Reborn Before Doomsday: My System Has Infinite Storage

The plastic bag slipped from my fingers the moment I stopped breathing, and it hit the wooden floor and scattered the little food I had managed to find that morning across the dusty room. A rotten cucumber rolled under the table and a piece of cabbage landed near my feet, but I barely noticed because my eyes were fixed on the two people standing in front of me.

Cassian was kissing Vivienne.

Neither of them moved for several seconds. His hand stayed wrapped around her waist while her fingers rested against his chest as if they had done this a thousand times before, and my mind refused to accept what I was seeing, so I blinked hard and hoped the scene would vanish when I opened my eyes again. It did not.

“What are you doing?” My voice came out as a whisper before shock turned it into a scream. “Cassian, why are you kissing her?”

His expression changed at once. He glanced toward the window and then the door before he lifted a finger to his lips and shook his head.

“Keep your voice down.”

I stared at him, unable to believe what I had just heard. “Keep my voice down? I walk in on you kissing another woman and that is what worries you?”

His warning made a cruel kind of sense, though, because we no longer lived in a world where a scream brought neighbors running. There were no neighbors left, no police, no safe streets waiting outside to protect anyone.

Five years ago the world had ended. I still remembered the day the sky turned red and the rain that followed burned through skin instead of washing it clean. Buildings fell apart within hours, people ran screaming through streets that led nowhere, and governments and hospitals and television stations went silent one after another until nothing remained but static. Then the dead began to walk, and it did not take long for everyone to learn that those creatures wanted only one thing: living flesh.

For five years I had survived by staying careful and quiet, learning which abandoned buildings still held food and which had already been picked clean, stretching a single meal across several days until a proper dinner became something I only remembered instead of something I expected. And through all of it, I had shared almost everything I found with Cassian, because I loved him. For two years I had believed he loved me too, and in a ruined world that belief had been enough to make me feel less alone.

Now I looked at him and wondered how badly I had misunderstood everything.

“Start talking,” I said, my voice shaking though I refused to look away. Tears slid down my cheeks carrying dirt with them, but I did not bother wiping them off. Cassian opened his mouth and then closed it again, and something in his eyes was not the guilt I expected from a cheating man. It looked closer to irritation, as though my presence had become an inconvenience he wanted gone.

Before he could speak, Vivienne stepped forward with a strange little smile. “Cassian is my husband,” she said.

My whole body went still. “What?”

“You heard me.”

I looked at Cassian, waiting for him to laugh, to deny it, to do anything except stand there with his eyes dropped to the floor. My heartbeat grew so loud I could hear it in my own ears.

“That is not possible,” I said slowly.

Vivienne gave a quiet laugh. “Why not?”

“Because Cassian is with me.”

The words sounded pathetic even as I said them. For two years I had been the woman beside him, cooking whatever we found, searching for food until my feet bled, protecting him when the dead surrounded us, sleeping next to him while the world burned outside. How could there have been another woman? How could there have been a wife?

I suddenly remembered the day he brought Vivienne to the farmhouse, telling me he found her alone and starving and could not leave her behind. I had protested because our supplies were already low, but he begged me to let her stay, and of course I agreed, because whenever Cassian asked me for something I rarely knew how to refuse. I had given her food from my own share, blankets when the nights turned cold, medicine when she fell sick. All that time I had been caring for the wife of the man I loved.

“Tell her,” Vivienne said, nudging him with her elbow. “You should at least have the courage to tell your little girlfriend the truth.”

Girlfriend. The word cut deeper than I expected.

“Is she telling the truth?” I asked him again.

He sighed, and that single sound broke something inside me. “Vivienne is my wife. We have been married for ten years.”

Ten years. I stared at him as if he had turned into a stranger in front of me. Two years with me and ten with her, and I thought of every night he told me I was the only woman he wanted, every time I fell asleep believing it.

“I don’t understand,” I said.

“There isn’t much to understand,” he answered coldly, and when Vivienne moved closer and slipped her hand into his, his face softened in a way I had not seen from him in a long time.

“I love my wife,” he said. “I always have.”

I could not find any words.

“You were useful, Serelle,” he continued before I could ask anything else, and the room fell into a silence that pressed against my chest until something cracked inside it. “You survived better than most people. You knew where to find food, medicine, water. You were careful and strong. We needed you. I needed you.”

“So everything was a lie?” My voice broke on the question, and his silence was answer enough.

A sob tore out of my throat and I covered my mouth as every strange thing he had ever done suddenly fell into place: the unexplained disappearances, the missing supplies, the stories about barely escaping zombies. I had believed every word, worried through every night he vanished, while he had been with her the whole time.

“You used me,” I said.

“If we hadn’t used you, we would have died,” he answered without hesitation. “Look around. We have food, shelter, enough supplies to last for weeks, and you made that possible.”

I stared at the walls I had repaired, the windows I had reinforced, the doors I had barricaded, the tiny vegetable patch outside that I had planted with seeds I found scavenging. I had turned this abandoned farmhouse into the closest thing we had to a home, and he was telling me I had done it all for them.

“You could have told me,” I said.

“Would you have stayed?”

I could not answer, and he gave me the answer himself. “No. That is why I didn’t tell you.”

I pressed a hand to my chest as though I could hold my own heart together. “I saved your life more than once. I starved so you could eat.”

“I know,” he said, and I laughed through my tears though nothing about it was funny.

“Then how can you look at me like this?”

He said nothing. Vivienne did instead. “Because you were never important,” she said, smiling. “You were just useful.”

Something inside me went quiet. The crying stopped, the shaking stopped, and even the pain seemed to disappear for a moment while I wiped my face and stood straight.

“Get out. Both of you. Leave,” I said.

Cassian frowned. “This is our home.”

“Your home? What exactly did either of you do to make this place livable? I found it, I repaired it, I searched for food while you stayed inside and risked nothing. You didn’t build this place. You just took from it.”

His expression hardened. “You don’t get to throw us out.”

“Watch me.”

He crossed the room before I could step back again, and his arms closed around me and lifted me off the ground as though I weighed nothing. I kicked and struck at his back with my fists, screaming at him to put me down, but he carried me toward the door while Vivienne pulled it open and let the cold air rush in. Then he threw me outside.

I hit the ground hard enough to scrape my palms raw, and before I could recover, the door slammed shut behind me. I pounded on it and screamed his name until my fists ached, but no answer came, not even silence broken by footsteps. I stepped back slowly and looked at the farmhouse that had been my only shelter for months, and then at the dark forest stretching behind it, full of dangers I had spent years learning to avoid.

The wind moved through the branches. A twig snapped. Then another. A low growl rolled out of the darkness, and when I turned I saw one figure emerge from between the trees, then another, then too many to count.

I slammed my fists against the door one last time, screaming for Cassian to let me in, but nothing answered except the growing snarls behind me. I had no choice. I turned and ran into the forest, branches slapping my face and thorns tearing my legs while the sounds of snarling and footsteps closed in behind me.

Something tightened around my ankle before I even had time to scream, and I hit the ground so hard the breath left my lungs. I clawed at the rope wrapped around my leg, but the first zombie was already on top of me, its teeth sinking into my thigh, and pain exploded through my body as more of them piled on. I fought, I kicked, I screamed Cassian’s name even though I knew by then that he would never come.

Teeth sank into my side, then my shoulder, then my cheek, and my strength faded along with my vision. I thought of the farmhouse, of the food I had shared, of every time I had chosen him over myself, and I understood the cruelest truth of my short life just as everything went dark: I had loved a man who never loved me, protected the woman who stole my place, and when I needed them most, they had left me outside to die.