The TV was mid-broadcast when Grandma Carol started screaming my name.
"…the CDC has issued a regional alert as flu-like cases continue to climb. Residents are advised to limit public gatherings, avoid nonessential travel, and keep at least two weeks of supplies on hand…"
"Autumn! Are you listening to a word I'm saying?"
I stared at the living room of my mother's house — the scratched oak floors, the sagging couch she'd picked out the year I was born, and eight relatives packed across it like they owned the place. Which, apparently, they believed they did.
Because I have lived this day before.
Fifteen days before the end of the world, my whole family came to my door to take my house.
Last time, they got it.
I know how that sounds. Trust me, being dead makes it easier to admit. Ten years into the apocalypse, in the zombie surge that broke through the eastern safe zone walls, I finally had time to think about how I'd ended up there — and every road led back to this couch, these people, this afternoon.
"Your mother's been gone fourteen years," Grandma Carol said, "and Beth has been nothing but good to you. Everyone says so. Now your brother's getting married, and you won't even lend him the house? What are you, some kind of ungrateful leech?"
"She's not a leech, sweetie," Beth said from the arm of the couch, patting the air between us like she was calming a horse. "She's just overwhelmed. Aren't you, sweetheart?"
Then Rick — my father, though donor had always felt more accurate — spoke up from the recliner without looking away from his phone. "The house was never really yours anyway. You were a kid when your mom set up that trust. Half the lawyers in town will tell you it won't hold up. Family takes care of family, Autumn. We came all this way. Don't you feel guilty?"
A laugh climbed out of me before I could stop it.
They wanted my house. They also wanted me to pay for new furniture for Chase's wedding. What really gets to me is this — the shamelessness, all shiny and blinding.
What's even funnier: in my past life, I agreed to all of it.
I was fourteen when my mom died. She had just closed the biggest deal of her career, and fifteen minutes later, at an intersection where a drunk driver ran a red light, it happened. Beth moved in within six months, dragging Chase along, speaking softly, making stews and getting them on the table on time. And me — fifteen, full of prickles, starving for someone to sit down and have dinner with me — I mistook her patience for love.
I gave them everything. The scholarship, the first few years of my salary, and finally that house — the only thing my mom worked herself to the bone to leave me, written in black and white in a trust, in my name, set to unlock when I turned eighteen.
Then the apocalypse came, and I finally understood what the word family means. It means being abandoned — twice. It means Beth's hand shoving me off the National Guard truck so Chase could take my spot. It means scavenging alone in the ruins for ten years, and finally realizing that in these people's eyes I was never a daughter. I was a dish.
"Okay." I grabbed the few bags of discounted apples off the coffee table and swept them all into the trash, then sat down across from them.
Chase jerked his head up from his phone. "What are you doing? Mom bought those for you. Imported Honeycrisp. She said it's your favorite."
Right. My favorite.
Funny — I've been allergic to apples since I was nine. It was Beth herself who took me to the emergency room that night. She knew better than anyone.
"You don't get to talk to me about this house," I said.
I was staring at Chase when I said it. Something on my face must have been wrong, because his went pale for a moment and he looked away. Ten years of apocalypse leave marks on a person. I spent those years alone, filled with nothing but hate — looks like both of those things are living in my eyes now.
Chase went quiet.
"Sweetheart," Beth said gently, "if you're not feeling well, we can come back. But the wedding's in June, and Ashley has her heart set on somewhere downtown, and you know how the market is — nothing ever lists, and when it does, it's a bidding war by lunch."
This book's true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.
"Just think of it as helping your only brother." She added it with her voice choking precisely on cue, like a stopwatch. "And when you get married, our whole family will help you find a place just as good."
"It's not about helping or not helping," Rick said. "The house belongs to Chase, and that's the end of it. After you get married, you live wherever your husband puts you. Stop pretending."
Last life, I spent years wondering why my own father hated me. The answer had walked into our lives before I was born: Rick and Beth had already been married once, back in his hometown. Chase wasn't my half-brother at all. He was Rick's son, whole and entire — just not my mother's. And to Rick I had never been a daughter. I was a leak in his dead wife's money, a hole that kept letting it out.
But I'm not angry anymore. Anger burns fuel, and every minute I have now is on a countdown.
I held up three fingers. "Three hundred thousand."
Silence. Eight faces trying to do math at once.
"Excuse me?"
"The house," I said. "Mom's trust, my name on the deed, county records and all, legal since my eighteenth birthday. You want it? Three hundred thousand. Today only."
"You're joking. We don't have that kind of money!"
