“So, Pierce,” I said to the man sitting cross-legged on the floor of the station break room, just outside the impromptu circle we’d made. “What were you smelling back there?”

The conversation immediately died down at the question, as my entire group was intrigued to hear what he had to say.

“Not so sure,” the young man said. “Mostly, just smells like death. The things — the wights — they smell dead. I thought they were zombies of some kind.”

“Well, if they are, it’s not brains or human meat they’re after,” I said after a round of humorless chuckles died down.

“They certainly come after us like they want something,” one of the others said. He was a short, dark-skinned Latino with the last name Urquidez. The only reason I knew that was because it was on his uniform. I’d failed to catch anyone’s names in the second round of introductions.

“They want him,” I said, pointing at Pierce. “They want the power inside of him.”

“Me?” Pierce said with incredulity. “That’s absurd. I don’t have any powers.”

“Right,” I answered sarcastically. “And yet you can smell if someone else around you has abilities.”

“I just have a keen nose.” He said it defensively, and I could tell he wasn’t quite ready to believe it just yet.

“All good,” I said placatingly. “But in the interest of honesty, Heidi is the same way.” I pointed at the girl, who let out a muffled, indignant shriek before covering a mouth filled with potato chips.

“No, I’m not!” she finally choked out when she’d swallowed the food and took a drink of the nasty mineral water. She looked at Mason, who put a consoling arm on her shoulder.

“Of course not,” he said, and he looked over at me while he said it. “Lieutenant Ward is just making fun. Aren’t you, LT?”

“Sure,” I said. I looked over at Andy, who just shrugged.

“Do you have special powers?” Pierce asked. I assumed the question was targeted at me since everyone looked at me.

“Not exactly,” I answered. “I feel physically better than ever, but I wouldn’t say it’s a superpower if that’s what you’re thinking.” Pierce looked disappointed after I said it.

“I survived the apocalypse, my friend is a superhero, and all I got was this lousy shirt,” Mason said, which provoked genuine laughter this time. “Seriously though,” he continued, “if you learn to fly or run at super speed, I’m gonna be real jealous.”

“Teleportation,” one of the agents said.

“Super strength,” another put in.

The group continued talking about which superpowers they wanted. Mason said, “the Force” because he was just that nerdy. Of course, a nerd argument broke out after that, whether the Force could be considered a superpower. Midichlorians came up, which made exactly no one happy.

As the talking continued, I gradually felt sleepier. I got off my chair and slid onto the floor, resting my back and head against the wall. It was not terribly comfortable, but at least it had neck support.

“You okay, man?” someone said.

“Yeah,” I answered. “Didn’t sleep real well last night. Just need to rest my eyes.”

Despite my exhaustion and my sudden need for more rest, I did not immediately drift off. I thought about the question of superpowers. What would I want, if I had the chance? Even with my eyes closed, I could still see the flows of mana around me. I traced them, even looking down at my own mana channels. When I looked closer, however, I received a startling shock. I saw an aura I’d never noticed before — black pulsing through the mix.

I focused on the darkness, how it seemed to surround the other mana. It almost behaved like the red mana, but where the red mana seemed to have a symbiotic relationship with the other colors, almost seeming to enhance and create new colors, this black mana choked the other colors, like a boa constrictor around a victim’s chest, and I could tell from watching it that it was… feeding on the other mana. Even as my senses lingered on it, I caught the brief scent of death.

Acting purely on instinct, I pulled mana from other parts of my core. I willed – almost begged – the blue mana, or water mana, as I was now thinking about it, into a sphere around the snake, as if to drown the thing. The darkness swirled, and I could sense resistance to the constricting sphere I’d placed around it. I urged the red mana into the blue, mixing it in thickly around the snake in an impenetrable layer of water, superheated to the point I could sense the snake was writhing in agony.

My chest exploded in pain as I tried to pull silver mana from the core of my body. The water and fire mixed to hold the snake’s body in place under the combination of heat and pressure. I felt my concentration waver as the silver aura leached coalesced into a dagger, but I forced the mana together.

I drove the point of my manufactured weapon directly into the head of the black snake, and fire and water soaked into the wound along with the pure silver. It coursed into the snake, tearing at it, feeding on it. A portion of the power the snake had already consumed was being returned to me, seeping back into my core. Where I’d felt weak and dazed, I suddenly felt revitalized and awake, my eyes snapping open. Only to notice the others standing around me.

“I think I figured it out,” I said in awe.

“If you’re going to say forty-two, we already know that,” Mason said.

“Shut up, nerd!” Someone in the back of the group whispered quite loudly, but everyone shared a laugh, Mason included.

“I think I figured out what has been happening to me,” I looked around for Andy. "Andy, I want to try something, and I want you to be there while I do it."

I couldn't quite tell before, but now I realized how, over the last couple of days, my thoughts had been growing darker. Whatever that power was that I'd been absorbing, part of it was attempting to take over.

"Sure, what do you want to do?" Andy asked.

