Chapter 11

Grace Mercer arrived at the radio station at 4:17 a.m. with two coffees, a dead phone battery, and hospital footage that had already made her throw up once in the staff bathroom. The city outside was still dark, but the streets were not quiet anymore; somewhere beyond the station's glass doors, a car horn had been blaring for nearly ten minutes, and a man in a bloodstained shirt was stumbling along the pavement while drivers swerved around him and screamed through their open windows.

She had spent the last three days turning scattered reports of assaults, unexplained deaths, and missing hospital patients into something the newsroom could broadcast without getting sued, fired, or accused of spreading panic. Her managers had handed everyone the same approved language, repeating it so often that Grace could practically hear it in her sleep: neurological outbreak, isolated incidents, no confirmed reanimation. The government insisted that hospitals were functioning, emergency services were responding, and the public should remain calm, which would have been more reassuring if the hospitals were actually answering their phones.

Grace dropped her bag beside the editing console and opened Peter Shaw's message again, her fingers moving too quickly across the keyboard as she loaded the video onto the monitor. Peter had sent it just after midnight with three messages telling her not to share it, followed by another begging her to watch the entire recording before deciding he had lost his mind.

The footage showed a hospital examination room with pale walls, a stainless-steel trolley, and a body lying beneath a thin white sheet. Two medical workers entered, checked the patient's pulse, and exchanged a few words that the camera could not capture, then one of them pulled the sheet over the man's face while the other wheeled the trolley toward the door.

The timestamp continued running after they left, and Grace leaned closer to the screen, waiting for something that might explain why Peter had sounded like a man about to jump out of his own skin.

The body sat upright.

It happened so violently that the sheet slid to the floor, exposing a man whose eyes were open and whose mouth hung crookedly to one side. He turned his head toward the door, then climbed off the trolley with a stiff, jerking movement, his bare feet striking the tiles as he lurched out of the camera's view. A few seconds later, somebody ran past the open doorway, followed by another person whose hands were covered in blood.

Grace rewound the footage and watched it again, then a third time, because her brain kept trying to find a normal explanation and coming back with absolutely nothing worth a damn.

Her phone began vibrating against the desk, and Peter's name flashed across the screen.

"Grace, please tell me you haven't sent that recording to anybody else, because if the hospital finds out I copied it, they'll come after me before I can even explain what happened," he said, his voice so strained that she had to turn up the volume to hear him over the machinery humming in the studio.

"Peter, slow down and tell me exactly what you saw, because I have watched your video three times and that man was not moving when the medical workers left him in the room," Grace replied, rubbing her forehead while the frozen image remained on the monitor.

Peter swallowed audibly before continuing, explaining that the patient had been pronounced dead after attacking a nurse, and that the hospital staff had locked down the ward when the patient began moving again. Another body had disappeared from the morgue, a senior physician had ordered everyone to stop discussing the incident, and Peter had been warned that accessing the recording again would cost him his job.

"Can you prove the video is authentic, Grace, because I swear to God I didn't edit anything and the original is still sitting on the hospital's internal system with the room number and timestamp intact?" he asked, speaking faster as though somebody might be listening through his phone.

Grace pulled a notebook toward her and began writing down the details, but before she could ask for the physician's name, Peter's voice dropped until she could barely hear him.

"Someone is outside my apartment door, and they've been standing there without saying anything for several minutes, so if this call suddenly cuts off, please don't assume my phone has run out of battery."

A dull knock sounded through the receiver, followed by another that rattled something in Peter's apartment.

Grace pushed back from the desk so quickly that her chair rolled into a cabinet, and she shouted his name while the call filled with a shuffling noise and a muffled crash. Peter said something she couldn't understand, the knocking became a heavy pounding, and then the line went dead without another word.

She called him back immediately, but the call failed, and the second attempt went straight to voicemail.

"Shit, Peter, you had better answer that bloody phone," she muttered, staring at the screen before forcing herself to stand and carry the footage to the newsroom editor.

Martin Hale was already arguing with a reporter over a stack of printed government statements when Grace placed her laptop in front of him and played the recording without asking permission. He watched the body sit upright, pressed his lips together, and closed the laptop before the video could reach the part where people began running past the doorway.

