The Fall

The apartment stairwell smells faintly of detergent, cigarette smoke, and damp concrete. Plastic grocery bags hang from tired hands. Bottled water, canned food, instant noodles, batteries, painkillers—small purchases repeated across thousands of homes during the past few weeks.

Outside the building, traffic continues normally.

For weeks, news broadcasts and social media feeds have circulated footage of violent outbreaks overseas. Hospitals overwhelmed. Police shootings. Quarantine failures. Blood-covered civilians attacking paramedics and bystanders.

The WHO continues referring to it as a rapidly spreading neurological infection.

Most people stopped taking it seriously days ago.

After COVID, after years of health scares and endless online panic, another possible pandemic became background noise. Conspiracy theories, memes, arguments, denial.

Daily life continued.

The market earlier remained crowded and functional. Long lines. Restocking shelves. Nervous laughter near the canned food aisle.

Helen adjusts the grocery bags hanging from her wrists near the next stair landing.

“Remind me next time,” she mutters, “we are not buying this much shit at once.”

A scream violently echoes through the apartment stairwell.

Below.

Wet. Sudden. Cut short almost immediately.

Several seconds later, another scream erupts somewhere outside the apartment complex. Car horns begin blaring continuously in the distance.

Metal railings below shake hard enough to rattle against the concrete walls.

Fast footsteps.

Erratic.

Something slams violently into the lower stairwell wall.

A man suddenly stumbles into view between the railings below. Blood pours from the side of his neck, splattering across the concrete steps as he tries dragging himself upward.

Another figure is attached to him.

Biting.

The attacker tears backward violently, pulling flesh free from the man’s throat in long red strands.

The stairwell fills with choking noises.

For a moment, the attacker stops moving.

Its chest rises and falls rapidly.

Blood drips from its mouth onto the concrete.

Then its head lifts upward.

Its eyes fix on the upper stairwell.

And it starts running.

The grocery bags cut into your fingers as you follow your husband up the apartment stairs, the stale smell of concrete and old paint hanging in the cramped stairwell. A bottle inside one of the bags knocks softly against your knee with every step.

Your husband glances back at you with a tired grin, adjusting the plastic bags hanging from his wrists.

“We should’ve brought the car closer,” he mutters. “My hands are fucking dying.”

You snort quietly, breathless from the climb.

“Well maybe if someone didn’t insist on buying enough canned food to survive the apocalypse—”

“Hey, you saw the news too.”

The words hang awkwardly for a second.

The news.

For weeks, every channel and social media feed had been filled with clips of some new infection spreading overseas. Violent incidents. Quarantines. Hospitals overflowing. The WHO urging people to avoid contact with infected individuals showing extreme neurological aggression.

But nobody really cared anymore.

After COVID, after endless panic cycles and internet fearmongering, people were exhausted. Most treated it like background noise. Another scare. Another thing people would joke about online for two weeks before forgetting.

Even the market earlier had felt mostly normal. Crowded, maybe a little tense, but normal.

No riots. No panic buying. No soldiers in the streets.

Just another day.

You’re halfway to your floor when a scream suddenly rips through the stairwell below.

You freeze.

The sound is so sharp, so full of terror that your stomach immediately tightens.

Your husband stops too, frowning toward the lower floors.

Another scream erupts outside somewhere in the distance.

Then another.

A car horn blares continuously somewhere beyond the apartment windows.

“What the fuck...” he mutters.

A violent crashing noise explodes beneath you.

Metal railings rattle.

Footsteps hammer against the stairs below—fast, frantic, uneven.

Then you see them.

A man stumbles upward into view, clutching at the railing so hard his fingers leave bloody smears across the metal. His face is pale, twisted in agony.

Something is attached to him.

At first your brain refuses to process it.

Then it lifts its head.

A woman.

Blood pours from her mouth and chin as she tears herself away from the side of his neck with a wet ripping sound.

The man collapses screaming.

The woman doesn’t even look at him afterward.

Her eyes snap upward toward you and your husband.

They’re wide.

Bloodshot.

Terrified.

Not empty.

Terrified.

Then she opens her mouth and unleashes a scream so violent and inhuman it echoes through the entire stairwell as she charges upward toward you.

The wind drags through the dead grass in long, whispering waves as your patrol moves between the abandoned houses. Six years ago this place had probably been alive—children running through yards, radios playing behind open windows, smoke rising from chimneys.

Now it’s just another corpse left to rot beneath an empty sky.

The village sags quietly against the horizon. Roofs have collapsed inward. Wooden fences lean at strange angles. A rusted bicycle lies half-swallowed by weeds near the road.

