Sobriety kills.
Calder Rye checked the meter anyway.
Calder Rye knew the difference between quiet and too quiet.
Quiet was wind through a cracked storefront. Quiet was the soft scrape of a loose sign swinging on a single bolt. Quiet was the far-off shuffle of dead feet across broken glass, aimless and bored.
Too quiet was when the city held its breath.
He stopped beneath the skeletal awning of what used to be a pharmacy and let his shoulders settle against the pillar. He didn't move for a full count of ten. In this world, stillness was a test. The virus loved tests.
His metter tapped once against his chest—thin, plastic, scavenged, ugly. The little screen flickered and offered him a number like a judgment.
0.05%
Calder exhaled through his nose.
Not safe. Not dead. The knife-edge.
He looked down the street. The asphalt had buckled years ago and never finished falling apart. Cars sat where they'd died: doors open, trunks wide, the inside bones of them exposed. A billboard leaned at a violent angle over the road, its sun-bleached smile advertising something that no longer existed. In the distance, the dead wandered in a slow drift, bumping into each other like sleepwalkers in a dream they couldn't wake from.
Calder's hand hovered near his belt, where glass clinked softly against glass. He didn't grab anything yet. He waited for his own body to speak first.
Hands: slight tremor.
Breath: steady.
Vision: a little too sharp.
That was the part that killed you—when the world came into focus like it wanted to be understood.
He turned his wrist inward and checked the faded numbers tattooed along the inside of his forearm. Not decoration. Not sentiment.
A scale.
Intervals, not oceans, someone had once said. Not to him. To a room full of half-sober fools who thought bravery was a cure.
Calder didn't have cures. He had minutes.
The pendant flickered again, as if impatient.
0.04%
His stomach tightened. Not fear—math.
He reached for a vial and stopped himself. The reflex to drink at every dip was how people died with their mouths open and their minds gone. You didn't chase the meter. You guided it.
Calder pulled a small notebook from his coat instead. The pages were soft at the edges from being handled too often, damp in places where rain had found its way inside. He flipped to today's mark.
DAY 2,113
WAKE: 0.06
MOVE: 0.05
STRESS: —
He stared at the blank line and listened.
The city gave him nothing.
That was the problem.
When there were noises—moans, scrapes, a distant crash—your brain stayed scattered. Alcohol helped scatter it further, just enough to keep the virus from syncing its teeth into you. But when everything got clean and still, the virus had room to work.
Calder felt it then: not pain, not yet. A crawling awareness at the base of his skull, like someone had placed a cold finger there and was waiting to press.
He closed the notebook and slid it away.
"Alright," he whispered to nobody. "Alright."
He chose a vial with a blue thread tied around its neck. Not because the color meant anything mystical. Because blue meant slow.
Anchor tonic.
Calder popped the cork with his teeth and let a single measured swallow hit his tongue. It burned. It always did. A controlled fire, small enough to hold.
He forced himself to wait before swallowing again. One swallow. Then nothing. Give it time. Give your blood time to become uninteresting.
He rolled the tonic in his mouth like a man tasting something expensive and stupid, then swallowed.
The pendant didn't change immediately. It never did. People died waiting for instant results, panicking, drinking too much, vomiting up their doses in the street while their brains snapped into clarity in the worst possible way.
Calder waited.
At the far end of the road, a dead man in a shredded suit had been shuffling toward a bus stop for no reason at all. Now it paused. Its head angled sideways, as if listening for a song only it could hear.
Calder froze.
The dead man's face was half gone, jaw hanging wrong, eyes dull as old marbles. But it had heard something. The infected did that sometimes. When someone sobered too fast. When someone thought too clearly, too long.
Calder didn't blink.
A second infected turned its head.
Then a third.
They weren't looking at him—not exactly. They were listening through him, toward the pattern of his thoughts.
His pulse kicked harder.
Don't panic. Panic sharpens. Sharpness invites.
Calder pressed the vial against his lips but didn't drink again. He watched the dead as if he could bore a hole through them with attention alone.
The pendant flickered.
0.05%
Better.
The dead man in the suit relaxed. Not like a human would. Like a machine losing interest in a signal that wasn't worth chasing. It resumed its drift.
Calder let himself breathe again, very slowly, very carefully, as if breath might make noise.
