Chapter 444: Aftermath of the Boardwalk’s Screamer [1]

The scream that tore through Atlantic City that night was something nobody in the Boardwalk would ever forget.

It was not a human scream.

It was not even close.

The sound came from somewhere beyond the streets and rooftops, huge and sharp enough to vibrate through the walls of every house. It dragged people out of bed. It made children cry before they even knew why. It made guards on the barricades stop and stare into the darkness, trying to understand what they were hearing.

Then the Infected came.

They crashed against the Boardwalk barricades in numbers no one had been prepared for.

The walls Marlon and his community had spent three months building did not hold for long. Under normal circumstances, the barricades could keep scattered Infected out. A few at a time could be handled. Guards could shoot them down, push them back, or lure them away before they became a serious threat.

But the Screamer changed them.

The sound pulled the Infected from all directions and pushed them into a frenzy. They threw themselves against wood, metal, and concrete without slowing down. Bodies piled against the barriers. Hands clawed through gaps. The pressure kept building until the defenses broke apart.

Then the swarms flooded in.

Every barricade was breached.

Infected poured into the Boardwalk streets while the Screamer continued to echo through the night. Houses that had been safe only hours earlier became traps. Doors were forced open. Windows shattered. People who had been sleeping woke to screams outside their rooms and footsteps running across the streets.

The attack lasted less than an hour.

It was enough.

The Boardwalk had been a home.

Not a perfect one. Nothing was perfect anymore. But people had built routines there. They shared food, guarded one another, fixed broken roofs, watched over children, and tried to make the small stretch of Atlantic City feel like somewhere worth living.

Callighan had taken all of that apart in a single night.

The Emerald Hotel had been chosen as the emergency gathering point long before the attack. Marlon had made sure everyone knew the plan: if the Boardwalk was breached, they were supposed to head there immediately.

Many made it.

Some ran through the streets with weapons in their hands. Others carried children. A few arrived bleeding or injured, helped along by neighbors who refused to leave them behind. The hotel doors closed behind them one group at a time, and the people already inside kept dragging furniture toward the entrances until the lobby became a wall of desks, cabinets, couches, and broken doors.

But not everyone reached it.

Thirty people died.

Most of them had been living away from the hotel, in houses closer to the outer barricades. The Infected had overwhelmed them before they could get out or before help could reach them.

Others survived by locking themselves inside rooms, basements, and shops. They stayed silent while the attack raged outside, listening to Infected scrape at doors and windows, praying to any god that still listened for the noise to move away.

When the Screamer finally stopped, nobody celebrated.

It was still dark outside.

The buzzing silence that followed felt almost worse. Everyone knew the Infected had not simply disappeared. They were still moving through the streets, feeding on the dead, wandering through homes, and searching for whatever sound might bring them closer to the survivors hiding inside the hotel.

Marlon ordered the guards at the entrances to retreat into the lobby.

The doors were shut.

The barricades were reinforced.

No one was allowed to make unnecessary noise.

They had no choice but to wait for the night to pass.

Nobody in the Emerald Hotel truly slept.

The people in the rooms lay awake, staring at ceilings or sitting against walls with weapons in their laps. Children cried quietly into their parents’ clothes. Some adults whispered to one another. Others did not speak at all.

The Screamer’s noise had stopped, but it stayed inside their heads.

Every distant scrape sounded like an Infected trying to force a way in. Every creak in the hotel made someone reach for a weapon. Every loud breath or cough drew sharp looks from people too tired and terrified to be patient.

Marlon, Rico, Molly, Martin, and several others stayed in the lobby through the entire night.

They took turns watching the doors and windows. They kept their weapons ready. Nobody sat comfortably. Nobody loosened their grip for long. The only real goal was to make it until sunrise.

When natural light finally began reaching the streets outside, the Boardwalk looked different.

The morning exposed everything.

Bodies lay near the broken barricades. Infected wandered between ruined homes. Furniture, wood, trash, and shattered pieces of metal covered the roads. The places people had cleaned, repaired, and defended for months had been reduced to wreckage.

Gunshots echoed almost immediately.

Marlon did not waste time.

He was angry.

Everyone was.

The Boardwalk had been attacked because Callighan wanted them afraid. He wanted them driven into one building, trapped together, exhausted and dependent on whatever he decided to do next.

Marlon understood that.

He refused to let it happen.

He took his weapon, opened the hotel defenses with the others, and began clearing the streets.

They shot down Infected one after another.

There was no careful conversation about conserving every bullet now. The Infected had already broken into their home. Marlon wanted them gone as fast as possible. He wanted the streets back before fear became stronger than the people living there.

