PATIENT ZERO -The lone survivor
They moved with the stiff, jerky reluctance of hostages walking through a minefield.
Around their necks, the silver collars pulsed with an angry, rapid red light.
The man in the center—the one who had destroyed the gate—was a mountain of mutated muscle. His arms were disproportionately massive, the skin vibrating so intensely that the air around his fists blurred in a localized haze of seismic friction. To his left stood a young woman whose forearms had split open, revealing jagged, foot-long spikes of rapidly regenerating bone. To the right was a boy whose very outline seemed to glitch and tear, his physical form constantly dissolving into dense, black smoke and re-solidifying.