My Wife Killed Me, Now I’m the Apocalypse Billionaire

Chapter 3: Jackpot

Sean walked out of the civil affairs bureau with exactly four thousand, two hundred dollars left in his bank account. The rest of his savings had been slowly bled dry over the years by Jessica's shopping habits, George's "business investments" that never returned a cent, and Margaret's endless list of household expenses that somehow always fell on Sean's shoulders.

Four thousand dollars. That was the sum total of his worth after six years of marriage.

He pulled up the banking app on his phone and stared at the number. In his past life, this moment would have crushed him. But Sean Miles was not the same man anymore. Because he remembered something that no other person on earth could possibly know.

The winning lottery numbers for the Mega Millions draw on March 3rd.

07, 14, 28, 33, 51. Powerball: 09.

He had memorized them by accident in his previous life. A man at the refugee camp had been rambling about it for weeks, waving around a news clipping, screaming about how he had been one number off. The numbers had burned into Sean's memory the way useless information sometimes does, sticking around long after important things have faded.

Sean walked into the first gas station he saw and approached the counter. A heavy set man with a gray beard was restocking cigarettes behind the register.

"I need lottery tickets. Mega Millions." Sean pulled out his wallet.

"How many?" The clerk barely glanced at him.

"One hundred. Same numbers on all of them."

The clerk stopped what he was doing and turned around fully. He looked Sean up and down, taking in the wrinkled jacket, the cheap shoes, the general appearance of a man who did not look like he had money to burn on a hundred lottery tickets.

"One hundred tickets with the same numbers? You sure about that, buddy?" His eyebrows were halfway up his forehead.

"I'm sure."

"That's two hundred bucks. Same numbers on every single one?"

"07, 14, 28, 33, 51. Powerball 09. All one hundred tickets." Sean laid two hundred dollar bills flat on the counter.

The clerk shook his head slowly but started punching in the numbers. "Your funeral, man. I've been selling these things for eleven years and I've never seen anyone buy a hundred of the same ticket."

"First time for everything." Sean kept his face neutral while the machine printed ticket after ticket.

Twenty minutes later, he walked out with a thick stack of lottery tickets wrapped in a rubber band and stuffed inside a brown paper bag. His next stop was the cheapest hotel he could find that still had clean sheets and a working lock on the door.

The Greenfield Motor Inn was twenty nine dollars a night and smelled like carpet cleaner and old coffee. Sean dropped his bag on the bed and sat on the edge of the mattress. The room was small, ugly, and completely private. Perfect.

He held out his right hand, palm up, and focused.

The air above his palm shimmered, then split open like a tear in invisible fabric. A faint blue glow outlined the edges of what looked like a doorway into absolute nothing. Sean reached his hand through and felt cool, empty space on the other side. Dry air. No temperature, no wind, no sound.

The pocket dimension. One hundred thousand square meters of empty storage space that existed in a fold of reality only he could access. In his past life, he had awakened this ability six months after the apocalypse began. The cosmic radiation had mutated his cells and given him this spatial gift. Somehow, it had traveled back with him.

Sean pulled his hand out and the tear closed silently. He held up the brown paper bag, focused again, and pushed it through the shimmer. The bag vanished. He closed the rift, then reopened it a second later and reached in. His fingers found the paper bag exactly where he had left it.

Good. It works on objects. Size doesn't seem limited. I need to test weight capacity later.

He spent the next hour opening and closing the spatial rift, putting things in and pulling them out. The TV remote. A pillow. The entire bedside table, which he shoved through the opening with both hands and retrieved thirty seconds later without a scratch.

In my last life, I only figured this out after the ice came. I wasted months not knowing what I could do. Not this time.