APOCALYPSE HOLLOW: DEATH WANTS HER BACK

*Day 30*

My son was nine years old the night I died for him.

I always figured a pole would get me. Forty feet up in an ice storm, a line that should have been dead and wasn't, one bad second. Fourteen years with the power company, and I'd made my peace with that kind of ending.

Not this one. Not on my knees on a cellar hatch in the dark, with my boy underneath it.

"Mom." Eli's voice came up through the boards, thin and frightened. "Mom, let me up."

"No, bug. Stay down."

The front door started to go at 11:52. I knew because the battery clock over the woodstove was the last thing I'd fixed in that cabin, and I looked at it the way I've always looked at clocks. Like it owed me something.

Thirty days. That was how long I'd kept him alive.

Thirty days since I'd driven the company truck east through the first rainy night, Spokane burning orange in my rearview mirror and Eli's last text still glowing on my phone. *where r u*. Thirty days since my mother opened the cabin door in her bathrobe and asked what on earth I was doing there.

Now my parents were buried behind the woodshed, the food was running low, and something outside had finally figured out we were here.

I'd spent the last month teaching Eli everything I could remember from summers in these mountains. How to set snares, find dry wood beneath snow, and tell when ice was thick enough to walk on. I showed him the old coal chute behind the cellar shelves, the one Dad boarded over years ago, and how it came out under the woodshed. Just in case. He'd learned faster than I expected. Faster than I wanted him to have to.

There were things I hadn't taught him. Things a nine-year-old shouldn't need to know.

The door hit the wall.

They came in wet and gray. Three of them, then four, then I stopped counting. The smell came with them, copper and leaves rotting beneath snow. The lantern on the table threw their shadows across the logs, too long and moving wrong.

I was already on the hatch, knees planted against the boards, back braced against the pantry cupboard, the hatchet from the woodpile gripped in both hands.

The first one came straight at me. I buried the hatchet in its skull the way Dad taught me to split rounds, all hips and no arms. It collapsed across my legs, pinning me against the hatch. Good. Let it stay there. Anything that made me harder to move was worth having.

The second one got my forearm.

It didn't bite like an animal. Animals let go. This thing bit like a man who'd forgotten what he was doing halfway through and just kept doing it. I felt teeth scrape bone. I screamed and swung until it released me, then slammed my bleeding arm against the cupboard to keep my balance.

There's a rule they teach you before they let you climb a pole. Three points of contact. Doesn't matter if you're scared, tired, or hanging forty feet above concrete. You don't let go.

The third one got my shoulder.

"MOM!" Eli was pounding the underside of the hatch. Every blow traveled straight through my knees. "Mom, open it! Please!"

"I'm right here, bug." My voice sounded strange. Almost calm. "You stay where you are. Don't open this hatch for anything."

"But Mom—"

"Promise me."

He was crying now. I could hear him trying not to.

"I promise."

I wanted to tell him I loved him. Wanted to tell him where I'd hidden the extra batteries and the little emergency radio. Wanted to tell him about Dante, who might still be alive somewhere west of here, and how to find him if he ever got the chance.

Instead, I held the hatch.

The pain was enormous until it wasn't. Cold spread through my fingers, climbed my arms, and settled somewhere behind my ribs. My grip loosened around the hatchet. I watched it fall, heard the blade strike the floorboards, and couldn't make myself reach for it.

Then the infected stopped.

One leaned close enough that its breath brushed my cheek. Its nostrils flared as it smelled my face, my hair, the blood soaking through my shirt. For one terrible second, I thought it had heard Eli beneath me.

But it wasn't looking at the hatch.

It was looking at me.

Something changed in its cloudy eyes. It straightened, made a low clicking noise in its throat, and backed away. The others followed, shuffling through the ruined doorway into the snow.

They left me bleeding on the cellar hatch.

"Mom?" Eli whispered. "Are they gone?"

I tried to answer. My mouth wouldn't work.

"Mom?"

Hold the hatch, I told myself. Just a little longer.

My heart did something I'd felt a hundred times on the job, from the outside. A breaker tripping. One clean click, and then the line goes dead.

Darkness took me.

Not the darkness of the cabin. Something deeper, without cold or pain or the weight of my own body. I couldn't hear Eli anymore. Couldn't feel the boards beneath my knees.

Then pale white letters appeared, sharp-edged as frost growing across glass.

[Host vital signs: Terminated.]

[Viral integration: 100%.]

[Compatibility: Anomalous.]

[Searching for compatible protocol...]

Something moved behind the words. Not a person. Not anything I could see. But I felt it examining me, the way a supervisor studies a damaged transformer before deciding whether it's worth repairing.

[Level Up System: Hollow Protocol located.]

[Host restoration available.]

[Warning: Restoration will result in permanent biological alterations.]

A voice followed. Neither male nor female. It sounded like wind pushing beneath a closed door.

Do you want to live?

I thought of Eli, alone beneath the floorboards. Nine years old, with nobody left to protect him.

"Yes."

[Consent recorded.]

[Restoration initiated.]

I woke with my cheek pressed against cold wood.

For a moment, I couldn't understand what was wrong. My arm didn't hurt. Neither did my shoulder. The weight across my legs was gone, and the cabin was quiet except for the wind moving through the broken doorway.

I pushed myself upright.

The floor was stained dark beneath me. My shirt hung in stiff, bloody strips, but the skin underneath was whole. I touched the place where teeth had torn into my forearm and found nothing except a pale crescent, cold and smooth beneath my fingers.

The lantern was gone. Gray daylight filtered through the windows. Snow had blown halfway across the room, covering the dried blood and the hatchet lying beside the stove.

How long had I been lying here?

Pale letters answered before I could wonder twice.

[Restoration complete.]

[Time elapsed: 4 days, 11 hours.]

Four days. My stomach dropped.

"Eli?"

I crawled off the hatch and pulled at the iron ring. The door came up easily.

The cellar was empty.

His blanket was gone. So was the little backpack he kept packed with his grandfather's compass, a flashlight, and whatever treasures he'd decided were worth saving.

"Eli!"

I stumbled to my feet, calling his name again as I searched the cabin. His boots weren't beside the stove. His coat was missing from its hook.

Outside, the snow stretched between the cabin and the trees, smooth and undisturbed.

No footprints. No sign of where he'd gone.

Pale letters flickered across my vision.

[Hollow Protocol: Online.]

[Host Status: Hollow.]

[Primary Mandate: Mother of the Horde.]

I stared at the words, barely understanding them.

"Where is my son?"

[Human target location: Unknown.]

"He's nine years old. His name is Eli. Find him!"

[Target unavailable.]

Something shifted among the trees.

A gray figure stood beyond the woodshed, watching me. Another emerged beside it, followed by a third. Their heads turned toward me in perfect unison.

I knew what they were. I'd died with their teeth in my flesh.

But none of them came closer.

[Horde units detected: 3.]

[Awaiting maternal command.]