Beneath the Earth's Surface

An unconventional, slow-paced zombie story, best read at your leisure.

In the second year after the zombie outbreak, Earth begins its “great cleanup.” Lin Mo is a “bug” that the cleanup failed to remove. He can hear zombies “talk” through fungal threads and vibrations, and see them systematically repairing the planet, while sorting human civilization into the trash.

Humans see him as a monster, imprison him, and want to take him apart for research. Zombies see him as an anomaly, and want to either “format” or “delete” him.

When the human “Iron Law” superhumans collide with the zombies’ “Purification Protocol,” Lin Mo discovers that the glowing veins growing beneath his skin not only let him eavesdrop on the planet’s “heartbeat,” but also seem to let him... swallow anything that wants to delete him as “nourishment.”

And so, in the deepest silence of the apocalypse, a solitary half-human, half-zombie begins his experiment in survival: how to find a third path between two kinds of “rightness” that both want him dead, or to “eat” a path into existence.