Chapter XX: The Hunt Begins

I've Done It Before

The first thing The Zombie Hunter noticed about Boron was the silence. Not true silence—Boron hadn't earned that luxury yet. Somewhere beyond the hills, warning bells continued to ring. Runecorp's containment towers hummed along the horizon, and every so often a distant crash rolled through the valley. But compared with the Boron he remembered, the land felt dead.

He had traveled these roads before. Years ago, when another outbreak threatened settlements far beyond the wasteland, people called him crazy for walking toward the infected instead of away from them. By the time it ended, nobody was laughing.

He'd learned what most people never wanted to know: how the infected moved, how they hunted, and how quickly panic could destroy a settlement before the dead ever reached it. Most importantly, he'd learned that surviving an outbreak required someone willing to do what everyone else was too frightened to do.

So when word reached him that Boron was falling, he turned around.

He came home.

The highway leading toward town told him most of what he needed to know. Wagons had been abandoned along the roadside. Suitcases lay open beneath autumn trees. Runecorp barriers blocked routes that hadn't been blocked when he left, and beyond them cold white containment lights stretched across the mountains.

Then he saw the balloons.

Three of them had been tied to a weathered road marker—red, yellow, and blue. The Zombie Hunter stopped and studied them for a moment. He had heard the stories. Apparently, the infection had found The Balloon Man.

"Wonderful," he muttered before continuing toward town.

The closer he came to Boron, the worse it became. Barricades had been torn apart. Doors hung from broken hinges. Entire sections of the market district had been abandoned. Deep gouges scarred one street where something enormous had moved through.

Whatever The Stranger had unleashed wasn't behaving like the outbreaks he'd fought before. That concerned him.

The Zombie Hunter had faced the dead. He understood the dead. But Boron wasn't simply dealing with zombies anymore. The infection was changing them.

Stories had already traveled beyond the containment zone. There was an infected carnival performer leaving balloons throughout the forest. A three-headed clown tearing through the town. A massive carnival patron survivors had begun calling The Alpha.

Mutations.

That was new.

Still, new didn't mean unbeatable. Eventually, every monster made a mistake.

The Zombie Hunter reached the ridge overlooking the carnival shortly before sunset and stopped there for several minutes. It was difficult to reconcile what he saw with his memories of this place.

He remembered Boron during autumn. Golden trees. Warm cider. Families walking toward the carnival beneath strings of lanterns while music drifted across the valley. He remembered a place where people still found reasons to celebrate despite everything the world had taken from them.

Now the Ferris wheel stood motionless against the gray sky. The Big Top disappeared beneath layers of fog. Torn banners moved through empty streets while Runecorp's containment lights blinked beyond the mountains.

The place looked lost.

It wasn't.

Not yet.

The Zombie Hunter descended the ridge.

By nightfall, word began spreading among the survivors. Someone had crossed the western checkpoint. Someone had walked directly through the Dead Zone. Someone had passed the balloons and kept going.

At first, nobody believed it.

Then a series of distant impacts echoed from somewhere beyond the market district. Silence followed. Minutes later came another, this time closer.

Survivors hiding inside the old buildings began looking through cracks in boarded windows. They couldn't see much through the fog, but the infected had noticed something.

They were moving.

Not toward the shelters.

Away from them.

That was when people began believing the stories.

The Zombie Hunter had returned.

Inside Runecorp, his arrival caused a very different reaction. Cameras followed him through Boron while analysts pulled archived records. Old files appeared on monitors that hadn't been opened in years.

Someone inside the observation room recognized him immediately.

"That's impossible."

Another technician enlarged the image.

"No. That's him."

A file appeared across the central monitor.

ZOMBIE HUNTER

Most of the information beneath the name had been classified.

The director stared at the screen. "What's he doing here?"

Nobody needed to answer.

The Zombie Hunter already knew exactly what he was doing.

He reached the edge of the old carnival shortly after midnight. Something moved between the abandoned game stalls. Then another shape appeared, followed by several more.

The Hunter stopped.

For the first time since returning to Boron, he smiled.

"There you are."

The infected began moving toward him, but he didn't move. He had seen this before. Different town. Different faces. Different outbreak.

Same mistake.

They thought they were hunting him.

The Zombie Hunter tightened his grip on his weapon and looked across the ruined carnival. The Stranger had turned Boron into an experiment. Runecorp had turned it into a containment zone. The infected had turned it into a hunting ground.

Fine.

Let them.

They had forgotten one important thing.

Hunters lived here too.

The first infected rushed from the darkness. The Zombie Hunter stepped forward.

"I've done this before."

Another emerged from behind the tents, then another.

His smile widened.

"I can do it again."

For the first time since Patient Zero took his first bite, something had entered Boron that the infected themselves had reason to fear.

The hunt had begun.