Chapter 3

I ran away from Fort Haven’s wall like a man driven insane by grief and terror, stumbling blindly over sharp rubble and broken glass that sliced my ankles open raw. I felt none of the physical pain. All I could see, all I could hear, all I could feel was Lila’s broken pleading eyes, the silent warning in that faint shake of her head, the echo of her tortured scream trapped forever in my ears.

It can’t be her. It cannot possibly be her.

I collapsed heavily behind the collapsed shell of an old apartment ruin, my hands shaking so violently I dropped my comms device three times before I could unlock the screen with trembling fingers. I dialed Lila’s video call without hesitation, the slow ringing tone dragging on like a death sentence, each chime stretching into eternity.

Ten seconds. Thirty seconds. A full minute.

I was balanced on the razor edge of total collapse, ready to surrender to the terrible truth I’d been fighting to deny, when the screen suddenly flared to life.

Lila’s face filled the frame, soft features, gentle familiar smile, warm eyes crinkling at the corners—exactly the sister I had remembered and missed for three long years. Perfect, unharmed, clean, alive.

“Brother? Why are you calling so late tonight?” Her voice was warm, familiar, perfectly matching the tone I’d heard in countless messages and calls over the past three years.

I opened my mouth to speak, but no sound escaped my tight throat. My chest felt stuffed with broken concrete and cold ash, impossible to draw a full breath.

“You look so pale and tired,” she tilted her head slightly with pretended gentle concern. “Are you alright out there alone in the dangerous wasteland? Are the zombie packs giving you trouble?”

“I’m fine,” I forced out at last, my voice rough, hoarse, cracking with suppressed emotion. “I just… missed you. Wanted to see your face.”

She laughed lightly, a soft musical sound, showing the small pointed canine tooth I had teased her about endlessly when we were kids. Every expression, every little mannerism, every subtle head tilt felt identical to the real Lila.

For a split second, I almost believed it was truly her, safe inside the base, untouched by the horror on the outer wall.

But my eyes scanned every tiny detail instinctively, trained by years of surviving the apocalypse to spot lies and hidden danger instantly.

The background behind her was blurred, washed-out cold artificial white light, no real room furniture, no window view, no personal decorations—nothing but a vague empty backdrop. Then my gaze locked onto her hands, resting lightly in front of the camera lens.

Wrong. Completely wrong.

The real Lila’s fingers were short, slender, delicate, nails always neatly trimmed into soft rounded shapes since childhood. The hands visible on my screen were long, sharp-knuckled, palms wider, nails cut into square sharp edges. Not her hands. Not even close.

My blood turned ice cold in my veins.

I replayed the memory frame by frame in my mind. Three days prior, Lila had sent me wedding preparation photos with her hair cut neatly just past her collarbone. The woman on this video call had waist-length flowing hair—impossible to grow that much length in only three days. A physical impossibility.

Third fatal, undeniable flaw: I paused the video playback the moment she stood up to pour a glass of water, capturing her side profile perfectly.

Her stomach was completely flat, no curve, no swell, no hint of pregnancy at all.

Five months pregnant. No woman could hide that gentle abdominal curve under a tight fitted dress. Not even with the loosest clothing.

Three impossible, undeniable flaws. Any single one could be dismissed as a minor coincidence, a trick of lighting, a change in appearance. All three stacked together?

The woman on my screen was not Lila. She was a fake. A counterfeit. A performance.

My comms device slipped from my nerveless fingers, clattering loudly onto the jagged broken stone at my feet. I snapped my head back toward Fort Haven’s wall, my vision blurring with a mixture of volcanic rage and crushing sorrow.

The broken, tortured, mutilated bait hanging from the crane—that was the real Lila. The smiling perfect face on my video call was nothing but a manufactured illusion. A hologram lie.

I stood unsteadily to my feet, legs weak with grief but resolve hardening into unbreakable steel. I was ready to charge straight for the Fort Haven gate, to tear down the concrete walls with my own hands, to rip her broken body free from that crane and carry her away to safety no matter how many soldiers stood in my path.

Then a flash of silver sliced silently through the dark night sky.

A precision throwing knife, thrown from somewhere atop the wall, flying true and deadly, cutting cleanly through the last remaining steel cable holding Lila’s broken body suspended over the wasteland.

Metal snapped with a shrill, ear-piercing ringing that cut through the night.

Her broken frame plummeted ten meters straight down from the crane, slamming heavily into the concrete ground below the wall with a sickening, dull, bone-crunching thud.

Blood splattered across the rubble in dark glistening pools, reflecting the pale moonlight eerily.

She still moved. Twitching weakly, her broken body spasming on the cold stone, whimpering faint muffled sounds, clinging to life by the thinnest thread imaginable.

