Reborn as the Zombie King

Chapter 4: It's True

The infected descended on the screaming girl like starving dogs on a fresh bone. The screaming didn't last long.

Chase watched the entire thing happen, expression flat and dark. He wasn't in any hurry to deal with the ones now feeding on Mia's core.

Instead, he bent down, picked up a heavy stone, activated his newly-formed speed ability, and took off after Nathan.

You want someone to blame? Blame yourself. You had a real power and you used it to run. His thoughts came out sharper than he expected. Coward. Damn coward.

Nathan was sprinting hard toward the nearest clear stretch of street when he registered something behind him footfalls too fast, too heavy, and wrong in a way that made his skin crawl. Not the shamble of the infected. More like a motor winding up.

He glanced back out of pure reflex and caught one clear look at Chase's bone-white face bearing down on him before the stone hit.

It caught him square in the skull. Blood ran down into his eyes. He died without ever understanding why the "zombie" had abandoned an easy kill just to chase him down with rocks.

This was Chase's first time killing a living person. He waited for the horror to hit.

It never came.

Guess that answers that, he thought, almost amused at how little it cost him. I'm officially a monster.

The reason didn't need much explaining, not to himself. Nathan had thrown away the person who trusted him to save her own skin. That wasn't so different from what Vanessa had done to him, standing at that gate, watching Liam throw him over the wall without blinking.

People like that don't get to walk away clean.

Face empty of anything resembling regret, Chase cracked open Nathan's skull, pulled free a green crystal core, and swallowed it.

A light-based core. Sounds useless on paper. Green's still better than nothing.

He let the power settle in, then turned back toward the trees to find what was left of Mia.

The bodies on the ground didn't interest him at all. Since the change, hunger and sleep had simply stopped applying to him the only thing that pulled at him now was the crystal cores themselves, and even that pull he could control.

Is this what being the Zombie King actually means?

He found the infected that had gotten to Mia's body first, dragged it bodily out of the loose crowd, and hauled it under a nearby tree.

One clean strike cracked its skull like a walnut. Inside: the blue core he'd been hunting.

The moment he swallowed it, gold light bloomed across his skin, and something warm and powerful rolled through his entire body. He actually felt himself changing taller, denser, more solid.

Chase had spent his old life hunched over a keyboard, decently built but nothing special. Now, looking down at his own forearm, he could see clean lines of muscle that hadn't been there yesterday.

Feels like I just leveled up. Everything's sharper. Stronger.

"Ahhh"

He tested his voice on instinct and stopped, startled. The rasp had softened. Not gone, but noticeably less ruined.

More cores, more voice, maybe. Maybe I get to sound human again. The thought mattered more than he expected. He couldn't exactly hold a conversation with the rest of the infected.

He tested the light core first a small ball of brightness bloomed in his palm, flaring once before fading.

Useful for drawing attention, or blinding someone stupid enough to get close. Fine. Not flashy, but fine.

Then he tried the blue core's gift, focusing the way instinct told him to. A small flame kindled at his fingertip, shrinking and swelling as he willed it.

A flick of his wrist sent a small fireball arcing into the dark.

Now that's an actual weapon.

But something about the fire felt wrong against water like it would lose that particular matchup badly. Chase frowned, filed the thought away for later, and headed back to the car.

He circled a few more blocks without finding anything else worth chasing, so he swung by the mall he'd already looted once, packed two more suitcases full of food, and pointed the car back toward Chloe's.

Might as well feed the golden one too. She's the only living core I've found so far. I want to know what she can actually do.

Chloe had just drifted off when the knock came, and she jolted upright in a cold sweat.

She crept to the window and confirmed it her pink car, parked in the backyard again, right on schedule.

Then she spotted Chase standing at her door, looking up at her with an expression she couldn't quite place.

Wait. Why does he look... different? More human. Bigger, somehow.

And then she noticed the two suitcases at his feet.

Whatever fear she had left melted away fast. By the time she made it downstairs to open the door, she'd more or less decided Chase meant her no harm.

This time he stepped inside without hesitating.

"Wh-what are you doing" Chloe stumbled back a step, startled by how confidently he walked in now.

She was still in her pajamas, moonlight catching the shape of her against the window, and for one brief second Chase's gaze lingered before he deliberately looked away.

Get it together, he told himself. You're a zombie. Read the room.

"Ahhh"

He pointed at the two suitcases.

Chloe understood immediately this time and opened them more food, neatly packed, same as before.

She also noticed something new. "Your voice... sounds almost normal now."

"You're a zombie," she said slowly, studying him, "but is your throat bothering you?"

Chase wanted, very badly, to say something scathing. He settled for gesturing instead right hand curled like he was holding a pen, moving it side to side.

"You want wine?" Chloe guessed. "I only have tap water, sorry, I don't have any red"

Chase pinched the bridge of his nose.

"Wait can you even eat crystal cores? Does that make you, like, dumber?"

He gave up on gestures entirely and started searching her front hall instead, ignoring her rapid-fire questions until he found what he wanted: an eyebrow pencil sitting on the entry cabinet.

"Oh! You need something to write with!"

Finally. Chloe darted upstairs and came back with an actual notebook and pen.

"What's your name?"

Chloe stared at the handwriting like it had personally offended her, then took the pen and wrote back: Chloe Sutton.

Chase resisted the urge to sigh and wrote instead, pressing hard enough to nearly tear the page: "You can just say it out loud. I can understand speech fine."

"Oh oh, right, duh."

"I'm a zombie. But I still have my own mind. My own thoughts."

"Oh my god. So you're not going to eat people?"

"Haven't yet."

Which was, technically, the truth. He'd cracked open plenty of skulls, but only for what was glowing inside them. Whether actual hunger for a person would ever hit him, Chase honestly couldn't say. He filed that uncertainty away too.

"That's such a relief. I was terrified earlier a driving zombie, seriously? And thank you, for the food. I've been surviving on one bag of crackers for three days. I would've starved without this."

"What's your ability?"

"I don't have one." Chloe's face fell as she said it. "I checked. I felt nothing. I don't know what's wrong with me."

Chase frowned at that. Was she lying? Guarding herself? But nothing about her expression read as false just genuine disappointment.

"Everyone has something," he wrote. "Maybe you haven't found it yet."

He thought of his own case an ability that only surfaced once he'd died and come back wrong. If something that strange existed, hers could be just as buried, waiting on the wrong trigger.

Something else pulled at his attention. Chase crossed to the mirror mounted by her front door, curious not just about his new face but about what if anything was glowing behind it.

The reflection staring back was undeniably a zombie pale skin, eyes gone a deep, dark red but stronger now, more filled-out, closer to something that had once been a man.

And around him, faint but unmistakable, hung a ring of energy. Not light exactly. Closer to a held breath of pure dark.

His crystal core, he realized with a slow chill, was black.