Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 3:55 PM
Countdown to Extraction: 58 Hours, 46 Minutes Remaining
Renee sat on the filthy, stained carpet, her spine pressed hard against the heavy wooden kitchen table she had wedged beneath the front door's deadbolt.
The apartment was a suffocating tomb. The setting sun, bleeding through the cheap plastic vertical blinds, cast long, distorted shadows like skeletal fingers across the trash-strewn living room. Behind her, Dot's breathing was a horrific, mechanical metronome. Huuuck. Huuuck. The Kussmaul respirations were pulling wet and deep, the older woman's failing body fighting a desperate, losing war against the acidic poison actively dissolving her from the inside out.
Outside, the world was ending.
Through the thin, uninsulated walls of the complex, Renee could hear the terrifying symphony of the collapse. The sharp, staccato crack-crack-crack of small-arms fire echoing from the direction of the Truman Parkway. A car alarm wailing endlessly three blocks over. And underneath it all, the screams. They were faint, carried on the chilling December wind, but they were unmistakably human. Short, abrupt shrieks of absolute, agonizing terror that were invariably cut short by the wet tearing of meat.
Renee didn't move. Both of her hands were wrapped tightly around the handle of the rusted cast-iron skillet resting on her knees. Her knuckles were bone-white. Her amber eyes were locked dead ahead, staring into the gloom, completely empty of fear. Only a cold, venomous readiness remained.
A sharp, biting draft of cold air seeped in through the quarter-inch gap between the bottom of the front door and the carpet. It ghosted over the floorboards, chilling the back of her thighs and sending a violent shiver up her spine.
That specific sensation—the icy draft creeping under a cheap, hollow-core door, the heavy weapon clutched in trembling hands, the desperate need to make herself completely invisible in the dark while a monster hunted her—hit Renee with the force of a physical blow.
It was a muscle memory she hadn't activated in nearly thirty years.
Suddenly, she wasn't thirty-six years old sitting in her sister's apartment in Savannah during the apocalypse.
She was eight years old.
Twenty-eight years ago. 1997.
The cold air was seeping under the door of the narrow, mildew-stained bedroom closet in the projects off MLK Boulevard.
Eight-year-old Renee sat completely still in the pitch black, her knees pulled tight to her chest, wedged behind a pile of dirty laundry and her mother's empty shoeboxes. Her small fingers were wrapped in a death grip around the handle of a heavy, grease-stained frying pan she had quietly slipped off the stove twenty minutes earlier.
She was holding her breath until her lungs burned, listening to the heavy, uneven footsteps stomping down the narrow hallway outside.
"Renee!" the voice slurred, thick and dripping with ugly, predatory intent. "Come out here, little girl. Uncle Nick got something for you."
It was Nicolas. But all the junkies who haunted the apartment, smoking and playing spades in a chemical haze, just called him Nick. He was one of her mom's "uncles." That was the sick, twisted word Abby used whenever a new man started sleeping on their couch. Be nice to your new uncle, Renee.
But Renee knew better. They had a lady come to her school a few months ago. She had a felt board and little cut-out dolls, and she had talked to the class about "good touches" and "bad touches." She told them that if an adult ever gave them a bad touch, they needed to tell a trusted grown-up immediately, and the grown-up would make it stop.
So, Renee had told her mom.
She had stood in the kitchen, crying so hard she was hyperventilating, and told Abby exactly what Uncle Nick was doing to her when Abby was asleep.
But the lady with the felt board had lied. The grown-up didn't make it stop.
Abby hadn't hugged her. She hadn't called the police. She had just looked at Renee with hollow, exhausted, terrifyingly empty eyes, turned up the volume on the television to drown out the sound of her daughter's sobbing, and told her to go to her room.
Renee hadn't known it at the time—she was only eight—but Nick wasn't just a boyfriend. Nick was the plug. He was the one bringing the little plastic baggies of crack and meth into the apartment. Abby was so deeply, hopelessly buried in her addiction that she would do absolutely anything to keep the drugs flowing. She traded her own daughter's body for a synthetic high.
