DEAD CITY: A ZOMBIE APOCALYPSE

The alarm had been screaming for forty minutes.

Riccardo Gonzales finally slapped it silent at 9:47 a.m. before rolling onto his back and staring at the water-stained ceiling of his condominium unit on the fourteenth floor of Avida Towers, Makati City. Morning light bled through the gap in his curtains while a car horn blared somewhere outside amidst the usual morning chaos of EDSA traffic.

He groaned and rubbed his face, muttering, "Dude, why."

His phone showed three missed calls from Professor Harmon, fourteen unread group chat messages, and a calendar notification screaming MIDTERM PRESENTATION AT 8:00 AM in bold red letters.

"Oh, you have got to be kidding me."

He was already typing a frantic apology message to his group mates when the building shook.

It was not the rumble of a passing truck or construction equipment, but rather a deep and bone-rattling tremor that sent his glass of water sliding off the nightstand and his bookshelf swaying against the wall. Riccardo grabbed the doorframe on instinct as his heart hammered in his chest.

"Earthquake?" he breathed.

The shaking happened again and again with rhythmic and heavy impacts that felt as though something enormous was walking outside.

He crossed to the window and pulled the curtains open.

For several seconds, his brain simply refused to process what his eyes were seeing.

The intersection of Ayala Avenue and Paseo de Roxas was normally a sea of vehicles and office workers in pressed slacks, but it now looked like the set of a horror film that had gone catastrophically off-script. Cars were overturned and burning as a city bus plowed sideways into a glass office lobby. People were crawling out of the wreckage, but they did not move the way injured people typically crawl. Instead, they moved in a wrong, jerky, and excessively fast manner with their heads tilting at unnatural angles that made Riccardo's stomach clench.

A woman in a shredded blazer tackled a running man to the pavement and bit into his shoulder as if she were eating a sandwich.

"What the..."

His phone exploded with notifications, prompting him to look down with numb fingers.

The group chat from his Political Science class read:

Marcus Webb: bro where are you, the school is on FIRE

Marcus Webb: like actually on fire bro not a drill

Jasmine Cole: riccardo ANSWER YOUR PHONE

Jasmine Cole: [VIDEO ATTACHED]

Derek Santos: guys i think Mr. Patterson just ate someone in the hallway i am not joking i am hiding in the bathroom right now

Jasmine Cole: derek GET OUT OF THERE

Marcus Webb: i saw three students turn in the parking lot, their eyes went white and they just ATTACKED people, riccardo this is real bro GET OUT OF YOUR CONDO

He fumbled with his phone and called his mother, and it rang twice before she answered.

"Riccardo," his mother said, her voice tight and controlled in the specific way she used when things were genuinely bad. "Thank God. Are you in your unit?"

"Yeah, Mom, I just woke up, but what is happening out there? The streets look entirely..."

"Lock your door, push something heavy against it, and do not open it for anyone." He could hear his father's voice in the background sounding low and urgent. "Your father and I are in the house where we have barricaded the front and the garage, so we are okay."

"Where is Lucia?" The question came out much sharper than he had originally intended.

There was a pause that lasted far too long.

"Mom, where is Lucia?"

"She left for school early this morning and is not answering her phone." His mother's voice cracked slightly on the last word before she managed to pull herself back together. "Her school is in Quezon City, Riccardo."

"That is forty minutes away on a good day," he replied while already moving toward his closet and yanking out his jeans. "On a day where the entire city apparently has rabies, that is incredibly dangerous."

"Riccardo, you are absolutely not going outside."

"She is only fifteen, Mom."

"And you are twenty and unarmed, and I cannot bear to lose both of my children in a single morning."

The building shook again even harder this time. Something on the street below produced a terrible sound that resembled a car being crumpled by bare hands, which was immediately followed by screaming that cut off very suddenly. Riccardo pressed himself back against the window and looked down at the scene.

The source of the destruction was finally visible.

The thing moving through Ayala Avenue was massive, standing easily three meters tall, and although it was built like a man, it was wrong in every proportion. Its arms were too long and dragged slightly as it moved. Furthermore, it was running rather than shuffling or lurching. It was sprinting with the kind of terrifying speed that made the cars it shoved aside look like mere toys. The creature caught a fleeing security guard in one swipe and threw the man thirty feet through a plate glass window as if he weighed nothing.

"Oh my God," Riccardo whispered.

"What is it, and what do you see?"

"There is something huge down there, Mom, and it is not just people. There are things down there that look like mutated monsters."

A shadow passed over the window, prompting him to look up reflexively before immediately wishing he had not done so.

The creature was roughly human in shape, or at least it had been at one point in time. Now it possessed a leathery and dark wingspan that blotted out a full section of the sky, stretching between elongated arms and a torso that had twisted into a terrifying hybrid of a man and a bat. It banked low over the intersection, dropped down, and plucked a running civilian off the sidewalk with both feet before climbing swiftly back into the sky.

Riccardo stepped back from the window until his spine hit the opposite wall.

"Mom, I have to call you back."

"Riccardo, wait."

"I will call you back because I love you, and please tell Dad the same." He promptly hung up the phone.

His hands were shaking, and he was aware of that fact in a distant, clinical way. He was similarly aware that he had no weapons, no plan, no car, and a fourteen-story drop between himself and street level. His little sister was somewhere in a city that had apparently decided to become an absolute nightmare.

His phone buzzed to reveal a push notification from an app he had never downloaded:

🧟 DEAD CITY: SURVIVE THE OUTBREAK 🧟 "The apocalypse is here, so do YOU have what it takes? D******d now and claim your SPECIAL REWARD before it is too late!"

Riccardo stared at the notification and asked, "Are you SERIOUS?" He actually let out a short and incredulous laugh. "There are people getting eaten outside, yet the algorithm is serving me zombie game ads?" He moved to swipe it away but fumbled and accidentally tapped it instead, causing a d******d bar to appear on the screen.

"No, no, no," he muttered as he tried to close it. However, the progress bar completed instantly.

SPECIAL REWARD UNLOCKED. CLAIM NOW?

He had absolutely no idea what that meant and had zero time to find out because someone unexpectedly knocked on his door.

There were three sharp knocks followed by a young female voice that sounded slightly out of breath.

"Is someone in there? Please help me because they are on this floor."

Riccardo looked at the door, glanced down at his phone, and finally looked back at the window where the shadow of enormous wings passed once again over the burning skyline of Makati City.

He finally grabbed his baseball bat from behind the closet door.