Revenge16 min read
I woke to screaming and found war at my door
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I woke at four a.m. to the phone.
"Don't open the door. No one. Whoever comes—don't open it!" Lakelyn Gray's voice, sharp, then a wet, choking scream. Then tearing sounds, crushing sounds, the kind of noises that eat hope.
Tearing? I froze.
"Lakelyn—don't—" I didn't finish. The line went dead.
I looked at my phone. 4:01 a.m. I lay back down. I was tired. I let my eyes close.
Then: "CRASH!" The ceiling above me answered with violence. I sat straight up.
The clock said nine. I pulled the blanket up and tried to sleep again. The house answered with another series of bangs—above me this time.
"Thump! Thump! Bang! Bang!"
"Can someone just let a girl sleep?" I shouted at the ceiling. I kicked the air like that ever helped. It didn't. The noises grew closer, and the faint echo of a scream threaded through them.
The scream pricked a memory. I grabbed my phone, hands shaking, and called Lakelyn. It went straight to voicemail.
"Knock knock knock!" Someone knocked on my door.
I nearly slammed the phone down. I remembered Lakelyn's first words: Don't open the door. I kept my hand on the knob and forced myself to breathe.
"Someone—please—help me! Please—"
The voice was faintly familiar. It sounded like the neighbor who ran a fruit stand.
I pulled the peephole cover and almost burst into tears. Bloodshot eyes, a gray face, a mouth that opened wrong and turned as if a mask had melted. The eyes were bright red. The face twisted.
Oh God. A real walking corpse.
I took two steps back. He'd been cute before—I'd been thinking how to tell Lakelyn to take him up on my contact list. I pressed Lakelyn's "emergency" number instead. She'd drilled me on it every day. I knew it by heart.
The line clicked. A man's voice barked, "You better have worse news than this, or—"
I sniffed. "Please—it's Lakelyn—she called—"
"Stop crying," he snapped, "we're not done yet." A voice that could order someone across a battlefield. Then softer: "Where are you?"
"Cloudview Gardens—Block 5, Unit 3, 806. SpongeBob." I said it like a joke to steady my voice.
He sighed once. "We're checking the area. Keep your phone charged. We'll pick you up in five days. Stay put. Lock your doors and windows. No noise. At noon every day, text me 'alive.' Got it?"
"I—got it."
He hung up. The knocks continued, the small, dry claws on my door. I checked the time. Nine forty-eight.
I closed windows, pulled the safety bars, latched the balcony. Lakelyn had been ridiculous about safety—bulletproof window, a top-of-the-line lock on the door, an expensive alarm. I used to joke she had a bunker for one. Now I thanked her.
A creature started climbing up the balcony. It wanted in. It pulled at the metal bars as if they were paper. When it saw me it bared jagged teeth and reached with hands that ended like knives.
I slammed the glass and the bars shut. My phone chirped. The man sent a message: "I'm Gustavo Duran."
Gustavo. The name lodged oddly in my head. "Sounds familiar," I told myself, and then I texted back: "I'm safe for now. One outside my balcony."
"Don't open any windows," he answered. "We'll come. Wait for the noise to pass to open the curtains."
Outside my window a crowd of red alerts exploded on social media. Half the world screamed at once: the first wave, theories, panic. Early posts showed faces with bites. The news anchor said the government declared a wartime notice.
At noon I sent my "alive" text. I boiled snail rice because that's what I did when I was afraid—comfort food. My phone buzzed. Gustavo: "We will pick you up. Do not open the balcony."
I sat and watched a live feed. The post that burned into my chest was a press conference live-stream. A normal day turned into carnage. People screamed as pale, agile monsters scaled the walls and slammed into the crowd. The police shot at them. The shots did nothing. They shot heads off. The heads did not die. The bodies kept moving like a pair of hands refused to let go of life.
I threw a spoon and covered the screen with the blanket until it felt safe.
At eleven-thirty a helicopter came into view. Army green, stencil numbers. A rope ladder dropped.
The men dressed like soldiers lowered the rope. They told me to go out the balcony on the ladder. I climbed. A soldier caught me, wrapped my arms tight, hauled me up. He was strong. Warm. Then the ladder snapped.
"Gustavo!" the soldier shouted. "Gustavo!"
Someone had to hold the ladder. Two people stayed on the ladder and pushed me upward; behind us a soldier slipped and fell. I watched him plummet as the chopper rocked. The soldier who caught me fell.
