DAY ZERO

The last drink

Old David went quiet for a second.

Just sat there, looking at nothing in particular. His thumb was doing that thing it did sometimes — rubbing slow circles on the arm of the chair without him noticing.

"You know," he started, then stopped. Exhaled through his nose. "Time is a weird thing. When you're young you feel every single day. Every morning drags. Every week feels like a month." He shook his head slowly. "And then you blink. You just — blink. And three years are gone."

Amara hadn't touched her food in a while.

"That's what happened to me and Brian. We blinked and suddenly I was nineteen and he was twenty and the academy was throwing him a graduation ceremony and I was standing in that crowd thinking —" He paused. Laughed quietly to himself. "I was thinking, when did this happen. Like genuinely. When did we get here."

The ceremony was the kind of thing the academy did well. Neat rows of chairs. Dress uniforms. Flags that didn't move because the wind had been asked nicely to stay away. Families in the stands, proud and dressed up, waving and crying and taking pictures.

David stood in the cadet section and cheered louder than anyone when Brian's name was called.

Brian Osei.

Brian walked across that stage like he'd been walking across stages his whole life. Calm. Easy. The same unhurried way he did everything. He shook the Commandant's hand, took his certificate, and when he turned to face the crowd his eyes found David immediately — like he already knew exactly where he was standing.

He gave him one nod.

David whooped like an i***t.

A few cadets around him turned and stared. He didn't care even a little bit.

But underneath all of it — underneath the noise and the pride and the genuine happiness he felt for his brother — something quieter was happening. Something David kept pushing down every time it surfaced.

He's leaving.

He's actually leaving.

An hour later there was a knock on David's chamber door.

He already knew who it was.

Brian filled the doorway in his graduation dress uniform, certificate tucked under his arm, a look on his face that was trying very hard to be casual and not quite managing it.

"Cadet," he said. Deep voice, deliberately formal. "At ease."

Something fired off in David's brain automatically — three years of conditioning — and he was on his feet, spine straight, chin up, hands behind his back before he even realized he'd moved.

Brian lost it.

He cracked up properly, shoulders shaking, the big warm laugh that David had heard a thousand times by now and still hadn't gotten tired of.

David broke into a grin. "Shut up, man."

"You just — you actually—" Brian couldn't finish the sentence. He was still laughing when he stepped inside and dropped onto David's bunk like he owned it, which honestly wasn't far from the truth. "Three years of brainwashing, bro. They got you good."

"Says the guy who showed up here at eleven."

"I was advanced." Brian grinned. Leaned back on his elbows. Let the silence settle.

And just like that the laughter faded naturally, the way fire does when it's burned through what it needed to burn through. What was left was something quieter. Realer.

David sat down on the opposite bunk.

"So," he said.

"So," Brian said.

"I guess this is it."

Brian looked at him. Really looked at him, the way he did when he wasn't going to say something small. "You know I'm not disappearing, right. I'm graduating, not dying."

"I know."

"David."

"I know, Brian."

"Your dream," Brian said. "Your mum. All of it — I meant what I said. I'm in that with you till the end. You call me, I'm there. Doesn't matter where they post me, doesn't matter what I'm doing." He paused. "You hear me?"

David nodded. Stared at the floor.

He didn't mean to tear up. It just — happened. Quietly, without permission, the way emotions do when you've been holding them in a small room for too long and someone opens a window.

He wiped his face fast with the back of his hand. Pretended it didn't happen.

Brian pretended not to notice. Which was exactly right.

Then David stood up and crossed the room and hugged him. Not a quick thing. Not a pat on the back. The kind of hug that says everything that words are too clumsy for — you saved me, you held me together, you showed me what a brother actually feels like, I don't know how to do any of what comes next without you standing next to me.

Brian hugged him back just as hard.

Neither of them said anything.

They didn't need to.

When they finally pulled apart Brian cleared his throat and looked away for a second, composing himself in that dignified way of his that David had always found both annoying and deeply comforting.

"Alright," Brian said. Sniffed once. "None of that happened."

"Agreed."

"Good." He straightened his uniform. "Wanna get a drink?"

