Surviving the Apocalypse With My Yandere Ex-Girlfriend

Chapter 226: Harder than I ever had

The hoe slammed into the frozen ground with a dull thunk, the impact vibrating all the way up Carl’s arms.

He leaned his weight into the handle and dragged the blade through the stubborn earth, carving another shallow trench before stopping to catch his breath. Sweat rolled down his forehead despite the cold, stinging his eyes until he wiped it away with the sleeve of the faded gray jumpsuit they had forced him to wear.

The fabric already clung to him.

Dirty.

Damp.

Stained with mud and dried blood that wasn’t entirely his.

Beyond the steel gates only a few yards away, dozens of infected crowded together in a restless mass.

Their snarls rose and fell like waves.

Rotting hands shoved through the narrow gaps in the bars, fingers clawing at empty air whenever Carl wandered too close. Faces pressed so hard against the metal that skin split open, fresh blood smearing across the rusted steel.

The gate groaned every few seconds.

Not because it was breaking.

Because there were simply too many of them leaning against it.

Carl couldn’t stop looking at it.

Every groan sounded like the beginning of the end.

Every scrape of metal made him wonder if this would be the moment it finally gave way.

Miriam hadn’t chained anyone.

She hadn’t beaten them.

She hadn’t even starved them.

Not yet.

Instead, she had given every survivor a job.

Dig.

Carry.

Repair.

Harvest.

Build.

The same labor they’d done before the world ended.

Only now every task came with the knowledge that one mistake—one broken fence post, one loose hinge, one collapsed barricade—would leave them trapped between two monsters.

The infected outside...

And the intelligent ones inside.

Carl’s grip tightened around the wooden handle.

He could still hear Miriam’s voice as clearly as if she were standing beside him.

She had climbed onto the roof of the farmhouse hours earlier and fired round after round into the sky.

The explosions had echoed for miles.

Birds scattered.

Silence followed.

Then...

The answering screams.

Hundreds of them.

Thousands.

The woods themselves had begun to howl.

Carl remembered the smile on Miriam’s face as she lowered the rifle.

"Of course I’m not going to make this decision easy for you."

She hadn’t shouted.

She hadn’t needed to.

Everyone had heard her.

"You have four hours before the infected surrounding this place break through those gates and take everyone here alive."

She had looked over every frightened face.

Calm.

Patient.

Almost motherly.

"Choose to join us. Become like us."

She had spread her arms toward the growing horde.

"And they won’t harm you."

Carl swallowed hard.

The words hadn’t left him since.

They clung to the inside of his skull like cobwebs he couldn’t pull free.

His eyes drifted back toward the gate.

One infected stood out among the others.

Young.

Maybe sixteen.

Maybe seventeen.

About Carl’s age.

His clothes had once been a school uniform.

Now they hung in blood-soaked strips from his body.

His eyes glowed an unnatural crimson.

His laughter never stopped.

It wasn’t happy.

It wasn’t angry.

It was empty.

The boy slammed both hands against the bars again and again, laughing hysterically while reaching toward Carl with blood-caked fingers.

He couldn’t reach him.

He kept trying anyway.

Carl stared.

Longer than he should have.

This...

This was salvation?

This was the future Miriam wanted them to accept?

His stomach twisted.

Something ugly rose inside him.

Disgust.

Anger.

Fear.

Before he could think himself out of it, he lifted the hoe.

The sharpened end drove between the bars.

Straight through the infected boy’s eye.

There was almost no resistance.

A wet crunch echoed against the steel.

The laughter stopped instantly.

The body shuddered once before slowly sliding down the gate, leaving a dark ribbon of blood behind it.

Carl yanked the hoe free.

His breathing had become uneven.

Fast.

He didn’t regret it.

Not for a second.

Then—

CRACK.

A gunshot echoed somewhere behind him.

Carl spun around so quickly the loose fabric of his jumpsuit twisted around his legs.

His heart lurched.

One of the intelligent infected was striding toward him.

Fast.

Every instinct screamed at Carl to back away.

