he evacuation took forty-seven minutes.
Forty-seven minutes of moving fourteen terrified survivors through a burning building, past corridors packed with newly-claimed zombies, down a stairwell that groaned with heat stress from the spreading fire.
Forty-seven minutes in which I added another forty-two zombies to my network.
My head was splitting.
"Wei." Chen Chen's hand found my arm as we emerged from the lobby. The night air hit us like a blessing—cool, clean, free of smoke. "You're bleeding."
I touched my face. My nose. She was right. Blood was trickling from my nostrils, dark in the moonlight.
"It happens," I said. "The more I control, the more it costs."
"How many is that now?"
I didn't answer. The truth was, I wasn't sure anymore. The connections blurred together at the edges of my consciousness—a sea of dead minds, all of them obedient, all of them hungry for direction.
Four hundred and twenty-seven, Ghost supplied. Master grows strong. Pack grows large.
Four hundred and twenty-seven. Up from three hundred and forty-nine this morning.
The headache made sense now.
------------------------------
We made it back to the compound at midnight.
Max Yang was waiting at the gate, her expression tight with controlled worry.
"Forty-five survivors now," she said as the group filed through. "We're going to need more space."
"We'll find it." I watched Chen Chen help an elderly man through the entrance. "Any problems while I was gone?"
"Rachel's team arrived two hours ago. Set up in the warehouse next door, like you arranged. The precog—Maya—she's been asking for you."
"What about?"
"She won't say. But she's been staring at the sky since sunset. Hasn't moved. Hasn't spoken to anyone except to ask when you'd be back."
I felt a chill that had nothing to do with the night air.
"Where is she?"
"Roof."
------------------------------
Maya sat at the edge of the compound's main building, her legs dangling over the three-story drop.
Her silver eyes were fixed on the eastern horizon, where the first hints of dawn were beginning to color the darkness.
"You came," she said without turning. "Good. There's not much time."
"Time for what?"
"For you to understand what's happening." She finally looked at me, and I saw something I hadn't seen before—fear. Raw, genuine fear in those ancient, glowing eyes. "The Hive King moved tonight."
"Moved?"
"Its tunnels connect to older systems. Deeper ones. It's been spreading—sending tendrils through the drainage system, the old subway routes, the utility corridors." She shivered. "It knows about your compound now. It knows exactly where you are."
My blood went cold.
"How?"
"The zombies you claimed today. Some of them were its." Her voice dropped. "When you claimed them, when you filled their voids with your will... it felt the connections break. It traced them back. Back to you. Back to here."
I'd been careful. Claiming zombies far from the compound, using intermediary routes, never leading directly home.
But I hadn't accounted for this. For a creature intelligent enough to map the deaths of its servants.
"How long do we have?"
"Dawn of Day 5. Maybe a few hours after." Maya's silver eyes were distant, seeing something I couldn't. "It's gathering its forces. Thousands of them. All converging on a single point beneath the city. When it rises, it won't be alone."
"Can we evacuate?"
"No." The word was flat, final. "It's too fast. It can track you through the connections. Wherever you go, it will follow. The only option is to fight."
"With four hundred zombies against thousands?"
"With whatever you can gather in the next thirty hours." Maya turned to face me fully. "That's why I asked to see you. I need to show you something."
------------------------------
She led me down from the roof, through the compound's corridors, past sleeping survivors and nervous guards.
We ended up in a small storeroom that had been converted into Maya's quarters. Sparse—a cot, a chair, a table covered with hand-drawn maps and scattered notes.
"I've been mapping it," she said. "The Hive King's territory. Every tunnel, every drain, every connection I can see in the visions."
I studied the maps. They showed Seattle's underground—layer after layer of infrastructure, some of it modern, some of it dating back a century or more. Maya had marked certain areas in red.
"These are its domains?"
"The core territory. Where its control is absolute. Any zombie that enters those zones becomes part of it immediately—absorbed into the collective." She pointed to a dark circle near the city center. "And this is where it sleeps. The heart."
"How did something this powerful appear in five days?"
"It didn't appear. It was always here." Maya's voice was haunted. "The virus didn't create it. The virus woke it up. It's been dormant under Seattle for... I don't know. Centuries, maybe. Waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"For enough death. Enough fuel. Enough souls to feed its awakening." She met my eyes. "And then you came back, Wei. You, with your power over the dead. You accelerated everything. Made it hungry. Made it ambitious."
I stared at the map.
"You're saying this is my fault."
