Page 7 of Before Their After

I checked my phone, blood chilling the flesh around my bones. “No bars.”

The recollection of the buzzing nauseated the inner part of my ear as the world around me filled with white stars. Each notification cluttering up my home screen was worse than the last. The ground beneath me swirled as if I’d had five shots too many.

“They pushed the big red button,” I said. “Let’s go.”

“What button? Go where?” Evander asked, his voice distant, detached.

He sounded his age. Something I’d never heard him sound like before. I had to remind myself constantly that my brother was only sixteen. With everything he had seen, heard … been through, it was easy to forget.

I didn’t answer him.

Home.

It was the only place we could go. There was nothing left for us on this bridge. No one was coming. No one would ever come, not for a long-ass time.

It was just us now. There was no changing that. I waited for the tears to fall, but none came. No sadness filled my heart, only anger soothed my soul.

Hellbent.

I was hellbent my entire life on destroying everything my father touched. To be the opposite of him was to be a better man. Now the word had a different definition. A different intention.Hellbent. To keep my brother alive, I would become the man we both feared.

Part Two

THE GENERAL

The End

AMAIA

This is the end.It has to be. Please let it be.

The world did not end with an asteroid, or climate change, or super volcano. No. No one considered that the world would be brought to its knees by an unfathomable scenario.

Society did not crumble, one empire after another. Humanity destroyed each other, yes. But the world I now lived in, the world I was forced to survive, I don’t suppose an author or screenwriter could properly depict it even if they tried.

Hell. Chaos. Death.

So much death.

That about summed it up. Death lingered in the air, complementing the permanent stench of rotten eggs and the taste of metal coating my tongue. I was foolish to have left without my gas mask, grabbing my bug-out bag in such a hurry. I had been careless and arrogant in ignoring my dad’s insistence on keeping my mask in the bag for this exact situation. Okay, maybe notexact.

My mom and I had teased him relentlessly about his doomsday prepper hobby, insisting that years in the military had muddled his brain. A career based on preparing for the worst, most inconceivable situations could do that to a person. Joke was on me, I guess.

A tear dripped down my face at the thought of never being able to tell him he was right, the opportunity gone along with my parents. Only hours ago, the cell towers had connected for a brief moment. Long enough for my best friend Sammy to get through to her family and check in, while I impatiently tried to reach my own. The line didn’t even connect. In truth, I knew they were gone. There had been a sense of finality in my father's last text. No texts from Sloan popped up and mine hadn’t delivered. And then Sammy was gone too.

At least she got to say goodbye.The door behind me thudded against my skull, the impact catching me off guard. A deep growl hummed near my feet. Harley’s tail tucked and ears flattened against her head.

“Shh, it’s okay, girl. It’s okay,” I cooed, crouching down to rub her silky black fur. My hands shook in unison with the door behind me, a series of groans and guttural screeches finding their way beneath the door.

I just needed a second to think. Put together a plan. Lack of planning put me in this situation to begin with. The smart thing would have been to head back to my apartment on day one with Sammy in tow. It would have been safer, and there would have been a better chance of making it to the storage unit on the other side of town alive. Probably would have been easier to stock up on ammo and weapons the first day too.

Hindsight’s 20/20, and I had been too weak to make my move then, anyway.

And now, I was out of options and forced to face my new reality. The key I needed to retrieve my own weapons wasbehind the door I leaned against, my mask too. I wouldn’t be able to make it across town and to wherever was next without them. My dead slash undead fiancé slammed his body against it.You could try a gun store. But chances were, there was nothing left worth risking my life. Especially unarmed.

Fuck it, I thought as I rammed against the now unlocked door. There was no plan that would get me what I needed. I had no weapons other than one of the hunting knives from my bag, and our studio apartment left little to no room for improvising. My best chance would be to bum-rush past him and try to maneuver my way back out. I had the speed, and if I had to, I could fight my way out. I’d always been able to hold my own. My dad had made sure of it.

I rammed the door open hard enough that Xavier was thrown into the wall. The stun of the impact bought me half a second before he lunged, narrowly missing my body as I fell onto my back, scrambling to get upright again. Frantically, I searched for my knife now tossed somewhere around the room.

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