Apocalypse Stockpiler: My Ex-wife gets nothing

Chapter 2

The phone kept ringing.

Jayden fixed his eyes on it, frozen, while sunlight poured across his bare feet. A warm blanket lay over his legs. The air smelled like laundry soap and toast.

He was alive.

He tore up his shirt and searched his ribs for the wound. Smooth skin. No blood. No scar.

His heart slammed against his chest.

The phone buzzed a fourth time. He swallowed, pressed the green button, and held it to his ear without saying a word.

"Jay?" Summer's voice sounded bright and impatient. "Hello? Are you there?"

His fingers tightened until the phone creaked.

It was the same voice that had whispered goodbye.

"I'm here," he managed hoarsely.

"Finally. Listen, I'm at Dana's. I had way too much wine, so I'm taking a taxi home. Don't leave yet, okay? I need to talk to you about the weekend at my parents' place."

"Okay."

"Okay? That's it?" She laughed. "You sound weird. Are you sick?"

"I'm fine."

"Whatever. Be home soon. Love you."

She hung up.

Love you.

Jayden sat very still. Then he laughed, a short ugly sound with no humor in it.

"You were stabbing me ten minutes ago," he whispered.

He staggered out of bed and into the bathroom. He gripped the edge of the sink and made himself study the mirror properly.

The man staring back was not the starving, hollow-eyed ghost from the cracked window in the last apartment. He had color in his cheeks. He had a full face. His hair was clean.

He seemed like a man who had never heard a stranger scream in the dark.

The man in the mirror was thirty-one years old, with a clean jaw and healthy color in his cheeks. There was a faint scar over his left eyebrow from a forklift accident two years back.

In his last life, frostbite had taken that scar away.

"Same face," he murmured. "Different ending."

He checked his messages. A text from his landlord about the rent. A reminder about a dentist appointment he had never kept the first time. A photo from a coworker's birthday party, with a whole row of grinning faces.

He zoomed in on them.

A cheerful man named Carl, who would freeze beside the loading dock in the first week. A young intern named Pia, who would never make it home. A woman from accounting who had once shared her lunch with him when he had nothing.

Half of them were dead now. Or would be.

His stomach rolled. He pressed the back of his hand to his mouth and breathed until it passed.

Then he checked the date.

It was exactly one year before the day the sky turned red.

Three hundred and sixty-five days.

He counted it twice, the way he counted pallets, in case he had made a mistake.

He had not.

He opened the news on his phone. A celebrity divorce. A football transfer. A weather report promising light rain and mild temperatures for the weekend.

Mild.

He read the word four times.

He opened his banking app. Eleven thousand, four hundred and six dollars. A gym membership for Summer that he had never questioned.

His knees almost gave out. He grabbed the sink and breathed through his teeth. This was not a dream. Dreams did not charge interest, and they did not send texts about the dentist.

He sat on the edge of the bathtub and set three rules for himself.

Rule one: trust no one, especially her.

Rule two: tell nobody the truth.

Rule three: every day, move one step closer to being ready.

It was the kind of list he used to write for a warehouse. It felt strange to write it for a life.

He walked to the window and pulled the blinds up.

Street noise rushed in. A bus hissed at the corner. A delivery van idled with its hazard lights on. A woman in a yellow raincoat walked her dog past the bakery, and nobody around her was running, or hiding, or glancing at the sky.

Jayden pressed his forehead against the warm glass.

"You have no idea," he whispered.

His phone rang again. This time the name on the screen was Hank Dobbs.

Hank had been his shift supervisor at the warehouse. In the last life, Hank had died in the second month of the cold, holding a loading door shut against a panicked crowd.

Jayden answered with a trembling thumb.

"Hunter!" Hank's voice boomed through the speaker. "Where are you? The Larkin delivery is stuck at gate four, and the driver's threatening to leave!"

"Hank," Jayden breathed. His voice cracked.

"Yeah, it's me. Are you crying?"

"No."

"You sound like you're crying."

"I overslept," Jayden lied, wiping his face. "I'll be there in forty minutes."

"You never oversleep."

"I know."

He hung up and stood there with his eyes closed, listening to his own breathing.

"Hunter, you better not be in trouble," Hank grumbled, his voice gruff. "You know I'd cover for you if you were. But I need to know."

"I'm not in trouble."

"Good." A pause. "Eat something. You sound like a ghost."

"I will."

Hank hung up.

He thought about the warehouse, the stacked pallets, and the loading door Hank would one day die holding.

Hank was alive. Hank was yelling about a delivery. For a moment, the joy hit him so hard that it almost hurt.

Then the cold thought arrived behind it.

He knew exactly how and when Hank would die.

**********

Jayden went to the kitchen and opened the fridge. Cold light spilled over his face. Milk. Eggs. Half a takeout box. A wilted head of lettuce.

Things that would be worth a man's life in a year.

He closed the door slowly and gripped the counter until his hands stopped shaking.

One year. That was all he had.

One year to prepare for the end of the world, and one year to decide what to do about the woman who had caused his death.

He turned his eyes toward the bedroom and the second pillow, still dented in the shape of her head.

For the first time in six years, he felt no love. He felt no hatred either. He felt something quieter and colder.

He felt like a man holding a stopwatch.

A key scraped in the front door.

He turned slowly.

The door swung open, and a pair of expensive heels stepped into the hallway.

"Jay? Why are you standing in the kitchen like a ghost?"

Summer dropped her purse on the entryway table. Beside her keys, a small white rectangle slid out and landed face up on the wood.

A hotel keycard.

Dana did not live in a hotel.