Chapter 1: Pandemic Grocery Raid
The fluorescent lights buzzed like dying insects, casting jagged shadows across the aisles. Roy gripped his rifle, the polymer stock cool and familiar against his cheek as he swept the sight over the choked expanse of the grocery store. Rotting produce spilled across the linoleum, a sweet, cloying smell fighting with the deeper, metallic scent of old blood. An overturned shopping cart lay on its side, wheels spinning lazily in a faint, ghost-driven draft.
“Clear left,” he murmured, his voice barely a breath.
Beside him, Rosa adjusted the strap of her hiking bag, the black tactical gear absorbing the dim light. Her two hatchets, heads darkened to avoid glare, were a comfortable weight in her hands. “Right’s a mess, but clear. You smell that?”
“Mildew and failure. The usual.”
“And iodine. Pharmacy’s this way.”
They moved in practiced sync, footsteps silent on the grimy floor. Roy watched their six, his tall frame allowing a view over most shelving units. His engineering mind constantly mapped exits, calculated sightlines, assessed structural integrity. This place was a decaying system, and every noise was a potential variable.
The pharmacy counter was a fortress of collapsed wire security gates. Rosa ducked behind it, her braid slipping over her shoulder. Roy took up a position where he could watch both the approach and her back, his rifle steady.
“Jackpot,” she whispered, her voice echoing slightly in the confined space.Bottles clinked. “Amoxicillin.Cephalexin. Real painkillers, not just the expired garbage.” Her pre-med knowledge turned scavenging into a precise science. She began filling her bag, her movements efficient, her sharp green eyes scanning labels.
Roy’s own bag was lighter, destined for hardware: any durable sealants, heavy-duty tape, spare wiring.Useful things. His gift was making systems work, and Jason’s last request had been for a working hot plate. He’d already found the elements.A crash echoed from the front of the store.Distant, glassy.
They froze. The hum of the faltering generator stuttered, and the lights dipped, then brightened.“Walker?” Roy breathed.Rosa shook her head, listening.“Too loud. Too… deliberate.”
Another crash.Then a third.Methodical.Spaced.
A low moan filtered through the aisles, answered by another, then another.A chorus.
“They’re being herded,” Roy realized, the pieces clicking together with cold, logical dread. “Someone’s drawing them in.”
“Or leading them.” Rosa stood, hatchets ready. “Back door. Now.”
They moved away from the counter, but the pharmacy was a trap, one exit choked with toppled shelving.The moans grew closer, a wet, rattling symphony. The first walker lurched into view at the end of the aisle, its jaw hanging slack, one arm shriveled and dark where the parasite had devoured the tissue from within.
Rosa didn’t hesitate.She stepped forward and brought a hatchet down in a clean, brutal arc. The skull cracked and it fell.Another took its place.
Roy fired, a single controlled shot that dropped a second one.The report was deafening in the enclosed space. “We’re boxing ourselves in!”
“Only way out is through!” Rosa grunted, shoving a cart into the path of two more, buying seconds.
The hoard was thickening, a dozen rotten faces now pressing in from the main store.And behind them, standing calmly near the shattered automatic doors, was a man.
He was bald, with hollow cheeks that looked starved, but his posture was rigid, alert. His eyes, dark and violent, were fixed on them. He held a device—a bulky, jury-rigged thing with a conical emitter, like some parody of a sci-fi prop.
“Silas,” Rosa spat, recognizing him.The former lab tech. Rumors said he’d gone deep into the Applied Sciences building and never come out the same.“Rosa. Roy,” Silas called, his voice raspy but carrying.“You’re disruptive. Your little colony up at Anderson Hall… it’s an anomaly. Uncontrolled variables.”
“We’re just living, you psycho!” Roy shouted, firing again.A walker fell.
“Living is the problem,” Silas said, almost sadly.He raised the device.It wasn’t aimed at the walkers.
It was aimed at Rosa.
Roy saw the calculus in an instant: the crowded space, Rosa’s focus on the immediate threat, the weird tech, Silas’s obsessive eyes. He didn’t think.He engineered a solution.
He dropped the rifle on its sling, lunged, and shoved Rosa hard into the gap between two frozen drink coolers.
A thin, cyan beam lanced from Silas’s device.It missed Rosa by inches and struck Roy square in the chest.
