Chapter 1

I’m a convenience store owner.

When the acid rain apocalypse hit, it ate through metal, wrecked power, and turned clean food and water into currency.

Last time, I made one mistake: I opened my door to my ex, Claire Voss, and her lover, Derek Hale. They didn’t come for shelter—they came for my stash. The blade in my abdomen taught me what mercy buys in a broken world. I killed them, but as my vision faded, the radio crackled with one final update: the disaster was ending.

Day thirty. I didn’t live to see morning.

Then I woke up—one week before it began.

This time I do only one thing: lock myself in my underground storage room with exactly thirty days of food and water, and wait for the rain to stop.

But Claire is hoarding again, louder than ever—embezzling money, emptying my shelves, trying to starve me in the first week so I’ll crawl back begging.

That’s when it hits me:

She thinks the apocalypse lasts forever.

She has no idea it only lasts thirty days.

————

I was sitting in the corner behind the register, my back pressed to a cold metal cabinet. Every breath tugged at the wound in my abdomen, and the bleeding wouldn’t stop.

The gauze from the plastic bag had been gone for a while. All I could do was tear off a strip of my shirt and clamp it over the cut.

Half the cigarette pack in my pocket was soaked through with blood, but I still pulled out the last one. My fingers shook so badly when I lit it that the flame wavered in the draft, like it could die at any moment.

Acid rain hammered the front window, a steady hiss like handfuls of fine gravel.

A pale ring of corrosion had eaten into the edges of the frame. Every so often, a drop slipped through a split in the weather strip. The moment it hit the floor it gave off a faint white smoke, carrying a sharp, chemical bite.

I held the cigarette between my lips and took a drag. My throat immediately itched. The cough came up fast, unstoppable, and the taste of blood filled my mouth. I turned my head and spat the dark mouthful onto the tiles.

Then I looked down into the aisle.

Two bodies lay between the shelves, twisted like their last movements had been snapped in half.

Claire Voss was slumped against a toppled rack of chips. Her hair was stuck to her face with blood, and her eyes were open, as if she was still trying to confirm whether I was dead.

Derek Hale lay beside her. I’d driven a short knife—one we sold on the rack—straight through his throat. Blood had crawled out from under his collar and dried dark.

The gash in my abdomen was his work.

When the blade went in, I even heard it: skin parting, flesh tearing. Then the heat hit, a raw burn, like someone had shoved a red-hot rod into my body.

Claire had been right there. She hadn’t shouted for him to stop. She hadn’t looked surprised. She just took one step back, like she didn’t want blood on her shoes, and gave orders in that familiar, practical tone:

“Hold him down. The key’s on him. He has more stock somewhere.”

My name is Ethan Cole. I’ve run this neighborhood convenience store for seven years.

It used to be just a business—coffee, sandwiches, beer, cigarettes for whoever wandered in at two in the morning.

After the acid rain started, this place turned into a node. Whoever had food, clean water, medicine, batteries—whoever could keep them—could buy themselves a few more days. The sign out front didn’t change, but in everyone else’s eyes it wasn’t a store anymore. It was a warehouse. A supply point. A target.

And I went from being a small-time shop owner to the guy everyone watched.

In the first week, people were still arguing online about whether it was “extreme weather.” By the second week, trucks stopped coming into the city. Supermarket shelves were stripped bare. People started smashing car windows on the street just to steal water. The humid haze of acid rain made everything damp and tacky. Paper packaging went soft. Rice and flour clumped. Can lids rusted around the seams. A lot of electronics shorted out the moment you touched them. Metal locks turned gritty with corrosion, leaving white powder on your hands every time you opened a door.

Worse, if the rain hit your skin it stung, and if you stayed out too long it raised blisters. People learned quickly that going outside wasn’t “looking for supplies.” It was gambling with your life.

I made it to the end of the month not because I was brave, but because I had one advantage: the underground temperature- and humidity-controlled storage room beneath my store.

It had been built as an old-style cold room and wine cellar. Thick walls. Decent insulation against moisture. Early on, I didn’t understand how valuable it was. I only realized after everything in the ground-level stockroom started spoiling in waves. I carried what was still edible downstairs and discovered that the place worked like a small safe: humidity couldn’t get in, and the temperature stayed steady. After that, every time someone tried to loot me or test my defenses, that room was the reason I survived.

But surviving didn’t mean winning.

Claire was my girlfriend—more accurately, my ex.

Not long before the collapse, she broke up with me. She was vague about it. “We don’t fit.” “You’re always stuck on this little store.”

