E3 Day One (5)

A female reporter in the front row set down the coffee cup in her hand.

The humanoid slowly turned its head. With the technology of the time, the facial modeling could hardly be called refined, but the rotting skin texture, the torn wound stretching from the corner of its mouth to its ear, and the milky white film over its eyeballs still carried enough visual impact when projected onto the big screen.

It stood up.

The angle of its joints was wrong.

Its knees bent backward to an unnatural degree, its center of gravity pitched forward, both arms hanging down as it shuffled step by step toward the camera.

Quite a few people below the stage held their breath.

The image cut.

A short-haired female character held a handgun, her back pressed against a wall, as the camera switched to a fixed overhead angle from above and to the side.

At the far end of the corridor, three identical humanoids appeared at the same time. They were not fast, but the pressure brought by their numbers was entirely real.

The next sequence of cuts sped up.

A door was smashed open, revealing a room piled with filing cabinets. Documents and photographs were scattered across the desk.

A close-up of text flashed past. It was some kind of experimental record, the wording calm and detached, while the contents made one's stomach churn.

Another cut—a long corridor, the windows on both sides shattered, moonlight spilling in. Two incomplete corpses lay on the floor. When the character passed by, one of them moved.

The entire trailer had not a single line of dialogue.

Only ambient sound, footsteps, the opening and closing of doors, and the occasional dull crash of something collapsing in the distance.

In the final three seconds, the image froze on