"I figured it out, and I know how to stop it." I looked over at Heidi meaningfully. Even as I looked at her, I no longer felt the temptation to kill her and try to take her power.

Even the colors of her mana had changed, or perhaps that was just my perception. They seemed more vibrant and less… threatening, somehow.

"I want to absorb the energy from one of the corpses and see if I can filter out the corruption," I continued as I made my way to the front door of the building.

"Corruption?" Andy asked behind me.

"Yes," I said, excitedly turning to him. I knew I was talking loudly, and everyone was listening, quite interested. "I think as I absorbed all the foreign energy, it tried to influence my mind. I just got rid of it, and I want to see if I can filter it out."

"Whoa, hold on there," Andy said, putting his hand on my shoulder and stopping me before I could leave. "You want to pull more of this mind corruption into yourself after you just got rid of it?"

"Don't you see?" I asked. "If I can filter it out, or get rid of any corruption, then I might be able to use this energy to its full potential. But more importantly," I spoke hurriedly as he opened his mouth to protest, "it could be the first step to learning how to remove corruption from others."

That got his attention.

"You mean we could fix those poor bastards?" A note of uncertainty lingered in his voice.

"We won't know if we don't try," I said firmly.

He paused for a long moment before nodding his head, "We'll try one, and you tell me how it goes."

"I want to be careful," I said as I headed for the door. "It might take me longer than usual."

I left the station by the same door we'd all come in, and almost everyone followed me out, aside from the few agents who'd been left on watch. I went to the closest of the fallen corpses. The body had been left to rot in the parking lot and flies buzzed all over it. I could see the gleam of mana shining out from the core.

"This might be disgusting," I said to the newcomers in our group.

"Shit, man," Karl said. "You ain't never worried about it before."

"Yeah," I said, a bit chagrined. "I wasn't exactly myself." With that, I drew my combat knife and began to cut into the man's chest, directly under the sternum to reach up toward the heart.

I examined the core as I reached in, looking for what I knew had to be there. There was no snake, no malicious dark mana. Eventually, I found them. Black specks seemed to swirl between the rest of the mana, almost holding the disparate energies together.

"Here I go," I said. I touched the core, trying to focus on the energy I wanted to pull on. It didn't matter. Everything flooded into my body, and I immediately began to panic. This time I could see the black mana flowing into me, passing into my chest and trying to spiral off. I crushed the black mana, using the other forms to tie up and burn it before it could flood into my channels.

I let out a laugh and pumped my fist in the air when it was done, using my bloody right hand, of course. There were sounds of disgust as everyone took a step back from me, but I didn’t care. The exhaustion I’d felt just minutes before had left my body, and I felt strength seeping back into my bones.

"I did it!" I turned to find my closest friend left in this corner of the world. "Andy, I did it."

"Next?" he asked.

"You're sure?" I said. "We agreed it was your call."

He just laughed. "If you said anything else, I might not be sure. But now? I'm sure."

"How many bodies?" I asked the others.

As it turned out, there were eighteen other bodies, and I absorbed and purified the energy from each of them into my own body. The process got easier, but not any cleaner with all the blood.

When it was done, I looked down at my chest at the shining brightness of my core. It put to shame what I saw in Heidi and Pierce.

After I'd disemboweled my third corpse, most of my companions left. Andy and Pierce stayed behind though, the younger man saying something about enjoying how the lingering smell from the bodies vanished, like finally shaking off a nightmare after it's stuck with you. Not that the bodies actually smelled any better. Left out in the open air like this for days, they still stank, but it was the normal smell you would expect from a corpse. Andy was just… Andy. He wasn't going to let me do it alone.

Once I was done, my right arm was thoroughly covered in blood. I would have to find some water that wasn’t for drinking. I remembered I had some wet rags and even wet wipes in my backpack, but they wouldn't be enough for this much blood.

I decided to wipe most of it on my pant leg. I could always change into clean clothes later. We made our way back to the station, where the newcomers gave me odd looks. I’d been cutting open bodies, and I couldn’t really blame them. What kind of sociopath would I have to be to do that? Of course, some things I’d done in the military would probably scare them too. There’s no pleasing everyone.

I felt like I was on the verge of a breakthrough. My understanding and connection to the mana around me were deepening, and a few times I thought I could have simply reached out to the white mana in the air and moved it around with my hand. Of course, nothing happened when I did, but it felt so close. What I hoped though, was that I could learn a way to cure the corrupted people, if I could remove the taint from their cores.

Everyone else had finished packing while we were out. When the whole group was ready to leave, there were enough of us that we split into three groups. After some debate, Hogan agreed to put Andy and me at the tip of the spear with Chavez and two other agents whose names I couldn’t remember. The rest split into slightly larger groups to cover each of our flanks. Carter was on the left and Commander Hogan was with the group on the right.

We left the station unlocked and the chain link fence wide open as we moved onto International Boulevard toward the nearest convenience store to find more food and hopefully a local map.

At first, there was very little activity. Once we passed May Street and started to see apartment buildings, that’s when everything went to hell. The former residents of those apartments had taken to the streets to hunt in packs.