Chapter 194: Boardwalk At Day

“So did you have a good sleep together?” Molly asked with a smile. “I hope you were gentle with her—a bullet wound is extremely painful, and she needed proper rest.”

I glanced at her with an expression asking ’are you serious?’ “She’s stronger than she appears. And she’s not my girlfriend.”

The clarification came out perhaps more emphatically than strictly necessary, which only seemed to amuse Molly further based on the way her smile widened slightly.

“Tell me, boy—how old are you exactly?” Molly asked suddenly, her tone shifting from teasing to genuinely curious.

“Seventeen,” I said simply.

I’d turned seventeen back in June. The others had held a small celebration for me—nothing elaborate, just shared rations that were slightly better than usual and a few kind words. Our situation had been too dire for anything more substantial, and honestly, I hadn’t wanted anything bigger. Surviving another year felt less like an achievement and more like postponing the inevitable.

“W…What?” Molly stopped walking entirely and turned to stare at me with an expression caught somewhere between shock and disbelief. “Seventeen?”

“What?” I asked, genuinely confused by her reaction.

Molly looked me over carefully, her gaze traveling from my face down to my boots and back up again, reassessing everything she’d observed about me through this new lens.

“You sound and behave much older than that,” she said finally. “I would have guessed twenty minimum based on how you carry yourself and handle situations.”

It was probably because of the Dullahan virus and what it had done to me over the past months. My body had changed in ways that went beyond simple physical fitness. I’d grown taller—at least three inches since the infection, putting me well over six feet now. My frame had filled out with muscle that was denser and more defined than anything natural exercise could have produced. Even my face had matured, the last traces of adolescent softness burned away and replaced with harder angles from what Rachel told me.

I knew on some level that my genetics themselves had been altered, rewritten by whatever alien science the Dullahan virus represented. But I wasn’t an expert in biology or xenology or whatever field would even apply here. All I knew with certainty was that something had happened to me at a fundamental level, and was probably still happening, still changing me in ways I couldn’t fully perceive or control.

I preferred to simply ignore that reality most of the time. Thinking too hard about what I was becoming felt like staring into an abyss that might stare back.

Without the Dullahan enhancement, I would have died long ago anyway—probably in the first week of the outbreak, torn apart by infected or starved in some hiding spot. Whatever price I was paying for survival seemed acceptable compared to the alternative.

“We don’t have much choice about how we act in this world,” I said quietly. “You grow up fast or you don’t grow up at all.”

“You’re right about that,” Molly replied, her expression sobering into something sadder and more reflective. “Even children have to act like adults if they want to survive nowadays. Childhood as we understood it doesn’t really exist anymore, does it?”

“That’s not the worst part, unfortunately,” I said, feeling something dark and heavy settling in my chest. “People like us have been lucky—we had friends and family, we found communities quickly after the outbreak, we had resources and skills to pool together. But billions of other people didn’t have the same chances we did.”

The images rose in my mind despite my best efforts to keep them buried: children wandering the streets as infected, their small bodies violated by the virus, jaws torn and hanging, stomachs split open, tiny hands reaching with mindless hunger.

Children. Small children. Six years old, five, four, even younger. All of their faces were etched into my memory no matter how desperately I tried to bury them away in mental compartments I never opened. Every single one of them haunted me .

I couldn’t help thinking about their final moments. How scared they must have been. How painful it must have been as infected—maybe their own parents, transformed and unrecognizable—tore into their flesh and ate them alive. The screaming. The confusion. The absolute terror of being consumed by monsters wearing familiar faces.

It was inhuman. Worse than inhuman—it was a calculated atrocity.

I clenched my fists unconsciously, nails digging into my palms hard enough to leave crescents in the skin.

If this had been a natural virus that mutated organically through random chance, it would have been tragic but bearable in some fundamental way. An act of cruel nature, meaningless and impersonal. But knowing what I knew—that this virus had been engineered and purposefully spread by an alien race with specific genocidal intent—that changed everything. It transformed tragedy into crime, accident into murder, genocide in planetary level.

“Cooperation has been the only thing keeping any of us alive until now,” I added, forcing my voice to remain leveled. “All of us. Every survivor community. We only made it this far by working together, pooling resources, protecting each other.”

And cooperation might be the only possible way humanity could ever stand against the Starakians in any meaningful sense. But… I refused to drag everyone I loved into what seemed like a completely hopeless fight against vastly superior technology and numbers.

How hypocritical did that sound? How contradictory was my thinking?

On one hand, I was determined to recover Elena from Russia, to cross an ocean and traverse a continent just to find her. On the other hand, I was planning to somehow fight the Starakians, to make them pay for what they’d done to Earth. But simultaneously, I wanted to protect my makeshift family from exactly that kind of suicidal confrontation.

Nothing about my thoughts was coherent. I felt completely overwhelmed by conflicting emotions pulling me in different directions with equal intensity.

But I genuinely couldn’t live with myself if I just settled down, found or built some semblance of family and safety, knowing the Starakians were still out there hunting people like me and killing millions in their path. The guilt would destroy me more surely than any infected could.

Jasmine had been one of their casualties—killed because they wanted to capture Wanda and eliminate me as a threat. And there would be more victims if nothing changed, if no one acted .

But who the hell was I to attempt some kind of desperate heroic stand against an entire alien race with technology that made our most advanced weapons look like stone tools?

In that nightmare vision I’d woken from, I’d seen hundreds of Frost Walkers among countless other varieties of engineered bioweapons and advanced technologies. We’d struggled to kill even one Frost Walker at Jackson Township—it had required multiple people, careful planning, and significant resources just to bring down a single specimen.

