Zhenlan woke up choking on blood.

For one violent second, all he could hear was the screams of his people being ripped apart by the zombie horde.

The compound walls collapsing.

Gunfire.

The wet tearing sounds of flesh being ripped apart while people begged for help over radios that nobody answered anymore.

Then came the shriek.

High pitched.

Inhuman.

The Banshee.

Half the men defending the walls had died from the scream alone. The other half had been torn apart afterward when the Devourer smashed through the eastern barricade with enough force to bring half the compound down behind it.

Then the horde came in.

Thousands of infected.

Too many to count.

Far too many to kill.

He still remembered Chenghai standing beside him on top of the inner wall while blood poured down one side of his face. The scar over Chenghai’s left eye had split back open sometime during the fighting, but the other man never even seemed to notice.

"North tower is gone."

Zhenlan remembered hearing those words clearly through all the screaming.

Then another explosion.

Another section of wall collapsing.

The infected pouring through the gap like floodwater.

Someone was crying over the emergency frequency.

Someone else was laughing.

Then came the pain.

A hand had grabbed Zhenlan from behind just as the Devourer broke through the center of the compound.

Teeth.

Claws.

Something ripping into his shoulder hard enough to expose bone.

He remembered falling.

Remembered infected piling over him while the smell of blood and rotting meat filled his lungs.

And through all of it?

Silence over the radios.

No reinforcements.

No allied warlords.

No rescue.

Just static.

Then darkness.

The moment Zhenlan opened his eyes, he jerked out of the chair he was sitting in.

The first thing he noticed was the lack of pain.

The second was the ceiling above him.

Not concrete.

Not steel.

A pristine white ceiling with popcorn spackle on it.

Warm lighting glowed softly from a nearby lamp while cold air drifted lazily through vents overhead. Somewhere deeper in the building, machinery hummed steadily in the background.

Zhenlan froze.

His breathing slowed instantly.

No panic.

No confusion.

Only assessment.

He was alive. Uninjured. But in an unknown location.

He looked down at his hands. They were clean without any trace of blood on them. Even the old scars that he had gotten in the early days of the apocalypse were completely gone.

Slowly, he touched the side of his neck where an infected had nearly ripped his throat out during the famine years.

But his skin was smooth. Not even a healed scar to tell him that it really had happened.

This was wrong.

So very, very wrong.

Movement across the room caught his attention immediately.

Chenghai sat near the wall beside several unopened military crates, his posture rigid while his eyes scanned the room with the same cold calculation Zhenlan knew all too well.

At least if he woke up in a new place, he wasn’t completely alone.

"Status report," Zhenlan barked to his commander.

The silence between them stretched several long seconds before Chenghai finally spoke. "We died."

His voice was flat, completely emotionless.

"Yeah," sighed Zhenlan as he nodded in agreement. "I remember that part, too. What I don’t understand is how we are here... and where is here?"

"No idea," replied Chenghai, his eyes narrowing on the military grade equipment that he would have, and had given his left eye for. "But there is only one way to get information."

Hours passed in near silence while the two of them brought the systems online piece by piece.

Generators.

Battery arrays.

Satellite uplinks.

Communication towers.

The equipment had been thrown into the mansion carelessly, almost offensively so. Expensive military hardware sat half unpacked across the dining room while cables tangled together beneath the table like someone dumped an entire convoy into the house without understanding what any of it actually did.

Zhenlan fixed a wiring issue inside one of the battery systems while Chenghai brought another radio online beside him.

By the time the generators finally stabilized, the entire mansion hummed faintly with working power while cold air drifted steadily through the vents overhead.

Functional.

Safe.

For now.

Static crackled softly through the radios spread across the dining room table. Chenghai sat beside them with a notebook open while he wrote information down in short precise lines across a map they found in one of the cabinets earlier that night.

Military checkpoints.

Evacuation routes.

Safe zones.

Supply convoys.

Still functioning.

Barely.

One of the emergency frequencies crackled suddenly.

"...southern evacuation point compromised—"

Static swallowed the rest.

Chenghai still wrote something down.

