UCLA was never meant to fall. The school that once buzzed with youthful energy now groaned beneath the weight of decay, rot, and screaming flesh. The group—Gussa, Michelle, Milo, Martina, Natalya, and Taylor—pushed through the shattered remnants of Bunche Hall, the air thick with smoke and the reek of burnt bodies.

The stench of smoke and blood hung thick in the air as Gussa sprinted across the blood-slick pavement of the UCLA campus, his heart pounding like war drums in his chest. The once-pristine university now teemed with shambling horrors—corpses reanimated by a force he could barely comprehend. Buildings burned in the distance, casting eerie shadows that danced across walls streaked with gore.

The night bled into chaos.

They didn’t know what was chasing them. Not exactly. Not yet. But they knew it shouldn’t exist.

Sirens wailed like wounded beasts. Smoke curled over the once-familiar university quad, turning the air into a choking haze of sulfur and rot. Screams echoed off concrete, tangled with gunfire, wet impacts, and an unearthly chorus of moaning hunger.

Gussa stood at the edge of the biology building's shattered glass doors, his hands slick with blood that wasn’t his. Behind him, Michelle kicked in the last of a vending machine, stuffing bags of trail mix and water bottles into her backpack with shaky hands. Milo wiped gore off a baseball bat with a disgusted grunt.

"Let’s move before they regroup."  Martina suggest in a hushed whisper.

The first of them came lurching through the stairwell—half its head sloughed off, eyes glowing like hot coals, its limbs twitching unnaturally fast, too many joints bending the wrong way. Milo growled, taking the lead, fists balled. “That’s not a person.”

“No shit,” Michelle snapped, pulling a broken chair leg from the floor. “What the fuck is it?”

Milo’s heart hammered. He’d read about things like this—sort of. Occult fringe crap, things his mother used to whisper about in japanese when she thought he was asleep. Trifold Radiance, Infernal Echoes, sacred wounds. All of it felt like a half-remembered fever dream now.

The horde burst through the windows like water under pressure. A cascade of pale, bloated flesh smeared with black ichor, teeth gnashing and hands warping into bone hooks and fused fingers. Screams erupted from the quad below, and then the lights flickered out entirely.

“RUN!”

"SUV," Milo said, voice tight. "Campus Security lot. It's big enough to carry us all."

They burst into the open.

The campus, once alive with late-night cramming and skateboard wheels, had turned into a hunting ground. The horde had broken through the perimeter two hours ago. Campus police were either dead or worse. In the distance, the Ackerman Student Union was engulfed in flames, silhouettes writhing inside as if the building itself had been possessed.

The SUV was there, just where Milo had spotted it earlier. A forest green Chevy Suburban, still intact. But between them and escape, at least thirty of them—the infected—clustered near the fountain, some gnawing on a corpse that twitched even in death.

Gussa moved first.

"Over here!" Michelle screamed, her voice cutting through the chaos.

Gussa skidded to a stop beside her, panting, eyes flickering with strange golden light—something awakened in him, something ancient and barely understood. He didn’t have time to process it. Not now.

They barreled into the parking structure, Milo had managed to hotwire the dusty beat-up Chevy Suburban from the campus security lot, the engine grumbling to life like a beast waking from a long sleep. Martina clambered in next, blood smearing her white tank top, her hands trembling as she helped Natalya into the back seat.

The undead were faster than they should be—galloping, crawling, climbing the concrete walls like insects. One of them lunged through the window and grabbed Natalya by the hair, its mouth unhinging like a snake’s. Milo yanked it back and crushed its head against the frame.

It didn’t die right.

It spasmed. Twitched. Screamed from a hole in its chest it didn’t have before. A scream that sounded like more than one voice—like a choir of wrongness.

Taylor hesitated, staring back at the horde of undead lurching toward them. Some were naked, others half-melted and twisted by unknown forces—skin bubbling, bone elongating, mouths stretched wide into screams that never ended. The reek of rot and sulfur made him gag.

"Taylor! MOVE!" Milo roared.

Taylor bolted forward. One of the things reached for him—a professor, or what used to be one, its jaw unhinging with a wet snap. Its fingers, swollen and black with necrosis, nearly grazed his shoulder. Gussa tackled it, ramming the butt of a fire extinguisher into its face until it stopped twitching. There was no time to marvel at the flicker of pale-blue energy that laced his strikes.

 “DRIVE!”

Milo floored it, tires squealing. Gussa felt something spark in his chest—like recognition. Like memory. A word surfaced and disappeared.

Taylor vomited in the back seat as Milo gunned the engine.

They left the campus in a cloud of burning rubber and screams.

They sped off, the tires screeching across pavement coated with entrails. The SUV fishtailed as they broke through the gates and out into the streets of Los Angeles. Behind them, the campus was a warzone of hellish moans and crumbling structures.

For the first hour, no one spoke.

Then Michelle broke the silence. “We need to get to my dad’s place. Stillwater, Nevada. He’s a prepper—he has weapons, food, everything.”

“Stillwater?” Milo asked. “That’s... up by Reno, right?”

“Yeah. We’ll take the back roads. Through Lancaster, Mojave, then cut northeast to California City. After that, it's a straight shot. But, first let’s stop at my buddy John’s place in California- City. He should have some supplies for us.”

Martina looked out the window, her voice low. “What were those things? People don’t just... change like that.”

No one answered. Except Gussa.

“Something’s broken. In the world, I mean. I think... I think magic is real.”

The others stared at him. 

Natalya laughed, but it was a brittle, humorless sound. “Dude. You’re concussed.”

“I’m serious. Back there—I felt something. Like... a current, like my blood turned into lightning. And I saw it. Energy. Color. Like the world had veins, and they were bursting.”

Taylor shook his head. “Magic doesn’t exist.”

