Chapter 1 — Boom

I always thought my death would be tragic.

Like, slow-motion, dramatic music, someone crying my name in the rain.

Not me sitting on a broken rooftop, smoking the last cigarette in the world while zombies scream downstairs.

Figures.

The sky’s on fire, the city’s gone, and my parents are probably still arguing about whether it’s my fault.

Spoiler: it kinda was.

I flick the lighter again — click, click, click — until the flame finally catches.

“Congrats, Lexi,” I mumble, taking a drag. “You survived sixteen years just to end up as zombie chow.”

Down below, I can hear them — the moaning, the scratching, the sound of teeth on metal.

Gross.

One of them used to be my chemistry teacher.

Guess she finally found her element: brainium.

I laugh. The world’s ending and I’m still making bad jokes.

Typical me.

I glance at the small detonator in my hand.

A single red button. I found it in a military truck an hour ago.

Someone scribbled on it in marker: “LAST OPTION.”

Last option, huh?

Sounds about right.

I take another drag, blowing smoke into the burning air.

“I never liked this city anyway.”

The zombies are climbing now — dozens of them, crawling over each other to reach me.

Their skin peels, their eyes glow, and their hands are inches from my shoes.

I could run.

I could scream.

I could… not.

Instead, I smile. A stupid, reckless, sixteen-year-old smile.

“Guess I’ll go out my way.”

I press the button.

For a second, nothing happens. Then everything happens.

The sound is beyond sound — just a deafening white noise that eats the world.

Heat swallows the air. Buildings crumble. The sky turns into liquid fire.

The last thing I see is the flash reflecting off my lighter.

And then—

black.

Silence.

Something cold hits my face.

Water? No — it’s someone’s voice.

“Lexi! Wake up! You’re drooling on your desk again.”

I blink.

Desk?

My head jerks up.

Bright classroom lights. Posters about algebra. A teacher writing equations.

No smoke. No zombies. No fire.

Just… school.

“What the hell—?” I whisper.

“Language,” says Mrs. Carver from the front, giving me that teacher death stare.

My brain short-circuits. Mrs. Carver’s alive.

Alive and lecturing about quadratic functions.

I glance around.

The windows aren’t shattered. The sky isn’t burning.

And my best friend, Maddy, is beside me, doodling hearts in her notebook.

Maddy.

Who literally got eaten in front of me two years ago.

My hand starts shaking.

I touch my hair — shorter. My clothes — middle school uniform.

On the whiteboard, there’s a date: April 3rd. Two years before the outbreak.

No.

No freaking way.

I slap my cheek. It hurts.

“Lexi?” Maddy says. “You okay? You look like you saw a ghost.”

I laugh. A tiny, hysterical laugh.

“Oh, it’s worse,” I say, staring at the clock ticking too slowly.

“I saw the end of the world.”

Mrs. Carver clears her throat. “Care to share with the class?”

I lean back in my chair, smirking.

“Nah,” I say. “They wouldn’t believe me anyway.”

But inside, one thought keeps screaming:

Ten days. I’ve got ten days before it all starts again.

And this time she must survive?

I’d always thought I’d get a warning. A creeping dread. Something subtle. Not a full-blown apocalypse flashing in my brain like a badly edited movie trailer. But here I was, two years before the outbreak I’d lived through—or thought I had—and already noticing things that didn’t make sense.

“Maddy,” I muttered under my breath, scanning the hall while pretending to copy notes. “Stay close and act normal. And for the love of all that’s holy, don’t touch anything gross.”

She frowned. “Gross? What do you mean?”

I didn’t answer. Not yet. Because the first telltale signs were subtle. A janitor sneezing violently in the corner. Students complaining about sudden fevers. A rat scurrying down the hall, twitching weirdly before it… stopped twitching. I’d seen that exact look in the eyes of the infected in my previous life. And it was never good.

By lunchtime, I knew: something was coming. I could see the patterns forming—the way the weak ones got picked off, the way panic spread faster than rumors. And this time, I wasn’t going to wait to die.

“Lexi?” Maddy’s voice snapped me back. She tugged at my sleeve. “What’s going on?”

