Experimental Gene Therapy is the only permanent cure for infection, and it has to be used twice. Phalanx Pills do not cure you — they only reset the clock. Successfully extracting also clears the infection. Everything else is buying time.
Infection is a countdown, not a permanent condition. From the first symptom to full turn is roughly five minutes.
How you get infected
Three routes, and they are not equally likely:
- Failing the grab struggle, or being grabbed while your stamina is below about 15%. The lower your stamina, the harder the struggle is to win. At zero stamina there is no struggle at all — you are bitten regardless of health.
- Any zombie hit while you are at 50% health or below. The lower your health, the higher the chance. Above 50%, a normal zombie hit will not infect you.
- Gas. Standing in the cloud a freshly killed Shambler leaves, or being hit by a zombie that has walked through one. A gas-touched zombie has a significantly higher infection chance on its attacks.
The practical consequence of route 2 is counter-intuitive: use your bandages. Hoarding medical supplies to be prepared is precisely backwards, because low health is the condition that makes infection likely in the first place.
The three stages
| Stage | What you experience |
|---|---|
| Incubation | Nothing at all. No symptoms. |
| Onset | White light and blur at the edges of vision, audio echo and distortion, coughing your teammates can hear |
| Terminal | Hallucinations, worsening cough, whispering, heavy stamina penalties — and in the final 30 seconds, pulsing red veins at the screen edge |
Because incubation is symptomless, the moment you start seeing or hearing things is the moment you learn you are already in stage two. You do not get a warning before that.
The practical readout: cough → hallucinations → red veins. Veins mean seconds.
Your four options
1. Phalanx Pills — buy time
Pills reset the infection timer to the start but do not cure you. Each bottle holds three doses. They do not restore health, stop bleeding, or restore stamina — they do one job.
Take them only when the red veins appear. Each dose buys back the full five-minute timer, so a three-dose bottle is worth close to fifteen minutes if you spend it correctly. Taking a pill at the first cough throws away most of that dose's value, and the classic new-player mistake is burning an entire bottle in a few minutes doing exactly that.
Do not throw the bottle away after one dose. It has three.
2. Experimental Gene Therapy — the actual cure
The only permanent cure, and it is a two-step process people routinely get wrong:
- First use: draw blood.
- Wait roughly 30 seconds for the progress bar to fill and turn green.
- Second use: inject.
Once cured, you are immune to reinfection for the rest of that match. The kit is discarded after a single use — and a half-used kit dropped by a teammate can be finished by someone else.
This is the most common cause of squad wipes: drawing blood, assuming you are cured, putting the kit away, and not realising the timer never stopped.
Timing matters. Producing the cure takes time. If you already have red veins, it is too late to start — at that point you want pills, not a cure.
3. Extraction — free and total
Successfully leaving the area clears active status penalties, so extracting while infected cures you. Infection does not carry across matches. If you get out alive, you get out clean.
4. Ending it yourself
Holding a loaded firearm, press K. Your character dies without turning, and the body drops its supplies for the squad. Use this only when both treatment and extraction are hopeless — a turned player becomes a sprinting zombie that attacks their own teammates.
Triage order when you have nothing
- Ask your squad for pills or a kit. Someone usually has one.
- If nobody does and the objective is still far off, head for the nearest early extraction point. Getting out cures you, and a failed run costs far less than a lost character.
The higher the difficulty, the more this matters — at the top tiers, catching an infection eventually is treated as inevitable rather than as a mistake.