Chapter 197: A Zombie Invasion
Nat shook his head, letting out a dark, dramatic sigh. "What an unfilial grandson you are. Letting an old man do all the heavy lifting while you just sit around giving driving lessons. Shame on you."
"Hey! I’m coordinating our private security team when I’m not giving April lessons! Okay?" Alexander protested indignantly, glaring at Nat while the rest of the table laughed under their breaths.
Sitting silently beside April, Emily listened to the entire conversation in growing, bewildered shock. Fortresses? Atmospheric domes? Shelter? Soil contamination? Safe houses?
She looked around the table at these powerful, immensely wealthy men talking about survival structures like it was an imminent reality.
Emily slowly lifted her head, her voice quiet and hesitant as she broke her silence. "Is... is there going to be a war?"
The entire dining table went dead silent.
Every eye turned toward Emily. She was the only person in the room who had no idea what was actually coming—the only one entirely ignorant of the apocalyptic timer ticking down.
April looked at her sister’s confused brown eyes, remembering that Emily had said earlier she didn’t understand what was happening.
"It is not a war, Emily," April said flatly, her dark eyes locking onto her twin with absolute, unvarnished honesty. "In less than six weeks, a global biological collapse will occur. A zombie invasion."
Emily froze, her breath catching in her throat. "A... A what?"
"Zombies," April repeated calmly, as if stating the weather forecast. "An infectious virus that reanimates the dead and drives them to devour living flesh. A single bite or scratch from these zombies guarantees infection and death. The supply chains will collapse, society will burn, and the world will descend into absolute, merciless chaos."
Emily blinked, her mind completely reeling. "Zombies...? Like... like in movies? Is this a government warning? Did the military issue an alert?"
"No," April replied smoothly. "The government knows nothing yet and even if they did, they are probably covering it up and trying to handle it."
Though no one knew where the zombies came from, or how they came about, April did not believe that the government did not notice the signs before it spread so much.
The cowardly leaders would try to block out the news from spreading and only when it was too late would they send out the warning signals to stay in your homes or head for safe spaces in the city and all around the world.
"T-then, how did you know about this?" Emily asked, looking even more confused.
"I foresaw it. I am a seer, remember? I saw the fall of the world with my own eyes."
Emily stared at her identical sister, her chest heaving as the sheer, terrifying weight of April’s words settled into her mind. "Does that mean... the world is really going to end?"
"Yes," April said flatly. "It is."
April leaned slightly closer, her dark eyes piercing into Emily’s soul. "So tell me, Emily... What are you going to do about it? What is your plan when the world burns?"
Emily sat frozen in her chair. She looked down at the half-eaten food on her plate, then looked up at the towering men surrounding the table, before finally meeting April’s gaze. Her eyes went completely blank, her voice dropping into a small, hollow whisper.
"I... I don’t know," Emily confessed, her fingers trembling against her lap. "I don’t even know if I want to be alive by then."
A heavy, suffocating silence fell over the dining room.
April stared at her twin, realizing that while the men at the table had spent weeks pouring billions into defensive infrastructure, Emily was still floating in the hollow void of her grief.
Then, a sudden, deliberate tapping sound broke the silence from the far end of the table.
Click. Click. Click.
April blinked, her eyes shifting past Nat toward the end of the long mahogany table. She had almost forgotten.
Emily wasn’t the only person at this table who had been entirely ignorant of the apocalypse timer. There was one uninvited guest who had just sat through the entire conversation, taking notes on his tablet, and had now absorbed a piece of high-tier intelligence that cost billions in cash.
Dr. Oliver Baxter slowly lowered his stylus. Behind his thin silver-framed glasses, his sharp, analytical eyes were uncharacteristically wide. His clinical, unbothered posture had stiffened into absolute rigidity.
A scientist driven purely by empirical evidence, Oliver’s first instinct should have been to dismiss the entire claim as a ridiculous, irrational delusion.
Predicting a viral, reanimative collapse of global society based on ’seer visions’ broke every standard protocol of logical peer review.
And yet...
Oliver’s eyes flicked to April’s face, then recalled how a silk handkerchief had materialized out of thin air less than an hour ago, and finally toward the memory of the cellular regeneration water he had tested in his lab.
He had just witnessed a direct, physical violation of spatial physics with his own eyes. If spatial dimensions and mass-energy distortion existed—phenomena science had failed to replicate for centuries—then the concept of precognition and viral mutation was no longer an absolute impossibility. It was simply an unmapped variable.
"A viral pathogen capable of prompt motor-function reanimation upon somatic death..." Oliver murmured softly, his voice tight as his mind calculated the biological variables at lightning speed. "To bypass immune response and trigger rapid muscular necrosis alongside aggressive neurological rerouting... the pathogen would require an impossibly high mutation index."
He looked directly at April, adjusting his glasses with two fingers. "You are asserting that a global pandemic of this scale will initiate in under forty-two days?"
April looked at the surgeon with a flat, unbothered expression.
"Right. There was also this guy," April muttered dryly under her breath.
She didn’t understand all that scientific jargon he just spewed but it seemed like he got the gist of it.
She leaned back against her chair, folding her arms over her chest as she stared at the doctor. "You should thank your lucky stars, Doctor Oliver. You just heard a life-saving, apocalyptic prediction that cost everyone else at this table two billion dollars each... and you got it completely for free."