If the Starakians genuinely committed to exterminating humanity with their full capabilities, they could wipe us off the planet in weeks, maybe days. In some twisted way, using the Infected Virus to slowly transform and eliminate us was actually the ’gentlest’ method they could have employed. A quick mercy compared to what their actual military might could accomplish.

“Cooperation is indeed essential,” Molly said, her voice pulling me back from the spiral of dark thoughts. “But too much selflessness can ruin the small community you’ve managed to save. Sometimes protecting your own has to come first, even when it means turning away others who need help.”

Was that another polite way of warning me not to push for our community to settle here? A gentle reminder that their resources were already stretched and they couldn’t absorb sixty additional mouths to feed?

“We won’t cause any problems for you or your community,” I said simply, keeping my tone neutral.

“I hope that’s true,” Molly replied, and there was something in her voice—not quite suspicion. “You seem like someone who cares deeply about your people, so I think you understand how difficult managing a community becomes. We’re supporting over two hundred survivors here. Every decision has to account for all those lives.”

“I understand completely,” I said dryly, recognizing the subtext clearly enough. “Resource scarcity makes every choice life-or-death.”

“Where are we going, exactly?” I asked then, realizing we’d left the hotel entirely and were now walking along the Boardwalk itself.

Now that it was late morning with bright sunlight flooding everything, I had a perfect view of the Boardwalk and the surrounding area for the first time.

The wooden planks stretched in both directions, weathered gray by decades of salt air and foot traffic, some sections replaced with mismatched lumber where rot or damage had required repairs. To our right, the beach spread out toward the Atlantic Ocean—golden sand marked with scattered debris and the high-tide line visible as a darker band. The waves rolled in with steady rhythm, their sound a constant backdrop that felt almost peaceful compared to the infected-filled urban ruins we’d been navigating.

To our left stood the buildings that had once made Atlantic City famous: massive casino-hotels rising like monuments to excess and optimism, their facades still showing traces of neon glory beneath layers of grime and neglect. Many windows were broken or boarded. Some structures showed fire damage. Others appeared relatively intact but clearly abandoned.

Between and behind these towers, I could see the defensive works Marlon’s community had constructed—barricades blocking streets, firing positions on rooftops, watch towers improvised from scaffolding and scavenged materials. The settlement extended several blocks inland from the beach, creating a substantial territory that must have required enormous effort to clear and secure.

“Marlon keeps his headquarters in one of the smaller hotels near the pier,” Molly explained, gesturing ahead toward a structure that was noticeably more modest than the towering casino where we’d spent the night. “He prefers something defensible and practical over impressive. Former military thinking, I suppose.”

“Are we heading there, then?” I asked.

“No, actually—he’s waiting for you here,” Molly said, stopping and pointing toward an arched entrance on our left side, set back slightly from the main Boardwalk path.

I looked up at the weathered signage mounted above the archway, reading the faded letters: Brighton Park.

The entrance was framed by decorative stonework that had probably been impressive once, back when Atlantic City was a thriving tourist destination. Now the stone showed cracks and water damage, and some of the ornamental elements had broken off entirely. But someone had clearly made efforts to maintain it—the area around the entrance was swept clean of debris, and the metal gates that probably once locked at night had been removed or propped permanently open.

“This place was quite a mess when we first reached it after the initial chaos,” Molly explained as we turned to enter the park. “We managed to clear the Boardwalk of infected fairly quickly—that was the priority since it gave us the most defensible position with ocean at our backs. But Marlon absolutely insisted on preserving this particular spot. Said we needed somewhere peaceful and quiet, somewhere that reminded people what they were fighting to protect. It was also his favorite place before the outbreak—he used to come here to think, apparently.”

As we walked along the park’s main path, I spotted several people going about various tasks. Some carried buckets of water from what must be a working well or cistern somewhere within the park grounds. Others tended to what looked like small vegetable plots carved out of former flower beds. A few sat on benches performing maintenance on weapons or mending clothes.

All of them glanced at me as we passed—their gazes carrying that mix of curiosity and wariness.

None of them called out or challenged us, though. Molly’s presence served as implicit authorization, a stamp of approval that allowed us to pass without confrontation thankfully.

“It does look remarkably clean,” I acknowledged, glancing around at the maintained pathways and deliberately preserved landscaping. “You’d almost think infected had never stepped foot in here.”

The park was surprisingly intact compared to most places I’d seen since the outbreak. Paths had been swept clear of debris and fallen leaves. The grass in some sections looked like it had even been cut recently, probably with hand tools since powered lawn equipment would be long dead. Small trees and bushes showed signs of careful pruning rather than wild overgrowth. Someone—or more likely many someones—had invested significant labor into maintaining this space.

“It took considerable time and effort,” Molly said with obvious pride in her voice. “Marlon was extremely stubborn about it, did most of the work himself in the early days when we had more pressing survival concerns. But eventually others started helping—partly because he shamed us into it, partly because we began to understand why it mattered. Having one place that wasn’t just about survival, that held some beauty and peace… it helps people remember they’re still human.”

I understood that instinct on a fundamental level. In the face of endless horror and degradation, preserving something beautiful became an act of defiance, a statement that humanity was more than just surviving day-to-day.

“And where is he?” I asked, scanning the park ahead but not immediately spotting anyone who seemed like they were waiting for a meeting.

“Right there,” Molly said, pointing ahead along the main path toward the center of the park.

I followed her gesture and her gaze.

At first I only heard the sound—a rhythmic thunk-thunk-thunk of something sharp cutting into wood.

Then I saw him.

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