Chapter 4:
Red Flags
The air tasted like burnt copper and ozone, thick with the acrid sting of panic. My tongue felt heavy in my mouth, coated with the metallic aftertaste of fear. Outside Milo's apartment, the city had become a graveyard of flickering neon and shifting shadows. The drones moved like mechanical vultures, their floodlights carving surgical wounds through the blood-red dusk. Every sweep of light sent my pulse skittering, every mechanical whir of their rotors tightening the knot between my shoulder blades.
Stage Red.
The words pulsed behind my eyes like a migraine. I'd seen the bulletins, heard the warnings whispered in frightened huddles on street corners. Stage Yellow meant stay alert. Stage Orange meant get inside. But Red? Red meant the government had stopped pretending they could control this.
I pressed my forehead against the cool glass of the window, my breath fogging the pane as I peered through a finger-width gap in the blackout curtains. The street below was a nightmare painting . Emergency broadcast screens casting their sickly glow across abandoned cars and scattered debris. The looping message scrolled endlessly:
"CURFEW IN EFFECT. ALL CITIZENS REMAIN INDOORS. AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS."
The voice was too calm. That's what chilled me most. No urgency, no emotion, just the flat, dead tone of something that had never been human to begin with.
Behind me, Milo's fingers flew across the keyboard in a staccato rhythm that matched the jackhammer pounding of my heart. The blue light from his laptop screen painted hollows beneath his eyes, making him look like a corpse propped up at the kitchen table. Between us, Rina's encrypted shard pulsed weakly, its tiny LED blinking like the last gasps of a dying animal.
"Anything?" My voice came out cracked and raw, barely recognizable.
Milo dragged a hand through his greasy hair, leaving it standing in erratic spikes.
"This isn't normal encryption," he muttered, more to himself than to me. "It's... alive. Like it's fighting me."
I chewed the inside of my cheek until I tasted blood. The coppery tang grounded me, kept me from screaming.
"Can you break it?"
He shot me a look that made my stomach drop.
"I can try. But Cat..." His Adam's apple bobbed. "This thing has teeth. One wrong move and it'll fry itself. And probably take my rig with it."
I didn't answer.
What could I say?
That it was worth the risk?
That whatever was on that shard might be worse than not knowing?
The silence stretched between us, thick with all the things we weren't saying.
Then the world exploded.
The first blast hit like a punch to the chest. The windows rattled in their frames, the vibration traveling up through the floorboards and into my bones. Milo and I froze, our eyes locking in wordless horror.
Then the screaming started.
Not the short, sharp cries of surprise. These were the long, drawn-out wails of people who knew they were dying. I was at the window before I realized I'd moved, yanking the curtain aside just enough to see. Three blocks east, a mushroom cloud of black smoke twisted into the sky, backlit by an unnatural orange glow that painted the surrounding buildings in hellish relief.
"They're bombing the quarantine zones," Milo whispered. His voice sounded hollow, like someone had scooped out everything that made him human.
My stomach turned to lead. The realization hit like a physical blow. They weren't trying to contain the outbreak anymore. They were sterilizing it. Burning away the infection and everyone caught in it.
Another explosion, closer this time. The floor bucked beneath my feet, sending a coffee mug crashing to the ground. Somewhere in the distance, a car alarm began its electronic wail before cutting off abruptlyoo abruptly.
Milo's hand closed around my arm with bruising force. "We need to move. Now."
"Move where?" I hissed, yanking free. My pulse roared in my ears. "There's nowhere left! They're bombing the whole damn city!"
He didn't answer. Just turned back to the laptop, his fingers moving faster now, more desperate. The shard's LED flickered erratically, casting jagged shadows across his face.
Green.
The screen bloomed with data.
***
For one suspended moment, time stopped. The air left my lungs in a rush as the file tree unfolded across Milo's screen. Charts, maps, strings of code that made my eyes water to look at. And at the center, pulsing like a wound:
ZERA_TERMINUS.mp4
Milo's hand hovered over the trackpad. I saw the tremor in his fingers, the sweat beading at his hairline. Then he clicked.
The footage was grainy, shot from a high angle like a security camera. White walls. Steel tables that gleamed under harsh fluorescent lights. And in the center of the room -
A man strapped to a gurney.
Except it wasn't a man. Not really. Not anymore.
His skin had taken on a sickly gray pallor, stretched too tight over protruding bones. Black veins stood out in stark relief beneath the surface, pulsing like living things. His mouth hung open in a silent scream, lips peeled back from teeth that had grown too long, too sharp.
But his eyes...
God, his eyes.
Pupils blown so wide they nearly swallowed the irises, swimming in seas of blood-red sclera. They darted wildly, animalistic, tracking something only he could see.
The camera shook as a figure in a bulky hazmat suit moved into frame. In their gloved hands, a syringe filled with liquid so vibrantly red it seemed to glow from within.
