The world did not so much change as it simply… ended. One moment, the convoy was rumbling across the cracked, grey expanse of the Great Barrens, the rising sun a pale, watery eye at their backs. The next, the horizon before them ceased to be a flat line and erupted into a jagged, broken silhouette. It was as if a titanic, petrified forest of steel and stone had been frozen in the act of collapsing. A strange, heavy silence descended, broken only by the grumble of their own engines. The air itself changed, growing thicker, colder, and carrying a faint, acrid scent of old dust, rust, and something else—something organic and deeply wrong.
Michael let the binoculars fall to his chest, the strap rough against his neck. They had arrived. The edge of the Detroit Ruins. A shiver, completely unrelated to the morning chill, traced its way down his spine. This was the place of nightmares, of campfire stories told to frighten children. And they were walking into it.
The approach had been chosen with a specific, gut-churning memory in mind: the twitching, unnatural congregation they'd glimpsed in that distant, blighted forest. The map had offered an alternative route, skirting what they guessed was the forest's edge, adding perhaps a mile or two to the seven they needed to cover to reach the skeleton of Wayne State University, and within it, their grail—the biolab tucked in its western quadrant. Seven miles on paper. In this necropolis of shattered concrete and twisted I-beams, it might as well have been seventy.
The journey to the ruins' lip had been deceptively calm. Only a single, shambling figure had been drawn to the thunder of their engines. It was a pathetic thing, clothes hanging in rotten rags, moving with a stiff, lurching gait. It had fixated on the lead vehicle, the hulking M4 Sherman tank they'd christened 'Old Ironsides' in a moment of bleak humor. With a mindless shriek that was more air than voice, it had hurled itself directly at the tank's prow, clawing at the fresh olive-drab paint with bony fingers before the thirty-ton behemoth simply rolled over it. There was a wet, crunching pop, and then it was gone, a dark stain on the asphalt. The incident was so brief, so utterly inconsequential to the machine, that it hardly registered as a threat. It felt more like squashing a particularly ugly beetle.
Then, the world stopped.
Not with a bang, but with a grinding squeal of brakes. Old Ironsides, which had been pushing aside rusted car husks like a bull through dry grass, slowed to a crawl, then halted completely. The entire convoy shuddered to a standstill behind it. The sudden silence was profound, broken only by the tick-tick-tickof cooling metal.
"Command, this is Rhino One," the tank driver's voice fizzed through the static of Michael's handset, tinny with tension. "We've got a proper cork in the bottle up here. A real mess. Orders?"
Even as the voice crackled in his ear, Michael saw the turret hatch on the Sherman swing open with a metallic shriek. The tank commander, a bulky shape in a sealed hazard suit, emerged up to his waist, his gloved hands immediately finding and gripping the butterfly triggers of the turret-mounted .50 caliber machine gun. He swivelled the heavy barrel in a slow, menacing arc, scanning the silent, gaping windows of the buildings that loomed over the street like rotten teeth.
Michael didn't need the report. He'd already seen it through his binoculars. A hundred yards ahead, the street—which had once been a broad avenue—vanished into a chaotic sculpture of destruction. It wasn't just a traffic jam; it was a cataclysm in metal. A dozen or more vehicles, ancient sedans and trucks, were not merely piled up; they were foldedinto one another. One car was perched grotesquely on the roof of the one in front, its rear end jutting into the air like the stern of a sinking ship. Another was compressed into a perfect, shiny cube of scrap. It was a plug of mangled steel and shattered glass, utterly impassable. The buildings on either side offered no bypass; they leaned drunkenly inward, their lower floors collapsed into mounds of rubble that spilled into the road. The way was shut.
Michael's thumb found the call button on his radio. He'd equipped the entire force with the devices, linked through a powerful repeater in one of the trucks. For ten kilometers, at least, they could talk. Now, he spoke to all of them, his voice calm, a forced steadiness he did not feel. "All units, listen up. Drivers, marksmen, stay with your vehicles. Everyone else, dismount. Form a defensive perimeter around the convoy. We advance on foot. Spears and shields to the outer ring. Archers behind them. Gunners, form the core. Snipers, get to high ground—rooftops, truck beds, wherever you have a sightline. Move."
