Apocalypse Ground Zero: Refusing To Leave Home-Chapter 33: Trapped

POV: Wei Lingyun

Sure... Wei Lingyun had driven through worse traffic in his life, but never traffic that was actively trying to kill him.

The streets were nothing short of pure chaos.

Abandoned vehicles blocked intersections at angles that screamed panic or death. The doors were left open, the engines were still running, and the belongings of the occupants were scattered across pavement like the people had simply stopped existing mid-action.

He took side streets, back roads, anything that looked remotely clear, his hands tight on the wheel while his mind worked through the impossibility of what he was seeing.

In front of him was noting short of a swarm of bodies that moved wrong.

That was the only way to describe it.

They shambled through the streets with that jerky uncoordinated gait that made his instincts scream warnings his conscious mind was still trying to process. Their arms were outstretched, their jaws working in a single open and close motion. Even their eyes were filmed over with something that shouldn’t exist in living tissue.

And they were everywhere.

Yuche’s call had been brief and absolute: Get here. Now. Bring everyone.

Always one to obey an order from him, Wei Lingyun had grabbed the three men closest to him—Feng, Dao, Ming—and they’d armed themselves and moved without asking questions.

Of course, it helped that that was how things worked in their world. Orders came down and you followed them or you didn’t survive long enough to regret the choice.

They’d made it six blocks before Feng saw what was really happening.

"What the fuck are those?" he had asked, his voice tight with something that might have been fear or disbelief or both.

Lingyun had glanced in the rearview mirror and seen them—a group of people converging on a woman who’d been trying to reach her car.

She had screamed once before the sound had cut off abruptly as bodies swarmed over her. They watched as the people pulled her down, tearing into flesh with teeth and hands that moved with mechanical efficiency.

"Drive faster," Dao had said from the back seat.

Lingyun had pressed the accelerator.

Two blocks later, Ming had opened his door while the vehicle was still moving.

"What are you doing?" Lingyun had demanded, swerving to avoid an overturned truck.

"I’m not going out there," Ming had said, his voice shaking. "I’m not—fuck this, I’m going back—I don’t owe the Boss anything."

Then he jumped, hit the pavement hard, and rolled a few feet. When he got to his feet, he started running back the way they’d come.

Lingyun had watched in the mirror as more people turned toward the movement, converging on Ming with that relentless shambling pace that suggested they would never stop until they reached what they were hunting.

Ming had made it maybe twenty meters before they caught him.

"Jesus Christ," Feng had whispered.

At the next intersection, Dao had grabbed his weapon and opened his door. "I’m out. This is insane. We’re all going to die if we keep going."

"Yuche needs us," Lingyun reminded the man, his voice flat.

"Yuche can handle himself. I’m not dying for this."

With those parting words, Dao had left and Feng had followed thirty seconds later, muttering apologies that Lingyun barely heard over the sound of his own heartbeat pounding in his ears.

And then he’d been alone.

The smart move would have been to turn around. Find shelter. Secure a defensible position and wait for whatever was happening to resolve itself or at least become clearer.

That was tactical thinking. That was survival instinct. That was what training said to do when the situation became untenable and reinforcements abandoned the mission.

But Jian Yuche had saved his life more than once, and he owed the man everything.

It had been three years ago, in an alley behind a warehouse where a deal had gone wrong and bullets had started flying and Lingyun had taken a round to the shoulder that had dropped him to the pavement while men with guns closed in from both sides. He’d been bleeding out, his vision going dark, and starting to accept that this was how it ended.

And then Yuche had appeared—calm, efficient, deadly—and cleared the alley in under a minute with precision that still made Lingyun’s training instincts sit up and take notice.

Get up, Yuche had said, pulling him to his feet. You don’t die today.

They were closer than brothers. Bound by blood and debt and the kind of loyalty that didn’t break just because the world stopped making sense.

Jian Yuche wouldn’t have left him to face this alone, and neither would Lingyun. So he kept driving.

The property came into view and his chest tightened.

The gate was still standing, but barely—bars bent inward, the metal twisted, and gaps wide enough for bodies to push through. And they were pushing through.

Dozens of them, maybe more, shambling across the lawn toward the house with that wrong jerky gait that made the hairs on the back of his neck scream warnings. 𝚏𝗿𝗲𝐞𝐰𝚎𝕓𝐧𝚘𝘃𝗲𝐥.𝐜𝚘𝕞

More of those... things... had gathered at the gate, pressing against the damaged metal, reaching through the gaps with arms that moved with mechanical persistence.

Lingyun made a decision.

He gunned the engine.

The vehicle surged forward, tires screaming against pavement, and hit the gate at full speed.

Metal shrieked and bodies went flying in all directions. The impact threw him forward against the seatbelt hard enough to knock the air from his lungs, but the gate gave way all the same.

Suddenly he was through, racing up the long driveway with infected on both sides converging on the noise.

He didn’t slow down. Didn’t try to avoid them. Just kept the accelerator pressed to the floor and let momentum carry him forward. He let the vehicle plow through anything that got in the way.

Bodies hit the hood with a dull thud and the windshield cracked under the pressure even as something grabbed at the side mirror and tore it clean off.

The house loomed ahead—solid, defensible, exactly the kind of place you wanted to be when the world collapsed.

Lingyun killed the engine twenty meters from the front door.

The sudden silence was deafening. Then the moaning started—low, guttural, wrong—coming from every direction as infected turned toward the vehicle and began their shambling approach.

He grabbed his gun from the passenger seat, checked the magazine with movements that muscle memory executed without conscious thought, and opened the door.

The things were close. Too close. A man in a torn business suit reached for him with hands that were missing fingers, bone visible through shredded flesh. A woman with half her face torn away dragged herself forward on broken legs that shouldn’t have been able to support weight.

Lingyun raised his weapon and fired.

The shot was clean, center mass, exactly where training said to aim. The figure jerked backward from the impact, stumbled, and then kept coming.

He adjusted his aim and fired again, this time a headshot. The figure dropped and stayed down.

The only problem was that the sound drew more of them. A lot more.

Lingyun continued to fire in controlled bursts, dropping infected with headshots that his training had drilled into muscle memory over years of practice.

One down.

Two.

Three.

The bodies piled up but more kept coming, converging on the noise like it was a dinner bell, their moaning growing louder as they closed the distance.

The front door was fifteen meters away. Then ten. Then five.

He fired until the magazine clicked empty, dropped it, reloaded without breaking stride, brought the weapon back up and continued firing. His shoulder ached from the recoil and his ears rang from the gunfire.

Sweat ran down his face despite the cold air, but he couldn’t stop what he was doing.

One of the things grabbed his jacket and he twisted, brought the weapon around, fired point-blank into its skull. The grip loosened. He kicked it away and kept moving.

The steps. The door. Safety was three meters away, then two, then—

Something grabbed his ankle.

He looked down and saw an infected that had been crawling across the ground, its legs shattered but still functional enough to drag itself forward. Its hand was locked around his boot with grip strength that felt impossible for damaged muscle and broken bone.

Lingyun fired again and the hand went limp.

He reached the door and pounded on it with his free hand, his weapon still raised, still firing into the mass of infected that pressed closer with every second.

"Open up!" he shouted. "It’s Wei Lingyun!"

The moaning grew louder. Bodies surrounded him on three sides. His weapon clicked empty again and he dropped the magazine, reached for another, found nothing.

He was out of ammunition.

The door remained closed.

And the infected kept coming.