Doomsday Hell Maiden: I Divorced Him Before the End

Chapter 1: The Gate

"Please, Julian. I'm your wife."

He didn't look back at me.

I was on my knees in the dirt in front of Safe Zone Four, my broken leg bent under me, my hands pressed against the cold steel of a gate that stood twice as tall as a house. Behind me the night was full of sounds I had stopped trying to name. Wet breathing. Claws on asphalt. Something dragging itself along the road, slow and patient, like it already knew I wasn't going anywhere.

On the other side of the bars, the floodlights made everything bright and clean. Julian stood in the middle of that light in a pressed gray jacket. He looked like a man who had slept well for forty days.

Because he had.

"Sir," said the guard beside him, a young man who kept glancing at me and then away. "She says she's your wife. She's not bitten. I can see her arms from here. The rules say if there's no infection, we can open the side door."

"She's infected," Julian said.

"Sir, I don't see any..."

"I said she's infected." His voice was calm. It was the voice he used on waiters and contractors and the people he owed money to. "Do you know how many people are inside this wall? Four thousand. Do you want to be the one who explains to them why you let a carrier in because she cried at the gate?"

The guard's mouth closed.

I laughed. It came out as a cough, and there was blood in it. "Julian. Look at me. Just look at me."

He finally did.

I had spent forty days imagining that moment. Forty days of eating spoiled crackers in a bus shelter, of hiding in a drained swimming pool while things walked over the cover above me, of dragging my leg eleven miles along a highway because the last text he ever sent me said Meet me at Safe Zone Four. I'll get you in. I had pictured him running to the gate. I had pictured him crying. I had pictured him on his knees on the other side, just like me.

What I got was a man checking his watch.

"Serena," he said. "I'm sorry it ended like this."

"Ended?" My voice cracked. "I gave you everything. My father's company. The trust. The house. I signed every paper you put in front of me. Julian, I carried you."

"I know." He nodded, as if I had complimented his tie. "And I appreciate it. But the world is different now. There isn't room for everyone."

"There's room for her."

I hadn't meant to say it. It just came out.

Behind him, in the shadow of the guard tower, a woman stepped forward with a little boy on her hip. She wore a clean white coat. Her hair was brushed. She had the soft, wounded face of someone who had never once in her life been the one left outside.

Camille Voss. I had met her at a charity dinner six years ago. She had been Julian's assistant. She had brought me a glass of water when I felt dizzy. I had thanked her.

The boy had his father's eyes.

"Mommy," he said, pointing at me. "Why is that lady bleeding?"

"Don't look, Oliver." Camille turned the boy's face into her shoulder. Then she looked at me over the top of his head, and for one second, only one, the soft face slipped. There was no pity in it. There was no guilt either. There was just the quiet satisfaction of a woman watching a door close on someone else.

That was when I understood that it had never been a mistake. Not the affair, not the child, not the way Julian had pushed me to sign my trust over "for tax reasons." I wasn't the wife he had stopped loving. I was the bank he had finished withdrawing from.

"How long?" I asked him.

He didn't pretend not to understand. "Oliver is four."

Four years. Four birthdays. Four Christmases when he had told me he was working late and I had kept his dinner warm.

"The woman I'm saving," Julian said, and he put a hand on Camille's back, "is the one holding my son."

Something behind me roared.

It wasn't the thin shriek of the small ones. This was low and heavy, a sound I felt in my teeth. The guard went white. The floodlights swung toward the road, and the light caught a shape coming up out of the dark, too tall, too many joints, its jaw hanging open on more teeth than a mouth should hold.

"Close it," Julian said.

"Sir, the side door is still..."

"Close the gate."

I screamed his name. I screamed it like a prayer, like a curse. I threw myself at the bars and got my fingers through them and grabbed the sleeve of his jacket. He looked down at my hand.

Then he took my wedding ring, the one I had bought him with my own money on our fifth anniversary, the plain gold band he had worn every day and swore he would never take off, and he slid it off his finger. He placed it in my palm, and he closed my fingers over it.

"Keep it," he said. "I won't need it where I'm going."

He pulled his sleeve free. The motors groaned. The gate began to slide, and the gap between us, one foot, two feet, three, filled with white light that I would never walk into.

I didn't beg anymore. I'd used up all my begging. I just watched his back as he walked away with his son and his mistress, and I thought, very clearly, I trusted you more than I trusted myself.

The thing behind me reached the road.

I turned my head, because I wanted to see it. I wanted to look at whatever was going to kill me instead of looking at him. It stood over me, tall as a streetlight, and it smelled like a hospital and a slaughterhouse. It had no eyes. It leaned down, and its mouth opened, and I closed my fist around the ring.

I remember the pain for about two seconds. After that I remember nothing at all.

I woke up because the sun was in my face.

I lay there for a long moment, waiting for the claws. For the smell. For the dark.

Nothing came. There was only warm light on my cheek and the faint sound of the air conditioner humming and, somewhere far below, the muffled noise of traffic. Real traffic. Horns and engines and a man shouting at a taxi.

I opened my eyes.

The ceiling above me was white, with a thin crack in the corner that I had been meaning to have fixed for months. The sheets were silk. The pillow smelled like lavender.

I sat up so fast the room spun.

"No," I said. My voice was hoarse and young and wrong. "No, no, no."

