Chapter 3: Seventy-Two Hours

"Please. Please. Please."

Ariana's own voice woke her. She was on her back, mouth open, hands clawing at her throat.

A chime was ringing somewhere close. Bright. Cheerful. It did not stop.

"No," she gasped. "No, no, no."

She rolled onto her side and her hand found a warm, soft thing under her cheek. A pillow. A cotton pillowcase that smelled of laundry soap. Sunlight lay across the blanket in a long yellow stripe.

The chime kept going.

She pushed herself up. Her shoulder did not hurt. She pulled the collar of her shirt aside and stared at the skin there. It was smooth and pale and whole. She pressed her fingers into it, hard.

Nothing.

"That's not possible." Her voice shook. "I was bitten. I felt it. I felt the teeth."

She checked her other shoulder. Her arms. Her ribs. She yanked up her pajama pants and looked at her legs, and they were just legs.

The chime kept ringing. She finally turned her head and found her phone on the nightstand, glowing and buzzing against the wood.

She grabbed it. Her thumb slipped twice before the alarm stopped.

The screen lit up with the lock photo, and her breath caught. It was her and Sabrina at Sabrina's twenty-third birthday, squeezed together, mouths wide open in laughter. Under the photo, in plain white numbers, sat the time and the day.

7:00 AM. Tuesday, October 13.

She read it three times. Then she read the small line below it.

Meeting: Inventory Review, 9:00.

"No." She laughed, and it came out wrong. "I went to this meeting. I sat in that room. That was the last normal week of my life."

The words stopped in her throat.

She knew that date. She had stood at the window of this apartment on the morning of Friday, October 16, and watched the first black drop hit the glass. She had burned that morning into her memory.

Today was Tuesday.

She leaned over the edge of the bed and was sick on the rug.

The bathroom tiles were cold against her back. She sat on the floor with her knees pulled up, shaking, with the door shut and the water running so nobody would hear.

Nobody was there to hear. That was the point. She knew that. She ran the tap anyway.

"Sorry," she whispered to the empty room. "I'm sorry. I'm so sorry."

She heard herself say it. A tired, hollow part of her mind noticed. Who are you apologizing to?

Nobody. She did it out of habit.

A faint scratch of music came up through the bathroom vent. The old building carried sound from the floors below, and she had always been able to hear a little of the radio in 8B. A woman's cheerful voice was reading the morning weather.

"...a curious system sitting out over the water, folks, and the forecasters can't quite agree what to call it. We'll keep an eye on it. Back to you, Gary."

"Gary, you old fool," said another voice, thin and dry, somewhere below. "Nobody agrees on anything."

Ariana's hand flew to her mouth.

The voice coughed. It muttered something about the kettle. A chair scraped.

Mrs. Dale.

Alive. Eighty years old and arguing with the radio.

Ariana crawled to the vent and put her ear against it. She heard a spoon tapping a cup. She heard a cat that did not exist being scolded for something it had not done.

She laughed. It broke in her chest and turned into crying, and she folded her arm over her mouth and cried into her sleeve until her ribs hurt.

When she could breathe again, she rapped on the pipe beside the vent. Two taps. Then two more.

A pause.

Two soft taps came back.

"Good morning," Ariana whispered. Her face was wet. "Good morning, Mrs. Dale."

Her bedroom was full of small proofs.

The blue jacket on the chair. The charger tangled on the floor. The unfinished crossword on the dresser. On the shelf above her desk stood a framed photograph, lying face down.

She picked it up. She already knew what it was.

The three of them on a beach, last summer. Jason in the middle with an arm around each of them. Sabrina's head thrown back, laughing. Her own cheeks pink from the sun, and a smile so open it looked painful to see.

"You look so happy," Ariana told the girl in the picture. "You have no idea."

She thought of that girl's hands and what had been done to them on the stones of an alley. She set the frame back down on its face, and her hand did not shake.

The kitchen looked exactly the way she had left it. The clean dishes in the rack. The coffee maker, the glass jar of sugar, a half-eaten orange sitting on a saucer. A grocery list stuck to the fridge in her own neat handwriting.

Milk. Bread. Eggs. Rice (small bag).

She stood in front of it for a long time.

"Okay," she said. "Okay. Think."

She pinched the inside of her arm until it burned. She bit the inside of her cheek. She slapped her own face, lightly, then harder. The kitchen did not change. The clock on the stove said 7:21.

"This is a dream. People die in dreams and wake up." She said it aloud, hoping it would make it true. "The brain makes up details. It's making up the soap smell. It's making up..."

Her phone buzzed on the counter.

She flinched so hard she knocked the orange off the saucer.

Two messages. She picked the phone up with both hands.

The first was from Jason. Sent at 11:42 last night.

Can we talk? I've been an idiot.

The second was from Sabrina. Sent at 6:15 this morning.