David laughed. "Yeah. Yeah let's get a drink."

The academy cafeteria was still half full from the post ceremony crowd. Families, graduates, cadets, a whole mix of people in various stages of celebration. Someone had brought a cake. Someone else had brought better music than the cafeteria speakers deserved.

It felt good. It felt like an ending that was also a beginning, which is the best kind.

David and Brian found a spot at the counter and ordered. Something cold, something fizzy — the cheap stuff the academy stocked that tasted vaguely of artificial fruit and bad decisions. They were mid conversation, Brian mid sentence actually, when David noticed the man three seats down.

He noticed him because he went quiet suddenly. Mid laugh. Like someone had cut his power.

Then his glass slipped out of his hand.

It hit the counter and shattered and nobody thought much of it, just another graduation day accident, somebody's already cleaning it up — but then the man slid off his stool and David watched him and something in his stomach went cold because the way the man fell wasn't right. It wasn't the loose collapse of someone who fainted. It was rigid and wrong, like every muscle in his body had fired at once.

He hit the floor and started seizing.

People noticed now. Someone called for a medic. Someone else was already on their comm. The crowd around him opened up, that instinctive human circle that forms around someone in distress.

And then the man vomited blood.

Not a little. Not the kind of thing you explain away. Dark and violent and wrong and the room went from concern to something colder in about half a second.

David was already on his feet.

The man stopped convulsing.

Went completely still.

Someone said thank god under their breath.

And then he stood up.

Not the way people stand up. Not slowly, not shakily, not with the disorientation of someone who just lost consciousness. He stood up fast. Mechanically. Like a puppet pulled by a string. His eyes were open but nothing was happening behind them.

The room didn't understand what it was seeing yet.

David did. He didn't know why. Some animal part of him that sat below language and logic and rational thought just — knew.

He grabbed Brian's arm.

The man lunged.

He crossed the distance to the nearest person in about a second and a half and bit down on their shoulder and the screaming started and everything happened at once — chairs scraping, people running, someone knocked the cake off the table, glass breaking — and the person who'd been bitten stumbled back against the wall with their hands pressed to their shoulder and David watched them slide down to the floor and start going through the same thing and oh god oh god oh god—

"David." Brian's voice. Flat and focused, all the graduation warmth completely gone, replaced by something military and sharp. "David. Look at me."

David looked at him.

"We need to move. Now."

The soldiers in the room had their weapons out. Three of them, shouting commands at something that wasn't going to listen to commands. The first infected man had already gotten to two more people. The sounds coming from across the room weren't sounds David had words for.

The shooting started.

It helped for about thirty seconds.

There were too many of them too fast. The soldiers were trained for threats that responded to bullets the way threats were supposed to — by stopping. These things didn't stop. They slowed, stumbled, sometimes dropped, but the ones that dropped got back up and the ones that didn't were immediately replaced by whoever they'd gotten to in the meantime.

"RUN!" Brian grabbed David's collar and they were moving, through the chaos, around overturned furniture, past people who were running and people who were frozen and people who were already too late—

"FIRE IN THE HOLE!"

David didn't know the voice. He'd find out later it was Jack — Jack Mercer, cocky, loud, the kind of guy who'd been waiting his whole life for a moment that justified a rocket launcher.

This was not that moment.

David turned just in time to see Jack, wild eyed and grinning the grin of someone who had catastrophically misjudged the situation, fire a rocket launcher inside a building.

He missed.

The rocket hit the ceiling.

The ceiling came down.

David didn't remember the impact exactly. One moment he was running, the next the world was a wall of sound and pressure and dust so thick he couldn't see his own hands. He was on the floor. He didn't know how he got there. His ears were doing a high pitched whine that blocked everything else out.

He pushed himself up.

Coughed. Couldn't stop coughing.

The cafeteria — what was left of it — was unrecognizable. Chunks of ceiling, twisted support beams, rubble everywhere. Dust still falling like grey snow.

Something moved in the rubble to his left. One of them. Pulling itself out of the debris with that horrible mechanical persistence.

David looked around.

"Brian." His voice came out wrecked. "Brian!"

