None of the content, cities, or names in this story relate to the real world
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Inside a silent shopping mall, a display television played by itself, its signal flickering in and out.
NASA has discovered a new comet approaching Earth. It is expected to reach a magnitude of -6 by the end of this month and will be visible throughout the night in the Northern Hemisphere.
The CL2026 comet split due to Earth's gravity at its perigee. At 6 PM today, a spectacular meteor shower will be visible over Siberia.
An unknown virus has broken out in Siberia. Within one hour, tens of thousands of people have shown symptoms. Those infected exhibit signs of mania, irritability, and mechanical feeding. Experts speculate that the virus is transmitted through air, water, and contact with the bodily fluids of the infected. Further research is required for specific details.
A virus outbreak occurred on a flight from Russia to the United States. Passengers attacked the crew in a fit of rage, causing the aircraft to lose control and crash over the Arctic!
10 hours after the virus broke out in Siberia, the first case appeared in our country.
"The number of infected people in our country is rising rapidly and has now covered 90% of cities. Experts suggest that everyone stay at home as much as possible and avoid going out unless absolutely necessary. Please wear a mask if you must go out!"
"Attention residents, our city currently has abundant supplies and will not run out. Please do not go out to panic buy. Staying at home is the best way to..."
The static returned.
The television screen flickered once and suddenly went dark.
Perhaps it was a power outage, or perhaps it was something else.
The pitch-black screen reflected the light from the entrance, projecting the image of the empty street outside.
Suddenly, a stiff and twisted figure slowly entered the street, and the television screen eerily captured the movement.
The figure moved slowly from left to right. As it moved, a mechanical rasping sound came from its throat, sounding as if its windpipe were being strangled or as if it were struggling to breathe through clotted blood.
"Heh... heh..."
The figure gradually drifted off the screen and disappeared into the street outside.
It was as if nothing had happened.
Silence returned to the city.
...
Aghh!
With a sharp headache stinging his mind, Alto snapped his eyes open.
He was lying on a bed that wasn't particularly comfortable. It was not the single bed from his school dormitory.
A sea of white met his vision.
White walls. White windows. White sheets. White blankets. Even the bedside table was white.
Alto was confusion.
The headache made it impossible to think.
With his hands braced against the bed, he forced himself to sit up.
He was wearing light blue and white striped clothes, and an iron IV stand hung from the ceiling.
Without needing to think much, he immediately judged from the decor and colors that he was in a hospital.
At that moment, memories came rushing back like a tide.
School had just announced the start of summer break. Before leaving for home, the Zenith university of physical education and the local Zenith petroleum university were scheduled to play a friendly basketball match.
As a skilled shooter, Alto had actively participated in the event.
During the game, he was accidentally pushed down. He hit the back of his head on the ground and blacked out on the spot.
And now, he was awake.
With a numb hand, Alto felt the back of his head and discovered it was wrapped in thick gauze.
He pressed down on the injured area, and a dizzy spell immediately made his stomach churn. He couldn't stop himself from vomiting.
Based on his limited medical knowledge, he figured he had a mild concussion.
After lying down for a while longer until the dizziness and headache subsided, he sat up again.
This time, he noticed something abnormal.
"Quiet!"
The surroundings were too quiet!
It was an eerie silence.
As a student athlete, Alto often visited the hospital due to injuries, so he was quite familiar with the environment.
But this was the first time he had seen a hospital this quiet.
In the past, there were always various noises, but today everything was unnervingly still.
After some time of confusion, he turned and pressed the call button on the headboard.
But after several minutes, no one came to check on him.
While complaining about the nurses neglecting their duties, Alto took a deep breath and shouted at the top of his lungs: "Nurse! Anyone?!"
His body had not yet recovered, so his voice was not very loud. Even though he shouted, it was useless and received no response.
"What a crappy hospital!"
Alto felt around his pillow and then looked at the bedside table.
"Where is my phone?"
Without a phone, he couldn't contact the outside world, and Alto started to panic.
He had no way of knowing what had happened after he fainted, who had brought him to the hospital, or how long he had been there.
A few bags of compressed biscuits, some chocolate, and a 500ml bottle of mineral water sat on the bedside table.
Alto found it strange. Who would bring these things to visit a patient in the hospital?
"Usually, people brought flower baskets or a few pounds of fruit. What was the deal with unhealthy biscuits?"
Supporting himself against the bed, Alto slowly shuffled toward the ward door. It took him three minutes to finally reach it.
