The steady, rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor pulled John back from the void. His eyelids felt impossibly heavy, like iron gates rusted shut. He forced them open with sheer willpower, blinking once, twice, before the harsh white glare of a flickering fluorescent light burned into his vision.
The sterile sting of disinfectant filled his nostrils. His mind was foggy, like wading through smoke, fragments of memory surfacing of gunfire in the dark, shouts over the comms, the sickening impact of a round tearing into his chest. The failed covert op. His men. The mission that ended in failure.
He shifted against the stiff hospital sheets, recomposing himself, riding out the dizziness. His body felt foreign. Too light and too weak, the muscle fibers slackened from disuse. After nearly a month comatose, his nervous system was sluggish, motor pathways dulled. His legs, deprived of constant stress and weight-bearing, had lost tone and strength through atrophy. He knew the science, knew exactly why he would feel like a man learning to walk again but that didn't ease the frustration.
After a few minutes of steady breathing, he sat up and tore the nasal cannula from his nose, the tubing snapping back. He yanked the electrodes from his chest with no ceremony. The monitor that had once tethered him to the living world had gone silent, its last blip already forgotten. The fluorescent bulb above buzzed one final time before dying, plunging the room into a half-dark gloom.
John swung his legs over the side of the bed and planted his feet on the cold tile. The shock of contact hit him, but when he pushed to stand, his knees buckled instantly. His muscles, starved from disuse, couldn't bear his own weight. He collapsed hard onto the floor, the impact sending a dull ache through his chest wound.
"Goddammit," he hissed under his breath, dragging in a ragged breath. His throat felt like sandpaper.
"Nurse!" His voice was hoarse, raw, but still carried command. "Nurse! Somebody!"
Only silence answered him. No footsteps, no rushed response. Just the soft electric hum of dead machines.
Grimacing, he pulled himself upright using the ventilator stand, his gown loose against his toned but diminished frame. His eyes were sharp now, scanning, analyzing. Something was wrong. Terribly wrong.
John stumbled into the restroom, turned the faucet with trembling hands, and drank greedily. The lukewarm water hit his system like salvation. He could feel just how dry his body was as his IV bags long emptied, his veins running on nothing.
When the edge of thirst dulled, he staggered to the door. A gurney had been shoved against it from the outside. John frowned. Defensive positioning. Someone had blocked the room in. Why? He shoved it aside with effort and stepped into the hallway.
The world beyond his room looked nothing like a functioning hospital. The corridor stretched into darkness, bathed in the intermittent glow of failing lights. Some fixtures sparked, wires dangled from the ceiling like vines. Dust and dried streaks of something darker stained the walls. Papers littered the floor, medical charts scattered and trampled. A wheelchair lay overturned, one wheel still faintly spinning from some unseen disturbance.
John's jaw tightened. His instincts told him this was no ordinary evacuation.
"Where is everybody… and what the hell happened here?" he muttered, his voice low, as if speaking too loud might draw something unwanted.
He moved to the nurse's station, scanning for supplies. The phone was dead. Lines cut, or power gone. He rifled through drawers, finding nothing of real use—until his fingers closed around a small box of matches. Primitive, but better than nothing. He pocketed it.
That was when the light shifted. A flicker at the edge of his vision drew his attention down the hall.
A shape, and a movement.
Through an open doorway, he saw her, a nurse in shredded scrubs, her body mangled as though flayed by claws. Most of her skin was gone, strips of muscle exposed, tendons glistening in the half-light. She turned at the sound of him, her head snapping unnaturally fast, eyes cloudy and dead yet somehow locked onto his.
Then she moved. Stumbling, jerking, but purposeful, toward him. The sound that came from her throat was not human, a wet gurgling that curdled the air.
John's blood ran cold.
"What the hell happened to you…?" His voice was firm, but beneath it lay disbelief.
No answer. Just the grotesque gargle and the scrape of her dragging feet.
"Hey! Back off, woman!" he barked, planting his feet despite the weakness in his legs. Instinct made him grab the nearest weapon—a stainless-steel IV stand. He leveled it like a spear, keeping the staggering figure at bay.
Her jaws snapped at the empty space between them, teeth yellowed, blood still fresh around her mouth.
John's grip tightened.
"What the fuck are you?" The words weren't really for her. They were for himself.
She lunged again, too close. John pivoted, grabbed the red fire extinguisher bolted by the wall, and swung with trained precision. The impact cracked across her skull, sending her crumpling to the ground in a tangle of limbs. But even as she lay there, her body twitched, fingers clawing at the tiles.
John didn't wait to see if she would rise again. He turned, moving fast, his pulse hammering in his chest. He pushed through the corridor, past locked doors and abandoned rooms, until finally he reached the main exit.
He shoved open the glass doors and stepped outside.
The air hit him first. Stale, acrid, carrying the stench of rot and smoke. The parking lot stretched before him, a graveyard of twisted metal and scorched vehicles. Corpses lay slumped against cars, some burned, some picked clean to bone. The once-bustling city beyond was silent, its skyline fractured by fire-blackened buildings and plumes of smoke rising lazily into the gray sky.