“Just… trust me,” I said. My brain was already running calculations, survival routes, escape plans. I had ten days. Ten days to change the course of the world.

The first attack came in the cafeteria. At first, it was confusing—one of the lunch ladies screaming, students running, a blood-curdling sound echoing off the walls. Then I saw it.

A kid, one of the football team guys, convulsing on the floor. His skin was pale, lips blue. Before anyone could reach him, he lunged—fast, unnatural. Teeth—sharp, desperate. He bit the girl behind him before she could scream. And that’s when the chaos hit.

I grabbed Maddy, yanking her behind the lunch counter. “Stay down! Don’t move!” I whispered. My hands were shaking, but my mind was clear. Panic was the enemy. Logic was the weapon.

The hallways were crawling now, the first wave of the infected spilling like a flood. I’d memorized the layout of this school two years ago, every emergency exit, every weak door, every hiding spot. Survival was a game of angles and speed.

“Lexi, what do we do?!” Maddy’s voice cracked.

I crouched low, scanning. “We go roof. Then the old maintenance ladder. I know a path—trust me, just follow my lead.”

Her wide eyes said she trusted me, even if she didn’t understand why. That was fine. I didn’t need her understanding, just her cooperation.

We ran through the gym, avoiding the first wave, slipping past a group that hadn’t noticed us yet. I ducked into the janitor’s closet to grab an emergency kit—first aid, duct tape, a crowbar. My little preparations from nightmares I’d already lived. Every choice was calculated, every step a probability check.

By the time we reached the roof, the courtyard below was chaos. Students were screaming, running, biting. The world I’d seen in my nightmare two years from now was starting early. And it was worse—this time, I could do something.

“Lexi…” Maddy’s voice trembled. “I… I don’t want to die.”

“You won’t,” I said firmly. Smiling, even. “Not today. Not while I’m around. I’ve got plans.”

Plans. Yeah, that’s what it was. The detonator, the escape routes, the knowledge I’d carried like a secret weapon in my head. I wasn’t going to survive by luck this time. I was going to survive by being smarter, faster, and a little reckless—exactly the way I was born to be.

I grabbed her hand. “Ready? We move on three.”

And as the first of them climbed the fence, I counted. One… two… three…

The first thing I noticed was the beat.

It was ridiculous — a stupid, catchy chorus that had been trending for weeks — pulsing in my ears like a metronome. I’d grabbed my phone out of habit when we bolted across the courtyard and jammed the earbuds in without thinking. “Neon Night” by Kira Vale was blasting, and somehow the poppy synth drops made everything feel cinematic. I laughed at myself for a second. Then a hand grabbed the back of my jacket and yanked me down.

Below the lip of the rooftop, they were coming. Close now. Voices that used to be names, now scraping at the chain-link like they could tear the metal with their teeth. Up close they smelled wrong — like wet paper and old iron — but the song kept my head clear. It set the tempo.

“Lexi, what do we do?” Maddy’s whisper hitched into a sob. Her face was pale where the rooftop lights hit it, hair stuck to her forehead with sweat. She looked like she wanted to run, or cry, or both.

“We get to the stairwell,” I said, voice low. “I can get us down the maintenance shafts. Faster. Fewer bodies.” My hands were steady. That steadiness wasn’t luck — it was practice, a hundred replayed endings filed away in my head like blueprints. Ten days, I reminded myself. Ten days to break the script.

A figure shoved itself up onto the roof, one of the janitorial crew from the cafeteria — his uniform torn, his eyes gone glassy. He lurched like he had a marionette inside him pulling the strings. Another followed. And then the first tried to climb the ladder.

Maddy froze. Her fingers dug into my sleeve. “Lexi—”

“Move,” I said, and my tone let her know I wasn’t asking.

I hopped down, landing light and controlled. The first one turned, like something in its head recognized movement, and lunged. Reflex took over. The song hit the chorus and in the same heartbeat I swung.

The bat in my hands was an old aluminum thing I'd grabbed from the gym closet earlier — nothing fancy, perfectly weighted. It tasted right in my palms. I didn’t think. I felt the rhythm instead: one-two, one-two, the beat lining up with the arc of my swing. The first head met bat with a dull thud that didn’t splash or spray or anything cinematic. It just stopped. The body slumped, limp as a puppet whose strings were cut.

