Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The scream wasn't human.

It echoed through the ventilation shaft with a wet rasp—half windpipe, half something rupturing. The parasite Bloom had found a host.

Juno, Shade, and H-13 stood frozen in the husk of Vault K-0 as the last of the spores were sucked upward. Above them, the silence returned. But it wasn't peace.

It was migration.

"They grew inside someone," H-13 said, stepping back from the vent. "Someone who didn't know they were infected."

Shade scanned the exits. "How long before it... blooms again?"

H-13 turned grim. "Less than an hour. But this time, the parasite won't need pollen. It's merged with a mind."

They hurried out of the collapsing vault, through the maintenance tunnels beneath Blackout's surface. Juno moved faster than before—driven not by fear, but clarity. She now remembered the old VIREX blueprints from her mother's files, every hallway and false exit.

But something wasn't right.

As they passed corridor mirrors and smashed cameras, Juno noticed strange reflections. Her own face, but subtly wrong—eyes darker, expression twisted. Shade's shadow flickered with something moving beneath his skin. And H-13's reflection… showed nothing at all.

"Keep moving," Juno said.

But they didn't get far.

They entered a hydroponics lab—abandoned, vines dead long ago.

Except now they weren't.

Fresh green tendrils had sprouted across the floor. Not like normal vines. These twitched.

At the center of the room, a figure knelt. Hooded. Still.

Shade raised his weapon. "Hands where I can see them."

The figure looked up.

It was a man. Pale. Eyes glazed and leaking dark sap. Skin moving—bulging in time with his breath. His voice was cracked, almost childlike.

"They said it was a cure... but it grew teeth. It loved me. It nested inside my lungs. It showed me things I lost... and promised they'd come back."

He smiled—mouth splitting wider than it should.

Then the growths beneath his skin moved.

"I am the garden now," he whispered.

And bloomed.

His body erupted—splitting open as vines tore through his ribcage. Hands formed at the end of tendrils. Faces stretched from leaf-like tissue. Screams became blossoms. The Bloom had become sentient.

Shade fired. H-13 shouted for Juno to back away.

She stood firm.

"No more running."

She stepped forward, raising both hands.

The parasite twitched.

It recognized her.

"Why did you choose me?" she asked.

The garden-thing answered with every voice it had stolen: "Because you're fertile with memory."

Juno activated her Genome override, her bloodstream now tuned to resist internal mutation.

"You fed on pain," she said. "Now taste purpose."

A pulse of light surged from her palms—encoded not with aggression, but clarity.

Memories. Intact. Unbroken.

The Bloom recoiled.

It couldn't feed.

It withered.

One by one, the flowers died.

The host collapsed, twitching once before falling silent.

Shade exhaled. "Was that… the last of it?"

"No," H-13 said, staring at Juno. "That was only a test bloom. The real parasite is still evolving."

And worse?

It now remembers her.