Chapter 6

Emma 's POV

When I opened my eyes, the clock in the bottom right corner of my screen read 9:30. I scratched my head in annoyance.

I came back to life again.

For someone like me, this endless rebirth is torture."

I let out a helpless sigh and started going back over the three lives I had already burned through.

Half an hour wasn't enough to get clear of the Financial District, so becoming a zombie really was the best option on the table.

Except that being a zombie came with one thing to watch out for: stay away from David.

I glanced over at my chosen retreat, the second-floor security room, card reader plus a mechanical key, two locks, load-bearing concrete walls.

All I had to do was run the same play again: wait for the zombies to show up, jab one from a safe distance with the knife, and carry the virus off to the electrical room, where I'd lock myself in and let it take me.

A zombie's limbs are so twisted that there's no way it could manage anything as fine as throwing a deadbolt or working a keypad lock.

"A perfect plan!"

I nearly applauded myself.

I took the mascot suit and started waiting beside the guard.

This time I wasn't wearing it to stop myself from biting anyone; I wanted one more layer of padding for when I got close to a zombie in a crowd.

The guard gave me a sideways look. "Miss, hiding back here to slack off? Your supervisor will spot you fast."

I kept my head down. "Doesn't matter. She won't get a chance to dock my pay."

The second I said it, the terrified look on Sarah's face from my last life flashed through my head.

Last time around I had tried warning the guard and got nowhere, so this time I wasn't bothering. Living is exhausting, dying is exhausting, and the only thing left is to look after myself.

My legs had gone numb from crouching, but the infected I'd been waiting for finally turned up.

I jabbed the long pole with the paring knife lashed to it into one of them quick, then hugged the knife and turned and bolted.

I turned and ran.

By then the building's alarm had cycled through several rounds, and some departments had followed the instructions and sent their people home, so a huge crowd was pouring down the emergency stairs. I went up against the flow.

Before long, the people who reached the first floor ran straight into zombies tearing at anyone alive, and screams and cries for help went up from every side.

With both main doors filling with the infected, there was no way out, and some people turned and ran back upstairs to hide, only to meet the crowd coming down. The stairwell jammed solid, and nobody could move forward or back.

The zombies on the first floor finished with the living and followed the noise into the stairs, and while the people at the bottom tried to climb to safety, the ones above kept pushing down without any idea what was happening, so apart from those the infected got, a stampede in the middle of the run killed and injured most of the rest.

All of it I watched from the security room. By then I had already gotten my hands on the virus and locked the door behind me, and that square room full of glowing screens was my last utopia.

I shut off most of the feeds and kept one sixteen-way grid. Third, on each host machine I installed a streaming client and a cloud drive: one looping Succession, one looping The Office, one looping Friends.

At the end I took a box cutter and added a shallow cut to the back of my hand. May the zombies feel no pain, amen.

My pigeon-toed feet held up my twisted body as I threw myself wildly against the electronic screen.

The moment I hear a human voice, a powerful urge to bite comes over me.

Now all I could do was watch Friends while chewing on the speaker.

The plastic cost me a front tooth, and then I found the most absurd part of the whole mess: I had forgotten to turn the volume down.

Between bites of screen I watched the feeds.Bodies lay scattered everywhere across an office floor that used to be so tidy, the infected drifting with no purpose at all; now and then a survivor slipped through, and got surrounded soon after.

A few days in, I got used to the constant sound of human voices. I stopped ramming the screen, stopped chewing the speaker, and could sit and watch quietly.

That was the least painful stretch of my life, and the most human I have ever been, except that I was no longer human.

When Succession looped for the fourth time, a very small scream came out of the monitor, followed by footsteps.

I looked at the feeds. A group had climbed in through the window off the street-side fire escape, accidentally let two zombies in behind them, and fallen back to the second-floor break room.

At first I couldn't work out why anyone would run into a building that had already fallen; then I watched them go through the cabinets, tear the water cooler apart, pry the vending machine open, and I understood. They had come for food.

I counted it off by the loop count. One pass took about two days, so the fourth meant roughly a week had gone by outside. A week is long enough for every survivor to hit the same problem: hunger.

They were professionals. Three outside holding the door and clearing zombies, two inside searching fast.

The one inside, bouncing around and making the cabinets rattle, looked strangely familiar. Black hoodie, cuffs worn through, a single earbud hanging there playing nothing.

The one on the door was even more familiar: white shirt, sleeves rolled to the elbow, an old scar on his forearm, one hit per zombie, never a wasted motion.

The eyebrows on my corpse twitched. My head had been cracked open that way. It was David. The one going through the cabinets was Marcus.

I wasn't the least bit worried about another headshot. Two locks and a load-bearing concrete wall stood between us, and he had no idea I was even in here.

They're here to gather supplies; they won't clear out every floor. And even if they do come up here, David doesn't know the door code.

Then Marcus shouted, "We're surrounded." David's voice came through the monitor speaker: "There's an escape line."

But he didn't head for the window. He went the opposite way from the escape route, into the back kitchen.

My zombie eyebrows jumped again, very bad feeling came up with them.

He dragged a long coil of hemp rope out from beside the gas hookup on the stove, laid a trail of cooking oil along it, and ran for the window.

He dodged two zombies lunging at him, and in the last second before he threw himself outside he tossed the lit lighter back into the room, where it landed right on the rope.

I understood in a heartbeat. Thirty-plus floors, nearly five thousand people in the building on a weekday, and the second floor tied into the whole level's gas lines and the fuel room.

He had seen the building turn into one big horde and decided to burn it clean. He wasn't running.He's clearing out a hazard..

The feed went white, then black. The boom folded the soundproof door out of shape, and heat poured in through the gap.

If I could still work my body, I would have given David the finger.

In the flames,I swore angrily： "Fuck."