The journey south was a masterclass in tense acoustics. Theo moved not through streets, but through capillaries—alleys, back-lot gaps, drained monsoon culverts. He held the radio close, its static hissing like the city's last breath. The transmission about Hotel Cendana was his only vector, a scream lodged in the machine. It was a direction, and any direction was better than the silence of his apartment.
He kept his eyes on his immediate perimeter, but his mind was a radar sweeping for Melin. He scanned every still form, every flutter of movement behind glass. A discarded green scarf made his heart seize; it was just trash. The hope was a constant, low-grade pain.
The density of the Shamblers increased as he moved toward the city's more affluent southern sectors. They weren't aggressive unless provoked by sound or movement, but they were becoming environmental hazards, like human-shaped sludge blocking the pipes of the city.
He found the minibus on Jalan Sisingamangaraja.
It was a white, boxy vehicle, now caked in grime, its front end crumpled against a lamppost. A throng of at least fifteen Shamblers crowded it, pressing against the windows and doors with that mindless, persistent pressure. Their collective stench was a visible haze. But what caught Theo's eye was the driver's-side window—it was webbed with cracks from the inside, and behind the murky glass, a shape moved. A living shape.
Not Melin. The build was wrong. But it was someone. A point of heat in the cold system.
Theo's morality, a simple circuit of 'see problem, apply fix,' engaged before his survival instinct could override it. He couldn't fight them. He had to redirect.
He scooped up a chunk of rubble from a shattered storefront. With a careful, underhand toss, he sent it sailing over the minibus to clatter against the metal shutters of a boutique thirty meters down the street.
Clang-clang-clatter.
A dozen grey faces swiveled in unison. With a sluggish, tectonic shift, the crowd began to peel away from the minibus, shuffling toward the new noise.
But not all. Three remained, too fixated on the immediate source of warmth.
It was enough of a gap. Theo slid from his alcove, moving low and fast toward the minibus's side door. He gestured frantically at the figure inside to unlock it. He saw a wide, terrified face—a young man—nodding violently. The central lock clicked.
As Theo yanked the door open, a cold, iron grip closed around his ankle.
One of the remaining Shamblers, a thing in the remains of a delivery uniform, had lurched under the bus. Its dead-fish eyes stared up, its mouth—lips cracked and bleeding a blackish fluid—opened. It didn't snarl. It just descended, like a machine executing a program.
Theo felt a blinding bolt of white-hot pain as teeth—brittle, but sharp—sank into the meat of his calf, just above his boot. He shouted, a raw sound of shock and agony, and instinctively brought his other foot down on the thing's temple. Bone crunched. The grip loosened.
"HEY! HERE!"
The shout came from the young man inside, now brandishing a tire iron. He wasn't just a victim; he was a catalyst. He leaped from the minibus, swinging the iron in a wild, powerful arc that connected with the head of a second Shambler with a sickening thwack. The move was unpolished but fueled by adrenalized strength. A kickboxer's instincts, without the ring.
Theo scrambled back, his leg screaming. He fumbled at his tool belt, his vision swimming. His hand closed not on a wrench, but on his butane soldering torch. Without thinking, he flicked the striker.
A blue-white jet of flame roared to life.
He didn't aim for the head. He aimed for the sensory cluster. He waved the searing tongue of fire across the faces of the two advancing creatures. They didn't scream, but they recoiled, a primal, biological circuit breaker tripping at the intense heat. Their dry, rotten clothing smoldered.
"Move!" Theo gasped.
The young man didn't need telling. He grabbed Theo's arm, hauling him up, and they fled, leaving the hissing, stumbling things behind. They spotted a standalone security posko, a tiny concrete booth with steel shutters half-drawn, and dove inside, yanking the shutter down behind them with a final, echoing clang.
Darkness. The smell of stale sweat, old coffee, and dust. The only light came through the gun-slit window, cutting the young man's face into planes of fear and exertion.
"Pras." The young man held out a hand that was still trembling. "Prasetyo. Thank you."
"Theo." He managed a nod, collapsing onto a plastic chair, his attention already ripped away from introductions and down to his leg. The pain was a deep, throbbing burn. His pants were torn, dark with blood. He could see the imprint of teeth, ragged and deep. The flesh around it was already an angry, livid red.
Prasetyo found a first-aid kit, rustling through it. "We need to clean it. In the movies, a bite—"
"I know what it means." Theo's voice was flat. The fear was a cold stone in his gut. Not fear of death. Fear of failure. If I turn into one of those things… I stop searching. Melin is out there, alone, in this. She might be hurt. She might be waiting. I can't. I CAN'T become a mindless thing. I need to be healthy. I need to be WHOLE. I NEED TO FIND HER.
The thought wasn't a prayer. It was a command. A primal, fundamental rewrite of his own personal laws. I WILL NOT SUCCUMB. I WILL NOT BREAK. I WILL FIND HER.
He gritted his teeth as Prasetyo poured iodine over the wound. The sting was astronomical. Theo focused past it, down into the pain, into the torn meat of himself. He visualized the system: breached vessel, contaminant introduced, cellular integrity compromised. He mentally screamed at the components. SEAL. PURGE. REPAIR.
Prasetyo was blotting the area with a gauze pad. He froze. "Wait—"
"What?"
"Look at this."
Theo looked down. The bleeding, which had been a steady seep, had stopped. Not clotted, but stopped, as if someone had twisted a valve shut. The angry red inflammation around the bite was receding, pulling back like a tide. As they watched, the deepest part of the wound, where they could see a glint of something too white to be anything but bone, began to pucker and close. New, pink skin knitted itself across the gash at a speed that was not natural. It was the speed of time-lapse photography, of a healing process compressed from weeks into minutes.
In thirty seconds, all that remained was an angry red scar, shiny and new, and a smudge of blood on perfectly intact skin.
Then the price arrived.
A furnace ignited in Theo's core. A fever surged through him, sudden and violent. His vision swam, his muscles trembled as if he'd run a marathon. A profound, gut-wrenching hunger twisted his stomach, followed immediately by a wave of nausea. He felt simultaneously invigorated and utterly, dangerously depleted.
He slumped back, breathing raggedly, drenched in cold sweat.
Prasetyo stared, first at the miraculously healed leg, then at Theo's fever-flushed face. The gauze pad, stained yellow and red, hung forgotten from his fingers.
"That's not... that's not how this works." His voice had gone quiet, almost childlike.
Theo looked at his own leg, touching the fresh scar. It was real. The fever was real. The hollow, screaming need in his cells was real.
He hadn't just survived a bite.
Something inside him had rejected the system failure.
He didn't know what it was. He didn't have a name for it. It wasn't "Unbreakable Will" yet—it was a raw, desperate, biological override.
All he knew, as the fever burned through him, was a single, solid truth amidst the chaos: he was not like everyone else. And that meant, maybe, he had a chance.
He met Prasetyo's wide eyes in the dim light.
"Water," Theo croaked, his throat parched. "Food. A lot of it." The first law of his new power revealed itself not in glory, but in metabolic debt. "Then we keep moving."