Surviving the Apocalypse With My Yandere Ex-Girlfriend

Chapter 219: Do not weep

Resources are finite. Always have been. Even in the world before this, it had practically been shoved down our throats by the people who controlled everything we thought we needed.

Now, in an apocalypse setting, it wasn’t just an idea anymore.

It was law.

I’d spent hours bent over a map, eyes dragging across roads and markers, trying to find any gas station close enough to matter.

Nothing.

Not a single viable option that hadn’t already been picked clean.

Then it hit me.

Painfully obvious.

Gas stations were always the first places stripped in an apocalypse.

Fucking duh, Adrian. Why the hell didn’t I think of that from the start?

That realization changed everything.

It meant we were on foot now.

Me, Aubrey, and the rest of us.

Well... most of us.

We’d started hitting anything that even remotely made sense.

Municipal garages.

Snowplow depots.

Road maintenance yards.

Construction companies.

Anything that stored fuel in bulk tanks instead of exposed pumps already drained dry and abandoned.

Especially in Vermont.

The cold here wasn’t subtle anymore.

My breath fogged in front of me as Hale and I walked toward a maintenance depot, the air sharp enough to sting the lungs on the way in.

Jesus, man.

Every mile we drove, every stop we made, it just made it more obvious how quickly the world was turning hostile in ways that didn’t even need infected anymore.

Even the cold felt like it was winning.

Of course, Lila was with us.

Not clinging like before.

Not distant either.

Just... present.

Changed.

Not in the way people like to say when they want to sound hopeful about it.

Before the evolution.

God, I hated calling it that.

Because there was nothing evolutionary about it.

It wasn’t growth.

It was awareness.

Too much of it.

Like something that learned how to think faster than it learned how to feel.

She wasn’t stupid anymore.

She wasn’t chaotic.

She was deliberate.

She understood space now.

And right now, she knew I needed it.

That was why she kept it.

Not out of respect.

Out of calculation.

"So," Hale began.

My eyes shifted to him immediately, breaking the quiet.

"Yeah."

"How’s this idea work anyway?"

I didn’t stop walking.

He wasn’t challenging me, not exactly, but there was a weary skepticism in his eyes that he didn’t bother to hide.

"We aren’t looking for a pump," I explained, keeping my voice low and my eyes sweeping the rusted chain-link fence ahead of us.

"These depots use gravity-fed bulk tanks or manual rotary pumps for their fleet. If the electricity is dead, the fuel is still sitting in the belly of those tanks." I said.

"We break the padlock on the inspection hatch, drop a clear vinyl hose down into the reservoir, and create a manual siphon using the hand pump I packed. We take only what we can carry in the four five-gallon jugs, bring it back to the truck, and get the hell out of this place."

Hale listened without interrupting, just nodding once when it made sense.

We continued walking for a moment.

Then— he asked.

"Any reason you left Terri with the truck?"

I looked at him, slightly confused, like it was obvious.

Not in a dismissive way. Just... self-explanatory.

I didn’t say she couldn’t handle it.

I didn’t need to.

But I could tell Hale already understood what I wasn’t saying.

"Just seemed appropriate," I said instead.

He frowned, but kept walking.

After a moment, he spoke again.

"You give her less credit than she’s worth."

I glanced at him.

"She went down into that underground mess with Aubrey to pull you out. Kid’s got guts."

Lila’s expression shifted slightly.

Not visible anger.

Something quieter.

Sharper.

But she said nothing.

I still didn’t understand that reaction.

Didn’t want to.

"I’d know." Hale said with finality.

"Yeah... I’ll keep that in mind next time," I said.

We reached the maintenance depot not long after.

The structure looked half-dead, metal siding dulled by weather, entry points half-collapsed or forced open by time or something else that didn’t care about preservation.

We moved in anyway.

Past blockers.

Past broken signage.

Into silence that felt too intact for something abandoned this long.

As we checked areas and moved deeper inside, Hale finally spoke again.

"You’re a smart kid, Adrian."

It came out of nowhere.

No setup. No warning.

Just something dropped into the air like it had been sitting there waiting.

I glanced at him.

Something warm hit my chest before I could stop it.

Not comfort exactly.

Just recognition.

"Eh," I said lightly, forcing it down. "This was nothing."

