Apocalypse Rebirth, From Trash to God

The Ninetieth Day

Chapter Seven

The calendar on the bunker wall said Day 90.

Ninety days since June 8. Ninety days since the sky broke early and black rain ate the world.

Outside the bunker, the city was dead. No cars. No lights. No music. Only black mud, burned buildings, and the howls of beasts that used to be people.

Inside the bunker, the solar lights glowed warm. There was rice. There was clean water. There was meat. There was medicine. Jax had been right. Food was now worth more than gold.

On the morning of Day 90, Mira woke Jax up.

"They are here," she whispered, holding her rifle. "On the camera."

Jax stood up from his bed. He was not the old Jax anymore. In three months, his body had become strong. His shoulders were wide from carrying steel. His eyes were cold from watching the world die. His spatial power hummed inside him like a second heart, louder than ever before.

He walked to the monitor.

Four figures were climbing the north hill. And behind them, a truck with five more men holding guns.

Jax knew all four faces.

Ravena Voss. Once wearing expensive dresses, now wearing torn dirty clothes, her hair messy, her face thin. Kade Voss. Once big and lazy, now thin and angry, holding a rusted pistol. Selene Voss. Once beautiful and cold, now dirty, her lips cracked, her beautiful hair cut short.

And Commander Drax.

Drax was no longer in a security uniform. He wore raider clothes, a leather jacket made from car seats, a scar on his face deeper than before. He held a shotgun. He was the leader of the group now.

Old Man Finn came to the monitor and gasped. "It is them..."

Leo hid behind Lina. Lina held him tight.

Mira loaded her rifle with a click and said, "You knew they would find us."

"I counted ninety days," Jax said calmly. "In my first life, I died on Day 14 after the rain. They found my hill on Day 90 in this life. I have been waiting."

Outside, the truck stopped at the bottom of the barbed wire Jax and Mira had set on Day 2. Drax shouted, his voice hoarse from months of screaming in the dead world.

"JAX COLE! WE KNOW YOU ARE IN THERE! WE SAW THE LIGHTS! WE SMELL THE FOOD! OPEN THE DOOR!"

Ravena shouted too, her voice breaking, "Jax! My son! Please! We are family! We are dying! Kade has not eaten in two days! Selene is sick!"

Kade raised his pistol and shot at the steel door. The bullet bounced off with a clang.

Jax put on his jacket - the same cheap jacket that had vanished in the hospital on the day he said no to the kidney. He opened the inner door and climbed the ladder to the wall of his bunker.

He stood on the wall.

The wind blew black dust. The sky was still yellow-gray.

He was clean. He was strong. His clothes were washed. His face was shaved. While the four people below looked like rats, Jax looked like a king in the apocalypse.

Behind him, Mira stood on the wall too, with her silver hair tied back and her rifle pointed down.

Silence fell on the hill.

Drax stared up at Jax and his eyes went wide. "You... you are alive... and clean..."

Ravena fell to her knees in the black mud. She cried, real tears this time. "Jax! My boy! Forgive me! Forgive us! We were wrong! We should not have treated you like a slave! We were stupid! Please! One bag of rice! Just one!"

Selene looked up at him, her eyes wet. In ninety days of eating trash and drinking dirty water, she had finally understood what she threw away.

"Jax," she whispered. "I know I was cruel. I watched you die in your first life and did nothing. I remember now you said you died for two bags of rice. I was wrong. Can we start again? I can be your wife again. I will cook. I will clean. Please open the door."

Jax looked down at them and his chest felt nothing. No love. No hate. Only cold fire that had finally finished burning.

"I remember too," he said, his voice loud and clear over the hill. "I remember the cold black mud under my knees. I remember the wire cutting my wrists until blood ran down. I remember Ravena holding two bags of rice like treasure while I begged. I remember Kade kicking dirt in my face. I remember you, Selene, saying 'You were always useless, at least now you can be useful once.' I remember every second."

Ravena sobbed harder. "We were desperate! The world had ended!"

