STRAIGHT! UP! GAY!

The first thing Mina noticed was the silence.

Not the ordinary hush of a city before dawn, but a silence that felt engineered—like someone had reached into the world and pinched the sound out of it. No scooters whining down alleyways. No vendors calling out breakfast specials. No dogs barking at nothing. Just the faint, patient click of a traffic light changing for an audience that no longer existed.

She stood on the roof of a mid-rise building with a courier bag strapped across her chest and a length of cloth wrapped around her forearm like a promise. Below, the boulevard ran straight toward the river, and along it the dead moved in loose, drifting clusters, as if the street itself were a current and they were debris.

Mina had lived her whole life in this city. She’d learned its rhythms the way you learn weather—by instinct, by the skin of your teeth, by paying attention when you didn’t want to. Now the rhythm was gone. The city still stood, stubbornly vertical, but it had become a stage after the actors had left.

She had seen outbreaks on screens before. Everyone had. Disaster always came with a soundtrack, a narrator, a safe distance. This one arrived with no warning and no music. It arrived in her building’s stairwell, in the eyes of a neighbor she’d nodded at for years without ever learning his name. It arrived with hungry hands and a wet, ruined breath.

Mina didn’t scream then. Not because she was brave, but because she was busy.

She had slammed the fire door, wedged a metal mop handle through the bars, and run up the stairs until her lungs burned. When she reached the roof, she had looked out across the city and realized, with cold clarity, that the world had become an equation.

You survived, or you didn’t.

And if you survived, you did it on purpose.

She checked her supplies: two bottles of water, a packet of dried fruit, a headlamp, a roll of bandage, a small tool kit, and the thing that had become her signature—a broad, utilitarian machete she’d pulled from a maintenance closet and sharpened on the concrete edge of the rooftop. It wasn’t a mythic sword. It was blunt practicality with a better edge.

On the far side of the boulevard, a school sat behind a fence. She could see the playground equipment—slides, swings—frozen in the exact posture of joy. A banner still hung over the entrance, sun-faded and cheerful.

And on the roof of that school, she saw movement that wasn’t the drifting sway of the dead.

A hand. Small. Waving like a flag.

Mina exhaled and tasted metal in her mouth.

“Alright,” she said to the empty air. “We do this properly.”

She descended through her building carefully, avoiding the stairwell where the first infected had thrashed against the door earlier. Instead, she used the service ladder down into a maintenance corridor and slipped out through a side exit into the alley.

The alley smelled like rain and rot. The dead were less concentrated here, but they were closer, and closeness was a language they spoke fluently.

Mina moved the way she’d learned to move on crowded subway platforms: shoulders narrow, steps decisive, gaze scanning for openings. She kept to shadows, not because zombies feared darkness, but because movement in open space was an invitation.

A shape lurched from behind a dumpster. She saw the slack jaw, the torn sleeve, the dull eye reflecting her headlamp’s faint glow.

The dead weren’t monsters in the way stories promised. They were broken.

That didn’t make them less lethal.

Mina didn’t waste energy on speech or prayer. She stepped in, pivoted, and brought the machete down at an angle she’d practiced in her mind a hundred times. The blade struck true. The body fell with an unceremonious weight, like a sack of laundry dropped on a tiled floor.

She kept walking.

At the end of the alley, she reached a narrow street lined with shuttered storefronts. The windows were plastered with old posters: concerts, discounts, phone repairs, language classes. All the normal ambitions of people who’d believed tomorrow would arrive.

A cluster of zombies wandered near an intersection. Mina watched them from behind a parked delivery truck, counting, mapping their drift. Three. One with a limp. One in a fluorescent vest. One with hair still tied back in a careful braid.

That one hurt. The braid meant someone had once cared enough to make sure the day started neat.

Mina waited for the timing. When the trio turned slightly, exposing a gap, she crossed—fast, silent, firm. Her bag brushed the truck’s side mirror and made a faint clink.

All three heads snapped toward the sound.

The dead didn’t think, but they remembered the shape of need.