A raw, animalistic roar burst out of my chest—not a human shout, not a spoken word, but a powerful mental frequency only the undead could perceive and obey.

My million-strong zombie horde awakened completely.

From every ruined building, every shadowed alley, every collapsed highway overpass, every dark forest hollow for five hundred miles around—they rose one after another. Hundreds became thousands, thousands became tens of thousands, rising as one endless black tide swarming toward Fort Haven’s gate. They stacked their rotting bodies into towering zombie ladders against the concrete walls, reaching decaying hands desperately upward, trying to catch her broken form before further harm could strike.

The combined weight and force of the horde snapped the crane’s rusted remaining supports entirely. Undead hands caught her crumpled body mid-fall, shielding her from worse impact on the unforgiving concrete.

I was seconds away from saving her. Seconds away from pulling her free from Fort Haven’s cruelty forever.

Then a cold, sharp female command cut through the night air from the top of the wall, loud and unyielding:“Kill her now. Never let her merge into a zombie vessel!”

It was Lynn Hale—Kane Reid’s most loyal, most ruthless female lieutenant, his right hand soldier, cold-blooded, calculating, completely without mercy.

I lifted my head just in time to see her draw a compound hunting bow, nock a steel-tipped arrow, and release the string without a single moment of hesitation.

The arrow tore through the darkness like a speeding bullet, unmissable, perfectly aimed.

It pierced straight through Lila’s right eye, burying deep into her skull, splitting bone and destroying her brain instantly.

Her body went limp in the zombies’ grasp in an instant, all movement ceasing forever.

My heart stopped beating entirely.

I charged forward recklessly, throwing all caution aside, ignoring the wall archers aiming straight for me, ignoring the soldiers raising their rifles along the gate, ignoring every deadly danger Fort Haven could unleash.

But the massive iron reinforced gate of Fort Haven slammed shut directly in front of me, heavy metal crashing against concrete with a thunderous boom, sending sparks flying across the cold ground.

Blinding searchlights swept the wasteland, illuminating piles of zombie corpses, pools of fresh blood, and Lila’s lifeless body tangled in undead remains beyond the sealed gate.

I dropped to my knees heavily in front of the impenetrable gate, shoving my bleeding fingers into the narrow metal crack, forcing them in until my nails split completely open and warm blood ran down my wrists and forearms.

The gate did not move an inch.

On the wall high above, Lynn Hale lowered her bow silently, turning to vanish into the base’s shadow without a single glance downward. Kane Reid stood alone on the battlement, staring down at me once—one cold, dismissive, contemptuous look, exactly like watching a stray dying dog lying helpless in the gutter.

I knelt in blood and ash, helpless and broken, staring at my sister’s lifeless body trapped beyond the sealed iron gate. I command a million zombies, an unstoppable undead tide capable of flattening Fort Haven to rubble in mere hours. I wield the strongest Zombie Dominion power ever recorded in the Gray Fever apocalypse.

Yet I could not save the only person I loved, the only family I had left in this dead world.

I watched Kane torture her slowly, watched Lynn execute her with a single cold arrow, watched them use advanced hologram technology and AI voice synthesis to lie to me, manipulate me, fool me for two full years.

And in this crushing moment of grief and rage, the darkest, most horrifying truth crashed into my mind like a wrecking ball:

Lila was not merely drained of her antibodies and discarded as useless live bait once her utility expired. Fort Haven and Kane Reid never planned to let either of us live. Every nightly “good night” message, every fake wedding photo, every scripted video call was never just a casual lie—it was a carefully calculated trap, designed to lull me into complacency, keep me isolated outside the walls, then lure me willingly into Fort Haven to harvest my far stronger Dominion power, lock me away in a secret underground lab, and use me as their next permanent blood and power source exactly like they used my sister.

The entire base is now celebrating her cold-blooded murder as a glorious military victory. My million zombies wait silently beyond the walls, holding back only by my fragile self-control, ready to storm the barriers and burn every human inside to ash at my slightest command.

But I just discovered a strange hidden bloodline scar and genetic mark on Lila’s corpse—a secret birthmark proving Kane’s twisted experiments stretch far beyond simple antibody vaccine production. He has been secretly researching Dominion bloodline offspring, breeding and studying children born with our rare zombie-controlling gift, and Lila’s unborn baby was never meant to die that night. Kane planned to steal her child, raise it in isolation, and create an army of Dominion children to control the undead forever.

Now I have two deadly wars to fight: burn Fort Haven to blackened ashes and avenge every moment of Lila’s suffering, and expose Kane’s inhuman bloodline experiment conspiracy… before he hunts me down, captures me alive, and completes his twisted apocalypse plan once and for all.