Michael found himself lying on the ground. For once, it wasn't some semi-solid, bloated piece of infected flesh, but an actual, real cement floor. He must have gotten out of the creature that was carrying him.
Where had the girl gone?
Michael pushed himself up, supporting his weight with his arms. But they didn't feel like arms anymore.
The cold carapace-like covering was still there. He could feel it pulsing, pushing deeper. It was surrounding his arms, but it wanted more. It wanted to claim them entirely. Spikes of the freezing crystalline structure pierced into his arm, replacing his flesh, rewriting the structure into something new.
That probably wasn't good.
It clearly wasn't the same as the zombie infection, that mush was obvious. But it did seem to be some sort of infection, with the way it was slowly overriding his flesh. Fortunately, though he could feel it happening, the process wasn't going very quickly, and was easy enough to ignore.
But then it stopped. Just as Michael was about to look at his surroundings, the inwards creeping grinded to a halt.
Oh, no.
That might even be worse than it going slowly. At that place, it would take at least a few weeks. But if it was triggered by a certain action, then yes, he could avoid it, but if he couldn't, it might go much, much faster.
And it was the apocalypse as well, so he knew that he would need to do it. Whatever the trigger was, it would be necessary, unless it was out of his control. Michael wasn't a stranger to this sort of story arc.
But before he could avoid it, he had to discover what it was.
And that meant figuring out what he had been doing just before. If he had been acting while unconscious, that would be the worst possible outcome. If not, then whatever it was was dangerous, which was either a good or a bad thing. It was possible that it being dangerous would be a reasonable excuse that he could give to other people not to do it, but it was equally possible that it being dangerous would mean that no one else was capable of doing it properly. And considering how deep it had grown this time, he figured he could do something like whatever he had just done about seven times before his arms were claimed completely. And Michael had no doubt that it would continue to infect more of his body each time.
He looked around, finally.
He was near the middle of a massive warehouse. All around him was splattered blood and bits of flesh. They were shredded enough that he couldn't tell if they had belonged to a single creature or a large group. It could either be the mutant creature or a horde of zombies. In either case, there wasn't anywhere near enough flesh to have belonged to any more than three humans.
So unless some zombies had eaten the torn flesh of others and left him alone, which wasn't likely, then he might have eaten it himself, or it went somewhere else.
Michael raised a hand in front of his face. The crystal that had enveloped his hands when he had seen them back inside the Mutated was shrinking slowly, retracting.
But it was also deep, deep red. Red enough to have been made up of the compressed flesh of enough zombies to nearly fill this warehouse.
That wasn't good. He still didn't know whether he had eaten it or absorbed it, but he had intaken it somehow. Maybe that was what had caused the growth.
The crystals shrank until they were just a thin dusting over Michael's hands, a few scattered yellowish nodes poking up through his skin. Although it was obvious if you looked closely, at a distance his hands would still pass for normal human ones. But he still needed to get gloves, and fast.
Michael looked up at the creaking of an old, rundown wooden door. It might be a zombie, but that wasn't likely. The only other person he could think of was the girl-woman who had been in the Mutated with him.
The figure that pushed through the door wasn't her. It wasn't anywhere near short enough, and much more corded muscle than the girl's body had been, and more efficient movement and vicious intent than the woman's mind had had.
But he recognized it, somewhat. Especially when she turned her head towards him, and a long black ponytail swished through the harsh backlight let in by the door.
Zoe.