I didn’t beg. I didn’t dig. In the week after the breakup, I was busy with deliveries and inventory, telling myself life would settle back into something normal.

Then the acid rain came.

In the early days I never even thought about looking for her.

Part of it was because she’d already walked out of my life. The bigger part was because I could barely keep myself alive.

Until three days ago—when the acid rain had been falling for almost a month.

She showed up at my door.

Her knocking blended into the rain. She called my name and cried like it was real. She said she couldn’t hold out anymore. She said she and a friend had nowhere left to go.

By then the rain had gone on so long that the streets were nearly empty. Even the boldest looters had gone to ground.

Claire stood outside under a rain poncho, water dripping from the brim. Her face was pale, her lips trembling. Derek stood behind her with his head down, like a quiet guard.

I saw a raw red burn on the back of her hand where the rain had touched her, and I softened.

I opened the door and let them in. I even poured them hot water and handed over a pack of compressed biscuits. In that moment I thought I’d done the right thing, because even in a broken world you tell yourself there should still be a line you don’t cross.

They stayed in the store for a few days.

On the first day, Claire kept saying thank you, and Derek stayed quiet. On the second day, they started asking how much food I had. By the third day, the arguments started coming more often. Claire said I was hiding things too well, that the three of us couldn’t last long, that I couldn’t just think about myself.

I didn’t tell them about what I had downstairs. I only said we needed to ration.

Then, in the next second, Derek came up behind me.

When I turned, the knife was already in.

I remember grabbing his wrist. I remember knocking a shelf over.

I snatched up a crowbar and slammed it onto the back of his hand. He yelped and let go. The knife stayed buried in my gut. I had to yank it out myself, and blood poured out in a rush.

Claire didn’t step back. She actually stepped forward, bracing Derek and checking his hand with a tenderness that had nothing to do with me.

In that moment, everything snapped into focus.

That was why she left me.

She and Derek had been together the whole time.

Even before we officially split, I’d felt something was off between them. I didn’t want to look too closely. When I finally thought about asking, she ended it. Once we were broken up, I told myself there was no point digging for answers.

When they came to “ask for help,” they’d been careful, because they weren’t sure I would open the door. Now they didn’t need to pretend anymore.

Claire said, “Hand it over. Where are you keeping it?”

When I fought back, I didn’t have time for thoughts.

Derek was strong, but he didn’t know the layout. I smashed the lights so the store went dim, then drew them toward the glass entrance. The bottom of the door had already been partially eaten away by the rain, and acid water had seeped in.

The patch of wet floor turned into a trap.

Derek slipped for half a step. I drove the crowbar into his knee. When he dropped, I took the short knife and pushed it into his throat.

Claire screamed and lunged at me. I blocked her hand, then shoved her into the collapsing shelves. The impact was dull and heavy, like a bag of groceries hitting the ground.

I won.

And that was as far as it went.

The wound in my abdomen was too deep. My strength drained out like someone had pulled a plug. I dragged myself back behind the register, lit the cigarette, and waited for my body to go cold.

The radio sat on the counter. The batteries were almost dead, the signal breaking into static. Just when I thought it would finally go silent, the channel cleared for a moment. A mechanical female voice cut through the noise:

“Extreme acid rain conditions are expected to weaken significantly within the next several hours… Residents are advised not to go outside. Air humidity remains high and may cause irritation and corrosion… Rescue corridors are being restored…”

I listened, and a laugh slipped out—small, painful, and wrong in my chest.

The rain really was easing.

I looked up through the gray-white curtain beyond the glass. The rain that had been like a mesh was thinning into broken lines. The white smoke rising off the pavement was lighter now. Far down the street, a streetlight flickered on, like power was coming back.

I knew it. If I could hold on for a few more hours, someone would come. Rescue, police—whatever you wanted to call it—order would return.

But I wasn’t going to make it.

The cigarette burned down to the filter. My fingertips went numb. I set it on the edge of the counter and tried to take another drag, but my chest wouldn’t rise.

My vision narrowed, as if someone was turning off the lights in the store one by one.

At the instant my awareness broke, the rain and the store bell overlapped in my ears.

“Ding—”

My eyes flew open.

Harsh sunlight poured through the front window. There was no corrosive stench in the air—only coffee and warm bread. A customer stood at the register with a few bills in hand. Seeing me frozen, he waved in front of my face.

“Sir? My change?”

I looked down at my stomach. My shirt was intact. No blood. No wound.

I patted my pocket. A full pack of cigarettes. My keys. On the wall, the calendar showed a date I knew too well—

one week before the acid rain began.

I pressed my fingers against the counter. The surface was solid and cold and real.

I was back.