Chapter 3

Daisy's POV

After midnight, my phone buzzed again.

I practically lunged for it.

"Who are you." "How do you know about my office." I sent them one after another. Read receipts, nothing back.

All I got in return was a short link.

I stared at it for a while.

I'd be lying if I said I didn't believe it. The thing with Lena lined up too well — lined up like somebody had known what was coming and went out of their way to give me a heads-up.

But I'm not the kind of person who clicks just any link either.

There were three burner phones under my bed, all prepaid, none of them tied to an account. Worst case, this phone dies too.

With that in mind, I clicked.

The page spun twice and the Doomsday Survival Guide popped up.

Under three thousand words. I read every line of it, and at the very end two words sat there, bold and red: MUTATION.

Underneath, one sentence. Everyone evolves. Those who don't won't survive the new world.

What kept looping in my head was the footage. Lena lunging, her teeth sinking into the arm of the person next to her, tearing a chunk of meat off.

Her pupils were gray. Her joints bent at angles that made no sense. She walked like something was holding her up by a string from behind.

We've only ever seen that in movies. The movies call it a zombie.

The news called it rabies.

The guide called it evolution.

For the first time it occurred to me that all these words were describing the same thing.

Lena wasn't sick. She had turned into something else.

So what about me.

Was I already standing next to that line and just didn't know it.

I dragged the printer over from the corner of the desk and plugged it in.

This isn't something I can leave sitting on a phone. Later the power goes, the internet goes, the screen goes black, and those few thousand words go with it. And I've never trusted a battery to last.

I needed it on paper. Paper doesn't need power or a signal, and tucked into the Tesseract Space it can sit there for good, and the day I pull it out it's still there, not one word missing.

I hit print and ran off a dozen copies in one go, and watching the pages slide out of the tray one at a time I still felt it wasn't enough, so I ran a few more.

Three of them got placed right then. One rolled up and shoved into the Tesseract Space, in the same cell as the water and the meds. One buried at the bottom of a box in the storage room. One taped to the inside of my front door.

The tape went crooked twice. My hands wouldn't stop shaking.

When I was done I turned around and the box of pasta on the coffee table had gone cold long ago.

I sat there and finished it, not a bite left, but I honestly don't remember what it tasted like.

That night the kitchen ran wide open.

Three slow cookers going at once, two Dutch ovens working through beef and meatballs, every scrap of raw meat in the fridge and the freezer into a pot to cook through.

The instant stuff went through the microwave and the air fryer, and the four burners on the stove each held a pot. Chili, tomato soup, macaroni, hot cocoa.

The guide said there'd be extreme heat ahead and extreme cold after it, and something hot in your stomach is the only thing that makes you feel human, so every time a pot came off I funneled it into thermoses, screwed the lids down tight, and put them in the space.

Time inside every cell of the Tesseract Space is stopped. Whatever goes in comes out exactly the way it went in.

So I made everything open-and-eat. Nothing that needs a second round of heating, out of the space and straight into my mouth.

Water came first.

The guide said the water supply would start going bad after three days, and past those three days nothing coming out of a tap could be trusted again.

Three days.

The bathtub, the buckets, the five-gallon jugs — anything that could hold water got filled, and I kept one cell in the space just for water, the surface flat as glass.

I didn't dare sleep.

The laptop and the phone in the living room stayed on, every feed set to read itself aloud, earbuds in my ears working through it top to bottom while my hands never stopped.

It wasn't that I wasn't afraid.

I'd just done the math. One more meal is one more guarantee. Mutation carries risk, and a failed evolution is death. All I wanted was to hold out until somebody made the drug that raises your odds and lowers the body count.

The lights went out while I was filling the fourteenth bottle.

Not a flicker. Every appliance in the apartment went silent at the same instant, the streetlights below went dark along with them, and the window looked like somebody had thrown a blanket over it.

I stood there a while with one hand on the edge of the stove.

The words in that guide were crawling off the page one line at a time.

This building has good soundproofing. That's what I pay for.

But that night I heard it anyway.

First a scream, very short, like something cut it off halfway.

Then dogs. A whole spread of them barking.

Then the howling. Not people shouting at people. The kind that comes out of a throat packed full of something and only just squeezes through.

My hand was already on the curtain.

I didn't pull it open.

I pressed the curtain back into place, checked the door lock, pulled everything half-finished off the stove and back into the space, and told myself to keep my head down, because being greedy is its own way of dying.

I fell asleep on the couch, only to be woken up by the phone.

“This is building management. A new strain of rabies popped up in San Francisco overnight. It spreads quickly, and symptoms set in fast. Starting today, no one is allowed to leave for any reason. The whole city is shut down—businesses, schools, everything’s closed.”

I made a sound like I'd just woken up and told her sure, I'd cooperate, I wouldn't go anywhere.

She sounded relieved, thanked me, hung up, and hurried off to call the next unit.

I checked the time. Eight in the morning.

The TV signal kept cutting out, the anchor stumbling through the copy, and I grabbed at the keywords and wrote them down. Typhoon. Geomagnetic storm. Earthquake. Tsunami. Volcano.

Winter was almost here, and yet several typhoon systems had spun up out at sea and gone off script, and the whole coastline was under warnings.

Major geomagnetic storms would be frequent starting today, and researchers were on the air teaching people how to kill the power and where to take shelter.

Volcanoes under the ocean and on land were going active at the same time, all over the world.

I put the pen down, looked at the fridge, then at the shopping list I'd had taped up for a year, and for the first time thought that list was too short.

The TV steadied for two seconds, every channel cutting to the same picture.

A broadcast.

It said humanity was facing the largest disaster in its history, very possibly an extinction on the scale of the one that took the dinosaurs, and it called on every person on earth to pull together and get through it.

When it ended, the picture broke up again.

I sat on the couch for a long time.

One person, eighth floor, an apartment packed with food and water, and a guide only I had read.

I stood up, walked back into the kitchen, and lit the stove again.