Lahat ng Kabanata ng REBORN IN THE APOCALYPSE, CLAIMED BY THE COMMANDER : Kabanata 1 - Kabanata 6

The first thing Emilia Anderson heard on the forty third day of the apocalypse was her fiancé telling a stranger exactly where to find her.She was already running when it happened, her boots slipping on ash slick asphalt, her lungs burning with every breath, and the scream that tore across Ashgrove Bridge was not coming from a Hollow this time. It came from the crowd at the stronghold gate, fifty desperate survivors who had just realized the guards were not opening the steel doors to let them in. The guards were opening fire.Emilia dove behind a collapsed bus as bullets shattered the windshield above her head. Glass rained across her shoulders like cold hail. She pressed her cheek to the rusted metal and made herself count to three, the way she had trained herself to do whenever panic tried to swallow her whole, and on the count of three she lifted her eyes to the wall above the gate.Daniel stood there in a clean gray jacket she had never seen before. Joss stood pressed against his

Emilia read the message a third time, and the words did not change, which was the only reason she did not throw the phone out of the window.Only two people in the world should have known about the bridge, and one of them was dead in a version of time that no longer existed. She thought of Daniel's smiling face on the wall and Joss's fingers curled around his arm, and she knew with a bitter certainty that anyone who remembered the same night could be either her salvation or her next betrayal. The trouble was that she had no way of telling which.The blue panel flickered in the corner of her vision.Time remaining until the Red Event, 47 minutes. Suggested location: unknown. Probability of survival at current position, 31 percent.Thirty one percent was a number she could not argue with. Her apartment sat in the middle of a dense district full of panicking strangers, and in her first life it had been overrun within the first hour. If she stayed, she would die again, and she had no inte

The headlights swept over the basement wall and stopped, and the engine outside cut off with a cough that sounded far too confident for a world that was ending.Emilia pressed herself against the cold stone beneath the narrow window, where only a strip of the courtyard was visible, and she watched a black armored truck settle in the gravel with its beams pointed at the observatory doors. The Hollows had already turned toward it, dozens of pale shapes dragging themselves away from the entrance with that wet clicking rasp, drawn by the light and the noise like moths toward a lantern.The truck doors opened. Two armed men in the stronghold's gray uniforms stepped out first and fanned across the courtyard, firing short, disciplined bursts that dropped the nearest Hollows to the gravel. Behind them Daniel climbed down from the passenger side with his jacket buttoned to the throat, one hand lifted to shield his eyes from the red glare of the sky, and Joss followed him with her blond hair ti