Day Zero: The Last Bite

Marcus Cole checked the monitor wall for the third time in ten minutes. Nothing wrong. Just the usual crowd stacking up on Platform 4, waiting on a delayed train. He rubbed his eyes and reached for his coffee. That's when he saw the man in the gray jacket drop. "Hey, somebody help him!" a woman on the platform yelled. Her voice came through the station's cheap speakers, tinny and small. Marcus leaned into the screen. The man on the ground wasn't just fainting. His back arched. His legs kicked out. Foam ran from his mouth and pooled on the tile. "Priya, you seeing this?" Marcus said into his radio, forgetting for a second that Priya Anand wasn't on shift tonight. Nobody answered. He was talking to himself. He grabbed the station phone and dialed emergency services. Busy signal. He tried again. Busy. On the screen, three people knelt around the man, trying to help him up. Marcus checked the timestamp in the corner of the feed. 6:04 PM. The man's eyes opened. Wrong. Marcus didn't know how eyes could look wrong, but they did…flat, empty, aimed at nothing. Then the man grabbed the woman closest to him and bit down on her arm. She screamed. The crowd scattered. Marcus stood up so fast his chair hit the wall behind him. "No, no, no." He grabbed the radio again. "This is Cole, maintenance level 2, I need police at Platform 4 right now, we have an assault in progress…" Static. He checked the timestamp again. 6:10 PM. Six minutes since the man went down. On the screen, the bitten woman dropped to her knees. Her body shook the same way his had. Marcus watched the clock in the corner of the feed count up. At 6:16, she opened her eyes. Flat. Empty. She grabbed the man next to her. "Six minutes," Marcus said out loud. "Every time. Six minutes." He didn't know why that detail mattered more than anything else happening on the screen, but it did. It meant this thing followed a rule. Rules could be worked with. Chaos couldn't. The platform camera showed people running for the stairs, but more of them were falling, more of them turning. In under two minutes, what looked like six infected people. Marcus counted them the way he'd count faulty signal lights on his rounds. Force of habit. It kept his hands from shaking. His phone buzzed. A text from his ex-wife, Danielle: *Pick up Elena from Mrs. Hart's at 7 like we said, don't forget.* Marcus stared at the message and then back at the monitor, where a man was being pulled apart by three people who used to be commuters ten minutes ago. "I'm not gonna make 7," he said to no one. He grabbed the master key ring off his desk and sprinted for the maintenance corridor that connected to Platform 4. If people were still alive up there, he needed to get them out through the service tunnels before the transit police showed up and did nothing useful, which, based on the silence on every emergency line, was looking likely. He hit the corridor door release and pulled it open. The smell hit him first…copper and sweat and something sour underneath it. Then the sound. Not screaming anymore. Just wet, tearing sounds, and somebody's shoe scraping against tile in a slow drag. "Hey! Anybody hurt, come toward my voice!" Marcus called into the dark stairwell leading up to the platform. Footsteps answered him. Fast. Too fast for someone injured. He didn't wait to find out who it was. He grabbed the heavy door and hauled it shut, dropping the manual bar lock into place just as something slammed into it from the other side. The door shook in its frame. Marcus stepped back, his hand still on the bar, breathing hard. The pounding didn't stop. Three hits. Four. Steady, like a heartbeat that wouldn't quit. "Okay," Marcus said, mostly to make himself feel less alone. "Okay. Think." He'd worked these tunnels for nine years. He knew every junction, every drainage line, every access ladder between here and three stations over. Nobody else on staff could say that. If this door held, he had time to get out through the lower maintenance line and come up somewhere the infected hadn't reached yet. His radio crackled, and for a second his heart jumped…until he realized it was just dead air with a faint hum underneath it. He turned the volume off. No point drawing anything toward the sound. Marcus took one more look at the door bowing slightly with each hit, then turned and ran deeper into the tunnel, his flashlight beam bouncing off wet concrete walls. He'd never been more aware of how alone he was down here, and how far away 7 PM at Mrs. Hart's house suddenly felt. Behind him, the pounding on the door stopped. That should have been good news. It wasn't. Marcus slowed his run, listening. No pounding. No screaming. No sound at all except his own breathing and his shoes on wet stone. He stopped completely at the next junction, chest tight, straining to hear anything. Then, from s omewhere behind him in the dark, low and wrong, something exhaled.