Coffee this week?? I miss you!!

Ariana read them without breathing.

She remembered Jason's message. She remembered the exact weight of it in her chest, the way her heart had lifted. She had answered within one minute. Of course we can talk. He had come to dinner the next night with flowers. By Thursday they were together again. On Friday morning he had not been there at all, and by the time he knocked, it was raining.

She remembered Sabrina's message too. She remembered her own reply. Yes!! I miss you too!! She had sent three hearts.

Her thumbs were already moving.

I miss you too, she typed to Jason. The cursor blinked after the last word. I'm so glad you wrote.

She stared at the screen.

He locked the door, said a quiet voice in her mind. He held both bags and he looked at the floor.

"No," Ariana said.

Her thumb hovered over the send arrow. Her whole body leaned toward it. This was the easiest thing in the world. Say yes, say sorry, say it was all her fault. Pull the soft warm blanket of him back over her shoulders.

She pressed the delete key. She held it down until the words were gone.

"No," she said again, louder.

The screen went back to the unread message. I've been an idiot.

"Yes," she whispered. "You have."

Her hand shook. She set the phone face down on the counter and gripped the edge of it with both palms until her knuckles went white.

She did not reply to Sabrina either.

The phone buzzed again. A voicemail icon had appeared under the messages. Her boss.

She almost let it go. Then she tapped it, and the message played on speaker.

"Ariana, it's Greg. Quick one. Can you bring the Riverside freight numbers to the nine o'clock? And don't be late, it's your turn on notes. You're a lifesaver. Thanks."

The message ended. Ariana stared at the phone.

Greg Marlow. Corvane Freight. Inventory Review. She had spent four years of her life in a gray office building counting pallets and arguing about shipping rates. She had thought it was a small life. Now she understood that every pallet she had ever counted was a tool.

"Riverside," she said slowly. "Riverside Wholesale Depot."

She had a login for their system. She knew their receiving managers by first name.

She did not know yet what to do with that. But for the first time since the chime, she was thinking about something besides the pain.

She remembered the last time she had spoken to Jason. Three weeks ago, in this kitchen.

Just sign it, Ari, he had said. It's a loan. It's not a big deal.

It's forty thousand. In my name. With your credit.

You don't trust me?

I don't trust the loan.

You're cold, he had said. He had stood there, handsome and furious, with his keys in his fist. You'd let me drown before you'd spend a dollar.

Then he had left. She had cried for two days and apologized to him in her head the whole time.

Ariana looked at the face-down phone now, and the whole memory belonged to somebody else.

She opened her laptop on the kitchen table. Her password still worked. The date in the corner of the screen agreed with the phone. So did the date on the work email, and the date in her calendar, and the date on the news site, which she opened with a trembling hand.

Politics. Football. A fire in a warehouse across town. A scandal about a mayor.

Halfway down the page, in a small gray box, was a headline she had never once noticed.

Meteorologists Track Unusual System Approaching Arcadian Coast.

She clicked.

Forecasters say an unusual weather system is expected to reach the eastern coast by Friday morning. The system's structure has been described as unlike anything in recent records. Officials urge residents to monitor local advisories. "It is not expected to be dangerous," said one meteorologist, "but we are watching closely."

"Not expected to be dangerous," Ariana repeated.

Something in her chest went very still.

She remembered Friday. She remembered every second of it. She had been standing at the window with a mug of coffee, wearing Jason's old sweatshirt. The clock on the stove said 7:00. A single black drop hit the glass in front of her face. It slid down slowly and left a black trail on the glass.

By nightfall the city had lost its power. By the next morning, the screaming had started.

She looked at the laptop clock. 7:34 AM, Tuesday.

She did the math. It took her two tries, because her hands were still shaking, and her brain kept sliding off the numbers.

Tuesday, 7:00 AM to Friday, 7:00 AM. Three days. Seventy-two hours.

"Seventy-two hours," she whispered.

She pulled a pen out of the cup on the table and, after a moment, pushed up her sleeve. On the inside of her left forearm, in small neat letters, she wrote the date. Under it, she wrote Fri. 7:00 AM.

Then she wrote one more thing, and her pen dug into her skin as she did.

DO NOT OPEN THE DOOR.

"Okay," she said. Her voice cracked. "Okay. It's real. It's real, and you know what's coming. You're awake. You're alive."

She said it again, slower. It sounded stranger every time.

"It's real."

The kitchen was very quiet. A tap dripped in the sink. Far below her, faintly, she could hear Mrs. Dale humming off-key.

Ariana lifted her head.

The air in front of her face was bending.

It was only a small ripple at first. Then it deepened and sharpened into thin lines of pale light, and the lines became letters, and the letters hung in the air at the exact height of her eyes.

She did not move. She did not breathe.

[Apocalypse Survival System Activated.]