The zombie slammed against the containment glass, its decaying fingertips leaving smears of bioluminescent fluid. Dr. Elara Sinclair adjusted her bone-conduction headset, watching the spectrogram spike at 137Hz every time the creature snarled.
"Subject 36 exhibits identical vocal resonance patterns as the other infected," she muttered into her wrist recorder. The morgue-turned-lab reeked of antiseptic and betrayal—three weeks since the military had abandoned this quarantine zone, leaving her with nothing but corpses that wouldn't stay dead.
A proximity alert blared. Elara spun to see seven more zombies materialize in the corridor's gloom, their milky eyes reflecting the emergency lights like feral cats. Theoretically, they shouldn't detect her through the soundproof glass. Theoretically.
Her gloved finger hovered over the sonic emitter. The headset's real-time translation software had decoded their growls into three repeating words: Kneel. Obey. Hunt. But when she replayed Subject 36's 137Hz frequency through the lab speakers, the approaching horde froze mid-stride.
Then they knelt.
Elara's breath hitched as the creatures pressed foreheads to blood-smeared tiles, spines arched in grotesque reverence. The spectrogram flared crimson—not at 137Hz, but 666Hz. A chill crawled up her neck. She'd heard that number whispered in the abandoned hospital's sublevels, where Patient Zero's containment pod leaked black roses through its seams.
The bone-conduction device suddenly vibrated with triple intensity. Subject 36's jaw unhinged with a wet crack, emitting ultrasonic waves that shattered three specimen jars. Shards of glass embedded themselves in Elara's radiation suit as she dove behind a cryo-tank.
"Warning: Vital signs exceeding safe parameters," chimed the AI. Her HUD displayed spiking cortisol levels—hers and the zombies'. The horde outside began swaying in unison, cracked lips moving in silent prayer.
Then the lights died.
Emergency power bathed the lab in hellish red. Elara's headset picked up new frequencies—not from the zombies, but from the ceiling vents. A liquid shadow dripped onto her shoulder, sizzling through the protective fabric. She rolled aside just as Patient Zero's containment pod crashed through the floor grating, suspended by writhing vines of blackened veins.
The pod's biometric lock read ACCESS DENIED in pulsating scarlet, but Elara's stolen Level-9 clearance still worked. Frost billowed as the hatch hissed open, revealing...
Nothing.
No corpse, no mutated horror—just a single frozen blood bag labeled X-23 and a note in elegant cursive: For the curious songbird. Before she could react, the pod's shattered coolant lines erupted. The blood bag exploded in a shower of crystalline plasma that sliced through her hood.
Elara screamed as blue-tinged fluid seeped into the gash across her cheekbone. The world kaleidoscoped—suddenly she was seeing double through the zombies' eyes, tasting copper and chrysanthemum pollen, hearing a man's voice whisper equations in a language that burned.
When consciousness returned, the zombies were gone. Only their knee prints remained in the congealed filth, arranged in perfect concentric circles around her lab. Her HUD showed 23:23:23 on all clocks. The bone-conduction headset had fused to her skin, its display now permanently locked to 137Hz.
As she peeled off the ruined radiation suit, the wound on her face glittered with embedded blue crystals. They hummed in harmony with the damaged sonic emitter—and with the faint red light blinking inside a shattered security camera above.
Twenty-three floors aboveground, Damien Cross watched the feed from his penthouse overlooking Manhattan's corpse-choked skyline. The whiskey in his cut-crystal tumbler began freezing over as his body temperature plummeted—a side effect he'd learned to control decades ago. The girl's discovery of the resonance frequency was ahead of schedule.
Interesting.
He crushed the glass, letting shards embed themselves in his palm. The wounds healed before the blood could stain his €10,000 suit. On the wall screen, the virologist's biometric data streamed alongside Patient Zero's final transmission:
SHE ACCEPTS THE CROWN.
Damien's augmented right iris zoomed in on the glowing crystals forming around Elara's wound. The Black Rose protocol was blossoming faster than anticipated. He'd need to accelerate Phase Two—and personally ensure the good doctor didn't survive her next experiment.
As midnight painted the dead city in monochrome, seven stories beneath Elara's lab, something metallic stirred in the hospital's forgotten nuclear reactor core. The black roses growing through its cracks began pulsing in time to her new heartbeat.