They came at her in a staggered wave. Mina didn’t run. Running was for panic and panic was expensive. She angled her body, forcing them into a line—one at a time.

The first reached for her. Mina stepped off-center, used the cloth-wrapped forearm to catch the wrist, and guided the lunge past her. Her machete rose and fell. The second lunged, and she met it with the flat of the blade to the face—hard enough to throw it off balance—and then she finished the motion with a clean cut.

The third—the one with the braid—came slower, almost hesitant, as if the body remembered manners and the brain did not. Mina felt a flash of grief that had nowhere to go.

“I’m sorry,” she said, and ended it.

She stood still for two breaths afterward, listening. Nothing else approached. The city swallowed the sounds again, indifferent.

She pushed onward toward the school.

As she neared, she saw the fence gate hanging partly open. A row of bicycles lay scattered on the ground, abandoned mid-escape. Inside the courtyard, there were more dead—too many to fight head-on without drawing a crowd.

Mina crouched behind a low wall and studied the layout like a problem set. The courtyard had benches, a small garden, a maintenance shed. The dead drifted toward open space, drawn by the simplest paths.

She needed to move them like water.

From her toolkit she pulled a small metal tin and a handful of loose bolts. She shook them gently. The sound was sharp, bright—wrong in a world that had gone dull. She tossed the tin toward the far corner near the garden.

The dead turned, the nearest ones drawn to the new noise. Mina threw a second distraction farther along, creating a trail of sound that guided their attention away from the main entrance.

When the center of the courtyard thinned, she moved.

She slipped through the gate, low and quick, and crossed to the school’s side door. It was locked, but the window beside it was cracked. She used the machete’s spine to pry it wider and slid her arm through to reach the latch.

Inside, the school smelled like dust and old snacks and something sour beneath it all. The hallway was dim. Children’s drawings lined the walls: suns with faces, stick-figure families, a cat that looked like a triangle with whiskers.

Mina’s throat tightened. She forced her attention forward.

From above came a faint tapping—someone moving carefully on the rooftop access stair.

She moved toward the stairwell, avoiding the main corridor where sound would travel. In the stairwell she found smears on the wall—blood, dried, as if someone had leaned there for balance. It wasn’t a good sign, but it was evidence of life.

Halfway up, a zombie lurched from the landing, drawn by the echo of her footsteps. Mina pressed herself against the inner wall, let it stumble past her centerline, and struck. The body crashed down the stairs with a hollow thud.

She didn’t chase it. If it wasn’t moving, it wasn’t a problem.

At the rooftop door, she knocked twice—soft, controlled—and then once more.

A child’s voice whispered through the crack.

“Password?”

Mina blinked. “Password?”

There was a pause. “My teacher said… people have to know the password or they’re zombies.”

Mina almost laughed, but it came out shaky. “Smart teacher. What’s the password?”

“It’s… ‘tomorrow.’”

Mina leaned close to the door. “Tomorrow.”

The lock clicked.

The door opened a hand’s width. A girl’s eye appeared—dark, alert, sharp as a needle.

“How do you know tomorrow?” the girl demanded.

Mina answered honestly. “Because you said it.”

The door opened wider.

On the rooftop were five children and one adult—an exhausted man in a torn sweater with a bandaged leg. The children held improvised weapons: a broken broom handle, a metal ruler, a thick textbook like a shield. Their faces were smudged with dirt and determination.

The girl who’d opened the door—maybe ten—held herself like a commander. “I’m Asha,” she said. “He’s Mr. Han. We have water but not much. There are zombies downstairs.”

“I know,” Mina said. “I’m Mina. We’re leaving.”

Mr. Han’s voice was hoarse. “Where?”

Mina looked out over the city. She could see smoke in the distance from a district where something had burned days ago. She could see the river like a blade. She could see bridges clogged with abandoned vehicles.

Then she saw it: a radio tower on a hill, still lit by emergency power. And beneath it, a complex of buildings—fenced, concrete, defensible.

“The broadcast station,” she said. “If it’s staffed, they’ll have supplies. If it’s not, it’s still a fortress.”

Asha stared at her. “You can get us there?”