Everything felt bizarre. With a steadying breath, he slowly turned the doorknob.
Deathly silence lay outside the door.
Before him was a dark, deep corridor typical of a hospital's inpatient department.
However, because there were no lights, it felt somewhat ghostly.
There was no one moving in the hallway, and there were no extra sounds. The ghostly atmosphere added a layer of terror to the scene.
Alto even suspected he might be in an abandoned hospital.
But the modern equipment and the clean terrazzo floors suggested this was a common hospital that had not been abandoned.
Np doctors, no nurses, and no patients? wtf is going on!
With a creeping sense of dread in his heart, he braved the walk toward the nurse's station, following the signs in the corridor.
The rooms on both sides of the hallway were tightly closed and silent, as if they were all empty.
Alto did not dare to open the doors to see if anyone was actually inside.
With footsteps kept as quiet as possible, he moved slowly toward the nurse's station.
A few minutes later, he finally reached it.
The nurse's station was empty. A landline phone sat on the desk, disconnected from the power.
With a glimmer of hope, Alto picked up the receiver. There was no sound at all. Even after he checked the wires, the familiar dial tone did not come.
The power was out.
It was a miracle that a hospital would actually lose power.
Generally, hospitals had at least one set of backup circuits that would automatically start during a power failure.
A total blackout like this would only happen if some major disaster had occurred.
Alto looked around but couldn't tell what kind of disaster it might be. Although the place was empty, it seemed orderly.
He tried walking forward a few more steps and called out in a low voice: "Anyone there?"
No one answered.
For some reason, Alto had feeling that he shouldn't make too much noise, as if he were afraid of disturbing some unknown life form hiding somewhere.
Just as he was about to return to his ward to look for other clues, a rustling sound suddenly came from the ward ahead, sounding as if someone wearing slippers was slowly shuffling along.
With a cold shiver running through him, Alto emboldened himself and crept closer.
An ajar hospital room stood with its lock broken. A heavy chain lock hung from the door, as if something terrible was being kept inside.
"Why would a ward have such a lock? Even if a patient suffered from manic psychosis, a sedative and a restraint strap should have been enough to handle them. "
Because it wasn't the original lock, a palm-sized gap remained in the doorway.
As Alto leaned in to look, a hand with greyish-green skin suddenly shot out from the gap.
Alto pulled back instantly. With a heart hammering so hard it felt like it would burst from his mouth, he felt a sharp pain in his chest from the pounding.
The gap was only wide enough for a hand to pass through, making it impossible to see the state of the person it belonged to.
As soon as the hand emerged, it began clawing wildly at the air.
With bony fingers and filthy nails, the limb released a faint, lingering scent of decay.
Alto backed away several steps, unable to grasp the situation.
It was a human hand, yet it didn't look like one.
The ajar door rattled against the frame as the arm flailed. A raspy, gasping sound like a ho-ho came from inside the room, making his skin crawl.
Triggered by the sounds made by the unknown creature in that room, a chain reaction began. Various noises started echoing from the wards on both sides of the corridor.
There were sounds of things crawling and scraping along the floor, the heavy thud of footsteps, and unconscious raspy gasps or clicking sounds. It sounded as if their throats were blocked and they were struggling to exhale.
With a buzzing in his head, Alto didn't have time to think and immediately turned back.
At that moment, his weakened body was instantly flooded with adrenaline. He shifted from a walk to a run, rushing toward his own room.
Regardless of what monsters were locked in those wards or what the situation was outside, at least the room he had just stayed in was safe!
Alto ran back to his room in one breath, quickly shut the door and turned the lock.
Even with the door locked, he didn't feel at ease. He dragged two chairs over to barricade the entrance before finally sitting down to catch his breath.
However, before his breathing could even out, a thought flashed through his mind that made the hair on his neck stand up: "the bathroom"
This ward had a bathroom!
And the bathroom door had been closed this whole time!
He hadn't checked to see if anything was inside!
With hands that were beginning to shake, Alto grabbed the metal IV stand and approached the bathroom anxiously.
It was a stroke of luck that he was an athlete. Even while sick, his body remained solid. Holding the IV stand now, he didn't find it heavy at all; he even felt that if he encountered danger, he could swing the stand as a weapon.
He pressed his ear against the bathroom door and listened for a moment. It was as silent as a vacuum inside. Not a single sound could be heard, forming a sharp contrast to the chaotic noise currently filling the hallway.
With a hand gripping the metal stand tightly to find a shred of strength, Alto used his other hand to pull the bathroom door open.
