Theo's cry wasn't a sob. It was a short, sharp exhalation of pure despair, the sound a compressor makes when its seals finally blow. He sat slumped against the pharmacy's cold rolling gate, the image of those dead-fish eyes swimming in the dark behind his own. Mel. Mel where are you in this?
The sound of his anguish was a beacon in the quiet street.
A shutter creaked open above. Then another. Faces, pale and drawn, appeared in windows. His neighbor, Mr. Yusuf, the retired schoolteacher, peered from his doorway down the block, a crowbar in his hand. "Theo? That you?"
Theo couldn't form words. He just looked up, his face a mask of tear-streaked grime.
It was like watching a circuit complete. One by one, the survivors of the alley emerged, drawn by the raw humanity of his breakdown. Susi from the third floor, still trembling. Old Mr. Anwar from the warteg, clutching a wooden rice paddle like a weapon. A young mother, Lani, clutching a toddler to her chest, her eyes wide with a fear that mirrored Theo's own.
They formed a ragged half-circle around him, not too close, a community united by dread.
"Your wife?" Susi whispered.
Theo nodded, swallowing a knot of glass.
"My boy went out last night." Mr. Yusuf's voice was hollow. "To see the red lights. He hasn't—" His voice caught. "He hasn't come back."
"The radio stopped," Lani said. "Then the phones. TV was just… snow."
As if summoned by the word, someone—a young man Theo recognized as a convenience store clerk—called from a doorway. "Wait! TV's working!"
They crowded into the clerk's narrow ground-floor room, a space smelling of incense and dust. The small CRT television flickered. A news anchor sat at her desk, her smile pristine, her makeup flawless.
"…assure the public there is no cause for alarm. The temporary isolation of certain sectors is a precaution. The reports of illness are due to a combination of seasonal flu and mass hysteria. Please remain in your homes. Stay calm. Help is on the way."
The footage was wrong. The ticker at the bottom of the screen scrolled yesterday's weather. It was a recording. A message on a loop, playing into the void.
"That's from yesterday night," the clerk muttered, hitting the side of the TV.
"They're not coming," Mr. Anwar said.
The hope that had flickered for a second died, leaving a colder darkness. Theo understood. It was a pressure release valve on a boiler that was already cracking. A meaningless gesture.
"Why are we still here? it's dark already, Let's go back home before we think what to do next." said Lani, looking around.
Pharmacy = Medicine. The thought cut through Theo's grief. Antibiotics. Antiseptics. Painkillers. Bandages. The tools to fight infection, to treat wounds. In a world turning septic, it was the closest thing to power.
As if the realization had summoned its antithesis, a shadow fell across the street outside the open door.
They all turned.
A figure stood in the middle of the road. It was like the one in the park, but worse. Its clothes were stained and torn. One arm hung at a brutal, unnatural angle. Its head was tilted, milky eyes fixed on the group huddled in the doorway. It didn't snarl. It didn't run. It just began walking toward them with that same terrible, mechanical persistence.
"Close it!" Mr. Yusuf yelled.
The clerk lunged, slamming the heavy steel-and-glass gate shut, fumbling with the deadbolt. The thing didn't alter its pace. It walked directly into the gate.
Thump.
A soft, solid sound of flesh and bone meeting unyielding surface. It didn't react to the impact. It took a stiff step back, and walked into the door again.
Thump.
Then another appeared from an alley. And another from behind a parked car. Drawn like moths to the living warmth, or perhaps to the hum of the desperate human hearts inside. They converged on the pharmacy, a shuffling, stinking half-circle.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
A rhythm. A dreadful percussion against the glass. They weren't trying to break it down. They were just… continuing their motion. An obstacle was met, but the command to stop didn't compute. They pressed their faces against the glass. Rotted lips smeared greyish fluid. Blank eyes scanned the interior, not with hunger, but with a void that wanted to be filled.
"What is that?!"
"What are they??!
"That's Mr. Yanto right?! What happened to him?!"
"They want in—"
"They don't want anything," Theo heard himself say, his technician's mind analyzing the horror. "They're broken. Leaking. And we're just... the pressure they're trying to equalize."
The young mother's child began to wail, a high, sharp sound of pure terror. The things outside reacted to the noise, their thumping becoming more concerted, a ragged drumroll against the door and the rolling security gate behind the glass.
"The back!" Mr. Anwar shouted. "Is there a back door?"
The clerk shook his head, pale. "Just storage. Solid wall."
They were trapped. The thump-thump-thump was the sound of a tomb being sealed. Theo's hand went to his toolbelt, his fingers closing around the cold steel of his heaviest wrench. It was useless. You couldn't fix this.
He looked at the faces around him—Yusuf's grim resolve, Lani's desperate tears, the clerk's petrified shock. This was the new system. Compression. Entropy. Decay.
Just as the glass of the door began to crack, webbing out from a persistent impact point, a new sound tore through the street.
It wasn't a moan. It wasn't a thump.
It was a wet, guttural, roaring SKREEEEEE—
A sound of tearing cartilage and straining muscle, horrifically loud, violent, and organic. It came from the roof above the rolling security gate.
Every one of the pressing creatures froze. Their heads swiveled upwards in unison, that unnatural, puppet-like motion. But for the first time, their blank faces seemed to register something beyond the simple obstacle of the door. Something like… recognition. Or subjugation.
Theo's blood went cold. This was different. This was not mere persistence. This was a predator's call.
Before anyone could breathe, before a thought could form—
CRASH!
Something massive and unimaginably heavy slammed into the rolling gate from the outside. The impact wasn't the soft thud of a body, but a catastrophic, focused blow of dense flesh and bone. The entire metal structure shrieked in protest, bowing inward in the center with a sound of tearing rivets. A huge, distinct dent deformed the metal, shaped not like a tool, but like a massive, malformed fist or a clubbed limb.
Dust and chunks of rotted cement rained down. The things outside shuffled back a step, a crude mimicry of deference.
The gate held, but now bore the terrible imprint of something that had been human, but was human no longer. Something where the virus hadn't just broken the mind, but had rewritten the body with reckless, brutal force.
Silence, for a heartbeat, broken only by the ragged breathing of the survivors and Lani's choked sob.
Then, from the other side of the tortured metal, came a new sound. A deep, wet, rhythmic Huff… Grunt. Like the breathing of a bull, but corrupted, bubbling with fluid. It was the sound of a colossal, inefficient respiratory system working overtime.
HUFF… GRUNT.
HUFF… GRUNT.
It was moving. Circling. The heavy, limping tread of it shuddered through the floor—THUD… drag… THUD… drag.
It was coming back for another blow.
Theo's mind, trained to diagnose problems from sound alone, screamed a new, chilling diagnosis. This was no shambling, broken thing. This was the virus expressing a new, terrible imperative: strength. dominance. harvest.
The cliffhanger wasn't a machine. It was an apex mutation.