The pharmacy looked like a place where someone had tried to survive the end of the world,and lost.
Leon stopped just inside the doorway, not taking a single step farther. His gaze moved slowly across the interior, registering the chaos in a way that was almost painful, because this wasn't ordinary wreckage from looting or panic.
This was something worse. Something more intimate. More brutal.
Shelves had been overturned. Glass display cases were smashed. The floor was carpeted with pill boxes, syringes, torn pamphlets, and jagged bits of plastic that crackled softly under his boots.
His guard rose on instinct.
He held his breath and listened.
The silence inside the pharmacy was heavy,sticky,broken only by the faint buzz of a fluorescent light and the distant, muffled sounds of the city beyond the walls. When his eyes drifted toward what had once been the customer counter, his stomach lurched.
The countertop was almost completely soaked in blood.
Not just splatters. Smears,long streaks, like something had been dragged across it. And on the floor between overturned chairs lay scattered chunks of organs, impossible to identify at a glance, too human to look at without flinching.
Leon swallowed hard as the bus came roaring back into his memory,the flash, the scream, the explosion of a body.
"Same thing…" he whispered. "The same thing happened here."
Then he jerked as he heard soft, uneven breathing coming from behind one of the shelves.
His sword lifted automatically.
But instead of rushing forward, he moved in slow, careful steps, placing his feet so he wouldn't crunch glass or knock anything over. His heartbeat climbed as the shelf finally opened up his view,
A woman.
She sat with her back against a metal rack, knees drawn to her chest, breathing hard like someone who'd just finished a fight right at the edge of collapse. Beside her lay a dead zombie, its body mangled,head and torso covered in impact marks, like someone had beaten it blindly with whatever they could grab.
The woman looked up at Leon.
For a split second her eyes widened in sharp caution, but when she saw he was human,and not another thing wearing human shape,her shoulders sagged. A weak, exhausted smile flickered across her face.
"Easy…" she rasped. "You don't have to worry. I killed the bastard."
Leon didn't answer right away. He was still trying to make sense of her presence in the slaughterhouse around them. The woman, as if needing to fill the silence, continued. Her voice shook, but it was surprisingly practical.
"I was helping two customers," she said, staring at a point above his shoulder like she wasn't fully in the room anymore. "Normal day. One older guy. The other… some suit."
She let out a short, nervous laugh.
"And then,light. That flash. I thought it was a short circuit or something."
Her laugh died in her throat.
"Then the first one started screaming," she continued, swallowing. "Like something was burning him from the inside. I ran to him,I wanted to help, call an ambulance…"
Her hands clenched into fists.
"And then he just… exploded. Right in front of me."
"This isn't normal," she said more softly, almost to herself. "People don't just explode."
She looked up again.
"And before I could even do anything… the other guy started making sounds. Not screaming. Gagging. Moving like he was drunk, like he couldn't control his own body. And then,"
She tilted her head toward the corpse beside her.
"...he came at me."
Her gaze swept the ruins: the destroyed racks, the blood, the scattered organs.
"All of this…" she said quietly. "This is what our fight did."
Leon stayed silent, listening. Every word she spoke added another layer to the world he was trying to understand,until it stopped being an abstract apocalypse and became a chain of very specific, very human tragedies.
He took a step toward her on reflex, the same impulse that made people help before they'd even decided whether it was safe.
He was already opening his mouth to say something calming,
When the woman suddenly screamed.
"Don't come closer!"
Her voice cracked into pure panic, and she scrambled backward across the floor, like distance itself could still save her from something.
Leon froze.
"Hey, easy..." he said quickly, raising his free hand in a gesture meant to look harmless. "I'm not going to hurt you. I want to help."
For a moment she just stared at him, breathing shallowly.
Then,very slowly,she shook her head, like what she was about to show him was something she couldn't even bear to look at herself for too long. She turned slightly and pointed with a trembling hand to her forearm, just beneath the sleeve of her pharmacist's coat.
At first glance, it looked like nothing.
A small scratch. A thin line of broken skin, like she'd caught herself on a nail.
But the skin around it had already changed.
It had taken on an unnatural gray-green tint, threaded with darker veins that spread outward in slow, steady lines,like mold creeping across a damp wall. The area was swollen, like something beneath the skin was trying to push farther in.
And when she moved her arm, Leon saw her fingers twitch a fraction too late, as if the signal from her brain was arriving with a delay.
The woman let out a sharp, sudden laugh,completely wrong for the moment,then doubled over, coughing hard.
"See?" she said when she could breathe again. "That's not… a normal scratch."
Leon felt a dry knot form in his throat.
"It… looks bad," he admitted carefully. "But maybe… we can do something. It's a pharmacy. Meds, antibiotics,"
He cut himself off, because even in his own head those words sounded empty.
A hospital. A functioning hospital. The thought was almost ridiculous.
"We'll find a way," he added anyway, more stubbornness than belief.
The woman looked at him,and then her body jerked in a few short, unnatural motions, like something inside had tugged her by invisible strings. Her shoulders twitched. Her head tilted at the wrong angle.
A low, guttural growl slipped out of her throat before she could stop it.