There was no heat.No impact. Just a sudden, terrifying sensation of the world lurching, like a dropped elevator.The sound telescoped, becoming a roaring, deafening landslide of noise. The ceiling rushed away, the lights blurring into blinding suns. The ground—a chip in the linoleum the size of a crater—rushed up to meet him.
He collapsed, not in pain, but in profound dislocation.His own breath was a hurricane in his ears.
He was three inches tall.
From his new, terrifying perspective, he saw the scuffed toe of Rosa’s boot, vast as a continent. He saw the fallen walker nearby, its decaying face now a distant, rotten mountain range.The stench was overwhelming, a chemical landslide of rot.“Roy? ROY!” Her voice was the voice of a god, a thunderous, panicked quake that vibrated through his very bones. Her gigantic hand, calloused and familiar, swept down, her fingers blocking out the world as they searched the ground where he’d stood.
He tried to call out, but his voice was a faint, mosquito-like whine lost in the cavernous boom of her movements and the encroaching groans of the walkers, which now sounded like approaching earthquakes.
Above them, Silas watched, a smudge on the distant horizon. He lowered his device, a faint smile on his lips. Then he turned and vanished into the light of the broken doors, leaving them to the hoard.Rosa’s searching fingers stopped. Her immense, green eye, filled with a terror he’d never seen before, lowered to the ground. It scanned, frantic, and then locked onto him.Her pupil dilated, a black pool of horror.She saw him.
Her breath hitched, a sound like a crashing wave. The walkers were closing in, their titanic feet shaking the earth around him. One wrong step from her, one stumble, and he’d be a stain.Her hand, steady now with a ferocious, trembling will, descended again. This time it wasn't searching.It was a deliberate, careful platform. Her fingertips, rough as ancient stone, slid gently beneath him, lifting him from the abyss of the floor into the thunderous cage of her curled palm.
Her fingertips, rough as ancient stone, slid gently beneath him, lifting him from the abyss of the floor into the thunderous cage of her curled palm.
The world became a dark, warm cave of skin and the frantic drum of her heart. The sounds outside—the groans, the stumbling—were muffled, monstrous. He was pressed against the tough fabric of her shirt, each thread a ridge under his tiny form.“Hold on,” her voice boomed, a vibration through her ribs. “Just hold on.”
He felt her move, a violent, lurching motion that sent him tumbling against the walls of her hand.She swore, the word a low rumble. Another lurch, followed by a wet, cracking sound he felt in his bones. A choked gurgle, then a heavy thud that shook the universe.
The light returned as she partially opened her fist, just enough for him to see.They were past the pharmacy counter, moving fast towards the stockroom doors. A walker lay crumpled behind them, its skull cleft. Rosa’s breathing was a hurricane in his ears.She shifted her grip on him, her movements urgent but impossibly careful.
She secured one hatchet back into its sheath and wielded the other single-handedly. Meanwhile, in her other hand, Roy was cupped securely against her chest. He knew this put her at a disadvantage, but he was struggling to think of a better option, until he looked up and saw the gap between her high collar and neck.
It was a tunnel of shadowed skin, leading up to the column of her throat.A sanctuary.
“Your collar!” he shouted, his voice a pathetic squeak against the cacophony.Somehow, she heard it. A minute tilt of her head, a flicker of her eye downward.She understood.
As she kicked a pallet jack into the path of a shambling figure, her thumb and forefinger pinched the fabric of her collar, pulling it away from her skin.Her other hand, the one cradling him, dipped swiftly. She tipped him, not dropped him, into the dark opening.
He slid a few inches down the warm, smooth plane of her back before coming to rest, cushioned by her shirt and the harness of her backpack straps.It was a tight, secure space. The world was her movement now—the powerful roll of her shoulders, the flex of her muscles as she swung the hatchet, the steady, terrified pump of her heart just inches from his head.He was inside the armor.
“Good?” she gasped, delivering another killing blow.
“Good!” he yelled back.
Freed, her empty hand snatched the second hatchet. She became a storm. A whirling, efficient machine of sharpened steel and raw survival instinct. Roy could only cling to the fabric, a passenger in a hurricane of violence, listening to the awful sounds of her work.Then, silence. Not true silence, but the absence of immediate groans.Just her ragged breaths and the buzz of the lights.
“Clear,” she panted.“Back door’s just ahead.”
She didn’t run. She walked backwards, hatchets ready, eyes scanning every shadow. Roy felt her muscles coiled, ready to snap.The emergency exit door was propped open with a cinder block. Fresh, cold air flooded the space, a shocking contrast to the store’s decay.
