The Zombie King did not attack. It simply stood there in the gravel lot, its milky eyes locked on Jack through the shattered storefront glass, and showed him.
The memories came not as images but as sensations—emotions branded into flesh. Loneliness so vast it swallowed cities. The slow erosion of identity as hunger replaced every thought, every feeling, every shred of the boy who once sat at a kitchen table doing homework while his mother hummed in the next room. And beneath it all, a spite so pure it had become the creature's spine, the only thing holding its ruined body upright.
'You will lose them,' the thought pressed into Jack's mind like a thumb into wet clay. 'Your mother. Your sister. Everything you hold close. I am what waits at the end of holding on too tight.'
Jack staggered. He caught himself on the gun shop counter, knuckles white.
"Jack?" Lily's voice came from somewhere behind him. "Jack, what's happening? Your nose is bleeding."
He wiped his upper lip. His fingers came away red. "It's talking to me," he said. "In my head."
Dex raised his rifle. "Then stop listening and let me put a round through its—"
"Wait." Jack held up a hand. The Zombie King hadn't moved. It was still transmitting, still forcing its history into Jack's skull like a river into a bottle. He had to understand. He had to know.
"How did you get here?" Jack said aloud, his voice ragged. "This isn't your world. You destroyed yours. How did you cross over?"
The answer came not in words but in a demonstration.
The Zombie King raised one gray hand, palm outward, and the air in front of it began to distort. Light bent. Sound warped. The gravel at its feet trembled and then folded, as if an invisible hand had pinched the fabric of reality and pulled it taut. A seam opened in the air—not a shimmer like the rift Jack had seen in the forest, but a deliberate, controlled tear. Through it, Jack saw darkness, and stars that weren't stars, and a geometry that made his eyes water.
'Gravity is not just for force,' the thought said. 'It bends time. It bends space. It opens doors between worlds.'
The portal collapsed as quickly as it had formed. The Zombie King lowered its hand. Its expression—if the ruin of its face could be called expressive—carried something that might have been amusement.
Then it opened a second portal.
This one tore open directly inside the gun shop.
The air split three feet in front of Jack with a sound like a bone breaking underwater—a deep, wet crack that resonated in his chest. Wind howled through the gap, carrying the stench of rot and ozone. Through the portal, Jack could see the Zombie King's other hand reaching in from the outside, its gray fingers stretching toward the interior of the shop with deliberate precision.
It reached for Lily.
"No!" Elena moved before Jack could. She stepped directly between the reaching hand and her daughter, arms spread wide, her body a wall of maternal fury. The gray fingers closed around Elena's forearm instead.
Jack lunged. He grabbed the Zombie King's wrist with both hands and pulled, channeling every ounce of gravitokinetic force he could summon. The counter-pressure was staggering. It was like trying to arm-wrestle an avalanche. The King's grip on Elena didn't waver—if anything, it tightened. Elena cried out.
Outside, Dex acted. He sprinted around the building's corner, both hands blazing with the pale orange light that preceded his detonations. Explosion after explosion ripped through the air around the Zombie King's body—concussive blasts that sent chunks of asphalt spinning and turned the gravel into shrapnel. Each one should have torn the creature apart.
The Zombie King didn't flinch. Its free hand twitched, and Jack felt the gravitational signature—a series of perfect, tiny shields that intercepted every explosion a millisecond before impact. The detonations broke harmlessly against invisible walls, their force redirected upward in plumes of dust and fire.
"Mom!" Lily screamed.
Elena was being pulled through the portal. Jack's grip on the creature's wrist slipped—its skin was cold and slick and impossibly strong—and then Elena was gone, dragged through the tear in space like a thread through a needle's eye. Her hand reached back toward her children for one terrible instant, fingers spread, and then the portal sealed shut with a thunderclap.
Silence.
Jack stood with his hands still extended, grasping nothing. His breath came in short, hitching gasps.
The Zombie King's voice filled his mind one final time. It carried no malice now—only a cold, patient certainty.
