Man, that twist honestly caught me off guard even though I’d seen people hinting at it online. The whole book sets you up to think the main character, Cal, is just a desperate guy trying to survive the infected by hiding out in a butcher shop. You’re following his daily grind, the fear, the isolation. Then, about two-thirds in, he finally ventures out and gets bitten. You brace for the tragic turn, the inevitable end… but he doesn’t turn. He stays himself, just with a gnarly wound.
The real gut-punch isn't that he's immune, though. It's that the narrative slowly reveals, through his own fragmented memories and the notes he finds from his past self, that he wasn't a survivor who stumbled into the shop. He was the butcher who worked there before everything fell apart, and the 'infected' he's been so terrified of? They were his regular customers, neighbors, people he knew. The 'dead meat' he’s been surviving alongside in the cold room isn't just random bodies; it's his own handiwork from the early days of the outbreak, a secret he’d completely blocked out. The twist recontextualizes every paranoid thought and every moment of supposed courage into something much more horrifying and tragic.