Rosa burst out into the grey afternoon light, spun, and slammed the heavy metal door shut. It echoed like a gunshot in the empty loading dock. She stood for a moment, back against the door, chest heaving, staring at the chain-link fence and the cracked asphalt beyond.
Slowly, very slowly, she reached a hand up over her shoulder, her fingers entering the collar.They found him, trembling. She extracted him with the care of someone handling a live grenade and brought him level with her face.
Her eyes, wide and green and frantic, searched him.“Are you hurt?Roy, talk to me. Are you broken?”
“I’m okay,” he said, his own voice still alien to him.“I’m… intact.Just small.”
Her lips trembled. She leaned her forehead gently against the hand that held him, a gesture of devastating relief and exhaustion.“That bastard. That utter bastard.”
“We need to move,” Roy said, his practical mind fighting through the shock.“He knew where we were.He might be waiting.”
Rosa nodded, straightening up. She looked at her cupped hand, then at her own person. The hiking bag, the weapons, the logistics of carrying a three-inch-tall man across a dangerous city.
“Shirt pocket,” Roy said, pointing a microscopic arm towards the zippered chest pocket on her tactical gear. “It’s got a flap. I’ll be secure.”
Without a word, she unzipped the pocket with her teeth, her fingers too occupied with holding him.She lowered him inside. The space was dim, lined with soft cloth, and smelled of her—sweat, leather, and a faint hint of the lavender that grew in their rooftop garden. He sank into the fabric as she zipped it closed, leaving just a crack for air.
The world became the rhythmic, jarring sway of her run. The sound of her boots on pavement was a continuous, ground-shaking thunder.He could feel every leap over debris, every cautious pause at a corner. Her hand would occasionally come up and press against the pocket, a silent check.
He sat in the dark, listening to the hammer of her heart begin to slow into a steady, determined rhythm. He was not a passenger, he told himself.He was a problem.And every problem had a solution. He just needed to recalibrate his tools.Starting with his own mind.
From inside the pocket, his voice was a faint buzz against her chest. “Rosa?”
“Yeah?”
“When we get back… don’t tell Jason yet.”
Rosa’s breathing, still ragged from the run, hitched. The fabric of the pocket pressed in around him as her hand came up and covered it from the outside, a silent, desperate gesture. “Roy, he’s gonna know something’s up if I go back alone.” Her voice was low, a strained murmur meant only for the tiny space he occupied. “Don’t worry.Besides.I’m not leaving a bastard with this kinda tech alive. Not when he could follow me back.”
The statement wasn’t fury.It was geology. A tectonic plate of resolve settling into its final, unshakeable position.It terrified him.
“Rosa, no.We need to regroup. You can’t go after him now, not with me like—” he protested, his squeak lost as she began to move again.
She wasn’t running back towards the store. She was cutting a diagonal across the wasted parking lot, aiming for the skeletal remains of a strip mall whose sign read “S-Mart” in broken letters. Her boots crunched over gravel and glass, each step a minor earthquake. From his pinprick vantage through the pocket’s mesh vent, Roy saw the world as a tilted, sweeping panorama of curb-sized boulders and weed-trees that loomed like ancient redwoods.
“We are regrouping,” she hissed, ducking behind a scorched delivery van. The metal door groaned as she leaned against it, her hand once more checking the pocket’s bulge.“Just not at home. Not yet.”
She unzipped the pocket an inch. Her giant eye, a cosmos of green and white and furious capillary red, peered in.“Listen.Silas is a lab rat. He’s obsessive.He saw his experiment work.You think he’s just gonna walk away? He’ll track us.To the pharmacy first, then back to Anderson. He’ll want to see what he did. He’ll want to study it.”
The word ‘study’ dropped like a stone in his gut.She was right. It was a variable he hadn’t calculated—the perpetrator’s curiosity.In their world, curiosity was a ravenous thing.
“So we turn the variable,” Roy said, forcing his voice to steady. “We control the experiment.”
A faint, grim smile touched the corner of her visible eye. “That’s my engineer.”
She explained between scans of the lot. The S-Mart had a secondary loading dock facing the alley, shielded from the main road.It was closer than Anderson Hall. It had a manager’s office upstairs, one window, one door.Defensible.A temporary base of operations.