Instead, he raised the hoe again.

His palms were already slick with sweat.

He knew better than to trust any of them.

It didn’t matter how politely they spoke.

It didn’t matter how human they acted.

A tiger could learn tricks.

It was still a tiger.

"HEY!"

The infected woman’s voice cut across the yard.

Carl tightened his grip.

She stopped only a few feet away.

Her appearance was unsettling in all the wrong ways.

At first glance she looked almost normal.

Almost.

The faint crimson lingering in her eyes betrayed her immediately.

So did the unnatural stillness in her posture.

She wasn’t breathing as heavily as she should have been after walking so quickly.

She wasn’t blinking often enough.

She stared at him with an intensity that made Carl feel like she was looking through him rather than at him.

"We don’t kill our brothers and sisters," she said coldly.

Carl almost laughed.

Instead, he frowned.

"Brothers and sisters?"

She gestured toward the dead infected at the gate.

"They’re one of us."

Carl looked from her...

To the corpse slowly pooling blood beneath the fence.

Then back again.

"They were trying to tear my face off."

"They’re confused."

"They’re infected."

"They’re family."

Her voice never rose.

Never wavered.

She believed every word.

It made Carl’s skin crawl.

"Every life matters," she continued. "Saved or not."

Carl felt something dark settle over him.

"Really?"

His voice came out quieter than he’d intended.

"Because mine doesn’t seem to."

She frowned slightly.

"I’m the one working outside the fence," Carl continued.

"I’m the one standing three feet away from a hundred infected while everyone else gets to stay inside."

He jabbed a thumb toward the gate.

"If one of them grabs me through those bars, what happens?"

The infected woman didn’t answer immediately.

Instead, she smiled.

A small, almost sympathetic smile.

"You’ll have the opportunity to be saved."

Carl stared at her.

"Miriam gave you a choice," she said. "A generous one."

Generous.

The word almost made him sick.

His eyes narrowed.

Only then did he notice it.

A thin line of blood trickled from one of her nostrils.

She reached up instinctively and wiped it away before it could drip onto the front of her uniform.

The movement was so quick most people would’ve missed it.

Carl didn’t.

Neither did she.

For the briefest moment...

Something flickered across her face.

Embarrassment.

No.

Concern.

Then it disappeared just as quickly.

"If I see you kill another one," she said, her voice hardening again, "I’ll report you directly to Miriam."

She took one step closer.

"So don’t."

The warning lingered between them.

Carl said nothing.

He simply stared back.

After another long moment, she turned and walked away without another word.

Carl watched her until she disappeared around the corner of the work yard.

Only then did he lower the hoe.

His eyes drifted back toward the smear of blood she’d left on her fingers.

He couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Why...

Why had an intelligent infected gotten a nosebleed?

—

I sat alone inside the transparent glass enclosure they had locked me inside.

The walls stretched from floor to ceiling, so clean they barely looked real. Every surface reflected my own face back at me from different angles.

There was nowhere to look except at myself.

Or my mistakes.

My knees were pulled tightly against my chest, my arms wrapped around them until my fingers had gone numb. I couldn’t remember how long I’d been sitting like that.

Minutes.

Hours.

Time didn’t seem to exist inside this place.

Not after what Huxley had told me.

His words refused to leave.

They circled endlessly inside my head, each lap somehow hurting more than the last.

You are the mechanism.

You carry the cure.

I laughed once.

The sound came out hollow.

Broken.

If somebody had told me that yesterday, I would’ve punched them in the mouth.

Now...

Now I didn’t know what to believe anymore.

I was...

The cure?

To all of this?

To the infection.

To the evolution.

To everything.

My breathing slowed.

If that were true...

Then there was only one explanation.

I was infected.

Not sick.

Not turning.

But infected all the same.

Somehow.

Some way.

My mind drifted backward.

Englewood.

Chicago.

The first days.

The panic.

The blood.

The bodies.

Lila.

Always Lila.

She had been bitten.

I hadn’t.

I knew I hadn’t.

