All Chapters of THE APOCALYPSE SYSTEM : Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

*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

*DAY 01*"Emma!"I came up out of sleep like I'd been yanked by the hair, already sitting, one hand flat against my chest. My heart was going so hard I could feel it in my teeth. For a few seconds I forgot how breathing worked.Pink curtains.That was the first thing. Pink curtains, faded along the fold where the sun hit them every afternoon, with that one hem I'd never finished stitching because I'd gotten bored in the ninth grade.Behind them, soft gray morning. Next to the bed, the wardrobe with the sticky left door. The little table under the window. My desk, still buried in old notebooks and a mug of pens I'd stolen from three different banks.I knew this room. I hadn't slept in it for two years.This isn't the apartment. My brain kept circling that like a dog that can't settle. No brown stains on the plaster. No boards nailed over the windows. No gouges in the door where something had spent a whole night trying to get through it. And no smell.That was the part that got me. Noth

I took the stairs slowly, one hand on the rail, because I didn't trust my legs. The smell of onions and butter got stronger with every step, and by the time I reached the bottom my eyes were already stinging. Mom was at the stove with her back to me, wearing the green apron with the burn mark on the pocket. She was humming off key like always, flipping a pancake with a fork because she could never find the spatula. I stood in the doorway and just looked at her. The last time I saw her, there had been screaming and smoke and no time to say anything at all. Dad was at the table with the newspaper held up in front of his face, his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead where he'd forget them for an hour. Lily sat across from him picking blueberries out of a bowl, one at a time, like nothing in the world could ever go wrong. "There she is," Dad said, lowering the paper. "Sleeping Beauty. We were about to send a search party." I didn't answer. I crossed the kitchen in four steps and

I took the pen. My fingers were steady, and I couldn't believe it. Two years of fear had taught me how to keep my hands still while my whole body screamed, and I had never been more grateful for a skill I wished I'd never learned. "Thirty-one thousand," I said softly, and let my eyes go wide and a little scared, the way the old Emma would have done. "Daniel, that's everything I have. Every single dollar." "I know, I know." He leaned in, squeezing my free hand across the table. His palm was damp and I fought the urge to pull away. "That's why it matters. It shows we're serious about our future. Marcus says the returns could triple in six months." "Triple?" I put a hand to my chest. "Wow. That sounds amazing." His shoulders relaxed. I saw it happen, the tiny drop of tension, the smile growing into something greedy and warm. *He thinks he has me.* My stomach rolled, but I kept going. "But my dad would kill me if I signed something without reading it first," I said, and gave a nervou

My heart was pounding, but my feet were steady. I came down the stairs one step at a time, with the blue folder held against my chest, and I made sure Daniel could watch every second of it. Mom stood frozen by the coat rack, one hand pressed to her mouth. Dad had come out of the kitchen and stopped beside her, his jaw set like stone, and I felt something warm settle at my back. *I'm not alone this time.* "Good morning, Daniel," I said, as sweetly as I could. "You're up early." "Don't play games with me." His voice shook with anger. "Where's the money, Emma? The transfer bounced. Marcus has been waiting for it since nine, and now he's standing in your house looking like an idiot." "What transfer?" His mouth opened, then shut. For one second he looked like a man who'd stepped on a stair that wasn't there, and I almost smiled. "The investment," he said slowly. "The one you agreed to. You promised, Emma. You said you'd sign." "I said I'd think about it. And I did." I tilted my head