The Apocalypse Started Today, but I've Lived It for Ten Year

The Refusal

I thought about Teodora's husband.

I had met him once, years after the basement in Queens, on the road to the Wastes. A quiet man with a gentle face, carrying a rifle he did not know how to use. He had followed his master's orders for two winters. He told me, without any anger at all, that he could not remember the last time he had wanted something for himself.

Five seconds.

I pressed my thumb to the air, found the word Refuse, and held it.

The pain came at once. It wasn't sharp. It was a deep, slow tearing behind my breastbone, as if something had been stitched there in the last thirty seconds and I was now pulling at the seams. My knees buckled. I grabbed the edge of the counter and held on while the room went white at the edges.

Across the room, Dale gasped and arched off the chairs.

"Dale!" Ruth caught his shoulders. "Dale, look at me. Look at me!"

"I'm okay." He was panting, eyes wide. "I'm okay. Something just, something let go. Like a hand opening." He laughed weakly. "That's the weirdest thing I've ever felt."

I stood there, breathing hard, waiting for the window to say something. When it did, it was short.

[Bond refused.]

[Hollow Crown: Dominion locked.]

[Hunger +1.]

I stared at the last line. Hunger. The skill description had said it waits for hunger, and I had taken that for a kind of poetry. Now it looked like a meter.

"Hunger of what?" I muttered. "What does it want?"

The Crown said nothing. The pain eased until it was only an ache, and then only the memory of one. I straightened up slowly. My hands were steady. They always were.

Ruth was looking at me, and she was not fooled.

"Whatever that was," she said, "it wasn't the first time you've done something like it."

"No," I said. "It wasn't."

It took twenty minutes for the room to settle. Dale fell asleep on the chairs with his mouth open, snoring softly through the dust mask, his color almost normal. Ruth checked his pulse three times and every time found it steady. Gil Halloran locked the front door, pulled the blinds, and made tea in a back room on a camping stove, because he said that if the world was ending he would at least have a hot drink.

I sat at the counter and told them the truth.

I kept it short. I told them that I had lived this day before. That I had lived ten years after it, and died on a battlefield, and woken up this morning in a cafe with a cracked phone and a dead man's memories. I told them about the System, the Cosmic Selection, the stages and the monsters and the hundred ways a person could die. I told them the world would not get better. I told them what I knew about the first week, and why the bank atrium had fallen, and why the bus had come.

When I finished, nobody spoke for a while.

Gil stirred his tea. "If you'd said this to me yesterday, I'd have called someone."

"And now?" I asked.

"Now I've seen the sky." He shrugged. "A man updates."

Ruth took longer. She sat on the stool beside Dale and looked at the dust mask on his face, at the receding gray lines on his arm, at the blood still drying on my sleeves. She was a nurse, and I had told her something that couldn't be tested. I could see her weighing it against what she had already watched happen.

"I don't know if I believe you," she said at last. "Ten years in the future. Coming back in time. It sounds like a story people tell when they've lost someone."

"It might be."

"But you pulled me out from under a bus I never saw coming." She looked at me steadily. "You told the man in the suit the bank would fall, and it fell. You cut a gland out of a dead man and fed it to a patient, and he's alive." Her voice stayed level. "I'm not going to say I believe in time travel. I'm going to say I believe in you. That's different, and for now it's enough."

I nodded. It was more than I had expected.

"So what happens next?" Dale's voice came, thick with sleep, from the chairs. He hadn't been as asleep as he'd seemed. He pushed himself up on one elbow. "You said you'd explain where we're going."

I had been turning it over for ten minutes.

"The plan was a hardware store on Eighth," I said. "It's a perfect base. Heavy doors, tools, a stockroom, a roof you can hold. In my timeline it became the safest building in Midtown, and half the people in the district lived there before the winter. It's the best thing within five blocks."

"And it's full of people who wave at you like they're expecting you," said Ruth.

"Yes. Which means someone else has the same plan, and has had it longer than I have."

"The woman with the duffel bags," Dale said.

"Maybe. Maybe not." I rubbed the back of my neck. "Either way, I'm not walking into a place where twenty people stand in a line and wait for me. So we need somewhere else. Somewhere we can hold overnight. By midnight I need to be in a specific place, and I can't do that if I'm still running."

"What happens at midnight?" Gil asked.

I told them about the Merchant.

I was halfway through the part about the coins when I heard it.

It came from across the street, thin and high and sharp. A girl's voice. Not the long, ragged scream of someone who had already given up, but a short one, cut off in the middle and followed by the clatter of something metal hitting the pavement.

I was at the window before I decided to move. I tilted two slats of the blind apart.

Directly across Ninth Avenue, between a laundromat and a shuttered bakery, a young woman was backed into the corner of an alley. She wore blue scrubs, a thin jacket, sneakers worn through at one heel. Her dark hair had come loose from its tie. In her right hand she held a scalpel, the blade no longer than my finger, and she was holding it out in front of her as if it were a sword.

Three infected stood between her and the street. They were not in a hurry. The nearest was already reaching for her.

I knew her face.

I had seen it a thousand times in a thousand different lights, thin and drawn, then hard and calm, then glowing with a pale green radiance on a wall of broken concrete while behind her ten thousand people sheltered under a sky full of fire. The humans of my last life had a name for her. They called her the Last Wall.

She was twenty-two years old. She could barely hold that scalpel without her hand shaking. She had no class yet, no skills, nothing. And according to everything I remembered, she was supposed to be in Boston.

She wasn't supposed to be here.

I was already pulling the axe off the counter.