The Brute's skull caved under my gauntlet. I felt the crunch in my forearm, wet and brutal, like pounding a watermelon wrapped in rotted leather.
Blood sprayed up my arm, half-congealed and thick with black veins. The body crumpled, convulsed, and then stilled, its head twisted at the wrong angle.
"Two down," I muttered, scanning the yard. "How many more?"
The train depot was a goddamn maze. Cracked tracks, rusted rails, overturned cargo cars. Some containers still had old shipping logos barely visible under scorch marks and splattered gore. And deeper in the yard… I saw movement.
Too many. Too fast.
They weren't the slow, twitching kind. But the sprinting and violent kind, like starving wolves.
A wave of them, over twenty, poured from between two crushed train cars. They came in different shapes. Some short and hunched, their blades fused to arms like living machetes. Others were tall, lean, and jittering with speed, heads twitching too fast to track.
