DAY ZERO

Brown eyes

"So how'd you survive?!"

That was Eli. Obviously.

Old David had barely finished the sentence — well, I'm sitting here, aren't I — and Eli was already on his feet, completely abandoning any pretense of bedtime energy.

"Did you grab something?" Theo was up too now. "Like a branch or something?"

"Maybe he landed in water," Amara offered, though she was leaning forward just as badly as the rest of them.

"Or maybe—" Eli's eyes went wide. "Maybe he landed like a superhero. Like feet first. BOOM." He demonstrated on the porch, landing from a six inch jump with both feet, nearly spilling Amara's soup.

"Eli—"

"What! It could've happened!"

Old David watched them with the quiet amusement of someone who had lived long enough to find almost everything funny. He waited for the noise to settle. Then he looked up.

He pointed at the clock on the wall.

The grandchildren looked.

Looked back at him.

"No," Amara said flatly.

"Bedtime," David said.

The sound they made. All four of them. A collective groan so theatrical it probably woke the neighbours.

"Grandpa you CANNOT leave it there—"

"I just did."

"That's not FAIR—"

"Eli get off the railing—"

"But the CLIFF—"

David held up one hand and they went quiet. Not because he was stern — he wasn't. But seventy years of knowing exactly when to stop talking had given him a stillness that rooms tended to respect.

"You want to hear everything," he said. "Every single bit of it. Yes?"

Four heads nodded.

"Then sleep." He settled back in his chair. "Good girls and boys hear the rest. That's the deal."

They grumbled. They negotiated briefly and unsuccessfully. They went inside.

The next morning David was barely out of his bedroom before they found him.

He had made it approximately four steps down the hallway, slippers on, cup of tea not yet in hand, eyes not fully open, when he rounded the corner and found all four of them sitting in a neat row on the corridor floor like they'd been there for hours.

Which, based on Naza's expression from the kitchen doorway, they had.

"Morning Grandpa," they said. Almost in unison. Angelically.

David stared at them.

He went and made his tea.

They followed him to the porch. Settled into their spots with the practiced efficiency of people who had claimed territory. Waited.

It was Theo who finally broke first. Quiet, patient Theo, who had lasted longer than anyone.

"So the cliff," he said.

David smiled into his tea.

"Where were we," he said.

"THE CLIFF—" Eli started.

"He knows, Eli—"

"The cliff," David confirmed. He set his cup down. Looked out at the morning. "Right. The cliff."

He woke up not knowing where he was.

That was the first thing. Just — ceiling. Unfamiliar ceiling. Cracked plaster and a water stain shaped vaguely like something he couldn't name. A thin bar of light coming through a window with a broken shutter.

He lay there and let his brain catch up to his body.

Where am I.

Then everything came back.

all at once, the way bad memories prefer to arrive. The cafeteria. The man falling off his stool. The blood. The biting. Brian's hand in the rubble. Brian's face. Brian's voice saying your mum is still out there and David's own legs carrying him away and

He squeezed his eyes shut.

Brian.

Brian was gone.

He lay completely still with that for a moment. Let it be true. Let it settle into the parts of him it was going to permanently occupy. There's a thing that happens when you lose someone and your brain keeps forgetting for half a second and then remembering again — a tiny reset of pain, over and over, until the knowing becomes constant. David was in that phase. Had probably been in it for a while.

He'd never see him again.

Never hear that laugh.

Never get told good man after doing something he didn't think he could do.

His eyes were wet and he let them be wet because there was nobody watching and Brian deserved the tears, he deserved so much more than tears actually—

The door opened.

David turned his head sharply, something cold firing through him — creature, run, move—

It was a girl.

Twenty, maybe. She stopped when she saw him awake, and something moved across her face. Relief, maybe. She was carrying a small medical kit and wearing clothes that had seen better days clean but worn.

"Hey," she said carefully. "You're up."

David stared at her. His heart was still hammering. "Were you the one who"

"Found you?" She crossed the room and set the kit down. "Yeah. That was me."

He opened his mouth.

"Don't try to sit up yet," she said, before he'd even thought about it.

He tried to sit up. Pain hit him like a wall — sharp and total and radiating from his ribs, his head, basically everywhere — and he stopped immediately.

"I literally just said—"

"Okay." He breathed through it slowly. "Okay. I'm not moving."

She gave him a look that managed to be both professional and deeply unimpressed. Then she pulled a small scanner from the kit and started checking his vitals with the quiet efficiency of someone who had done this enough times recently that it no longer required thought.