And it wasn't just the molestation Abby tolerated. It was the brutal, unyielding violence.
Nick beating the absolute shit out of Abby wasn't a one-time event. It was a weekly occurrence. Abby's face was a constantly shifting canvas of yellow, purple, and green bruises. She always had a split lip or a cracked rib. Nick would get high, get paranoid, and use his heavy work boots on Abby's ribs while Renee hid under the kitchen table, pressing her hands over her ears to block out the wet thuds and her mother's screaming.
And then there was the system.
Abby was in and out of the county jail on possession and petty theft charges so often that Renee knew the intake deputies by their first names. And whenever Abby got arrested, or whenever the screaming got too loud, the neighbors would call the cops. And the cops would call DFCS.
Renee's entire childhood was a masterclass in lying to the Division of Family and Children Services.
She knew the script by heart. She would sit in a sterile office, her legs dangling off a plastic chair, and look the social worker dead in the eye. Yes, ma'am, we have plenty of food. Yes, ma'am, my mom takes good care of me. No, ma'am, those bruises are from when she fell down the stairs. She had to lie, because the alternative—the terrifying threat of foster care, of being ripped away and thrown into a system that she knew would chew her up and spit her out even worse—scared her more than the beatings.
But the lies couldn't hide the reality. The schools kept calling DFCS because Renee was always filthy. She showed up to third grade smelling like cat piss, stale cigarette smoke, and rotting garbage. Her clothes were crusted with stains, her shoes held together with duct tape. She saw the way the teachers looked at her—that suffocating, pathetic pity. She saw the way the other kids held their breath when she walked by.
Whenever the heat from DFCS got too intense, Abby would pack whatever they could carry into black trash bags in the middle of the night, and they would flee to another roach-infested trap house in another broken neighborhood. Always running. Always hiding.
But she couldn't hide from Nick.
He had hurt Renee so many times. But the last time... the last time had been a nightmare of pain and blood. He had cornered her in the bathroom while Abby was completely unresponsive on the couch, foaming slightly at the mouth from a bad hit. Nick had been rough, careless, and vicious. He had torn her open. She had bled into her cheap, unwashed underwear for a solid week afterward, crying in absolute agony every time she had to walk to the bus stop, completely alone with a dark, violent trauma that was actively destroying her from the inside out.
And now, Nick was drunk and high again, and looking for her.
Renee could smell him through the closet door. The sharp, toxic scent of burnt meth, chemical rot, and the sour sweat of a predator.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
His heavy boots stopped right outside the closet. The floorboards creaked under his weight.
Renee bit down on her own forearm to keep her teeth from chattering. She raised the heavy frying pan in the dark, her small, eight-year-old arms trembling violently under the weight of the cast iron.
Not this time, she thought, a terrifying, homicidal clarity settling over her tiny frame. The tears streaming down her face mixed with the grime, but her eyes were cold. If he opens this door, I am going to shatter his skull.
The doorknob rattled.
Renee squeezed her eyes shut, pulling her arm back to swing.
"Nick!" Abby's voice suddenly shrieked from the living room, frantic and shrill. "Nick, the cops! A cruiser just pulled into the complex!"
The doorknob went completely still.
"Shit," Nick hissed. The heavy footsteps immediately turned away from the closet, sprinting down the hallway toward the back fire escape.
Renee sat in the dark closet for another three hours, her bladder aching, the frying pan still raised, long after she heard the back window slide open and Nick disappear into the night. He didn't find her that day. He didn't touch her that day.
But as she sat shivering in the dark, eight-year-old Renee knew the brutal, devastating truth.
He would get her again. Because in this world, nobody was coming to save her.
Present Day.
Renee blinked, the oppressive darkness of Kimmie's apartment rushing back in to replace the suffocating ghost of the closet.