A foul stench hit him, making him gag.
By the light filtering in through the window, he saw a semi-decayed corpse lying on the floor, covered in crawling white maggots.
With a pale and shocked expression, Alto saw his reflection in the mirror on the wall directly facing the door.
He slammed the bathroom door shut.
However, that nauseating rot had already filled the entire room.
Having cleared the threat of the bathroom, Alto put down the IV stand and lay back on the bed.
A patient was still a patient, and that brief exertion had drained all his strength.
His earlier burst of energy was merely an illusion created by adrenaline. And his head spined again.
But now was not the time to rest. Even if his body rested, his brain could not!
He needed to think and analyze. He had to figure out what the current situation was and what he should do next.
How much time had passed since he was pushed down and knocked unconscious during the ball game?
The sun was bright outside, a sight only seen in summer. It felt like it was around three or four in the afternoon.
It felt similar to the day he was playing ball, so had he been out for a day, or a week?
It couldn't be much longer than that, or the scenery outside would have shown seasonal changes.
He had confirmed that all his personal belongings were missing. He didn't know if they were stolen or simply lost.
Either way, the wallet and phone he had on him were gone.
He had seen the hospital's logo in the hallway earlier. This was Zenith's hospital, an excellent top-tier general hospital.
This hospital always had a shortage of beds. Whether it was the outpatient clinic or the inpatient department, it was packed every day, yet now it was strangely quiet.
In such a massive hospital, not only were there no people, but there were even unknown creatures in the wards.
"What on earth is going on? "
"And to make it worse, there is a rotting corpse in the bathroom! "
Alto felt like his brain was about to short-circuit!
Looking back at the compressed biscuits and bottled water on the bedside table, he seemed to understand a little.
These were likely left specifically for him by someone!
But they had left the items without even leaving a note to help him understand the current situation.
"Could it be that the person who left these things didn't have time to leave any other information? "
Various eerie sounds continued to echo in the hallway outside, sounding terrifying.
Alto felt as if he were in an abandoned hospital at the end of the world.
Perhaps, it really was the apocalypse.
And the hospital before him had likely been abandoned!
Alto still felt uneasy, so he moved a white-painted metal bedside cabinet to block the door.
This way, even if the door was suddenly forced open, any intruders wouldn't be able to enter the room immediately, giving him a moment to react.
Before figuring out exactly what happened, he didn't plan on leaving this room again.
After all, what happened in the hallway was too bizarre. he didn't believe it was safe out there.
Besides, there was a corpse in his room!
This was a society ruled by law; if there was a body, the police should have arrived long ago!
Still, a corpse was safer than those eerie creatures that could make noise.
There were no communication tools to contact the outside world, and there seemed to be no other living people in this hospital besides him.
As for the living beings making noise in the other wards, he could only say they still looked human, but what they were inside was anyone's guess.
Alto guessed that some kind of disease had broken out and the patients had all been infected.
"But why am I fine? "
He couldn't understand it.
Humans cannot comprehend things that lie outside their own knowledge.
The noises in the corridor didn't disappear just because Alto had left; instead, they grew more intense.
Eventually, it even triggered the wards on the floors above and below to start making those eerie sounds.
Alto could clearly hear the sound of nails scraping against the floor on the ceiling of his room, accompanied by those raspy, ho-ho gasps caught in a throat.
Goosebumps slowly spread across his entire body.
With various fears and doubts clouding his mind, Alto kept his logic sharp. He quickly thought that the eerie disturbances were all caused by sound. He had made the first noise, which caught the attention of the humanoid creature in the chained ward. The massive racket that creature made then triggered a chain reaction, causing everything locked inside the rooms on this floor to become active. After that, the noise impacted the floors above and below. That was how the current situation came to be.
I need to avoid making any more noise for now.
With a sense of relief, Alto noted that those things were still locked inside the rooms rather than wandering the halls. By this point, he had a rough idea of what those humanoid creatures were, but he needed to see one clearly to confirm his suspicions. After all, he had only seen a greyish-blue arm and heard some strange noises so far.
Leaving the room to peer into other wards was clearly unwise. With his focus shifting toward the window, he decided to check the view outside. He might find some clues there. He rubbed his temples, finding that the dizziness from earlier had faded as he thought through the situation. He had calmed down significantly and was no longer as anxious as before.