Getting there was a lesson in terror and scale.A puddle became an inland sea. A discarded soda can was a gleaming skyscraper.The rusted skeleton of a shopping cart was a vast, chaotic jungle gym. Rosa moved with a new, agonizing caution, her head constantly swiveling. Every normal sound—the creak of a sign, the scuttle of a real rat in a dumpster—was amplified into a potential avalanche.
When a walker did shambble into the far end of the alley, Roy felt Rosa’s whole body lock. It was a lone figure, clothes tattered, one leg dragging a foot that was little more than bone. From Roy’s position, it was a colossal, shambling monument to decay.Rosa didn’t fight. She froze, becoming part of the scenery behind the van.The walker moaned, its head lolling. It paused, seeming to stare right at their hiding spot with milky, pupil-less eyes. Roy held his breath, though his lungs now required so little air.
After an eternity, it turned and lurched away, following some invisible, pathetic scent trail.
Rosa’s exhale was a gust against the mesh. She moved again, swift and silent, slipping through a busted panel in the S-Mart’s loading bay door.Inside, the world went dark and cavernous. Dust motes hung in slants of gray light like suspended planets. The air was stale, thick with the smell of old cardboard and mildew. She navigated through a forest of empty steel shelving, her footsteps echoing in the immense silence, until she found a metal staircase. Each step she climbed was a series of jarring, vertical lurches for him.
The manager’s office was a fishbowl overlooking the stockroom, its interior stripped bare save for a metal desk bolted to the floor and a toppled office chair. Rosa barricaded the door with the desk, then sank into a corner, finally still. Her hands, trembling now that the immediate danger had passed, came up and carefully extracted him.She set him on the dusty floor before her. He stood on a landscape of gray particulate and looked up.From down here, she was a mountain range of fatigues and worry. Her face, tilted down, was a vast, expressive moon.“Okay,” she breathed. “Talk to me.Systems check.”
He raised his arms, turned in a slow circle.“All limbs responding. Vision is… hyper-focused.Hearing is insane.Balance is off. Feels like I’m on a ship in a storm.” He tapped his own chest. “Cardio feels normal, but that’s relative. My heart’s beating about a thousand times a minute, I think.”
“Adrenaline. And a smaller pump moving less blood.” Her medical mind was engaging, a familiar and comforting process.“Any pain?Dizziness? Nausea?”
“Just the world-shattering existential dread.Standard for a Tuesday.”
A real smile, brittle but real, touched her lips. “Smartass.” She leaned closer, her breath a warm, periodic wind. “Can you walk?”
He took a few steps. His gait was unsteady, the texture of the dust a crunchy, alien terrain.Each step required immense conscious effort.“I can. It’s like learning all over again.The gravity feels… different. Stronger, relative to my mass.”
She nodded, already strategizing. From a side pocket on her pants, she produced a small, rolled-up strip of clean cloth—a remnant from their first-aid training. She flattened it on the floor beside him, then took a bottle of water from her pack. With infinite care, she unscrewed the cap and let a single drop fall onto the cloth. It spread into a dark, damp circle the size of his entire body.“Drink,” she commanded. “You’ll dehydrate fast at that surface area-to-volume ratio.”
He approached the miniature lake, crouched, and cupped his hands. The water was cool and immense.He drank, the act feeling strangely monumental.
As he drank, Rosa’s expression hardened, looking out the grimy window. “Silas will be working on two assumptions.One, that we’re dead, consumed by the hoard. Two, that if we’re not, we’ve run straight home.”
“So we don’t go home. And we make him question the first assumption,” Roy said, wiping his mouth.“Exactly. We make him come to us.On our terms. In a place where his tech and his walker-herding are less useful.” She looked down at him, her eyes gleaming with a fierce, protective light.“But I need to know what we’re working with. What did it feel like?”
Roy sat on the dry edge of the cloth, wrapping his arms around his knees. He looked impossibly small.“It wasn’t an energy beam, not really.It felt like… a rearrangement. A compression.Like every atom in my body was politely asked to move closer together.It was instantaneous. And it felt… efficient.”
“Efficient,” Rosa repeated, storing the data.“Not destructive. That’s good. Maybe it’s reversible.”
“Every action has an equal and opposite reaction,” Roy murmured.“Compression suggests expansion is possible. It’s a matter of finding the right key.”
“And we start by taking the keymaker’s keyring,” Rosa said, her voice dropping to a whisper.She glanced at the window.The grey afternoon light was deepening towards evening. “We wait until full dark. Then we move.”