Rico fought beside him.

Molly helped direct people away from dangerous areas and carried ammunition whenever someone ran low. Martin and the men from Margaret’s community stayed as well, even though they had come to the Boardwalk only to help during the emergency.

They did not leave after the Screamer stopped.

They stayed through the night.

Then they stayed through the morning.

Marlon was grateful for that.

He had barely known Martin and the others before this. Their communities had only recently begun working together, and trust was still something people gave carefully in a world like this.

But fighting side by side changed things.

They covered one another while clearing the streets. They shared bullets. They pulled people back before an Infected could drag them down. When someone grew tired, another person stepped into their place.

By the middle of the morning, there were hundreds of Infected bodies scattered across the Boardwalk.

The streets that had been relatively clean before the attack were covered in blood, broken limbs, discarded weapons, and shattered barricade pieces. The smell made people gag. The work left everyone exhausted.

Still, they kept going.

Nobody stood around crying in the streets.

Nobody gave up.

There would be time to mourn the dead. There would be time to learn every name that had been lost, to tell the families, and to stand together when they buried them.

But first, they needed to make the Boardwalk safe again.

So everyone helped.

People dragged Infected bodies out of the streets and piled them away from the homes. Others repaired the weakest barricades with whatever materials remained. Wood was nailed together. Metal sheets were dragged into place. Broken furniture became temporary barriers.

The new defenses were not as strong as the old ones had been.

Not yet.

But they were enough to stop Infected from walking freely into the community while the larger repairs were planned.

More than a hundred people worked throughout the day.

Women, men, teenagers, elders, guards, and people who had never held a weapon before the apocalypse all found something to do. Some carried supplies. Some cleaned blood from the floors of homes. Some checked damaged houses for survivors. Others passed water and food to the people rebuilding the barricades.

By the afternoon, they had recovered more than half of the Boardwalk.

It was not the same.

Some buildings were too damaged to use. Several streets still needed to be cleared. The outer barricades would need days of work before anyone could trust them again.

But the Boardwalk was theirs.

They had taken it back.

Marlon could see how exhausted everyone was. Their clothes were filthy. Their hands were sore. Many had not slept at all. He knew pushing them any further would only lead to mistakes and injuries.

So he called for people to slow down.

They had done enough for one day.

That was when Margaret arrived.

She came with Clara, Linda, and several others from her community. They brought food that had been prepared in advance, along with blankets, tools, and furniture that could be used inside homes or against the temporary barricades.

The people of the Boardwalk accepted it with tired gratitude.

No one made speeches.

No one had the energy.

They simply took the food, shared it around, and kept working where they could while the afternoon light faded over the damaged streets.

Margaret and the people from her community understood better than most what the Screamer could do.

They had already lived through it once.

Jackson Township had fallen under the same kind of attack. The noise had spread across the town, drawing Infected in from every direction and driving them into a frenzy. The barriers from the Municipal Office there had not held. Streets filled faster than anyone could fight through them, and entire groups of people had been cut off before they could reach a safe place.

The scale of what happened in Jackson had been worse than the attack on the Boardwalk.

Their town had been completely swarmed.

There had been no nearby community to send help. No group arriving with extra weapons, food, or hands to reinforce the barricades. They had been alone, forced to choose between staying and dying or abandoning the place they had fought to build.

So they left.

Not everyone made it out.

A lot of people died during that escape, and the ones who survived carried the memory of it with them. They knew what it felt like to watch a home become impossible to defend. They knew the helplessness of hearing that sound in the dark and realizing the Infected were already coming.

That was why Margaret had not hesitated when she heard what happened to the Boardwalk.

She gathered volunteers from her community as soon as she could. Martin had gone ahead with several men during the attack, but Margaret came afterward with Clara, Linda, and others carrying food, blankets, furniture, tools, and whatever supplies they could spare.

Many of them had survived Jackson Township.

They did not need Marlon to explain the damage or tell them why people looked so exhausted. They saw the broken barricades, the blood in the streets, the damaged homes, and the faces of people who had lost someone overnight.

They had worn those same expressions themselves.

So they helped.

They helped clear the Infected bodies from the streets. They carried broken boards and metal sheets toward the barricades. They handed out food to people who had not eaten since before the attack. They helped move furniture into homes where doors had been broken, and they stayed beside grieving families without pushing them to speak.

Nobody from Margaret’s community treated the Boardwalk’s losses like somebody else’s problem.

They had been victims of the Screamer too.

They knew that recovering from it meant more than surviving the night.