Mina looked at the children—at their small hands gripping big responsibilities. She thought of every person who had said “someone should do something” and then waited for someone else.

“Yes,” Mina said. “But you do exactly what I say. No hero moves. Hero moves get people killed.”

Asha nodded once, solemn. “Okay.”

They moved at dusk, when the light was low and the dead’s attention seemed to drift. Mina went first, Mr. Han in the middle with the smallest child supported by the others, and Asha at the back, counting heads like a drill sergeant.

In the courtyard, the dead had gathered again, drawn by their earlier distractions, but Mina guided the group along the building’s shadowed edge, using parked equipment and walls as cover. She stopped them with a raised hand when a zombie wandered too near, waited until it drifted away, then continued.

The city became a series of rooms without ceilings: alleys, stairwells, courtyards, underpasses. Every space had its own dangers. Every corner had the potential to be the last.

Mina kept them moving not by speed, but by discipline.

When the dead got too close, she eliminated the nearest ones quietly—never swinging wildly, never letting the machete ring off metal, never letting panic turn a clean solution into noise. Each strike was purposeful, economical. Not rage, not triumph—just work.

And as the hours passed, the children stopped crying. They stopped asking why. They watched her and learned.

Asha learned fastest.

At one point, they had to cross a wide street with no cover. Mina studied the drift of the dead. The street was a mouth and they were crumbs.

She took out her headlamp and clicked it on, aimed toward a side alley, and tossed it onto the pavement. The light bounced and skittered, drawing several zombies toward it like moths. Then she threw a bottle cap, then a stone—small sounds, leading their attention away.

“Now,” she whispered.

The group crossed in a tight cluster, feet light, breaths held. They made it to the other side as the dead pressed toward the false beacon.

Asha’s eyes were wide. “You’re… moving them.”

“Yes,” Mina said. “You don’t always need to fight a storm. Sometimes you redirect it.”

By the time they reached the hill, night had fully arrived. The broadcast station’s perimeter fence stood intact. The gate was locked, but there was no movement on the other side.

Mina signaled the group to stay back and approached alone. She looked for signs: tire tracks, fresh footprints, light behind windows, any hint of life.

Nothing.

Then she heard it—a faint, rhythmic sound from inside. Not a voice. Not a moan. A generator, running.

Power meant somebody had cared enough to keep it alive.

She climbed the fence with careful hands and dropped silently to the other side. The courtyard inside was cleaner than the streets. Fewer dead, as if the fence had filtered them out. She moved to the main door and tried it.

Locked. Of course.

She circled to a side entrance and found a maintenance hatch with a compromised lock. Someone had been here. Recently.

Mina opened it and slipped inside.

The interior smelled of oil and old coffee. The corridors were lined with equipment and cables. Emergency lights cast everything in thin, anxious pools.

She moved toward the generator room, and there she found them—not zombies, not survivors in the way she’d hoped, but something in between: a small group of people barricaded behind a door, armed, terrified, alive.

A voice called out. “Stop! Identify yourself!”

Mina raised her hands. “Human. Alone. With five children and an injured teacher outside. We need shelter.”

Silence. Then the door cracked open.

A woman with a wrench in one hand and a shotgun in the other stared at Mina like she was an impossible math problem. “Five kids?”

“Yes.”

The woman swallowed. “Bring them.”

When Mina returned to the fence and guided the group inside, the people at the station—three women, two men, all exhausted—reacted like people rediscovering their own decency in real time. They ushered the children in, poured water, brought blankets. Mr. Han collapsed into a chair and cried in a quiet, devastated way that made Mina look away.

Asha sat upright, still holding her broom handle. Her eyes tracked everything.

Mina crouched beside her. “You did well,” she said.

Asha hesitated. “Are there more zombies tomorrow?”

Mina considered the question. It was both naive and perfectly accurate.

“Yes,” she said. “But tomorrow can also have plans.”

That night, while the others slept, Mina climbed to the station’s highest point and looked out over the city. In the distance, zombies moved through streets like ink spreading in water. Not endless, but relentless.