What followed was a quiet, efficient frenzy. Doors whispered open on oiled hinges (a luxury Michael had insisted upon). Men spilled out, not with panic, but with a grim, focused speed. They moved like parts of a single organism. The 'cannon fodder'—volunteers from the bandit gangs and Base 0005—formed the outer shell, their weapons not guns, but long, wicked-looking poles fashioned from reinforced steel rebar, tipped with sharpened scrap metal. Behind them came the archers, a mix of hardened scavengers and a few of the more dexterous Sweetwater Ditch men, their quivers full of crudely fletched arrows. At the heart of the formation clustered the two dozen men entrusted with the precious firearms. Meanwhile, like spiders finding perches, thirteen figures scrambled onto the roofs of the trucks and vans. This was the sniper team. Its arsenal was a testament to scarcity: two proper, scoped hunting rifles, and eleven ancient, well-oiled M1 Garands, their wood stocks polished smooth by decades of use.
The team was led by a man called Richard. He was a half-elf, a fact evident in the subtle points of his ears and the unnatural grace of his movements. Back in the Ditch, he had a reputation as a sly, somewhat unsavory character—a 'right dodgy bloke,' some muttered. But with a bow or a rifle in his hands, he was transformed. It was said he had a 'wicked eye,' a talent so preternatural it felt like cheating. Michael had seen it himself. Given one of the scoped rifles, Richard had spent a single afternoon on the range, firing just five precious rounds. By sunset, he was hitting man-sized targets at 800 meters with an ease that was almost insulting. Now, the elegant, deadly curve of a composite bow was slung across his back, a weapon of last resort or silent kills. The rifle, a long, sleek thing, was cradled in his arms like a lover.
Seeing his people fall into their assigned positions, a tense, breathing wall of humanity around the silent metal vehicles, Michael keyed his radio again, this time for the tank. "Rhino One, this is Command. It's just wreckage. A bad crash, not an ambush. Don't wait for an invitation. Make us a door."
From the lead truck, the sound that followed was not of gunfire, but of industrial violence. The Sherman's engine roared, a deeper, angrier sound than before. It lurched forward, not with speed, but with an inexorable, grinding power. It did not try to go around the tangled mass of cars. It went through.
The sound was the worst part. A deafening, screeching cacophony of grinding metal, shattering glass, and the brittle crunch of old, dry bone. The tank's reinforced prow slammed into the side of a rust-eaten sedan. The car did not so much move as it disintegrated, folding like tinfoil, its frame screaming in protest. Something pale and multi-limbed—a decades-old occupant—was briefly visible amidst the crumpling steel before being pulverized into a cloud of dust and fragments. The tank's treads, each link weighing a small fortune, clanked over the remains, flattening what was left into a vaguely car-shaped sheet of scrap. It was brutal, primitive, and horrifically effective. The convoy, holding its collective breath, watched as Old Ironsides carved a path, not by clearing the obstruction, but by reducing it to a flattened, groaning pathway of compressed ruin.
They followed in its wake, stepping over warm, twisted metal, the air thick with the smell of liberated rust and a faint, chalky odor that nobody wanted to think about. They were in.
The silence of the city was a living thing. It pressed in on their ears, broken only by the scuff of their boots on debris, the hum of their suit fans, and the ragged sound of their own breathing, magnified inside their helmets.
It didn't last.
The voices began to crackle over the radio network, tense and clipped, painting an invisible map of creeping death.
"Contact, left flank, ten o'clock! Three hostiles, visual range two klicks, emerging from a shell of a bus!"
"Contact, right rear, four o'clock! Two sighted, third floor of a six-story structure. Windows gone. Could be lurkers. Watch for ambush."
"Movement, straight ahead, in the shadow of the overpass…"
The Infected were coming. Drawn, Michael knew, not just by the noise, but by the scent of warm, living meat—a scent that had not walked these streets in generations. They came in ones and twos at first, shambling from doorways, crawling from piles of rubble. Gaunt, desiccated things that moved with a jerky, awful speed.
And to Michael's own surprise, the plan—his plan, concocted from a mixture of desperation, historical battle diagrams, and pure guesswork—worked. It worked alarmingly well.
