GARDEN OF MONSTERS

The first zombie I killed that morning was still wearing a wedding ring. The gold band was caked with dried blood and loose skin, but it caught the morning light as the creature lunged at me. The second was wearing my squad leader's missing boot, the laces still tied, with a severed foot still swollen inside it. The third was still screaming when Darius put a bullet directly through its skull. The sound of the shot was deafening in the empty street. Dark blood and fragments of brain matter sprayed across the cracked pavement, and the body finally went limp. "Rhea!" Darius shouted, his voice raw with exertion. "Gravity! Now!" I was already moving before he finished the command. I slammed my open palm toward the broken road and forced my ability to activate. The air around us shuddered violently as if the atmosphere itself had become heavier. Every loose stone, every shard of glass, and every piece of rusted metal within a six-meter radius jumped off the ground and then slammed back down. The three infected that were charging us lurched mid-sprint as the gravitational field around their bodies multiplied tenfold. I heard the first one's spine snap with a wet, audible crack. Its torso folded backward at an unnatural angle until its head touched its own heels, while thick, blackened blood poured from its nose and mouth. The second one's skull could not withstand the pressure. The bone split open along the suture lines and its eyes were forced out of their sockets before its entire head was crushed flat against the asphalt like rotten fruit. The third one kept crawling. Its arms were shattered, its legs were broken, but its jaw was still snapping with relentless hunger. Of course it kept crawling. Nothing inside the forbidden zones ever knew when it was supposed to stay dead. "Are you holding them?" Kael called out from his position behind the ruined bus. "For another ten seconds!" I shouted back, my voice straining. "Wonderful. That is nine seconds longer than I expected from you." "Shut up and shoot!" Kael laughed coldly and pulled the trigger. His bullets were precise and without mercy. Each round found the exposed brain stem of the infected. He never wasted ammunition, which was fortunate considering the Guild had issued us exactly twenty-four rounds for an expedition that was supposed to last three full days. The Blackthorn Hero Guild had many talents. Generosity was not one of them. My knees buckled without warning. The crushing pressure I had created vanished instantly, and the dead bodies dropped heavily onto the road with a sickening thud. I stumbled backward and caught myself against the rusted shell of an abandoned car. A sharp, throbbing pain pulsed behind my eyes. My lungs felt too small for my chest, and every breath I took burned. I had used my ability for less than thirty seconds, yet my entire body reacted as if I had run up ten flights of stairs while carrying a corpse on my back. "F-rank," Darius muttered under his breath, loud enough for me to hear. "Every single time." I pretended not to hear him, even though the words stung more than the pain in my ribs. I was used to it. At twenty-three years old, I was officially the weakest combatant in Blackthorn's seventh expedition squad. My gravity manipulation had been enough to earn me a place among the awakened, but it had never been enough to earn me respect. Not yet. The Guild's ranking system had placed me at the very bottom of the ladder. F-rank. It was the rank given to people whose abilities were considered too weak, too inconvenient, or too expensive to maintain in combat. My ability suffered from all three problems simultaneously. I could compress gravity into a crushing field, create temporary gravity wells that trapped anything inside them, distort the trajectory of fast-moving objects, anchor myself or other objects in place so they could not be moved, and briefly reduce gravity enough to make a person float for a few seconds. On paper, it sounded impressive and versatile. In practice, every single use drained my stamina completely, and once I pushed my ability past its safe limit, I could not activate it again for a full hour. One hour without my power inside a forbidden zone was essentially a death sentence. Still, I had survived six expeditions into these zones. That was six more expeditions than the Guild's recruitment officer had expected me to survive. I wiped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my trembling hand. "Are we done?" I asked, trying to keep my voice steady. Darius glanced at the corpses twitching on the road. "For now." He was a B-rank enhanced fighter, broad-shouldered and permanently irritated by everyone around him. His ability strengthened his muscles and bones to an inhuman degree, allowing him to break through solid concrete walls with his bare hands. He wore his confidence like a suit of armor. Unfortunately, he also had a habit of treating everyone beneath his rank as a personal inconvenience that needed to be managed. He looked at me with open disdain. "Try not to waste your ability on low-level trash next time." "Try not to let low-level trash surround us next time," I replied. Kael made a strangled noise behind his rifle as he tried to suppress a laugh. Darius turned slowly toward me, his expression darkening. "What did you say to me?" "That you have excellent leadership skills," I replied quickly. "I was admiring them." "You are a terrible liar." "I am a terrible fighter, too. We all have our own specialties." Kael could no longer hold it in and burst out laughing. Even Nessa, our healer, allowed herself a small smile. Darius did not smile. "Keep talking, Vale. One day, your mouth is going to get you killed." "Then I will at least die knowing I contributed something entertaining to the team." "Enough," Selene interrupted sharply. She was crouched beside the nearest corpse, examining its discolored and peeling skin with a gloved hand. She pulled back a flap of