Never Dead Twice: Reborn To Rule The Zombie Apocalypse

I died with a stranger’s boot print on my hand.

That’s what I remembered first when I woke up. Not the cold, not the screaming, but a boot, size eleven, crushing my fingers against the lip of the evacuation truck. Dominic’s boot. It wasn’t an accident, because he looked down at me while he did it.

“There’s only room for one more, Row,” he’d said. Tessa was already folded into the seat behind him, her face buried in my husband’s shoulder. My half-sister. My sister. Our son on her lap.

Our son. Theo had Dominic’s eyes, and I’d always thought they were mine too. In those last seconds, with snow filling my lungs, I finally understood why he’d never once called me Mom.

The truck pulled away. The dead came down the road like a tide of gray wool. The last thing I felt was not fear but something worse: stupidity. I had spent seven years being useful to the people who were going to let me freeze.

I sat up gasping, one hand clawing at my own throat.

Warm sheets. Morning sun. The pale blue wall I’d painted myself, badly, the summer we bought this apartment. A phone on the nightstand, screen lit.

Tuesday, 6:12 a.m.

And under the time, in plain white letters that had not been there a second ago, hovering in the air above the phone where nothing could possibly be written:

90 DAYS.

I raised my hand and the letters moved with my gaze, as though printed on the inside of my eyes. I counted my fingers. All ten. Unbroken. No frostbite, no scars, only the small crescent on my thumb from the night I’d burned dinner for Dominic’s mother.

I knew this morning. I’d lived it a hundred times. And I knew what the next ninety days held: the first rain in thirty years, the Flood that would swallow the lower city, the hunger, the frost that came too early, and then the thing the news never named properly, the sickness that made the dead stand up and walk.

I had one lifetime of knowledge and a second lifetime to use it.

“Rowan!”

Gloria’s voice came through the door like a hammer. My mother-in-law didn’t knock. She announced. “We have guests at noon and the good silver isn’t polished. Dominic needs his gray suit pressed. I told him you’d do it before breakfast.”

In my first life I had answered Of course, Gloria about two thousand times.

I swung my feet to the floor, and my knees didn’t shake.

The door opened without a knock. Gloria stood in her silk robe, sixty-one years old and perfectly lipsticked, a woman who had never carried her own grocery bag. Behind her, Dominic leaned against the frame with his phone, scrolling, not looking up. I didn’t need to see the screen. I knew whose name was on it.

“And there’s a casserole for the Hendersons,” Gloria went on, “and Warren will want breakfast. You know how he gets.”

Uncle Warren. Dominic’s uncle had moved into my spare room “temporarily” two years ago and had never once washed a dish.

I walked to the dresser, opened the top drawer, and took out a flat brown envelope from the very back, one I’d been too afraid to open for three years. My grandmother’s slanted handwriting crossed the front. Open this when you are ready to leave him.

Ada Calloway had died believing I never would.

I tore it open.

You will have asked why I never came to your wedding. Because I knew who he was. I’ve left you the Calloway holdings in a sealed trust, to be disclosed to no spouse. Cold storage warehouses. A freight company. The mine at Harrow Ridge. I always said the world would end badly, Rowan. Be ready.

A lawyer’s card was clipped to the page. Albert Finch.

My hands were steady. I thought: Refrigerated warehouses. Diesel. A mine above the flood line. For seven years I had believed I had nothing.

“Rowan.” Gloria’s voice sharpened. “Are you listening?”

I turned. Dominic had finally lifted his eyes. Thirty-four, with a good jaw and warm brown eyes I’d once mistaken for love. Now I saw how he actually looked at me: the way you look at a well-working appliance.

“Row,” he sighed. “Don’t make this a thing. Just do the suit.”

“No,” I said.

The hallway went quiet. Warren, shuffling out of the spare room in his undershirt, froze with one foot in the air. It was a small, soft, almost polite no, and it landed like a dropped plate.

“I’m sorry?” said Gloria.

“I won’t polish the silver. I won’t press the suit. I won’t feed Warren.” It was easier the second time. “I’m done.”

Dominic laughed, then stopped when I didn’t. “Row. What’s this about?”

You put your boot on my hand, I thought. But nobody would believe me if I said it. The only weapon I had was that I knew everything and they knew nothing. That was worth more than any fortune.

I dragged my gray duffel out of the closet and began dropping clothes into it, unfolded.

“Where do you think you’re going?” Gloria’s voice climbed.

“Out.”

“You can’t just leave.” For the first time in seven years Dominic sounded like himself. It wasn’t hurt, and it wasn’t fear. It was the offended anger of a man who has discovered that something he owned has a will of its own. “You don’t have a dime. Your job’s a joke, and your sister can barely stand you. Where would you even go?”

The white numbers glowed at the edge of my vision. 90 DAYS.

I zipped the bag and smiled at him with nothing behind it.

“Dominic. I want a divorce.”

His face emptied.

Behind him, his phone lit up in his hand. He tilted it away a moment too late, and I caught the name and the first line of the preview, and my stomach went cold:

Tessa: Is she gone yet? Remember, she can’t find out about the safe-house list before Friday.

Safe-house list?

In my first life, no one had said a word about a safe-house list.

Which meant something in this timeline was already different.