THE LAST 100 DAYS

Borrowed Time

Chapter 7: Borrowed Time

*Click.*

It came from under the rubble, soft and patient.

"It's alive," Pete breathed. "Marcus, it's still alive."

"Back up. Everyone, back up."

Ethan didn't move. Blue text had split the dust in front of his eyes.

**[EVOLVED CARRION BEAST DEFEATED.]**

The slab near the bottom stopped shifting.

The clicking came again, but from a rooftop across the street. A different creature, a different voice. Whatever lay under the concrete was silent.

"Ethan." Marcus gripped his arm. "Your face. What are you looking at?"

*Nothing.* The word was already in his mouth. He swallowed it.

**[APOCALYPSE TIME ACQUIRED: 17 MINUTES.]**

Ethan stopped breathing.

The numbers in the corner of his vision had been falling for seven days, steady as a heartbeat. He had learned to feel them without looking, the way a prisoner learns the shape of a cell.

They had just gone *up.*

**[93 DAYS, 1 HOUR, 41 MINUTES]**

He read it again. Then again. His hands began to shake.

"Is it dead?" Dana whispered.

"I think so," he said. His voice sounded like someone else's. "It stopped moving."

"You think?" Pete snapped. "You buried it alive and you *think?*"

"Pete, enough." Marcus turned back, eyes narrowing. "Ethan. Something's wrong with you."

"I'm bleeding. Everything's wrong with me."

"That's not what I mean."

A new line unrolled across Ethan's vision.

**[UNIQUE FUNCTION UNLOCKED: TIME HARVEST.]**

**[SURVIVAL TIME MAY BE ACQUIRED FROM EVOLVED TARGETS.]**

**[SURVIVAL TIME MAY BE CONVERTED INTO TEMPORARY ENHANCEMENT.]**

His knees almost gave out.

*Acquired.* Nobody else had a clock that could go up. He had watched Dana's lips move at midnight, reading her own numbers, and her face had told him everything. Her clock only fell. Everyone's did.

Everyone's but his.

"Ethan, *talk to me.*"

"Concussion," he lied. It came out smooth and fast, and the ease of it frightened him more than the monster had. "I'm dizzy. Give me a minute."

Marcus studied him far too long.

"Fine. Sit." He turned to the others. "We move before the rest of them arrive. Pete, Eli, help Dana with the packs."

They moved.

Ethan stayed on the curb, staring at the rubble, and thought it through the way he had thought through every impossible thing since midnight.

*If I tell them, what happens?*

Dana would cry with relief. Marcus would ask questions. Pete would ask worse ones.

*A man who can add days to his life. In a world where everyone is counting down.*

He thought of Pete at the barricade with their food on his back and a daughter across the river. A starving man would sell a lot for a miracle. He would kill for more.

*They'd stop seeing me as a person. I'd become a resource.*

Ethan folded the secret down small and put it somewhere deep.

---

They found shelter in a pharmacy stockroom two blocks east and sealed it with shelving. Marcus rationed water. Dana fed her son. When the room settled into the ragged sleep of exhausted people, Ethan slipped into the corner behind the pill shelves and closed his eyes.

**[TIME HARVEST]**

**[AVAILABLE: 17 MINUTES]**

**[CONVERT TO ENHANCEMENT?]**

*Reaction speed. Smallest amount.* He didn't know how he knew to think it. The thought just formed, the way a sentence forms.

**[CONVERTING: 1 MINUTE.]**

The shelf in front of him jumped.

No. The *room* had slowed. Dust drifted like ash through still water. Dana's chest rose and fell at half speed. A moth he hadn't noticed hung in the air, wings barely moving.

Ethan lifted his hand. It moved normally, but everything else crawled.

His stomach turned over with a mixture of joy and horror.

*It works.*

Then it ended. The room snapped back into motion, and his ears popped.

He looked at his clock.

**[93 DAYS, 1 HOUR, 40 MINUTES.]**

*Minus one.*

He sat there in the dark and made himself understand it. He had paid a minute of his life, or whatever the clock actually was, for forty seconds of speed. Seventeen minutes had come from killing a creature that nearly killed him. One minute was gone in a blink.

*Power costs time. And time is the only thing I can't make more of.*

Except he could. Evolved monsters. One at a time.

He pulled the soaked paper map from his jacket, flipped it over, and wrote in tiny, cramped letters:

*Evolved target = +17 min. Convert 1 min = ~40 sec reaction speed. Temporary. Cost is permanent.*

Then, below it:

*Kill more. Stay alive. Tell no one.*

His pen hovered. Beneath it, a thought arrived that he didn't want.

*How long before Marcus notices I'm different?*

Across the room, Marcus's eyes were closed. His breathing was too steady to be sleep.

Ethan looked away.

**[NOTICE.]**

His heart stopped.

**[EVOLUTION IS ONLY BEGINNING.]**

**[THE NEXT GENERATION WILL NOT HESITATE.]**

Outside, in the dark, something heavy dragged itself across the pharmacy roof and stopped directly above Ethan's head.

It was not trying to be quiet.