Chapter 1: Awakening in the Ruins
The first thing Jake registered was the antiseptic smell—that sterile hospital cocktail of bleach and desperation that had haunted his medical school rotations. But underneath it lurked something else, something that made his stomach clench before his conscious mind caught up. The sweet, cloying stench of decay.
His eyelids felt like they'd been glued shut. When he finally pried them open, fluorescent lights flickered overhead, casting everything in sickly, strobing shadows. The ceiling tiles were water-stained and sagging. One had fallen completely, leaving a gaping black maw where it should have been.
This isn't right.
Jake tried to sit up and immediately regretted it. His head pounded like someone was using his skull as an anvil. The hospital bed creaked under his weight—an old-fashioned manual bed, not the electric ones from his residency. Everything felt wrong, displaced, like a movie set built to look like a hospital but missing crucial details.
Then the memories hit him like a freight train.
The crosswalk. The truck running the red light. The sickening moment when he realized he couldn't dodge, couldn't do anything but watch death approach at forty miles per hour. The impact had been briefer than a blink—a flash of pain and then... darkness.
After that came the void. Not the peaceful nothing he'd expected, but an endless gray space where a voice had spoken to him. A presence so vast and alien that his mind had refused to properly process it, leaving only fragments: "Another world needs you, little soul. You won't survive it as you are. What would help you endure?"
He'd been terrified, confused, babbling about survival and protection and somehow knowing what was coming. The entity had seemed amused by his panic, responding with something that might have been laughter: "Yes. Those will serve. The dead shall answer your call, provisions shall manifest, and matter shall bend to your will. But nothing comes without price, little vessel. You go where I send you, when I send you, as I send you."
Before he could ask what that meant, reality had dissolved.
Now he was here, wherever here was, with a body that felt too solid to be dead and memories of powers that sounded like fever dreams.
Jake forced himself to focus on his surroundings. The room was small, clearly a patient room, but everything was covered in dust. A wheelchair sat overturned in the corner. The window blinds were drawn, but weak sunlight filtered through, illuminating motes of dust dancing in the stale air.
He swung his legs over the side of the bed, noting he was wearing scrubs—pale green, the kind medical students used during clinical rotations. His hands looked wrong somehow, younger than they should be, unmarked by the stress lines he'd earned during his third year. But the face in the reflection of the darkened TV screen was definitely his own: dark hair, brown eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses that were miraculously unbroken, the same slightly crooked nose he'd inherited from his father.
The silence was what finally made his blood run cold.
Hospitals were never silent. Even at three in the morning, there should be the hum of machines, the distant conversation of night staff, the electronic beeping of monitors. But this place was tomb-quiet except for the occasional groan of settling architecture.
Jake stood on unsteady legs and moved toward the door. The hallway beyond was dimly lit, emergency lighting casting everything in red shadows. Gurneys sat abandoned at odd angles, some still bearing lumpy shapes covered by stained sheets. The nurses' station was empty, computer screens dark, papers scattered across the floor like fallen leaves.
He knew where he was now. The knowledge hit him with crystalline certainty, sending ice through his veins.
This is The Walking Dead.
Not the comics—he'd never read those. But the TV show, the one he'd binged during his brief breaks from studying. The hospital, the silence, the abandoned equipment, the smell of death that seemed to permeate everything. He was in the goddamn zombie apocalypse.
"No," he whispered, then louder: "No, no, no, this can't be happening."
He had to warn someone. There were people alive in the building somewhere—had to be. He could get them out, get them to safety before the walkers found them. He knew what was coming, knew exactly how this played out.
Jake ran to the nurses' station and grabbed the PA microphone with shaking hands. "Attention everyone in the hospital," he said, his voice cracking. "You need to evacuate immediately. There's been an outbreak of—"
The words died in his throat. Literally died, like his vocal cords had simply refused to cooperate. He tried again, forming the words carefully: "There are infected people in the building. They're dangerous—"
But what came out of his mouth was gibberish: "Fear car infested pimple, sing buildup. Spray dangerous—"
Jake stared at the microphone in horror. He tried once more, speaking slowly and clearly: "The dead are walking. They bite people. You have to run."
"Fred lead car talking. Spray tight maple. Cue have blue gun."
His hands started shaking so violently he dropped the microphone. It clattered to the floor, the sound echoing in the empty hallway like a gunshot. The speech block was real. Whatever entity had sent him here, it had made sure he couldn't use his foreknowledge to change things. He was trapped with the knowledge of what was coming but powerless to warn anyone.
