His lips were bitten through, his mouth full of blood. He looked at me with raw, broken grief and shook his head—barely, almost imperceptibly.
He didn't want me to go out there.
"Give him an adrenaline shot. Don't let him die."
Darkness crept in.
The slaughter hadn't produced the results she'd wanted. Muriel's face was tight with fury.
I pressed my hand over my nose and mouth, fighting the urge to vomit.
I went back to the video call from earlier.
I'd screen-recorded it.
I studied every frame.
The fingers visible on the other end were thicker, longer than my brother's.
The hair length didn't match the photos that had been sent to me either.
They looked more like they belonged to the squad leader standing beside Muriel.
My brain detonated.
I had to confront that man myself.
I had to find out who he really was.
But at that moment, up on the wall, a blade flew with surgical precision.
The cloth strips shredded apart.
Their only connection—severed in a single cut.
The bait thrashed forward, bending desperately at the waist, but his empty sleeves caught nothing.
Gravity did the rest. The bundle hit the ground with a wet thud and burst open in a spray of red.
"AHHH!"
He convulsed like he'd been electrocuted, thrashing wildly, his screams so raw they barely sounded human.
At the same instant, I let out a guttural snarl.
Every zombie holding position went berserk, surging toward the gate in a frenzy.
"There it is! That bastard really can command the undead. Too bad for him—"
The squad leader beside Muriel cursed under his breath.
The guards were well-trained. Rifles up. A wall of gunfire.
But the zombies weren't attacking the walls.
They swarmed over one another, climbing shoulder to shoulder, stacking into a grotesque living ladder.
The sheer, suffocating numbers rendered the shotguns useless.
The guards stared, bewildered by the unnatural behavior.
"What are they doing?"
"No—their target is HIM!"
Muriel screamed the order, lunging for the crane lever, trying to hoist the bait up and out of reach.
Too late.
Thousands of dead hands seized the bait's body, their collective force wrenching against hers.
The crane arm snapped.
"Kill him! Don't let him turn!"
The squad leader's voice cracked with panic.
An arrow split the air and punched straight through the bait's skull.
He killed him.
He was destroying the evidence.
Rage whited out my vision. I charged forward without thinking, without caring.
One thought. Only one. Climb that wall and kill the squad leader.
With the bait gone, the hunt was over.
They pulled back fast.
The scene left behind was carnage.
The zombie legion had taken devastating losses.
The man lay in the center of it all, like the ruined heart of a flower blown apart.
"No. Please don't let it be—please, God, don't let it be—"
I stumbled through the piled corpses and pulled what was left of him into my arms.
Gently, I brushed the hair from his face. His skin was chalk-white, frozen in the agonized expression he'd worn when he died.
Identical to the brother in my memory.
"Don't... please..."
Tears streamed down my face. I traced along his unseeing eyes, past his cheek, behind his ear.
There, near the ear, a scabbed-over scar.
And behind it—a small, familiar bump.
The moment my fingers found it, a ringing flooded my ears and swallowed every other sound. All that remained was the hammering of my own heart and the ragged saw of my breathing.
The last shred of hope I'd been clinging to crumbled to dust.
It was a hereditary trait in our family.
Dad had it. My brother had it. So did I.
"How... that's impossible... it can't be..."
Tears poured down my face. My lips trembled around words that wouldn't form. I couldn't breathe.
I tried to check for other marks on his body.
But his arms were gone. His legs were gone.
"AHHH!"
I collapsed into the heap of corpses and screamed until my throat tore.
This was fake.
This had to be one of Muriel's schemes.
