Day 3: An Atheist Who Learned to Pray

The group had already left the rooftops by the time they made their way to Grand Mont Plaza. There were a massive amount of corpses that adorned the fourth floor and many of the zombies were still active, moving around the lower floors of the plaza. Faced with this Nikolai opted to take the body of a woman who was crawling on the ground, already turned, and carried her to the inside of the shoe store that was located below the stairs to go to the rooftop.

With a knife Nikolai cut open her torso while Jason held the two walls of the body for the Serb to pull out the woman's rotting organs. It could already be seen that there was a considerable amount of larva crawling through the remains.

—Something we learned is that to walk among them we must be like them. —Nikolai finished dissecting the woman and eventually buried in her head the same knife with which he cut her open. —Not quite literally, but you'll understand.

With his hands covered by blood-stained leather gloves, Nikolai began to rub his hands and part of the organs on Jason's back, chest, legs and arms that were already covered by the tactical suit they stole from the gun store. Jason took a white mask that he stole from a costume store and, this only covered his mouth, as it had two holes for his eyes and two small holes for his nose.

The police officers watched in horror as Nikolai "painted" the mask and Jason now emanated an unpleasant odor and his clothing was highlighted by the green, black, purple and red colors that were traces left by Nikolai when he rubbed the flesh on Jason's clothing.

Later Nikolai went through the same process looking even more intimidating because of his large size and remarkable wingspan. Anyone who saw him would think that Nikolai would be a killing machine, a being that came from somewhere so dark that he wouldn't mind taking the lives of both the living and the dead.

And they would be right.

—Yesterday I was surrounded by those things, and as I killed some of them... apparently the blood that splashed over me covered me. We believe the dead identify themselves by smells and noises. —Jason dragged the woman's body over to where the cops were. —Who goes first?

Matthew was the first of the policemen to be "marked" with the woman's blood. He was holding back the urge to vomit and the disgust he felt was indescribable. Just breathing was difficult and when he took a breath of air for a moment he thought that whatever was in the blood would travel to his mouth through that desperate inhalation for air.

Greg showed only disgust, this from his expressions and the rude things he said every time he got a piece of meat smeared on his chest.

—Let's see if it's safe.

Nikolai came out of the shoe store and approached a man, he was an already turned guy who was missing half the skin on his face. When he approached Nikolai he just sniffed him and continued on his way. Nikolai had never been so close to a zombie, he could see its black eyes, completely dilated and the pupil had a characteristic brown color very well marked. He saw how it died, apparently it was devoured in a group since part of its clothes were torn, under those spaces there were bite marks.

He had been gutted.

Nikolai walked away from the man and motioned for the others to follow him, waving his hands. The group stood nearby, watching as the dead fought each other or were eating each other. Those who were "fresh" seemed to be talking, though they only babbled the letters "a" and "o" repeatedly, when angry they growled.

Very carefully the group left the squares making sure not to bump into any of the dead and to be careful with their steps. When they got out to the park they realized that things were much worse there. Nikolai commented that Megan told him that the civilians tried to escape using their cars,... but it was really useless since the dead got them first. It was not surprising to see cars with blood all over the seats inside.

Jason was most shocked to see a crib with remains, although he didn't want to go near it to see what it was.

The group had to go around the park where they could see how the dead varied, some of them were completely roasted but still moving, others were zombies crawling on the ground unable to use their legs, probably because they were run over.

By the time they first arrived at Spring Plaza things were not as they expected.

Spring Plaza stood out as the area with the most space in the mall, it could simply be Black Card Plaza and Pink Flamingo Plaza combined. Something that called the attention of the place was that there were two huge supermarkets, there was a cinema, also three luxury restaurants and it had establishments of Vallimorth's own bank, followed by several instances where people could go and make payment of services such as water, electricity or light.

It didn't take them long to see their target when in the distance one of the elevators leading to the upper floors of Spring Plaza glittered with a man inside, a group of zombies around him and the elevator wouldn't go up or down, it was stuck.