I died once.
Not as a figure of speech. Something that called itself a Temporal Aberrant tore my chest open, and the quantum fold inside me burst into shards. The last thing I saw was my squad's bodies—Dexter, Caleb, Nora, Rico, Elijah, and the dog that grew up alongside me. Ten years of the apocalypse, and we'd cut a path across half of America. In the end, not one member of Ghost Hounds was left.
Then I opened my eyes. Las Vegas. A cheap motel room. Not a scratch on me. The date on the nightstand told me everything: three months until the Aurora Pulse.
Last time around, I spent those three months hoarding canned goods in a supermarket. This time, I'm going to empty the whole store while the doors are still open.
Powdered milk, seafood, grain, oil, salt, sugar, heavy-oil generators, solar panels, batteries, water purifiers, seeds, medicine, ammunition, C4—I stuffed the world into my pockets like a squirrel gone rabid.
The night the aurora came, I had every last one of them lock the doors. Nobody leaves, no exceptions. Last time, five of our eight turned aberrant, and the other three shot each other before dawn. This time I got a full squad of awakenings and not a single corruption. Even the dog came out of it as a mutant.
After that came the aberrant tides, the acid rain, the polar vortex, the camps that ate people, the families that ran live human experiments, the conglomerates that bred corpses and sold them as household goods. We killed our way through all of it, and a mercenary crew became an army of three hundred thousand. Ghost Hounds, wiped out to the last man in another life, standing alive at the end of this one—one by one, out of the mountain of corpses.
But rebirth was never free.
A shadow has followed me since day one. On awakening night, it dropped ether cores at our feet, one after another. The Aurora Pulse came earlier than it should have. Time moves wrong inside my quantum fold. And somewhere I can't see, someone has been replaying my every scene, over and over.
Finally, on the peak of Crest Mountain, it said it to my face—
"I'm the one who sent you back."
As for why. As for the price. As for whose three months I bought back with this life of mine—
Turn the page and find out.