She went rigid.
Tears sprang to her eyes.
"See?!" she shrieked, her voice shooting up an octave. "Do you see that?! I told you! I told you there's no way!"
She started breathing faster, her words spilling out in a rush, like she was terrified that if she stopped talking, she'd lose whatever control she still had.
"I've been sitting here for… ten minutes," she said, half-laughing, half-crying. "Ten fucking minutes and I can feel it,"
She jabbed her fingers against her chest.
",I can feel it getting inside me. Like someone's switching me off from the inside. First my hand… then my head… my thoughts…"
Another growl escaped her, lower this time. Shorter.
"I'm trying to think normally," she said, tears running down her cheeks. "I really am. I think about home. About how I was supposed to come to work tomorrow. About how this should all go back to normal. Like it's just a nightmare, some,"
She gave a hysterical laugh.
",some sick dream."
She looked at Leon like he was the last thing in the world anchoring her to being human.
"I don't want to die," she said, quieter.
And that sentence hit harder than any scream.
"I don't want to become… that. I don't want to lunge at people. I don't want to growl. I don't want someone to kill me because I'm not me anymore."
Her hands began trembling more violently.
"I can feel it trying to take control," she whispered. "Like it's telling me it's easier. That I can stop being afraid. That it won't hurt."
A low sound crawled up her throat again, and she clenched her jaw like she was fighting herself.
"Please," she said, looking at Leon,almost begging. "If… if I stop talking like a person… if I get aggressive… don't let me,"
Her voice broke.
"Don't let me hurt anyone."
She breathed hard, her face wet with tears, laughter, and fear, and Leon stood there with his sword lowered, feeling the conversation cut deeper than any fight he'd had so far.
Because this wasn't a scene from an apocalypse movie.
This was a human being who was still alive,and knew she might not stay that way much longer.
She sat in silence for a moment, breathing like she was gathering the last scraps of strength. Then she started talking faster, in broken sentences, like someone terrified that if they paused, they wouldn't get to finish.
"I have a family," she said, and for a moment her voice softened in a strange, fragile way. "They live on the edge of the city. A block near the old tram loop,third entrance is easy to recognize because someone always left a bicycle by the stairs. My husband works nights, today he's probably…"
She cut herself off and let out a humorless laugh.
"The kids are at my sister's. A few streets away. They were only supposed to stay for the weekend."
She kept going,more chaotic now, but painfully precise,names, little details, the color of the apartment walls, the smell of coffee in the morning, stupid arguments about things that had seemed important just yesterday. Like each detail was a final anchor keeping her on this side.
Then she reached into the inside pocket of her coat with trembling fingers and pulled out a small medallion on a thin chain,simple, worn smooth from constant use.
Without warning, she threw it toward Leon.
"If… if you meet them," she said quickly, almost pleading, "please, give them this. Tell them,"
She hesitated.
"...tell them I tried."
The medallion hit the floor and rolled a few inches.
Leon looked at it, then at her. His brows knit hard. His face tightened, turning sour with something that hurt.
Because in that moment she stopped sounding like a random survivor.
She sounded like someone saying goodbye.
He didn't answer.
That was enough to break her.
"Take it!" she screamed, hysterical, her voice collapsing halfway through. "Please,take it! I don't want it left here! Give it to them, do you hear me?! Give it to my family!"
Her shoulders shook.
Leon finally moved.
Slowly, carefully, he stepped closer and picked the medallion up off the floor. The metal was cold against his fingers. For a second it felt heavier than it had any right to be.
When he slipped it into his pocket, the woman exhaled hard and nodded several times.
"Good… good…" she whispered.
She was getting worse.
The skin around the wound had darkened to near-black, and one of her eyes began to fade,its pupil dissolving until the whole thing turned milky white and dead, while the other still stared at Leon with terrifying awareness.
She jerked suddenly, like something inside her yanked.
Her gaze flicked to the sword in his hand.
She lifted her head sharply and drew in air, like she was about to say something important,something final.
"Do it…" she started, her voice trembling. "Before I,"
She stopped mid-word.
Her eyes focused on his face,young, exhausted, too new to choices like this,and something in her broke somewhere else. She shook her head faintly.
"No," she whispered. "That would be too,"
She couldn't finish. She looked away.
"Too selfish."
A moment later, she looked back at him, quieter now.
"Go," she said. "Please. As fast as you can. Before,"
A short growl slipped out of her again.
"Before I stop thinking. Don't watch it."
But Leon didn't move.
Not a step.
He stood there like her words hadn't reached him at all.
When she realized that, she snapped.
"Get the fuck out!" she screamed, the sound tearing through the pharmacy's silence. "Leave! I don't want you watching this! I don't want you here!"
Leon shook his head slowly.
When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet, full of pain,yet his eyes had gone cold, almost dead.
"I can't," he said. "I can't leave you like this."
He lifted the sword just slightly,not as a threat, but like he was admitting what it meant.
"If I let you fully turn," he added after a moment, "someone else will pay for it with their life. Maybe someone who still has a family. Someone who still has a chance."
After those words, silence fell so thick it felt like it pressed against their ears.