Her chest was heaving. Her face was soaking wet. She wiped a trembling hand across her cheek, smearing the tears. The cast-iron skillet in her hand felt incredibly heavy, a seamless continuation of the weapon she had held twenty-eight years ago.
She took a deep, grounding breath, forcing the memories back down into the dark, locked box in her mind.
Ten minutes had passed.
Down the short hallway, the weak trickle of the bathroom sink faucet suddenly shut off. There was a pause, a quiet sob, and then the rusted pipes let out a loud, groaning squeal. The sputtering hiss of the shower kicked right back on.
Tally had given up on the sink. She had to get back under the freezing water. She had to wash the fresh blood off her legs before the mechanics smelled it.
Renee stared at the dark hallway, the cold, jagged edge of her resentment completely melting away, leaving behind a profound, heartbreaking realization.
She wasn't angry at Tally. She was jealous of her.
Tally was everything Renee had never been allowed to be. Tally was soft. She was clean. She had never had to lie to a woman with a clipboard to keep her mother out of a jail cell. She had never had to hide in a closet with a frying pan to keep from being raped. Tally threw tantrums over oversized sweatpants because her biggest trauma before yesterday was a bad haircut.
Renee had been punishing a seventeen-year-old kid for having a childhood.
"God, I'm so messed up," Renee whispered to herself, her voice rough and cracked. "Get up. Be the adult."
She pushed herself off the floor, setting the skillet down on the kitchen counter. She walked quietly down the hall, stepping over the spilled trash, and went back into the bedroom.
The oversized white Nike t-shirt and Troy's massive grey sweatpants were still sitting on the edge of the particle-board dresser where she had left them. Renee picked them up, folding them neatly over her arm.
As she turned to leave, her eye caught something tucked behind a dusty, empty bottle of cheap cologne on the dresser top.
It was a tiny, rectangular bar of soap. The kind you steal from a cheap motel cleaning cart. It was still wrapped in its crinkly, translucent plastic wrapper.
Renee snatched it up, her heart twisting with a strange mixture of relief and sorrow.
She gripped the tiny bar of soap tightly in her palm. She was going to mother that infuriating teenager. She was going to stand outside that door, hand her the soap, and make sure she was okay. Just like she had done for Kimmie.
The thought of her sister dragged another, entirely different ghost out of the shadows.
Twenty-three years ago. 2002.
It was five months after Uncle Nick had finally been permanently removed from their lives. He had sold an eight-ball of meth to an undercover vice cop in the parking lot of a gas station. The raid had been loud, violent, and highly educational for a thirteen-year-old Renee, who watched from the living room window as they slammed Nick onto the hood of a cruiser, bleeding from his nose.
Without Nick, Abby's supply dried up. She couldn't pay the rent.
A few months later, Kimmie was born. A tiny, screaming infant brought into a world of absolute chaos.
They were evicted three weeks after Kimmie came home from the hospital. With nowhere else to go, Abby dragged them all to the other side of town to move in with a Black woman named Tenesha.
"It's temporary, Ren," Abby had promised, her eyes glassy, a lit cigarette dangling from her lip as she hauled a trash bag full of their clothes up the concrete steps. "Tenesha's got Section 8. It's a nice place. Four bedrooms, three baths. We're on the list, baby. We're gonna get our own house just like this soon."
They never did get their own house.
Tenesha's place was big, sure. But "nice" was a massive stretch. Tenesha had four kids of her own. The house was a chaotic, deafening madhouse, smelling constantly of dirty diapers and cheap weed.
And it was completely infested with German cockroaches.
They were everywhere. They lived in the hinges of the kitchen cabinets. They scurried across the linoleum when you turned on the lights. They dropped from the ceiling fans.
Renee didn't get a bedroom. At fourteen years old, she slept on a thin, stained foam mat directly on the floor in the corner of the living room, keeping baby Kimmie's carrier right next to her head to protect her from the bugs.
