Commander Li’s eyes followed the rat as it disappeared beneath the broken foundation of one of the damaged buildings near the eastern barricade.

The thing moved quickly despite the strips of flesh hanging from its body, its swollen tail dragging through the mud before vanishing into the darkness beneath the concrete.

Then another rat followed it inside and Li’s expression hardened slightly.

Most people would have ignored it. A rat was a rat, especially now. But after seeing zombie birds dive at people’s eyes and watching undead cats climb over piles of bodies like predators hunting prey, Li no longer trusted anything small enough to disappear into places people stopped paying attention to.

The rats had come from somewhere. And judging by the condition of them, whatever was breeding them was getting worse.

"Commander?" Sun Ming asked from behind him.

Li tore his gaze away from the hole. "Come with me."

No one questioned him.

His men fell into step automatically as Li turned away from the military sector and followed the direction the rats had come from. The sounds of the base stayed loud behind them at first, shouting soldiers, distant alarms, engines struggling to start, but the further they walked, the quieter the military side became.

The walls changed first.

Concrete barriers gave way to chain-link fencing patched together with loose wire and broken boards. Floodlights stopped appearing every few meters, leaving entire stretches of the road dim enough that movement disappeared into shadow between one step and the next.

Then the smell hit. Not the blood or antiseptic smell of the medical buildings, but something much, much worse.

It smelled like rotting garbage that had been left too long in the rain. Human waste. Mold. Stagnant water. Bodies that had started decomposing before anyone bothered moving them.

It settled thick in the back of Li’s throat, almost choking him, as they crossed fully into the civilian district.

The civilian sector began less than two streets away from the military barricades, but it felt like an entirely different world.

Mud swallowed their boots with every step as they moved deeper into the district. The roads had disappeared beneath standing water and garbage, forcing civilians to walk through ankle-deep filth just to move between tents.

Torn tarps hung from ropes tied between poles and damaged buildings, the cheap plastic sagging beneath collected rainwater that dripped steadily onto the people crowded underneath.

The tents themselves barely counted as shelter.

Families packed together beneath sheets of plastic, old blankets, broken furniture, anything they could find that might block the cold wind long enough to survive the night. Children sat wrapped in damp clothes with hollow eyes and sunken cheeks while exhausted parents stared blankly ahead like they had already given up expecting things to improve.

And everywhere Li looked, he saw hunger. Not necessarily the type of hunger that could be solved by a simple meal, but the hunger born of pure desperation.

The kind that hollowed people out from the inside until survival was the only thing left.

Bodies lay scattered throughout the streets between the tents. Some had blankets thrown over them while others remained completely exposed, rainwater pooling around bloated limbs and pale faces.

Rats, both zombie and normal, crawled freely across them, tearing at flesh while civilians stepped around the corpses without slowing down.

No one reacted anymore.

That was somehow worse.

A child crouched beside one of the drainage ditches with an empty plastic bottle in his hands, carefully scraping muddy rainwater into it one drop at a time before bringing it immediately to his mouth. Nearby, another little boy sat against the side of a collapsed tent chewing slowly on what looked like wet cardboard while his mother stared at him with empty eyes.

People noticed the soldiers immediately.

Women grabbed children and pulled them closer as Li’s team walked past. Men lowered their heads and moved out of the way without being asked. Several civilians physically flinched when Zhao Yicheng’s fire flickered briefly around his hand after someone stumbled too close to him in the crowd.

It was clear that they were terrified of anyone in uniform, and Li couldn’t blame them. Not after seeing all this.

What made it worse was that the deeper they walked, the uglier it became.

Two men were fighting in the middle of the street over the body of a dead rat, both of them covered in mud as they clawed at each other hard enough to draw blood. One finally slammed the other face-first into the ground and grabbed the animal, clutching the bloody carcass against his chest like someone had handed him treasure.

A few tents further down, a woman sat in the mud rocking back and forth with a coughing child in her arms. The boy wheezed weakly against her chest while she whispered something over and over again under her breath, her voice completely broken.

Then Li heard shouting.

He turned automatically toward the sound.

A man stood beside one of the larger tents gripping a small child hard enough that the boy was crying from pain. The child couldn’t have been older than four.

"We agreed on twenty dollars," the father snapped angrily. He twisted the boy’s arm harder, forcing another scream out of him. "Look at him. He still has his baby fat. The meat will be tender. No muscles you have to cut through."

Li felt Chen Minghao freeze beside him.

A woman knelt in the mud nearby clutching another child tightly against her, her face buried against the older boy’s chest while she sobbed hard enough her entire body shook.

"Shut up, woman," the father sneered. "You’re the one that wants us to feed that useless brat. If you want food, we need money. Unless you want me to kill this one myself and we can just eat him?"

The woman’s cries broke into something louder, more desperate.

Then suddenly she shoved the older child away from her hard enough that he stumbled backward into the mud.

Before anyone could react, she pulled a knife from her waistband and drove it directly into her own chest.

Several civilians nearby screamed.

The woman collapsed immediately into the mud at her children’s feet while blood spread slowly through the rainwater beneath her body.

The father barely looked at her.

Instead, he glanced back toward the other man and jerked his chin toward the corpse. "I’ll throw in the mother for another ten. You know she’s fresh."

The buyer frowned. "Too old," he muttered dismissively. "Not worth more than five."

Commander Li stared at them.

No one else around the tents reacted much at all.

A few people looked over briefly before turning away again. One woman pulled her child closer and kept walking. Another man continued trying to start a small fire beneath a piece of metal roofing without even lifting his head.

Like this had already become normal.

"It’s no wonder Rouxi didn’t want to come here," Chen Minghao murmured quietly beside him, his face pale as he looked around at the civilians shrinking away from them.

No one disagreed.

Luo Xin suddenly moved.

The medic pushed past Li and dropped to his knees beside one of the tents where a woman clutched a bundled infant tightly against her chest. Her face was streaked with dirt and tears while she begged so hard her words barely sounded human anymore.

"Please," she cried. "Please save him. Please."

Luo Xin carefully pulled the blanket back.

Then froze.

Even from several feet away, Li could see the infant’s skin had already started turning grey beneath the dirt smeared across his face.

Death grey.

Luo Xin still tried.

Of course he did.

His hands glowed faintly as he pressed them against the baby’s chest, healing energy spreading through the tiny body in weak pulses that faded almost immediately. Luo Xin’s jaw tightened harder with every passing second before the glow finally disappeared altogether.

The baby never moved.

The sound the mother made afterward barely sounded human.

Luo Xin remained kneeling there in the mud for several long seconds, staring down at the dead infant in his hands while the woman screamed and sobbed beside him.

Around them, the civilian sector continued moving.

Children cried from hunger inside collapsing tents. People fought over scraps of food barely worth eating. Rats crawled through puddles thick with blood and garbage while civilians huddled beneath leaking tarps praying for things that were never going to come.

And somewhere deeper in the district, another person started screaming.