LOGIN"Zinnia Vexley, sit down right now before I have my guards strap you to a stretcher and ship you directly to the military psychiatric ward!" General Octavian Vexley roars, slamming both massive fists onto his polished mahogany desk hard enough to make his brass medal display rattle.I don't sit down. Instead, I march straight into his high-security military office, kick off my soot-covered leather boots onto his pristine Persian rug, and flop aggressively onto his leather sofa."Uncle Octavian, please! I didn't come to your top-secret headquarters to get a lecture on mental health!" I yell back, waving my torn jacket sleeve in his face. "Look at this coat! This isn't fashionably distressed denim! This is literally ripped by a three-hundred-pound zombie in a torn Santa hat who tried to eat my face in the year 2046!"Octavian rubs his temples violently, letting out a long, exhausted groan. "Zinnia, listen to yourself! The police called me thirty minutes ago! They found your car parked t
SWOOSH!The blinding column of white light dissolves so fast my eyes practically pop out of their sockets, and I hit the floor with a heavy THUD.Instead of ice-crusted asphalt or burnt supermarket linoleum, my cheek presses squarely against the plush Persian rug inside Dorian’s living room. The warm scent of vanilla candles and roasted pine nuts fills my nose.The roaring fireplace is still crackling softly, popping a tiny ember onto the hearth like nothing ever happened.I sit up instantly, gasping for air and waving my arms wildly in front of my face. "Don't bite me! I have ten thousand volts and zero tolerance for holiday carnivores!"Silence greets me.No snarling corpses. No howling arctic wind. No crying survivors holding frying pans.I glance down at my wrists. The dark soot stains, the torn leather jacket sleeve where the zombie claw snapped at me, and the deep, angry red scrapes on my elbows from falling through the storage room door are all still right there."Wait a second.
"Oh, marvelous! Keep banging on the glass, you dead holiday shoppers, because I am totally in the mood to practice my brand-new weightlifting skills on your rotten faces!" I shout, bursting out of the dark supermarket storage room with a jagged steel shelf leg in my right hand and a serrated butcher knife in my left.Outside the shattered storefront shutters, the giant mall atrium looks like an angry swarm of ants just kicked over a hornets' nest. Dozens of grey-skinned zombies in torn winter coats, dirty Santa hats, and blood-stained holiday sweaters are pouring through the broken revolving doors, groaning like a broken lawnmower choir as they shuffle straight toward the supermarket aisles."Help! Somebody help us! Behind the deli counter!" a frantic voice yells from the far left corner of the store,followed immediately by the loud, metallic CLANG of a heavy frying pan hitting something very hard.I spin around so fast my ponytail slaps me across the cheek. Tucked behind a tall glass
BANG! CRASH!The heavy steel storage door finally gives up the ghost, bursting inward off its rusted hinges as the six-foot shelving unit packed with canned pumpkin puree topples sideways across the concrete floor like a timbered redwood."Oh, marvelous! Welcome to Zinnia’s House of Pain, please wipe your rotting feet on the canned squash before attempting to eat my face!" I yell at the top of my lungs, vaulting onto an overturned wooden pallet while gripping my ten-inch serrated chef’s knife with both white-knuckled hands.Three rotting zombies tumble into the cramped storage room in a tangled heap of torn winter coats, blackened fingernails, and holiday tinsel. The nearest one—a gaunt, grey-skinned man wearing a crooked plastic reindeer headband and a blood-soaked supermarket apron—scrambles upright first, lunging straight at my shins with a wet, rattling hiss."Back off, Rudolph, your nose isn't red—that’s just dried arterial spray!" I shout, swinging my chef’s knife in a wild hori
"Move your rotting ankles, you holiday-themed rejects, because I am not dying inside an abandoned shopping mall dressed in cashmere boots!" I shout over my shoulder, sprinting full-tilt down the snow-dusted central atrium while half a dozen snarling corpses scramble clumsily over overturned decorative sleighs behind me.The shattered revolving doors of the Grand Starlight Mall slam violently against their rusted frames as I barrel inside, kicking up a cloud of grey dust and yellowed wrapping paper. Ahead of me stretches a cavernous,multi-story monument to dead capitalism, draped in tattered red velvet ribbons, collapsed inflatable snowmen,and giant plastic candy canes snapped in half like bone fragments."Hello?! Security?! Mall Santa?! Literally anyone with a pulse and a blunt object?!" I holler into the echoing gloom, vaulting smoothly over a fallen information kiosk and sprinting toward the glowing green exit sign flickering weakly at the far end of the concourse.Silence answers m
[CHRONOS CHRISTMAS SYSTEM ACTIVATED. INITIATING EMERGENCY TEMPORAL DISPLACEMENT: PLUS TWENTY YEARS.]A blinding sphere of electric-blue light detonates around my body just as the burning warehouse roof caves inward, swallowing the roaring flames whole and hurling me sideways through an invisible tunnel of freezing static. My stomach lurches violently as gravity flips upside down three times in a row, and an instant later, I slam face-first into a three-foot drift of dirty, ice-crusted snow."Gah! Cold! Freezing! What in the name of—cough, cough—where did the fire go?!" I gasp, scrambling up onto my knees and spitting freezing grey slush out of my mouth while slapping snow off my singed wool coat.Around me, the roaring warehouse inferno has vanished completely. Instead, I am kneeling in the middle of a shattered, snow-buried six-lane avenue lined with half-collapsed skyscrapers whose broken windows yawn like jagged black teeth against a bruised, slate-grey sky. Shredded red-and-green







