RTS System in the Apocalypse: New World

The Westgate-bound platoons moved without much concern for the dark.

Most of the infected that had occupied the main streets were gone. They had flooded the highway days earlier and died under Hans’s firepower.

Through the Radar map, one could confirm the area to be safe enough for soldiers to walk without lights and without hesitation.

Only the far edges where Westgate flowed either further east, south, or into the deeper city still held any real uncertainty.

They wouldn’t be going that far tonight.

Scouts moved ahead in pairs, marking buildings as clear one at a time. Mechanized squads followed at a distance, engines humming low, headlights low, guided by nothing more than the Radar feed that steadily updated on every soldier’s HUD.

Ten or so kilometers from base was close enough that the signal never wavered.

Hans watched the markers spread through Westgate’s grid, block after block, and let himself believe, just for tonight, that this part of the plan might actually go the way he’d drawn it up.

...

Three floors up, in a residential block marked clear an hour earlier by someone else’s sweep, a Scout named Priya tried a door that wasn’t locked.

It should have been locked for as every other door on the floor had needed forcing.

She pushed it open slowly, her MP7 raised out of habit rather than expectation.

The apartment beyond was dark, curtains drawn, air stale in the particular way of a room that had been sealed a long time.

”Clear,” her partner said from the hallway, checking the other rooms first.

Priya didn’t answer right away.

The living room held four people. A man and a woman on the couch, a boy and a girl between them, all four arranged with a care.

They had nothing to do with how anyone would fall when something kills them.

No wounds. No bites.

Just pure stillness, and a small amber bottle sitting empty on the coffee table beside four glasses.

She lowered her weapon.

On the refrigerator door, held by a magnet shaped like a sunflower, a child’s drawing curled at the edges. Stick figures, a house, a dog that didn’t exist in the photographs on the wall.

A date was written in the corner in careful, uneven handwriting.

Priya stood in the doorway for longer than the sweep required.

”Anything?” her partner asked from behind her.

”No,” she said. ”Just mark it.”

She stepped back out and pulled the door shut behind her, gently, the way she might have if the people inside could still be woken by the noise.

The report she filed later listed the apartment as cleared. No survivors. No infected.

It didn’t mention the drawing, or the bottle, or the way all four of them had been facing the window when it happened, as if waiting for something that was never going to arrive.

Some things weren’t worth putting in a folder Hans would read between two more urgent ones.

She kept walking. There were more doors on this floor, and the night wasn’t getting any shorter.

...

Two blocks over, in the back room of a hardware store that had already been marked for salvage, an Army Soldier named Okoro found the second one.

The storage room had been turned into something else entirely—a nest of blankets and cushions dragged in from elsewhere, arranged in a rough circle around a battery lantern long since dead. Enough bedding for six people, maybe more.

He counted the ration wrappers first, out of habit. Weeks’ worth, folded flat and stacked in a corner like someone had kept score.

Then he counted the bodies.

There were only four of them. Not the expected six.

Unlike the apartment two blocks back—word of the discovery had already spread quietly through the platoon—these folks hadn’t gone quietly.

Okoro had seen enough zombie kills to know what those looked like. This particular scene wasn’t exactly that.

A section of pipe still rested where it had fallen. Pale blood stains could be seen on its edges.

On another was a kitchen knife with a broken handle.

These wounds didn’t match anything in this room’s original purpose. Whatever ration count had run out here, whatever line had finally been crossed, it hadn’t been the infected who crossed it.

He didn’t try to work out who the other two people had been, the ones the ration count implied but the body count didn’t confirm.

Gone before this happened, maybe. Gone because of it.

There was no way to tell from a room this cold, and no one had asked him to find out.

”Status?” his squad leader asked over the radio.

Okoro looked at the neat stack of ration wrappers one more time before answering.

”Four confirmed. No visible signs of infection among them. Marking it and moving on.”

”Copy. Anything worth logging?”

He thought about the careful fold of each wrapper. It was the kind of habit formed in saving up for tomorrow’s rations right up until there wasn’t a tomorrow left to ration for.

The thought alone almost creeped him out.

”Nothing that changes the sweep,” he said. ”Just people.”

He left the lantern where it was. Somebody else could decide what to do with a room like this.

He had three more buildings on his list before sunrise, and the night, like Priya’s, wasn’t getting any shorter either.

...

A third squad passed through a small neighborhood park on their way to the next block, and found nothing worth reporting at all.

A few infected corpses could be seen, possibly gunned down to death by the APCs on their approach from the earlier operations.

But that was all to be seen. Just a park, exactly as ordinary as it must have looked the day before everything stopped.

A swing set creaked faintly. One seat still moving in a breeze too slight to explain the motion on its own.

A bicycle lay on its side near the entrance, training wheels still attached, chain rusted through.

In the sandbox, what had once been a sandcastle had long since collapsed into a shapeless mound, rained flat sometime in the intervening months, the small plastic shovel beside it half-buried and forgotten.

Nobody spoke as they crossed it.

There was nothing here that needed marking and nothing that needed a report filed after.

Just a swing, still moving. A bicycle, still waiting. A castle that would never be finished, in a park that would never hear a child’s voice again.

The squad moved on before anyone had to say anything about it.

Behind them, the swing kept its slow, empty rhythm, matched to nothing, for no one.