Chapter 1

Last time, the world ended.

My fallen comrade left me the fortress he spent his life building. I hesitated, let his niece’s boyfriend inside, and that mercy killed everyone. They took the warehouse, cut the power, and put a knife in my gut. I crawled into the underground control room and triggered the self-destruct protocol he’d hidden for the worst day. The entire fortress went up in flames.

Then I opened my eyes—one month before disaster.

The gate was still closed. They were still outside. Everything could still be fixed.

This time, I set one rule at the door: anyone who opens it without approval is a traitor.

She cried like before, begged me to let her boyfriend in, called him the man she loved—and when I refused, she reached for the controls anyway.

So I grabbed her wrist and threw her out with them.

————

I pressed my back against the metal door of the underground control room, barely keeping myself from collapsing.

The stab wound in my abdomen was deep. Blood ran down the hem of my shirt and dripped onto the floor with a soft, steady patter.

Above me, the alarm beacon rotated, washing the room in pulsing red. The outer paddock had fallen. The warehouse was gone. The system repeated the same status report again and again, its voice calm—as if nothing had happened.

I raised my head and looked at the wall of monitors.

On feed one, the east side of the warehouse was already burning. Half the shelving had collapsed. Flames crawled up the stacked crates, and smoke pressed low over the living area.

On feed two, a section of the electrified wire fence had been smashed down. Several infected were climbing over bodies, forcing their way inside. On feed three, armed men were tearing through weapons cases and storage cabinets with practiced hands. They didn’t look like people acting on impulse—they looked like people who had been waiting for this.

Evelyn was on the screens too.

She stood at the warehouse entrance, hair a mess, her face streaked with ash, pointing toward the storage bays as she spoke to them. Beside her, Rick held a gun, grinning with the excitement of a thief who’d finally broken into a candy shop. Two bodies lay on the ground. I recognized them—one was a farmhand who’d been feeding the cattle two days ago, the other a woman who had helped me move supplies.

There were no survivors.

At least, the cameras showed no one left to save.

Even if someone was still breathing somewhere, it was too late.

The paddock, the warehouse, the corridors—everything was cut off.

I coughed once. My mouth tasted like rust.

A few weeks ago, the world outside hadn’t fully fallen apart. The news talked in scattered headlines—riots, infections, quarantine lines, highways shut down in a few states. The real collapse came faster than anyone expected.

After the zombie virus broke wide open, towns stopped functioning within three days. Police systems failed. Supermarkets were stripped bare. Hospitals filled up, then went dark. After that, the roads were clogged with abandoned cars and bodies, and the living became more dangerous than the dead.

That was when I brought people to this farm.

Some had already been nearby. Some I picked up on the road. And Noah—he’d done community work before, fixing roofs for the elderly, helping move supplies. I’d crossed paths with him a few times. He was steady enough. Back then, I believed that if we could hold this place, we could all make it.

Because this wasn’t an ordinary farm.

It had belonged to my old friend-in-arms, Alexander Fast.

When we were young, we fought in the same war. We crawled out of the dead together.

He was smarter than me, and better at making money. After he got out, he went into investing, energy, and defense contracts—more money than he could ever spend. He never married. No kids. People called him a strange man: rich enough to live however he wanted, yet he spent most of his life building this farm out in the countryside.

Only I knew why.

He had seen cities flattened by war. He had seen a street of people wiped out in half a day. And he had seen what happens when order disappears—how quickly people turn each other into prey.

He never believed the world would stay stable forever, so he turned this place into a real shelter.

On the surface, it was a farm: a warehouse, fenced paddocks, livestock pens—just a private ranch with good infrastructure. Underground was the core: blast doors, independent power, water purification, air filtration, medicine, weapons, and long-term food reserves. All of it down here.

Right where I was standing.

Forget riots. Even if a world war broke out, this place could last a long time.

Alexander even told me himself—the structure was built to a standard meant to survive in the aftermath of a nuclear strike.

Before the outbreak, he had already died of illness.

Before he went, he left his will and every permission level to me—this land, this farm, and the underground fortress.

And I still failed to hold it.

The problem wasn’t the infected outside.

It was the people inside.

Evelyn was Alexander’s niece.

She hadn’t lived in this city before. She rarely visited. She never cared what her uncle spent here or what he built. After Alexander died, she came to town—probably hoping to claim a piece of the inheritance.

When the outbreak hit, she stayed on the farm. And she decided—naturally, in her mind—that blood made her the owner, that she had the right to say who belonged here and who didn’t.

That evening, Rick showed up at the paddock gate with a few men in a truck. They pounded on the metal and screamed for help, screaming like they were about to die.

I never should have let them get close.

But Evelyn made a scene from the inside.

She said Rick was her boyfriend. She said this was her uncle’s property, not my camp. At the time, I didn’t want to turn it into a public fight. I didn’t want to humiliate my friend’s niece in front of everyone.

I hesitated for a few seconds.

Those few seconds ruined everyone.

The moment the gate opened, Rick’s people acted grateful. They helped carry supplies, helped repair the fence, thanked us nonstop. But within two days they were probing the warehouse layout, learning the guard shifts, asking about the underground entrance, trying to pull people to their side. By the time I realized what they were doing, it was already too late. Some people were bought. Some were fooled. Evelyn kept speaking for them. Then came the blackout, the ambush, the fire, the infighting. The paddock was breached—and the knife in my stomach had come from behind, from one of Rick’s men.

After that, I ran into the underground fortress and physically locked the door from the inside.

Leaning on the console, I forced myself upright and brought the main screen online.

There was only one option.

Denial Protocol.

When Alexander designed this place, he left one last measure.

If the fortress was about to fall completely—if the core systems were about to be taken—then the whole site would self-destruct. Not just the underground. The surface paddocks, the warehouse, key support points, and the perimeter charges would detonate together, wiping the entire compound off the map.

It wasn’t madness. It was damage control.

This place could not fall into the hands of someone like Rick. Give men like that a fortress that could hold off the dead, store weapons, and sustain life for months or years, and everyone still alive within reach would become their prey.

I pressed my hand to the activation panel.

The system read my fingerprint. A cold mechanical voice filled the room.

“Denial Protocol confirmed. Countdown: sixty seconds.”

The numbers appeared.

On the monitors, Rick’s men were hauling explosives toward the underground access, clearly preparing to breach the door by force. Evelyn followed beside him, greed written all over her face. She thought she’d picked the winning side—thought that once Rick took the place, she’d be entitled to a share.

I remembered Alexander when he was still alive—one night, sitting on the ranch fence with a drink, watching the sunset. He told me that if the day ever came, I couldn’t afford to be soft. Softness, in bad times, was worth less than nothing.

Back then I laughed and told him he worried too much.

Now I knew he’d seen further than I ever had.

The countdown kept dropping.

I leaned against the console, gripping the pistol at my waist, knowing I wouldn’t need it. Blood kept pouring from my abdomen. My vision blurred at the edges. Even without the blast, I wasn’t walking out of this room.

So be it.

At least this time, they would take nothing.

I stared at the numbers until the end.

The ground shuddered first, a heavy tremor like the entire farm sinking at once. Then the explosions rolled in layers—warehouse, paddocks, access tunnels, main supports—ripped open at the same time by fire and shockwave. The camera feeds went white, then died.

The control room walls began to split. Overhead steel warped and buckled. Heat slammed down like a door.

I closed my eyes. The last thing I thought of wasn’t myself.

It was that if I ever got another chance, I would never hand the door to anyone again.

The next second, the world blew apart.

And then I snapped my eyes open.