Chapter 4

Daisy's POV

I lit the stove and kept it going.

The signal kept dropping. It took forever for a message to go through, and none of the friends I managed to text wrote back.

Around then, I started a journal.

On day one of the outbreak, City Hall was still saying it had things under control. More cars came and went below than the day before, and people in hazmat suits walked back and forth.

Day two brought a complete reversal in the weather. By morning it was too hot for even a T-shirt. By night the cold was unbearable. The temperature had swung nearly sixty degrees in one day. At least we still had water, power, and heat.

A water main broke on day three. The outbreak they kept calling rabies was slipping out of their control, and each blackout lasted longer than the one before. The worst lasted two nights before the power came back. I barely slept for three days, cooking most of my food while I could.

I stopped making anything that smelled once I realized one pot of meat could stink up the whole floor. After day three, the food deliveries stopped. The street emptied. No one came by, not even in a car.

By day four, the tap water smelled so bad nobody would touch it. That afternoon, a few people had had enough and decided to go out and see what was happening. Plenty of us upstairs yelled at them to stay put.

"What, are we supposed to sit here and die of thirst?"

"You're just scared. We're going."

"What if they take off and leave us behind? The EMTs didn't even show up today. You want us to just sit here and wait?"

The ones who weren't scared wouldn't listen. The rest had been pushed to their limit over the last few days. We kept shouting from upstairs, but none of them looked back.

They were about to leave when someone in a hazmat suit appeared around the corner. A few of them breathed a sigh of relief and waved him over. One even cursed at him.

"We thought you were gonna leave us up here to starve or die of thirst. You know the tap water smells like something died in it?"

"Yeah. Fix the water already."

While they shouted, I watched him walk. His knees barely bent. One leg dragged, and his arms swung out of sync.

The people below yelled louder. He didn't turn his head once.

That was when I knew nobody was coming.

Screams rose from below. The people who'd been about to leave were yelling that the EMT had turned too. The building went quiet all at once. Almost everyone ran back to their apartment and locked the door.

The Doomsday Survival Guide had called it to the day. Day four.

I wiped my eyes. I was on my own now. Somehow I had to get through what came next.

That night the screams got worse. Heavy things hit the ground one after another, and from below came something like an animal's howl. People in the other buildings had started fighting over supplies. The smell coming up through the vents was stronger than it had been the previous two days.

I went through what was left of my messages while I still had a signal. Almost every one of them was desperate. I stopped halfway through. Anyone else would have lost their mind by then. I still had the space to fall back on. When somebody knocked on my door, I stayed quiet.

Two days later, we lost both water and power. I couldn't hear a single living voice in the building anymore. Downstairs, zombies wandered from door to door, scratching day after day. The early ones couldn't break a door down. All they could do was scratch.

The people who were still alive fought harder over supplies. More than once, they pounded on my door. I heard someone outside say quietly that it was too solid to give, no matter how hard they hit it. They didn't know I'd spent a whole night on the other side with my hand on the chainsaw's pull cord.

Then I started to go wrong myself. It took longer to think. My body felt sluggish, and so did my tongue.

By day ten, I had to admit it. I'd turned.

I was angry enough to spend ten days in bed.

My mouth wouldn't open. The only thing I could force out was a low rasp. I kicked my legs in frustration.

A few kicks in, it hit me that my legs still worked. So I got out of bed.

Some of the stiffness went away, but my tongue still felt clumsy. Maybe it was because I hadn't spoken to anyone in so long.

I tried to talk. All I got were the same two dull sounds, my cheeks puffing out. I curled up on the bed and thought for a long time before I remembered the journal. When I tried to write, I found that my thinking hadn't recovered either. It took me half a day to get one sentence out.

After that, I spent another three days lying there.

Later I found out I could survive without eating.

I'd spent the first days piling up food and water. Now I'd turned, and I couldn't eat any of it.

I wanted to cry, but zombies didn't have tears.

I shut my mouth, took something out of the space, and chewed it dry. Cold was all I could feel. Nothing else came through.

By then, a little over two weeks had passed since it started. I'd gotten up and lain back down more times than I could count. I had no idea what was happening outside.

The building had been hollowed out. The zombies below kept multiplying. Some could climb walls now.

People were still alive, though. During the day, I could hear them scavenging.

They tried to pry my door open more than once. When it wouldn't budge, they gave up. I couldn't be bothered with them. I wasn't human anymore anyway.

I'd planned to go on lying there. Then, on the morning of day twenty-six, artillery fire broke the silence over San Francisco.

The rescue was finally underway.