POV: Zhou Chenghai
The sound cut through everything else—low, guttural, and wrong in a way that made Zhou Chenghai's training kick in before conscious thought could catch up.
He moved immediately, crossing the living room in three strides and hitting the panel beside the front door.
Locks engaged with heavy metallic clicks throughout the house as the security system responded to manual override. It sealed every entrance point in the sequence he'd programmed two days ago.
Having friends in low places was beneficial when he'd started making calls to people who owed him favors. They had come through for him in a short time, and now he was thankful for true friends.
"Windows," he said, not looking at Xu Zhenlan or Jian Yuche, just moved toward the control panel mounted near the hallway entrance.
His fingers moved across the touchscreen with practiced efficiency, bringing up the security grid and activating the reinforced shutters on the ground floor.
The house was only a little older than ten years, and the security infrastructure had been designed for human threats that came with having a rich CEO as the owner. It was meant for break-ins, kidnapping attempts, and the kind of violence that came with Xu Zhenlan's business operations.
But the bones were solid and the upgrades he'd been implementing over the past forty-eight hours had turned it into something that could withstand a siege if necessary.
The shutters descended with smooth mechanical precision, cutting off the natural light and transforming the interior into something that felt more like a bunker than a residence.
Emergency lighting kicked in automatically, casting everything in the flat white glow of LED strips mounted along the ceiling edges.
Xu Zhenlan was already moving toward the television, grabbing the remote and switching it on, cycling through channels with the kind of focused intensity that meant he was gathering information rather than simply watching it passively.
Chenghai pulled up the exterior camera feeds on his phone, swiping through different angles, trying to get a clear picture of what they were dealing with.
The front gate came into view first.
Bodies were pressed against the iron bars, dozens of them, maybe more, their arms reaching through the gaps with jerky, uncoordinated movements that looked wrong even through the grainy security footage.
They moved like people who'd forgotten how bodies were supposed to work, all shambling steps and dragging limbs and heads that lolled at angles that suggested broken necks or severe neurological damage.
Some of them were still wearing business clothes, others were in hospital gowns, a few were covered in enough blood that it was impossible to tell what they'd been wearing before whatever had happened to them.
"What the hell," Jian Yuche breathed as he looked over Chenghai's shoulder. There was something in his voice that Chenghai had never heard before—genuine uncertainty.
He didn't think the other man had it in him to sound like that. It was the kind of tone that came from encountering something that didn't fit into any existing framework for understanding threats or violence or human behavior.
Chenghai zoomed in on one of the figures, watching the way it moved, the way its jaw worked like it was trying to bite something that wasn't there. He could see the way its eyes were filmed over with something that looked like cataracts but spread across the entire surface.
The figure's hands gripped the iron bars and pulled, not with any particular strength or coordination, just a mindless repetitive motion that suggested it would keep pulling until something broke or it physically couldn't continue.
"Is that..." Jian Yuche stepped closer, his eyes narrowing as he looked at the phone screen, then at the television where news footage was showing similar scenes from multiple locations across the city. "Is that zombies?"
The word hung in the air like something absurd, something that belonged in movies or video games or late-night horror shows.
But that was not reality, not in a world where Chenghai had spent fifteen years dealing with actual threats that could be understood and countered and neutralized through training and tactics and superior firepower.
"Impossible," Chenghai replied, shaking his head, still watching the figures at the gate. "There is no such thing as zombies."
"Those look like zombies to me."
But they did. And that was the problem.
They looked exactly like what zombies were supposed to look like in fiction...shambling, mindless, driven by some base instinct that overrode everything else.
But zombies didn't exist.
Couldn't exist.
There was no biological mechanism that would allow a body to continue functioning after death, no virus or bacteria or parasite that could reanimate dead tissue and create the kind of behavior he was watching on the security feed.
Except Chenghai was watching it.
Right now.
In real time.
On the television, a news anchor was trying to maintain professional composure while footage played behind her showing crowds of people running through city streets, emergency vehicles with lights flashing, what looked like military personnel setting up barricades.
The footage cut to a reporter on the ground, her voice tight with barely controlled panic as she described scenes of violence and chaos spreading through the downtown district.
"—reports coming in from multiple hospitals that emergency rooms are completely overwhelmed—patients displaying extreme aggression and what witnesses are describing as cannibalistic behavior—authorities are urging people to stay indoors and avoid—"
The feed cut abruptly to static, then switched to another location, another reporter, another scene of chaos.
This one showed what looked like a shopping district with people streaming out of stores and running in all directions while figures that moved wrong pursued them with that same shambling, relentless gait.
Xu Zhenlan cycled through the channels on TV faster than ever.
Every station was showing similar footage. Some were still trying to maintain the fiction that this was containable, that emergency services were responding appropriately, that people should remain calm and follow official instructions.
Others had abandoned that pretense entirely and were just showing raw footage of collapse—crowds stampeding, fires burning unchecked, bodies lying in the streets while other bodies that should have been lying still continued to move and hunt and feed.
Zombies might not be able to exist... but apparently, no one told them that.