Michael froze. He felt something cold and hard on his palms. Throughout the past three days, he had felt nothing of the sort. The flesh behind him had been wet, slimy, and slightly yielding, although strangely, and fortunately, it had never left any residue on him.
He looked over at the woman. She was in the same position. If anything had changed, and he was fairly sure something had, then the girl hadn't noticed it. Michael still wasn't sure whether or not to think of her as a woman or a girl. She had the body of a girl, but apparently the mind of an old woman. Michael had never before met someone so defying of classification merely by virtue of their shockingly stereotypical attitude. She acted just like any other neurotypical old woman, gentle, kind, and always ready to tell him a story from back when she was young.
But her stories varies greatly, ranging from thousands of years ago to just a few decades, some that Michael knew himself, and even some that he had experienced, though those were very few. And, her body was that of a young girl, perhaps no more than a few years younger than Michael himself. Of course, she could also be a bit older. Some people around Michael's age and even older were short and thin enough to look much younger than they were.
But that couldn't at all explain this large of a discrepancy. Once you got to around a century of life, it was easy to tell, no matter who you were. Hair had changed color by that point, a brilliant, pure white as though infused with life from the heavens, and skin was beginning to fold and crease.
And although she had shown evidence, through her tales, of multiple centuries of life, she hadn't shown even a hint of either of those signs.
It was getting more and more likely that she was, or had been, a part of the same organization as Zoe, Kane, and Eve, though it was also possible that she could be from a rival corporation that also lived in the shadows and had similar technology.
The strength that Eve had displayed, as well as the speed that Zoe had shown, and Kane's unnatural stillness along with his ridiculous power, it was all entirely preternatural. They had found some way to boost human performance, unless they were all wearing imperceptible performance-enhancing prosthetics or exosuits.
And while outside technology was a possibility, it was unlikely, to say the least. Michael hadn't seen so much as a trace, and he had seen Kane entirely shirtless, taking hits from zombies on his bare skin and shrugging them off like they were nothing.
And then... there was the thing that he had seen just before falling unconscious.
A single drop of black fluid dripping from Eve's mouth.
If they were robots, they were incredibly realistic. Michael would believe it more if he hadn't seen their blood. Luke had bled just like him under Eve's teeth. Eve had been dripping blood at the same time as the black fluid leaked after being hit by the massive Mutated.
Any way that you looked at it, they held secrets that Michael needed to figure out. And they were likely used to lying. That meant that Michael might not even be able to tell if this woman was telling the truth or not when she said they were waiting for the creature to die.
Michael didn't think that zombies did die. They were undead, cursed forever with a skewed version of the gift of life, ever hungering for what they could never again feel. Heat, life, consciousness. They devoured everything that they saw that reminded them of it. But if she believed it, truly, then he wouldn't doubt her.
It wasn't like he had anything to do about it.
Unless he did.
There were only two questions left. Whether or not she was telling the truth, and whether or not he could do anything about it.
And for one of those questions, he felt that he was about to receive an answer.
As his hands remained pressed against the cold, smooth solid, he felt a strange numbness begin to creep up them.
Michael pulled his hands forward.
His forearms were encrusted with a warm off-white bone-adjacent substance, covering them completely all the way from his elbows to the tips of his fingers, and forming wicked-looking spikes at the ends.
He looked up. The woman was staring at him, eyes wide, horrified.
And the next thing he knew was something red spraying across his face, obscuring his vision.