“NO! P-please stop! *cough* I… I’m sorry!” I had to beat him to the point of exhaustion before I started to try and force the gas down his throat. “Just shut up and die already…" This isn’t nearly as fast as I thought it would be. “This is taking way longer than I thought it would. I’ll try bleach next; otherwise, it’s just faster to choke them to death or drown them in a puddle.

I finally got enough gas in him for him to die. That was a lesson learned, gas isn’t as deadly right away as you’d think. I had to go through multiple gallon jugs for it to kill him finally. It was a struggle to get him to drink it, and a struggle for his body to keep it in. Any amount of bleach a person drinks is deadly, but it would also cause heavy bleeding, which would mean I’d need to be careful not to cause too much damage, otherwise it wouldn’t create a perfectly intact zombie.

Everyone in the room was silent as they watched me slowly drown this man with gasoline. Even the women had pressed themselves as far away from me as their bodies could. To be fair, I did just do some unhinged shit. It didn’t take a genius to see how they viewed me, how they viewed the person that saved them from a terrible life of being used for sexual relief until they were broken or dead. “Oh, sorry, should I have put him out of his misery faster? I’ve seen what he’s done, how many good men did these prisoners kill?”

Moving over to the other man who had stayed the entire time after seeing me pierce the back of the one that tried to run, he pissed himself at some point. He had frozen in fear and silently watched me kill his new boss, silent tears streaming down his face from the horror of what was happening. I moved with fluid motion as I slashed his neck.

It had been a long time since I was this violent, but I knew it needed to be done. These girls would spread the rumor of how I killed this man, it was in such a ridiculous way that many would doubt it… But how many wouldn’t think of attacking our base because… What if it were true?

It was a method of using extreme overkill to spot potential threats in the future; it had worked for other bases, but the biggest problem with that method was that the person had to stay the strongest. The moment they weren’t the strongest anymore, they’d be put down in a similar brutal fashion. I wouldn’t have that problem. Even if I didn’t consume any more cores, I’d just naturally be stronger than anyone, at least for the first ten years of the apocalypse.

I looked at the crowd again, the few that didn’t flinch away from my sight looked at me with fear or disgust. All except the woman who accidentally shot me. I had glanced at her out of the corner of my eye when I was killing the leader, and the only thing I saw on her face was satisfaction. She might have been slightly deranged, but as she only fired one bullet and let me kill him after, it was clear she hadn’t gone insane.

She looked athletic, most of her clothes were covered in blood or stains from being tied by herself for so long. It had me curious. I moved over to free her as I asked. “I’m curious. Why are you separated from the other girls?” 

I freed her, she looked warily at me, gun still in hand, as she rubbed her wrists that had been rubbed raw and bloody from the handcuffs. She kept eye contact with me for a few seconds before looking around, finding a knife, and running toward it. I let her, thinking she might have come back to fight me, instead she moved to one of the downed me. Stabbing him over and over again, she cried out. “You. Fucking. Bastard. I did. So. Much. For. You. And you. CHEAT. ON. ME!”

She kept stabbing for over a minute, dozens, if not hundreds, of times before she stopped, her chest heaving from exhaustion, as I noticed she was slick with sweat. She spoke through deep heaves of breath. “I *huff* fought back. I *huff* managed to kill *huff* one of the prisoners *huff* and took his gun.” She pointed at the dead man she had just stabbed with the gun.

“And this fuck. This subhuman here betrayed me to their gang. I had been with him because he was soft spoken and kind *huff* but look where that got me. The leader of the prisoners was so mad that I killed one of his men that he tied me up and had me watch my boyfriend have sex with other girls. I think he wanted to break me, but all it did was make me more pissed at the both of them. If anyone tried anything, I’d have bit their dick off or killed them as soon as I could move my hands.”

I freed them all before I asked. “Is that all of them? Do you see any of them that were out on patrol or something that might come back?” A bubbly blonde spoke up. “Yeah, there is a balding Mexican, and two of the bigger college guys aren’t here either. They were sent by Titus to find my roommate, who escaped.” She was one of the few who didn’t look completely disheveled. She had offered herself to them to keep from being tied down, which let her take care of the girls who didn’t agree to be part of their gang.

There were too many to worry about, so I let them have the guns as I warned them to protect themselves; otherwise, they could end up in the same situation again if those guys came back. I waited for the people to turn into zombies before killing them and harvesting their cores. Some of them didn’t have one, it appeared that the drop rate was starting to slow down.

I didn’t know why every zombie dropped cores when they first started appearing, but out of all the fifteen people I killed, only five had cores. A core every three zombies was still far, far higher than what I remembered in my previous life. It wasn’t even one out of every hundred, unless they survived a significant portion of time. Going back into cities and killing zombies that hadn’t seen people for a long time resulted in higher cores than average. But once again, it was maybe one out of every ten at best.

I claimed the two zombies that had powers. The leader was obviously a strength-based powered, while the one who protected the door was a five-time endurance zombie. I hadn’t noticed he was harder to kill, but once again, I was extremely, extremely strong. The man could have possibly survived having a gun unloaded into him, but he couldn’t survive the lack of blood to his brain. 

I talked to the two girls who could gain powers in the future. “Listen, you both can gain powers. I can give you a core right now that will let you activate your powers like that big black guy I killed and turned into a zombie. But I’m done giving handouts. If you want a core, you have to work for me.” 

It was clear to everyone that the world wasn’t going to go back to normal. Both agreed to follow me as I gave them their cores. Both froze for a second while the core activated their powers. Darcy gained elasticity, which boosted her physical stats up to about double, her endurance to about four times normal, but also made it almost impossible to injure her with blunt force attacks. She could survive being thrown off the Empire State Building, as long as she didn’t land on a sharp rock at the bottom.

Beatrice gained vision-based teleportation. She could teleport herself(and possibly others in the future) to anywhere in her line of sight. My breath hitched as she told me her power. That was insanely overpowered. One of the bigger apocalypse cities had a second in command who could teleport in a similar way. If I didn’t know for sure it was a man, that’s where I thought Beatrice would have ended up. She had most likely died in the first timeline.