"I'm saying this was always going to happen. You just made it happen sooner." Her voice softened. "But that's also why you're the only one who can stop it. Your power and its power—they're two sides of the same coin. Death commanding death. Will against will."
"If I lose—"
"If you lose, it absorbs you. Your memories. Your abilities. Your consciousness." Maya's silver eyes were unblinking. "And then it becomes something even worse. A Hive King with ten thousand years of knowledge. With the tactical genius of someone who's survived everything. With a human face and a human name."
"The monster wearing my face."
"Yes."
------------------------------
I spent an hour studying Maya's maps.
The Hive King's territory formed a rough oval beneath the city center—approximately two miles long, one mile wide. Its heart was somewhere beneath the old Pioneer Square district, in a section of tunnels that predated Seattle's modern drainage system.
"These older tunnels," I said. "What were they?"
"Some kind of underground city. Built in the 1890s after a fire destroyed the original settlement. They raised the street level and buried the old buildings." Maya traced the lines on her map. "The Hive King has made its nest in the foundations. Where the death is oldest. Where the echoes of the past are strongest."
"And on Day 5?"
"It rises through the central drainage nexus. Here." She pointed to a location about four blocks from my compound. "That's the emergence point. That's where the battle happens, whether you want it to or not."
Four blocks.
The Hive King was going to surface practically on my doorstep.
"Can we collapse the tunnels? Seal it in?"
"I've seen that future. It doesn't work. The tunnels are too extensive, too interconnected. You'd need to destroy half the city's infrastructure, and it would still find a way out."
"Then we have to fight."
"Yes."
I looked at the map one more time, memorizing the layout, the choke points, the places where terrain might give an advantage.
"You said I need more than four hundred zombies. How many?"
"Thousands. As many as you can claim before dawn tomorrow."
"That's impossible. Even if I pushed my limits—"
"You're not at your limits." Maya's voice was certain. "Not even close. The headaches, the nosebleeds—those are your mind resisting the expansion. Fighting against what you're becoming."
"What I'm becoming?"
"The Zombie King. The true one. The one who commands not hundreds or thousands, but millions."
I stared at her.
"That's not possible."
"It's not possible for a human." Her silver eyes held mine. "But you stopped being fully human ten thousand years ago. The question is whether you're willing to accept that."
------------------------------
Dawn found me on the compound's walls, watching the city wake to Day 5's eve.
Four hundred and twenty-seven zombies. One Elite. Forty-five human survivors. And somewhere beneath my feet, an ancient horror was counting down to emergence.
The math didn't work. Even if I pushed my claiming to the breaking point, even if I sacrificed sleep and sanity to expand my horde, I couldn't match thousands.
Unless Maya was right.
Unless the limits I believed in weren't limits at all—just walls I'd built inside my own mind.
Min-Tong found me as the sun crept over the horizon.
"You didn't sleep."
"No."
"The girl—Maya—she told me what's coming." Min-Tong stood beside me, close enough that our shoulders touched. "Day 5. The Hive King."
"Yes."
"Can you beat it?"
I thought about the question.
In my original timeline, I'd never faced anything like this. The Tier 5s I'd fought had been singular creatures—powerful, yes, but individual. Not a collective. Not a network.
The Hive King was something new. Something that shouldn't exist. Something that only existed because I'd come back and changed the rules.
"I don't know," I admitted. "But I'm going to try."
"What do you need?"
"More time. More zombies. More power." I turned to look at her. "And I need you to stay safe. Whatever happens tomorrow—"
"Don't." Her voice was sharp. "Don't ask me to hide. Don't ask me to wait on the sidelines while you fight."
"Min-Tong—"
"You came back ten thousand years to save me. You changed the timeline, altered the future, all because you couldn't stand the thought of me dying." Her dark eyes blazed. "Do you really think I'm going to let you face this alone?"
"You don't have powers yet. You can't—"
"Then give me something I can do." She grabbed my arm. "There has to be something. Coordination. Communication. Medical support. Something."
I looked at her—at the woman I'd loved for millennia, standing in the dawn light with fury in her eyes and determination in her heart.
She wasn't the Saint yet. She didn't have her healing power, didn't have the abilities that would make her invaluable on the battlefield.
But she was still Min-Tong Lin.
And she was right. She wasn't going to wait on the sidelines.
"Medical," I said finally. "We're going to have casualties. Human and zombie. I need someone coordinating triage, directing resources, making sure the wounded don't become the dead."
"I can do that."
"It won't be safe."
"Nothing's safe anymore." She squeezed my arm. "When do we start?"
I looked at the rising sun.
"Now."