The file opened. The brochure layout was perfect. He hit print.

Leo’s thumb hovered over the save icon, a nervous habit left over from a decade of desktop publishing. The deadline for the Raccoon City historical society’s memorial brochure was in six hours. His MacBook hummed on the coffee table, the screen displaying a grainy, sepia-toned photo of the old Arklay Mountains trailhead.

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:

Then, beneath it, in a smaller, frantic script:

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

The printer whirred, groaned, and spat out a single sheet of paper. It wasn’t his brochure. It was a memo, typed in a jagged, Courier font: Leo laughed. A prank. Some kid hacking the store’s print queue.

He didn’t think much of it. A server glitch. Maybe the apartment’s lousy Wi-Fi. He saved the file locally, closed the laptop, and decided to walk the four blocks to the 24-hour Kinko’s. The streets of downtown Raccoon City were eerily quiet. A fine October mist clung to the streetlights. He passed the police station—windows dark, a single cruiser abandoned at the curb, its door hanging open.

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.