Reborn before the outbreak, Now they beg at my gate

CHAPTER 1: THE LAST THING I GAVE THEM

"Don't look at me like that, Leo. Someone has to stay behind, and it was never going to be Brandon."

Vanessa said it softly, the same way she used to say goodnight, and somehow that gentleness hurt more than her hands on my shoulders. Behind her, the loading dock gate of the Harbor Mall shelter stood open to the dead air of the street. Beyond it, in the gray smoke of the fourth month of the outbreak, the horde was drifting closer, hundreds of them, dragging their broken feet across the asphalt.

I tightened my grip on the canvas bag in my arms. It held the last eight vials of antibiotics I had traded my mother's ring for two days earlier. I had crawled through a collapsed pharmacy to get them. I had come back with a torn knee and a cut across my palm, and I had still been smiling when I handed them to Vanessa.

"I gave you everything," I said. My voice cracked, so I swallowed and tried again. "The food was mine. The generator was mine. The water filters were mine. I kept you all alive for four months."

"And we are grateful." Brandon stepped out from behind her, his hair combed back neatly, his cheeks flushed and healthy because I had given him my rations again last night. He slid one arm around Vanessa's waist. "But you are slow now, Leo. You are hurt. We cannot outrun them if we have to wait for you."

"Outrun them?" I looked from his face to the three friends behind him, the friends I had fed from my own storage, the friends who would not meet my eyes. Their packs were already on their backs. They had planned this. They had planned it while I was out in the ruins bleeding for them.

Vanessa took the canvas bag from my arms. I let her, because my fingers had gone numb. She passed it to Brandon without looking at him, and he unzipped it just enough to count the vials, and he smiled.

That was the moment I understood that the smile was not new. He had smiled like that when he borrowed my car. He had smiled like that when Vanessa kissed me at my own birthday dinner and glanced at him over my shoulder. I had spent my whole life explaining away every little thing, because I wanted a family so badly that I had stopped seeing the people in front of me.

"Please," I whispered. "Vanessa. I loved you."

"I know." She stepped back and nodded to the others.

Two of them seized my arms. I fought, and I got one elbow into someone's ribs, and I heard a satisfying grunt. But I was starving and half-lame, and they were not. They dragged me through the gate and threw me onto the broken pavement. My palms scraped open. The gate began to close.

"It will only take the horde a few minutes," Brandon called through the narrowing gap, and his voice was almost kind. "That should be enough time for us to reach the boats."

The gate slammed shut.

I lay on my side and listened to the sound of the dead coming. It was not a roar. It was a dry, shuffling rustle, like leaves in a storm drain. A shadow fell across me. Then another one.

I did not scream. I looked up at the pale smoke-filled sky and thought, very clearly, that if I could have one more chance, I would not give them so much as a single grain of rice.

Then the world went white.

I woke up gasping, with my fingers clawing at a cotton sheet.

There was no rot in the air. There was no smoke. There was only the smell of lavender detergent and the low hum of an air conditioner, and sunlight coming in through the curtains of a bedroom I had not seen in almost a year.

I sat up so quickly my head spun. My hands were whole. The scraped palms were smooth, and the old torn knee did not hurt at all. I pressed my fingers against my throat and felt my own pulse hammering against them, fast and alive.

My phone lay on the nightstand. I seized it with trembling hands and woke the screen.

The date read June 14.

I stared at it for a long time. Then I opened the calendar, and my pulse slowed to something cold and steady, because I knew that date. The first confirmed infection in this city had been logged on July 29, in the old harbor district. I had read it on a news bulletin while Vanessa packed the car for a trip I had not yet realized was a lie.

That meant I had exactly forty-five days.

I pressed the heel of my hand over my mouth and breathed through my nose until the shaking stopped. Forty-five days. I knew where the first outbreak would start. I knew which pharmacies would be emptied by the second week, which grocery chains would shut their doors, and which buildings would become the so-called safe zones that turned into graves. I knew exactly who would betray me and how much they would take.

The bedroom door was ajar. Through the gap I could hear Vanessa's voice in the kitchen, low and warm and coaxing, the voice she used when she wanted something.

"No, he still has no idea," she was saying. "I told you, he trusts me completely. Once the money from his father's trust clears next month, we move it all into the new account, and then I will deal with him."

A man's laughter drifted through the speaker, easy and unmistakable. Brandon.

I did not cry. I did not storm into the kitchen. I slid out of bed without making a sound, pulled the wool blanket tight around my shoulders, and sat back on the edge of the mattress with my phone in my fist, and I smiled, slowly, for the first time in what felt like a lifetime.

Let her believe I was still the man who trusted her. I had forty-five days to take everything back.

I had barely finished the thought when the air in front of my face shimmered, and a thin blue panel of light unfolded out of nothing.

[SPATIAL SYSTEM ACTIVATED]

Storage capacity: 1 cubic meter.

Task 1: Acquire 100 liters of clean water within 6 hours. Failure will result in permanent sealing of the storage space.

The kitchen went quiet.

Then, very softly, Vanessa's footsteps started toward the bedroom door.