely, and his apartment became so dead and quiet that he could clearly hear his own frantic pulse hammering inside his ears like a tribal drum.

Riccardo lay completely motionless on his kitchen floor for thirty agonizing seconds while staring blankly at the ceiling and realizing he was covered in dark blood that did not belong to him.

"Okay, that actually happened," he whispered out loud to absolutely nobody in the empty room.

He grabbed the limp body and dragged it over to his front door, opened the barrier a mere three inches to verify that the hallway was currently empty, and then hauled her remains outside into the corridor. He immediately shut the door, locked the deadbolt, secured the heavy chain, and finally slid his back down against the wood until he was sitting on the floor with his knees pulled tightly to his chest and his bloody hands hanging limply over them.

The horrifying reality washed over him that he had just brutally killed a human being.

She had obviously been actively turning into a mindless monster who absolutely would have killed him if he had not defended himself, and he understood with complete rational clarity that there had been absolutely no other viable option available to him. However, that logical justification did absolutely nothing to stop his adrenaline-filled hands from shaking hard enough to audibly rattle his knuckles against the hardwood floor.

His forgotten cell phone suddenly lit up over on the kitchen counter.

He chose to ignore the distracting device completely.

The phone repeatedly lit up again and again until the digital screen impossibly expanded far past its physical glass boundaries to project a pale blue holographic rectangle outward into the room like an advanced device out of a science fiction film, and it simply hovered there in the exact middle of his destroyed kitchen directly above the overturned chair and the shattered ceramic dishes.

Riccardo sat frozen on the floor and stared upward at the glowing impossible object in total disbelief.

⚠ MILITARY SURVIVAL SYSTEM ACTIVATION COMPLETE ⚠

Host identity confirmed as Riccardo Gonzales, and the first official kill has been recorded as a standard Stage-1 Infected entity. The system is granting a reward of fifty survival points and unlocking the first level of the Combat Instinct skill.

"Congratulations to you, soldier, because you are still breathing and that fact alone puts you far ahead of most of the population."

Right below that message, the glowing hologram expanded into a full digital interface that featured a clean and military-styled design perfectly organized into separate interactive tabs.

[ STATS ] [ SKILLS ] [ INVENTORY ] [ MISSION ] [ MAP ]

Riccardo slowly pushed himself up off the bloody floor, walked cautiously over to the glowing interface, and reached out to physically tap the stats tab with one of his blood-stained fingers.

NAME: Riccardo Gonzales LEVEL: 1 HP: 85/100 (minor head trauma detected) STRENGTH: 14 AGILITY: 12 PERCEPTION: 16 SURVIVAL RATING: F+ (improving)

He simply stood there in silence for a very long period of time while trying to process the impossible situation.

"I somehow downloaded a mobile zombie game during the outbreak of an actual zombie apocalypse," he said slowly as he looked down at his trembling hands, glanced back up at the glowing holographic interface, and surveyed the bloody carnage that used to be his tidy kitchen. "And that bizarre application literally gave me a real-life survival system."

The floating interface pulsed with a helpful blue light in direct response to his statement.

[ NEW MISSION AVAILABLE: LOCATE AND SECURE FAMILY MEMBER NAMED LUCIA GONZALES, AGE 15 ] REWARD: +200 SP | Skill Upgrade Token x1 TIME REMAINING: 47:32:09

Riccardo carefully read his younger sister's name glowing on the holographic screen before shifting his gaze to read the ominous countdown timer ticking away directly beneath it.

The frantic shaking in his bloody hands finally came to a complete and sudden halt.

"Alright then," he said quietly, but his tone of voice had completely changed. Something cold and deeply focused had finally settled behind his dark eyes, and it was a dangerous quality that had definitely not been there when he had peacefully woken up forty minutes ago to a missed alarm. "What exactly do you need me to do first?"

The system's advanced interface simply glowed steadily in the wrecked kitchen of his fourteenth-floor apartment, hovering forty feet above a sprawling city that was currently eating itself alive while it patiently waited for his very next move.