Zhenlan moved toward another crate and paused.

Movement near the kitchen caught his attention instantly.

His body reacted before thought did.

Tension tightened through his shoulders while his hand drifted automatically toward the knife sitting beside the table.

A man leaned casually against the kitchen counter drinking coffee like the world outside wasn’t collapsing.

Tall.

Broad shoulders.

Relaxed posture.

Warlord Wei Lingyun.

Zhenlan froze.

Even younger, there was still something unmistakable about him.

After all, power recognized power.

The last time Zhenlan saw Wei Lingyun, the man stood on top of a highway barricade surrounded by burning vehicles while infected tore through civilians below. 𝕗𝕣𝐞𝐞𝘄𝐞𝚋𝚗𝗼𝘃𝗲𝗹.𝚌𝕠𝚖

Nobody crossed his territory without permission. Nobody.

Not because of any laws.

But because people who crossed him just simply disappeared.

Now he was standing barefoot in a kitchen holding a coffee mug.

What the fuck was this place?

Another movement near the back doors drew Zhenlan’s attention immediately.

The Supreme One, Jian Yuche sat near the windows slowly turning a satellite phone over in one hand while early morning sunlight spilled lazily across the floor around him.

He was calm in a way that no one would have ever believed him to be.

He was the Warlord of the western regions.

His name alone was enough to scared people to death.

And here he was, at ease in a way that made even less sense than Wei Lingyun.

The last time Zhenlan saw Jian Yuche, the man walked through an infected siege covered in enough blood to look carved out of it. Rumors said entire survivor compounds surrendered the second they realized whose territory they wandered into.

Now he was sitting in a dining room staring at a satellite phone like he was debating whether or not to make a call.

Neither man acknowledged Zhenlan directly.

Neither acted threatened.

Which somehow made the entire situation worse.

Chenghai adjusted another radio frequency slightly before speaking quietly without looking up from the map.

"There is something wrong with them."

Zhenlan’s eyes narrowed slightly.

"You know that already?"

"It’s in the way they move. They are acting like this is their home... and they are used to us."

Zhenlan grunted once and filed that information away. Nothing was making sense at the moment. But a smart man knew when to keep his mouth shut and go with the flow.

Wei Lingyun eventually looked over from the kitchen, his gaze sliding across the room before stopping briefly on Zhenlan.

"I knew you had a stick up your ass before," he muttered casually. "But did it get bigger overnight? You weren’t this bad yesterday."

Yesterday.

The word felt wrong but Zhenlan said nothing.

What exactly was he supposed to say to that?

Sorry. I died several hours ago and woke up inside a mansion with two rival warlords who should not be here?

No.

Absolutely not.

The radios crackled again.

"...northern shelter requesting immediate medical assis—"

Static.

Silence swallowed the room again.

Nobody moved toward the microphone.

Good.

The last thing they needed was strangers learning this place existed.

Footsteps sounded upstairs a few seconds later.

Both Chenghai and Zhenlan reacted instantly.

Chenghai’s hand drifted toward the knife beside the radios while Zhenlan stepped partially behind the dining room entrance without conscious thought.

A woman rushed downstairs like she had just been told that they were being attacked by a zombie horde and probably wouldn’t survive it.

She walked straight past them, not even bothering to glance over into the dining room, and went straight into the living room.

Then immediately grabbed a phone off the coffee table.

The screen lit up.

And her entire face changed.

Relief hit her so hard it almost looked painful.

"I have internet."

Zhenlan forgot how to breathe.

No.

No, that wasn’t possible.

The woman standing twenty feet away looked exactly like Rouxi.

Not similar.

Not close.

Exactly.

But Rouxi was dead.

He buried her himself two months before the apocalypse began after a drunk driver wrapped his truck around her car during a rainstorm.

She had snuck out of the house after he forbade her from going on a ski trip with her friends.

Three hours later, the police arrived at his front door.

He still remembered standing beside the coffin while rain soaked through his suit jacket and dirt hit the wood lid in heavy wet clumps.

She looked too small inside it.

Too young.

So who the fuck was this woman?