Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition Chapter 1257: Story 1257: They Grew Inside

Chapter 1257: Story 1257: They Grew Inside

The scream wasn’t human.

It echoed through the ventilation shaft with a wet rasp—half windpipe, half sothing rupturing. The parasite Bloom had found a host.

Juno, Shade, and H-13 stood frozen in the husk of Vault K-0 as the last of the spores were sucked upward. Above them, the silence returned. But it wasn’t peace.

It was migration.

“They grew inside soone,” H-13 said, stepping back from the vent. “Soone who didn’t know they were infected.”

Shade scanned the exits. “How long before it… blooms again?”

H-13 turned grim. “Less than an hour. But this ti, the parasite won’t need pollen. It’s rged with a mind.”

They hurried out of the collapsing vault, through the maintenance tunnels beneath Blackout’s surface. Juno moved faster than before—driven not by fear, but clarity. She now rembered the old VIREX blueprints from her mother’s files, every hallway and false exit.

But sothing wasn’t right.

As they passed corridor mirrors and smashed caras, Juno noticed strange reflections. Her own face, but subtly wrong—eyes darker, expression twisted. Shade’s shadow flickered with sothing moving beneath his skin. And H-13’s reflection… showed nothing at all.

“Keep moving,” Juno said.

But they didn’t get far.

They entered a hydroponics lab—abandoned, vines dead long ago.

Except now they weren’t.

Fresh green tendrils had sprouted across the floor. Not like normal vines. These twitched.

At the center of the room, a figure knelt. Hooded. Still.

Shade raised his weapon. “Hands where I can see them.”

The figure looked up.

It was a man. Pale. Eyes glazed and leaking dark sap. Skin moving—bulging in ti with his breath. His voice was cracked, almost childlike.

“They said it was a cure… but it grew teeth. It loved . It nested inside my lungs. It showed things I lost… and promised they’d co back.”

He smiled—mouth splitting wider than it should.

Then the growths beneath his skin moved.

“I am the garden now,” he whispered.

And blood.

His body erupted—splitting open as vines tore through his ribcage. Hands ford at the end of tendrils. Faces stretched from leaf-like tissue. Screams beca blossoms. The Bloom had beco sentient.

Shade fired. H-13 shouted for Juno to back away.

She stood firm.

“No more running.”

She stepped forward, raising both hands.

The parasite twitched.

It recognized her.

“Why did you choose ?” she asked.

The garden-thing answered with every voice it had stolen: “Because you’re fertile with mory.”

Juno activated her Geno override, her bloodstream now tuned to resist internal mutation.

“You fed on pain,” she said. “Now taste purpose.”

A pulse of light surged from her palms—encoded not with aggression, but clarity.

mories. Intact. Unbroken.

The Bloom recoiled.

It couldn’t feed.

It withered.

One by one, the flowers died.

The host collapsed, twitching once before falling silent.

Shade exhaled. “Was that… the last of it?”

“No,” H-13 said, staring at Juno. “That was only a test bloom. The real parasite is still evolving.”

And worse?

It now rembers her.