He capped the vial and slid it back into his belt loop. His hand trembled from the effort of restraint.
That was the real trick of surviving this world: not drinking.
Anyone could drink. Anyone could drown themselves until their mind was mush and the virus couldn't find a clean surface to cling to. Anyone could live a week that way. A month, if they were lucky. A year, if they were stupid.
Living longer took control.
Control was lonely.
Calder pushed away from the pillar and started walking again, boots stepping softly, eyes always moving. He cut down an alley lined with waterlogged cardboard and cracked ceramic, then slipped through the broken back door of a diner whose sign still read OPEN in dead neon. Inside, daylight came in long slants through shattered windows, turning dust into drifting gold.
He liked places like this. Not because they were safe—nothing was safe—but because they were predictable. The dead didn't gather here often. Not enough stimuli. Not enough echoes.
He moved behind the counter and crouched, reaching into a hollowed space beneath the register. His fingers brushed metal.
A small tin. The kind that used to hold mints.
He opened it.
Inside were three things: a spare battery for the pendant, a folded strip of cloth, and a polaroid so faded it was almost blank. Calder didn't look at the photo. He closed the tin and slid it into his coat.
Sentiment was clarity. Clarity was food.
He stood and listened again. Still quiet. But not too quiet.
Then—something else.
A soft click.
Not in the room.
In his pocket.
Calder's body tightened.
He didn't move his head. He moved his eyes. His hand slipped into his coat and found the object buried there—hard plastic, the size of his palm. He drew it out slowly.
A voice recorder.
He hadn't seen it in weeks. He'd found it on a corpse and kept it because it still worked, because sometimes you needed to leave instructions for yourself like breadcrumbs in a fog.
He hadn't pressed it.
It had pressed itself.
The tiny red light blinked once, then stayed steady.
Recording.
Calder stared at it as if it were a living thing.
His pendant flickered.
0.06%
Safe.
He didn't feel safe.
He thumbed the recorder and stopped it, then held it up to his ear. The device hummed faintly, like it wanted to speak.
Calder hesitated.
Listening was dangerous. Listening meant focusing. Focusing meant clarity.
But the little red light had already been on. Something had already happened. Something had already been said.
He turned the recorder over in his hand. The back was scratched, and along the edge someone had carved letters with something sharp.
Not a name.
A direction.
BRIDGE / EAST / 2 NIGHTS
Calder's mouth went dry.
The bridge east of here was dead territory. Everyone knew that. Everyone avoided it. Not because there were more infected—there were always infected—but because the air over there went too quiet, too often. Like something moved through it that the dead respected.
Calder swallowed and forced himself to relax his shoulders.
No.
Not something.
Someone.
He thought of the way the infected had tilted their heads a moment ago. Listening. Then losing interest.
He'd seen that kind of listening before.
Only once.
A clean man in a ruined street. A voice without tremor. A calm smile that made Calder want to drink until he couldn't remember his own name.
Elias Crowe.
Calder tightened his grip on the recorder until plastic creaked. Then he loosened it. Control.
He tucked the device into his coat like it was a live ember and stepped away from the counter. His eyes went to the door. The windows. The ceiling tiles.
Nothing moved.
And that, more than anything, made him want to run.
He breathed in.
He breathed out.
He reached for his notebook and wrote with shaking hand:
STRESS: HIGH
NOTE: RECORDER ACTIVATED. MESSAGE MARKED. BRIDGE EAST. 2 NIGHTS.
He stared at the words until they stopped looking like a threat and started looking like a plan.
Outside, the dead continued their aimless drift. The city pretended it was asleep.
Calder didn't believe it.
He stepped to the doorway and paused, letting the light hit his face. He looked down at the pendant one more time, as if numbers could reassure him that the world still followed rules.
0.06%
Safe.
Alive.
For now.
He slipped out of the diner and into the street, moving like a man who had learned the art of disappearing in plain sight.
Behind him, somewhere in the quiet, something else moved with measured steps—too steady, too sure—and the city held its breath again.
Calder felt it like a pressure on the edge of thought.
Not a sound.
A presence.
His hand brushed the Anchor vial at his belt.
The recorder was warm in his hand.
Not from the sun.
From use.
Calder looked east.
He hadn't planned on moving tonight.
But the meter didn't care about plans.
0.06%
Alive.
For now.