Nightfall Protocol:A Zombie Romance

Chapter One: Awakening

Chapter One: Awakening

Cough.

The sound tore out of me before I even knew I was conscious. My eyes cracked open to a world smeared with light and shadow, everything doubled and swimming like I was looking through water. I blinked hard, once, twice, willing my vision to cooperate. It didn't, not fully — but enough came into focus that I could tell I was lying on cold concrete, and that concrete was not where I remembered being.

I tried to push myself up. Bad idea. My leg screamed in protest, a jagged, white-hot pain that shot from my calf straight up into my skull, and I collapsed back down with a groan that didn't sound like it came from me.

Okay. Okay. Think, Ferguson.

Fragments started coming back, unwilling at first, like pulling teeth. Screaming. Loud, raw, terrified screaming. Something sprinting behind me — no, not something. Things. Plural. I remembered running, remembered my lungs burning, remembered the moment my legs gave out and the world had gone dark.

I forced my eyes to focus on my surroundings. An alley. A narrow, filthy alley, walls close enough on either side that I could nearly touch them both if I stretched out my arms. Dumpsters lined one side, overturned, their contents spilled across the ground like the aftermath of a riot. And just past them, a door — glass-paneled, cracked down the middle, with faded lettering that read MEDIFI PHARMACY — GROUND FLOOR.

That explained some of it, at least. Medifi. The hospital. That was where the call had sent me.

The memory sharpened, unwelcome and vivid: the radio crackling to life in my car, dispatch relaying a 911 call that had come in garbled and frantic. A nurse, screaming down the line. Help — they're after us — oh God, help— and then nothing. Just dead air and the hiss of a disconnected line.

I'd been the closest unit. I hadn't waited for backup.

Stupid, I thought now, staring up at a flickering fluorescent light that buzzed somewhere above me like a dying insect. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

But it was too late for regret. I needed to move.

I patted myself down, cataloguing the damage. My leg was the worst of it — a deep gash along my calf, still oozing, the fabric of my pants stiff with dried blood. My head throbbed in time with my pulse, and when I touched my temple my fingers came away sticky. Bruised ribs, probably, from the way every breath pulled tight across my chest. But nothing broken. Nothing that would stop me.

And then — relief, sharp and real — my hand brushed against my hip and found the familiar weight still holstered there. My sidearm. Still with me. Small mercies.

I allowed myself exactly three seconds of gratitude before forcing myself upright, biting down hard against the pain that flared in my leg as I put weight on it. I limped toward the pharmacy door, testing each step, refusing to let my body dictate what I could and couldn't do right now. Not with whatever had chased me still out there somewhere.

The glass door groaned as I pushed through it. Shelves lined the small space, most of them picked over or knocked to the floor entirely — boxes of gauze, bottles of antiseptic, blister packs of pills scattered like confetti across the tile. Someone had been through here in a hurry. Looking for supplies, maybe. Or running from something, same as me.

I found what I needed in the wreckage: a roll of gauze, half a bottle of rubbing alcohol, medical tape. I worked fast, kneeling by an overturned shelf and cleaning the wound on my leg as best I could.

"Ouch — son of a—" I hissed as the alcohol hit raw skin, a fresh wave of pain lancing up through the muscle. It burned worse than I expected, worse than it had any right to.

Unbidden, Mike's voice surfaced in my head — Mike Monroe, my partner on more missions than I could count, always with some smartass comment for every situation. "I don't get it," he'd said once, half-joking after a particularly brutal op. "Guy takes a bullet in the shoulder without blinking, but the second the medic starts bandaging him up, he's crying like a baby."

I understood it now, in a way I hadn't back then. Adrenaline didn't leave room for pain. It was only in the quiet after — in moments exactly like this one — that your body finally got the memo and made you pay for everything you'd been ignoring.

I finished wrapping the gauze tight around my calf, tied it off, and allowed myself a breath. Just one. Then I was back on my feet, back out into the alley, g*n drawn and held low but ready.

The fluorescent light above me kept flickering, stuttering shadows across the brick walls in a rhythm that made my skin crawl. Something about this place felt wrong in a way that went beyond the obvious — beyond the blood, beyond the wreckage. It felt watched.

And then I remembered her.

Mia.

She'd been with me when the team arrived at Medifi — cameras rolling, microphone in hand, chasing the story like she always did, consequences be damned. My best friend since we were kids trading scraped knees on the same street. The last time I'd seen her, she'd been sprinting ahead of me, screaming words I hadn't fully processed until now.

"Run! They're after us!"

Then the crowd had scattered, the screaming had swallowed everything, and I hadn't seen her since.

My chest tightened. I needed to find her. Needed to know she was alive.

That's when I heard it — a wet, rhythmic sound drifting from somewhere deeper in the alley. Chewing. Slow, deliberate, and unmistakably wrong.

I raised my weapon, thumbed off the safety, and moved toward the sound.