Reborn Before The Apocalypse

CHAPTER 3: SOMETHING'S ALREADY WRONG

The board came away from the window much easier than it should have.

I froze, holding my breath, waiting for the noise to draw someone toward me. But nothing happened. There was just the distant, low hum of a streetlight a few blocks over and the sound of the wind pushing an empty cart across the parking lot, its wheels squealing against the cracked concrete.

Ten at night. I’d told Lilly I was just going for a drive to clear my head after the strange morning I'd had. She had kissed my cheek and told me not to stay out too late, treating me like a guy heading to a bar rather than someone crawling through a boarded-up window into a dead grocery store.

[Distance to anomaly: 40 meters.]

The system's text hovered steadily in the corner of my eye as I dropped down onto the broken tile inside. The smell hit me first: a mix of mildew, rot, and a sour, underlying stench that made the hair on my arms stand up. Further in, shelves lay overturned, and beyond them, the darkness pooled so thick that my phone's flashlight barely managed to cut through it.

I hadn't ever really fought anyone in my life. Not truly. A few scuffles in high school, maybe, but nothing that ever drew blood. I wasn't a fighter by any stretch of the imagination.

But I had died once before, and that experience had changed the way fear sat in my chest. It wasn't gone; it was just smaller than it used to be.

[Distance to anomaly: 20 meters.]

I picked my way through the debris, my hand shaking slightly as I held the phone. Every few steps, I stopped to listen, but all I could hear was my own pulse and the occasional groan of the old building settling.

Then, I heard it breathe.

It wasn't loud. In a way, that made it worse a wet, rattling sound, like lungs that had forgotten how they were supposed to function, coming from behind a collapsed shelf about ten feet ahead.

[Distance to anomaly: 10 meters.]

[WARNING: Hostile detected.]

My light swung upward just as it moved.

It lunged off the top of the shelf all at once, moving much faster than anything of its size should have been able to. I didn't have time to think; I only had time to throw myself sideways into a rack of rusted shopping carts. Metal shrieked against metal. A sharp pain shot up my shoulder where I hit the ground, and just above me, where I had been standing a split second ago, something landed with a heavy, sickening thud.

I got my first real look at it in the glow of my dropped phone.

It had been a person once. Maybe it still technically was. Its skin had turned a dull gray, stretched too tight in some spots and split open in others, revealing something dark and wet underneath that didn't look like any anatomy I recognized. The eyes were the worst part they weren't glazed or empty. They were tracking me, sharp and hungry, set in a face that shouldn't have had the muscle left to hold an expression.

This wasn't the mindless, shuffling creature I remembered from the actual outbreak. This was faster. Smarter. It felt wrong in a way that made my stomach drop through the floor.

It lunged again.

I didn't even decide to move. My body just reacted, some primal instinct throwing me backward just as its hand with too many joints and long, black nails swiped through the air where my throat had been a heartbeat before.

[Restraint: Active. Threat proximity increasing reward multiplier.]

I didn't have time to process what that meant. I grabbed the first thing I could reach a jagged piece of broken shelving and when it came at me again, I swung with every ounce of strength I had.

The impact jolted up my arms. The thing staggered, letting out a screech that turned that wet rattling sound into something higher and angrier. I swung again before it could recover, and this time the jagged metal caught it across the side of its skull with a sound I knew would haunt my sleep for a long time.

It went down and stayed down.

I stood there, chest heaving, still gripping the shelving with shaking hands, staring at the dead thing that had almost killed me in a building that shouldn't have held anything like it.

I let the shelving fall. My legs felt like they didn't even belong to me anymore.

I had killed something. I had actually killed it, with my own hands, alone in the dark, months before anyone else in this city would even realize something like this existed.

And strangely, it hadn't felt like a mistake. Beneath the fear and the trembling, it had felt almost... right.

I stood there for a long moment, trying to let my breathing settle and the shakes subside. Then, quietly, I asked the system the question that had been gnawing at me since the first warning appeared this morning.

How is this possible? The outbreak isn't supposed to start for months.

The reply came slower than usual. It felt almost reluctant, if a system could even feel reluctance.

[Query: Acknowledged.]

[Anomaly activity detected across multiple locations, timeline advanced beyond expected parameters.]

[Cause: Unknown.]

[Note: You are not the only variable currently active.]

I read that last line twice. Then a third time, my mouth going dry.

Not the only variable.

I thought back to Kyle's text from this morning. Got some news. Lilly had mentioned he sounded excited on the phone, and I’d just assumed I’d let myself believe that it was something ordinary, a job or something small that didn't matter yet.

I thought about the shadow of him behind that reinforced door in my previous life. Retreating. Choosing not to open up.

[Additional anomaly detected.]

[Distance: 1.2 kilometers from current location.]

[Classification: UNKNOWN.]

My stomach turned to ice.

The coordinates blinked into view in the corner of my vision, and I recognized the address before the system could even finish displaying it.

Kyle's apartment.