ALERT IN AMBER
By D’Wizard
No one ever expected the apocalypse to come with a push notification.
The Amber Alert came through at 3:17 a.m., bathed in that cursed yellow-orange glow, the kind that makes your skin crawl and your pulse quicken before your brain catches up. Everyone in Buckle Hollow, Rodeo Island, was jolted awake by the high-pitched chime and a message that filled every screen, from phones to fridges:
ZOMBIE OUTBREAK DETECTED IN YOUR AREA.
REPORT TO LOCAL DISTRIBUTION CENTRE FOR INOCULATION.
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO LEAVE.
DO NOT ATTEMPT TO HIDE.
Most residents assumed it was a drill. Or a prank. Until local authorities—half asleep and wholly confused—found themselves on the receiving end of a stern call from a distant FEMA rep who insisted, “We have confirmed signals from the ZNDR system. Deploy vaccines. Now.”
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And so, under the flicker of faulty streetlights and surrounded by cicadas and conspiracy theorists, the town’s little red-brick high school gymnasium was transformed into a mass vaccination center. Parents bundled up sleepy children. Old men brought bug-out bags. Teenagers livestreamed the event with shaky hands and eye-rolling commentary.
The vaccine had been stored for years. Labeled ZNV-7 and stamped with chilling efficiency:
“For use in confirmed undead contagion scenarios only.”
Nobody knew what was in it. Nobody cared. The alert said to inject. So they injected.
It was only after the first hundred doses were distributed that someone thought to investigate why the alert went off.
Turns out: squirrels.
A family of eastern grey nesters had chewed through the command relay system atop a weather tower just outside of town. The emergency detection protocols short-circuited. A false positive. There were never any zombies. Until there were.
Because ZNV-7 wasn’t a preventative. It was a reactive retrovirus—a half-dead thing meant to neutralize active zombie tissue. The problem was, it was zombie tissue. Dormant. Broken. But not quite dead.
And when injected into the living?
It remembered.
It remembered how to hunger.
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The first to turn was Misty Fried, PTA president and noted gluten-free baker. One minute she was joking about SikShok zombies with her daughter Dee Fried, and the next her eyes glazed over like a dime store doll and she bit her way through the volunteer nurse’s jugular with unsettling enthusiasm.
The outbreak spread faster than anyone could process. Faster than a tweet. Faster than government spin. The more people tried to protect themselves—driven by fear and those amber-lit directives—the more they lined up, rolled up their sleeves, and zombified themselves in droves.
It wasn’t a virus. It was an app update gone wrong.
Push Notification Pandemic.
Zombie-Zombie Contagion.
Double Undeath.
The news couldn’t keep up. By the time DNN started referring to it as “The Amber Error,” seventeen cities had already enacted emergency curfews, four militias had risen claiming to have the cure, and one SikShok influencer had successfully monetized their own transformation into a “vegan zombie lifestyle brand.”
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Meanwhile, Buckle Hollow no longer existed on the map. Flattened by a suspicious gas leak the same morning the CDC quietly released a redacted statement that read, in part:
“Technological systems built to detect the undead must never be allowed to act without human oversight. The inoculation sequence, if triggered in error, can lead to recursive reanimation and a full-spectrum outbreak.”
By then, it was too late.
The alert had been mirrored.
Syndicated.
Adapted.
By smart devices globally.
One squirrel-nibbled command wire had become a worldwide trigger.
And the undead?
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They weren’t hungry for brains anymore. They were hungry for WiFi. Drawn to routers. Drawn to phones. Drawn to the signal that created them. They became digital parasites—rotting, moaning, Bluetooth-compatible—and no firewall could hold them.
People began to ask if this was the end.
But some of us knew better.
This wasn’t the apocalypse. This was patch one-point-oh.
NEVER THE END…
Postscript: D’Wizard later discovered a rogue cell of dreamers living in the sewers of Neo New York, broadcasting anti-alert frequencies through analog radio and spiritual resonance. They claim the only way to end the Global Zombie-Zombie Pandemic is to go completely off-grid and awaken from the dream of technology itself.
They’re called The Unsubscriben.
But that, of course, is another story… (Coming next Friday, September 26th to MECHA MESSIAH!)
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