A soft shuffling sound from down the hallway made him freeze. It was barely audible, like slippers on linoleum, but in the oppressive silence it might as well have been thunder. Jake's heart hammered against his ribs as he turned toward the sound.
The thing that had once been a nurse emerged from a patient room about thirty feet away. Her scrubs were torn and stained with something dark that definitely wasn't coffee. She moved with the jerky, unsteady gait he recognized from the show, but seeing it in person was different. The wrongness of it, the way she tilted her head and opened her mouth to release a low moan that spoke of endless hunger—it bypassed his rational mind and went straight to some primal part of his brain that screamed predator.
The walker noticed him. Her milky eyes fixed on him with the single-minded focus of a heat-seeking missile, and she began moving in his direction with that shambling, inevitable gait.
Jake's first instinct was to run, but his legs felt like they were made of concrete. The walker kept coming, arms outstretched, mouth opening wider to reveal teeth stained with gore. The sound she made wasn't quite human anymore—a rattling moan that seemed to vibrate in his bones.
Twenty feet. Fifteen. Ten.
"STOP!"
The word erupted from him like a mental scream, born of pure terror and desperation. It wasn't spoken aloud but somehow projected directly from his consciousness to hers.
The walker froze mid-step.
For three precious seconds, she stood perfectly still, her arms still reaching for him but her body locked in place like someone had pressed a pause button. Jake stared at her in shock, afraid to breathe, afraid to move, afraid that any action might break whatever spell he'd cast.
Then the moment shattered. The walker shook her head like she was clearing away cobwebs and resumed her advance with renewed hunger.
Jake ran.
He sprinted down the hallway, his bare feet slapping against the cold linoleum, chasing the red glow of exit signs. Behind him, the walker's moans grew louder, joined by answering calls from other parts of the hospital. His mental scream had worked, but it had also acted like a dinner bell.
He burst through a stairwell door and took the steps three at a time, his lungs burning. The entity's words echoed in his memory: "The dead shall answer your call." It had given him some kind of necromancy, the ability to control walkers, but it was weak, untrained, barely functional. Three seconds wasn't going to keep him alive for long.
More sounds drifted up from below—shuffling feet, hungry moans, the scrape of fingernails against concrete. The hospital was full of them, and his command had been like ringing a dinner bell. Blood trickled from his nose, warm and copper-tasting. Even that brief moment of control had cost him.
Jake reached the ground floor and pushed through the exit into blinding sunlight. The parking lot was a graveyard of abandoned cars, their doors hanging open like broken wings. In the distance, smoke rose from the city skyline. The silence outside was even more profound than it had been inside—no traffic, no sirens, no sounds of civilization.
He was alone in the zombie apocalypse with powers he couldn't control and knowledge he couldn't share.
Jake found an unlocked car and climbed into the backseat, locking the doors behind him. His whole body was shaking now, adrenaline and terror warring in his system. He pressed his hands against his face and tried to process what had happened.
The entity had granted him three abilities, but they came with rules, limitations, costs. The necromancy worked but required enormous effort and caused physical pain. He couldn't warn anyone about future events—some kind of mystical gag order prevented him from sharing his foreknowledge. And whatever the third power was, it hadn't manifested yet.
As if summoned by his thoughts, his backpack—when had he been wearing a backpack?—began to glow with a soft, warm light. Jake opened it with trembling hands and found three cans of beans and two bottles of water that definitely hadn't been there before.
The Survivor's Bounty. Food would manifest for him, somehow, probably based on how many people he was responsible for. Right now, that was just himself, so he got basic rations. But if he found other survivors, if he built a group, the power would scale.
Jake stared at the impossible food and started to cry.
Not from relief or gratitude, but from the crushing weight of what he'd become. He was no longer Jake Martinez, third-year medical student who worried about board exams and student loans. He was a character in a horror story, armed with powers he didn't understand, trapped in a world where every day was a struggle for survival.
The tears came harder as the reality settled in. He had godlike abilities compared to normal humans, but they came with prices he was only beginning to understand. Worse, he was alone with the knowledge of every tragedy that was coming, unable to warn anyone, forced to watch people die when he could have saved them.
He thought about the family he'd tried to warn, probably already barricaded in that pharmacy he'd seen a few blocks away. They would die tonight or tomorrow because he couldn't make the words come out right. Their blood was on his hands before he'd even met them.
Jake curled up in the backseat of the stranger's car, clutching his impossible food, and wept for the life he'd lost and the burden he'd gained. Outside, Atlanta burned in silence, and somewhere in the distance, the dead walked the earth with endless hunger.
Tomorrow, he would have to figure out how to survive in this world. Tonight, he would mourn the man he used to be.
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