Chapter 2

Daisy's POV

The dizziness faded by degrees. I dropped to my knees on the floor, dry-heaving, and brought up the half can of energy drink I’d chugged before dinner until all I could taste was bitterness.

When I closed my eyes again, the Rubik's Cube that wouldn't stop turning was gone.

What was left was a single cube, hanging still in the back of my mind. Sharp edges, dead still. That whole spinning fit had probably just been its self-test.

I tried to "look" at it.

Something I couldn't name crawled up the back of my neck, like gripping my own wrist. It was part of me.

A storage space that size out of nowhere, and my heart skipped a beat.

Then another sentence pressed down on me. Something was seriously wrong with the world.

I walked to the window with one hand on the wall and lifted a corner of the blinds.

Outside, everything was business as usual. Somebody walking a dog, somebody just up out of BART heading home, a DoorDash guy cutting across the intersection on his bike, the streetlights soaking everyone in warm yellow.

Quiet as any ordinary Thursday night.

They had no idea what tomorrow was going to look like. I watched for a long time, until my eyes ached, and then said it low. "Don't know if I'll ever see a night like this again."

I pulled every curtain shut and started pushing the bags from the store into the space, one item at a time.

The first time I held my breath, afraid things would go in and never come back out. When I confirmed I could pull everything back exactly as it went in, right down to the folds in the plastic bags, I let out a long breath. It stores, it retrieves.

Time to stock up for real.

Then I opened the storage room to the right of my front door.

Three metal shelving units went all the way to the ceiling. The freezer was packed to the lid.

I was already the kind of person who treats prepping as a hobby. My supply list was taped to the fridge.

Canned goods: ten-year canned chili, Spam, beef stew, green beans, corn, meat and vegetables mixed in together, twenty cases stacked up.

Staples: ten cases of MREs, ten cases of energy bars, five fifty-pound bags of rice.

Quick stuff: pasta, ramen, instant soup, canned chowder.

Ten cases of water, plus the five-gallon jugs on top of that. Seasonings: three cases of salt, a few bottles each of soy sauce, vinegar, olive oil, hot sauce.

Milk and eggs and produce were what I picked up day to day. There was another round of that in the kitchen fridge.

The gear was a bug-out bag I'd put together myself.

Leatherman, fire steel, water filter straw, tactical flashlight, Mylar blanket, three days of food.

Next to the bag sat a chainsaw, an axe, and a tactical knife. In the corner were three gas cans and a generator. There were medical kits, QuikClot, Advil, gauze, bandages, and unopened bottles of multivitamins scattered around.

I ran my hands over all of it and it didn't feel good. I used to buy this stuff for fun. Never thought one day I'd be living off it.

I put the storage room into the space item by item.

I was willing to bet everything on it because that feeling of being welded onto me made it certain: as long as I was alive, the stuff was there, and I was the only one who could touch any of it.

That kind of exclusivity made me steadier than I had ever been.

Two big water barrels had been sitting in the bathroom for years. I tried sending the water in with no container at all. It worked. The water pooled on one face of the space, clear all the way down. So I just turned the tap on, figuring I'd drain the barrels in every so often and keep one cell set aside for water.

I started doing the math. One face alone was about two hundred cubic meters. How many faces were there? I lost count somewhere along the way, and it felt like a cube really was turning, silent, somewhere in my head. At least on this one thing, I didn't have to panic anymore.

The night got darker outside. Should I head out now and grab more? I pushed the thought down. Night is always more dangerous than day. Get through tonight first.

I went into the kitchen and dropped a box of Trader Joe's frozen pasta in the microwave.

Back then I was in the habit of prepping myself a week of food on weekends, all of it into the freezer, three minutes in the microwave when I wanted it. That one freezer shelf was my life.

I rinsed a small bowl of blueberries too, the really big kind. Good for your eyes, I told myself.

I carried the food to the coffee table and turned on the old TV. I've always liked a TV better than a projector, because it puts me back in front of the news with my grandparents when I was little, and nothing else has ever given me that same steadiness.

Just past six, the local news channel.

"Welcome to tonight's latest update. This is reporter Vera, reporting for you."

She said there had been a rabies incident in an office building at the SOMA tech campus. The person was a young woman, and the one who bit her was her colleague Lena. Lena had gotten her last rabies shot the night before. Unfortunately it came on faster.

I was bent over my food. My head came up.

The feed cut to the scene. At first Lena lunged at the person next to her, and the one filming was still laughing. "All right, Lena's finally worked herself into rabies from all that overtime." By the time the person who got bit screamed and had a piece of flesh torn off her, the laughing turned into screaming. The camera lurched, all blur, and the rubberneckers scattered in one rush.

That wasn't rabies. I knew that better than anybody.

The reporter went on. Plenty of people online were calling this a zombie biting, pure rumor; the woman just had sharper teeth than most, which was how she'd done that kind of damage, and the public shouldn't buy into it. The anchor took over smiling and started the sign-off.

I couldn't eat another bite.

I cast my phone to the TV and went through X. #SFZombies and #endoftheworld were already sitting on the trending list.

My back was soaked with cold sweat. I stared at the face frozen on the TV and played the same thing over and over in my head. I had been sitting right next to Lena. Closest of anyone.

So close.

That close, and the one who got bitten would have been me.