Abby and Tenesha were entirely useless. The second the sun went down, the two women would spend an hour in the bathroom doing their makeup, sharing hits off a glass pipe until their eyes were dead and dilated, and then they would leave for the clubs downtown, completely abandoning the house.
Fourteen-year-old Renee became the de facto mother to five neglected children.
She remembered the night the roach incident happened with horrifying clarity.
It was 2:00 AM. Abby and Tenesha were gone. Renee was asleep on her mat when a blood-curdling scream ripped through the dark house.
It was Marcus, Tenesha's six-year-old.
Renee had bolted upright and sprinted into the boys' room. Marcus was thrashing on the mattress, screaming hysterically, clawing violently at the side of his own head, tearing chunks of his own hair out.
"It's in my head!" the little boy shrieked, his eyes rolling back in pure, unadulterated terror.
Renee had dragged him into the bathroom, flipped on the harsh overhead light, and tilted his head. Deep inside the dark tunnel of his ear, two long, brown antennae were twitching frantically. A massive cockroach had crawled inside while he was sleeping and gotten stuck. Every time the insect tried to back out, its barbed, spiky legs scraped mercilessly against his eardrum.
Fourteen-year-old Renee hadn't panicked. There were no adults to call. There was no one to save them.
She ran to the kitchen, found a bottle of cheap vegetable oil, and ran back. She laid the screaming boy on his side, pinned his shoulders to the tile, and carefully poured the thick oil directly into his ear, suffocating and drowning the roach. When the twitching finally stopped, she used a pair of rusty tweezers to meticulously, sickeningly extract the dead insect from his skull.
She had rocked the sobbing little boy to sleep for two hours after that, her own hands shaking, completely disgusted and furious at the ghosts of the mothers who had left them there to rot.
She had walked back out to the living room, looked down at baby Kimmie sleeping peacefully in her plastic carrier on the floor, and made a vow.
I will protect you, fourteen-year-old Renee had thought, brushing a thumb over Kimmie's soft cheek. I will be the mother she can't be.
Present Day.
Renee stood in the hallway outside the bathroom door.
She wasn't fourteen anymore. But the instinct to protect the helpless, the obnoxious, the terrified kids of the world was baked straight into her DNA.
Tally wasn't Kimmie. Tally was a nightmare. But she was their nightmare right now.
Renee raised her hand and knocked gently on the bathroom door.
Inside, the sputtering hiss of the shower shut off.
"What?" Tally's voice came through the wood. It was thick, exhausted, and completely defeated.
"It's me," Renee said softly. The cold, clinical edge was completely gone from her voice, replaced by a deep, maternal warmth. "I found some soap. It's not much, just a little hotel bar, but it lathers."
There was a long pause.
Then, the deadbolt clicked.
The door slowly swung open, just enough to reveal the teenager standing in the gap.
Tally looked absolutely wrecked. She was clutching the clean hand towel and the crude cardboard pad against her bare chest, desperately trying to cover herself. She had clearly just stepped out of the freezing shower again; dirty, rust-tinged water dripped from her shoulders. Her light brown skin was heavily mottled with purple and blue from the freezing ambient temperature of the room. She was shivering so violently her teeth were audibly clicking.
Her eyes were bloodshot and swollen, the skin around them red and puffy from crying. All the bitchiness, all the entitlement, all the sharp, defensive edges were completely gone. She just looked incredibly young, profoundly terrified, and totally broken.
Renee held out the small, wrapped bar of soap, the massive grey sweatpants, and the oversized white t-shirt.
"Here," Renee said gently, her voice barely a whisper in the quiet hallway. "Wash up. Put these on. If you need help tying the strings on that pad, just ask. It's going to be okay, Tally."
Tally looked at the clothes, and then up at Renee. Her lower lip trembled, and a fresh, silent tear slipped down her cheek.
She slowly reached out a freezing, shaking hand and took the soap.
Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 4:08 PM
Countdown to Extraction: 58 Hours, 33 Minutes Remaining