Berserkers Under the Blood Moon

New chapter is live.

Settle in, take your time, and let's see what waits in the dark 🖤

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Evan's eyes glowed faintly red in the night.

Whenever he looked up at the Blood Moon, the color deepened.

He sat in the car, breathing shallowly, though he had not moved. His heartbeat was loud enough that it almost seemed to carry beyond the windows.

His hands gripped the steering wheel. He did not even notice the veins standing out along his forearms.

Heat rose from his mouth with each breath, driven by blood moving too fast through his body.

He looked like a machine running past its limit.

Tap.

Evan turned his head without expression.

A walker was bumping its head against the car window.

It could not see him through the one-way tint, but the light, confused tapping had become a frantic assault accompanied by a hoarse growl. Even with brain matter smearing the glass, it kept slamming itself forward.

It was 11:59 p.m.

Evan shifted gears, wrapped both hands around the wheel, and drove straight ahead.

A red haze filled his vision.

Under the Blood Moon, the walkers were not the only things going mad.

He glanced into the rearview mirror.

The walker that had been beating itself against the window was running.

Its movement looked almost human, but wrong in too many places. Watching it was enough to make the skin crawl.

Lightning tore through the blood mist that had swallowed the sky.

Behind that walker, more than a dozen blurred shapes lurched into motion. They sprinted after Evan with no hesitation at all.

"Fewer than twenty," Evan said through his teeth. "They run just a little slower than a healthy adult. If they surround me head-on, I'm dead."

"This is insane. These are the same walkers that can barely shuffle in daylight?"

Even at Lv. 6, one mistake against a dozen Berserker Walkers could get Evan eaten alive.

The Blood Moon followed above the car, fixed over him like it was riding on his shoulders.

If anyone else could see it, they might have thought Evan himself was carrying the moon.

Lightning split the sky again, carving open the red fog and exposing the hideous faces behind him.

The dead did not tire. They did not fear. They wanted to eat Evan, or become experience for him.

Since the 7 Days to Die system had awakened, the system had made Evan and the dead natural enemies.

Then the road ahead grew familiar.

Red-eyed, Evan smiled in a way he rarely did.

"I can't handle all of you alone," he said. "But if I get some help, that's different."

"You want me dead, system? Tough shit. I'm staying alive."

The fortified yard came into view.

Evan jerked the wheel. The car swung sideways, drifted, and crashed through the entrance.

Bang.

The impact woke everyone inside.

Before they could react, Evan activated the smoke grenade and threw it.

Then he slung the Horse-Bone Sledgehammer across his back, stepped onto the roof of the car, and climbed onto the building.

Fast footsteps sounded inside. One man pushed the door open, and more than a dozen followed him out.

"You came back?" a bald man roared. "Watch every exit. He's not getting away this time. I'm burnin' him alive!"

The man radiated violence. His right hand was blackened and wrapped in blood-soaked bandages.

The explosion from the other night had clearly caught him.

All the usable vehicles had been destroyed, so they had never been able to hunt Evan's team down. Now Evan had returned on his own, and the bald man took it like a gift.

His remaining people, a little over a dozen armed men, raised their guns and squinted through the smoke, trying to see inside the car.

Then a staggering shape appeared, its outline sharpening as the smoke thinned.

The bald man's face lit up.

"Fire!"

A dozen armed men pulled their triggers at once.

Muzzle flashes tore through the smoke, filling the air with the smell of gunpowder.

The staggering figure jerked as dozens of bullets punched into it. After a few struggling steps, it collapsed.

The smoke cleared.

The men approached carefully.

The bald man rushed ahead, used the barrel of his rifle to roll the body over, and froze.

"That's a walker?"

At the same moment, more than a dozen screams erupted behind him.

Not human.

Not animal.

Every man in the yard stiffened and turned toward the gate.

A line of walkers stood there, though they no longer looked like the slow dead these men knew. Their heads twitched at different rhythms. Their eyes moved.

The sight made the men swallow hard and step back.

"Put them down," the bald man snapped, turning toward the house. "Then search. Those bastards are still nearby. We settle this tonight. They killed my people, blew up every damn-"

He never finished.

Through the roar of gunfire came a string of screams that made the blood go cold.

The bald man's stomach dropped, and his breath caught.

He turned in disbelief.

A rotten face filled his vision, less than a foot from his own.

"Fuc-"

He struggled to raise his rifle.

The gun was too long at that distance. The muzzle pressed into the walker's abdomen, and he fired several times.

The walker lunged forward and wrenched its head back.

His scream shook the yard as it tore one eye from his skull, nerves and bloody tissue stretching after it.

The walker swallowed, then bit into his throat.

Half his neck vanished. His head lost its support and rolled across the ground.

On the roof, Evan watched the slaughter below and felt no pity.

He only clicked his tongue.

"Waste."

"This group wasn't weak. They had weapons, ammo, and supplies. Stronger than Greene Farm by a mile."

"But they treated Berserkers like ordinary walkers. That decided it."

"Fifteen against fifteen, and they still got crushed."

For ordinary survivors, Blood Moon Berserkers were a brutal escalation.

People used to the slow dead could not imagine walkers that ran almost as fast as living men and ignored gunfire unless the head was destroyed.

At that speed, landing clean headshots was not easy.

By then, Evan could already tell this raider group would be wiped out tonight.

They had always relied on numbers, guns, cruelty, and striking first.

They had never imagined that one day Evan would bring Berserkers to harvest them instead.

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