Reborn50 Days Before The Apocalypse Now; My Ex Begs For Food

Chapter One

"You good-for-nothing woman!"

The voice cracked through the room like a whip. "You're still asleep? How dare you?"

Sharon jolted upright, gasping as though she had surfaced from deep water. Her heart hammered against her ribs. For a moment she couldn't tell whether the sound in her ears was her own breathing or the echo of the screaming that had filled her final moments.

She turned slowly. Her so-called husband stood right beside the bed, shaking with rage. He was the one man she had loved and sacrificed everything for.

Her hands moved on their own, from her neck to her head, then down her arms and legs. There was no torn flesh and no blood. There was not a single wound. Her skin was warm and whole.

I'm alive.

Sharon ignored Michael and his rambling. Her eyes drifted to the calendar hanging beside the bed, and her breath caught. A red circle marked the date, fifty days away: her house-opening ceremony.

The memory struck her all at once. The glass doors shattering. The guests screaming as the dead poured through the garden gate. The cold, rotting hands dragging her down by the ankle while she reached for her husband.

And Michael had looked at her. He had truly looked at her, then turned around and pulled Vivian into his arms. "Don't be afraid, I've got you," he had told her best friend, right in front of Sharon, before he ran and left her to be devoured.

She had been given a second chance. She had been reborn to prepare for what was coming, and this time there would be no looking back.

She lifted her gaze and studied Michael carefully, as if seeing him for the first time. The sagging confidence, the cruel mouth, the small, selfish eyes. How blind she had been.

"I'm talking to you and you're staring at me?" Michael snapped. "Bow your head, you bow-legged idiot."

Sharon did not look away.

"Look at that. You've grown balls." He let out a bitter laugh. "When I talk to you, you stare me straight in the eyes, is that it?"

Before she could answer, his palm cracked across her cheek.

The sting spread hot across her face, but Sharon felt nothing close to the old fear. In her last life, that slap would have made her cry and apologize for something she hadn't done. Now it only cleared her head.

She stood up quietly from the bed. Her fingers curled into a tight fist, and she drove it into Michael's cheek with everything she had.

He stumbled back, stunned. A thin line of blood trickled from the corner of his mouth.

"You bitch!" he screamed, wiping it with the back of his hand. "Have you lost your mind?"

Sharon said nothing. She turned back to the calendar, her eyes moving over the circled date again and again.

"I have no time left," she whispered.

"What? What are you mumbling about? Are you stupid?"

She brushed past him and headed for the door. Her mind was already racing: food, water, fuel, medicine, steel for the gates, a way to move the money before he could touch it. Fifty days was not much, but it was enough if she never wasted another hour on this man.

"Sharon!" Michael lunged and caught her wrist. "Where do you think you're going? You're walking out on me? Today I will teach you a lesson you'll never forget!"

He let go to tear open his belt buckle. The leather slid free with a hiss, and he folded it in his fist, smiling coldly. "Maybe I've been too gentle with you all these years."

Gentle.Sharon almost laughed. She remembered every bruise she had hidden under long sleeves, every excuse she had made to her family, every night she had cried silently into her pillow so he wouldn't hear and get angry again.

When the belt rose, she caught his right wrist in an iron grip. Her other hand wrenched the belt out of his fingers.

Michael's eyes widened. "What are you...?"

The belt came down across his shoulder with a sharp crack. He yelped and stumbled back, clutching himself in disbelief.

"Please, stop! What has gotten into you?"

"What has gotten into me?" Sharon's voice was calm, which made it far more frightening than shouting. She struck him again, then again, each lash falling on the exact spot where he had once marked her. "Is that what you want to know?"

Michael cowered against the dresser, his arm raised over his face. The man who had towered over her for years suddenly looked small.

"You ungrateful, wicked monster," she said. "I tolerated you for years. I told myself you would change, that one day you would become the Michael I fell in love with. And what did you do? You chose her over me. You chose my own best friend."

Her voice trembled for the first time, not from fear but from the weight of a death she alone remembered.

"You took everything that belonged to me and handed it to that woman. You stood there and watched while I..." She swallowed the words. He would never understand them, not in this life. "Today, I'm the one teaching you a lesson."

The belt fell once more. Michael whimpered, sliding down to the floor.

Sharon drew a long, steady breath and tossed the belt at his feet. It landed with a dull thud. Silence settled over the bedroom, broken only by his ragged panting and the ticking of the clock on the wall, counting down the days she had left.

She crouched in front of him, her eyes cold and clear.

"Let me explain it to you, dumbass. I, Sharon, am no longer your disregarded pet or your slave."

Michael stared at her, lips trembling, unable to form a single word.

She rose to her full height and looked down at him without a trace of the love that had once blinded her.

"I want a divorce.”