Chapter 1: Reborn

POV: KIRA

“Thank you for being so stupid.”

That was the last thing my husband said to me.

But first, there was the cold.

It crawled through my jacket and into my bones like rot, and with it came the putrid smell of blood.

My eyes opened to a dark night, my skull throbbing painfully where something heavy had struck it.

Warm liquid trickled down the back of my neck.

“Ah…” I groaned. “Henry?” I called out to my husband.

I tried to move, but ropes bit into my wrists and ankles.

I was bound to a lamppost in the middle of the street.

And someone had hit me.

“Henry, I’m over here!” I called out again, a bit louder now.

I shouldn’t be doing that. They could hear me.

The undead.

The scourge of this new world, whose decaying flesh still filled the air with their putrid smell.

I heard footsteps, and my neck turned before I could stop it, my heart racing inside my chest.

Henry stepped out of the dark. His face was calm, as it had always been.

He held a bloodied pipe in one hand.

Behind him, Fiona lingered with Tommy’s small hand locked in hers. They were all packing boxes.

Relief hit me all at once.

“Thank God. Baby, someone hit me, they tied me up. You have to get me out of here…”

Henry gently approached me and knelt.

I braced myself for freedom, but he suddenly tightened the knot at my wrist!

“What are you doing?” I stared at his hands.

“Making sure it holds,” he replied casually.

“Henry, please.” A broken sound left my mouth. A laugh, perhaps?

“The soldiers are coming with their helicopters. You heard the broadcast; there’s a safe house. We can all go there. Just untie me, and we’ll go together!”

“Oh, for fuck’s sake!” Fiona’s voice cut through the air.

My sister-in-law glared at Henry.

“You hit her with a pipe, and she’s still talking? You should have bashed her skull harder!”

The world spun for a moment.

“Fiona?” I whispered. “What did you just say?”

“I said,” she repeated slowly, as if speaking to a child, “that he should’ve hit you harder. You’ve got a skull like a cockroach anyway. Your brains should be painting this street now!”

“I didn’t want to kill her myself,” Henry muttered.

“Why not, honey? It would’ve been cleaner. Now look what you’ve done.”

I looked from one to the other.

My mind refused to accept what was before me.

“…Honey?… Fiona, he is your brother.”

She laughed at me.

“My brother?”

She slid her arm around Henry’s waist, and he pulled her close without hesitation, as if his body had done this a thousand times.

And before my eyes, Henry planted a deep kiss on her lips!

I froze!

“He’s not my brother, dummy. Who do you think has been warming his bed since before you even met him?”

“No. You’re—you lived in my house. You held my hand when my father died. You…”

“I held your hand because someone had to keep the idiot calm while Henry got his hands on your inheritance.”

My ears rang.

I turned to my husband, begging him with my eyes to say it was a joke.

Henry sighed.

“Don’t look at me like that. It’s embarrassing.”

“Henry…”

“I never loved you, Kira. You were rich, lonely, and you were so desperate for a family that you’d have married a lamppost if it smiled at you. Do you know how easy you were? It was almost sad.”

Something inside my chest tore open without a sound.

I fought back the tears gathering at the corners of my eyes.

“Tommy,” I breathed.

My eyes found the little boy standing behind Fiona, small and sleepy in his oversized coat.

“Tommy, sweetheart, come here. Mommy’s okay—”

Tommy shrank back and hid his face in Fiona’s coat.

“He’s not your son…” Fiona said.

The cold went through me again, deeper this time.

“…He never was.” She stroked his hair, and he leaned into her without thinking. “I carried him. I birthed him. I was never your surrogate, Kira. Your husband fucked this child into me. We just wanted your money. And your real baby? The one you pushed out half-dead on that hospital bed, drugged to the eyeballs?”

She chuckled.

“Henry signed the adoption papers while you were sleeping. It was a closed adoption. You never would have found him. And honestly, he’s probably dead by now. Or… he’s become a dirty zombie. Whatever.”

I couldn’t breathe. I couldn’t scream. My whole body had become a single raw, bleeding nerve.

For eight years, I believed Tommy was my son. They told me my baby had died. That something was wrong with my womb and I’d never carry my own child again.

Fiona volunteered to be my surrogate.

“How could you do this to me? I loved you, Henry! I gave you everything!” The words left my mouth before I could control them.

I could feel the tears falling now.

“Don’t be dramatic, Kira. You were a pathetic, clingy, insecure heiress with more money than she knew how to handle. I should have done this a long time ago.”

“Henry…”

“You’re not coming with us tonight. And I wanted you to know exactly why. I have to admit, watching you struggle to feed us even after the apocalypse was corny to see. You were always available for anything—hunting, running to the pharmacy for drugs, scavenging…”

The drugs in my pockets rocked as I sniffled. I had risked my life again that night to get those drugs for Tommy.

“You really did your best for us. For Tommy. Just think of this as… one last sacrifice.” Henry smiled at me.