"The world had not ended when you asked for my kidney," Jax said. "You planned to kill me even before the black rain. You had insurance on me. You never saw me as family."

Ravena's face went white. "How... how do you know about insurance..."

Kade could not take it anymore. Hunger and shame made him violent, just like before.

"Shut up! Shut up talking!" Kade screamed and raised his rusted pistol at Jax on the wall. "You think you are a god because you have food! You are still a rat! You are still useless!"

He pulled the trigger.

BANG!

Inside the bunker, Lina screamed. Finn shouted, "JAX!"

But the bullet did not hit Jax.

It stopped.

In mid-air, halfway between Kade's gun and Jax's face, the bullet stopped and floated, spinning slowly, like time itself had frozen.

Everyone on the hill stared.

Jax raised one hand. He did not touch the bullet. His spatial power rippled.

He thought, _STORE._

The bullet vanished.

Then he thought, _CUT._

The air in front of Kade rippled like water.

Kade screamed.

His hand - the hand holding the pistol - fell off.

Clean cut. No blood at first, then blood gushing. The hand with the gun fell into the black mud, fingers still twitching.

Kade collapsed, holding his bleeding stump, screaming louder than any beast in the city.

Ravena screamed. Selene screamed. Drax's men raised their guns in terror.

Mira shouted, "Drop your weapons or you are next!"

Drax was not scared. Drax was greedy. He saw Jax's power and wanted it. He raised his shotgun at Jax.

"You freak! You think you can cut hands! I will blow your head off and take your bunker!"

He fired.

Jax did not stop this bullet. He opened his other hand.

Behind Drax, the air tore open.

A black door, big as a truck, appeared out of nothing. Inside it was not a room. It was Jax's hidden space. The huge stadium-sized space where time does not move, where ten tons of rice floated, where guns and medicine and fuel floated, where food never rots.

But in one corner of that space, Jax had made a void. A place with no air. No light. No ground. No end.

Drax's shotgun blast vanished into the space, swallowed.

Then Jax thought,  MOVE.

Drax flew backward.

Not pushed. Pulled. The space itself grabbed him.

Drax flew into the black hole, arms waving, screaming, "NO! NO! WHAT IS THIS!"

He landed inside the space, floating among Jax's rice bags. He tried to breathe. No air. He clutched his throat. His eyes bulged. He kicked and floated, surrounded by food he could never eat.

Jax looked at him for one last second.

"For two bags of rice," Jax said.

He closed his fist.

The black door slammed shut with a sound like a book closing.

Drax disappeared forever.

Gone. No body. No grave. Just endless black where there is no air.

The hill went silent except for Kade's screaming and Ravena's crying.

Jax looked down at Selene one last time. She was on her knees, beautiful no more, just a starving woman in black mud.

"You will never get my food," he said to her. Not cruel. Just final. "You chose to be cruel like Ravena, even though you were adopted and she used you too. You could have been different. You chose not to."

Selene broke down and cried into the mud.

Jax turned to Ravena.

"I give you one small bag of rice," he said. "Not because I love you. Because I want you to live longer and suffer more in the dead world you helped make. Your lab under Voss Biotech made this rain. You knew and you did nothing."

He threw a small bag of rice down the wall. It landed in the mud.

Ravena crawled to it like an animal.

Jax turned his back and climbed down. Mira followed, her rifle still on them.

Inside, he closed the big steel door. The clang echoed.

Outside, on the camera, the Voss family fought over the one small bag of rice. Kade bleeding with no hand. Ravena clutching rice with dirty hands. Selene crying. Drax gone. Their truck men running away after seeing Drax disappear.

Then, deep in the forest around the hill, red eyes opened. Beasts heard Kade's screaming and came closer.

The Voss family grabbed the rice and ran away into the dark, limping, bleeding, fighting each other as they ran.

Mira stood next to Jax at the monitor and said quietly, "Are you okay?"

Jax watched them disappear from his camera and then turned the monitor off.