The world had been beautiful once.
Not perfect—but warm. Predictable. Alive.
Ty had been a university sophomore then, his life mapped out in clean, hopeful lines. Morning practices, aching muscles, roaring crowds, and a future that stretched far beyond the court. Basketball was his gift—his discipline, his escape—but it had never been what mattered most.
That place belonged to Noah.
Noah, his quiet shadow. His constant.
They had grown up side by side, two lives stitched together so tightly it was impossible to tell where one ended and the other began. From scraped knees and shared lunches to late-night talks and whispered dreams, they had been inseparable from infancy to university.
Ty was loud where Noah was soft. Athletic where Noah was delicate. Confident where Noah hesitated. Noah had always been shy, introverted, a little feminine in the way he moved and spoke—but Ty had never seen that as weakness. If anything, it was what grounded him. Balanced him.
They were two halves of the same whole.
Until the world ended.
The Pandemic arrived quietly. A headline. A warning. A promise that it would pass in weeks.
It didn't.
By the second month, nearly the entire human population had mutated into something no longer human. The media called them Fleshbounds—a clinical name that did nothing to capture the horror of what they were.
Fleshbounds were not the slow, mindless corpses of old movies.
They were mutated humans, twisted by whatever disease had rewritten their biology. They grew unnaturally tall, their spines elongating until standing upright became impossible. Instead, they moved hunched and predatory, stalking on elongated arms and legs like grotesque insects. Their bodies were little more than stretched skin clinging to bone, jagged shards of skeletal growth piercing through flesh in places it never should have.
They reeked—an overwhelming stench of rot and iron that lingered long after they passed.
Their jaws were the worst part.
Disfigured and split, the lower half of the skull had warped so severely that when a Fleshound opened its mouth, it looked as though its head had been cleaved apart. Inside were three rows of razor-sharp teeth, layered and uneven, constantly grinding against one another. Their eyes bulged and blackened, swallowing all light, and when they screamed, it was shrill—piercing enough to freeze blood and shatter focus.
Every Fleshound bore the same mark: a few thin strands of black hair, no matter what color they'd had before. The transformation was agonizing. Survivors spoke of bones stretching, skin tearing, nerves screaming until consciousness finally snapped.
Killing one was nearly impossible.
The only way was a precise shot to a specific point in the neck—a narrow gap just beneath the base of the skull, where the elongated vertebrae failed to fully protect the upper cervical spine and brainstem junction. The target was no wider than a coin. Miss it, and the creature kept coming. Their stretched necks swayed and bent unnaturally, making the shot a test of patience, steadiness, and near-perfect vision.
The world collapsed into chaos.
Ty tried to survive with others at first—small groups, temporary alliances—but it never lasted. Sometimes Fleshbounds found them. Other times, desperation turned people into monsters long before infection ever could. Hunger made killers of survivors.
That was how Ty earned the scar.
A blade meant to take his life tore across his face instead, carving a deep line from his forehead to his chin, narrowly missing his left eye. He lived. Barely. Blindness had come close enough to feel.
After the Pandemic struck, he lost Noah.
He searched for years. Through ruined cities, abandoned camps, whispered rumors, and mass graves. Noah had vanished when Ty was twenty-one, swallowed by a world that no longer kept records of the dead.
Eventually, hope ran out.
Ty told himself Noah was gone.
At twenty-eight, he returned to the last place that had ever felt like home—their old childhood treehouse, hidden and forgotten. He rebuilt it into a shelter. A refuge. A grave for memories he couldn't bury.
And yet…
Some nights, when the wind moved just right through the trees, Ty wondered.
Was Noah really dead?