REBORN: ENTER INTO THE APOCALYPSE

CHAPTER FOUR - Whitefield

Ray grabbed the form and he immediately signed it.

He didn't read it this time. He already knew every word on every page. He took the pen from Wolfe's hand without giving it a second thought and signed his name at the bottom and handed it back without making any eye contact.

Wolfe looked at him for a moment. Something shifted in his expression, not suspicion exactly, more like a man recalculating a number that came out different than expected.

The process took four hours.

Ray was taken to a facility and experimented on with different tubes implanted into him, he was also injected several times. 

The operation was a success.

After the operation Ray suddenly stood up.

“I need to be somewhere.” He told Crane

“But we just finished the experiment, you need a few hours to fully recover and you  need to be at the facility before…"

"I need two hours first," Ray said.

"That's not how this…."

"My mother and my sister are both in this hospital right now." Ray looked at him directly. "You're not losing anything in two hours. Give me the time."

Wolfe studied him. Then he folded his hands and observed him, "Two hours. Don't make me come find you."

He walked towards the elevator.

Ray watched the doors close and then turned and walked in the opposite direction.

He had a reason for the two hours and it wasn't sentiment.

In his previous life he had mutated inside the supermarket, and blacked out. 

And when he became conscious the powers were already there, zombies had surrounded him but his powers saved him, he had directed them away with the wave of a hand.

The powers were raw and undiluted.

He had found his sister that day and had brought her to their apartment.

After a few days together they were able to save more people and their apartment had become a survival zone.

The zombies were unable to penetrate there and he had provided more than enough provisions that would take care of them if the apocalypse was to last for a month.

 But Wolfe's people came for him and killed everyone in the apartment, leaving only his sister and capturing him.

They had framed everything from the first day of his capture and they had written the rules and Ray had worked inside those rules for a few weeks before he understood how badly he had been used.

This time the mutation was happening on his own terms at the same workplace but around people he chose.

He needed to be at Whitefield.

He took the bus a thirty minute drive, Route 14, sitting at the back watching the city move past the window looking exactly like a city that had no idea it had four days left. People are still minding their normal business and regular activities are still going on. 

A woman was pushing a baby stroller. Two kids were arguing over a phone outside a corner shop.

Ray watched all of it and kept silent.

******

Whitefield Supermarket, Crescent Street.

He pushed through the staff entrance at the back at exactly 8:40am and found the shift schedule on the board and wrote his name in for the 9am to 3pm slot. 

He needed at least six hours. The mutation in his previous life had taken approximately four hours to complete from first symptoms before he became fully stabilized. Six hours gave him enough time.

He approached Pete's office and his door was open.

Ray knocked on the door. Pete was at his desk, his jacket was already off, with reading glasses on, looking at invoices with the focused hate that he brought to everything administrative.

"Parker." Pete looked up. "You're not on shift today."

"I need the shift, Pete. I'll cover anything."

"I've got full coverage already."

"I'll do the stockroom. You've had the Hendricks delivery sitting undone for two days."

Pete looked at him over his glasses, he was  always fond of looking at people over his glasses when he was deciding whether they were worth his time or not. Ray had watched him do it for two years.

"Fine," Pete said. "Stockroom. And since you're asking for the favour…" He opened his desk drawer, pulled out an envelope, and dropped it on the edge of the desk. 

Then he looked back at his invoices. "Month's pay, minus the two days you called in sick in February."

Ray picked up the envelope and opened it.

It was ninety dollars short.

He looked up. "Pete this isn't…."

Pete reached over without looking up from his invoices and threw the envelope. The notes scattered across the floor between them. A few slid under the desk.

"Pick it up," Pete said, still reading.

Ray crouched down and started collecting the notes from the floor. He got to the last one and Pete's shoe came down on his hand. Not by accident it was flat and intentional, full weight, pressing his knuckles into the concrete floor.

"That one's an extra note," Pete said, looking down at him now. "My mistake. Hand it back, punk."

Ray looked up at him from the floor.

Pete's face had the expression it always had a kind of  bored contempt, the specific look of a man who had spent years practising small cruelties on people who needed their jobs too much to respond.

Ray pulled his hand free, stood up, and placed the note on Pete's desk.

He didn't say a word.

But in his head, clearly and without anger, just as a fact “wait until I have my powers. You will be standing in a dead city with nothing and I will have everything. You will beg me for a bottle of water and a packet of instant noodles and I will remember this exact moment.”

He walked out of the office and into the stockroom.

*******

The Hendricks delivery was six pallets of canned goods, dry pasta, bottled water and cleaning supplies. Ray worked through it quickly, scanning and shelving, and tried to keep his mind on the task.

At 10:20am the first symptom appeared.

A low bang at the base of his skull. He had felt it before  or rather, he hadn't felt it the first time because he hadn't known what it was. 

Now he recognised it immediately and his hands stopped moving and he stood very still between two shelving units and breathed.

It was starting.

He had maybe forty minutes before it became visible. He needed to stay in the stockroom, stay on his feet, and stay away from anyone who would call an ambulance.

He picked up a crate of canned tomatoes and kept moving.

At 10:55am he was on the shop floor restocking aisle four when the hum became pressure behind both eyes, across his shoulders, down his arms. His hands were shaking. 

He put the crate down and gripped the shelf edge and stared at the floor tiles and counted his breathing.

"Are you okay?"

He looked up.

A lady was standing three feet away with a shopping basket, looking at him directly. Mid-twenties, natural hair pulled back, wearing a green jacket and carrying a basket with exactly three items in it.

She was looking at him the way people look at someone who is clearly not okay and needs someone to acknowledge it.

Ray stared at her.

He recognized her immediately.

He knew exactly who she was and he knew what she had done the last time this moment happened and he knew what it had cost her. 

When he had blacked out in his previous life it hadn't been in his apartment like he thought. The memory was sharpening now, the way memories do when something triggers them.

It had been here, on this floor, in this aisle, and she had been the one who stayed beside him and kept people back while he convulsed and when the first infected came through the entrance forty minutes later she had put herself between Ray's unconscious body and the door.

She had actually helped Ray survive, she helped him all the way through hordes of zombies, to the hospital, just because he got bitten.

She has kept Ray safe all the way.

An emergency unit attended to Ray before she reached the hospital and they had classified him as infected. And even after, when he was classified  as an infected, she believed that he wasn't infected.

Her face was the last face he saw before he totally blacked out.

When he became conscious he woke up in the midst of hordes of zombies and he saw how she was brutally torn, she wasn't even allowed to turn before she was ripped apart.

She had died trying to save Ray's life.

Ray had never known her name.

"Hey." She stepped closer. "You don't look good. Do you need me to get someone?"

Ray opened his mouth.

The pressure behind his eyes spiked so hard his vision cut to white for a full second and he grabbed the shelf with both hands and the canned goods shook.

She dropped her basket and grabbed his arm to keep him upright and said something he couldn't hear properly because the sound in the store had dropped to a low underwater register.

It was happening right now.

He had one clear thought before the white took everything.

“She cannot be here this time. She cannot stay.”