The swarm hit like a storm of rotting pressure.

One at a time initially, each one arriving and drawing the next the way a signal draws a response. Within thirty seconds the windshield was covered. Six of them that I could count, more moving in from the edges of the square, the hundred infected in the open space all receiving the same message and starting toward the same source.

"We are so dead," Mercury breathed.

She stood from the front seat, pressed herself between the headrests and squeezed through to the back, landing on Jenn with the specific gracefulness of someone who had stopped caring about gracefulness.

"You think this thing is armored," she muttered, settling herself.

The infected on the windshield were pressing their faces to the glass. One of them, a naked female whose body told the story of where the infection had found her, pressed her breasts and face hard against the glass, sniffing, biting at nothing. The others joined, rocking the car with increasing force.

"Poor girl," Mercury said to Jenn. "You’re going to die a virgin."

"Could you stop that," I said.

"What are we going to do?" Mercury asked, then turned to Jenn. "Why aren’t you reacting? You’re sitting there like a statue."

"Mercury," I said. "I need you to calm down. We need to think."

"Think about what?" She couldn’t hold it. "I didn’t sign up to transform into one of these things. I would have stayed in the Forsaken City."

I let her finish.

"Jenn," I said. "How many do you think are out there?"

Jenn looked through the glass, calm, her eyes moving across the square.

"A hundred and one," she said. Like she had already known before I asked.

I didn’t doubt her. I couldn’t explain why I didn’t doubt her, but I didn’t.

"Okay," I said. "I need you both to close the door the moment I’m out."

"Okay," Mercury said, before she had processed what I meant.

"I’m going out," I said. "You lock it immediately behind me."

"You are not going anywhere, Bram."

"You need to—"

"She’s right," Jenn said, cutting across my explanation. "What’s the plan?"

I turned to face them both, completely unbothered by the infected pressing against the glass three inches from my head.

"I’m an ability user," I said.

Jenn stared. "Are you?"

"These things are going to break through. I’m going out and I’m going to draw them away from the car. You lock the door immediately behind me and you stay inside."

Jenn was already nodding, already moving, climbing between the seats to take position at the door. Mercury opened her mouth.

I was already out.

The door pulled shut behind me before Mercury finished the sentence.

I connected my palm to the first infected. It dried instantly, dropping where it stood. Every head in the square turned simultaneously, the way they turned when a signal changed, a hundred bodies reorienting toward the new source of living heat.

The swarm turned on me instantly. The first infected hit me hard, its decaying weight slamming into my chest and shoulders. I discharged. It crumbled into dry dust against me, but the next one was already there, then another. The ground under my boots was soft, shifting sand that sucked at my feet and made every step heavier.

I started moving away from the car, pulling them with me. They followed with the total commitment of things that had no other purpose. I could feel the vibration of them through the ground, the mass of a hundred bodies moving in the same direction, some bumping into each other, the ones at the edges breaking into a run.

I backed up, using my hands and feet to move across the ground, the charge dropping in my vision with each contact.

[1812. 1800. 1799. 1780.]

They caught up with me and came over the top. I stopped moving and let them.

Bodies climbed over me, pressing down with increasing, crushing weight. The air was forced out of my lungs as the mound grew heavier, layer after layer of desiccated flesh and bone pinning me to the sand.

The pressure on my chest became brutal, compressing my ribs and making each inhale a shallow, labored fight. My arms and legs were immobilized under the growing weight, muscles burning from the strain.

The charge kept dropping, each contact burning through one unit, the numbers falling faster than I could read them. I lay in the sand under the weight of infected that were drying one by one, the pile shifting as bodies went still, until the movement stopped completely and there was nothing left on top of me but weight.

[LEWD LEVELING SYSTEM]

[Charge: 1,712]

I couldn’t move. The dried bodies had me pinned. I lay in the center of the city square under a hundred dried infected and listened to the silence of the aftermath.

"Bram." Mercury’s voice. Above me. Getting closer.

Then hands. Both of them working through the pile, rolling dried bodies aside, shifting the weight one piece at a time until I could see the sky again and then Mercury’s face above it, and Jenn’s beside hers.

They pulled me out.

Mercury’s arms wrapped around me instantly, tight and trembling, her body heat bleeding into mine as she held on with desperate strength. Her grip pressed hard across my back and ribs, her breath coming fast and warm against my neck.

I held her back, one arm around her waist, feeling the way her body shook against me while residual charge still tingled through my palms and arms.

The square around us was a graveyard of gray, desiccated bodies scattered across the sand. The dead car sat in the middle like a forgotten monument. We were alone in an unknown infested city with no maps, no backup, and no working vehicle.

"Help me." A male voice drifted from one of the nearby buildings, cutting through the heavy silence and pressing a new tension into the warm, dusty air.

We all turned toward it.