Morning of the Shambling Routine

The morning came with a pale sun and an air that forgot to be kind. I brewed coffee, and the kettle sighs like an old dog. The routine felt solid and necessary, as if any crack in it would let the day spill out and crawl across the walls. I dressed, checked the trash, emptied the sink, and locked the door behind me as if lock threads could keep the world at bay. On the street the daylight wore a careful smile, but the city itself seemed to listen. People moved with a habit we had learned by heart, and yet every action carried a faint tremor, as if the morning itself remembered something it had forgotten yesterday. Back in my hall I heard shuffled footsteps from the floor above, a stuttering rhythm that did not belong to any one person. The sound wound around the corners and vanished, leaving a faint echo that could have been a child learning to walk or something else entirely. I told myself it was nothing, but that word tasted like dust on my tongue. When I returned to my apartment I found the door itself odd, not in its color or its hinge but in a mark pressed into the wood. A bite mark on the door, curved and shallow, as if something with a mouth wider than mine had pressed into the grain. I studied it, half expecting to discover the thing that left it, half knowing I would not like what I found. The mark looked old yet too fresh to be accidental. It was a warning, a signature of hunger on something I trusted to stay closed. I tried to keep to my routine anyway. I walked to work, bought a coffee at the corner shop, skimmed the morning news, and pretended the city was ordinary. The voices on the radio spoke of safety and guarantees, but there was a tremor in the speakers, an inability to pretend. People passed with their eyes angled away from mine, as if the day had become a border crossing and we were all pretending we had never crossed. A note waited on the fridge when I got home, a small scrawl that did not belong to me. It simply read: do not answer the door. It did not feel like a prank, and it did not feel like a warning from someone else. It felt like a rumor you could hear only in daylight, when you had convinced yourself the world would not remember your face. Then the memory began to creep into the day as if it had always lived there just beyond vision. In the center of a crowded street a child-like voice whispered at the edge of hearing. It was the sort of day when the ordinary and the terrible share a table and pretend not to notice each other. And then the line came, quiet as a sigh: "they remembered my name." That thought was a bad map and I followed it anyway. I checked the corners of rooms I had already checked. I listened to the old building breathe. The hallway offered a new chorus of noises, every board speaking in a language I almost understood. It was not just fear, but the sense that something waiting behind the morning would slip into daylight and pretend to be a neighbor. Night fell with the same careful daylight still in the air. The bite mark on the door glowed faintly in the lamplight as if it held some pulse. The city settled into a rhythm of ordinary hunger, a hunger disguised with sidewalks and storefronts. And when I finally rested, I understood that waking up to a zombie outbreak is not one event but a process, a creeping version of dawn that touches every habit until the morning itself starts to hunger. If this is the day after, then the next day will bear the same pattern, the same small terrors tucked into the morning light. I will keep my routine, I will listen for something in the wall that does not belong to me, and I will still feel the push of the dawn pressing against the back of my spine, reminding me that not all mornings are made of sun and coffee but of something else, something patient, hungry, and very old. That is all I can tell you, for now. The morning is not finished with me, and the city is not finished with us.