Chapter 3

Daisy's POV

My phone buzzed again sometime after midnight. I all but lunged for it.

I fired off two messages, one after the other. "Who are you?" "How do you know about my office?" Both showed as read. Neither got an answer.

A short link was all they sent back.

I stared at it for a while. I couldn't pretend I didn't believe the warning anymore. What happened to Lena matched it too closely. It was as if someone had known what was coming and gone out of their way to warn me.

That didn't mean I clicked on just any link.

I had three prepaid burners under my bed, none tied to an account. The worst that could happen was that I'd lose this phone too.

I clicked.

The page spun twice before the Doomsday Survival Guide came up.

It was under three thousand words. I read every line. At the bottom, one word stood out in bold red: MUTATION.

Beneath it was a single sentence: Everyone evolves. Those who don't won't survive the new world.

I kept replaying the footage in my head. Lena had lunged at the person next to her, sunk her teeth into the woman's arm, and torn off a chunk of flesh.

Lena's pupils had gone gray. Her joints bent at impossible angles. The way she walked, you'd think somebody was holding her up with a string from behind.

I'd only ever seen anything like it in movies. In a movie, she'd have been a zombie.

The news called it rabies. The guide called it evolution.

It was the first time I'd considered that all three might be talking about the same thing.

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

And me? How close was I to crossing that line without even knowing it?

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

I couldn't leave the guide on my phone. Once the power and internet went out and the screen went black, those few thousand words would be gone. I'd never trusted a battery to last.

I needed a paper copy. Paper didn't need power or a signal. If I kept it in the Tesseract Space, I could pull it out whenever I needed it, with every word still there.

I printed a dozen copies. As the pages slid out of the tray one by one, a dozen still didn't seem like enough. I ran off a few more.

I put three away right then. I rolled one up and shoved it into the same cell in the Tesseract Space as the water and medicine. Another went at the bottom of a box in the storage room. The third I taped to the inside of my front door.

I got the tape crooked twice. My hands wouldn't stop shaking.

By the time I turned around, the pasta on the coffee table had long since gone cold. I sat down and finished every bite, though I couldn't remember what it tasted like.

The kitchen went into overdrive that night.

I had three slow cookers going and two Dutch ovens full of beef and meatballs. Every bit of raw meat in the fridge or freezer went into a pot to cook through.

I ran the instant meals through the microwave and air fryer. Every burner on the stove had a pot on it: chili, tomato soup, macaroni, hot cocoa.

The guide warned of extreme heat followed by extreme cold. Something hot in your stomach was the only thing that made you feel human. As each pot came off the stove, I poured its contents into thermoses, screwed the lids on tight, and put them in the space.

Time stood still in every cell of the Tesseract Space. Everything came back out exactly as it went in.

So I packed meals I could open and eat right away. Nothing would need reheating once I took it out.

Water was the priority.

According to the guide, the water supply would start to go bad in three days. After that, I couldn't trust anything that came out of a tap.

Three days.

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

I didn't dare sleep.

I left the laptop and phone on in the living room and set the feeds to read aloud. With my earbuds in, I listened to one update after another while my hands kept working.

I was scared. I'd just done the math. Every extra meal bought me a little more time. Mutation was risky, and a failed evolution meant death. I wanted to hang on until somebody came up with a drug that improved the odds and saved more lives.

I was filling the fourteenth bottle when the lights went out.

There wasn't even a flicker. Every appliance fell silent at once, and the streetlights went dark too. It looked like someone had thrown a blanket over the window.

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

The guide was coming true, one line at a time.

The building was well soundproofed. That was what I paid for.

I still heard it that night.

A short scream came first, cut off halfway through. Then dogs started barking all over. After that came the howling. It didn't sound like people yelling at each other. It sounded like something barely forcing its way out of a clogged throat.

I'd already reached for the curtain.

I left it closed.

I pressed the curtain back into place, checked the door lock, and took everything that wasn't done cooking off the stove and put it back in the space. I told myself to keep my head down. Getting greedy was another way to get killed.

I fell asleep on the couch. The phone woke me.

"This is building management. A new strain of rabies appeared in San Francisco overnight. It spreads quickly, and symptoms come on fast. Starting today, no one is allowed to leave for any reason. The whole city is shut down. Schools and businesses are closed."

I made a sleepy sound and told her I'd cooperate. I wasn't going anywhere.

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

It was eight in the morning.

The TV signal kept dropping, and the anchor kept stumbling over the script. I wrote down the words I could catch: tropical cyclones, geomagnetic storm, earthquake, tsunami, volcano.

Winter was almost here, but several tropical cyclones had formed offshore and veered off course. Warnings were in effect along the entire coast.

Starting that day, major geomagnetic storms would be frequent. Researchers went on the air to explain how to shut off the power and where to take shelter.

On land and under the ocean, volcanoes all over the world were becoming active at the same time.

I set down the pen and looked at the shopping list on the fridge. It had been there a year, and for the first time I thought it wasn't long enough.

The picture steadied for two seconds. Every channel switched to the same broadcast.

Humanity was facing the worst disaster in its history, possibly an extinction on the scale of the one that had wiped out the dinosaurs. The broadcast urged everyone on earth to pull together and get through it.

The picture broke up again as soon as it ended.

I sat on the couch for a long time.

I was alone on the eighth floor, with an apartment full of food and water and a guide no one else had read.

I got up, went back into the kitchen, and lit the stove again.