The blood was still warm on my hands when I died.
Not my blood. The last zombie on Earth had that honor—a withered thing that had once been human, ten thousand years ago when humanity still existed. I crushed its skull with my bare hands, felt the familiar crack of bone, and then... nothing.
No more enemies. No more humans. No more anything.
Just me, standing alone in the ruins of a world that had forgotten what sunlight looked like, surrounded by the corpses of the undead army I had spent millennia building.
And then I felt it. A pull. Something reaching through the void, grabbing hold of my consciousness like a hand closing around my throat—
I woke up screaming.
My eyes snapped open to a white ceiling. Not the ash-gray sky of the dead world. A ceiling. With a small water stain in the corner that looked vaguely like a rabbit.
I knew that stain.
I had stared at it every morning for three years before the world ended.
My body moved before my mind caught up. I threw off the blanket—blue, cheap cotton, bought on sale at the mall that would become a mass grave in eight days—and stumbled to my feet. The floor was cold against my bare soles. Smooth laminate. Not the cracked earth and broken concrete I had walked for centuries.
My hands. I stared at my hands.
Smooth. Unscarred. The calluses from ten thousand years of combat, gone. The burn marks from the Inferno Zone, gone. The missing pinky finger on my left hand that I had lost to a Tier 5 Overlord in the Battle of Shanghai—
Still there. All five fingers, intact.
The bedside lamp flickered.
I froze, staring at the bulb. It flickered again—then steadied, as if nothing had happened. But something had happened. I had felt it. A pulse of... something. Cold and dark, radiating outward from my chest for just a fraction of a second.
And in that fraction of a second, I had sensed them.
The neighbors. Their warmth, their heartbeats, muffled through the walls like heat signatures on a thermal camera. The elderly couple in 4A, still asleep. Kyle Henderson in 4B, snoring through his CPAP machine. The family on the second floor, three small pulses clustered together.
I could feel them. I could feel their life.
Then the sensation was gone, as quickly as it had come, and I was just a man standing in his apartment with trembling hands.
What the hell was that?
I was twenty-eight years old again.
The digital clock on my nightstand blinked 6:47 AM. October 15th.
Seven days before the end of the world.
------------------------------
I didn't move for seventeen minutes.
Seventeen minutes of standing in my tiny apartment, breathing the recycled air of a world that still had air conditioning, listening to the distant rumble of traffic from a city that would be overrun with the walking dead in one hundred and sixty-eight hours.
In the original timeline, I had spent these seven days like everyone else—going to work, complaining about my boss, scrolling through social media, planning a weekend trip to visit my parents that would never happen.
I had been ordinary. Unremarkable. The kind of person who died in the first wave, torn apart by former colleagues who had turned within minutes of the outbreak.
But I hadn't died. Not then. I had survived, somehow, for ten thousand years. I had watched humanity's last hope flicker and die. I had built an empire of corpses and still failed to save a single person who mattered.
And now I was back.
Why?
The question pulsed in my mind like a second heartbeat. I had felt something when I died—that pull, that sense of being grabbed and dragged through the void. It hadn't felt random. It hadn't felt like an accident.
But I had no answer. Not yet.
I walked to the bathroom on autopilot. The mirror showed me a face I barely recognized—young, unlined, with none of the weariness that ten millennia of survival had carved into my features. My eyes looked almost innocent.
That wouldn't last.
I splashed water on my face and felt my thoughts finally begin to settle into familiar patterns. The panic receded. The disorientation faded. And what remained was something I had cultivated for longer than human civilization had existed:
Cold, calculated purpose.
My mind clicked into the mode I knew best—the engineer's mindset that had kept me alive for millennia. Ten thousand years of apocalypse survival was just data now. Cached. Ready to deploy. And this return? Just a system rollback. Same code, new runtime.
Seven days.
In seven days, the virus would be released simultaneously across every major population center on Earth. Within an hour, thirty percent of humanity would be infected. Within twenty-four hours, that number would rise to seventy percent.
