Lost Blood: Continued - Part One

The wasteland had no mercy and no patience. Every step outside Lafayette Medical hammered that truth into me. We’d barely crossed the cracked pavement when the ground beneath our boots betrayed us.

“Shit—RUN!” Larry’s voice cut through the chaos.

Not just any molerats—these were nightmares sprung to life. Thick, leathery hide stretched over powerfully coiled muscles, eyes black as tar, teeth like jagged shards of bone. The screeches tore through the afternoon air like static on a ruined radio.

Larry ran fearless, firing into the writhing masses with manic precision. Each shot a prayer, each drop a question unanswered. Clancy’s posture shifted; he wasn’t surprised by combat—he was combat—but there was war in his eyes now, readiness unspoken, body taut like a drawn bow.

I moved like I always do—guerrilla, shadow-step, measured chaos. Pinball flitted above us, whirring, servos clacking, his sensors a storm of data and warnings.

“Sir! Multiple heat signatures! They’re burrowing under you! MOVE!”

“Copy that!” I barked back, weaving through a lattice of debris. A cracked streetlamp sparked as it leaned against a collapsed wall, painting a fleeting grid of light over the dust.

The campus was a hive of madness. Dragonflies the size of footballs hummed overhead, bloated with fluid-filled abdomens. Radroaches swarmed the ground, and hunched, hungrily watching figures skulked in shadowed doorways. Ferals? Maybe. Something else? Definitely.

Larry, unfazed, pointed at the library. “There. If we can get in, we can hold for a bit.”

I assessed. Thick concrete walls, scarred but solid. If survival had a capital, this was it.

“Move light, move fast. Keep your eyes open.”

Clancy pulled his pulse grenades closer, muttering under his breath, ritualistic almost, like a priest blessing the dead before battle. I knew the man. War in his veins.

Pinball chimed in, almost gleeful:

“Sir! Trajectory to library is viable. Probability of success—high. Threat vectors—exponential.”

Larry grinned, fearless in the face of insanity, and we sprinted. Molerats snapped at our heels, buzzing dragonflies above, radroaches scuttling through rubble. Each of us a vector of chaos, moving as one with the noise, the dust, the uncertainty.

Then, the fountain. Rusted, cracked. And there it was—a hatch.

“Down here!” I shouted.

Larry leapt, last into the opening, sealing it just as a molerat lunged past. Darkness swallowed us whole.