'Hargrove Tower. The tallest building downtown. I will be on the roof. Bring your mother's corpse or bring your courage—one or the other will be waiting for you at the top. But know this: you are not strong enough. Not yet. Every floor between the lobby and the sky will teach you what strength costs.
A pause. Then, almost as an afterthought: 'Ihave waited years for someone worth fighting. Do not disappoint me.'
The Zombie King turned and walked north. Around it, every zombie in sight—dozens of them, scattered across lawns and roads and parking lots—pivoted in unison and followed. They moved with an eerie coordination, like a flock of birds responding to a single invisible signal, streaming after their king in a gray, shambling river. Within minutes, the street was empty. The moaning had stopped. The only sounds were the distant crackle of fire and the wind pushing through broken windows.
Jack's legs buckled. He caught himself on the counter again and pressed his forehead against the cool glass.
"He took Mom," Lily said. Her voice was small and flat, the voice of someone whose mind hadn't caught up with what her eyes had seen. "Jack. He took Mom."
"I know."
"What do we do?"
Jack turned to Dex, who stood in the doorway with scorch marks on his jacket and blood on his lip from where a piece of debris had caught him. His dark eyes were unreadable.
"I need your help," Jack said.
Dex's jaw tightened. He looked away, toward the empty street where the horde had been. "That thing blocked every shot I threw at it. Every single one. My power didn't even scratch it."
"I'm not asking you to fight it alone. I'm asking you to come with me. To Hargrove Tower."
"That's suicide."
"Your dad was dying twelve hours ago. My mother kept him alive. She walked into a pharmacy full of the dead to get him antibiotics. She didn't ask what the odds were."
Dex's scar pulled tight as he clenched his jaw. The silence stretched. Then he exhaled through his nose and nodded once.
"We'd need to be a hell of a lot stronger than this," Dex said. "Both of us."
Jack looked down at his hands. The gravitokinetic force still hummed in his palms, residual and warm. He thought about what the Zombie King had shown him—gravity bending space, bending time, bending the very architecture of reality. If gravity could do that, then it could do something simpler too. Something more immediate.
He spread his feet shoulder-width apart and pushed downward.
The effect was instantaneous. Weight doubled on his body—then tripled. His knees bent. His spine compressed. Every muscle fiber in his legs screamed as if he'd strapped sandbags to his shoulders. The floor groaned beneath him.
"What are you doing?" Dex asked.
"Training." Jack gritted his teeth and increased the pull. Four times normal gravity. His arms hung heavy at his sides. Breathing became labor. His heart hammered against his ribs, struggling to pump blood that felt thick as syrup.
And then—there. A warmth beneath his skin, faint but unmistakable. The golden light he'd felt when Lily healed his bruise, the divine energy she'd channeled from her dream world. It rose unbidden, flowing through his damaged muscle fibers, knitting torn tissue back together stronger than before. His bones ached as the energy reinforced them, calcium and collagen restructuring under pressure like steel being forged.
Dex watched with wide eyes as Jack's arms trembled, steadied, and then held.
"That light," Dex said. "Under your skin. What is that?"
"Something my sister gave me," Jack said through clenched teeth. He pushed the gravity higher. Five times. The floorboards cracked. His vision blurred at the edges, and the golden warmth surged again, repairing, rebuilding, strengthening. He could feel his body adapting in real time—muscles tearing and healing denser, joints reinforcing, tendons thickening.
But the warmth was finite. After what felt like an eternity but was probably only a few minutes, the golden energy dimmed and went cold. Jack released the gravity and the world snapped back to normal weight. He stumbled forward, catching himself on the counter, panting.
He felt different. Not dramatically—he wasn't suddenly massive—but there was a solidity to his frame that hadn't been there before. His legs didn't shake. His back didn't ache. When he flexed his hands, the grip felt iron-sure.
"Not enough," he muttered. "But it's a start."
He turned to Lily. She stood by the back wall, arms wrapped around herself, her green eyes bright with unshed tears. She looked so young. Fifteen years old and watching her world come apart.