I felt the helicopter tilt. Men shouted. Behind us, a pale figure jumped to the balcony and lunged. Two men on the rope held. The soldier fell. He was grabbed by the monsters. I watched bodies fall into the city.
And then—"Get the rope!" someone ordered. A big man dove and cut the rope. I was pulled inside.
I wept then. I held whoever caught me and didn't know his name, but I knew his face. He smelled like the river and gun oil. He let me cry.
I looked up and saw who ordered the rope cut. He stood on the line, leaning on the chopper's side, a uniform cut like a picture on a poster. He was young with a soldier's jaw. "Don't look," he told me, and then, softer: "It's okay. You're safe."
"Who are you?" My voice was a thread.
He touched my forehead like a steadying hand. "Alessandro Nunez," he said. "And we have to get you to safety."
I wanted to ask about Lakelyn. My words slid away.
He didn't hug me. Instead he put a hand on my shoulder like an anchor. I clung to that hand like I had clung to a promise once.
We landed at a ruin of a factory that had been converted into a command center. The men moved like a small army. A woman with short, flat hair and a cold edge to her voice told me, "Come with me; you can stay in Lakelyn's room."
"Where is Lakelyn?" I demanded.
"She's... she left earlier on a job." Hilary Sandoval didn't look me in the eye. "She won't be back soon."
They called me "Miss Gu" at first. Later I remembered I had been Eloise Carlson, but names blurred for me. Teeth, wounds, memories missing. Hilary led me to the room and left me with a photo album: pictures of a girl with my face when I was young—sharp eyes like someone who would not take orders—and a man who in one photo had my hand on his shoulder.
There were names. Gustavo. Alessandro. Lakelyn. They moved around the photos like a map of other lives.
"How long were you with her?" I asked Hilary, and she just said something like "two years" and left me with the photograph.
A war was moving across the city. The local group—Gustavo and his team—had been hunting a thing they called "first-generation" zombies: fast, mindful, able to climb and think like predators. Gustavo called his fighters "Wolfs." They were fast, rough, and loved their leader like they'd been born his.
"Why did they come for me?" I asked a man with a brown sweep of hair and sharp eyes who later introduced himself. "Brody Blevins," he said. "You were on their list."
"How do you know me?" I demanded.
He shrugged. "You were in Lakelyn's files."
When I asked about accounts of monsters that could be shot in the head and survive, they said, "Yes. They scream. They work in teams. They climb. They don't die when you think they're dead."
Gustavo came to me like a promise. "We picked you up because Lakelyn said you were family," he said, soft. "We'll keep you safe."
"Family?" I laughed, and it broke like a bone. I had few facts. I had one constant: Lakelyn's voice telling me to hide. I had a photo of us together. I had the smell of burning on me from a car wreck I didn't remember, and I had the world losing itself around me.
"She called me every day," I said. "She warned me."
Gustavo's eyes darkened. "She warned you because she loved you."
We worked out of a converted pharma factory. They called it the base. Screens tracked the city. Gustavo fought like a leader who had lost everything and now built a family by force and loyalty. There was Flint Pereira, the bald man who laughed like thunder and later would make the sacrifice I still taste in my mouth. There was Brody Blevins—sharp, ironic, the one who moved like a dancer in the rain. Preston Graf had a scar on his face and held a gun like a temper. Clancy Pinto kept a lean smile and a dangerous patience. Camden Mueller watched the sky.
They were killers and healers in the same breath. They argued like brothers.
"Why do you hide her name?" I asked Gustavo once. "Why won't you say who Lakelyn really is?"
He led me to a control room. "Because some truths are dangerous," Hilary said. "Because naming her now makes a target."
I wanted to anger him, but something else rose: curiosity like a flame under glass. I flipped through the photo book again. There I was as a different girl—with thick hair and sharper cheekbones. There were three faces next to me in a family portrait. One face was a man I couldn't place. Another was a boy I'd hugged once on a summer rooftop.
"You are not who you were two years ago," Gustavo said later, catching me as I touched the photograph a third time. "But you are still you."
When the "first-generation" attacked the city center press conference, I watched them cut through people like a harvest machine. A hundred people. The police fired. The heads fell. The bodies kept moving. I vomited into my hands.
That was the day a team—Gustavo's team—was supposed to use an explosion to divert monsters and get people to safety. They had planned. They had a mission.
Gustavo's men went into tunnels under the city to track where the first-gen were moving. They planned to plug two things: a trap and a rescue.
"Why did you risk so much?" I asked Brody once, when we were in the armory and he was checking a rifle.