Maddy’s gasp was loud enough to cut the music. Her eyes were huge. “How—?”

I kept moving.

The roof was small and flat; there was nowhere to run if I got stuck. So I made space. I stepped, pivoted, and let the momentum of the bat carry me, smacking at collars and skulls in clean, efficient hits. The song dropped into its bridge and somehow my movements matched it: a bat swing on the downbeat, a jab on the off. Each strike had a purpose — disable, separate, create distance. Not flailing, not panicking. Professional. Like a choreographed fight scene where I wrote the choreography.

A cluster of them surged up the ladder, their hands scrabbling for the edge. I planted my feet, swung wide, and the barrel of the bat clipped two of them at once. They folded, tangled, and slid back down the ladder. The bat hummed in my hands, reverberation running up my arms. It felt alive. It felt right.

Maddy watched, slack-jawed, her mouth forming words she couldn’t spit out. “Lexi… why are you so—”

“Because I can’t afford to be anything else,” I said, pulling her behind me. “Because you’re here and I’m not losing you again.”

Her eyes filled in a way that broke something in my chest that I didn’t know had been holding together. I hit the nearest one in the shoulder so it dropped to its knees. No gore, no poetic death throes — just blunt stoppers, one after another. We moved like a small, ugly dance, two survivors improvising steps: me the lead, Maddy following, her trust a physical thing in the squeeze of her hand.

Downstairs, the school sounded like it was being rewritten in real time: alarms long-since dead, distant screams that might have been human at some point, the slap and patter of feet that no longer belonged to people. But I had options. Calculations. I traced paths with my eyes — stairwell A had clear sightlines but led to the main exit swarming with bodies; stairwell C had a maintenance door that opened into a service alley where we could disappear into backyards and then to the canal. The canal had boats. Boats meant mobility. Mobility meant choices.

“Canal,” I said. “We go canal.”

Maddy’s hand tightened. She nodded like she knew better than to argue. We scrambled down the maintenance ladder — slow, careful, the way you lower something precious — and hit the hall just as another group rounded the corner. I swung one-handed this time, the bat cutting arcs that made three of them collapse to the floor in a heap. No theatrics. Just efficient removal of the threat.

We weren’t silent when we moved. We didn’t have to be. The chaos bought us cover; screaming served as camouflage. People were thinking about survival in short, sharp bursts, not strategy. That was my advantage. I thought in lines and angles and time: how long until reinforcements arrived, where the noise would funnel them, which doors would still open.

We reached the service exit and spilled into dusk that smelled of gasoline and fried food. The sky wasn’t on fire yet, but orange-laced clouds rolled low like a bruise. The streets were starting to clump with motion — small packs, mouth-breathing clusters that turned heads in unison. A car stalled in the middle of the road; someone abandoned it with the keys still in the ignition. It was ugly and messy and early.

Maddy stumbled, nearly falling, and I caught her. She looked at me like someone who had just seen a different mask drop from my face. “You fought like… like you knew what you were doing.”

“I did,” I said, and the truth tasted like metal. “I remember how it ends. I remember how it starts. I’m not letting it start on my watch.”

She pressed her forehead to mine, a quick, desperate human thing. “Promise me you won’t—”

“—I can’t promise I won’t get scared,” I cut in. “But I promise I’ll do everything smarter this time.” I smiled, because that was the only thing that made my insides stop going cold. “And also, Kira Vale makes an amazing soundtrack for murder.”

Maddy laughed, a short hiccup that was half terror and half relief. It sounded like music to me.

We moved toward the canal with the city behind us beginning to rearrange itself into something else. My bat tapped along my shoulder in time with the fading chorus in my earbuds. Ten days weren’t gone. Not by a long shot. But the countdown felt different now — less like a sentence and more like a timer I could borrow time from.

We slipped into the alley and into the wet, neon-tinged night, and for the first time since I’d woken up back in Mrs. Carver’s class, I felt like my nightmare had handed me a script — and I was going to rewrite the ending.