We kept moving.

And for a moment, it almost felt normal.

Almost.

Like maybe this would work out cleanly.

Like maybe Aubrey would calm down after this.

Like maybe things would stop breaking apart every time we fixed something.

For the first time in a long time—

things felt like they were going in a direction again.

Then I saw it.

I stopped without realizing I had.

Tracks.

Footprints.

Fresh.

Too fresh.

Not random.

Not scattered.

Directional.

Controlled.

I stared at them longer than I should have.

My stomach tightened.

"Hey, Hale?"

He stopped immediately.

"I don’t think we’re alone in this place."

That was all it took.

No panic.

Just confirmation.

We adjusted instantly.

Because maybe someone had passed through.

And that was a big, fucking maybe.

One I wasn’t comfortable betting everything on.

But turning back wasn’t an option either.

Not with Aubrey and the others split across other facilities, doing the same thing we were supposed to be doing here.

So we stayed.

I pulled my gun out and cocked it.

The sound was small.

But it felt loud in the space around us.

Hale looked at it.

Lila looked at me.

Nobody said anything.

Then—

movement.

A vehicle outside.

We dropped immediately.

Behind crates.

Behind cover.

Bodies low, controlled, silent.

The engine rumbled through the depot like it didn’t belong there.

And then the smell hit.

Rot.

Heavy.

Wrong.

Not decay left to time.

Fresh transport rot.

Like something being moved instead of lost.

I shifted just enough to see.

Pickup truck.

Bed loaded with body bags.

Too many.

Stacked poorly.

Some of them shifting slightly like whatever was inside still had weight to it that didn’t sit right.

My throat tightened.

"What the fuck..." I whispered.

Hale looked at me, face locked tight.

Lila stayed still.

Watching.

Calculating.

The truck reached the far end of the depot, pulling up alongside a massive, abandoned administrative building, its engine cutting out with a dying wheeze.

The moment the vehicle stopped, I rose from behind the crates.

I didn’t think about the plan. I didn’t think about the fuel. Curiosity, dark and irrational, hooked into my chest and pulled me forward.

There was a pragmatic excuse floating in my head— there was no way I could safely siphon gas while whatever that person and the people they were with were roaming around—

but it was mostly a lie.

"What the fuck are you doing??"

Hale snapped in a harsh, furious whisper, his hand reaching out to catch my jacket, but he missed.

He was visibly irritated, his jaw clenched as he watched me completely deviate from the parameters we’d agreed on.

We moved like ghosts along the perimeter of the courtyard, ducking behind rusted machinery and stacks of tires, running quietly when the open spaces forced our hand.

Hale’s irritation was boiling over; I could hear his heavy, ragged breathing right behind me.

Lila was even closer, practically pressing against my back, her proximity a constant, unsettling warmth.

As we drew closer to the administrative building, the wind shifted, carrying a sound that made the hairs on my arms stand up.

It was a faint, frantic noise of someone screaming...

But it was layered beneath something else.

A rhythmic, droning chorus.

It sounded a lot like chanting.

The driver’s side door of the pickup truck creaked open. A figure stepped out onto the asphalt.

I froze behind a rusted forklift, my eyes narrowing as I focused on the man’s face.

The moment the light hit his profile, my stomach twisted violently into a tight, sickening knot.

I suddenly felt stupid for letting my curiosity bring me this close.

His skin was a disgustingly pale and bloody, veins standing out like black lace against his throat.

But it was his eyes that gave it away—milky, ruptured, hemorrhaged spheres that rolled with a sickening, frantic energy.

He was infected. Through and through.

But he wasn’t sprinting. He wasn’t screaming or tearing at his own flesh. He walked around to the back of the truck, dropped the tailgate with a loud clatter, and hoisted one of the heavy body bags over his shoulder with an eerie, coordinated strength. He carried it toward the building’s entrance like a man delivering groceries.

What the fuck...?

I stared at the building.

The windows were broken.

Stained.

The sound coming out of it wasn’t chaos.

It was order.

Something inside me tightened.

"Adrian," Hale warned quietly.

I didn’t answer.

"Adrian," he said again, sharper this time. His voice trembling with a mixture of rage and something else.

I finally looked at him.

Then back at the building.

