The first thing Leo did every morning, even before he pissed, was check on his plants.
His apartment wasn't just an apartment; it was a greenhouse, a chaotic, verdant jungle crammed into a two-bedroom on the third floor. Vines with leaves like green hearts crept along the ceiling, hanging baskets dripped strings of pearls, and every available surface that wasn't a chair or a bed was occupied by a pot, a planter, or a propagation station. The air always smelled of damp earth and life, a scent that calmed the constant, low-level anxiety of his existence.
Leo himself was as unassuming as the moss he grew in terrariums. He was twenty-four, with a lanky build that came more from forgetting to eat than from any kind of exercise. His brown hair was a perpetual mess, usually falling into his hazel eyes, which held a quiet, focused intensity when he was looking at a plant, and a skittish uncertainty when he was looking at a person. His face was pleasant enough, with a smattering of light freckles across his nose, but it was a face designed to blend into the background. His hands, however, were his pride. They were long-fingered and nimble, the nails short and clean, though almost always rimmed with a faint crescent of black that no amount of scrubbing could ever fully remove.
This morning, his attention was on his prized possession, a *Monstera deliciosa* he'd nicknamed Mona. She was a beast, her glossy, fenestrated leaves stretching nearly a meter wide. He ran a gentle finger along the edge of a new leaf, still pale green and tightly furled.
"There you go, girl," he murmured, his voice soft in the quiet room. "Almost there. Just a little more sun."
He was so absorbed in the world of chlorophyll and cellulose that the distant wail of a siren barely registered. It was just background noise, part of the city's usual misery. Another followed, closer this time. Then another. A rising chorus of panic swelled somewhere beyond his green sanctuary, but Leo barely noticed. He was thinking about the new growth on his fiddle-leaf fig, a triumph that had taken six months of careful watering and strategic rotation.
He was also, inevitably, thinking about Sarah.
Sarah from 2B. She had a laugh that sounded like wind chimes and a smile that could make his brain short-circuit. Yesterday, they'd been in the hallway at the same time. She'd said, "Hey Leo, your plants are looking amazing!"
And he, the brilliant horticulturalist who could explain the intricacies of mycorrhizal networks, had grunted and said, "Uh, yeah. Weather's nice."
He wanted to slam his head into the wall just thinking about it. Twenty-four years old and he'd never even been on a date. His entire romantic history consisted of awkward high school dances and a few humiliating attempts at online dating, where conversations usually died around the time he explained the nitrogen cycle. A crude, bitter thought surfaced from the depths of his frustration.
*God, I just want to fuck someone. Just once. Feel something other than soil under my fingernails and the crushing weight of my own social ineptitude.*
He exhaled hard and dragged a hand through his hair, as if that might shake the thought loose. Then he looked toward his phone on the kitchen counter.
The sirens were getting louder.
He unlocked the screen and pulled up a news site. It took forever to load, the spinning wheel mocking him. When it finally appeared, the headline was stark and bright red:
**UNEXPLAINED VIOLENT OUTBREAKS CITYWIDE — STAY INDOORS**
Below it was a chaotic jumble of text.
"Reports of extreme aggression... convulsions... cannibalistic tendencies... authorities urging citizens to shelter in place..."
His blood ran cold.
He switched to social media. It was an inferno of panic. Hashtags like #Sick and #Rioting were trending. One video, taken from a car dashboard, showed a city street in chaos. People were running, screaming. In the foreground, a man in a business suit was on the ground, thrashing. As the person filming drove closer, the man's body arched in a way that looked physically impossible, a sickening crack echoing through the phone speaker. Then he lurched to his feet and dove headfirst through a car window.
The video cut to static.
This wasn't a riot. This wasn't a protest.
This was something else.
Outside, the sounds were no longer distant. A scream, raw and terrified, ripped through the air just down the block. Then another. The high-pitched shriek of tyres on asphalt was followed by the deafening crunch of metal and the tinkle of shattered glass.
Leo dropped his phone. It hit the hardwood and cracked.
"Okay. Okay. Think," he whispered, his heart hammering.
