SEVEN DAYS BEFORE THE WORLD ENDS

My leg gave out on the fourth step, and I hit the ground hard enough to taste blood. I did not scream. Screaming was for people who still believed someone was coming to save them. I pressed my palm against the gash in my thigh, forced my body upright against a crumbling wall, and kept moving. Behind me, somewhere in the smoke and the dead streetlights, something was counting my footsteps. It was not like the others. The others ran in straight lines, driven by hunger and noise. This one had stopped twice already, waiting for me to make a mistake. It knew I would turn left at the burned bus. It knew I would try the alley behind the pharmacy. Three years of surviving things that used to be human had taught me one rule above all others. The smart ones were the ones that killed you. My gun held two bullets. My knife had snapped an hour ago, and the broken half was jammed through my belt because even a shard of steel was worth carrying now. I ducked into what was left of an old apartment building, its front door hanging from one hinge, and pressed my back against a support beam that groaned under my weight. Silence… I closed my eyes and let my breathing slow down counting it tickle tock, even though my whole body screamed to keep running. In the dark, my mind went where it always went when I stopped moving long enough to let it. Kaelith. I saw him the way I always did, standing in the floodlights of the compound with his people fanned out behind him like a wall of loaded guns. I remembered the calm on his face, the way he had looked at me like I was a problem he had already solved. “Survival has no room for weakness, Veyra,” he had said to me, not in a cruel manner, he was just certain, the way a man is certain about weather. I had trusted him with the location of the last working generator. I had trusted him with the names of the children still alive in the east block. I had trusted him with three years of my life, and he had traded all of it for a seat at someone else’s table. They had not killed me quickly. They had made it a lesson actually.. A scrape of claws against concrete snapped me back into my body. It was close now, close enough that I could hear the wet, deliberate sound of it breathing through something that used to be a throat. I looked down at my two bullets and understood, with a strange and terrible clarity, that I was not walking out of this building. If I get another chance, I thought, gripping what was left of my knife, I will not make the same mistakes. I will not trust the wrong people. I will not wait to become dangerous. I will already be dangerous, before anyone has the chance to use me. Then it came through the doorway, and there was no more time to think. I do not remember every second of what happened next but I remember firing both bullets into the mass of it and watching it stagger without falling. I remember driving the broken knife into something that screamed in a voice too close to human. I remember its claws finding my side, my shoulder, my throat, and the floor rising up to meet me. Somewhere above the ringing in my ears, an alarm began to wail across the ruined city, long and mechanical and utterly out of place. The world went quiet in a way that had nothing to do with sound. My last thought was not of escape. It was a promise. Kaelith. The people who had stood beside him and watched. Every one of them, if I ever got the chance, would pay for what they had done. Then there was nothing at all… ~~~~~~ I woke up screaming... My hands flew to my throat, expecting to find it torn open, expecting blood, expecting the cold air of a dead city. Instead I found warm sheets tangled around my legs and soft sunlight cutting through familiar curtains. My throat was whole. My side did not hurt. I was lying in my old bed, in my old room, surrounded by things that had been ash for years. My phone sat charging on the nightstand exactly where I used to leave it. My hands were shaking too hard to pick it up on the first try. When the screen finally lit, the date stared back at me and refused to make sense no matter how many times I read it. Seven days before everything ended. I was still trying to convince myself this was some final, merciful hallucination when the bedroom door opened. “Veyra? I heard you scream.” My mother stood in the doorway in her old blue robe, her hair still damp from a shower, her face creased with the particular worry only mothers seem to carry. I did not remember crossing the room. One moment I was frozen on the bed and the next I had my arms locked around her, sobbing into her shoulder like a child, gripping the fabric of her robe so hard my knuckles ached. “Okay, okay,” she said, stiff with confusion, patting my back the way she used to when I was small. “It was just a nightmare, sweetheart. You’re safe.” She had no idea how wrong she was. And she had no idea how right. I forced myself to let go, wiped my face, and made myself smile so she would stop looking at me like I had lost my mind. The second she left the room, I grabbed my phone and opened every news app I could find. Ordinary headlines. Ordinary weather. Ordinary lives, still going about their ordinary business, with no idea what was coming for them in exactly seven days. I knew things now that no one else on earth could know. I knew which streets would burn first. I knew which government building would fall silent by Wednesday. I knew the exact hour the first infected would walk out of the quarantine lab downtown, smiling like nothing was wrong. I had no time to waste feeling grateful. I had work to do. I was still making a list in my head when my phone buzzed once in my hand. A message, from a number with no name and no contacts attached anywhere in my history. UNKNOWN: You came back too. My whole body went cold, I had not told a single living soul. There was no way anyone else should know…