gray flesh to reveal the black, pulsing veins underneath. Selene was our reconnaissance specialist, an A-rank tracker with the ability to sense biological movement within a limited radius. She rarely spoke unless she had something important and useful to say. At that moment, her expression had completely changed, and that worried me more than the corpses. "These are not ordinary infected," she said quietly. Mira approached her, one hand pressed tightly against the side of her head as if trying to block out a painful sound. Mira possessed enhanced hearing. She could detect a human heartbeat through thin walls and distinguish the subtle movements of creatures hidden deep beneath the ground. "They are too quiet," she whispered, her voice shaking. I looked at the bodies spread across the road. "Quiet? One of them was screaming loudly enough to shatter glass." "Not the infected," Mira's face had gone completely pale, and her lips were trembling. "The zone itself. The zone has gone quiet." A cold, unnatural breeze moved through the abandoned street, carrying the smell of decay and rust. Beyond the ruined buildings, the city stood in absolute silence beneath a sky that was the color of old bruises. Twenty-three years ago, the world had ended in a rainstorm. Nobody could agree on what exactly happened that day. Some survivors claimed the rain had carried an unknown pathogen that infected everyone it touched. Others believed something had fallen from the sky and contaminated the atmosphere. Religious groups called it divine judgment. Scientists called it a catastrophic biological event. The first victims developed high fevers that cooked them from the inside. The second group began to change, their bodies warping into something no longer human. The third group simply died. And then the dead started moving again. Within months, governments collapsed entirely. Entire cities disappeared behind massive quarantine walls. Animals mutated into things that no longer obeyed the laws of nature, growing extra limbs and mouths where none should exist. Some humans awakened extraordinary abilities, while others became monsters capable of tearing through armored military vehicles with their teeth. Humanity survived only by building heavily fortified settlements and establishing Hero Guilds. The Guilds hunted threats, recovered valuable supplies, protected the settlements, and decided which parts of the ruined world were worth saving. Everything else was declared a forbidden zone. We were standing deep inside one of them. Forbidden Zone Twelve: The Eastern Industrial District. Our mission was supposed to be simple. Enter the district, recover critical medical supplies from an abandoned pharmaceutical warehouse, confirm the current threat level, and return to the settlement before sunset. The Guild's official report had classified the area as C-rank. That should have meant the danger was manageable for a squad like ours. But the report had been issued eleven days ago. And in the forbidden zones, eleven days was more than enough time for an entire city to evolve into something completely unrecognizable and far more lethal. "Selene?" Darius asked, his hand tightening around his weapon. She stood up slowly, her eyes scanning the cracked road beneath our feet. "Something is moving underground." "How many are there?" "I cannot tell how many. The signal is too large." "Then try harder to focus your ability." Her eyes flashed with anger. "I am sensing movement beneath the entire length of this street. Either there are hundreds of infected moving down there together, or something is actively interfering with my ability to sense them." Nobody spoke after that. Kael lowered his rifle slightly, his usual confidence gone. "Interfering in what way?" Selene stared at the road as if she could see through the asphalt. "I do not know. I have never felt anything like this before." A low, deep vibration traveled through the ground and up through the soles of our boots. My teeth rattled from the intensity. Then came a sound like a giant creature dragging its massive claws across the underside of the world, tearing through concrete and metal. Mira stumbled backward, clutching her ears as blood began to trickle down her neck. "Something is coming right now!" Darius immediately raised his weapon and fell into a combat stance. "Defensive formation!" We moved on pure instinct. Darius took the front, his enhanced body ready to absorb the first impact. Gideon stepped beside him, raising both hands to form a large, translucent defensive barrier made of pure energy. Nessa positioned herself directly behind them, her healing ability already glowing faintly around her fingers. Kael climbed onto the wrecked bus for a clearer shooting angle. Selene scanned the surrounding buildings for secondary threats. Mira closed her eyes, trying desperately to listen through the overwhelming noise. And I took the rear position. As usual. Our squad had seven members, and every single one of us had a defined purpose. Darius was our frontline fighter. Gideon was our protector. Nessa was the one who kept us alive. Kael delivered long-range lethal attacks. Selene found threats before they could find us. Mira gathered information that nobody else could detect. And I manipulated gravity. At least, that was the plan on paper. The road exploded violently. Something enormous erupted from beneath the asphalt, throwing massive chunks of concrete and twisted rebar high into the air. The force of the eruption knocked me off my feet. I barely saw its shape through the dust before Darius shouted with raw panic in his voice. "CONTACT! CONTACT!" The creature resembled a massive centipede constructed entirely from fused human bones and blackened, rusted metal. Its segmented body stretched across the entire width of the street, and each individual section was covered in swollen, pus-filled mouths that opened and closed independently, drooling thick saliva. Its head had no eyes at all.