I felt them before I saw them.
Three new presences at the compound. Three heartbeats that burned brighter than the others—not with the steady warmth of ordinary survivors, but with something fiercer. Something other.
Awakened.
The word Maya had used. The term for people like me—people whose bodies had responded to the virus not with death, but with transformation.
I'd expected others to emerge eventually. In my original timeline, awakened had appeared sporadically throughout the first weeks, their powers manifesting in moments of extreme stress.
I hadn't expected three of them to show up on the night everything would change.
------------------------------
The compound was chaos when I arrived.
Survivors crowded the courtyard, staring at the sky. The ground had started shaking an hour ago—subtle tremors that grew stronger with each passing minute. Somewhere beneath us, something enormous was waking.
But that wasn't what had drawn their attention.
It was the man standing at the center of the courtyard.
He was young—mid-twenties, maybe—with hair the color of burnt copper and eyes that flickered with literal fire. Flames danced at his fingertips, casting orange light across the surrounding faces.
"About time you showed up."
His voice was rough, hostile. He turned to face me, and I saw the challenge in his posture. The barely contained aggression.
"Who are you?" I asked.
"Drake Morrison." He smiled, but there was no warmth in it. "The guy who's going to help you not die tonight."
------------------------------
Drake Morrison.
The name triggered something in my memories. In the original timeline, Drake had been a problem—a fire awakened who'd carved out territory in the industrial district, using his powers to dominate rather than protect. He'd burned through rival groups, killed survivors who refused to submit, built a kingdom of ash and fear.
We'd fought twice. The second time, I'd killed him.
But that was a different Drake. A Drake who'd had months to grow twisted by his power. This one was fresh—five days awakened at most—still finding his footing.
Still capable of becoming something other than a monster.
"Maya called me," Drake said, as if reading my thoughts. "Said there was something big coming. Something that needed more than one awakened to handle."
"She's right."
"Is she?" Drake's fire flared brighter. "Because from where I'm standing, you look like you've got things pretty well handled. Six thousand zombies. That's not a small army."
"The Hive King has more."
"The what now?"
------------------------------
I explained.
Not everything—there wasn't time for the full story—but enough. The creature beneath the city. The emergence happening tonight. The stakes if we failed.
Drake listened with growing disbelief.
"You're telling me there's a zombie god under Seattle?"
"Something like that."
"And you think—what—your dead army and my fire are going to be enough to stop it?"
"I think we don't have a choice."
Drake stared at me for a long moment.
Then he laughed.
"You know what? I like you. You're crazy. But I like you."
"Does that mean you'll help?"
"That means I'll stick around until I see what we're dealing with." His fire dimmed to a manageable glow. "Then I'll decide."
------------------------------
The other two awakened were less dramatic.
The first was a woman named Sarah Kim—slight, unassuming, with the kind of face you'd forget five minutes after meeting her. That was the point, she explained. Her power was invisibility—or something close to it. She could bend light around herself, make people's eyes slide past without registering.
"I was hiding in a parking garage when the virus hit." Her voice was soft, almost apologetic. "Stayed hidden for three days. When I finally came out, everyone was dead or turned."
"And your power manifested?"
"Second day. A zombie found me despite the barricade." She wrapped her arms around herself. "I just wanted to not be seen. And suddenly... I wasn't."
The second was a teenager—seventeen, maybe—named Marcus Chen. No relation to Chen Chen. His power was strength—the raw, physical kind. He'd demonstrated by lifting an SUV with one hand, though he looked more scared than proud when he did it.
"I was a football player," he said, flexing fingers that could probably crush steel. "I used to think I was strong. Now I'm..."
"Different."
"Yeah." He met my eyes, and I saw the fear there. The uncertainty of someone whose body had become a stranger. "Different."
------------------------------
Three awakened, plus myself.
Fire. Invisibility. Strength. Death.
It wasn't much. Not against what was coming. But it was more than I'd had this morning.
"Where's Maya?" I asked Max Yang.
"Roof. She's been up there since the tremors started. Says she can see the emergence point better from above."
I nodded and turned to climb, then stopped.
Min-Tong was standing at the edge of the courtyard, watching me.
"Come back," she said quietly.
"I will."
"Promise."
"I already did."
She smiled—a sad, knowing smile.
"Then do it again. For me."
I crossed the distance between us in three steps and took her hand.
"I promise," I said. "Whatever happens tonight—I'll come back to you."
"Good." She squeezed my fingers. "Because if you don't, I'm coming after you. Even if I have to walk into hell itself."
"I believe you."
"You should. I'm stubborn."
------------------------------
Maya sat at the roof's edge, same position as before.
