I don't need to breathe, but the habit of it still clings to me like a stubborn echo of the girl I used to be.
The apartment is too quiet when I arrive. The kind of quiet that screams danger—not with volume, but with absence. My steps are silent as I move over the blood-smeared tiles, the rubber soles of my boots making no sound against the broken glass and crusty filth. The flickering light overhead casts jittery shadows on the walls.
I pause.
They aren't here.
The couch is flipped, like it had been used as a barricade and then abandoned. The zombies on the floor have been stepped over, their insides smeared across the tiles with all the dead black worms.
Black worms can't survive without a living host for more than a few minutes before drying. Some can't even make it a full minute—some not even a handful of seconds. Depends on the mutation, mostly.
I scan the space.
There's no fresh blood. No trails. But something has passed through.