"Because if we don't push back, who will?" He said it like a prayer and then cursed.
He proved it three days later.
We followed one plan to a bank. They walked in like ghosts and led survivors to a vault. Flint and Brody and a small group fought claw-out and blood-in. They set a line of grenades and a path through corpses. They moved like a unit—precise, hot, dangerous.
Clancy watched a thin man, a bank manager named Preston Graf, with a look like a judgment. "You sold people out, Preston," Clancy said.
Preston's face went white. "I did what I had to," he answered.
"Those are words to die on," Flint said, and he smiled. That night he would step into the trap.
Gustavo's plan in the bank worked until it didn't. The first-gen still moved like chess pieces no one could read. Flint ran up to pull a man from a chair. He gave a half-laugh when the tape came loose. He was always loud. He was sudden. He had a face like a hero drafted into a bad movie. He sacrificed himself at the rope. He was the man who cut himself free so others could climb into the chopper.
I remember the wind, the whiplash. I remember the sight of Flint falling through the air and the hollowness in Gustavo's chest. He never cried like that again.
We dragged three first-gen into a net and bound them, thinking we could study a cure. Gustavo wanted a cure. He wanted proof to stop a man named Jared Fisher from doing something dangerous.
Jared Fisher was a top official in the city—a man with a plan called "Abandon the City." He had power. He wanted everyone out of the north, away from the power plant, and he wanted to sacrifice neighborhoods to hold a line. He had funds and friends. If someone gave Jared the means to control the crisis, he'd force the abandonment and seize the power.
Gustavo wanted leverage. He wanted a cure.
We had a break. Dr. Elio Bacon—thin, precise, and kind—worked out a formula that made the first-gen calm down. We saw their eyes clear. We believed we had a weapon.
We also watched a horror: the cured monsters' bodies grew denser, more powerful. Muscles thickened like they soaked up a new kind of strength. Elio warned: side effects unknown—there is a price.
We decided to push forward. We injected Lakelyn with the formula, hoping it would return her to human mind. She stood among the chained monsters like a woman in a storm. The veins receded. The red left her eyes. Her breaths came easier.
Then the lab door shook.
One of the monsters snapped its chains and ripped a lab tech apart.
Everything exploded.
Lakelyn fought back. She moved like a ghost of the woman I loved. She fought the monster for the room like a god. She saved me in that moment by ripping free enough to drive the killing thing away. She shoved me into a chopper and screamed, "Run!"
They told me later that Lakelyn risked being seen and the image would ruin our chance to make a deal with Jared Fisher. They told me later that the only way to survive was to be tactical.
"She saved you," Alessandro said, after the chopper lifted us above a city stitched by scars. "She saved you and then she twisted into the person the lab made her into. We don't know what she will be."
"I know her," I said. "Lakelyn is not a mistake."
Alessandro, the uniformed officer who held us like a shield, didn't answer. He watched the city go by like he watched a war map.
Days stretched into a fight. We dug a strategy with a paper called "Abandon City." Jared Fisher wanted to abandon the north to the fires. He waited for the city to fail and then walked in to say, "We will rebuild in our image." He used the chaos to expand his power. We collected evidence that Preston Graf conspired to fake evidence against my father—my father, who had been accused of corruption.
"My father would never..." I whispered. The files showed payments, transfers. Preston's signatures. A set-up.
I had been told I was an orphan. But the photos showed my parents. The photos showed the name "Guo"—no, these were old labels and I couldn't read them right—my head was a museum with many exhibits missing. I wanted my father back. I wanted the truth.
When Jared Fisher was cornered by the team—when we finally forced a meeting—he spoke with a mouth of ice.
"You want to make me change plans?" he said. "You have no power."
We had a cure in our hands, at least the start of one. We had proof Preston had been paid to set up my father. We had a city's residents still alive to testify. We walked into the public square where Jared planned to give his speech on "safety," where the city's media and a field of people gathered. We set the stage.
I stood on a stage Gustavo built. It was day. The sun was a worn coin in the sky. The crowd was angry, frightened, exhausted. Jared Fisher stood there with his officials.
"Today I propose—" Jared began.
Gustavo stepped forward. So did Alessandro. So did other survivors we had rescued from the vaults and hospital wards and university basements. They were doctors and bankers and shopkeepers and the old woman Preston had tried to hide.
I walked out and stood beside Gustav. My hands were steady. Two years of fog had given me a spine as tough as the metal bars we had barricaded the city with.