I grabbed my leg. The left one, the one that had been snapped below the knee by a car door when I was escaping the garage on day three. I ran my hands down the shin, the ankle, the foot. Smooth. Whole. I put weight on it, then jumped out of bed and stood on it with my heart hammering, and it held.

I looked down at my hands. No scars. No dirt under the nails. No calluses from forty days of climbing and crawling and digging. The manicure was fresh, pale pink, the one I'd had done because Julian said it made me look "polished" at his company's gala.

I stumbled to the dresser mirror and gripped its edge.

The woman in the glass was twenty-nine years old. Her cheeks were round and healthy. Her hair was long and glossy and still had the expensive highlights. She looked well fed. She looked loved. She looked like exactly what she was, a naive, devoted fool who had no idea her husband was already shopping for her replacement.

I had last seen that face on the morning of my twenty-ninth birthday.

My knees gave out. I slid down the dresser and sat on the carpet with my phone clutched to my chest, and I did not remember picking it up. I stared at the screen.

Wednesday, March 11. 8:42 AM.

I counted it twice. Then three times.

Doomsday had started on a Tuesday. March seventeenth. I would never forget the date. I had been standing in this very penthouse, watching the news, when the sky above the city opened like a seam splitting, and red light poured through it, and the first screaming started on the street. Six days. I had six days.

I started to laugh. It turned into sobbing without any warning, ugly and loud, and I pressed my fist into my mouth so the neighbors wouldn't hear. I cried for the woman who had died in front of that gate. I cried for the girl who had trusted. I cried until my throat hurt and my eyes were swollen shut and there was nothing left in me but a strange, scraped-out quiet.

When I finally stopped, I wiped my face on my sleeve and looked at my left hand.

The wedding ring was on it.

I looked at it for a long time. In the other life, I had been holding Julian's ring when I died. Here, mine was still on my finger, gold and polished, and I had no idea what had happened to his. Probably it was on his hand, three floors up in the office building he ran with my money, while he texted a woman I hadn't met yet.

No. I had met her. She had brought me water.

I pulled the ring off. It slid free more easily than I expected. I set it on the dresser, and it made a small, clean click against the wood.

"Okay," I said, to no one. My voice was steady now. "Okay."

I sat down at the little desk by the window and opened the drawer. There was a notepad in it, cream paper with my initials embossed at the top, a gift from Julian's mother. I took a pen and I wrote at the top of the page, WHAT I KNOW.

The sky would break at noon on the seventeenth.

The first wave would be small ones, the fast things we later called Skitters. They would flood the subways and the highways. The cell towers would fail by evening. Power would last another four days in the city center and then it would not.

The water would be bad by the second week. Fuel would run out by the third. The guards at Safe Zone Four would not take anyone who couldn't pay, and the price would be gold, or medicine, or a favor from someone with influence.

Julian would pay it. With my money. For a woman I didn't know existed yet and a child I hadn't been told about.

I wrote it all down, the dates, the locations, the things I had learned by dying a little each day for forty days. When I finally put the pen down, my hand ached and the page was full.

The door of the bedroom opened.

I shoved the notepad under a magazine so fast I knocked over the pen. My heart nearly stopped.

"Ma'am?" It was the housekeeper, Mrs. Alvarez, carrying a tray. She stopped in the doorway, wide-eyed. "I knocked, but you didn't answer. Are you all right? Your eyes..."

Mrs. Alvarez. Sixty-one years old, with a bad hip and a laugh like a kettle. She had worked for my family since I was a teenager. In my last life I had never even found out what happened to her.

I stood up and crossed the room and hugged her before I could stop myself.

"Oh!" She nearly dropped the tray. "Ma'am, what's wrong?"

"Nothing." I held on a moment longer, then let go and wiped my face again. "I had a bad dream. A really bad one."

"You poor thing. Here, drink your tea." She fussed over me the way she always had, and I let her, and I tried to memorize the weight of her hands on my shoulders. When she left, I sat down again.

I had a choice to make. I knew exactly what the old me would have done.

She would have gone downstairs and made Julian's breakfast. She would have kissed him goodbye at the door. She would have told him about her strange dream, and he would have patted her head and called her sweet. She would have signed whatever he put in front of her next week, because it was just paperwork, and he was so busy, and she wanted to be a good wife.

Then she would have died.

I looked at the ring on the dresser. I looked at the page of notes. I looked at the woman in the mirror, who looked back at me with swollen eyes and a face that didn't know yet how much it was going to change.

"I'm not going to beg," I told her. "Not this time."

I got dressed. I washed my face. I sat at the vanity and put on makeup carefully, hiding every trace of crying, because the person I had to be today was a wife who had slept fine and woken up happy. I practiced the smile. It took three tries to get it right.

I was reaching for my earrings when the phone buzzed on the desk.

I knew the name on the screen before I looked. My stomach tightened, and not with love.

Julian: Good morning, beautiful. Dinner tonight at Le Marais, 7 PM. Wear the blue dress. I have a surprise for you.

I read it twice.

In my last life, I had worn the blue dress. I had walked into that restaurant glowing, so proud of him, and he had slid a thick stack of papers across the table with a bottle of wine and called it a surprise. I had signed on page forty-two without reading it. Just paperwork.

The phone was still in my hand. I looked at his little blue heart for a while.

Then I typed, with a smile that I could feel in my own face, warm and sweet and perfectly steady:

Me: I can't wait, darling. I have a surprise for you too.

I pressed send. And for the first time in two lifetimes, I did not feel afraid.