With the half-closed curtain pulled back, he paced to the window and looked out. The ward was on the third floor, overlooking a patch of vibrant green grass. A narrow path meant for patient walks cut through the center of the lawn. Beyond the grass lay a concrete area that reflected the blinding white light of the bright sun. At the end of that concrete stretch was the hospital's outpatient department, and Alto immediately spotted the large plate for the outpatient building.
Normally, that place should have been bustling with crowds of people coming and going for medicine or appointments. That was the expected sight for a top-tier hospital. Instead, all he saw was the summer sun glinting off the polished floor tiles. Aside from that, he couldn't even see a single sparrow. Did this mean the evidence he wanted didn't exist?
With a stubborn refusal to give up, Alto pushed the glass window open and stuck his head out to get a wider field of vision. The moment the window opened, a foul stench rushed in with the hot wind. The summer heat and the rot mixed in the air and invaded the ward. Alto quickly closed the window, but he couldn't keep the smell out entirely. That stench was identical to the smell of the rotting corpse in the bathroom.
Was there another body quietly decomposing somewhere outside? With a heavy heart, Alto prepared for the worst-case scenario. It seemed the people in this hospital had either fled or died, and those who died had been left where they fell. Otherwise, it wouldn't smell this bad.
Alto suddenly remembered something. He had seen methods for determining the time of death based on the state of decomposition in crime dramas. The body in the bathroom could help him figure out the timeline. Unfortunately, he had been too panicked to look closely when he first saw it.
With a makeshift mask made from a pillowcase over his nose and mouth, he walked over and quickly pulled the bathroom door open for a look before shutting it again.
"Two days. The person had been dead for two days at most."
Alto made the judgment instantly. This meant he had been unconscious for at least two days, and the survivors had fled at least two days ago.
A lot can happen in two days; one could even fly directly to Europe. However, the current situation suggested that even if there were survivors, they couldn't have gone far in such a bizarre environment. Usually, when people encountered this kind of situation, their first instinct was to flee home. He had seen it on the news before, after earthquakes, many people couldn't leave their homes behind and would sneak back to live in them. Even during a past plague in this city, everyone's reaction was to head home rather than flee elsewhere. So, if he managed to escape the hospital, he should be able to find survivors outside. Then, he would finally understand what had happened.
As he was thinking, a sound suddenly came from outside. It was the scratching noise of someone walking in slippers. If he hadn't already seen the empty landscape, he might have been thrilled, thinking someone had appeared. However now, goosebumps covered his body in an instant. This didn't sound like a normal person, as no one would be walking like that in a hospital like this.
With fear, he still leaned toward the window to get a clear look. Every detail was a clue that might help him escape. Moving with light steps, he pressed his cheek against the glass. Alto saw a person in a hospital gown moving slowly across the concrete. The gait was slow and swaying, yet the figure remained upright. Their shoes dragged along the ground, and one leg seemed broken, scraping against the surface.
With a twisted and strange posture, the figure moved while one side of his body appeared stiff. One arm seemed to have been severed at the shoulder, hanging onto the body only by a thin layer of tissue. As the figure moved, the severed arm swung back and forth, looking absolutely horrific. Even more terrifying was the person's face; half of the skin was gone, revealing the white bone beneath.
Under the sunlight, he could see dried bloodstains all over the figure. In places where the hospital gown was torn, bite marks were visible on the flesh. While Alto was observing intently, the person suddenly stopped his shuffling steps. With a bizarre angle, the creature twisted his head around, facing the inpatient building with his mangled face. With a pair of cloudy eyes, he stared straight toward Alto's location, his mouth letting out constant, rasping breaths.
Alto hissed in a breath and immediately took a step back, hiding behind the curtain. Even though he knew those eyes hadn't actually seen him and it was just a coincidence, a wave of shock crashed through his heart. That terrifying face slowly turned back. The sound of footsteps rose again, growing more distant until they vanished.
Alto looked out the window again, but the figure was gone. He knew this was the evidence he needed. It was exactly like that figure. It kept a human shape but had stiff, twisted movements. It was sensitive to sound, but its vision was almost zero. It made mechanical sounds as if its throat were being squeezed. With greyish-blue skin covered in wounds, bite marks, and cadaveric spots, it seemed to feel no pain. Even injuries that would be fatal to a human posed no threat to that body.
Alto had seen this image many times in movies, but this was the first time seeing it in real life. That was why he hadn't been sure when he saw the hand in the hallway. Such things were usually the products of imagination. Now, however, he was certain that these things had truly appeared in reality.
Zombies.
Zombies that hunted the scent of the living and fed on flesh and blood had suddenly crashed into Alto's life.