The Day Before The End

Ara POV:

"Ara? Ara, wake up already!"

She shot upright, gasping for air.

Her hands flew to her throat first. Then her arms. Then her face. She noticed there were no bites, no blood, and no open wounds oozing something dark and wrong. She pressed both palms flat against her chest and felt her heartbeat slamming back at her, fast and panicked and alive.

She was alive.

"What the…."

She couldn't finish the sentence. Her lungs weren't working right. She kept pulling in air like she'd forgotten how to do it properly, each breath shallow, her whole body still braced for a smell that wasn't there. No rot. No chemicals burning the back of her throat. No blood soaking the air until it tasted like copper.

It was just her apartment. Her room. The morning light cutting through the curtains like nothing had happened.

Ara pressed her fists into her eyes and held them there.

It was a dream. It had to be a dream.

But the moment she lowered her hands and looked around, her stomach dropped. Because she knew this room. She knew exactly where that crack in the ceiling was, and which corner of her desk was chipped. She had lived in this apartment for two years before everything collapsed. Before the streets turned into graveyards and the air turned into poison.

Before Ryan left her to die.

She grabbed her phone off the nightstand and stared at the screen.

The date blinked back at her. She couldn't believe her eyes.

Ten days. She had gone back to the past, just ten days before the apocalypse started.

Ara sat there for a long moment, not moving. The memories were too sharp to be a dream. She could still feel the river closing over her head. Still feel the cold. Still hear Ryan's voice, flat and unbothered, telling her she wasn't worth keeping alive. Dreams didn't feel like that. Dreams faded at the edges of the mind. This didn't.

She was out of bed before she'd made a conscious decision to move.

"Okay," she said out loud, to no one. Just to hear her own voice. "Okay."

She needed to see it for herself.

Ryan's building was a twenty-minute walk.

She didn't knock when she reached. She knew the door code, had known it for two years, so she punched it in and pushed the door open before she could talk herself out of it.

The living room smelled like actual food, not the canned scraps she'd gotten used to rationing out over five years. His mother was in the kitchen. His sister was on the couch with her feet tucked under her. Nobody looked up when Ara walked in.

Nobody looked surprised, either.

That was the part that hit her sideways. Not the fact that Elena was there. Not the fact that Elena was wearing one of Ryan's shirts and her hair was still undone from sleep, her bare legs stretched across the couch like she belonged there. What hit Ara was how normal everyone looked. How comfortable. Like this wasn't new. Like it had been this way for a while.

"Ara." Ryan appeared in the hallway doorway, and the look on his face wasn't guilty. It was annoyed. "Why didn't you text first?"

"I didn't know I needed to," she said.

"You could've called…"

"Ryan." Her voice came out quieter than she intended but steadier too. "How long?"

He blinked, shifted his weight, and ran a hand through his hair the same way he always did when he was stalling.

"How long what?"

"You know what I'm asking."

Elena uncurled from the couch slowly. She didn't look embarrassed. She looked bored, which was somehow worse. She picked up her mug and took a sip, watching Ara over the rim.

"It's not what it looks like," Ryan started.

"Stop." Ara held up one hand. She was surprised by how steady it was. "Don't. I'm not doing this with you."

"Ara, listen to me—"

"I said stop." She looked at him for a long moment. At his face, which she had convinced herself she loved. At the way he was already gearing up to explain, to reframe, to make her feel like the problem. She had spent two years doing the mental gymnastics required to stay in love with someone who treated her like an afterthought. She had starved for him. She had bled for him. She had stood at the edge of a toxic river with zombie bites on her arm.

She was done.

"We're done," she said simply. "Don't look for me."

"Are you serious right now?" Ryan let out a short, disbelieving laugh. "Ara, come on. You're overreacting."

"Bye, Ryan."

She turned and walked back toward the door.

"You'll come back," he called after her. His voice had gone harder, mean in that way it got when he felt like he was losing control of something. "You always do. You have no one else."

She didn't answer. She walked out and let the door fall shut behind her.

She made it to the stairwell before she had to stop and press her back against the wall and breathe.

It hurt. She had told herself it wouldn't, but it did. She wasn't crying over him. She was crying over the version of herself that had spent two years making excuses for someone who was never going to deserve them. She wiped her face with the back of her hand and stood up straight.

Enough. She had ten days and she wasn't going to waste them falling apart in a stairwell.

* * *

The city border was on the east side of Telenburgh. She had clocked it before, back in her first life, as a potential escape route that never panned out. The military had it locked down, but she knew a gap in the fence line

If she could get through there before anyone noticed, she could be out of the city in under an hour.

She had her backpack on her shoulder and three days' worth of supplies stuffed inside it. Not much, but enough to get her somewhere safe before the outbreak hit. She didn't need a plan. She just needed to be outside the walls when everything started.

She found the gap in the fence and crouched down in front of it.

"Okay," she murmured. "Okay, let's go."

She pushed her bag through first, then started to follow.

And then every cell in her body locked up at once.

It wasn't pain exactly. It was more like her lungs simply stopped mid-breath. Like someone had reached inside her chest and pressed pause on everything at once. She jerked back from the fence instinctively and gasped, and just like that, the sensation released.

She stood there, panting, staring at the gap in the fence.

"What was that," she breathed.

She tried again. One hand, reaching through the gap. The moment her arm crossed the boundary, the same thing happened. A sudden, total cessation, like a warning shot.

She yanked her arm back.

And then she heard a mechanical voice.

"Player 001 detected."

Ara spun around, but nobody was there. Just the empty lot behind her, and the empty background.

"Who's there?" she called out.

It said nothing.

"LUS online."

The voice was coming from inside her head. Mechanical and flat, not quite human, but not quite like anything else she'd ever heard either. She pressed her palms against her ears. The voice didn't get quieter.

"Get out," she said through her teeth. "Get out of my head."

"Second chance protocol initiated."

Her breathing went uneven. She backed away from the fence, her eyes darting across the lot like she could find whoever was doing this, like she could make it make sense. There was no one. There was never going to be anyone. She knew that, somewhere underneath the panic. She just wasn't ready to accept what it meant.

"Warning: Attempting to leave the designated zone will result in immediate termination."

As if to make the point, a row of glowing text materialized directly in front of her eyes. It was just floating in the air like the world had decided physics was optional.

Her bag slipped off her shoulder and hit the ground.

She stared at the words. She read them three times.

Then the voice came one more time, steady and indifferent and completely impossible.

"Do you accept your first mission?”