I knew the exact moment the first zombie would rise in Seattle. 11:47 PM, in the basement of Westlake Center, when a security guard named David Lu would die of a heart attack and wake up hungry. The I-90 bridge would become a death trap by Day Two—thousands of cars gridlocked, nowhere to run when the horde came.
I knew my coworker Chen Chen would turn on Day One and kill four people before someone put him down.
I knew that Min-Tong—
The memory slammed into me before I could stop it. Her apartment. Day Three. I had run twelve blocks through streets full of the dead, fighting through a horde to reach her. But I was five minutes too late. Just five minutes. She was already turning when I burst through the door, her skin going gray, her eyes clouding over, and she had looked at me—recognized me—just before the change took her completely. Her last words, barely human: Wei... run...
I had held her hand as she turned. Felt her fingers go cold in mine. And then I had done what needed to be done.
I gripped the edge of the bathroom sink until my knuckles turned white. My fingertips still tingled, as if I was still holding her hand as it went cold. Some memories didn't fade with time. They just burrowed deeper.
Not this time.
This time, I would be ready. This time, I would use every scrap of knowledge I had accumulated over ten thousand years of apocalypse survival. This time—
A strange sensation rippled through my body.
The same pulse as before. But stronger this time—like I had accidentally triggered a debug mode I hadn't known existed.
I froze, still gripping the sink, as something moved inside me. It wasn't pain, exactly. More like... awareness. A new sense I had never possessed before, unfolding like a flower blooming in my chest.
I closed my eyes and focused on it.
There was something there. Something that hadn't existed in my previous life. A pool of energy, dark and cold, coiled at the center of my being like a sleeping serpent.
When I reached for it, the serpent stirred.
My eyes snapped open, and I watched in the mirror as my irises flickered—just for a moment—from their normal dark brown to a pale, corpse-gray.
Then they returned to normal, and the sensation faded.
I stood there for a long moment, processing what had just happened.
In my previous life, I had been an ordinary survivor. No special powers. No awakened abilities. Just ten thousand years of accumulated skill, knowledge, and ruthlessness. I had built my zombie army through technology, not supernatural gift—through virus manipulation and behavioral conditioning developed over centuries of research.
But this...
This was something new.
Something I shouldn't have.
Like discovering an undocumented feature in a codebase I thought I knew by heart. A patch installed without my consent, running processes I didn't understand.
I reached for the energy again, more carefully this time. It responded immediately, rising like a tide of cold ink spreading through my veins. The sensation was simultaneously alien and intimately familiar, as if this power had always been waiting inside me, dormant, and only now had found the key to awaken.
The bathroom light flickered. Just once. Barely noticeable.
But I noticed.
The darkness inside me had done that. Had reached out, just for a fraction of a second, and touched the electrical current flowing through the building's ancient wiring. I could feel it still—the faint pulse of electricity, the heat signatures of the neighbors moving in their apartments below and beside me.
I could sense life. And more importantly, I could sense the absence of it.
This was a power made for death.
I pulled the energy back, and the sensation faded. My hands were trembling slightly—not from fear, but from something I hadn't felt in millennia.
Excitement.
Careful. The warning rose from some deep, scarred place inside me. Last time I felt this excited, three cities died.
I filed that thought away but didn't dismiss it. In the apocalypse, excitement was never a good sign. It made you careless. It made you think you had already won.
I looked at my reflection—at the young, unmarked face of a man who had no right to the darkness coiling inside him—and felt the first genuine smile in ten thousand years tug at the corner of my lips.
I came back different.
------------------------------
I made breakfast.
It was a strange thing to do, perhaps. Here I was, with the weight of ten millennia pressing down on my shoulders and the knowledge that billions would die in a week, and I was frying eggs in a pan I had bought at IKEA.
But I had learned, over the centuries, that the small rituals mattered. Eating. Sleeping. Maintaining the appearance of normalcy even when everything inside you had become something other than human.
Besides, I hadn't tasted fresh eggs in nine thousand years. The novelty was worth savoring.
The first bite nearly brought tears to my eyes.
Salt. Pepper. The faint char of butter in a hot pan. Flavors I had forgotten existed. In the dead world, food had been survival—dried meat from whatever animals still lived, processed rations hoarded from bunkers that had failed centuries ago. I had eaten zombie flesh once, during the dark years, when there was nothing else. It had kept me alive. It had also cost me something I could never get back.