His eyes darted around his apartment, his safe space, his little green kingdom. Suddenly, it felt flimsy. Exposed. The front door was a hollow piece of crap. The windows were big and bright and vulnerable. One of them even had the cheap stick-on break sensor he'd installed after somebody had tried jiggling it open from the fire escape last summer.
He moved on pure adrenaline.
First, the door.
He grabbed the heavy particleboard bookshelf from the wall, grunting as he dragged it across the floor. Books on botany and plant care thudded free and scattered behind him. He shoved the shelf hard against the door, the wood scraping against the frame. It wasn't much, but it was something.
Next, supplies.
He yanked his hiking backpack from the closet and started stuffing it. Bottles of water. A half-eaten bag of beef jerky. Canned beans, canned tuna, canned soup. He wasn't a prepper; his pantry was mostly instant noodles and regret. He found a dusty first-aid kit under the bathroom sink and jammed it inside. His hands were shaking so badly that he barely got the zipper closed.
A heavy thud sounded in the hallway.
Then another.
A slow, rhythmic pounding.
Not a knock. An impact.
Leo froze, breath catching in his throat. He crept to the door and pressed his eye to the peephole.
The fisheye lens gave him a warped view of the hallway.
And there was Mr. Henderson from 3B.
Mr. Henderson, the retired accountant who always complained about Leo's balcony drips, was shuffling toward the apartment. Except it wasn't really Mr. Henderson anymore. His skin was a waxy gray-purple, like spoiled meat. His eyes, usually hidden behind thick glasses, were cloudy and milky, fixed on nothing. A dark, wet stain spread down the front of his shirt from his chin, and his mouth hung open as a low, guttural moan leaked out.
Leo stumbled back, clapping a hand over his mouth to smother a sound.
The pounding on the door became more frantic.
*Thud. Thud. Thud.*
The wood groaned. Something slammed into it hard enough to rattle the frame.
He wasn't hiding from a riot.
He was hiding from *that*.
His gaze flicked wildly around the apartment for a weapon. A baseball bat? He didn't own one. A knife? Too close. Then he saw the cast-iron skillet on the kitchen counter. Heavy. Solid. Real.
He grabbed it.
The cold iron steadied him a little in his sweating palm. He was a plant nerd. His idea of conflict was arguing online about the ideal soil pH for citrus trees. This was so far beyond anything he'd ever imagined that part of him wanted to laugh.
The bookshelf jolted another inch with a violent slam. Wood splintered. A grey, decaying hand punched through the weak centre of the door, fingers twitching, blindly searching for purchase.
Leo screamed.
He lunged for the couch and shoved it against the barricade, adding one more pathetic layer of defence. He could hear them in the hallway right outside now — feet dragging over the welcome mat, wet rasping moans, another body hitting the door.
There was only one way out.
The bedroom window opened onto the old iron fire escape bolted to the side of the building, but the nearest platform sat a full floor below. It wasn't a clean escape. More a controlled fall.
His mind flashed, absurdly, to his plants.
*Mona. The fig. The philodendrons. All of them.*
The thought hurt more than it should have. He'd spent years coaxing life out of cheap soil and bad light and a nervous wreck of a body. Leaving them behind felt like betrayal.
*Survive first. Grieve later.*
He ran to the bedroom and ripped the sheets off the bed, knotting them together with frantic, clumsy hands. He tested one knot. It held. Another crash sounded from the living room, louder this time, followed by the scrape of the bookshelf shifting.
He slung the backpack onto his shoulders, tied one end of the sheet-rope to the metal bedframe, and ran to the window.
With a raw shout, he swung the skillet and smashed the glass.
The stick-on break sensor shrieked at once, a piercing electronic scream.
"Shit."
He cleared the jagged edges with the skillet, swung one leg over the sill, then the other, and grabbed the twisted sheets. The backpack dragged at his shoulders. The fabric burned his palms as he lowered himself down the brick wall. He let go too soon, dropping the last few feet onto the grimy iron platform below.
Pain exploded through his ankle when he landed wrong.
He cried out and collapsed to one knee on the metal grating, the skillet clanging beside him. Above him, in his apartment, something crashed over. Then another thing. Then more. His place was being torn apart.