When two of the creatures, moving with a loping, simian gait, broke from an alleyway and charged the column, they never got within a hundred yards. A hissing cloud of arrows rose from the second rank. They fell in a dark, silent arc, thudding into the creatures with wet, sickening thwacks. The things staggered, pierced in legs, torsos, shoulders, looking like grotesque pincushions. They did not die, not immediately—their kind was notoriously hard to kill—but their charge was broken. Before they could recover, a second wave followed: a volley of hand-axes, thrown with the strong, practiced arms of the front-line fighters. The heavy blades spun through the air, embedding themselves in skulls and chests with final, crunchy thuds. The creatures went down, twitching, and then were still.
A small team would dart forward, yanking arrows from corpses and prying axes from bone with ruthless efficiency, then retreat back into the formation. The men with the rebar spears, the designated 'cannon fodder,' simply stood their ground, their weapons never having to lower. A fierce, almost giddy confidence began to bubble through the ranks. This was manageable. This, they could do.
While his men grew cautiously optimistic, Michael felt a cold, hard knot of a different problem forming in his gut. He stood with Captain Liu and Zhang TieZhu, the pre-Collapse city map spread on the hood of a truck, its plastic surface fluttering in the faint, foul breeze. They were, to put it bluntly, utterly lost.
The map was a lie. It showed neat lines, orderly intersections, clearly labeled parks and plazas. The reality was a formless, chaotic junkyard of epic proportions. What the map labeled 'Grand Boulevard' was a canyon of collapsed concrete and the skeletal remains of an elevated train track. 'Centennial Park' was a small forest of strange, thorny weeds growing through a lake of shattered glass. There were no street signs, no recognizable buildings, just endless, repetitive devastation. Was this pile of rubble the corner of 14th Street? Should they turn left at this river of office chairs and filing cabinets, or was that the entrance to an old subway tunnel? The theoretical seven-mile journey was becoming a nightmare of dead ends and backtracking. The only hope was to spot a fragment of a pre-Collapse business sign, some durable scrap of enamel or neon that could be cross-referenced with the map. But such relics were rare, weathered into illegibility or buried under tons of debris.
Frustration was curdling into panic when the convoy ground to another halt. This time, it wasn't a traffic jam, but the road itself being buried under the complete collapse of a twenty-story building. A mountain of shattered concrete, twisted rebar, and shattered glass blocked the way entirely. The Sherman tank could not bull through this; the rubble was thirty feet high.
Michael felt a flicker of relief. "Alright," he said, his voice tight. "Now the diggers earn their keep."
The three heavy engineering vehicles—a massive excavator and two front-end loaders—lumbered forward, their diesel engines roaring in protest as they bit into the foot of the rubble mountain. This would be slow, noisy work, but they only needed a path wide enough for the trucks.
As the mechanical monsters clanked and ground, filling the air with dust and thunder, the defensive perimeter tightened. The noise was a beacon, and the Infected came in greater numbers. Small, frantic skirmishes broke out on the fringes—brief flurries of arrows, the occasional crackof a Garand, the wet thump of an axe finding its mark.
They had been digging for nearly twenty minutes when a voice, sharp with excitement, cut through the radio's constant stream of warnings. "Sir! Command! You need to see this, we've found something!"
With Zak, his monstrous bodyguard, a looming shadow at his elbow, Michael pushed through the lines of wary men to where a small group of scavengers stood pointing. There, half-buried in fallen masonry but stubbornly clinging to the crumbling brick facade of a bombed-out building, was a sign. It was pockmarked by rust and bullet holes, its colors faded by decades of sun and acid rain, but the words, in proud, cursive script, were still legible:
MORMON BANK OF DETROIT
A slow, hard smile spread across Michael's face, invisible behind his faceplate. He didn't just see a sign. He saw a fixed point on the map, a beacon in the chaos. He knew exactly where they were now. And as his eyes traced the route from this bank to the university, another thought, cold and calculating, clicked into place. The biolab was the primary objective, the only reason for this suicide mission. But on the return journey… a intact pre-Collapse bank vault promised a different kind of salvation altogether. One filled not with hope, but with solid, spendable security. He filed the thought away, a secret, glittering possibility in the heart of the ruin. The day had just become infinitely more interesting.