But she wasn't alone.
Rachel Chen stood behind her, along with the heavyset man with the shotgun and the young woman with the tablet. Her entire team, weapons ready, watching the city.
"It's almost time," Maya said without turning. "Can you feel it?"
I could. The tremors had grown stronger, more rhythmic. Like a heartbeat. Like something breathing deep beneath the earth.
"The emergence point?"
"Four blocks east. The street above the central drainage nexus." Maya pointed. "It'll come up right... there."
I followed her finger.
The street in question was called Pioneer Square—an intersection that had probably been charming once, back when Seattle was a city instead of a graveyard. Now it was empty, abandoned, dark except for the fires still burning in distant buildings.
And as I watched, the pavement began to crack.
------------------------------
"It's starting!"
Rachel's shout brought everyone running. Survivors crowded onto the compound's walls, staring at the distant intersection where the ground was heaving like a living thing.
Cracks spread across the asphalt. Water mains burst, geysering into the air. Street lights toppled. Buildings groaned and swayed.
And then—
The street exploded.
Concrete and stone erupted skyward as something massive pushed through from below. The sound was incredible—the shriek of stressed metal, the roar of displaced earth, the collective scream of a city tearing itself apart.
From the crater climbed... it.
The Hive King.
------------------------------
I'd seen monsters in my ten thousand years.
I'd fought creatures that defied description. Beasts that had no business existing. Horrors that still visited my nightmares.
But I'd never seen anything like the Hive King.
It was massive—easily thirty feet tall, though size seemed almost secondary to its wrongness. It moved on multiple limbs, each one a different shape, like it had been assembled from a hundred different corpses and forced into a single nightmare form.
Its torso was a mass of exposed bone and rotting flesh, constantly shifting, constantly reforming. Faces emerged from its surface—human faces, dozens of them, all screaming silently, all trapped in an endless moment of horror.
And its eyes.
It had too many eyes. They covered its body like tumors, all of them glowing that same cold blue I'd seen in the Tier 2 before I claimed it.
All of them looking at me.
"Wei."
The voice came from everywhere and nowhere. It wasn't sound so much as vibration—a pulse of pure will that resonated in my bones.
"The one who returned. The one who commands the dead."
I stepped to the edge of the roof.
Six thousand three hundred zombies stood between us and the Hive King. All of them ready. All of them waiting for my command.
"I know you," I called back. "Or something like you. In my original timeline, creatures like you ruled the world for centuries. Mountains of corpses, empires of the dead."
The Hive King laughed.
The sound was horrifying—a chorus of voices, all screaming at different pitches, all merging into something that sounded almost like amusement.
"Timeline. Return. You speak as if time is a river." The mass of eyes focused on me with terrible intensity. "Time is a web. And you, little king, have tangled yourself in threads you cannot see."
"What does that mean?"
"It means you were not sent back to save them." The Hive King raised one of its misshapen limbs, pointing at the compound behind me. "You were sent back to build them."
"Build what?"
"An army." The voice dropped to a whisper that somehow carried across the entire city. "An army for the one who sent you. The one who waits. The one who hungers."
I felt ice crawl down my spine.
"Who sent me back?"
"You don't know." The Hive King's laughter returned, louder now. "How delicious. You don't even know who you serve."
"I don't serve anyone."
"Don't you?" The creature began to move toward the compound, its army of zombies—thousands of them—flowing from the crater behind it like a tide of rot. "Then let us test that claim. Let us see what remains when I strip away your lies."
------------------------------
"Wei." Maya's voice was barely a whisper. "I can see something. In the visions. The Hive King is telling the truth."
I turned to look at her.
Her silver eyes were distant, unfocused, staring at something beyond the physical world.
"Someone sent you back," she continued. "Something... ancient. I can't see it clearly—it's too big, too old—but it's there. Waiting."
"Waiting for what?"
"I don't know." Her eyes refocused on me, and I saw tears streaming down her cheeks. "But whatever it is... it's worse than the Hive King. Much worse."
Behind us, the Hive King advanced.
Its army spread across the streets, filling every intersection, every alley, every shadow. Eight thousand zombies. Maybe ten thousand. All of them moving with terrible coordination.
All of them coming for us.
I looked at my own army. Six thousand three hundred. Not enough. Not nearly enough.
But it didn't matter anymore.
The battle was here.
"Vanguard."
My Elite moved to my side.
"Master?"
"It's time."
I drew in a breath and reached for my power—all of it, every connection, every thread of will I'd spread across the city.
Six thousand three hundred zombies stirred as one.
The Hive King smiled.
And Day 5 began.