CHAPTER 5: It Said My Name

POV: Imani

The hall emptied in just a matter of seconds.

One moment, I was still processing the entire ceremony, still feeling the lingering sting in my palm and a strange buzzing sensation in my wrist. The next, I was being pushed along in a frantic crowd heading for the doors. Guards were shouting out formation numbers, and I caught a glimpse of a torch hitting the edge of a tapestry, followed quickly by someone trying to smother the flames with their bare hands. What struck me as odd was the sudden silence. After eight years of this turmoil, no one screamed. Instead, everyone moved quickly, faces tense and bodies rigid, with a grim determination that made it clear this wasn’t any one of them’s first time dealing with danger. They knew where they needed to go, what they needed to do, and they did it without wasting a single second.

As I was shoved into the outer corridor, I almost stumbled over a boy who looked to be about eight years old. He was sitting against the wall, blood trickling down from a cut above his eyebrow, and his mother was nowhere to be seen. People were stepping around him without stopping, their attention entirely fixed on the doors and the guards rushing through the corridor. I slowed down, my feet refusing to carry me past him, because leaving a bleeding child sitting alone against a wall was something I couldn’t bring myself to do, not even with everything that was happening around us. Before I even had time to think, my hands were already in motion trying to pick him up.

“Hey, look at me,” I said as I crouched down next to him, pressing my sleeve against his cut and felt him flinch beneath my touch before his body slowly went still. “It’s just a shallow cut, okay baby. You’re going to be alright. What’s your name?” I asked, keeping my voice calm even though my pulse was still racing so hard, hoping he would hear the steadiness in it and hold onto it.

“Tobin,” he replied, his voice coming out shaky.

“Okay, Tobin. I need you to press this cut really hard,” I instructed, placing his hand over the wound. “Do you know where your mom is?”

“I don’t…” he started to say, but before he could finish, the ground shook badly beneath us, shifting our weight. The movement was too heavy to be an earthquake, and it came with another impact that travelled through the floor and straight into my knees. Dust started falling from the ceiling beams as Tobin’s eyes widened, his fingers tightening around the sleeve that was pressed against his eyebrow.

“Stay close to this wall,” I told him firmly. “Someone is going to come for you. Just keep pressing against the cut and don’t let go.” I wasn’t sure if that was true, and the uncertainty of it tightened my throat, but it was all I had to offer him in this moment. I couldn’t leave him with nothing, so I pushed myself back up to my feet and found myself running toward the chaos rather than away from it. A part of me knowing that that was a terrible choice, but I pushed the thought aside before the fear of what could happen could convince me to turn around.

When I stepped into the courtyard, it felt like all hell had already broken loose. A lot of guards were armed with a mix of weapons, some holding a crowbar, others clutching rebar sharpened on one end, and one soldier was rationing shots from what looked like a real rifle. Firelight flickered across their faces, catching the strain in their expressions as they shouted over one another in so much panic. Smoke stung my eyes, the smell of burning fabric mixing with sweat, dirt, and something foul that I recognized almost immediately.

But what I saw didn’t look like the infected I had treated in the past. Those were fast, driven by primal instincts for hunger and noise, and predictable if you knew the patterns. This one moved differently, slowly and as if it had a purpose. It walked right past a guard swinging a crowbar at its head, absorbing the blow without so much as a flinch, and just kept moving.

It was moving in a straight line, and the moment I looked around to see what was happening was when I realized I was standing right in its path.

“Imani, move!”

I heard Zane shout, and something in the way his voice cracked made my chest tighten so hard I felt like I was falling to the ground. His voice was usually steady, controlled, and almost impossible to shake, but the strain in his voice meant that control was gone now. There was fear in it, raw enough that I felt it before I even saw him.

He rushed in between me and the creature before I had the time to react. And for one brief second, I saw the man from the ceremony in my mind, the composed man who had stood beside me whilst our wrists were bound together, the man whose fingers had tightened around mine when that strange sensation passed through the both of us suddenly. That man was gone now. Zane collided with the creature using his body, as a weapon, and the impact sent a sickening sound flying through the courtyard as something inside the creature ruptured.