"Subject 047, administering ZERA-C9."
The needle plunged into the man's neck.
For three heartbeats, nothing happened.
Then, the screaming started.
His back arched impossibly high, tendons standing out like steel cables beneath his skin. The restraints groaned in protest as he thrashed, his bones cracking audibly as they reshaped themselves beneath his flesh. His mouth stretched wider and wider.
Then the feed cut to black.
The last words burned themselves into my retinas:
"CURE IS THE VIRUS."
The silence that followed was absolute. Even the distant explosions seemed to fade away, leaving only the frantic hammering of my heart.
Milo was the first to speak.
"What the actual fuck was that?" His voice cracked on the last word.
I couldn't answer. My hands had taken on a life of their own, shaking so violently I had to press them flat against the table to keep them still. The wood grain bit into my palms, the pain sharp and grounding.
Because I knew.
I knew with terrible, gut-wrenching certainty.
That wasn't just some test subject.
That was Patient Zero.
And whatever they'd injected him with, whatever ZERA was, it hadn't cured him.
It had transformed him.
Made him into one of them.
The Antlers.
The pieces clicked together with horrifying clarity. The disappearances. The cover-ups. The way no one ever remembered seeing them, because they weren't just hunting people.
They were recruiting.
And my blood.
My blood was the key to stopping it. Or continuing it. I wasn't sure which possibility scared me more.
The sound of shattering glass tore through the apartment.
We spun in unison toward the window just in time to see the drone's metal claws retract from the broken pane. Its single red eye swiveled unnaturally in its socket before locking onto me with terrifying precision.
"CATARA LIN. YOU ARE IN VIOLATION OF QUARANTINE PROTOCOL. DO NOT RESIST."
The voice was wrong. Too many tones layered together, like a chorus of the dead speaking through a single mouth.
Milo moved before I could blink. He snatched the laptop and shard in one fluid motion, shoving them into my hands as he wrenched open the closet door.
"Go!"
"What about you?" My voice came out strangled.
"Don't argue, just fucking go!"
Another window exploded inward, then another. They were coming from all sides now. The mechanical screech of drones mixed with something else, something organic and wet that made my skin crawl.
I dove into the closet just as the first drone crashed through the living room window, its razor-sharp blades reducing the curtains to ribbons. Milo slammed the door behind me, his final words barely audible over the cacophony.
"Find the others!"
Then the world erupted in gunfire.
***
The closet wasn't a closet.
The realization hit as my outstretched hands met empty air where the back wall should have been. A tunnel, narrow, crumbling, stinking of mildew and old concrete. My breath came in ragged gasps as I ran, the laptop clutched to my chest like a holy relic. Behind me, the sounds of struggle faded, replaced by a new sound that froze the blood in my veins.
A horn.
Deep. Resonant.
The sound of the Hunt beginning.
I ran faster, my shoulder scraping against rough concrete, my boots slipping on damp stone. The tunnel seemed to stretch endlessly before finally spitting me out into an alley strewn with garbage and broken glass.
The sky burned red overhead, the air thick with smoke and the sickly-sweet stench of burning flesh. Somewhere nearby, a woman sobbed uncontrollably. A child screamed. A sound that cut off abruptly with a wet gurgle.
And beneath it all, the steady, rhythmic thud of boots on pavement.
Getting closer.
I pressed myself against the damp brick wall, my heart hammering so violently I feared it might crack a rib. Slowly, carefully, I risked a glance around the corner.
Three figures moved down the center of the street in perfect unison. Their black uniforms seemed to drink in the light, making them appear as walking voids. Their masks gleamed bone-white under the streetlights, the antlers casting long, twisted shadows that didn't quite match their movements.
One stopped dead.
Tilted its head at an impossible angle.
Sniffed the air.
I ducked back, squeezing my eyes shut.
Please. Please don't see me. Please...
A hand clamped over my mouth.
I nearly screamed, nearly bit down hard enough to draw blood.
"If you want to live, don't move."
The voice was female. Young.
And hauntingly familiar.
I went rigid.
Behind us, the Antlers passed by without slowing, their footsteps fading into the night. Only when the sound had completely disappeared did the stranger release me.
I spun, fists raised.
And froze.
The girl couldn't have been older than seventeen. Her dark hair was cropped short, her face smeared with soot and something darker. But it was her eyes that stopped me cold. Wide, terrified, and exactly like Rina's had been in those final moments.
She held out a shaking hand.
"I'm Nia," she whispered. "Rina's sister."
Then she lifted the edge of her shirt, revealing a jagged barcode tattooed across her ribs.
Identical to mine.
"They're coming for all of us," she said, her voice breaking. "And if we don't run now, we're dead."
The horn sounded again, closer this time.
And we ran.