“You will pay for this. Either in this life or the next. I swear it!”

The words barely left my mouth before Fiona slapped me!

“Even now, you’re still cursing? Ha! You really are a miserable hag!” she snapped at me.

“Fiona…”

“Just shut the fuck up, Kira. You’re nothing. You can’t do anything. Die in peace, and pray the zombies do not leave enough of you to become like them…”

Henry gently stroked my hair. “Because I’d gladly kill you twice.”

He smiled. Tears fell from my eyes again.

But no words left my mouth.

Suddenly, a sound split the night.

The thumping of helicopter blades.

Searchlights swept across the rooftops.

The soldiers!

“Henry! Let’s go! They’re here!” Fiona yelled.

“One sec,” Henry said and pulled out some duct tape.

He cut off a large piece.

“N—no—” I shook my head.

“Hold her fucking head,” he said to Fiona, who held me in place. I screamed as Henry taped my mouth shut.

My screams melted into muffles.

“Yeah. That’s better,” he said.

But from the alleys came another sound, wet and dragging.

Groans.

Hundreds of them.

The horde was coming too.

“Henry, let’s go!”

Fiona grabbed his hand.

With one final smile, Henry said to me, “Thank you for being so stupid.”

He didn’t look back.

I watched them take a staircase and make a run for the rooftop.

A few seconds later, the helicopter rose into the sky.

The undead reached me before the sound faded.

They came all at once, a tide of rotting hands and broken teeth.

I felt the first bite tear into my shoulder.

And then came the weight, the crushing, relentless gnashing of a hundred hungry bodies.

I screamed until there was nothing left in me to scream with.

Finally, I blacked out.

⸻

“Kira! Are you fucking deaf?”

I gasped awake.

Sunlight spilling through the windows hit my face so brightly that I winced.

The smell of expensive perfume filled the air.

A pen was pressed into my fingers, and a thick stack of paper lay on a polished mahogany desk in front of me.

My hands were whole. No rope. No blood.

“I said sign it.” My mother-in-law, Victoria Zade, loomed over me in a silk blouse, her lips pinched with irritation.

“One million dollars. A loan. Use your grandmother’s estate as collateral. Henry’s company is drowning, and you’re sitting here staring like a stupid cow. Do you want your husband to go bankrupt?”

I blinked twice.

I remembered this day. This was before the apocalypse. Before the world descended into chaos.

Was this… oh God… had I been reborn?

My eyes drifted slowly to my left. Henry sat on the leather sofa with his legs crossed, handsome and gentle, wearing the same gentle look he’d worn nine years ago when he proposed to me.

“Kira, honey,” he said softly. “It’s just paperwork. Mom’s stressed. Please don’t make this harder.”

I looked at his hands. Those same hands that had tightened the rope around my wrists.

My nails dug into my palm so hard I nearly drew blood.

My eyes dropped to the date printed at the top of the contract, and my blood ran cold.

Forty-six days from today, the first outbreak report would flash across every screen in the city.

The world would end in a matter of hours. And no one would know how the Z-virus came to be.

In my last life, I signed this contract. Henry took the million and used every cent of it to clear a gambling debt I never even knew existed.

Then he left me to drown in the debt that followed. I had cried and even apologized to him when he got furious after I found out his secret.

Apologized.

I almost laughed.

“Kira!” Victoria snapped again. “Sign!”

“Maybe she needs a moment?” the bank manager said to Victoria, who scoffed.

I lifted my eyes and let them fill with tears.

The old Kira would have signed in a heartbeat.

The new me would put on a mask and wear it until the day I tore their throats out with it.

“M-Mom,” I whispered, my voice just small and wounded enough.

“I just… my head hurts. Could I read it first? I don’t understand the numbers. I’m scared.”

Victoria’s face twisted.

“Read it? What is there to read? You’ve never understood anything in your useless life!”

“Honey,” Henry said, rising to his feet. His smile was perfect. “Don’t be difficult. You trust me, don’t you?”

I smiled through my tears. “Of course I do.”

“Then sign the loan. I will handle the rest. I promise.” He took my hand and kissed it, tightening my grip on the pen so much that I felt his disgust seeping through him.

I lowered my gaze to the contract, buying time, already turning over how to slip out of this room without a single signature.

But nothing was coming to me. I needed help.

Urgently.

Ding!

A voice suddenly rang through my skull, clear and utterly unreal. A screen suddenly opened in my mind’s eye.

[CONGRATULATIONS! YOU HAVE RECEIVED THE INFINITE HOARDING SYSTEM!]

My pen froze above the page.

What?

[HOST SYNCHRONIZATION COMPLETE. RESCUING HOST IN 3…2…1…]

The room lurched.

The edges of the world went white.

My knees gave out beneath me, and as I fell, I saw Henry’s face above me.

His perfect smile had vanished.

For the first time in two lifetimes, my husband looked afraid.

Then the darkness swallowed me.