Chapter 2

Daisy's POV

Little by little, the dizziness let up. I sank to my knees, dry-heaving until the half can of energy drink I'd chugged before dinner came back up. Bitterness was all I could taste.

I shut my eyes again. The thing that had been spinning like a Rubik's Cube was gone. In its place, a single sharp-edged cube hung motionless in the back of my mind. All that spinning had probably been a self-test.

I tried to "look" at it.

An unfamiliar sensation crept up the back of my neck. It was like gripping my own wrist. The cube was part of me.

My heart skipped. A storage space that big, out of nowhere.

Then another thought hit me: something was seriously wrong with the world.

I kept one hand on the wall as I made my way to the window and lifted a corner of the blinds.

Nothing looked out of the ordinary. Someone was walking a dog. Someone else had just come up from BART and was heading home. A DoorDash rider cut across the intersection on his bike. The streetlights bathed them all in warm yellow.

It was as quiet as any other Thursday night.

None of them knew what tomorrow would look like. I kept watching until my eyes ached.

"I don't know if I'll ever see a night like this again," I said under my breath.

I drew all the curtains and started transferring my groceries into the space, one item at a time.

At first I held my breath, afraid I'd never get any of it back. Then I pulled everything out again. Even the folds in the plastic bags were exactly the same. I let out a long breath. I could put things in and take them back out.

Time to stock up for real.

I opened the storage room to the right of the front door. Three metal shelving units reached the ceiling, and the freezer was filled to the lid.

Prepping had always been a hobby of mine. I'd taped my supply list to the fridge.

Twenty cases of canned goods: chili with a ten-year shelf life, Spam, beef stew, green beans, corn, and cans of meat and vegetables.

For staples, I had ten cases each of MREs and energy bars, plus five fifty-pound bags of rice. For quick meals, there was pasta, ramen, instant soup, and canned chowder.

I'd stocked ten cases of water on top of the five-gallon jugs. For seasoning, there were three cases of salt and a few bottles each of Worcestershire sauce, vinegar, olive oil, and hot sauce.

I bought milk, eggs, and produce as I needed them. There was a fresh batch in the kitchen fridge.

I'd packed my own bug-out bag with a Leatherman, a ferro rod, a water filter straw, a tactical flashlight, a Mylar blanket, and three days' worth of food.

A chainsaw, an axe, and a tactical knife sat beside the bag. Three gas cans and a generator were in the corner. First-aid kits, QuikClot, Advil, gauze, bandages, and unopened bottles of multivitamins were scattered around the room.

Running my hands over it all didn't make me feel any better. I'd bought this stuff for fun, never thinking I'd have to live off it.

I moved the contents of the storage room into the space, one item at a time.

I was willing to bet everything on that feeling, like the space had been welded to me. As long as I was alive, my supplies would stay there, and no one else could touch them. Knowing that made me feel steadier than I ever had.

Two big water barrels had been sitting in the bathroom for years. I tried transferring just the water, without a container. It pooled against one face of the cube, clear all the way down. I turned on the tap. I'd transfer the water from the barrels periodically and keep one compartment just for that.

I started doing the math. The space behind one face alone held about seven thousand cubic feet. How many faces were there? I lost count. It felt like a cube really was turning somewhere in my head without making a sound. At least this was one thing I didn't have to panic about anymore.

Outside, it was getting darker. I considered going out for more supplies, then dismissed the idea. Nights were always riskier than days. I just had to get through this one first.

In the kitchen, I put a box of Trader Joe's frozen pasta in the microwave. On weekends I used to prep a week's worth of meals and freeze them. Whenever I wanted one, it took three minutes in the microwave. My whole life was on that freezer shelf.

I rinsed a small bowl of blueberries, the really big ones. They were good for my eyes, I told myself.

I took my food to the coffee table and switched on the old TV. I'd always preferred a TV to a projector. It took me back to watching the news with my grandparents as a kid, and nothing else had ever made me feel quite as steady.

It was just past six. I put on the local news.

"Good evening. I'm Vera, and here's the latest."

She reported a rabies incident at an office building on the SoMa tech campus. A young woman had been bitten by her coworker, Lena, who'd gotten her last rabies shot the night before. Unfortunately, the symptoms had come on too fast.

I lifted my head from my food.

The station cut to footage from the office. Lena lunged at the person beside her. Whoever was filming was still laughing. "All right, Lena finally gave herself rabies working all that overtime." Then the woman screamed as Lena tore off a piece of flesh. The laughter turned to screaming. The camera jerked into a blur, and the onlookers scattered all at once.

I knew better than anyone that this wasn't rabies.

The reporter said people online were calling it a zombie bite, but that was just a rumor. Lena simply had sharper teeth than most people, which explained the damage. The public shouldn't believe everything they saw online. The anchor came back on with a smile and began to sign off.

I'd lost my appetite.

I cast my phone screen to the TV and scrolled through X. #SFZombies and #endoftheworld were already trending.

Cold sweat soaked my back. I stared at the face frozen on the TV, going over the same thing again and again. I'd been right next to Lena. No one had been closer.

So close.

The one who got bitten could just as easily have been me.