Apocalypse: Reborn System

Chapter 3: Movie Night

When Oliver and I arrived at my place, I was happy to see Lydia’s car was there, meaning she was already home. I went inside, calling out to Lydia to join us in the kitchen. Oliver helped me put the groceries away. He practically lives here when he is actively avoiding his parents, Charlotte and Samuel, and sister, Christine. Lydia finally comes into the kitchen after talking to her mom, Sarah, and her brother, Derek.

“Derek just got back from serving; he has the next three months off before he is deployed again. Mom can’t seem to talk sense into him to get him to retire,” Lydia says.

Derek is 34 and a Navy SEAL. He enrolled at 18 and has been on countless missions. He is a SCPO - CAPT, or a Senior Chief Special Warfare Officer, 2nd Captain. He looks like a bodybuilder, but you can tell he and Lydia are related. They both have blonde hair and blue eyes as well as similar facial features. They take after their mother in looks though she has a curvy figure from having children. Sarah, 52, works for the government as a city architect; she knows how to put a city together from the ground up. She has a book full of stuff to keep in mind when building a city, all the safety rules. She has even been taking classes on how to actually run a town and all that is included with that. Their dad works at a factory that processes several types of food and typically works long hours. He’s a manager who has worked there since high school. He’s on his way up to being the director of the plant when the current director retires next year. His name is Peter; he is 53, and he has dark blonde hair and dark blue eyes. He maintains a stocky, muscular build.

Oliver’s family grew their wealth from agriculture. They have land spread all over the place and receive the revenue off the land being rented and a share of the produce being grown. Oliver’s father has a rule about gaining land; after $100,000 profit, the next chunk of profits goes to buying more land for the business. Charlotte, 49, is a stay-at-home mother who helps Samuel, 51, deal with work misunderstandings since he tends to be a blunt person. Christine, 18, is in her last year of high school and then will be off to college in the fall. The Gray family looks similar to each other as all members have brown hair of some shade. Samuel has light brown hair with blonde highlights, dark green eyes and the same stocky build that Oliver inherited from him. Charlotte has deep brown hair with red highlights and light green eyes mixed with blue. She has a light build from going to the gym 3–4 times a week. Christine takes after her mom in that she almost looks like a younger version of Charlotte, except her body type is that of a slim build like a runner’s.

“I may go visit them in two weeks if I can get time off work and make sure I am caught up on studying.” Lydia says

I started fiddling with my necklace; that would be a bad idea. Not that she knows it. I realized I wanted to have Lydia with me this time around, Oliver too. I didn’t want to be on my own again. It was so lonely and maybe this time, with all the preparation, I will be able to feed more people and actually build a base.

“What’s that?” Lydia asks. She walks over and touches the necklace. “Where did you get this? It’s beautiful?” she asks.

“Would you guys believe me if I told you something absolutely crazy that no one else would believe?” I asked. “If I told you we had about a month before the apocalypse started, would you believe me, honestly?”

“I take it we aren’t going to do movie night?” Oliver asks as he holds up a thriller/horror movie. He had grabbed it after finishing helping me put away groceries. I tell them to grab comfort food, then I tell them everything. The bar fight that is destined to happen tomorrow night at The Barrel’s Bottom. Everything in-between that and me being nearby on the cliffs and me being sent back in time. The complete timeline, as far as I can remember it, to when I found myself at the coffee shop.

I am met with pure silence and disbelieving looks from both of them. They looked at each other and shared a conversation with their eyes before Oliver reached out to check my forehead and asked if I was feeling alright. I smacked his hand away and glared at both of them. Upset that they thought I would joke about something like this when I was being dead serious and wanting to enlist their help to prepare for the upcoming apocalypse.

“If you don’t believe me, come with me to Newts. Then you will see my amazing trunk and the other useful knickknacks I found last time. Some of them, I have no idea what they did, but some of them were dead useful while scavenging for food and water and some were even useful for protecting or hiding me. I would definitely have died multiple times without having those items from Newt’s store,” I said to them.

“Guys, I swear I am not messing with you. The apocalypse is coming and there isn’t anything we can do to stop it now. I came back too late in this timeline to fix it. Scavy’s Junkyard was the one that had been dumping toxic waste into the ocean in the same area, which led to people getting infected. They have already been doing it for a while,” I said sadly.

“What do you mean they have already been doing it a while?” Oliver asks. I then explained that Scavy’s had apparently been dumping toxic water into the ocean on the other side of the mountain range. They had been doing it for the last two years and had been paying off officials to conveniently look the other way and not report it further than themselves. They had basically gotten away with it up until the apocalypse started. I do know that their building had been thoroughly destroyed within the first year. I told them what I had known about what had happened to them and wound up crying for an hour on Oliver, who looked shocked to his core. Lydia held on to the hope that her and her family had been okay. I did tell her that the government officially went down in year two, and several official bases had been set up that were trying to help the remaining citizens.

After finally grieving their future/past selves, I dried my eyes and blew my nose with the tissues that Lydia had brought for me. I think, me breaking down is what finally made them believe that I wasn’t making this up and that it had really happened to me. That I really was back from a horrible, depressing future.