He reached for his phone to call his editor. No signal. Not zero bars—the “No Service” text looked wrong, smeared, as if the pixels were bleeding. He swiped to his files. The iCloud Drive icon was greyed out. Beneath it, a new folder had appeared. He hadn’t created it. It was labelled simply:

Leo sighed. “Great. Of all nights.”

The folder was filled with video files. Thumbnails loaded in sickly green and black. Grainy security-camera angles. A hallway. A wet floor. A severed hand twitching on the linoleum. The timestamp read:

Then, the banner dropped from the top of the screen.

He looked back at the Kinko’s window. The monitor inside was flickering. Not with error messages, but with faces. Missing faces. Dozens of them, syncing, updating, uploading from the cloud into the bodies of the things that were now stumbling out of the side streets.

Curiosity, that old fool, got the better of him. He tapped it.

The lights in the store went out. All except the monitor. On its screen, Leo’s brochure had been replaced by a single line of text: