Caught a Cowardly Little Zombie - Chapter 1

A taxi streaked through the twilight, racing down the open road at breakneck speed.

“Hang in there, we’re almost at the hospital!” the counselor urged, clutching Chu Xiaoran’s hand while casting anxious glances out the window to check their progress.

Xiaoran’s small face was deathly pale from the agony. Thick beads of sweat rolled from her forehead down to her pointed chin, trembling and pooling until they finally lost their grip and splashed onto the floor mat. Her hand was clamped tightly over her lower right abdomen, where a localized, twitching pain felt as though her intestines were being tied into knots and violently tugged. Her stomach churned with wave after wave of nausea that climbed up her chest, yet nothing would come up; it felt as if her throat were plugged, leaving her to do nothing but dry heave until her vision began to swim.

The moment the car swerved into the hospital bay, the counselor leaped out to summon the ER staff, who came sprinting over with a gurney.

Outside, the sun had fully dipped below the horizon, and the sky began to sink into a heavy, suffocating gloom. The atmosphere grew eerie, though the shift was so subtle it was hard to pin down. Suddenly, a violent gust of wind swept through, sending the tree branches into a frantic dance. Leaves were torn from their stems by the sheer force, spiraling through the air before settling into a ghostly, rotating circle on the pavement.

No one noticed that the moon, hanging high in the sky, had bled into a visceral, predatory red.

“It looks like acute appendicitis with a possible perforation,” the doctor announced after a quick series of exams. “It’s an emergency. We need her in surgery immediately.”

The on-call doctors and nurses scrambled to prep the theater. While an appendectomy was a routine procedure, a perforation changed the stakes entirely. It could easily lead to peritoneal infection, which, if left unchecked, was life-threatening.

The mere mention of surgery made Xiaoran’s heart seize. The primal fear of the unknown, coupled with her physical agony, brought fresh tears to her eyes. She gripped the counselor’s sleeve as if it were a literal lifeline, her voice a strained rasp. “My dad…”

“I’ve already called him, but…” The counselor trailed off, casting her eyes downward. She didn’t have the heart to finish the sentence, nor could she bring herself to look Xiaoran in the eye. Her father had refused to come.

The flickering light of hope in Xiaoran’s eyes slowly extinguished.

Her mother had passed away years ago, her father was a perpetual slave to his work, and the grandmother who had raised her had died two years prior. As a child, she had constantly wished her father would work less and stay home more, but every hope had been met with a hollow silence. Eventually, she had stopped wishing altogether, learning that expectation was simply a precursor to disappointment.

Perhaps it was the terror of the operating table that had triggered a subconscious need for family, but the realization that her father, who was in the same city and only an hour away—still wouldn’t show up left her heart cold. When disappointment piles up high enough, it hardens into despair.

“I’m being too dramatic,” Xiaoran whispered, her voice trembling as she forced a bitter smile onto her pale face. “Appendicitis is just a minor thing. Dad is so busy with work.”

Her father was a researcher. Sometimes his projects required him to be sequestered for months or even years at a time. When she was little, she hadn’t understood why he never came home. Other children would mock her, calling her a “wild child” without parents. She used to cry to her grandmother, who would stroke her hair with a gentle hand and explain that her father was a scientist studying viral genetics and biopharmaceuticals. Every new medicine he developed was a gift to humanity, her grandmother said, and she should be proud to have such a brilliant father.

But Xiaoran couldn’t find it in herself to be proud now. Selfishly, she just wanted a normal father who stayed home and looked after her. He had only appeared briefly for her grandmother’s funeral before being summoned back to his lab; why would a “minor” surgery be more important than that?

“We need to operate now,” a doctor said, stepping toward them. “Who is the family member? We need a signature.”

Whether she was numbed by the pain or simply hollowed out by her memories, Xiaoran felt a strange, sudden clarity wash over her foggy brain. She shifted slightly on the bed, gasping through the pain, her voice hoarse but firm. “I’ll sign it myself.”

The doctor hesitated, a flicker of pity crossing his face for this girl facing surgery entirely alone. Without a word, he handed her the clipboard.

As the doctor walked out of the ER, he sighed, muttering about how tragic it was for a girl that young to have to sign her own surgical consent. Ling Mo, who had just finished her own shift and was heading home, caught the remark. She instinctively glanced toward the ER. Through the glass, she caught a fleeting glimpse of a pale, long-haired girl around twenty years old being wheeled toward the operating theater.

*****

Because they were using a laparoscope to remove the appendix, Xiaoran was put under general anesthesia.

After the pre-op preparations and the attachment of various monitors, she lay on the cold table, fighting the pain to keep her body still. Her hands were at her sides, her fingers instinctively clutching the edges of the table in a white-knuckled grip.

Surgical drapes were layered over her, and a breathing mask was lowered gently over her face. A faint, white mist flowed into her nostrils, and her brain began to grow heavy. Her eyelids felt like lead, and finally, Xiaoran drifted into a deep sleep.

The heart monitor hummed with a steady beep… beep…, showing everything was within normal parameters. The surgeon skillfully made a 1cm incision at her navel, followed by two smaller ports on her right side.

“No signs of peritoneal infection,” the surgeon noted, glancing at the monitor.

“Good thing she was brought in when she was,” the assistant remarked.

Outside, the world had already begun to fracture. The sky was cloaked in a suffocating grey, and the darkness of the night seemed to warp into an unnatural, oily black.