But the creature didn’t go down with him as it got back up almost immediately. Zane didn’t back down either. He hit it again, blood splattering across his hands and forearms, dark in the fire’s glow. None of it seemed to be his own, and he didn’t even look at the blood. His teeth were bared, his shoulders tense, his breathing growing harsher as another growl tore out from his chest. He wasn’t calculating his movements anymore, wasn’t watching for an opening or waiting for someone else to give an order. Every part of him was completely focused on keeping that creature away from me.

My fingers curled at my sides with the realization that he was protecting me. The thought sent a strange rush of adrenaline through my chest, one I had no time to examine because the creature suddenly lunged itself toward me.

It was only able to get three feet closer to me before Zane’s hand closed around its throat from behind. His fingers tightened around the weak skin, his forearm straining as he pulled it backward with all his strength. The creature fought against him so badly that I started to feel tears roll down my face at the fear of it winning, but Zane held on tightly looking me intensely in the eyes, while dragging it down until it hit the ground fully.

In those moments when it was frighteningly close to me, I could see its eyes clearly, how they weren’t glazed like the other walkers I had encountered ever since this world ended. They were fixed on me, looking so focused and determined like it was sent to come for me personally. A cold rush of air moved across my skin, causing goosebumps to erupt all over me, as the smell of rotting flesh reached me, mixed with something else that made my stomach twist and turn.

Then in the blink of an eye, the creature opened its mouth. And what came out wasn’t a traditional snarl I had come to get used to. It had shape and rhythm, a guttural sound sounding out of it that formed two syllables, broken and wet, and dragged out from a throat that had long stopped functioning normally. The chaos of fighting continued around us, but then the noise seemed to fade just enough for me to hear what it was trying to say. ‘Ee-mah-nee’. My breath caught in my throat. It had said my name. There was literally no mistaking it, I’m very sure of that. That creation had said my name as clear as daylight.

Zane pulled the thing backward and slammed it directly into the ground with so much force that I heard a crack, followed by the sound of something giving way inside it. Even after that, it kept twitching terribly, its limbs jerking against the ground without any clear reaction to the damage. Its head remained turned toward me, its eyes still fixed intensely on mine, every part of me wanting to so badly look away, but I just couldn’t find it in me to.

Within seconds, Zane was in front of me. His hands gripped my face so tightly but carefully, warm palms pressing against my cheeks as he tilted my chin up to look at him. His eyes moved quickly over my face, down my neck, and across my shoulders and arms, checking every part of me he could see as the expression on his face continued to switch from worry to fear. His touch was firm, almost desperate, and I could feel the tension in his fingers.

“Tell me it didn’t touch you,” he said.

His voice was so raw, and I could see the blood smeared across his knuckles and soaking one of his forearms. He didn’t seem to notice any of it. His entire attention was on me, his thumb brushing against my cheek as his eyes searched all over mine.

“Imani. Look at me. Tell me it didn’t touch you, please.”

I hesitated, unable to respond right away. His hands were still on my face, his body close enough that I could feel the warmth radiating off of him despite the cold air around us. My gaze remained fixed over his shoulder at the creature on the ground. It was still twitching, still seeming to focus all its attention on me, just as it had since it stepped into this courtyard, like the fight had never really been the point, but its goal had always been to reach me.

“It didn’t have to,” I finally replied, my voice sounding steadier than I felt inside, almost unnaturally flat. “It already knew where to find me.”

Zane’s fingers tightened slightly against my cheeks, and his eyes stayed on mine for another second before I noticed movement behind him. I could hear footsteps that seemed unhurried amidst the whole chaos, and when I looked past him, I saw Naomi standing at the edge of the firelight. She looked completely composed, not a single hair on her head out of place, her eyes trained on the thing lying on the ground. Her expression held no trace of fear.

“Say that again,” she instructed.

Zane turned to her, still holding onto my face as if he wasn’t sure whether to let go. “Naomi, this is not the time for this.”

“Say it said her name.”

The entire courtyard fell silent around us, guards frozen mid action, the fire crackling somewhere behind Naomi. She wasn’t looking at me as she spoke; her eyes were locked on the creature on the floor still struggling. Her expression had morphed into something I recognized from the earlier event in the hall, from that moment when the recognition had passed between me and Zane. It wasn’t shock. It was like satisfaction, twisted into something darker than I could get myself to fully understand.

“Then he’s already found her,” she said, her voice low, almost like she was talking to herself, but there was enough stillness in the courtyard that every word reached me. “Just like he found the last one.”