Getting in the truck was the easy part. The road was where hell actually started.
The buses had gone first. An old passenger would slump in a seat — and the moment they stood back up, an entire busload of people had nowhere to run. A steel tube with one door, and something inside it that doesn't knock.
Then there were the lucky ones — the ones with their own cars, or an e-bike, who made it to work through all of that. Like Mr. Wang. They arrived to find the doors locked, stood around in confused little groups, and then watched someone covered in blood come stumbling up the sidewalk toward them.
This was Hour One of the end of the world. Everyone who saw that scene thought: a fight, an accident, somebody in trouble. The helpful ones walked up to give a hand and collected their conversion on the spot. 911 rang busy — all lines, all at once. The city was going under block by block, and most people were still at home, not yet out the door. Which meant the window was open *now*. In an hour, every road out of this town would be a parking lot.
That was when a young woman stepped into the middle of the road and spread her arms like a toll gate. Her boyfriend was at the curb, kneeling over an old woman who had just collapsed.
"Stop the car! She's sick! Stop and take her to the hospital!"
Hers were the only arms stretched across the only moving car on the street. I looked at her the way you look at a weather report. Then I put my foot through the floor.
She dove clear at the last second. Good reflexes. Her boyfriend's reflexes were all in his voice: "Are you insane?! You could have killed her! Cold-blooded — selfish — freak! Everybody's got a camera, lady — I'm putting you on TikTok—"
He never finished the sentence. The old woman he was holding opened her eyes — gray, clouded, nobody home — and bit through his neck. The blood went up in a sheet.
The girlfriend did the arithmetic of love: two steps back, then forward again, swinging her purse at the thing wearing her boyfriend's patient. "Let go of him! Let go of him!" She kicked it, hammered it, dragged him loose while it was busy — and got him three steps before the hand closed around her ankle. He stood back up, wrong. The old woman came off the pavement. Between them, they opened her up while she was still calling him *honey*. The last thing she saw in this world was the exhaust haze of the car that hadn't stopped.
I caught one frame of it in the mirror and gave it exactly one frame. Kindness? That's inventory from a different store. This was hell, and hell runs a different price list.
I ran the next mile flat-out. The road got worse, not better — a head-on flood of cars and runners, an intersection choked with rolled vehicles, and around every open door, clusters of them feeding on whoever hadn't gotten out. They heard the engine and came after it like dogs after a mail truck. Anything that moves. That was the rule now.
Wrong street. I felt it before I knew it — and then I saw it: a big red cross hanging over the entrance of Mercy General. Well. That explained the block.
Hospitals go first. Always. I put the truck straight through the middle of them — a dozen bodies bouncing off the hood — and punched across the intersection before the tide behind the doors could finish pouring out.
One of them was faster than the rest: a nurse, still in scrubs, face already gone. She came off the left sidewalk through the bike railing and hit my windshield with the full weight of a grown woman falling.
A blood-palm print, fingers spread. Up close, you could take inventory: the nose bitten off to a wet black hole. The right eye out of its socket, lid gone, resting on her cheek like it was thinking about dropping. One side of her mouth torn back to the bone — and on the other half, perfectly intact, this morning's lip gloss. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
She chewed on the glass a few times, got nothing, and took it personally — the muscles doing the tearing, ripping her ruined cheek wider until her face split like the poster of a J-horror film she'd never seen. Then she threw her whole weight at the windshield to come through it.
I stood on the brake, threw the truck sideways, and rotated one clean three-sixty in the middle of the intersection. Centrifugal force did the paperwork. She went one way, the two clusters on my flanks went the other, and I was through.
Zombies, I don't fear. I'd killed more of them than I'd ever bothered to count.
One intersection from clear, the world dropped a piano on the road. An eighteen-wheeler lost its brakes, folded, and lay down across the crossing directly in front of me — on top of six or seven cars, like it had been scheduled.
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The airbag went off against my face like a door slamming. When my ears stopped ringing: steel everywhere, one very large tire hanging in the air above my hood, clearance measured in inches. Four of them. Maybe five.
I hit the wheel once, tried the ignition. Dead. Fine.
Here's the hole I'd never patched: I didn't own a good vehicle, because I'd never planned to need one. Late in the world, fuel is the rarest resource there is — generators want it, vehicles want it — and a woman on foot is a woman who's hard to follow. Close range, I walk. Medium range, bicycle. Long range, I don't go. A car is a consumable that eats the one thing you can't replace. And now one of them had parked itself on top of me.
Outside, the shuffling got closer. I checked my head, checked the mirrors, unbuckled — and a long-handled shovel was in my hand before the door finished opening.
Knives are the wrong tool. The blade is thin; it goes in and stays in. A shovel flattens. A shovel goes through. A shovel finds the brainstem without asking for directions.