The sudden appearance of the blood moon had sent the internet into a frenzy. People were flocking to open spaces to catch a glimpse of the phenomenon; amateur astronomers were hauling telescopes up hillsides, and scientists were already theorizing that atmospheric pollution had trapped red particulates in the air.

In the heart of the city, a man walking down the street while scrolling through news of the red moon suddenly jerked to a halt. A light tremor took hold of his body, intensifying until he was shaking like a leaf, eventually collapsing onto the pavement. Passersby gathered at a distance, whispering and wondering if he was having a seizure, yet no one stepped forward to help. In a world where “scams” and “liability” were the first things on everyone’s minds, the gap between strangers had become an abyss.

One man, standing slightly closer than the rest, realized something was truly wrong. He pulled out his phone to call for an ambulance, but before the call could connect, the convulsing man stopped shaking. He raised his head slowly. His face was a sickly shade of grey-green, and his eyes were cloudy and hollow. He pushed himself up with a series of wet, sickening bone-cracks, his body twisting at impossible angles. He lunged out, a bruised, discolored hand clamping onto the man with the phone.

The bystander started to ask if he was okay, but he stopped when he saw the other man’s face. The stranger’s pupils were covered by a milky white film, and his entire gaze was vacant yet predatory. Before the man could react, the creature sank its teeth into his throat. Blood sprayed the pavement.

“Ah!”

“He’s killing him!”

“Call the police!”

Panic erupted instantly. Screams and sobs tore through the air. People in the immediate vicinity scrambled to flee, while those on the outskirts, driven by morbid curiosity, tried to push closer to see what was happening. The result was a chaotic, crushing bottleneck where people were trampled underfoot.

Before anyone could make sense of the horror, the man who had just had his throat ripped out and his shoulder mangled also began to stir. He rose with the same jerky, distorted movements—a literal walking corpse with bared teeth and lunged at the nearest person.

On the streets, everything fell apart. And this exact scene was playing out simultaneously across a dozen different points in the city.

*****

Inside the hospital’s operating theater, the lead surgeon finished the procedure quickly. He left the suturing to his assistant and stepped away to prep for his next case.

The assistant had just finished closing the wound and was about to begin the final disinfection when a commotion broke out at the door.

“This is a sterile theater! You can’t come in here!” several nurses and doctors shouted, but their protests were useless. After a crash of falling equipment, the theater doors were thrown open. A middle-aged man with disheveled hair and glasses burst into the hallway, his face a mask of terror and desperation. He ignored everyone, frantically trying to shove his way into the individual operating rooms.

The doctors immediately called for security while those who had just finished surgery tried to block his path. If an unsterilized civilian burst into a live surgery, the risk of infection was a death sentence for the patient.

But they had underestimated the man’s desperation. He brandished a long blade in his left hand and a heavy iron pipe in his right, swinging them wildly to keep anyone from getting close.

Just then, screams echoed from outside the surgical wing. People were shouting that something had gone horribly wrong. Most of the male doctors ran toward the exit to help, leaving only a few to deal with the intruder.

“The world is ending! It’s all over!” the man muttered, his expression flickering between sheer terror and a manic, hollow laugh. He swung his weapons at the remaining doctors, forcing them back a few steps, his voice a hoarse, jagged roar. “Why aren’t you running for your lives?!”

The doctors were baffled, convinced the man was having a psychotic break, but the screams and wails echoing from the hallways were becoming impossible to ignore. They sounded like a death knell. Giving up on the madman, the remaining staff turned and bolted toward the exit.

The middle-aged man let out a low, bitter chuckle and resumed his search, room by room. When he finally reached Chu Xiaoran’s theater, he stopped.

“Who are you? Get out!” the assistant shouted, turning with a piece of sterile gauze in hand.

The man didn’t say a word. He simply grabbed the assistant and threw him bodily out of the room.

“Xiaoran… Daddy’s here.” Chu Sheng, who had been charging around like a panicked animal, suddenly went still at the sight of her. He walked over slowly, looking down at his daughter as she slept peacefully on the table. His eyes were filled with a profound, aching tenderness. He reached out to brush a stray hair from her temple, his mind flashing back eighteen years to the moment a tiny, crying infant had entered the world. He had been so happy then. So proud to be a father.

“Xiaoran…” Remembering why he was there, the light in Chu Sheng’s eyes dimmed. He pulled a sealed syringe from his pocket, his hands shaking violently as he opened it. “I’m sorry, Xiaoran. I’m so sorry. You’re the only person I can trust…” He kept whispering the words like a mantra, gritting his teeth as he plunged the needle into her arm. A pale pink liquid flowed slowly into her veins. When the syringe was empty, his body slumped as if the string holding him upright had finally snapped. In that single moment, he seemed to age ten years.

After one last, lingering look at Xiaoran, Chu Sheng seemed to reach a final, grim resolution. He turned and walked away without looking back.

A few minutes after he left, Xiaoran’s steady breathing suddenly turned into a series of violent, involuntary tremors. It only lasted a moment before her body seemed to hit a “pause” button. Her breathing stopped entirely. Beside her, the heart monitor began to wail—a piercing beep-beep-beep that shattered the silence of the room.

After a long, agonizing minute, the alarm gave way to a single, flat, continuous tone.

The room fell into a dead, heavy silence.

But outside those doors, the world was a symphony of horrors. Grey-green faces were tearing into flesh, the air was thick with the sounds of screaming and flight, and those who fell were already beginning to shiver, rising again as stiff, mindless monsters to join the hunt.

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