The perfect mother system

Chapter 13 : The Apocalypse World

The world called her Kelly.

The system called her Host.

But she had always been Kate, and Kate was who she intended to remain.

She became aware of herself in stages.

First there was cold. Not the gentle winter cold of the Lu estate in its final season but something sharper and more aggressive, the kind of cold that had no interest in being endured gracefully. It pressed in from every direction and carried with it a smell that she had no reference for in any life she had lived. Ash and rust and something underneath both of those things that was organic and wrong in a way that made her body want to move before her mind had finished waking up.

She opened her eyes.

The sky was the wrong colour.

She had seen that sky in the moment between planes, grey and heavy and pressing down on the world beneath it like a lid on something that should not be opened. Seeing it properly now, from inside it, was a different experience. It was not simply overcast. It was the sky of a world that had forgotten what sunlight was supposed to look like, a permanent bruised twilight that sat over everything and leached the colour out of whatever it touched.

She was in a street.

Or what had been a street. The buildings on either side of her were still standing but only technically, their windows gone, their facades cracked and stained, their interiors visible through gaps that had been made by things Kate did not want to think about yet. Cars sat at angles that suggested they had been stopped suddenly and permanently. A shop front to her left had its door hanging open, moving slightly in the cold wind, and the sound it made was the only sound in the immediate vicinity.

Kate sat up slowly and took inventory.

Kelly's body was young, early twenties, and had been through things that showed in the way bodies show things they have survived. There were old scars on her forearms and a healed injury in her left knee that Kate could feel when she moved. The clothes she was wearing were thin and inadequate for the temperature and she was sitting on the ground of a dead city with no shelter visible and no indication of which direction safety might lie in.

She turned inward.

Ding. Welcome to Plane 2. Host has entered the body of Kelly. Original owner's memories are available. Please prepare to receive.

The memories came differently this time. She had been through the process once before and her mind accepted them with less resistance, the way a path through a forest becomes easier after the first time you have walked it. Kelly's life arrived in order, which she had not expected. Usually memories came all at once. These came like a story being told deliberately from the beginning.

A family that had never wanted her but had kept her for reasons that had more to do with appearances than love. A childhood spent being compared to the adopted sister and always falling short in the family's eyes, not because she was less but because the sister had understood early how to make herself the favourite and had worked at it with a focused cruelty that Kate recognised immediately.

Then the apocalypse.

The zombie virus had arrived without warning the way catastrophic things always arrive, suddenly and everywhere at once, and the world had reorganised itself around survival within days. Kelly's family had found a way into a powerful survivor camp and had gathered what they could and moved quickly.

They had left Kelly behind.

The adopted sister had told them it was an accident. That she had gone back for Kelly but the zombies were too close and there was no time. She had cried convincingly and the family had believed her because they had always preferred to believe her and because believing anything else would have required them to feel responsible for what happened next.

What happened next was that Kelly had spent three days alone in the dead city before the zombies found her.

The memory ended there.

Kate sat with it for a moment.

Then she accessed the system mall.

Ding. New plane detected. New items unlocked. Apocalypse survival package available.

She went through the new inventory with the same focused efficiency she had applied to every mall interaction since Plane 1. The items were different from anything available in the ancient China arc. Practical and specific to this world in a way that told her the system understood its environments thoroughly.

She purchased the laser gun first.

It appeared in her hand with a solidity that was startling even knowing it was coming. It was not large but it was clearly well made, black and precisely weighted, and it hummed faintly in a way that suggested it was already active. She turned it over once and then held it the way she had seen weapons held and found that Kelly's body knew something about this, some muscle memory from the apocalypse months before her death that told Kate's hands where to position themselves.

Good.

She purchased the space ability next.

Ding. Space ability activated. Host now has access to a personal storage dimension. Capacity unlimited. Items stored remain preserved indefinitely.

She felt it open somewhere inside her, a pocket of nothing that was also somehow everything, a place she could put things and retrieve them without anyone else being able to see or access it. She immediately stored several days worth of food and medical supplies, items she had loaded into the mall purchase queue while reviewing the inventory.

Then the zombie ability.

Ding. Zombie affinity activated. Zombies will not identify host as a living target. Host may move freely among zombie populations.

She stood up.

Down the street, perhaps forty metres away, three zombies were moving in her direction. She had seen them when she first looked around and had been tracking them in her peripheral vision while she worked through the system. They moved the way she had imagined zombies moved, without urgency but without stopping, following something sensory that she now understood would not register her as a target.

She stood still and watched them come.

They passed within two metres of her.

Not one of them looked at her.

Kate watched them continue down the street and disappear around a corner and then she turned in the opposite direction and began to walk.

The survivor camp that Chu Litian ruled was somewhere in this city. Kelly's memories had fragments of it, things she had heard before the apocalypse hit about a group that had organised quickly and taken over a defensible section of the city. The most powerful camp. The one that other survivors tried to reach and were not always permitted to enter.

The one where Kelly's family was living comfortably while Kelly had died alone in the cold.

Kate adjusted her grip on the laser gun and walked through the dead city with zombies passing around her like water around a stone.

She had done this before.

Not this exactly. Not this world or this cold or these particular ruins.

But she had walked into a hostile place with nothing but a system and a plan and she had changed everything about it.

She intended to do exactly that again.