"We’re here to siphon gas. Not whatever the hell that is. Let’s go."

I should’ve listened.

I didn’t.

I moved instead.

Lila followed instantly.

Hale hesitated for a second.

Then followed anyway.

We approached the window.

And I looked inside.

I saw them.

Infected.

Standing in formation.

Not attacking.

Not feeding.

Arranged.

Intentional.

And in the center—

a mother and her child.

Alive.

The woman was shaking violently, arms locked around the child like she could physically hold the world back if she gripped hard enough.

My eyes narrowed to slits, my breath catching in my throat.

What the fuck is going on?

"God, Adrian," Hale whispered from beside me, his voice trembling as he took in the scene.

"Come on—this is sick. We can’t do anything for them."

I didn’t answer him.

When you see something like this nowadays , the implications are obvious.

You expect a slaughter. You expect the raw, animalistic violence of monsters feeding on the living. Things were obviously going to get ugly.

But as I watched, the violence never came.

Instead, the infected surrounding the pallet began to sway. Their chests heaved in unison, and the low, droning chant I’d heard outside crystallized into distinct, terrifyingly coherent words. It was a liturgical, religious cadence, spoken with the hollow, rasping voices of dead men.

"Through the vessel, the blood is made pure," they chanted, their voices rising in a sickening harmony.

"Through the fever, the mind is made whole."

The truck driver stepped into the center of the circle, dropping the body bag to the floor. He looked down at the weeping mother, his milky eyes wide and fixed.

"Do not weep, sister," the driver said, his voice a distorted, wet rattle that still managed to carry an eerie, peaceful cadence.

"The flesh is a shroud of rot. The world before was a cage of scarcity. But the bite is not an end. It is the cleanse. The ascension."

The mother wailed, pressing her daughter’s head against her chest as the circle of infected closed in by a single step, their hands raised in a mockery of a priestly blessing.

"You have been chosen," the driver continued, his hand reaching into his pocket and pulling out a jagged, rusted bone-shard.

"To be reborn. To be enlightened by the bite of salvation. You and the seed of your womb are blessed to receive the divine transmission, rather than die in the cold like the unchosen."

I feld sick to my stomach just hearing that.

Was this some kind of cult...?

Suddenly, the driver stopped speaking.

The chanting ceased instantly, cutting off so abruptly the silence felt like a physical weight in the air.

Every single infected in the room paused.

Their bodies went rigid, their heads tilting at the exact same angle, like a colony of insects responding to a single, silent frequency.

Then—as if pulled by a single string—every single pair of milky, hemorrhaged eyes in that room snapped directly toward the window.

Directly at me.

My heart dropped to my fucking ass.

An electric shock of pure terror paralyzed my limbs— but was quickly overridden by the lattice.

Yet,

Before a single word could leave my mouth, before my fingers could even tighten around the grip of my gun, a sickening, wet CRACK exploded right next to my ear.

I spun around just in time to see Hale’s eyes roll back into his head. An infected had struck Hale clean across the temple with the heavy wooden butt of a bolt-action rifle, leaving hale to hit the frozen mud like a pack of cards.

"Oh sh—" The word died in my throat.

STAB.

Lila moved with lightning speed. Before the it could swing the rifle toward me, she stepped into his guard, a long, rusted hunting knife flashing in her hand.

She drove the blade clean through the side of the man’s neck, twisting it with a brutal, clinical efficiency.

The infected let out a wet, bubbling gasp, stumbling backward as he began to choke violently on his own blood, his hands clawing at the steel protruding from his throat.

But it didn’t change anything. It was a drop of water in an ocean of shit.

The sensory overload of the chanting, the screaming, the sudden explosion of violence, and the sight of Hale’s motionless body almost completely fried my synapses.

My peripheral vision tunneled into blackness.

I didn’t hear the footsteps behind me. I didn’t pick up on the shadow looming over my shoulder until it was already too late.

A heavy, crushing blow descended onto the back of my skull.

The world fractured into a brilliant flash of white pain. My knees buckled instantly, the ground rushing up to meet me. As my face hit the freezing dirt, the darkness rushed in from the edges of my vision, heavy and absolute.

The last thing my fading consciousness could register was the sound of a voice, Lila’s, screaming my name as my world completely vanished into the dark.