Nine days left.
The interior of the Ark was a perfectly climate-controlled paradise. Outside, the sky was a bruised, swirling purple, and the temperature had dropped twenty degrees. Inside, Catrin was wearing a silk robe, sipping a hot espresso on a plush leather sofa.
The elevator dinged.
Elias sprinted into the living room. He looked like a mad scientist, wearing a white lab coat over his wrinkled clothes. In his hands, he held a massive, perfectly bright red tomato.
"Boss! Look at this!" Elias yelled, practically shoving the tomato into her face. "Do you see this? Do you understand what this means?"
Catrin leaned back, raising an eyebrow. "It means you figured out the hydroponics."
"Figured it out? I mastered it!" Elias laughed, a manic, sleep-deprived sound. "The quantum core alters the localized growth cycle. I planted the seeds four days ago. Four days! Do you know how long a tomato usually takes to grow? Months! We have three full rows of vegetables downstairs that are ready to harvest!"
Nico trotted over from the television, dropping his toy dinosaur on the rug. He looked up at Elias with wide green eyes.
"Red apple?" Nico asked, reaching his chubby hands up.
Elias blinked, looking down at the kid. "Uh, no, little man. It’s a tomato."
"I want it," Nico demanded.
Elias looked at Catrin for permission. She nodded. Elias handed it over. Nico wiped it on his pajama shirt and took a massive bite, juice running down his chin.
"Yummy!" Nico beamed.
"See? The kid loves it," Elias grinned proudly. "I’m telling you, boss. We could stay locked in this box for fifty years and never run out of food."
"Good work, Elias. Go take a shower. You smell like fertilizer," Catrin said with a small smile.
Before Elias could argue, the massive flat-screen TV on the wall shifted. The cartoon Nico had been watching minimized into the corner, replaced by a live news broadcast.
Graves’s voice crackled over the intercom from his security desk downstairs.
["Boss. I figured you’d want to see this. Channel Four."]
Catrin set her espresso down.
On the screen, the financial news anchor looked pale and deeply uncomfortable. The ticker at the bottom of the screen read in bold red letters: VANCE HOLDINGS CEO INDICTED. SEC FREEZES ALL ASSETS.
The broadcast cut to a live feed outside a federal courthouse in the city.
A swarm of aggressive reporters and flashing cameras surrounded Julian Vance. He looked terrible. His usually perfect hair was a mess, his designer suit was wrinkled, and his polished, arrogant smile was completely gone. Two federal agents were flanking him, physically pushing reporters out of the way to get him to a waiting car.
"Mr. Vance! Is it true three hundred million dollars is missing?" a reporter screamed, shoving a microphone in his face.
"No comment!" Julian snapped, swatting the microphone away. He looked frantic. Desperate.
Catrin watched him panic on live television. She didn’t feel an ounce of pity. She just felt a deep, satisfying warmth in her chest. The man who had locked her outside in the apocalypse to save his own money was now entirely bankrupt, days before the world ended.
The broadcast shifted back to the anchor. "In related news, the Halcyon Hotel Group merger has officially collapsed following the Vance scandal, sending the Briar family stock plummeting by forty percent this morning..."
Her biological family was burning right alongside him. Perfect.
Suddenly, the encrypted burner phone on the glass coffee table buzzed.
Catrin glanced at the screen. Unknown caller.
She picked it up and swiped to answer, putting it on speaker so Graves and Elias could hear.
"Hello?"
"Catrin!" Julian’s voice barked through the phone. He was breathing heavily, background noise indicating he had just gotten into the car. "What the hell did you do?!"
"I’m having a quiet morning, Julian. What did you do?" Catrin asked smoothly.
"Don’t play games with me! The feds raided my office! They froze all my accounts! My credit cards are declining!" Julian yelled, his voice cracking with panic. "You gave them the ledgers!"
"I told you I was going to, Julian. You shouldn’t be surprised. You understand the math, right?"
"You psycho!" he screamed. "I have nothing! The banks won’t even let me withdraw cash for a hotel! My parents won’t answer my calls because their assets got frozen in the crossfire! I’m ruined!"
"That sounds like a personal problem," Catrin said, taking a slow sip of her espresso.
"Where are you?!" Julian demanded, his tone turning dark and threatening. "I know you liquidated the four billion. I know you bought that mountain property up north. I’m coming up there, Catrin. You are my wife. Half of that money is mine, and Nico is my son. If you don’t let me in, I’m bringing the police to take the boy!"
Catrin let out a low, cold laugh.
"You aren’t coming anywhere near my mountain, Julian," she said, her voice dropping to a deadly whisper. "And as for the police? Take a look out your window. Look at the sky."
"What are you talking about..."
"Look at the sky, Julian!" she snapped.
The line went quiet for a few seconds. "It’s... it’s purple. So what? It’s a storm."
