LENA
I died screaming.
The memory slams into me the second I open my eyes. Teeth in my throat. Hands tearing. The shelter doors sealed shut while Damon watched through the glass, his face blank as stone.
But that's impossible, because I'm staring at my bedroom ceiling right now. The one with the water stain shaped like a hand. The one I haven't seen in four months, because four months from now, this building will be overrun and everyone inside will be dead.
My heart pounds so hard it hurts.
Damon's arm is draped across my waist. His breath is warm against my shoulder. He's alive. He's here. He's sleeping like a man with nothing to hide.
I count to sixty without moving. Without breathing. Just counting, because if I don't count, I'll scream or I'll kill him, and I need to do neither of those things. Not yet.
Sixty seconds.
Then I slide out from under his arm and walk to the bathroom.
My hands find the light switch. The mirror shows me a woman I barely recognize. No hollows under her eyes. No scars on her arms. I grab my left wrist and turn it over, searching for the jagged white line where the first bite tore through muscle.
Nothing.
I check my right arm. My shoulders. The back of my neck where the last one got me before I stopped feeling anything at all.
All of it is gone. Smooth skin. Perfect skin. Like none of it ever happened.
My hands start shaking.
That's when I know this is real. My hands haven't shaken since the moment I woke up in that horde with death in my mouth and clarity in my head. But they're shaking now, because I'm alive and whole and standing in a bathroom that shouldn't exist anymore.
I died. I know I died.
So how am I here?
The air in my lungs feels too clean. No rot. No blood. Just soap and laundry detergent and Damon's cologne, the one that used to make me feel safe before I learned what he really was.
I grip the edge of the sink and force myself to breathe.
Think, Lena. Think.
If I'm here, if this is real, then today is March 15th. Ninety-two days before Z-Day. Ninety-two days before the dead start walking and the world ends and Damon and Cara throw me to the monsters like I'm nothing.
Which means I have ninety-two days to make sure it doesn't happen that way again.
The shaking stops.
I straighten up. Look at myself in the mirror. The woman staring back at me is twenty-nine years old with clear eyes and steady hands and a husband who thinks she's easy to control.
She has no idea what's coming.
But I do.
I walk to the kitchen. My feet know the way even though everything feels wrong, too bright, too normal. The coffee maker is still on the counter. The curtains are still blue. The world is still pretending it has a future.
I find a pen in the drawer by the fridge. I find an old notebook shoved behind the cookbooks. I sit down at the table and open to the first blank page.
My hand hovers over the paper.
Where do I even start?
With Damon? With Cara? With the supply caches I'll need or the people I'll have to save or the ones I'll have to let die because saving everyone is what got me killed the first time?
No.
I start with the only thing that matters.
I write the date at the top of the page. Then, underneath it, in letters so dark the pen nearly tears through: 92 days.
That's all I have. That's all anyone has, but I'm the only one who knows it.
I start writing.
The list comes fast. Supplies. Locations. Names of people I can trust. Names of people I can't. Petra goes at the top of the first list. Damon and Cara go at the top of the second. I write down the warehouse on East Street, the one with the medical supplies that no one will think to loot until it's too late. I write down the industrial site on the edge of town, the one with the high fence and the generator room and enough space to hold two hundred people if I'm smart about it.
I write and write and write until my hand cramps.
Then I hear footsteps behind me.
I close the notebook. Slow. Calm. Like I have nothing to hide.
Damon walks into the kitchen wearing the T-shirt I used to think was cute. His hair is messy. His smile is easy. He looks at me the way he always did, like I'm something valuable he's proud to own.
"You're up early," he says.
I smile back. It feels like putting on a mask made of knives.
"Couldn't sleep," I say. "Just making a list."
He glances at the notebook. "A list of what?"
"Things I need to do."
He laughs. Soft. Warm. Fake. "You and your lists. Always planning something."
"Always," I agree.
He moves closer. Puts his hand on my shoulder. The same hand that signed the banishment order. The same hand that waved goodbye through the glass while I screamed his name.
I don't flinch. I don't move. I just sit there and let him touch me, because he needs to believe I'm still the woman he married. The one who loved him. The one who didn't see it coming.
"I was thinking," he says, "maybe we could go out tonight. Just the two of us. You've been stressed lately."
I haven't been stressed. I've been dead.
But he doesn't know that.
"That sounds nice," I say.
He squeezes my shoulder and walks away to start the coffee. I wait until his back is turned before I let my smile drop.
My hand moves to the notebook. I flip it open to the next blank page.
And then I write the one thing I didn't put on the list yet. The thing that matters more than supplies or plans or survival.
I write it in letters twice as big as everything else:
Make them pay.
The pen tip breaks through the paper.
Behind me, Damon hums while he pours his coffee, completely unaware that the woman sitting at his table isn't his wife anymore.
She's something else entirely.
Something that came back from the dead with a mission and ninety-two days to complete it.
I close the notebook.
The countdown has already started.