Brothers of the Dark Road

An adrenaline obsessed Gen Z Seattle Police Detective, the delinquent genius of a missing molecular biologist, and a Taiwanese college freshman recovering from the uncanny death of his identical twin brother become a preposterous team against the Sahnbee Zu, a shadow nation of regenerative corpses bent on transforming the human world into its own private bento box...  Seattle is in the grips of inexplicable murders. Random people who seem perfectly normal one day, are found the next, decayed as zombies with their heads lopped off, brain pans liquefied, skulls flushed with sulfuric acid. Mayor Elizabeth Kameron appoints a special task force.Homeland Security soon butts in on the pretext that terrorists are testing a new bioweapon, but the Mayor feels the Feds are being disingenuous and misleading the SPD perhaps even with help from individuals within the task force itself.She secretly asks a member of the task force, a rookie, just a year out of the police academy, yet their most outstanding, most commended, most promising graduate in the past fifty years, to spy for her.Mitchell Stewart, 25, an adrenaline junkie ever on the search for the ultimate rush jumps at the high stakes assignment of snitch for a good cause. He guarantees the mayor he'll uncover any conspiracies, and also predicts he'll be the one who slaps the cuffs on this psycho perp, whom the press has dubbed The Sleepless in Seattle Horseman…Eighteen year-old Thunder Li prepares to leave home in southern Taiwan for university in the north. His identical twin brother, Zheng Wei—older by thirteen minutes, stays home, and attends the local college.Two weeks into Thunder's new life, his mother calls urgently that Zheng Wei is in hospital suffering from a mysterious necrosis that has put him into a coma and decomposing his body inch by inch. Thunder rushes home knowing only he can help his brother, for a crisis like this had been predicted.Nine years earlier when the twins were to undergo a double tonsillectomy, their mother, worried about the operation, visited a temple in Tainan to consult a fortuneteller.The fortuneteller assured her all would go well, but one day though, the twins will face a horrible calamity, but worry not, for the one twin had been born to save the other. The mother in later years often repeated the anecdote, which Zheng Wei always scoffed at it, but Thunder always believed… Jim Cantwell was in Scotland representing his Hong Kong secondary school at a science fair when a family friend and lawyer from Seattle appears suddenly with horrific news. Jim's entire family has disappeared from their Happy Valley home in a  home invasion gone hideously wrong with blood-drenched walls and gnawed human body parts strewn everywhere. Jim's geneticist mother, his orthopedic surgeon father, older sister, younger brother, amahs and family pet poodle were nowhere to be found. Hong Kong CID suspects a brutal Mainland Chinese triad, XY-13 is  responsible. But at HKG before boarding the flight for Glasgow, Jim's mother had given him a thumb drive that she told him to keep secret. Later he found 4 gigs worth of data on a gene she discovered that causes cascading necroses and deadly coma, resurrecting patients in three days ravenous for human flesh.Jim soon understands his family was killed and eaten by a Sahnbee, a living corpse that in a perpetual state of decomposition must eat healthy humans to continue existence. Once  back in Hong Kong Jim can search for these fiends. But the court and police have different ideas and send Jim to Seattle to live with the lawyer and family friend, now his legal guardian. But Jim's new life doesn't cut it,  not with what he knows, and he disappears into the underground city beneath Pioneer Square.