The being who had once been Subject 23 moved through the world like a force of nature—unstoppable, insatiable, and utterly without mercy. His newly transformed body operated with terrible efficiency, guided by predatory instincts that transcended human limitations.

  He hunted at night, when prey congregated in vulnerable groups. His enhanced senses detected humans from impossible distances—the sound of heartbeats, the scent of blood pumping through veins, the heat signatures radiating from living bodies. These sensory inputs guided him unerringly to settlements, gatherings, and shelters where humans clustered together, unaware of the predator approaching.

  His attacks followed a devastating pattern. He would descend upon a group with supernatural speed, moving too quickly for human eyes to track. The first victim would barely have time to register his presence before fangs punctured flesh. By the time the others realized something was wrong, it was already too te. He left no survivors, no witnesses to expin what had happened—only drained bodies that would ter reanimate with the same terrible hunger that drove him.

  In small towns, he eliminated entire communities in a single night. In rger settlements, he struck at isoted groups—night workers, revelers returning home in darkness, security personnel guarding perimeters. His survival instincts were fwless, leading him to prey that wouldn't be missed immediately, allowing him time to feed and vanish before broader arm could be raised.

  With each feeding, his body continued to reconstruct itself. Muscle density increased beyond human possibility. Bones reinforced themselves with microscopic ttice structures that provided impossible strength. His senses sharpened further, allowing him to perceive wavelengths of light invisible to human eyes, to hear conversations from blocks away, to detect the chemical signatures of fear before his prey even knew they were afraid.

  Yet for all these physical changes, his mind remained clouded by hunger—operating on instinct rather than reason, driven by need rather than thought. He had no awareness that his feeding method carried unintended consequences. As his saliva entered victims' wounds, it introduced his transformed DNA into their systems. Though he drained them to the point of death, this biological agent remained active in their tissues, initiating changes that would manifest hours ter.

  The first thousand victims fell within days. Each night brought new hunting grounds, new feeding opportunities, new territories conquered by an apex predator that had never before existed in nature. For the humans who discovered the aftermath of his visits, the scenes defied expnation—bodies drained of blood without obvious trauma beyond small neck wounds, no signs of struggle, no indication of how an entire group could have been killed simultaneously.

  What Subject 23 couldn't know—his consciousness still subsumed beneath primal hunger—was that his victims didn't remain dead. Hours after his departure, in morgues and crime scenes, at burial sites and medical examiner facilities, the bodies began to change.

  The transformation was excruciating for those who experienced it. Death gave way to something else—a painful rebirth as cellur structures reconstructed themselves using the tempte provided by Subject 23's DNA. Victims who had been utterly still suddenly convulsed in agony as their bodies remade themselves from the inside out. Their hearts remained stopped, their lungs unused, yet consciousness returned—along with overwhelming hunger.

  These newly created vampires cked the control or power of their progenitor. Most awakened in a feral state, mindless with hunger, driven by the same primal urge that had initially consumed Subject 23. They attacked anyone nearby—medical personnel, w enforcement officers, morgue attendants, grieving family members—spreading the contagion further with each new victim.

  The pattern repeated across continents. Subject 23 fed and moved on, leaving transformed victims who created more of their kind, who in turn created others. Within weeks, what had begun as a single predator had become an exponentially growing pandemic. Though these newly turned vampires retained memories of their human lives, they couldn't access them in any meaningful way. The feral state that dominated their consciousness pushed all human thoughts aside, repcing identity and personality with predatory instinct. They recognized pces and people from their former lives, but only as hunting grounds and prey. Their human memories existed beneath the surface but remained inaccessible through the overwhelming hunger that now defined their existence.

  Governments attempted to respond, but their efforts proved futile against an enemy that moved faster than bullets, shrugged off conventional weapons, and spread its condition through mere bites. Military quarantines failed as soldiers themselves became infected. Media bckouts couldn't prevent the growing panic as reports emerged of walking corpses attacking the living. Religious leaders procimed the end times while scientists struggled to understand a biological phenomenon that defied known ws of nature.

  Through it all, Subject 23 continued his relentless hunt, moving from region to region, country to country, continent to continent. The thousands he personally drained became tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands. The secondary spread from his victims reached millions. What had begun in a single boratory now engulfed the pnet in chaos.

  Three months into this global catastrophe, something changed within Subject 23. Whether from the cumutive effect of countless feedings or the natural progression of his transformation, his mind began to emerge from the hunger-induced haze that had driven him since awakening. Rational thought returned gradually, competing with instinct, bringing with it something he hadn't experienced since his transformation—memory.

  He remembered his identity. Not Subject 23, but the person who had preceded it—the nameless young man who had sacrificed himself to secure his brother's future. He remembered that he had never been given a name, that his entire existence had been defined by his retionship to Eli. He remembered the streets where he had worked odd jobs, the cramped apartment they had shared, his desperate efforts to keep his brother fed and clothed. He remembered Dr. Keller's facility, the experimental serum, the transformation.

  With these memories came awareness—of what he had become, of what he had done, of the world-destroying contagion he had unleashed. As his consciousness fully reawakened, he stood on a mountain overlook, witnessing the chaos that had engulfed the world below. Cities burned on the horizon. Military vehicles formed abandoned blockades on highways. The night echoed with screams as the creatures he had inadvertently created continued their relentless hunting.

  The hunger still pulsed within him, but no longer controlled him completely. For the first time since his transformation, he could think around it, could make decisions beyond the next feeding. The realization of his role in this apocalypse brought something he hadn't felt since awakening—horror at what he had become, at what he had done.

  Below him, humanity fought a losing battle against a predator species that shouldn't exist, a biological impossibility he had introduced into the world. The chaos was complete, the damage irreversible. And he, the nameless catalyst of this transformation, stood alone with the terrible knowledge that this extinction-level event had begun with a simple act of brotherly love—his decision to become Subject 23 to secure Eli's future.

  The irony was unbearable. In trying to give his brother a better life, he had destroyed the world that life would have occurred in. The thought of Eli—if he still lived—trying to survive in this nightmare ndscape of predator and prey brought the first emotion beyond hunger he had felt since awakening: despair.

  Yet even as he confronted the horror of what he had done, another thought formed—if Eli still lived, he needed protection now more than ever. With his newfound crity came purpose, a driving need that transcended even the constant hunger. He would find his brother. He would protect him in this transformed world, just as he had in the old one.

  With this resolution, the being who had been Subject 23 turned away from the chaos below, his enhanced senses already searching for any trace of the one person who had given his previous existence meaning. The hunger remained, would always remain, but now it competed with something stronger—the need to find Eli in a world that had become a nightmare because of his sacrifice.