The knife came from behind.Drew was crouching in the corner of a shattered pavement, chewing on a piece of moldy bread he’d dragged out of a dumpster behind a burned-out grocery store half an hour ago. Thick, fuzzy green fungus covered the crust. He’d scraped at it with his thumbnail, but he couldn't get it clean; with his stomach burning like hot iron from pure acid, he had no choice but to force it down anyway.Three days without a bite of food. His stomach was practically digesting itself. Life in the wasteland followed a simple, brutal law: skip food for a day, and you're a beggar; three days, you're a beast; a week, and you cease to be human altogether.Then came the cold metal.No footsteps preceded it—just the wet tear of a blade biting through tattered leather and dry flesh.The blade punched through his back, sheared between his ribs, and poked out straight through his stomach. As the dark blood burst forward, Drew caught the glint of the bare steel tip caught in the dim, gr

The cab slammed its brakes to a stop at the foot of the apartment complex.Drew slapped down a hundred-dollar bill and shoved the door open.Standing on the slick pavement, he squinted up at the twelve-story complex. The exterior beige paint was peeling away in dry flakes, exposing the sun-bleached grey concrete beneath.His apartment was on the top floor.He still had the original set of keys weighed down in his pocket. Madison had never bothered to change the deadbolts—in her mind, Drew was a spineless, broken loser who had crawled under a bridge to cry. He’d never have the guts to come back.Drew stared at the building, his gaze dark and distant.In the future wasteland, a structure like this was a textbook death trap: the stairwells above the third floor had collapsed into rubble, the basement was flooded with toxic sludge, and the upper levels were overrun by raiders taking potshots at each other with scavenged rifles for a can of beans. He had once jammed himself into an air duc

Drew walked through the house, room by room.Kitchen. Living room. Master bedroom. Bathroom. Basement.He wasn't looking at it as a home; he was evaluating it like a seasoned engineer inspecting a bunker.Walls: reinforced concrete, thick enough to take small-arms fire and shrapnel. Windows: high, narrow, easy to board up and defend. Doors: solid wood anchored with heavy deadbolts. Basement: dry concrete floor, windowless, equipped with its own separate side entrance.It was a perfect foundation for a safehouse.While it wouldn't survive a direct nuclear strike, against the desperate mobs, raiders, and opportunists that would flood the streets once the grid died? It would hold.Drew sat down on the leather couch, pulled a cold beer from the fridge, and cracked it open with a sharp snap.He didn't bother turning on the TV. He just stared at the blank screen, thinking.He had the house back, and the viper was gone. But that meant nothing if he couldn't survive what was coming.Ninety-on

At 5:00 AM sharp, Drew’s internal clock jolted him awake.No alarm. No warnings. Just pure muscle memory—a ruthless habit forged across five years of waking at dawn in the wasteland. In a world where sleeping in meant waking up as someone else’s meal or collateral damage, anyone who needed an alarm clock had long since turned to dust.Drew opened his eyes and lay flat on his back, staring silently at the ceiling for a solid minute.It was real. All of it. He was back in the pre-apocalypse, he had reclaimed his apartment, he had purged the rat that betrayed him, and he possessed an unexplainable interdimensional anomaly. Best of all, he had ninety-one days to prepare.Last night he had confirmed the existence of the pocket dimension, but he hadn't systematically mapped its hard operational boundaries yet.What was its true volume cap? What was the absolute weight threshold? What underlying physical laws governed its interior?He needed to verify every single variable with surgical prec

Drew stared at the text from Tyler on his phone screen, a cold, ruthless, and bloodthirsty smirk curling up his lips.He almost laughed out loud.In his past life, Tyler had been that stupid poison-peddling bitch Madison’s proudest "muscle" and enforcer. Standing nearly six-foot-three and built like a tank, Tyler made his living brawling on the streets and running extortion rackets. He used to bring his gang of thuggish cronies around all the time, barking orders and throwing his weight around in front of Drew.In Madison's eyes, Tyler was an invincible street fighter; but to Drew, who had survived five years of relentless blood and fire and personally slaughtered countless rabid raiders and gene-mutated monstrosities, Tyler was nothing more than a paper tiger soaked in fat and soapy water.Idiots like him had no idea they were poking a killing machine that had crawled straight back from the depths of hell.Drew’s long, lean fingers tapped rapidly across the screen, firing back a repl