I would’ve remembered.

Wouldn’t I?

Then how?

How the hell had something gotten inside me without me ever realizing it?

How long had it been there?

Had I been carrying it this entire time?

Every person I’d met...

Every place we’d traveled...

Every life that had crossed mine...

Had I been carrying the answer without even knowing the question?

My stomach twisted.

I lowered my head until my forehead rested against my knees.

Everything felt too heavy.

Too impossible.

Outside the enclosure, researchers walked calmly through the corridors carrying tablets and clipboards, speaking to one another as though the world hadn’t ended years ago.

Nobody looked at me.

Nobody cared.

To them I wasn’t Adrian.

I was a specimen.

A file.

A blood sample waiting to be opened.

Then—

A sharp crash echoed somewhere beyond the laboratory.

I didn’t move.

Another one followed.

Metal striking metal.

Raised voices.

Running footsteps.

For a second I assumed somebody had dropped equipment.

This place was too controlled for panic.

Too organized.

Then someone screamed.

Not startled.

Agonized.

My head lifted slowly.

Down the corridor, several researchers suddenly ran past the observation windows.

One nearly slipped on the polished floor before disappearing around a corner.

Alarms hadn’t started.

Not yet.

The silence somehow made it worse.

I stood.

Instinct more than thought.

My pulse began climbing.

Then I saw movement through the reinforced glass separating my enclosure from the medical wing.

Lila.

She wasn’t lying on the operating table anymore.

She was moving.

Violently.

Two orderlies were already on the floor.

One convulsed weakly, clutching at his throat.

Another never moved again.

Three security officers rushed through the doorway.

"Lila!"

The name escaped me before I realized I’d spoken.

She never heard it.

Or maybe she did.

Her movements never slowed.

One soldier lunged toward her with a restraint pole.

She caught it with both hands.

The metal bent under the force of her grip.

She ripped it free, yanked the man off balance, and drove her elbow into his jaw.

The crack echoed even through layers of reinforced glass.

He collapsed instantly.

Another guard raised some kind of injector.

She was already inside his reach.

Her hand caught his wrist.

Twisted.

The syringe spun into the air.

Lila caught it before it hit the floor.

Without hesitation—

She drove it straight into the man’s eye.

I flinched.

The syringe disappeared almost to the hilt.

He screamed.

Only once.

Lila shoved him aside before the sound had even finished.

The last guard hesitated.

That hesitation killed him.

She stepped inside his guard with terrifying speed, wrapped one arm around his neck, and twisted.

A dull snap filled the laboratory.

His body folded to the floor.

Silence.

No.

Not silence.

The alarms finally started.

Red emergency lights flooded the corridor.

A mechanical voice repeated something over the speakers.

I couldn’t make out the words.

None of it mattered.

Lila turned.

Her eyes found mine immediately.

Bright crimson.

Wild.

Focused.

Then—

She smiled.

Not the smile she’d worn while terrifying enemies.

Not the obsessive grin she’d worn when threatening people.

This one...

This one was different.

Relief.

Actual relief.

Like she’d been looking for me just as desperately as I’d been looking for her.

She ran.

Doctors scrambled out of her path.

Nobody tried stopping her anymore.

They simply fled.

She reached the control panel beside my enclosure.

Her hands moved across the keypad with impossible speed.

Numbers.

Commands.

Security overrides.

I frowned.

How...

How did she know any of this?

The system beeped.

Once.

Twice.

Then the magnetic locks disengaged with a heavy metallic clunk.

The glass door slid open.

Cold air rushed inside.

Before I could say a single word—

She crashed into me.

Her arms wrapped around me so tightly my feet nearly left the floor.

For a moment I couldn’t breathe.

Then I hugged her back.

Harder.

Harder than I ever had before.

Her body trembled against mine.

Not from fear.

From exhaustion.

I could feel it.

She had pushed herself far beyond whatever limit she had.

And as I looked ahead of me, I was trying. Desperately trying to believe that it was a possibility we’d make it out of here.

Couldnt we?