She understood then what she’d been avoiding: not just survival, but responsibility. If the dead kept roaming, they would eventually breach fences. They would eventually find children. They would eventually make tomorrow impossible.

Mina had been solving immediate problems. Now she had to solve the big one.

She went back down and found the station’s broadcast room. On the desk was a microphone, dusty but functional. A terminal screen glowed with a simple interface. A list of emergency frequencies.

She turned it on.

The hum in the speakers felt like the world taking a breath.

Mina pressed the transmit button and spoke into the microphone with a steadiness she didn’t feel but chose anyway.

“This is Mina,” she said. “If you can hear this, you are not alone. If you are trapped, do not run into open streets. Move to rooftops. Barricade stairwells. Use sound to redirect them, not yourself to outrun them. If you have children, keep them close. Protect them first.”

She paused, listening to the static.

“I am at the broadcast station on the hill. We have shelter. We can guide you in. I repeat: protect the children first.”

Then she did something else. Something strategic.

She began to map the city in her words: safe routes, choke points, places where the dead tended to gather, how to move quietly, how to avoid drawing crowds. She used simple language. Direct commands. No poetry.

Because this wasn’t a story. This was instruction.

Over the next days, the station became a beacon. Survivors arrived in small groups, then larger ones, drawn by Mina’s transmissions. The community grew. They rationed. They organized watch rotations. They built noise traps and simple barriers. They turned the station into a living thing with many hands.

And Mina did what she had always done best.

She worked.

She led scavenging teams, returning with medical supplies and batteries. She trained people to move without panic. She taught them to funnel zombies, to use terrain, to fight only when necessary and to fight decisively when it was.

She also did something few wanted to admit they needed.

She made a plan to end it.

Not in a single cinematic sweep, not with a magical cure, but with something more relentless than the dead: coordinated action.

They cleared block by block. They used radios. They marked safe paths with paint. They set controlled noise lures leading zombies into enclosed areas where teams waited—quiet, organized, protected.

When someone asked Mina how long it would take, she answered the only honest way.

“As long as it takes,” she said. “But it will take less if we stop pretending it’s someone else’s job.”

Asha started following her on runs, first carrying water, then bolts, then a crowbar. Mina tried to send her back every time.

Asha refused every time.

One day, after they’d cleared an entire district around a clinic, Asha asked, “Are you trying to kill all of them?”

Mina wiped sweat from her forehead and looked out over the streets where people were walking again—carefully, yes, but walking. Children stood behind barricades watching, not as prey but as witnesses.

“Yes,” Mina said. “Not because I like killing. Because I like children growing up.”

Asha nodded, as if that was the most rational thing anyone had ever said.

Weeks became months. The dead diminished, not in one dramatic collapse but in a steady decline: fewer clusters on the boulevard, fewer shapes drifting through alleyways, fewer sudden attacks in stairwells. People began to reclaim the city not with celebration, but with labor—sweeping glass, repairing doors, planting small gardens in courtyards where fear had lived.

On the morning the last known horde was cleared—pushed into an old stadium and ended with controlled precision—there was no cheering.

There was relief, heavy and quiet.

Mina stood at the stadium entrance with her machete hanging at her side like an old habit. Her hands were scarred. Her face was leaner. Her eyes had the calm of someone who had seen the worst and refused to become it.

Asha walked up beside her, taller now, hair pulled back into a careful braid.

“Is it over?” Asha asked.

Mina watched the empty field, the seats rising like cliffs, the bright sky above.

“It’s not over,” she said. “It’s different.”

Asha frowned. “That’s not an answer.”

Mina allowed herself a small, tired smile. “It’s the only answer I trust.”

They walked back toward the city together.

The streets were still scarred. The buildings still carried their grief in broken windows and faded posters. But somewhere, a kettle whistled. Somewhere, a child laughed at a joke that had nothing to do with survival. Somewhere, tomorrow arrived without needing a password.

Mina didn’t call herself a slayer. She didn’t call herself a savior.

She had simply looked at an impossible problem and decided it would not outlast her will.

And in the end, it didn’t.