He forced himself upright, teeth clenched. His ankle screamed, but it held.
He started limping down the stairs, one hand on the rusted railing, his breath coming in ragged bursts.
Then he rounded the next turn and stopped cold.
It was a woman. Or it had been.
She looked young, maybe twenty, and she was still wearing the torn form-fitting uniform of a coffee shop, the logo barely visible beneath a dark stain spread across her bountiful, heavy chest. She was shambling up the stairs toward him, drawn by the sound of breaking glass and the alarm. Her head lolled to one side at an angle no living neck should allow. Her jaw worked silently, teeth clicking together.
She was below him on the stairs. The wall boxed him in on one side, the railing on the other. There was nowhere to go but through her or over the edge.
She saw him.
A low hiss slipped from her throat, and then she lunged — faster than her shambling had any right to suggest.
Leo reacted on instinct. He swung the skillet with everything he had.
It connected with the side of her head with a dull, wet crack.
She reeled sideways, slamming into the railing, but she didn't go down. She jerked her head back toward him and came again errily, almost inhuman-like.
Leo shoved her hard, trying to knock her down the stairs. She was heavier than he expected, all dead weight and jerking resistance. His injured ankle gave out under him. He slipped, slammed backwards into the iron railing, and the world tilted.
Then she was on him.
Her hands clawed for his arms. Her face drove toward his throat. The smell hit him — rot, old blood, sour breath — and it was so foul it almost made him gag. He could feel the railing digging into his back, feel the give in his ankle, feel his strength bleeding out by the second.
He was going to die here.
On a rusty fire escape.
Eaten by a barista.
Something inside him split wide open.
A lifetime's worth of frustration, fear, loneliness, and hunger surged up all at once. His mind didn't form words at first. It was just a raw, animal refusal, a desperate force tearing up from somewhere older than thought.
Then it sharpened.
*I DON'T WANT TO DIE!*
The scream never left his mouth, but it tore through him like thunder.
*I HAVEN'T EVEN LIVED!*
The warmth of the spring sun through a window. Mona's newest leaf is slowly uncurling. The ache of waking up alone, again and again, in a bed that never held anyone but him...
*I HAVEN'T EVEN HAD A CHANCE TO LOSE MY VIRGINITY!!!*
The need to live — to keep going, to touch, to want, to become something more than this frightened, lonely version of himself — flooded every part of him.
And the world answered.
With a sound like roots tearing through stone, a thick woody vine burst from the brick wall beside him. It exploded outward in a green blur, covered in cruel, needle-sharp thorns. It wrapped around the creature's torso like a striking python and constricted with terrifying force. The zombie thrashed. Its fingers clawed at the vine, but the thorns drove deep into dead flesh, dark ichor welling from the wounds.
A second vine punched out from the narrow seam where the brick met the iron platform, thick as Leo's arm. This one didn't coil.
It hit.
It slammed into the zombie with the force of a battering ram and crushed her against the railing. A wet, choking sound burst from her mouth.
Leo stared.
His mind went completely blank.
The vines were coming from the wall, from the cracks in the masonry, from the grime-packed seams in the old structure — but he could *feel* them. He could feel the rough drag of brick where they anchored, the cold bite of iron, the soft, rotten give of the body they were crushing. A vibrant, impossible energy pulsed through them, green and alive and utterly connected to him.
He looked down at his hands.
They were glowing.
A faint, ethereal green light spilt between his fingers. The skin on his palms, shredded raw by the sheets, was already knitting itself back together. The pain in his ankle still throbbed, but it felt distant now, muffled beneath the rush surging through his body.
Below, the city screamed.
Above, his apartment was being destroyed.
And between those two truths, on a rusted fire escape streaked and smeared with fresh blood, Leo understood that something impossible had just happened.
The world had ended.
And something new had begun.
He looked from the pinned, writhing corpse to the green light in his hands. Terror still gripped him, but under it was something else now. Fear mostly, yet there was also some thrill and excitement he had never felt before.
He was no longer just Leo, the quiet plant nerd in apartment 3A.
He had changed and become....
Something different.
And he was still alive.