Nothing.

"BRIAN!"

A hand. Coming up from a pile of rubble about fifteen feet away. Fingers spread. Moving.

David crossed the distance in seconds, dropping to his knees, pulling at debris with his bare hands, not feeling the cuts, not feeling anything—

Brian's face emerged from the dust.

Alive.

He was alive.

Something flooded David's chest so hard it almost knocked him over. "Okay," he breathed. "Okay okay okay, I've got you, just—" He grabbed Brian's arm and pulled and Brian made a sound that stopped him cold.

The rubble on top of him wasn't moving. There was too much of it.

"David." Brian's voice was different. Still him, still calm in that infuriating way, but underneath it something that Brian never let show. "David stop."

"I can get you out—"

"David—"

"Just give me a second—"

"DAVID." Sharp enough to cut through. Brian looked at him. Really looked at him, dust caked on his face, and his eyes were clear. Completely, devastatingly clear. "Listen to me."

Something was coming out of the rubble to their right. Pulling itself upright.

"Your mum is still out there," Brian said.

David shook his head. "Stop—"

"She's more important." His voice didn't waver. "She's been waiting three years, David. Go. Please."

"I'm not leaving you—"

"Yes you are." Brian's hand found David's wrist. Gripped it. "Go get her. That was the plan. That was always the plan." The thing to their right had found its footing. Starting to move toward them. "Go."

David was crying and he didn't care. "Brian I'm sorry—"

"You don't have to be—"

He didn't hear the rest.

He ran.

He found a gun on the floor near the exit. He didn't think about it, just grabbed it, turned, put three rounds into the one that had been closest behind him. It stumbled. He ran.

The hallway was chaos. Pure screaming chaos. He saw people he recognized — families that had been at the ceremony an hour ago, dressed up, proud, holding flowers — and they weren't themselves anymore and he stopped looking at faces after that because he couldn't afford what looking at faces was doing to him.

A window at the end of the corridor. Ground floor. Except the ground floor was elevated here — he looked down at a twelve foot drop to the courtyard below.

Something hit the door behind him.

He jumped.

The landing was bad. He hit wrong, stumbled, rolled, lay there for a second staring at the sky with the wind completely knocked out of him.

Get up.

He got up.

There was a row of cars in the staff lot. He got to the nearest one, a sleek two seater, got his hands on the door panel and tried to hack the ignition The way nobody had taught him because he had no idea how to hack a car.

It didn't work.

He slammed his hand on the roof and turned around.

A bicycle. Chained to a rack near the wall. He found a piece of rubble, broke the chain in three hits, and swung onto it like his life depended on it which was because it did.

The gates at the far end of the compound were still standing but the things pressing against them from the inside — the ones that had already gotten through the cafeteria — were building up, compressing against the metal in a mass of dead weight and horrible strength and the gates were beginning to bend.

David pedaled.

The gates blew open.

They poured through and he could hear them behind him — not footsteps exactly, more like the sound of something that used to be human and wasn't anymore — and he pedaled harder than he had ever pedaled anything in his life, down the road that led away from the academy, past the treeline, past the sign that said FEDERAL MILITARY ACADEMY — SHAPING THE FUTURE—

The road curved.

Curved sharply.

He hit the edge before he understood what the edge was and then there was no more road, just air and the wind and the long drop of the cliff below.

And David Carter, nineteen years old, flew.

The porch was dead silent.

Eli had both hands over his mouth. Theo hadn't blinked in what felt like a full minute. Even Amara, who had started the evening trying to seem too old for all this, was sitting completely still with her soup forgotten in her lap.

Old David looked at his hands.

"Brian said I didn't have to be sorry," he said quietly. "I didn't hear it. Didn't hear it until later — until I'd replayed that moment so many times I could lip read what he was saying as I left." He paused. "Took me a long time to believe him."

Nobody spoke.

The city hummed softly in the distance.

"Grandpa," Eli said, barely above a whisper. "Did you survive the cliff?"

Old David looked at him.

The corner of his mouth moved. Just slightly.

"Well," he said. "I'm sitting here, aren't I?"