And then he saw movement. Not just one, but dozens of figures shambling aimlessly, their silhouettes broken, their movements wrong. Skin sloughed off in sheets, eyes blank, jaws snapping at nothing. They drifted through the wreckage in herds, searching for life that wasn't there.
John froze at the threshold, his mind running tactical assessments automatically. There are too many of them. There's no cover, and no safe lanes of egress.
But the weight of it, the sheer impossibility pressed into him all the same.
The world he'd left behind in a hospital bed was gone.
And in its place… something monstrous had taken root.
x
John stumbled out of the hospital grounds, his legs burning with every step. It wasn't a sprint, not even a run, more of a controlled jog, the pace of a man pushing through limits his body wasn't ready to meet. Muscle atrophy from the coma that John doesn't even know how long has left his stride unsteady, his balance precarious. Every few paces, his hand pressed against the bandaged wound in his chest, dull pain radiating with the rhythm of his heartbeat.
The hospital was already shrinking behind him, its broken windows glinting in the fading light. Ahead stretched a quiet neighborhood, a cluster of houses lying just beyond the outskirts of the city.
He was grateful for that, in his own grim way.
If I had woken up in the city proper, I'd be surrounded right now. Choked off. No chance in hell of making it out alive.
But here, the streets were sparse and eerily still, the silence broken only by the hollow whistle of wind slipping between abandoned cars.
John slowed, eyes scanning the environment with practiced precision. Mailboxes lay bent and rusted, newspapers yellowed and crumpled on doorsteps. A child's bicycle lay on its side in the street, one wheel slowly turning as if it had been abandoned mid-ride. Curtains fluttered from broken windows, some houses scarred by scorch marks. The smell was the hardest to ignore, an acidic cocktail of rot, smoke, and something metallic that clung to the back of his throat.
He muttered the word almost under his breath, as though saying it aloud made it real...
"…Zombies."
The word tasted absurd in his mouth, childish even but there was no denying what he had seen back in the hospital. The nurse with half her face gone, her dead eyes fixed on him, her body moving when it should not. It wasn't a hallucination. It wasn't shock. It was real.
They're fucking real. I wake up from a coma, and this is the world waiting for me.
From the corner of his vision, John caught sight of movement down the block. Figures of half a dozen, maybe more are staggering aimlessly, their gait uneven, heads lolling as though their necks couldn't bear the weight. They were distant enough not to notice him, but his gut clenched all the same. His SEAL training screamed caution: never underestimate an enemy, no matter how slow or clumsy they appear.
His mind, methodical and restless, latched onto the problem. How the hell does this happen?
Could it be viral? A mutagen leaking from some lab? A pathogen hijacking neural pathways, reanimating corpses through sheer biological trickery? He thought of prions, like the ones responsible for mad cow disease, proteins that corrupted the brain and drove animals insane. Or parasites, the kind that invaded insects, bending them to their will. He'd read about those in survival training manuals, dismissed them then as footnotes of nature. But now? Now, it seemed terrifyingly possible.
A virus, bacteria, hell could be a parasite. Something that turns death itself into a trigger. The body dies, but something fires it back up. And if it spreads by bite, like in the stories he knew…
He grimaced, a soldier's pragmatism overtaking the horror. Don't get bitten. Ever. And if one comes at you, aim for the head. Brain's the kill switch.
John's pace faltered, lungs burning, fatigue finally dragging at him. He stopped, leaning on his knees for a moment to catch his breath. His chest ached under the strain, but he forced it down. Stamina would return with time, but only if he lived long enough for it to matter.
A house stood a few yards away, its lawn overgrown, its windows intact but coated in grime. On the front yard, lying against a porch step, was a baseball bat that's scuffed, taped at the handle, but sturdy. John picked it up, giving it a test swing. It's still solid and reliable. It's crude, but still effective.
Weapon in hand, he approached the front door, his every movement controlled and deliberate. He twisted the knob slowly, and it unlocked.
He slipped inside, moving with the patience of a predator. The air smelled stale, tinged faintly with rot. Dust coated the furniture, but there were no immediate signs of struggle.
Still, John knew better than to trust appearances. He swept the house the way he would clear a room on deployment. Corners first, eyes always ahead, bat raised and ready. He listened for breathing, footsteps, the scrape of something unnatural. Silence answered.
Each room he passed was another small victory. A living room with photos still hanging crooked on the wall. A kitchen with plates left on the counter, as if their owners had stood up mid-meal and never returned. A bedroom with the sheets pulled back, but no one lying there.
By the time he finished his sweep, he was confident that the house was empty.
For now.
John tightened his grip on the bat, scanning the quiet interior once more. In this new world, the dead weren't the only threat. People were unpredictable as desperation made killers of even the innocent. And while he was still weakened, still shaking off the strains of his coma, he knew one thing for certain.
Even like this, he could put anyone down if it came to it.