Apocalyptic Rebirth: With a repairman system space, she rises again.-Chapter 553: The Quinn’s live!

But it wasn’t the location or the amount that stopped Peter’s heart. It was the logo embossed at the bottom_ a fierce eagle clutching a Q-shield. The Quinn family logo, he could recognize it anywhere.

He had helped design it back when Quinn group was started. Seeing the logo meant only one thing: The Quinns!

They were still alive and if they had thirty million to throw away, they were not just surviving but thriving.

"Hades Quinn..." Peter whispered, his voice a mix of awe and pure, venomous jealousy. "That bastard. How? Why does he get to have thirty million and supplies?"

The thoughts swirled in his head like a hurricane. Hades Quinn was supposed to be a memory; his men had told him that the Westbrook mountain where Hades had moved with his family had been destroyed by a meteor. Was that a lie? Hades was supposed to be dead, broken, and buried by the apocalypse. But thirty million? That kind of money meant Hades hadn’t just survived; he had rebuilt in the apocalypse. The bankruptcy story was a lie! He had built a fortress. A strong one, it seemed.

"Fortress Four," Peter read aloud, the name tasting like salty ash in his mouth. "He thinks he’s a king again and he can ride on my head."

He screamed in rage and fired his gun at the dead bodies as if he could kill them for a second time. He did not stop firing until the clip was emptied.

Everyone in the room was much more relieved when he finally lowered the weapon and appeared to be sane and calm.

"Why do you think they want Moon Raine?" Tigan asked. "Thirty million is a king’s ransom for one woman. Even the Greens do not have that much."

"Because he is a greedy bastard that wants everything." Peter laughed, a high, jagged sound that bounced off the concrete walls. "It has to be her ’sight.’ Hades was always a man of logic, but even logic fails in this world. Maybe he thinks she can help him rebuild a new world where he is the boss. If he had believed her when she was living at the Quinn manor, then he never should have parted ways with her in the first place."

But Moon had not mentioned the apocalypse while she was living at the Quinn manor, at least not to Hades. Not that Peter was aware of this.

"If that is true then it makes sense that he is looking for her now," Tigan said. "Many of us called her mad until the water swallowed people up in the Liora Islands."

Peter looked at the flyer again. A slow, greedy smile spread across his face. "He’s rich. He’s fat with resources. And he’s looking for my wife." An idea started forming in his mind. He looked at the broken remains of Charmaine’s group. "If it wasn’t for me, Hades Quinn would never have become who he is. I am the reason he has anything. And if he has built a fortress... then I think it’s time we moved on our plans of expanding our territory." Moon had told him that the only way to have power was through expanding Crosstown.

It failed to dawn on him that to rebuild all the way to Babel city, he would need vast resources. The kind he did not have.

Peter turned to his guards, his eyes bright with a new, manic energy. "Kill the rest of them. All of them. And listen to me clearly: chop their heads off because I don’t need them resurrecting with superpowers. I don’t care how tired you are,I want the heads completely detached." He marched to the bodies and made a guard pull one out. Then, he chopped the head off with a machete, not stopping until it rolled away from the body.

Heaving, Strauss pointed to the head. "That is how you do it."

The people in the bunker turned slaughter house cried and begged. But the guards went to work anyway. The bunker became a factory of death. Muffled thuds and the sound of heavy blades meeting bone filled the air for the next few minutes.

Outside the walls of Crosstown, there was a ravine where the city’s waste was dumped. It was a place were scavengers, vultures and other birds of prey gathered to hunt for food [dead and dumped humans]. In the middle of the night, a truck backed up to the edge and dumped a load of tangled limbs and headless torsos into the dusty ground.

The truck drove away, its taillights fading into the smog.

The birds descended on the flesh to feast.

Others stayed away, as if they sensed that something was amiss. For hours, nothing moved. The heat was already rising, baking the remaining corpses that were untouched. Flies buzzed in thick, black clouds.

Then, a finger twitched. 𝒇𝒓𝒆𝒆𝙬𝒆𝒃𝓷𝒐𝓿𝙚𝙡.𝒄𝓸𝒎

In the middle of the pile, a hand_ small and pale_ clenched into a fist. A body began to heave, pushing aside the weight of the dead. It was a slow, agonizing struggle.

Then, Emmet slid out from under a headless torso. He was covered in filth and gore. His neck was aching badly where the soldier’s blade had cut deep, nearly severing his head entirely, but it hadn’t finished the job. Now, there was a scar.

Emmet shouldn’t have been breathing. His heart had stopped in the basement. But one of the people that had been killed was different. He could regenerate! His blood had fallen into Emmet’s open mouth, miraculously saving the boy.

The re-generator had not been so lucky to survive because he was completely beheaded. His powers not strong enough to grow a new head.

First, Emmet looked around, trying to register where he was. The memories of the days in the bunker returned to him. He let out a choked, wet sob.

He rushed to the pile of heads that had been dumped in a partially open bag. Every movement was agony as he reached in and took them out, one by one. Soon, he found the one he sought. His fingers brushed slowly against the familiar face of his father.

He cradled it against his chest and cried helplessly. Behind him, a pack of vultures stalked slowly, waiting for life to be drained from him.

Emmet looked back at the cracked unfinished towering walls of Crosstown, the lights still flickering like a taunt. The people inside slept without a care, not knowing the kind of massacre that had just gone down.

"Peter Strauss," Emmet whispered, his voice a rasp of broken glass and hatred. "You didn’t kill us all. Just you wait, I will make you pay."

He stood up, his small frame shaking. With a broken metal pole from the dump, he dug a shallow grave and buried his father and other relatives. When he was done, he began to walk away from the city, he had heard Peter mention Fortress four.

That was where he would go if he wanted revenge. His father had taught him that the enemy of his enemy was his friend. Hades Quinn sounded like a friend he needed.