"You had four broken ribs," she said, not looking up. "Fractured skull. Some internal bruising that I did what I could with." A pause. "You've been unconscious for three weeks."

David processed that.

"Three—" He stopped. "Three weeks?"

"I found you at the bottom of a gully about half a kilometre from a cliffside." She glanced at him briefly. "Whatever you fell from, it was high."

Twelve feet to the courtyard. Then the cliff. He didn't know how far the cliff was. Hadn't exactly had time to measure.

"There was a hospital nearby," she continued. "Abandoned. I set up there when things got—" She paused. Chose her word carefully. "Complicated."

"The creatures," David said.

She nodded. Just once.

"What's your name?" he asked.

She looked up from the scanner properly for the first time. "Lia."

And that was when David actually looked at her. Not just registered her presence — actually looked. She had big brown eyes, the kind that caught light in an unfair way. Kaishen, he realised — back then that's what they called it, Asian heritage, though in 2134 bloodlines had been mixing for so long the word felt almost quaint. There was something careful about her face, like someone who had learned to keep their expressions close to the chest. But the eyes gave things away. They always did.

She was checking his pulse now, two fingers on his wrist, looking at the scanner readout.

He watched her do it.

"So what happened out there," he said. "While I was—" He gestured vaguely at the state of himself.

Lia didn't answer immediately. She finished what she was doing, made a small note on her scanner, set it down.

Then she looked at him with those brown eyes and said, "It's everywhere."

David said nothing.

"Everywhere everywhere," she continued. "Every city. Every region. The feeds that are still running — and there aren't many — they're showing the same thing from every angle. It's not contained. It was never contained." She sat down on the edge of the chair beside the bed. "I think we might be some of the only people who ran into them early and actually made it out."

The weight of that settled over the room.

David stared at the ceiling.

"What caused it," he said. Quiet. Flat.

"Pulse+."

Something moved through him. "What?"

"The drink. Pulse+." She crossed her arms loosely. "The ones who got infected that first day — they all drank Pulse+ that morning. Not all of them, not every batch, but enough. The spread started from there." She paused. "It's all over the news. Whatever's left of the news. The owner is getting pressed for it. He keeps saying he didn't know, that he had nothing to do with it." She exhaled slowly. "They're going to sentence him to death."

David was quiet for a moment.

Pulse+. The rival. The one his father had complained about for years, the one that had been eating into ShockWave's market share, the one Richard Carter had looked at across boardroom tables like a personal insult.

Why would they do that.

He didn't say it out loud. Just turned it over in his head, slow and uneasy, like something that didn't fit the shape of the box you were trying to put it in.

The owner kept saying he didn't know.

David believed him. He didn't know why he believed him. He just did.

"That's awful," he said.

Lia nodded. "Yeah."

He looked over at her.

She was making a note on the scanner again, lower lip caught slightly between her teeth the way people do when they're concentrating. There was something steady about her. Something that had clearly been tested recently and held.

He didn't realise he was smiling until she looked up and caught it.

She blinked. "What?"

"Nothing." He looked away. Felt his face do something he had no control over.

"You're smiling at nothing."

"I'm not smiling."

She stared at him. Looked back down at her scanner. The corner of her mouth moved, just slightly, though she seemed to feel it was important not to acknowledge that.

"Right," she said. "Well. Nothing. Okay." She stood, clicked the scanner shut, picked up the kit. "I'm going to rest. You should too." She moved toward the door. "And I mean actually rest. Don't try to stand. Don't try to be brave. Just—" She gave him a look over her shoulder. "Lie there."

"Yes ma'am," David said.

She left.

David lay there in the thin morning light, three weeks behind the rest of the world, four broken ribs, a fractured skull, and his best friend gone.

But he was breathing.

He was breathing, and somewhere out there his mother was still waiting, and somewhere out there the world was burning, and somewhere in a gully half a kilometre from a cliffside a girl named Lia had found him and decided he was worth saving.

He stared at the ceiling.

Brown eyes, he thought, completely involuntarily.

Then he went to sleep.

Amara had her chin in both hands.

"A woman saved him," she said softly. Like she was saying something sacred.

"First day," old David confirmed.

"And you smiled at her like an idiot."

"I wasn't smiling."

"Grandpa. You just said—"

"I wasn't smiling." He picked up his tea. Took a sip. "I was... reacting to the light. My skull was fractured."

Theo burst out laughing.

Even David couldn't hold it. The smile crept out the corner of his mouth and stayed there, warm and old and completely helpless.

Brown eyes, he thought again, seventy years later.

Still got him every time.