THE APOCALYPSE SYSTEM

*DAY 29*

Twenty-nine days in this apartment, and the thing I couldn't stop thinking about was how everything went into chaos.

I stared at the dull metal knife I'd been meaning to sharpen since last week. I had a whetstone somewhere, buried in the junk drawer under the dead batteries and the takeout menus nobody would ever call again.

Now I was standing in the kitchen holding a blade that couldn't cut a tomato, and the door slammed open hard enough to rattle the pictures on the wall.

"Emma!"

I spun around so fast I nearly dropped it.

Lily was in the doorway, bent over with her hands on her knees, dragging in air like she'd run the whole building. Her face was the color of old paper. There was blood on her cheek, a long smear of it, and I didn't ask whose.

"They're coming," she said. "Up the stairs. Emma, they're right there."

"How many?" I asked, my gaze furrowing slightly.

"I don't know. A lot. I stopped counting." Her voice cracked in the middle and her eyes went shiny. "Are we going to die?"

I dropped the knife I was holding and rushed towards her.

"No." It came out sharper than I meant it to. "Hey. Look at me. I'm getting us out of here."

I could already hear them. Not close yet, but the sound carried through the whole building, that wet, rasping growl they made, and under it something worse: nails dragging along concrete. Scritch, scritch, scritch. Like a dog that wants in.

Two years of this. Two years since the red rain came down on a Thursday afternoon, so pretty at first that people stood in the street with their phones up, filming it, and then an hour later those same people were biting each other.

At first, it all felt like a show. A Hollywood movie that was going to stop once the director shouted.

"Cut!"

I'd watched a city burn from a rooftop. I'd watched a man beat another man to death over a case of bottled water, and then sit down on the curb and cry about it. I'd watched a little boy in a dinosaur raincoat stand in the road screaming for a mother who was never going to come.

And I was still here. Not because I was tough, or smart. I'd just been lucky, and I'd picked the right people to stay close to.

Or I thought I had.

"Emma." Lily grabbed my sleeve. "We have to go. Now."

"We can't."

She stared at me. "What do you mean we can't?"

I turned back to the table. The map was spread out under the lamp, held down at the corners with a coffee mug and three cans of beans, and I'd been looking at it for an hour like it might change if I was patient enough.

"They're on seven, and we're on five. They'll sweep down floor by floor. The main stairs are choked from the lobby up, I saw it this morning. Anything on this side of the building is going to run straight into them."

"The fire exit, then." She jabbed a finger at the red square on the map. "Back stairs."

"There's a crowd at the bottom. Twenty, maybe more. I counted from the window." I shook my head. "We'd be dead before we hit the second landing."

Lily didn't say anything. Down the hall, something crashed, and we both flinched.

I looked at what we had. Three bottles of water, half a loaf of bread going stiff in its bag and two cans of beans, since I'd just used the third as a paperweight, which tells you how tired I was.

And one dull knife.

That was the whole inventory of our lives.

We had to wait for Daniel. That was the plan, the only plan. He'd gone out three days ago saying he'd heard a rumor about a sanctuary on the east side, some place with walls and a generator, and that he'd be back before we ran out of bread.

The bread was nearly gone and he wasn't back.

"Stay behind me," I said. "Whatever happens, you don't leave my side. Do you hear me?"

Lily nodded.

She was nineteen and she still looked about twelve when she was scared. I'd always looked out for her. Even before, when it was just homework and bad boyfriends.

After our parents died in the first wave, it was just the two of us, and I'd told myself I would burn the world down before I let anything happen to her. I meant it. I'd have died for her without even stopping to think.

That's what makes the next part so hard.

Something slammed into the front door. Lily grabbed both my arms. Another slam, and the whole frame shuddered.

"Emma! Emma, open up!"

I knew that voice. I'd have known it in my sleep.

"Daniel?"

My boyfriend.

Two years we'd been doing this together, sleeping in shifts, splitting the last granola bar down the middle. All the breath went out of me and I was across the room before I'd decided to move.

"Don't!" Lily dug her nails into my wrist. "How do you know it's him? What if he got bitten?"

"It's Daniel. He's out there because of us, Lily. Remember?"

The door shook again. "Emma! Hurry, for God's sake!"

I pulled free and turned the lock.

He had me by the wrist before the door was fully open. His jacket was torn at the shoulder and he smelled like smoke and sweat.

"Run. Right now, it's crawling out there, we have to move. We are not safe here anymore."

"Did you find it? The sanctuary?" I asked.

"There's no time!"

He dragged me out into the hall while Lily's footsteps scrambled after us. And I didn't ask a single other question, and I want to be clear that this was the first mistake.

Not the last, but the first.

The fire door at the end of the hall banged open under his shoulder. Behind it was the stairwell, and just across the landing, the old service elevator, the one he'd rewired last month with a car battery and a lot of swearing.

He shoved me through the door and I stumbled onto the landing, caught my foot on the top step, and went into the railing hard enough that white light flashed behind my eyes.

My elbow screamed.

"Daniel, where are we going? What is going on?" I asked.

He didn't answer. He wasn't even looking at me.

"Daniel," I called again.

His hand left mine. That's when I noticed he'd let go, not that he'd dropped me. There was a difference, and my body understood it before my brain did.

Then he reached back, took Lily by the hand, and pulled her into the elevator.

The gate rattled shut and the lock clicked.

For a second I honestly thought it was a joke. One of his stupid jokes, the kind he made when I'd been too quiet for too long, scare her half to death and then laugh about it. I even started to smile, God help me.

Then Lily turned and put both arms around his neck and kissed him.