I tapped my watch. "You've got five counts. After that I call my realtor and it goes on the open market. Five."
"We are your elders!" Grandma Carol shrilled. "You'd haggle with family?"
"Four."
"Watch me beat that mouthy streak out of you, girl."
"Three. Two."
Rick came up out of the recliner, arm already raised — and I kicked the chair out from under him, sent it skidding into the wall, and watched him land on the carpet with all the grace of a dropped sofa.
"One," I said, and dialed.
"Dan? Autumn Reeves. I'm selling the house on Maple Street. Three hundred thousand, as-is, today… No, no open houses. Then list it. They'll take it."
To be fair to them, it was a good deal. The house would have appraised at four fifty, easy — three bedrooms on a quiet street, fifteen minutes from downtown, and in this city everything moved the second it listed. Behind Beth's saintly face she had already done the arithmetic: buy at three hundred, sell at four fifty plus, pocket a hundred and fifty in pure profit. She could not let an outsider take that from her.
What she didn't know — what she couldn't know — was that in fifteen days, money would stop meaning anything. And I had just made sure that every dollar this family owned was locked inside a house about to be worth exactly nothing.
The government would issue its first real warning three days before it happened. By then the shelves would be empty, and they'd be standing in an empty house holding a signed purchase agreement and a pile of cash they would never get to spend.
As for me — I was going shopping.
The text message hit while I was still in the bank parking lot.
DEPOSIT POSTED: $300,000.00
Beth and Rick had paid without a fight, which told me everything about how confident they were. Dan kept calling the whole drive over — the market was that hot, and he could smell the commission — but I didn't care who else wanted the house. The recorder's office was closed until Monday anyway; the deed wasn't going anywhere.
"No rush on the transfer," Beth had said, wearing her generous face. "It's not that we don't trust you, sweetheart. We'll let you know when."
She didn't trust me. She didn't trust Chase's fiancée either — she wasn't about to put the bride's name anywhere near a deed she hadn't seen yet. Right now the paperwork said Autumn Reeves, and Beth wanted it that way. Every tangled thread in this family ran through my hands.
"Great," Chase said the second the money cleared, the mask dropping off his face like it had been hanging by a thread. "Then get your junk out of here. All of it. I don't want a single thing of yours left when Ashley sees this place."
"Chase, let her have a few days—"
"No. And take that mutt with you. If I see it again, I'm shooting it."
The dog.
I was out of my chair before he finished the sentence.
Summer.
I took the stairs two at a time. The bedroom door was shut, and through it I could hear a big body pacing, nails clicking on hardwood, staying silent the way only a trained dog can stay silent.
I opened the door, and ninety pounds of German Shepherd hit me at chest height.
"Hi, girl," I managed, into her fur. "Hi. I know. I know."
Summer was a retired military working dog, my mother's birthday gift the year I turned ten. "Every girl needs a bodyguard," she'd said, smiling. That time she wasn't joking. After Mom died, Summer was the one who slept across my feet through every nightmare. Beth's family tried to lose her twice; she found her way home both times — twenty miles, through traffic.
Past life, in the second month of the end of the world, I left her behind to go scavenge — because she was old and slow, and I thought I was doing the math.
Chase's family is another math problem.
I never forgave myself for that. And back in the ruins, in the dark, I made a vow: if I ever got one impossible do-over, this — this exact thing — would be the first thing I rewrote.
"Nobody's eating anybody," I told her. "Not this time."
She thumped her tail like she understood. Maybe she did.
I was packing the last of my mother's things when it happened.
Ding. The sound detonated inside my skull — crisp, glassy, impossible.
[SYSTEM ONLINE: STOCKPILE PROTOCOL]
Deposit goods valued at $1,000 or more within the next hour. Each deposit grants 10 cubic feet of personal storage space.
Countdown: 59:59
I stood very still, one hand on a box of my mother's dishes.
A cheat. A real one. The kind of impossible thing you only read about in stories, landing in my head fifteen days early — like the universe had finally decided to pay me back.
I picked up my phone with the hand that wasn't shaking. Twelve hundred dollars, brand new last month.
[DEPOSIT: SMARTPHONE — VALUED AT $1,199][STORAGE AWARDED: 12 CUBIC FEET]
The phone was gone. Just — gone, out of my hand. And in my mind there was a space the size of a closet, dim and airless and absolutely real, and my phone sat in the middle of it like a toy on an empty warehouse floor.
Fifteen days. Every dollar I had, converted into time. Every hour, into supplies.
Space. It was real.
I grabbed my keys.