“Tell that to the melting corpse that tried to rip your face off.”

The Suburban roared down the shattered streets of Los Angeles, weaving between overturned buses and smoldering wreckage. The windshield was cracked, spiderwebbed from the inside by desperate fists days earlier. Gussa gripped the steering wheel with white knuckles, sweat stinging his eyes as he swerved to avoid a lurching figure missing half its face.

They had been driving for hours — Michelle beside him, pale and silent, while Natalya, Milo, Martina, and Taylor huddled in the back. The SUV smelled of blood, oil, and smoke.

Outside the windows, the city was dead.

Cars burned in intersections, their metal frames warped and blackened. Buildings gaped open like broken teeth, windows shattered and walls slick with dark smears. Corpses littered the streets, bloated and torn, some still twitching as the virus gnawed away what was left of them. Every so often, a pack of the infected would surge forward, drawn by the sound of their engine — bodies malformed, faces frozen in eternal screams.

They passed a school bus on Sunset Boulevard, its yellow frame charred and melted. Inside, tiny hands still clawed at the glass. Milo muttered a curse and looked away.

“This whole city’s a grave,” Michelle murmured.

No one argued.

They left Los Angeles behind as the sky darkened to a deep, bloodstained purple. The hills of Lancaster loomed ahead, but the road there was no better. Blackened trees clawed at the air, their branches hung with the corpses of those who’d tried to flee. At one point, the Suburban rattled over a stretch of road thick with bodies, the tires thumping like they were rolling over stones.

They drove through Lancaster in eerie silence. The town looked abandoned, though now and then, shadows moved in windows.The group made a quick stop at an abandoned gas station. Gussa held watch while Michelle siphoned fuel, and Martina tried to tend to Natalya’s wound, whispering healing mantras between tightening bandages. Milo kept checking the mirrors.

"You think they're following?" he asked.

"They always are," Gussa replied.

Mojave was worse.

By the time they reached the outskirts of Mojave, the engine coughed once, twice — and died.

“Shit!” Gussa slammed his palm against the dashboard.

Smoke hissed from under the hood. The desert stretched around them — bleak, open, silent. In the distance, a lone wind turbine spun lazily, blades creaking in the evening wind.

“We’re walking,” Gussa said, his voice low, tired.

No one argued. They were too drained. Too haunted.

They grabbed what supplies they could — a few bottles of water, scavenged ammo, and Zion’s bloodstained baseball bat. His loss was a fresh wound, one none of them spoke of yet.

For hours they trudged through the dark, past desolate stretches of sand and rusted chain-link fences. The air stank of death. Sometimes they glimpsed shapes in the distance — shambling things, limping toward them on broken limbs — but they kept moving.

They crossed old highways littered with wreckage and dried blood trails, the stars overhead cold and uncaring. The night was filled with distant howls and wet, gurgling sounds that reminded them what waited in the shadows.

When dawn came, it brought no warmth. The sun rose blood-orange over a world stripped bare, a landscape of decay and rot. Gussa could see it in the others’ faces — cracked lips, hollow eyes, dirt and blood smeared across skin.

And still they walked.

Two Days Later — California City

The lifeless sprawl of California City. Every street looked abandoned at first glance, but things moved in the shadows. The infected. Or worse. A sickle moon hung over California City’s empty grid of half-built dreams and derelict streets.

The house looked so… normal.

A plain, one-story home with faded paint and a sun-bleached yard. There were no barricades, no sandbags, no makeshift fences — just an ordinary house at the end of a quiet street.

John opened the door before they reached the porch, his face lighting up in shocked relief. He was just twenty-two — too young to look this worn, too young to have blood on his hands, but here he was.

“That you, Michelle?”

The first to step forward was a girl in a loose black sweatshirt, dark waves of hair falling over her shoulders. Her eyes were wide but kind, and her smile hesitant. “I’m Lina,” she said. “John told us you were coming.”

Beside her stood a pale girl with heavy eyeliner and shoulder-length black hair that hung like a curtain. She didn’t speak at first, just gave a nod. She wore an oversized off-the-shoulder shirt covered in ornate gothic designs and held her phone in her hand like a mirror shield. “Hailie,” she finally said, voice low and flat.

Then, emerging from the hallway was a man with round glasses, a long uneven mullet, and a wild beard that looked like it hadn’t been trimmed since before the collapse. He wore a tattered cloak draped over his shoulders like a prophet. “J. Brown,” he said in a soft, slow voice. 

Damn,” he muttered. “You look like shit.”

Michelle walked forward and embraced him tightly.

They staggered inside, past the cracked welcome mat, into a house that smelled of sweat, stale food, and survival. It wasn’t a fortress. It was a house — a battered, desperate sanctuary at the end of the world.

In the dimly lit living room, the walls were lined with old family photos, now half-obscured by boxes of canned goods, medical supplies, and makeshift weapons.

They collapsed on couches and against walls, the weight of the last two days settling over them.

John clapped his hands. “So here’s the deal. We’ve been living off rations and rainwater, clearing out stragglers around the block, and keeping the grid dead silent. No generators after dark. No fires. No fucking up.”

Gussa surveyed them carefully. John had the look of someone who had seen hell and made it blink. Lina’s warmth was a flicker in the dark. Hailie looked like she’d already buried half the world. And J. Brown? He gave off the air of a man who dreamed in riddles.

This place wasn’t safe. Nowhere was. But for the moment, it was the closest thing they had to shelter.

And tomorrow, they’d have to decide whether to keep hiding—or fight their way to Nevada.

The night stretched long, but no one slept easy.

 No one spoke of Zion. Not yet. His absence was a raw wound that sat in the room with them, heavier than the heat, heavier than the smell of death in the air.

But for now — they were together. And in this world, that was rare enough.