But this... this was food. Real food, prepared in a real kitchen, with ingredients bought from a real grocery store that would be looted and burned in eight days.
A door slammed somewhere above me. Heavy footsteps. Then a voice, muffled but unmistakable:
"—can't believe the traffic yesterday. Twenty minutes just to get onto the highway! And my parking spot, someone took my parking spot again—"
I paused, chopsticks halfway to my mouth.
I knew that voice. Kyle Henderson from 4B. The arrogant bastard who had complained about my music exactly three times in the past year. The man who drove a BMW he couldn't afford and looked down on everyone in the building who didn't own property in the city center.
In the original timeline, Kyle Henderson had survived the first three days by hiding in his apartment with the door barricaded. He had refused to share food with the elderly couple in 4A. He had threatened to call the police when a family with children had begged for shelter.
On Day Three, he had come to me.
Please, he had said, on his knees, all that arrogance stripped away by three days of terror. Please, you have to help me. You're the only one who knows what to do. I'll give you anything—
I had helped him. I helped everyone I could, in those early days. It hadn't mattered. They had all died anyway.
But I remembered the look in his eyes. The moment when a man who had spent his whole life looking down on others realized he was nothing more than prey.
Enjoy your parking spot, Kyle, I thought, returning to my eggs. In eight days, your BMW will be a deathtrap, and you'll learn what it means to beg.
I wasn't proud of the satisfaction that thought brought me. But after ten thousand years, I had stopped pretending to be a better person than I was.
As I ate, I began to plan.
Seven days was both an eternity and the blink of an eye. In the grand scheme of things, it was barely enough time to make meaningful preparations. I couldn't build a bunker. I couldn't stockpile years of supplies. I couldn't warn anyone without being labeled insane.
But I could do certain things.
First: resources. Money was about to become worthless, but until then, it could buy me survival necessities—weapons, food, medicine, fuel. I had roughly seven thousand dollars in savings. Not much, but enough to start.
Second: location. My apartment was a death trap. Third floor of a residential building with only one stairwell exit. When the outbreak hit, I would be surrounded by newly-turned zombies within minutes. I needed somewhere defensible.
Third: Min-Tong Lin.
My chopsticks paused halfway to my mouth.
In the original timeline, Min-Tong had died on Day Three. We had broken up two months before the outbreak—a stupid fight about my work hours, about how I never made time for her—and I had spent the apocalypse regretting every word I never said.
By the time I found Min-Tong's apartment, she was already gone. Turned. One of millions.
I had carried that failure with me for ten thousand years.
Not this time.
But approaching her now would be... complicated. In this timeline, we had just broken up. She didn't want to see me. She didn't know what was coming. If I showed up at her door ranting about zombies and the end of the world, she would think I had lost my mind.
I'll figure it out, I told myself. I have seven days. That's enough time to find a way.
I finished my eggs, washed the dishes—another small ritual of normalcy—and got dressed for work.
Yes, work. I still needed to maintain appearances for a few more days. Quitting suddenly would raise questions I didn't want to answer. Besides, the office building had resources I could use.
I grabbed my phone and wallet, paused at the door, and looked back at my apartment one last time.
In my previous life, I had never seen this place again after Day Zero. I had fled into the chaos of the outbreak and never looked back. Everything I owned—photos, books, the stupid coffee mug Min-Tong had given me—had been lost.
Now I had a second chance.
I closed my eyes and reached for that dark energy again. It was still there, coiled and waiting, a power I didn't understand and hadn't possessed before.
Whatever had pulled me back through time, whatever force had decided to give me another chance—it had changed me in the process. Made me into something more than I had been.
Or perhaps something less than human.
I smiled and stepped out into the morning.
Seven days until the end of the world.
The first thing I would buy today wasn't food or weapons. It was time alone—a way to test how far this new power could reach.
Because if I could sense life through walls...
What else could I sense? What else could I do?
This time, I would be ready. And this time, I wasn't coming back empty-handed.