"Absolutely not, Grace, because a grainy recording from an unidentified source is not enough to accuse hospitals of concealing dead patients, and if we broadcast this without independent verification, we could trigger a stampede across a city that is already struggling to keep its streets under control," Martin said, pushing the laptop back toward her.

"What independent verification do you want when the hospital refuses to answer our calls and the official statement says nothing like this has happened, because those two things cannot both be true unless somebody is lying or nobody has any idea what is happening?" Grace demanded, keeping her voice low only because half the newsroom had turned to watch them.

Martin rubbed his face and told her to prepare a segment using confirmed reports only, without mentioning Peter's footage or suggesting that the dead were returning to life. Grace nodded as if she agreed, collected her laptop, and walked back to the editing room while anger crawled beneath her skin, hot enough to make her hands shake.

She could work with facts. Hospitals had reported unexplained deaths, several facilities had stopped accepting patients, and families were reporting missing bodies. Those were facts, even if the people in charge wanted to bury them under comforting words while the city came apart outside their windows.

By six o'clock, the station's phone lines were overflowing with callers describing relatives who had stopped breathing and then attacked anyone who came near them. One woman cried that her husband had bitten through her brother's cheek, while another caller shouted that the entire story was fabricated and accused the station of trying to start a riot.

Then a woman claiming to be a nurse came through the line, breathing so hard that Grace could hear her struggling to speak.

"They locked the morgue from the outside, and there are people trapped in here with me who have been screaming for help since the bodies started moving, so please send someone before they break through this door!" the woman begged.

A heavy impact sounded behind her, followed by a chorus of screams that erupted so suddenly Grace jerked away from the console. The caller shouted something about the door giving way, and the line filled with crashing metal, frantic footsteps, and a wet, choking noise that made several employees turn toward the speaker.

The station manager stormed across the room and cut the phone feed, ordering everyone to stop taking calls until they could establish whether the reports were genuine. Grace watched him disconnect the lines while people outside the newsroom crowded around their phones, showing one another videos of bloodied figures attacking motorists and stumbling through intersections.

When the manager disappeared into his office, Grace opened the emergency broadcast panel and selected the station's low-power channel, her pulse hammering as she loaded the segment she had prepared. She could not explain what was causing the violence, and she certainly could not tell anyone how to kill something that might already be dead, but she could warn them that the official story left out too much.

The red light above the microphone turned on, and Grace leaned forward.

"If you are listening right now, please stay away from anyone showing sudden violent confusion, and do not assume that a person who has stopped breathing is necessarily beyond danger, because hospitals across several districts are reporting unexplained deaths and missing patients while emergency services struggle to respond," she said, forcing herself to keep speaking as someone began pounding on the station's front doors.

She warned listeners to check whether hospitals were actually receiving patients before bringing injured relatives into crowded emergency departments, urged them to secure their homes, and begged them not to approach violent individuals alone. She admitted that officials had not provided enough information to explain what was happening, then ended the broadcast before the manager could return and shut her down.

Her hands were still trembling when a new message appeared from Peter.

It contained no words, only a video file.

Grace opened it, and the image revealed a hospital corridor outside the morgue, where several medical workers were bracing their shoulders against a heavy door while something pounded from the other side. One man had blood running down his neck, another was gripping a fire extinguisher with both hands, and a nurse near the wall was sobbing as she tried to dial a number on her phone.

The pounding grew harder until the doorframe began shaking, and then every person in the corridor stopped moving at once, their bodies locked in place as though somebody had pressed a button that controlled the entire world.

Even the camera image appeared frozen, but the timestamp continued advancing.

Grace dragged the progress bar backward and watched the final seconds again, her mouth going dry as she enlarged the far end of the corridor, where a tall, handsome man dressed in black stood watching the motionless hospital staff with an expression so calm it seemed grotesquely out of place among the blood, the barricaded door, and the terrified people trapped beside it.

The image sharpened enough to show his face, and Grace felt her fingers tighten around the mouse as she stared at him, unable to explain why every other person in the corridor had stopped while he remained standing there, looking toward the morgue as if he had arrived to collect something.