"It’s not a storm. It’s the end," Catrin said flatly. "In a few days, the paper money I took from you won’t mean anything. The police won’t mean anything. The only thing that will matter is who is behind a steel wall, and who is stuck outside. Have a nice life, Julian. What’s left of it."
She hung up and blocked the number.
Elias was staring at her, holding his breath. "Remind me never to piss you off, boss."
Catrin smiled softly. "Just keep growing my tomatoes, Elias."
["Boss."] Graves’s voice cut through the intercom again. This time, he didn’t sound amused. He sounded terrified.
["Commander Jax is on the secure line. We have a situation at the two-mile barricade."]
Catrin stood up immediately, tightening the belt of her robe. "Put him through."
A burst of static hissed from the speakers, followed by the heavy, deafening sound of automatic gunfire.
["Hold the line! Concentrate fire on the head!"] Jax was screaming over the radio. ["Boss! Are you hearing this?"]
"I hear it, Commander. Report," Catrin ordered, her heart rate spiking.
["Something just came out of the tree line at the lower barricade,"] Jax yelled over the sound of his men shooting. ["It’s not a person! It’s a... I don’t even know what the hell it is! Briggs put three rounds from a heavy machine gun into its chest and it didn’t even flinch!"]
Catrin rushed to the digital console on the wall. "Graves, pull up the drone feed for the lower barricade and put it on the living room screen."
"Doing it now!"
The news broadcast vanished. The screen flickered, showing a high-definition, top-down view from one of the Ark’s perimeter drones.
Elias gasped, dropping his tablet.
Catrin’s eyes narrowed.
At the heavy steel barricade two miles down the mountain road, Jax’s mercenaries were in full combat formation. They were firing relentless streams of bullets into the center of the road.
Charging at the barricade was a massive, twisted grizzly bear.
But it wasn’t normal. It was easily twice the size of a regular bear. Its fur was falling out in wet, sick clumps, replaced by thick, glowing purple veins that pulsed with unnatural energy. Jagged bone spikes protruded from its spine. It let out a roar that distorted the audio on the drone feed.
It was a Spore Mutant.
The environmental pressure from the approaching meteorites was already corrupting the wildlife.
On the screen, the mutant bear slammed into a heavy armored truck, tossing the three-ton vehicle sideways like a child’s toy.
["The armor-piercing rounds aren’t working!"] Jax yelled over the radio.
"Aim for the glowing purple clusters on its neck, Commander!" Catrin ordered sharply. "That’s the spore core! If you destroy the core, the nervous system shuts down!"
["Snipers! Target the purple clusters! Fire!"] Jax relayed the command instantly.
Three heavy sniper rounds echoed through the radio feed.
On the screen, the bullets ripped into the glowing purple mass on the bear’s neck. The creature let out a high-pitched, shrieking wail. It violently spasmed, stumbling backward before collapsing onto the asphalt. Black, tar-like blood pooled out from underneath it.
The mercenaries slowly stopped firing, keeping their weapons trained on the massive corpse.
The mountain fell dead silent again.
["Target neutralized,"] Jax said over the radio, his voice shaking slightly. ["Boss... what the hell was that thing?"]
"That was exactly what I hired you for, Commander," Catrin said, staring at the dead monster on the screen. "The atmospheric spores are accelerating. The wildlife is beginning to mutate."
["Are there more of them?"]
"Thousands. And they will get much bigger than a bear," Catrin said coldly. "Burn the carcass. Do not let anyone touch the black blood, or they will be infected. Triple the guard rotation, and lock the barricade permanently."
["Understood. Jax out."]
The radio clicked off.
Catrin let out a slow, shaky breath. In her past life, the mutants didn’t appear until the meteorites actually made impact. The timeline shift was making everything happen faster, and more violently, than she had anticipated.
"Mommy?"
Catrin turned around. Nico was standing by the couch, holding his half-eaten tomato. He was looking at the television screen. He wasn’t crying, but his green eyes were wide with confusion.
"Is that a bad doggie?" Nico asked.
Catrin walked over, kneeling down and pulling him into a tight hug. She buried her face in his soft hair.
"Yes, baby. It was a bad doggie," Catrin whispered, rubbing his back. "But the men outside chased it away. You’re completely safe in here."
Nico hugged her back, resting his chin on her shoulder.
"I’m not scared," he stated, sounding surprisingly confident for a four-year-old.
Catrin pulled back, smiling at him. "I know you aren’t, brave boy."
She stood up and looked at Elias. The brilliant engineer was pale, staring at the screen with absolute horror.
"Elias," Catrin said firmly, snapping him out of his trance.
"Yeah. Yeah, boss?"
"I want the outer perimeter laser grids brought online by midnight. And I want the Ark’s main defense shields set to automatic," Catrin ordered. She looked out the reinforced window at the bleeding purple sky.
The countdown was accelerating.
"The apocalypse isn’t waiting until next week," Catrin murmured. "It’s already here."