Horrific Shorts: Zombie Edition

The alley behind the old Chamber of Surgeons had always smelled of rust and rot, even long after the last body was carted out. The walls wept condensation like flesh after a fever, and strange symbols—vein-thin, pulsing—were etched into the brick by hands that had no bones.

It was here that the Vein-Walkers gathered.

They wore no robes. Only skin. Not their own. Their faces were masks of old humanity, sewn tight with surgical precision, lips sealed with black thread. Beneath, their bodies shimmered like raw muscle laced with flickering veins of light. They walked not on the ground, but through it—stepping between cracks in the world like crossing arteries in a vast cosmic heart.

Tonight, they came to open the Vein Eternal.

Jasper Crane, once a gravedigger, now something else entirely, stood in the center of their circle. His eyes had been replaced with obsidian marbles. He could see the pulse beneath everything now—how trees bled memory and buildings twitched in agony.

He had been chosen to host the Suture Spirit, the old blood god sealed in the city's buried veins. And the ritual must begin before the thirteenth beat of the meat-clock suspended above.

It beat once every two minutes.

The others began the Stitching Hymn, a guttural drone punctuated by wet clicks and shrieks like torn ligaments. The sound did not echo. It absorbed. Around them, the alley flexed and breathed.

Jasper raised the Needle Spine, a curved, living quill harvested from the back of a dying time-serpent, and plunged it into his own chest. But no blood flowed—only threads of silver-red thought, unspooling into the air like whispers made tangible.

From the stitched faces, mouths opened beneath the masks.

They began to drink.

Somewhere beneath the city, in the catacombs no longer mapped, something ancient twitched—something made of arteries and sorrow, once a deity, now a prisoner in the rootwork of Dreadmoor.

It had not been named in centuries.

Its first word, as it stirred, echoed not in ears but in the gut:

"Feed."

The Vein-Walkers tore Jasper open—not with rage, but reverence. Each vein they pulled from his body writhed with memories not his own: a childhood in a burning orphanage, a love affair with a faceless thing, a life lived backward in a collapsing house.

They tied these veins to the brickwork. The city groaned.

A red fog rose, thick with whispers. Buildings leaned in, listening.

Then the Suture Spirit came through.

It emerged not with grandeur, but with hunger—a slick, pulsing thing with too many teeth and not enough shape. It slithered across the veins, through the Walkers, wearing them like coats, filling their emptied skins.

They screamed. Joyfully.

Jasper, now veined with thought and thread, smiled.

The city's heart began to beat again.

But now, it was not its own.