All Chapters of Reborn To Bury Them My Doomsday Fortress: Chapter 1 - Chapter 5

When your own family drains your blood to buy their way into the safe zone, waking up again is not a second chance at love. It is a loaded gun.The needle in Rosalie's arm was cold, but she hardly felt it. The numbness had already climbed past her elbows.The clinic room smelled of bleach and wet rust. Beyond the reinforced door, the Spore Fog scraped along the concrete with a soft, sticky sound, like a tongue dragged across a wall. In less than a month it had eaten three quarters of the city."Keep the line steady, Nicholas," a woman whispered. "The gate scanner checks cell density. If the blood is agitated, it may flag her."Rosalie dragged her eyes open. The fluorescent light split into two, then three. Beside her gurney sat Sera Parker in a clean white coat, her cheeks pink, her hair brushed. Nobody out here had cheeks like that anymore.For four years Rosalie had kept these people alive. She had traded her mother's jewelry for canned beans. She had stood between them and starving

Only a fool hears a quiet sky and calls it peace.Rosalie did not look away. The autumn wind pulled dark hair across her cheek, but she stood like a post driven into rock. Behind the mine gate, a crane groaned as it lowered steel plate off a flatbed. Between her and Xavier Knight, the noise seemed to drop out, and the space stretched tight as a bowstring."A lab report," Rosalie said. "And you came here with a piece of paper instead of a team of scientists. Either the report is weak, Commander, or you do not trust it enough to act on it."Xavier did not blink. His gray eyes had a stillness she remembered from her old life, the look of a man who had walked through bad places and learned to read faces in them."Ordinary people buy air scrubbers for mold," he said. He stepped off the road and stopped two feet from her, tall enough to block the afternoon sun. "They do not order forty thousand respirator filters, a pallet of blast doors, and enough water purifier to run a small town. That

A locked door only means something to the people who are outside it.Rain drummed on the windshield as Rosalie drove north through gray morning mist. Inside the SUV nobody spoke. Beside her, Xavier held a tablet showing live satellite feeds of the coast, where a dense, red tinted bank of fog hugged the edge of the sea."The weather bureau calls it warm front condensation," he said. His voice was low in the quiet cab. He enlarged a thermal map. "They are telling the public it will burn off by noon.""It will not." Rosalie kept both hands on the wheel. "It will sit in the low ground and soak into the soil. It will creep into the drains. By the time anyone figures out it is not water, the power grid will be rotting from the inside."He turned to study her profile. Rain light slid along her jaw. "You talk like someone who has already counted the bodies.""I have counted enough," she said softly. "I do not plan to be one."He did not ask the next question. He had spent a day deciding not t