All Chapters of Apocalypse: The World Ends Overnight : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

The first scream tore through the university cafeteria at exactly 8:17 a.m. I remember the time with perfect clarity because I’d been staring at the clock when the sound ripped the ordinary morning apart. One second I was half-listening to Mia complain about an assignment neither of us had finished. The next, a girl crashed through the double doors with enough force to rattle the glass in its frames.Her white shirt wasn’t white anymore. Blood soaked through it, dark and heavy, dripping onto the tile as she staggered forward and screamed a single word.“Run!”For three full seconds nobody moved. Then she collapsed, and a boy near the front rushed to her with the instinctive concern of someone who still believed the world worked the way it had that morning. The moment he touched her shoulder, she seized his wrist and sank her teeth into his forearm.His scream detonated the room.Tables went over. Someone shouted for security. Mia’s hand locked around mine with bruising force, and she

The warehouse doors exploded inward, and Mia seized my arm and shouted for the rear of the building. Adrian was already firing back through the doorway when one of the men outside shouted an order that made my stomach drop.“Take her alive!”“They want us alive,” I whispered.“They want me alive.” He corrected it without looking at me, closing his hand around mine and pulling me deeper into the warehouse, past stacks of boxes and skeletal machinery. “There’s another exit. I’ve been here before.”Of course he had. Nothing about this man had made sense since he’d appeared with a rifle and an expression that never revealed a single thing he was thinking — and now armed strangers were hunting us because of me, specifically.We reached a metal door onto a narrow alley. He fired covering shots into the dark behind us as Mia and I sprinted out. We turned corner after corner until my lungs burned, and Adrian dragged us both into a recessed doorway, hissing at us to stay quiet. Footsteps thund

I stood at the window long after the black car disappeared, the unknown message still glowing on my phone like a quiet accusation. Every instinct left over from the first life screamed that Damian Cross hadn’t appeared by chance. He knew. Somehow he already knew I was planning to survive what was coming, and the fact that he’d chosen to warn me instead of drag me away made the warning feel more dangerous than any threat could have.I locked the door, closed every curtain, and sat on the edge of my bed with the notebook open on my lap. Ninety days didn’t feel abstract anymore. It felt like a countdown written across my skin. I crossed out my first list and rewrote it with ruthless precision, ranking every item by how fast it would become impossible to find once the virus hit the news: food that wouldn’t spoil, water purification, antibiotics, a generator that could run on more than one fuel type, a location no one who knew my name would ever think to search.By mid-morning I’d moved ev

Ethan’s car sat across the street for almost ten minutes after I cut the intercom, his silhouette unmoving behind the windshield, and the not-knowing pressed harder against my chest than any fight we’d ever had in the first life.“He’ll come back,” Damian said, not looking away from the window. “Men like him don’t take closed doors well. Especially from a woman who used to open every one of them without question.”I didn’t answer. The version of me who used to soften every conflict was dead. The man downstairs hadn’t figured that out yet.Then the headlights across the street cut off.Damian’s whole body changed — shoulders dropping into something coiled and ready, hand already moving toward the weapon under his jacket. “That’s not him leaving.”“What—”“Get down.” He said it low and hard, already pulling me sideways away from the window as the glass starred and cracked, a single round punching through the curtain and burying itself in the wall a foot from where I’d been standing. I h

I left before sunrise, phone dead in a Faraday pouch at the bottom of a rented locker, and spent the morning doubling back through streets I didn’t need, because every open signal now felt like an invitation to be found. The hospital was gone as an option. I needed a replacement, and I had exactly one memory to work from — a water treatment facility on the northern edge of the industrial district where, three weeks after the outbreak in a life that no longer existed, a handful of survivors had lasted longer than anyone expected before it was overrun.I found it by mid-morning. Thick concrete, a filtration system that still limped along, a service tunnel that opened well clear of the main roads. I was crouched behind a rusted fence section clocking the second broken camera when a work van rolled slow along the perimeter road, no markings, windows tinted, moving at a pace that had nothing to do with actually going anywhere.I went still and let it pass, heart hard in my throat, counting