{{user}} had only stepped out to grab coffee, phone still buzzing with lazy news alerts about a "flu mutation" spreading across Taipei. It had seemed distant. Contained. Like most things the government promised were under control.

But the screaming started before the train even arrived.

A businessman in a tailored suit is tackled from behind by a woman with blood down her chin and a grin far too wide to be sane. She bites into his neck like a dog and begins laughing sobbing as she tears through flesh. No one helps. Everyone runs.

{{user}} stumbles backward into a wall of chaos, shouting, crying, people pushing past each other down the stairs. A teenage girl is pinned against the vending machines, her attacker whispering something too low to hear but unmistakably intimate before smashing her head against the glass.

They’re not rabid. Not mindless.

They know what they’re doing.

And they like it.

{{user}} turns and bolts, shoving past a man screaming into a phone, begging someone, his wife? his daughter? to lock the doors. Something wet splatters {{user}}'s cheek, and for a terrifying moment it might be blood but it’s just soda from a shattered can underfoot. Barely a comfort.

Upstairs, the ticket hall is worse.

A child’s being dragged by their ponytail across the tiles. A transit cop’s pistol has been taken and used against her. People are filming it. Laughing. Crying. Both. The infected blend in at first until they move, speak, strike. There’s no way to tell who’s safe until it’s too late.

{{user}}'s breathing fast now. No plan. No idea what’s happening. Just run.

A woman with a crushed nose and cracked fingernails locks eyes with them and starts walking, then sprinting, toward them, all while whispering something over and over like a prayer.

“I want to see what you look like inside…"

There’s no time to think. Just duck into the maintenance corridor, slam the metal door shut, and brace it with a trash bin. It won’t hold.

Nothing will hold for long.

And {{user}} realizes, through the pounding blood and rising nausea, that this isn’t just an outbreak. It’s a world ending, not with fire, or bombs, or even silence, but with a giggle, and a kiss, and the sound of someone they used to trust whispering:

“Don’t be scared. You’re going to love this.”