To the Start of a New World

Extra 4: Hong Sheng is a Zombie

This chapter contains dark themes and minor self-harm.

Mood: Horror love, dark fluff, yandere, angst
Summary: In an alternate timeline, Lu Hao brings home a zombie Hong Sheng and loves him just as much. He'll do anything to take care of him, no matter how wrong it seems.
Content: Implied zombie-human intercourse

—

The SG discovered something horrifying in F City.

In the second year of the apocalypse, there had been a researcher in B City sentenced to death for his inhumane experiments. This man had escaped and traveled south, and now, he had set up a new lab in F City.

He had been kidnapping human survivors, and turning them into zombies.

"We can't let this continue." Lu Hao's eyes were sharp, angered by the blatant disregard for human life, the cruelty of the details he'd read in the reports. "Get ready to go immediately. We need to investigate. If this is true, we'll stop him."

At Lu Hao's side were the elite SG members who made up his strike team. They'd gone through thick and thin together, and if this lab was going to be guarded by advanced, mutated zombies, they needed all the firepower they could get.

The team broke into the lab, an underground bunker hidden in a forest. Just as the intel had said, the entire area was full of horrific evolved zombies whose powers were far beyond the scale of the zombies outside. Lu Hao and his team fought through them, carving their way deep into the laboratory.

There, they saw evidence of the experiments. The humans were being kept in cells, penned like livestock. There were isolation chambers holding zombies at various stages of transition.

In the end, the best mercy they could give these test subjects was death.

As they cleared out the rooms in this chamber, Lu Hao solemnly gave his order. "Anyone who's been tested on will need to be killed. Make it quick and painless. They deserve peace."

It was after Lu Hao had killed the lead researcher that he had found the defunct passageway.

It'd been obviously abandoned for a while. Old and crusted blood lined the walls and floor, and a rotten, musty scent filled the air. Lu Hao wouldn't have bothered to notice it if not for the subtle sounds of scuffling and zombie groans he heard far inside, past the walls.

He had an obligation to give these people a proper death. That's what stirred Lu Hao to enter the abandoned passageway and investigate the worn-down, forgotten cells.

This was where he found the failures.

They were the experimental test subjects whose mutations had made them even weaker than normal zombies. Lu Hao saw zombies with missing limbs, some whose muscles had atrophied to impossible thinness, and some that didn't seem to react to his presence at all.

More than anything, they were pitiful.

These people had their lives stolen from them. They'd been turned into monsters against their will. And then, they had been thrown away to rot.

Lu Hao went to each zombie and, with a gentle strike of electricity, ended their lives. His method left no marks on the bodies, so they could be recovered and documented in case any family members searched for them.

Once Lu Hao reached the last zombie in the hall, that's when his whole being froze.

The zombie in that cell looked familiar.

It was very thin, so pale that the skin was nearly a blueish white. It had long dark bangs covering its face, and when Lu Hao called out a name, horror overtaking him—the zombie looked up.