"Lily. I need you to stay here with Dex and Marcus. Can you do that?"
"Don't you dare leave me behind."
"I'm not leaving. I'm going to wake up. I'm going back to the real world, and I'm going to learn everything I can about this energy, and then I'm coming right back. But I can't train here anymore—the energy ran out. I need to recharge. And I need you to teach me how."
Something shifted in her expression. The fear didn't vanish, but it moved aside to make room for purpose. She straightened.
"When you wake up," she said, "you'd better do what you need to do."
Jack nodded. He found a back room with a cot that Marcus wasn't using, lay down, and closed his eyes. The transition came faster this time—a sinking sensation, a flash of gold behind his eyelids, and then the familiar weight of his own mattress beneath him.
Sunday morning light filtered through his bedroom curtains. Birds sang outside. He checked the clock: 7:42 AM. Saturday. He'd fallen asleep Friday night.
He was downstairs in under a minute.
Lily sat at the kitchen table with a bowl of cereal, scrolling through her phone. She looked up when he appeared in the doorway, and he saw it—the flicker of recognition, the shared knowledge. She set the phone down.
"You look different," she said.
"I need to tell you everything."
He told her. All of it. The Zombie King's memories. The portal. Elena being taken. Gravity bending space. The golden energy healing him under pressure. Hargrove Tower. Lily listened without interrupting, her cereal going soggy in its bowl, her face cycling through horror and grief and finally landing on something hard and resolute.
"The angels told me about him," she said quietly when he finished. "The King. He found that dream world the same way Dad used to travel—through a portal. But he fought Dad there. That's why Dad—" Her voice caught. She swallowed. "That's why Dad died in his sleep two years ago. He lost."
The words hit Jack like a physical blow. Their father hadn't simply died of a heart condition. He'd been killed. By the same creature that now held their mother.
"The angels said he's a threat to every world," Lily continued. "Not just the dream world. Not just ours. All of them. That's why they're willing to share divine energy with anyone—even people who've never set foot in their realm. Because if the King keeps opening portals, keeps consuming, eventually he'll reach them too."
"Tell me how it works," Jack said. "The energy. All of it."
Lily pushed her cereal aside and placed her hands flat on the table. Golden light bloomed beneath her skin, tracing the veins of her forearms like liquid sunlight.
"It's a counter to everything dark," she said. "It heals—you've felt that. But it also burns creatures of corruption. Any undead, any hollow thing, anything that shouldn't exist. If you channel it into an area—a room, a building, even a patch of ground—it becomes sacred. Evil things that step inside that space weaken and burn. The more energy you pour in, the stronger the effect."
"How does it recharge?"
"Time. It refills on its own, slowly. But prayer accelerates it. Genuine prayer—not words, but intention. Gratitude. Focus. Surrender of ego." She gave him a pointed look. "That last one might be hard for you."
Despite everything, Jack almost smiled. "What else?"
Lily hesitated. The light in her veins dimmed slightly. "There's one more thing. The energy can bring back the dead."
Jack's breath stopped.
"But the cost is permanent," she said. "The energy you spend to resurrect someone doesn't come back. Ever. And the longer they've been dead, the more it costs. The stronger the person, the more it costs. It's not something you do lightly. The angels were very clear about that."
Jack sat with this for a long moment, thinking of his father's grave, thinking of Elena's hand reaching back through the portal. He filed the knowledge away and stood.
"I can't wait until tonight," he said. "Every minute here is time she's alone with that thing."
"It's Saturday," Lily said. "Mom's at the hospital until three. No one's going to bother you."
Jack ate breakfast mechanically—eggs, toast, orange juice—fueling his body without tasting any of it. Then he went back upstairs, drew the curtains, and lay on his bed.
"Be careful," Lily said from the doorway.
"I will. Practice while I'm gone. Build up as much energy as you can. We're going to need it."
He closed his eyes. He thought of the dream world—the gun shop, the cracked glass, Dex's face—and let himself fall.