It started small.

A twitch in the leg of the nearest corpse. A subtle shift of weight, as if some last nerve was finally relaxing. Then a tilt of the head from another. A jaw falling open with a wet click. Small movements—easy to explain away. Reflex. Settling. Gas escaping.

But Star’s stomach dropped.

Something was wrong.

The corpse Glenn had been working on suddenly jerked upright with a violent spasm, its torso tearing itself free of the bed with a sound like wet cloth ripping. Star barely had time to react before the other bodies followed, snapping themselves upward one by one—uncoordinated, twitching—but undeniably moving. As they rose, their flesh sheared against the medical cots, strands of melted tissue still clinging to the mattresses, stretching like chewed gum before snapping away in stringy loops.

Glenn took a step back.

He didn’t scream. Didn’t shout. But Star saw the tremble in his hand.

Then, with practiced speed, Glenn stepped forward again. He reached out with one hand and snapped the reanimated corpse’s neck with a sharp, clinical motion. There was a dry crack—followed by an awful squish as the slack body slumped back onto the cot, its head twisted unnaturally.

Yasir recoiled like he’d been slapped. “Dude, what the—what the fuck—who are you? What the hell was that?!”

Glenn didn’t answer. His eyes were on the other corpses, now sitting upright in scattered postures around the room—some still dripping, twitching, wheezing like punctured bellows.

Andrea’s voice rose in disbelief. “You just killed him!”

But her accusation was hollow. None of them really believed that thing was still a person.

“If anything,” Glenn said, his voice cold and flat, “I put him out of his misery.”

He took a breath, seemed to steel himself. “At least we know these things can be killed eas—”

The corpse he’d just downed snapped upright again, its head lolling uselessly on the broken stem of its neck. The vertebrae jutted out like a spike, glistening and raw, the skull balanced precariously atop it. Glassy, milk-pale eyes rolled in their sockets until they landed on Star.

Star froze.

It saw him.

Glenn reacted instantly, reaching to grab it again—but the moment he touched it, the corpse convulsed. With a wet, gurgling retch, thick streams of putrid, dark green bile burst from its nose, mouth, eyes, and ears. The stench hit them like a wall—fetid, vegetal, and chemical all at once. It reeked of rot and mold, like spoiled milk left to boil in a corpse.

The fluid gushed, pooling beneath the bed, staining the sheets and dripping down in rivulets onto the fleshy floor. Then the others joined in.

Every corpse in the room began to spew the same foul substance, vomiting it in waves, bubbling from every orifice. It coated their cots, drenched the floor, spread like a glistening, green-black oil slick.

“Move!” Star shouted.

Glenn tried to step back—but the corpse he’d dismantled lashed toward him. Its free arm—the one he’d torn off earlier—dragged behind it, stretched on a tendon-thin thread of sinew. It swung like a flail, the fingers grasping blindly. Too short to reach him—for now.

But Glenn didn’t move.

He stood frozen, staring at the thing. At the long, bloated torso that twisted unnaturally as it dragged itself forward. The head dangled sideways, neck too broken to support it, but the eyes—those eyes never left Glenn.

It was looking through him.

The corpse’s eyes never left Glenn.

Even with its neck shattered and head lolling off to one side like a snapped flower stalk, it watched him—calm, patient, almost reverent. Then, with a sickening series of pops, its back arched violently and the head flung backward in a sudden, grotesque motion.

From its mouth erupted a geyser of bile—thick and forceful—splattering across the ceiling, the bed, the floor. It hit Star’s boots and soaked instantly into the soft flesh beneath them. And somehow—somehow—amid the churning rush of vomit, there were words:

“Praise the pit and praise the cry,
Of children birthed where corpses lie.
The womb is wide, the veil is torn—
O blessed Rot, through you, we’re born…”

The voice wasn’t just one—it was many, layered and warping in pitch. Man, woman, child, beast. It echoed in Star’s skull like it had bypassed his ears completely.

The bile pooled, thick and seething, at the foot of the beds. Then, impossibly, it began to climb the back wall. It defied gravity, smearing upward in pulsating veins toward the mural—the one of the black goat surrounded by robed, red-massed shapes. The fetid liquid drank the mural in as it reached the painted hooves, then the torso, then the teats, where malformed, goat-headed infants suckled.

And the corpses began to speak again.

All of them. At once.

“Mother’s milk will rebirth you…”

Their voices came in perfect rhythm, over and over, rising and falling with the cadence of a lullaby turned monstrous:

“Mother’s milk will rebirth you…
Mother’s milk will rebirth you…”

The bile reached the goat’s painted face.

It seeped in.

And then, impossibly, the goat moved.