Reborn as the Zombie King

Chapter 2: Grand Theft Auto (Zombie Edition)

The second the ability settled into him, Chase felt something close to reborn.

He finally had a card to play. A way back. All he had to do now was hunt down more of those glowing crystal cores and keep growing stronger.

He turned his attention inward, studying the power still humming through him. A primary-tier healing core regeneration, and a strong one. Already his ruined leg was knitting itself back together, flesh pushing forward like bamboo shoots after rain, visible if he watched closely enough.

"Slow is fine," Chase muttered to himself, voice still a ruined rasp. "Slow beats missing."

He started walking toward the parts of the neighborhood where the infected gathered thickest.

Right now I'm nothing next to Vanessa and Liam. A slow-healing corpse with zero combat edge. That changes, or I don't get my revenge at all.

He walked for what felt like an hour and found nothing. Not one glowing skull. Apparently crystal cores were rarer than he'd hoped.

Walking was also brutally slow on one regrowing leg. Chase decided a car made more sense find one, drive to wherever the infected were densest, and hunt properly.

Ordinary survivors avoided cars, worried the noise would pull every infected in a mile onto them. Chase didn't have that problem. Nothing out here so much as glanced at him twice.

Westchester in those first weeks was a ghost town. Everyone with any sense had barricaded themselves in with their pantries and stayed put. Empty streets, empty driveways, and if he was patient the occasional car sitting untouched in a garage.

So he went door to door, reading each house like a puzzle. Curtains drawn tight, blinds shut someone was probably still inside, hiding. Curtains hanging loose and undrawn, windows dark good odds the place was empty.

One house caught his eye: curtains hung but never pulled shut. Chase made his way around back, toward the door that led out to the driveway always unlocked in houses like this, made for driving straight out.

He pushed it open and froze.

A girl stood halfway into the driver's seat of a small pink car, keys already in hand. She turned, saw him, and went white as paper. Her legs started shaking before her brain caught up with what she was looking at.

Chase noticed it immediately a faint gold glow pulsing behind her eyes, buried somewhere in her skull. Another crystal core. A living one.

But something in him some scrap of the man he used to be recoiled at the thought. He wasn't hungry. He didn't want to hurt her. And, if he was being honest with himself, she was strikingly pretty even through the haze of his own fear-induced tunnel vision.

Don't be afraid, he wanted to say. I'm not going to hurt you.

What actually came out was a wet, rattling hiss.

Which, from where she was standing, was possibly the least reassuring sound in the English language.

She'd never been this close to one of the infected before. Food was running low at home, she'd finally worked up the nerve to go looking for supplies and now a zombie had just walked through her own unlocked back door.

"Stay back" Her voice cracked on the second word.

Realizing speech was a dead end, Chase switched to gestures. He pointed at her. Then at his own mouth. Then waved his hand back and forth no, not that, never that.

She watched, transfixed, clearly trying to decode it like a puzzle.

"You mean..." Her voice wobbled. "You want me to just get in your mouth and not fight it?"

She burst into tears.

Chase stared at her, genuinely stunned. Is being pretty inversely correlated with reading comprehension? Because this is not going well.

He tried again reordering the sequence this time. Mouth first. Then the no wave. Then pointed at her last, hoping the order would land differently.

It did not land differently.

"You... don't like me." A fresh wave of tears. "I know, I know you don't like me, just please don't eat me"

Chase's skull throbbed with something that felt suspiciously like a headache, which he was fairly sure zombies weren't supposed to get. For one wild second he actually considered just letting her have the crystal core and calling it a wash.

Instead, he pulled the core from his coat pocket and held it up.

She took one look, let out a small, strangled noise, and fainted dead away.

Chase sighed through his ruined throat, grabbed her keys and the gate remote off the ground beside her, dragged her gently back inside, and shut the door behind him.

Then he climbed into her pink car and drove toward Manhattan.

When the girl Chloe Sutton finally came to, she nearly screamed.

"I'm I'm not dead?"

She scrambled to the door, checked outside with shaking hands, and found the driveway empty. No car. No keys.

Understanding arrived slowly, in pieces.

"It didn't eat me. It just... stole my car? Zombies can drive now?" She pressed her palms to her face. "Wait. That thing I think I've seen it before. Isn't that the guy from three houses down?"

She'd been too terrified to really look at him earlier just a blood-streaked, filthy figure lurching through her back door. But now that the panic was fading, the shape of him nagged at her memory.

"Great. Fantastic. My neighbor turned into a zombie and stole my car, and now I have no food and no way to leave." She sank to the floor, knees pulled to her chest, and started crying again.

Chase drove until the suburbs gave way to the city, and found exactly what he was looking for near the heart of Manhattan a dense cluster of the infected, and among them, one skull glowing faint and gold.

A rock, one clean swing, and it was over. Practice, it turned out, made this considerably easier the second time.

He cracked it open, pulled the core free, and swallowed it.

New power flooded him a primary speed core this time. His legs would move faster once they'd finished healing, though he wouldn't know how much faster until he had two working ones again.

With nothing else nearby, Chase decided to check the mall.

Big enclosed spaces meant crowds, once. Crowds meant a higher chance more people had turned, which meant a higher chance of finding another core.

Inside, the shelves were still fully stocked untouched aisles of everything a person could want, useless now because nobody was brave enough to walk in among the infected to take it.

Chase had a better idea. He grabbed a suitcase from a luggage display, wheeled it into the supermarket section, and started filling it canned goods, water, anything that wouldn't spoil dragging it behind him through a crowd of the infected that couldn't have cared less he was there.

No more glowing skulls, though, no matter how long he searched.

So few of them have cores. Why did that girl have one? Is it every living person, or just some of them?

The thought sent him down a new line of reasoning: maybe he needed to be looking at the living, not just the dead. But this early into the collapse, most people were still barricaded in their apartments with their supplies, refusing to risk the streets.

And walking into a building full of frightened, newly-powered strangers sounded like an excellent way to get himself killed twice in one week.

Better idea. Check on Vanessa's crew instead.

He knew that estate wall better than anyone every angle, every gap where you could see straight into the yard. Four known cores, already awakened, already visible if he just looked in the right spot. Better data than blind guessing.

Chase turned the car around and drove home.

Back at her house, Chloe heard the gate before she saw the car. She crept to the window and peeked out just enough to see.

Her pink car, rolling back into the driveway. The same zombie from earlier, climbing out and popping the trunk to pull out her suitcase.

Wait. Chloe blinked. He has luggage now? And hold on didn't he only have one leg this afternoon? Why does he have two?

Chase spotted her half-hidden face at the window and pointed at the door.

"You want me to... open it?" Chloe's hand flew to her mouth, the shaking starting up again.

But she found herself walking toward it anyway. Some small, stubborn logic argued that if he'd wanted to eat her, he'd had his chance already, back when she was unconscious on her own kitchen floor.

She'd rather die knowing than die wondering. She opened the door.

Chase didn't step inside. He just slid the suitcase across the threshold and pointed at it.

"You want me to... open this?"

He nodded. Finally. Progress.

Chloe knelt and unzipped it, revealing rows of neatly packed food and bottled water.

Chase pointed at the food. Then at her. Then at his own mouth, miming eat, quickly, before it goes bad.

Chloe stared at the food. Then at him. Her eyes welled up all over again.

"You're giving me food... so I'll eat... so you can eat me after I've fattened up?"

Chase's ruined throat produced something between a groan and a growl, and it took every ounce of willpower he had left not to slam his own head against the doorframe.

I regenerated an entire leg today, he thought bitterly. This is somehow harder.