Once he confirmed he wasn't crazy, Liam realized he was surprisingly calm. Way calmer than he should be.


He looked down at the bloated, hideous corpse on the floor. The reality of the situation settled over him.


The world was gone. It wasn't just the massive flood drowning the city anymore. Now there were zombies—"Necrotic Mutations"—and this mysterious "Ether" system.


Everything has changed, Liam thought. Is this even the same world? Logic doesn't apply here anymore.


I don't know if this zombie was a fluke or if every corpse out there is going to mutate. If they all turn...


He thought about the city. Millions of people lived here.


The Great Deluge. He didn't know how many people had drowned, but in a city of millions...


The number made him shudder. A cold dread crept up his spine.


How many people had managed to evacuate? And how many were currently floating in the water, waiting to turn into monsters?


"It's not safe here. I need to find a rescue team, fast."


Liam gripped his hammer and cleaver tighter. He glanced one last time at the Cadaver. He was lucky the thing had been stiff and clumsy. If it had been faster, he'd be dead.


Realizing the situation was spiraling into a nightmare, Liam hurried back into his apartment. He locked the security door and headed straight for the bathroom.


He leaned into the mirror to check his forehead. The wound was a little red and swollen, but the skin was barely broken. It wasn't serious. He could still feel that faint, cooling sensation radiating from it. The cut had already scabbed over. The healing speed was honestly kind of freaky.


Liam grabbed a towel and carefully wiped away the drying blood on his face. He washed his weapons in the sink, scrubbing off the gore.


That's when he noticed the water pressure dropping. The stream from the faucet got weaker and weaker, until finally, it was just a slow, rhythmic drip.


The taps finally ran dry."


Liam sighed. He wasn't exactly surprised. Luckily, he'd gone into prep-mode early, boiling a ton of water and filling every bottle he could find. He even had a couple of washbasins filled to the brim. Thirst wasn't going to be a problem. Not yet.


The water outside was a different story. Sure, the whole world was swimming in the stuff, but who knew what kind of parasites or diseases were brewing in that soup? Liam wasn't about to risk a sip.


He grabbed his cleaned knife and hammer, hauled a bundle of bedding into his arms, and headed out.


Up on the roof, Liam dropped the quilt and scanned the horizon. There were no skyscrapers blocking his view here. Just water. An endless, flat surface stretching out like an ocean. You couldn't see a shore. It was like the whole planet had been erased and replaced by a water world.


"What kind of terrifying power caused The Great Deluge to end up like this?" Liam clenched his fists, his knuckles turning white.


He looked toward the nearest building poking out of the flood. It was a thirty-story tower, only about forty or fifty meters away. Liam stared at the upper floors, wondering if anyone else was over there staring back. Was he the only survivor?


No matter what, I have to find a way to check, Liam thought.


He lit the quilt on fire.


Thick, heavy smoke billowed into the sky. Liam watched it rise, hoping that if anyone was alive in that other tower, they'd see the signal. Maybe they'd even signal back.


He headed back down the stairs to the thirtieth floor. He glanced around casually, but then froze. His heart skipped a beat.


The stairs leading down to the twenty-ninth floor were completely gone, submerged. The dark water was lapping at the edge of the thirtieth-floor landing.


"I remember the first time I came down here, the water was two inches below the landing," Liam muttered. "How is it about to flood the floor now? It hasn't been that long... is the water still rising?"


The realization sent a chill down his spine. If the water was still coming up, the thirtieth floor wasn't safe. The flood could swallow this place at any moment.


Panic started to set in.


No. I need a raft. Now.


Liam didn't waste a second. He took the stairs two at a time, sprinting back down the hallway to his apartment. It was time to build.


He left his bedroom door intact but ripped the other two wooden doors in the apartment off their hinges. He figured if he lashed them together, they'd make a decent raft.


He did the mental math; two solid doors should hold his weight without sinking. He remembered seeing guys in the countryside balance on a single door with a bamboo pole, paddling across ponds. Two doors combined? Totally doable.


Next, he flipped his mattress and tore out the wooden slats from the bed frame. He laid the slats across the two doors and hammered them down with iron nails. Just like that, he had a raft.


He didn't have any rope, so he raided the linen closet. He took scissors to his bedsheets and duvet covers, shredding them into long strips and braiding them together.


The day blurred by. By the time he was done, he had several coils of sturdy cloth rope. He tied one to the raft and stashed the rest.


Outside, the sky was turning a bruised, gloomy purple. Liam wolfed down two pieces of bread and walked to the balcony window.


He needed to make sure everything was locked up tight. Night was falling, and after seeing that moving, attacking Cadaver earlier today, he knew he wasn't safe.


He reached the window and froze. There was a corpse floating in the water right outside.


It was face down, bobbing in the current maybe five feet from his balcony.


Liam jolted, his expression darkening. That body hadn't been there this morning. Where did it drift from?


"Dammit. Please don't tell me that thing is going to undergo Necrotic Mutation, too."


The closer he looked, the more his skin crawled. He couldn't stand having it that close. He grabbed a laundry pole, cracked the window open, and shoved the pole out, aiming to poke the body and push it away into the current.


The tip of the pole poked the corpse. Liam leaned into it, ready to shove.


Suddenly, the corpse's head snapped up.