"Shame will not be the city's law here," I said into the mic. My voice shook once, then connected.
The crowd listened. We showed video of the phone calls, the transfers, the memos. Preston Graf stood in the front row, trying to keep his face neutral, like a man trying to fold a knife into hope.
"Jared Fisher," Gustavo said, "you plotted to take this city by force and to sacrifice the people of the north as a cost. You bribed public servants. You forged evidence. You put men like Preston Graf in place."
"What proof? Who are you to accuse me?" Jared's voice was a growl.
I stepped forward and held up a file. "This is the evidence Preston Graf sent to the prosecution. Here is the transfer, the account, the false receipts. Here is the man who signed them." I pointed at Preston.
Preston's face lost color. He tried to stay calm for a moment and then the crowd began to move. They were hungry for justice.
"Look at his signature," I said. "Look at the account. Preston, explain to them why you signed off on this."
Preston opened his mouth. He tried to lie. He said it was the city's safety plan. He said the documents were legitimate. The crowd hissed.
Then Alessandro stepped to the front and said, "I have a camera with footage of Preston meeting with Jared Fisher at the harbor last month. They shook hands. Preston left with a briefcase full of documents. He sold his city's trust."
Preston coughed. "You are slandering me!"
"Is this slander?" Brody asked, voice low. He held a tablet that showed the meeting. The footage was clear. Preston's face was caught on camera like a thief.
The crowd's murmurs became a chorus. Someone in the back yelled, "Lock him up! Lock him up!"
Jared Fisher's hands tightened around the microphone. "You are not fit to give judgments," he said. He pointed. "You will be tried. You have put the city at risk."
Brody turned the tablet toward the crowd. "We will try him. Right here. Right now."
There is a hard thing about public punishment: you stand above the outcome and the crowd watches like a storm. It is not law, but it's a reckoning.
We arranged a temporary tribunal on the square. The bank manager was brought to the center, Preston in handcuffs. The crowd formed rings around us. Cameras—some ours, some the rare journalists who had not yet run—recorded every breath.
I read the transfers aloud. I showed receipts. Preston's voice turned thin. The first person to speak was an old woman we had rescued—a woman Preston had once refused to help when the bank refused her small pension.
"You took my money," the old woman said, spitting like a mouthful of coal. "You told us to move. You told us safety. You locked us out when the monsters came."
Preston looked as if the ground could open under him.
A line of those he had ruined stepped forward. A mother with bandaged arms, a student with blood-streaked clothes from the press hall, Flint's brother (Flint had a brother), all of them told stories of how Preston's signatures had closed doors or delayed defenses.
Preston tried to blink and make a neutral defense. "It wasn't just me. I..." he began. I had expected him to beg. He did not.
Gustavo stood in the center and said, "We will not lynch. We will give you public shame and restitution. Preston Graf, you will stand here and answer for each family you've harmed. You will confess in front of the city."
Preston's face cracked. He shouted the name Jared Fisher and tried to pass the blame. Jared, exposed now, could not fold this lawn into a stage. His confidences were everywhere.
Preston's reaction moved like a slow fall. First, he was defiant. "You have no proof!" He said to me, to the crowd. He pointed at Jared, hoping we would fling him back into the dark.
Then we played the harbor tape. We showed his stamp on the false account. We showed messages between him and Jared. The crowd's anger changed, and Preston's face turned from defiant to small and pleading.
He began to deny. "I was pressured. I had family—" he said. His voice became a puppet's squeal. The crowd started shouting: "Confess! Confess!"
He tried to bargain: "I will return—I'll return the money!"
"Where is the money?" I asked. He could not answer. Nobody who holds power does so without a ledger. Now his ledger was in our hands.
"On our television, we will show him the names of the people he has hurt," Alessandro said. "He will kneel and apologize in public. He will sign an account that will restore funds to each family. He will step down from his post and be turned over to local arrest for trial."
Preston's eyes finally found mine. He tried to say, "I was following orders."
"Whose orders?" I asked.
"You can't do this…" he started, then he broke and sobbed. The crowd closed in with slow clapping that was not applause but justice. The people filmed, the cameras flashed. The oldest bank customers stepped forward and took Preston's hands and told him how his signature had changed children's lives. They read their names to him, one by one, and he had to look into their faces and say, "I am sorry," and sign a public ledger that assigned restitution. The assembler of crimes had his ledger displayed to the public.
