"We'renotalone," my father whispered, handing me a vial of clear liquid and a folded blueprint. "It's treatable, Eric. You just have to multiply it."
Then, the laboratory went dead silent. Outside the reinforced door, the screaming stopped. Why had everyone stopped moving?
"Eric, run!"
Before I could ask, the force of a hundred rotting bodies thrashed through the bulletproof steel like paper. My father shoved me toward the hidden escape shaft, but I froze. A jagged bone was protruding from his knee; he couldn't walk.
"Father, no—"
"Take it and live!" he roared, slamming the hatch over my head.
Through the thick glass window of the shaft, tears cascaded down my face as I was forced to watch. I saw the morbid crowd of decaying humans tear into the last of my family. The image didn't just haunt me—it burned itself into my retinas.
I dropped into the sub-cellar, but there was no safety here. Dozens of the undead turned toward the sound of my boots. I raised my only weapon—a prototype fire cannon—and panicked. There were too many.
I scrambled into a nearby armored SUV, slammed the ignition, and put my foot to the floor.
"Get out of my way, freaks!"
I plowed through the cellar gates at 120 miles per hour, spraying dirt, bone, and black blood across the hood. But in the chaos, I didn't see the dead end.
The cliff edge hit me instantly. The SUV went airborne, plummeting into the canyon below.
BOOM!
The vehicle erupted in a massive fireball. I groaned, my hands gripping a thick tree root growing stubbornly out of the cliffside. The impact had thrown me clear, saving my life. Above me, dozens of zombies blindly chased the noise, stepping off the edge and raining into the flames. As their decaying flesh caught fire, I realized how the cannon worked—heat ignited the dormant air-virus inside them. They burned like dry tinder.
"I have to live..." I sobbed, hauling myself up the dirt wall. "I have to live."
Two months passed.
I survived inside the penthouse of a abandoned farm estate. I forgot my own birthday last week.. I had no reason to track time anymore.
I stood in the center of the training room before three wooden mannequins, their surfaces heavily scarred by knife slashes and bullet holes. In my hands, I balanced two long, curved katanas.
In the corner lay the shattered remains of the serum vial.
I had dropped it three weeks ago. The liquid—humanity's only cure—had soaked into the dirt floor and vanished forever. The most foolish, careless mistake since the dawn of man.
At first, I felt despair. But over twenty-one days of silence, that despair mutated into something darker.
My father didn't save me out of love; he dumped the weight of the entire ruined world onto a teenager's shoulders and died so he wouldn't have to carry it. He left me alone in a graveyard.
I raised the left sword, pointing the steel tip at the nearest mannequin's throat.
"No more missions," I whispered to the empty room. "No more cures."
I slashed downward, splitting the mannequin's chest completely in two.
"If humanity wants a savior, they can look somewhere else. From today on, I survive for me."