All Chapters of Project Dakota: Rising of the dead: Chapter 41 - Chapter 50

The scene at the Gables’ porch was no longer a private tragedy. The initial, piercing scream had acted like a grim summons, pulling people from their homes and their morning routines. They gathered in a loose, hesitant semicircle, a silent, growing audience to the horror. The air, once fresh with the promise of dawn, was now thick with the metallic tang of blood and the low, anxious hum of murmured voices. Faces, pale and drawn in the morning light, were etched with a familiar dread—the kind that came from knowing that no walls, no matter how well-fortified, could ever truly keep the darkness out.I found myself drifting forward, pulled by a morbid, investigative compulsion that overrode the visceral urge to flee. The initial shock was hardening into a cold, sharp focus. My eyes, against the protest of my churning stomach, traced the brutal narrative carved into Mr. Gable’s body. It was a path of destruction so deliberate, so savagely precise, that it spoke of a mind not merely fractu

The silence in my own head was a screaming thing. It had been days since the murder, days since we had all made that unspoken, desperate pact to pretend that the world had not cracked open beneath our feet. We moved through the sterile, fluorescent-lit halls of the Arcadia Sanctuary like ghosts performing a pantomime of normalcy. But the pretense was a fragile shell, and the memory of Mr. Gable’s blood-soaked body was a corrosive acid eating away at its underside. My thoughts kept circling back to one immutable, terrifying fact: Eli was hunting the immune. And my mind, traitorously, kept pulling Lester into that dark orbit.I found him in the common area, meticulously cleaning a set of tools that already gleamed. Lester, with his open face and a soul that seemed to have been forged from a purer, simpler metal than the rest of ours. His trust was a given, not a prize to be won. It was his greatest strength and, I feared, his most fatal flaw.“Lester,” I began, my voice carefully neutra

The walk back from Eli’s condo to the flickering lantern-light of the memorial was a journey through a landscape of silent, shared horror. Carlos and I did not speak a word. We didn’t need to. The image of that blood-caked knife, the stiff, gore-soaked fabric, was seared onto the back of my eyelids, a grotesque negative of the peaceful scene we were returning to. The very air felt different now, tainted. Each shadow we passed seemed to hold the potential of Eli’s grinning, duplicitous face. The distant, murmured prayers from the memorial service sounded less like comfort and more like a dirge for our own shattered innocence.We moved like ghosts, our footsteps silent on the grass, our bodies tense, coiled springs of dreadful knowledge. The normal sounds of the night—the chirping of crickets, the sigh of the wind through the skeletal trees—now felt like a mockery. How could the world continue its mundane rhythms when we now knew a murderer walked among us, his hands steeped in blood, h

The world narrowed to the shattered maw of the doorway. My feet were rooted to the spot, fused to the concrete by a surge of primal ice that shot up from the ground and into my veins. My breath, which had been coming in ragged gasps from the fight on the bridge, simply stopped. The scene in the lobby was a still life of slaughter.It wasn’t the random, hungry chaos of the dead. This was… methodical. Calculated. Chairs were overturned not from a struggle, but from a systematic search. Lockers were pried open, their contents—old magazines, a few cans of food, a child’s torn teddy bear—strewn across the floor like garbage. And the bodies… they weren’t just bitten. They were executed.A man I vaguely recognized, Mark, was slumped against the reception desk. He’d been shot in the back of the head. A dark, tidy hole in his skull, the exit wound a grotesque blossom of bone and brain matter on the polished wood of the desk in front of him. Another, a woman named Sarah, lay face down in a cong

The world has become a study in shades of gray and decay, but the sound of Carlos’s axe biting into the padlock of the auto shop’s rear gate was a brilliant, shocking note of clarity. It wasn’t a delicate sound. It was a percussive, violent clang of steel meeting steel, a noise that seemed to tear a hole in the oppressive silence that had settled over this part of the city. I flinched, my knuckles turning white where they gripped the cold, familiar weight of my pistol. Every loud sound felt like a blasphemy now, a challenge issued to the dead who were always, always listening.Sparks flew, a tiny, fleeting fireworks display in the overcast afternoon light. Moe stood a few feet back, his own rifle sweeping the debris-strewn alley behind us, a constant, vigilant silhouette. I watched the muscles in Carlos’s back and shoulders bunch and release with each swing. He was a big man, built like a slab of granite, and the axe was an extension of his will. With a final, grunting heave, the lock