That alone would have been punishment—the exposure. But we needed him to be marked so that Jared Fisher could not simply pick him up and hide him. So we gave Preston a public unmasking: his name, his transfers, his connections broadcast on assembled mobile phones. We had a petition and the city's people signed the paper with their own blood on it—no, not blood, but a signature of condemnation. They chanted until the echoes filled the square.
Preston pleaded, trembled, fell to his knees and begged. He tried to bargain for fewer consequences, for a chance to be useful.
"No," a man from the crowd said. He had been a mail carrier once; his family had been told to leave the north. "You will not bargain. You took our lives and handed us over."
When Preston tried to step back, someone—one of those he had ruined—took a marker and wrote in big black strokes across the ledger: "Shame." With the city's voice, Preston's face changed from a man in control to a man whose world had been boxed.
Jared Fisher tried to walk away, but the cameras caught him in the crowd. He tried to declare a press conference, to say he had only wanted to save people. The crowd laughed near-sobbed-laughed. He would be investigated. He could not hide.
In the end, Preston's punishment was public, thorough, and tailored: forced restitution under watch; public confession; removal from power; and a permanent mark on his name on every public roll that mattered. The people would not forget. The media fed into the story; the other cities asked questions. Jared Fisher's plans lost traction because the city's trust had been ruptured and made public.
For me, the most important scene was when Preston turned his face up to the sky, as if expecting mercy, and found only the city's full, honest eyes reflecting his misdeeds back at him. He was not lynched. He was stripped of his power and given a stage to confess.
The crowd had its revenge: exposure and restitution. It was ugly and righteous.
After that, there was no more talk of "Abandon North." Jared's power wavered. He still had friends, but he had been pinned to a board of truth. The cure we had was leverage. The city still bled and stank and the first-gen still lurked.
I learned how to load a gun that day. Gustavo handed me another magazine and said, "You saved us by surviving. Now learn to protect what you saved."
I learned to run with a rifle and to aim. I learned the feel of weight and cold metal.
The days blurred, and memories returned like slow tides. I remembered a childhood with three close people: a woman named Lakelyn who had saved me once and then many times; a boy who became a man—Gustavo—who was both brother and commander; and a soldier named Alessandro who had put his hands on me as if to anchor me.
I remembered the day of the car accident—flames, glass, a scream that had never left. I remembered the bandages. I remembered waking with new skin, a face like someone else's. I remembered missing my past and then finding it again in photographs and in other people's voices.
Working with Gustavo changed me. He taught me to be cold and then to be fierce. He taught me to make hard choices because there was no room for soft ones.
Lakelyn—she remained the biggest question. She had saved me. She had been changed by the lab's medicine. She had fought with her chains. Sometimes she screamed and savored blood, and sometimes she was the woman who taught me to hide and to love.
We found that the "cure" came at a cost. Some of the first-gen still grew stronger. That growth frightened Elio and the team. And it made us realize Jared Fisher would kill to control that power.
So we pushed forward. We went into Jared's offices and showed the city his ledger. We chopped his allies down like a vine. The city roared and changed its leaders.
One day after the public humiliation, Jared was dragged into a public inquiry. He tried to explain his motives in a press tent, but the people who had survived stared at him. He apologized publicly—a raw, brittle apology—and then was led away under guard to a formal trial.
When Preston was escorted through the streets later, people spat at him. He begged. He tried to give us names. He said he did it because he was afraid. The whole town watched his collapse and learned that fear and greed can look the same from the top. That was his punishment: the unmaking of his reputation and the restitution to those he'd hurt.
We never forgave him. The memory of his money and Jared's plans left a scar on the city. But the city changed. The plan to abandon the north was shelved. We used the cure as bargaining power.
The nights were still full of monsters. The morning still had ash. But we had a city that recognized the names of those who had hurt it.
I learned to sleep with one eye open. I learned to kiss with all the tenderness of someone who had lost years. Gustavo slept next to me sometimes, hands like a gauntlet around my waist. Alessandro watched like a brother. Flint's memory was a drum in the dark.
We took the cure to a lab and reworked it. We kept testing. We learned that sometimes there is no clean line between saving and changing.
And Lakelyn? She came to me once in a hallway of the lab. The chains were gone. The scars were there. She reached for me and then paused like she remembered I was not the same person she had left in a fire.
"Do you remember me?" she asked in a voice that had iron and smoke.
"I remember you," I said, and I meant it. I put my palm to her cheek and felt the heat of life under new skin.
She leaned into my hand. "Then we keep going," she said.
We kept going.
The End
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