The Awakened Girl in the Apocalypse

Daisy's POV

The email came in at 6:12, in the middle of my eighth pass at the same three lines of product copy, and it landed in my personal inbox with the sender field empty,

no subject line, and nothing in the body except two lines of text.

"Three minutes. Then everyone around you turns. Stay off the elevators."

I didn't believe it.

There is too much of that going around the Bay — AR gimmicks, influencer pranks — and somewhere in this city there is always a startup willing to trade a good scare for traffic.

My hands were already on the keyboard, so I typed out Jess? Maya? It's not April Fools', looked at the line for two seconds, and deleted the whole thing. The sender field was empty.

There was nobody on the other end to answer me.

Then the fluorescents over my desk flickered three times, and every printer on the floor jammed at once. "What is PG&E doing now?" Lena said, lifting her head from her screen. "How many times is that this year?"

I didn't answer her. The street outside had gone dark a while ago, and under the streetlights the branches of the palms and the sycamores swung back and forth like a hand reaching up out of the fog, ready to drag people down into the black water of the Bay.

Beside me, Lena turned her head.

I saw her eyes first, cloudy and gray, like frosted glass, and only after that did I see the skin at her throat gone waxy blue-white and the black creeping in around the edges of her nails.

"What's the matter?" She leaned toward me, in the same mother-hen tone she had used on me since my first week. "What are you staring at? Let the boss catch you and you'll be here till ten."

The stench of rotten flesh hit me before she finished speaking. My stomach lurched, and I shot up from the chair.

The whole floor was looking at me. I shoved the laptop and the charger into my bag, and I pulled the zipper twice before it would close.

"I don't feel well," I said to Lena. "I'm going home. Tell the boss I'm taking a sick day."

Lena looked at me like I had said something to her in another language.

"What do you mean you don't feel well," she said. "I got bit by a stray in the Mission yesterday, I went and got my rabies shots, and I'm still here, aren't I. You keep this up and the boss is going to fire you."

I caught the corner of her mouth twitching out of the corner of my eye — an unnatural jerk.

I was at the glass door by then. I threw the rest of it over my shoulder.

"Fine. Fire me. I quit."

Nobody in the office made a sound. Under the door of the boss's office there was a thin line of light.

I pushed through the fire door and went down three steps at a time, because you do not ride an elevator when the power is unstable, and if the car stops between floors you are meat in a can.

The emergency lights cut in and out, the concrete steps dropped away beneath me one after another, and my footsteps came back off the empty stairwell like somebody else running behind me.

On the last half flight I looked at my phone. Two minutes, from the email to right now.

I came out the front doors at exactly three, and up on the third floor a scream went through the building. Glass broke somewhere above me, and furniture went over.

Everybody standing around the plaza waiting on their Ubers looked up at the windows.

"Holy shit. Is somebody jumping?"

"Which one is this."

My hands were shaking too hard to hold the phone, and I did not look up, not once. I badged through the turnstile and got out of the park.

The email was gone out of my inbox, gone clean, the way things look when they were never there at all.

My bars started dropping, and the little wheel on my screen turned and turned. I wanted to text people, SMS and iMessage both, and every one of them just sat there stuck on sending.

I squatted at the curb and typed a few lines and deleted all of them. Wind was coming up off the water and the fog was already rolling in past the Gate, but everybody on the street was going about their own business.

I unlocked a Bay Wheels bike instead of touching the Muni, and twenty minutes later I was standing in front of Bayview Apartments.

I dragged a cart out at the Trader Joe's on the ground floor: milk, bread, instant pasta, chocolate, peanut butter.

I pushed a full cart up to the register. I shop there three times a week and Gloria knows me.

"Sweetie, what's wrong?" She came over from the shelves. "No overtime today? You look terrible."

"Rough day," I said. "I'm going home to eat my feelings."

"Are you still doing deliveries?" I said. "Ten cases of bottled water, up to the eighth floor. Just leave them in the elevator. I got laid off today and I start job hunting tomorrow, so I won't have time to keep coming down for it."

Gloria clucked her tongue and said she’d have a cart bring everything up for me, then told me not to wreck my stomach like that.

My hand stayed on the cart handle until my knuckles went white.

I was adopted, and after the people who raised me died the city took the house, and I had been in the Bay less than a year.

I closed my mouth. The word zombie never came out, because I didn't have any proof. The email was already gone and I hadn't even thought to take a screenshot.

Gloria rang me up, bagged everything, and walked me to the elevator. Before the doors closed I heard the guard talking to her.

"Delivery again? What's this girl buying all this for?"

“She got laid off. Doesn’t wanna keep running down for the water,” Gloria said. “Young folks, really loading up.”

On the eighth floor I pulled everything out of the car, hit the button to send it back down, and carried it inside load by load.

Door shut, deadbolt, chain, and back inside the only familiar space I had left, my heart finally slowed down.

The living room had one floor lamp on, pointed straight at the couch and straight into my eyes.

I dropped onto the couch and shut my eyes to breathe for a minute before I dealt with the pile by the door.

The moment my eyes closed, something was wrong.

There was a cube behind them, with more faces than I could count, turning and coming apart and locking itself back together.

I rolled off the couch and dry-heaved on the rug.