Nobody talks much during patrols anymore.

Talking means distraction. Distraction gets people killed.

Your boots press through damp grass as the patrol spreads carefully across the outskirts of the settlement ruins.

Ethan walks ahead with a shotgun resting against his shoulder, moving with the cautious calm of someone who has survived too long to panic easily. His beard has gone mostly gray over the years, though nobody ever mentions it.

To your right, Claire nervously scans the nearby tree line, fingers tight around her rifle.

“I hate places like this,” she mutters quietly.

Ethan snorts. “You hate every place.”

Normally someone would joke back.

Nobody does.

Because abandoned places are dangerous now. Not because of the dead alone—but because empty places usually aren’t truly empty anymore.

The infected rarely gather without reason.

Sound. Fire. Movement.

People.

The patrol slows near the center of the village.

One of the houses ahead has its front door hanging slightly open.

Fresh mud stains the wooden porch steps.

Not old tracks.

Fresh.

Ethan immediately raises a fist.

Everyone stops moving.

The silence afterward feels wrong.

No birds.

No insects.

Only the low creaking of old wood somewhere nearby and the distant howl of wind moving through broken houses.

Then—

A sound.

Faint.

Inside the house.

Crying.

Claire visibly stiffens. “No,” she whispers immediately. “No, no fucking way.”

The crying comes again.

A woman’s voice.

Weak. Trembling.

“Please...”

Every muscle in your body tightens.

Six years since the outbreak.

Six years since cities burned and governments collapsed and entire families vanished overnight.

And somehow hearing that single word still sounds worse than screaming.

Ethan slowly approaches the doorway, shotgun lowering into position.

The crying abruptly stops.

Silence.

A horrible, heavy silence.

Footsteps explode from somewhere deep inside the house.

Fast.

Violent.

Far too fast.

Ethan barely manages to turn before something launches from the darkness inside the doorway and slams into him hard enough to drive him off the porch.

The shotgun fires into the air with a deafening blast.

Blood sprays across the wall.

The infected woman on top of him is horrifyingly thin, almost skeletal beneath torn clothing, but she attacks with pure animal desperation—screaming, clawing, trying to force her mouth toward his throat.

And she isn’t alone.

Movement erupts inside the house.

Multiple figures.

Rushing.

Screaming.

The trucks arrived before sunrise.

Nobody in the capital slept after that.

Word spread fast—another frontier settlement gone. One of the northern construction towns. Small population. Rotational workers. Engineers, guards, mechanics, families that thought distance from the old cities meant safety.

Then silence.

By the time scouts reached the settlement three days later, there was almost nothing left.

Walls burned black.

Watchtowers collapsed.

The gates torn open from the inside.

Some bodies were found in the streets. Others were missing entirely. Entire dormitories had been emptied. Workshops stripped clean. Vehicles stolen.

And some people—

Some people had simply disappeared.

Nobody knew who attacked the settlement.

Bandits didn’t move like this.

Raiders didn’t organize like this.

This was something else.

Something military.

Something intentional.

Now the dead had finally been brought home.

Gray morning light spills across the capital’s central square, cold and thin beneath an overcast sky. Military trucks stand parked in long silent rows while white-covered bodies lie arranged across the pavement in careful lines.

Too many lines.

The fabric covering them shifts softly in the wind.

Around them, families move in silence.

Some kneel beside the bodies praying.

Some stare blankly.

Some haven’t found the courage to lift the sheets yet.

Nobody screams anymore. That part ended hours ago.

The grief now feels heavier than noise.

You stand among the crowd as soldiers attempt to maintain order around the square, though even they look hollow-eyed. Exhausted.

Twenty years after the infection ended the old world, humanity had finally started convincing itself things could stabilize again.

Permanent settlements.

Trade routes.

Power grids.

Schools.

Children born after the collapse.

People had started using the word future again.

Now everyone is remembering how quickly everything can still be taken away.

Near the center of the square, a young man collapses beside one of the covered bodies, clutching the white cloth so tightly his knuckles go pale.

“No...” he chokes out weakly. “No, no, no...”

Nobody tries to stop him.

A woman nearby quietly pulls back another sheet just enough to see the face beneath.

She immediately covers her mouth and turns away, shoulders shaking violently.

One of the soldiers standing guard nearby mutters under his breath:

“They butchered them...”

Another answers quietly:

“Not all of them.”

That’s the part sitting like poison in everyone’s chest.

Because there are fewer bodies than there should be.

Far fewer.

And nobody knows where the missing were taken.