The Flesh Reaper was dead. But the victory felt hollow.
Leon wiped blood from his face, his hands trembling. The stench of burning mutant flesh filled the air, thick and suffocating. Evelyn wanted to celebrate, but something felt wrong.
A distant, guttural screech.
From every direction.
Lucas paled. "Oh… hell."
From the shadows of the ruined buildings, they came.
Dozens of twisted, grotesque creatures—their bodies warped, their flesh stitched together in unnatural ways. Some crawled on all fours with elongated claws, others were hulking masses of pulsing muscle, their eyes milky and dead.
But they all had one thing in common.
Their flesh rippled like The Reaper's.
Evelyn's heart pounded. "It spread."
Mia swallowed hard. "What?"
Leon's face darkened. "Killing it didn't stop the infection. It triggered it."
The Flesh Reaper had been a seed. And now, the harvest was coming.
A massive mutant, at least ten feet tall, stomped forward. Its head was split down the middle, revealing rows of dripping fangs. Another creature, its torso stitched with the limbs of others, scuttled along the ground like a spider.
Reaper clenched his fists. "We don't have the ammo for this."
"FALL BACK!" Evelyn shouted.
The survivors sprinted toward the alley, but the creatures moved like a swarm. Crawling, leaping, tearing.
Lucas fired into the mass, blowing a hole through one's chest. It kept coming.
Reaper swung his machete, cleaving through a mutant's throat—but its flesh sealed back together.
Mia screamed as a slender, elongated mutant wrapped its tongue around her leg, yanking her toward its gnashing teeth.
Leon turned, firing a shotgun blast directly into its face. The head burst apart—but instead of dying, its body twisted, reforming into something even worse.
They couldn't kill them.
Evelyn pulled a flare grenade from her belt. "FIRE! LIGHT THEM UP!"
She tossed it into the horde. The grenade exploded, coating the ground in blazing flames.
The mutants shrieked. Writhed.
Then, something terrifying happened.
Instead of dying, their flesh melted together.
Mia gasped. "No… no, no, NO!"
The flames weren't killing them.
They were fusing them.
The fire-fed monstrosity rose—a towering, pulsating mass of fused flesh, tentacles sprouting from its back, dozens of screaming faces trapped within.
Leon whispered. "We're so screwed."
The creature lunged—and the screen cut to black.