Thirty Days To Doomsday:My Cheating Ex Begs At My Vault Door

The stairwell door was eleven inches from my fingertips when my husband turned the lock.

"Lorcan!" My voice cracked. "Lorcan, open it! They're right behind me!"

Through the narrow wire-glass window, I saw his face. Sweat, dirt, a cut across his eyebrow. He looked at me the way you look at a stranger on the other side of a street.

Behind him stood Perpetua Sloane, my best friend of fifteen years, holding his arm with both hands. She was wearing my red scarf.

"Oh, come on," Pia said softly. She was not even whispering. "Do we really have to watch?"

"Don't look," Lorcan told her, and pulled her head against his shoulder. Gentle. He had not touched me that gently in two years.

I hammered on the glass. "I gave you everything! Open the door!"

"That's exactly the problem, Odalys," he said. His voice came muffled through the steel. "You gave me everything. And there's nothing left I need from you."

Then I understood.

Not all at once. It came in pieces, like a dropped plate. The late nights at "the office." The ten million dollars my grandmother left me, which I had wired into his startup without asking a single question, because I trusted him. The startup that never seemed to launch. Pia's new apartment. Pia's new car. Pia's new diamond bracelet that she swore was a gift from an "admirer."

"How long?" I whispered.

Pia lifted her head from his shoulder and, for the first time, she smiled at me. "Since your wedding, honestly. You were such a beautiful bride. It was hard not to laugh."

The groan came from behind me.

I had been hearing that sound for three days, in the streets, in the lobby, down the elevator shaft. A wet, dragging rattle, like something that had forgotten how to breathe. The infected. That was what the news had called them, right before the news stopped. The infected. As if it were a cold. As if they were still people.

I turned around.

They were climbing the stairs, slow and jerking and endless. Eight. Ten. More behind them, filling the stairwell wall to wall. A woman in a torn nurse's uniform led the pack, her jaw hanging loose and wrong, her eyes clouded white like boiled eggs. Dried blood ran black from her chin to her collar. Yesterday she had been someone's colleague. Someone's friend. Now she came up on broken ankles with a terrible, patient hunger, and she was looking only at me.

The smell reached me next. Rot, and copper, and something sickly sweet.

"Lorcan!" I spun back to the glass. My voice had gone high and thin. "Lorcan, please! They're here! They're here!"

"Don't look," he told Pia, and turned her face into his shoulder.

I have never hated anything as much as I hate that I begged. But I did. I pressed my palms flat against the door and begged. "I'll give you anything! I'll sign anything! Please, please, please!"

He did not answer. He took Pia's hand, and the two of them walked up the stairs toward the roof, toward the helicopter he had bought a seat on with my grandmother's money.

Behind me, the groaning stopped.

That was somehow the worst part. The silence. The hush of many things drawing in a breath they did not need.

Cold fingers closed around my ankle.

I screamed and kicked. My heel hit something soft that gave way like rotten fruit, and it did not matter, because there were more hands, and more, dragging at my jacket, my hair, my arms. I was pulled down onto the concrete. The nurse's face swung over mine, close enough that I saw the black threads of veins under her skin, and her mouth opened wider than a mouth should.

Her teeth went into my calf first.

Pain is a small word. I don't have a bigger one. It came in white waves, shoulder, thigh, throat, and I heard my own voice climb until it stopped being a voice at all. Something wet and warm ran down my neck. I clawed toward the door with one hand, toward the wire glass and the empty landing above it, and I thought, absurdly, They didn't even look back.

They had not even looked back.

I will remember, I thought, while the dark came up over me like water. If there is anything after this, I will remember every second of it. Every word. Every smile.

I will remember the door.

Air.

Cold, clean, ordinary air, and the smell of lavender detergent.

I gasped so hard I choked, and I sat bolt upright, both hands clawing at my leg. My leg. My whole, unbitten, perfectly smooth leg, in soft gray pajama pants.

Sunlight fell across a white duvet. A ceiling fan turned lazily above me. On the nightstand, my phone buzzed, and buzzed, and buzzed.

I stared at it. I was shaking so badly that it took me three tries to pick it up.

The screen lit up with a date.

Tuesday, March 4th.

I knew that date. I had lived through that date, and I had lived through the day the world ended. Thirty days after March 4th was April 3rd, the morning the first infected man bit a paramedic outside St. Aldous Hospital. The morning the city stopped being a city.

I had thirty days.

I dragged myself into the bathroom and gripped the sink. The woman in the mirror was thirty-one, clean-faced, alive, with a slightly crooked part in her hair and dark circles from too many nights spent waiting for a husband who was never coming home. Her eyes were wide and glassy.

I touched my throat. I touched my cheek. I laughed once, a cracked sound, and then I put my hand over my mouth because I was afraid that if I started laughing, I would never stop.

"I'm alive," I told the mirror. "I'm alive. I'm alive."

I sat down on the edge of the tub and made myself think, the way I had never been able to think in that stairwell.

Thirty days. A city of millions of people who did not know they were already standing in a graveyard. A husband who did not know I had watched him lock a door on me. A best friend who still thought I was stupid.

And me, holding the one thing nobody else on earth had. Knowledge. I knew which stores emptied first. I knew which roads clogged. I knew that the water failed on day nine and the power on day eleven, and I knew what happened to the people who had trusted the government to tell them the truth.

I had died with nothing, because I had trusted the wrong people with everything.

I would not make that mistake twice.

My phone buzzed again on the counter. I picked it up and this time I looked at the notifications.

Three messages from my bank. One from my aunt Ilsabet. And one from Pia, sent eleven minutes ago.

Pia: Morning babe!! Lorcan told me you're flying out to Ilsabet's tonight, so let's do a big dinner tomorrow?? I miss you so much, you're my everything.

I read it once. Then I read it again.

My best friend. My everything.

The tremble in my hands stopped. It stopped all at once, as if a switch had been thrown, and what came up in its place was so cold and so clear that it frightened me a little. It was not rage. Rage is hot. This was something else. This was patience.

I opened the bank notifications.

SCHEDULED TRANSFER: $10,000,000.00 to VALE FUTURES LLC. Authorization required by 10:00 AM today.

There it was. Grandmother Rennick's whole life, sitting in a little gray box, waiting for my thumb.

In my last life, I had pressed approve at 9:52 that morning. Kissed my husband goodbye. Told him I was so proud of him.

I set the phone down on the marble counter, very gently, and looked at myself in the mirror again.

"Not this time," I said.

Then I smiled. It did not feel like my old smile. It felt like a door, opening the other way.