The nearest one was an old man in a bathrobe. I flattened him with the face of the blade, stepped in, and put the point through the top of his skull and into the brainstem. Lights out. Permanent.
I turned the shovel over in my hands, almost disappointed. Too early — no crystal cores yet, nothing in the skulls but the usual. Which simplified my mood considerably: no loot, no reason to be artistic about it.
I picked a thin lane and worked down the tail of the crash site, one shovel per head, quiet and quick. The horde was bunched at the front of the wreck, where the blood smell was thickest. I was through before the sound of me reached the front of the line.
A wrecked sports car sat at the curb — airbag also out — and the couple inside it, alive, watching me work. "She's killing them!" the girl screamed into her boyfriend's shoulder. "Somebody call the police!" I looked at their dead battery of a car, then at their live selves, and kept walking. Useless machine. Like its passengers.
The driver's door swung open anyway. "Take us with you!" the young man called, doing the math out loud. "Get us somewhere safe and I'll pay whatever you want — my father is the chairman of Westbrook Group. A million! Name it!"
I didn't spend a look on him. "You still think money buys something?" I said, and took the alley.
The residential blocks were quieter — most people locked indoors, waiting for the news to tell them what the noise outside was. I kept to the greenbelts and the blind side of the hedges, and the morning's harvest was three sanitation workers, two joggers, and a second man in a bathrobe. One shovel each. None of it loud.
The two of them trailed me the whole way, bickering at a funeral volume. "I can't walk in these heels!" "Then crawl!" He was out of patience and out of nice. She looked at him, then at me — one shovel per head, like I was mowing the lawn — bit her lip, and limped along behind us without another word. Some people learn fast only when the tuition is paid in bites. This story is hosted at novelping(.)com.
Three blocks on, salvation: a delivery box truck parked outside a convenience store, doors open, keys in the ignition, driver gone. Inside the store — nobody, and a dried sheet of blood behind the register. Somebody had turned; the rest had run. Their loss.
Rule one of the end of the world: never walk out of a store half-full. Thirty seconds of sweeping today outweighs a thousand sweeps next month, when every shelf in the county has been picked over by fear. I went in and emptied it — candy, batteries, first aid, lighters, the good coffee, the sandwich case, every bottle in the coolers, and the ice cream, because the freezer was still running and I am not a barbarian.
The two of them burst in just as the shelves went bare. The girl found her voice first: "You didn't pay for any of that! And you took everything — what are we supposed to eat?!"
Her boyfriend answered her, not me — "Are you sick?!" — and then turned the charm on for me instead. "Ma'am. Ma'am. Take me to Grandview Manor, out on the west side. That's all. Drop me at the gate and the money's yours. A million."
"You still think money buys something," I said, and shut the door on his face. Through the glass, I watched a millionaire watch his fortune expire in real time. Then I drove off with the truck and the morning.
Forty minutes of straight driving later, the buildings gave up and the road opened out. The farther I got from the city, the thinner they got on the asphalt. The outskirts didn't know yet. Give them till lunch.
I parked at the warehouse, and Summer announced me from two hundred yards out, loud as an intersection's worth of sirens. "Good girl," I said, rubbing her head. "You have no idea how good your timing is."
The warehouse still held most of yesterday's haul — the farmers' market run, the feed store, the whole back of the truck. I stood in the doorway, spread my hands, and the room emptied itself into the dark. Crates, feed, seedlings, and the small bleating luggage I'd bought yesterday: in. All of it.
Which raised a question. I looked at Summer. Summer looked at me, tail going. "Come here, girl. Let's try something." I reached into the dark for her—
Bark. Bark-bark. Nothing. The dark didn't take her. So: the system stores things that are (a) alive, (b) stupid, and (c) technically food. Chickens, yes. Lambs, yes. A ninety-pound German Shepherd with opinions — no. People, obviously no. Good to know where the edges of the map are.
I wasn't disappointed. A crutch isn't a leg. The system is a loan, and loans get called in. Use it — ride it, squeeze it — but every pound of it has to become *yours*: muscle, knowledge, doors that open under your own hands. The day it disappears, you're still standing. That was always the whole plan.
One hour later I was horizontal on the cloud-soft sofa from the mall, a cold Coke in one hand, a microwaved box of last night's steakhouse in front of me, and ninety pounds of dog across my feet — both of us watching the television I'd looted for exactly this moment.
"Emergency broadcast. Emergency broadcast."
"Multiple violent incidents reported across the city this morning. Our reporter is live at the scene—"
On-screen, a man with a perfect haircut and a perfect lapel walked toward a line of yellow police tape, camera crew behind him, toward the thing the tape was there to pretend wasn't happening. I took a sip of my Coke and settled in.