"Yeah, Mom. I know. I love you."
I leaned back against the kitchen counter, phone pressed to my ear, staring at the watermark on the ceiling I'd been meaning to report to the building manager for three weeks.
"I'm fine. Seriously." I rubbed the bridge of my nose. "Eating? Yes, Mom. Three meals a day. Sometimes even with vegetables."
"If you're going to lie to me, at least make it believable. You haven't eaten a vegetable in your life."
I almost smiled. She always called on Thursdays. Seven p.m. sharp.
"Worry about your blood pressure, Mom. Not me," I said, and I meant it. She was fifty-two, living alone in a two-bedroom house in City C, forty minutes inland from the coast. She'd lived there my whole life. Dad had died there. It was just Mom now, rattling around that house.
"I know it's been a while. I'll come soon, okay? I promise."
Liar.
I couldn't afford the gas. Or the bus. Couldn't afford much of anything, if I was being honest with myself, which I tried very hard not to be most days.
"You're going to your sister's party," she said. "Saturday. Don't you leave her standing there."
I glanced at the invitation on the counter. Her handwriting. A little gathering this weekend, to celebrate that she was pregnant.
"Yeah. I'll be there."
Five kilometers across City F. I could walk it if I had to.
Two years younger than me. Married. A baby on the way. And I was the one who got left behind.
"Alright. I'm gonna go watch some TV, okay? Yeah. Love you. Be safe. Bye, Mom."
I hung up. Set the phone face-down on the counter.
The apartment was quiet. A studio on the fifteenth floor of a concrete high-rise in City F. A city that sold itself as a capital of opportunity, a place where young professionals came to build careers. I'd believed that once. Moved here with a degree in engineering and the kind of optimism only someone at twenty could have.
Mechanical engineering. Four years of thermodynamics, fluid mechanics, materials science, structural analysis. Graduated with honors.
And none of it mattered. I'd applied to sixty-seven positions in a year of hiring freezes. Zero offers.
In the meantime, I'd driven for a rideshare app, stocked shelves at a warehouse, done freelance CAD work. The warehouse had let me go two months ago. The rideshare suspended my account over a rating dispute. The CAD guy ghosted me.
One month. That's what I had left. One month of rent, one month of chicken-flavored ramen and tap water, and then I'd have to call Mom and tell her I was coming home. Tell her that the city had chewed me up. That I was twenty-three years old and moving back into my childhood bedroom.
Just not tonight.
Tonight, I had Z Royal Defense.
I dropped onto the couch and picked up the controller. The TV was already on, the game's title screen glowing in the dim apartment.
A ruined city sprawled across the screen, overrun with shambling dead, and in the center of it all, a fortress bristling with turrets and barricades and razor wire.
Z Royal Defense. The one place I was measurably excellent.
The concept was simple enough. You had a base, zombies came in waves, and between waves you built. The difficulty curve was brutal. Most players washed out around wave fifty. The hardcore community considered wave one hundred a serious achievement. Wave two hundred was legendary.
I'd been pushing close to three hundred for the last week and a half.
I unpaused. Wave 298. A swarm of fast, skeletal runners poured through the eastern breach, pixelated jaws snapping, while a pair of Brute-class tanks lumbered toward the north gate. I redirected my flamethrower array, pulled two sniper NPCs off the south wall, and dropped a claymore chain across the eastern corridor. The runners hit the mines and evaporated into chunks. The Brutes ate fourteen armor-piercing rounds each before their health bars finally emptied.
Wave 299. Tunnelers. I'd anticipated them. Seismic sensors along the perimeter lit up and I detonated the buried charges, collapsing the tunnels before they could surface inside my walls. A secondary wave of crawlers came over the top. I switched to the Tesla coil network and let the arcing electricity chain through them like dominoes.
Wave 300.
The screen went golden. The music shifted. Triumphant horns, a choir rising. Text scrolled across the center of the display in massive block letters.
I stared at it. A leaderboard materialized. My handle, FORTRESS_SCOTT, sat at the very top. First place.
A laugh escaped me.
World's number one. Can't get a job. Can't pay rent.
I set the controller down and went to the kitchen for a glass of water. The tap sputtered and then ran cold and clear. I filled a glass, drank half of it in one long swallow.
The lights went out. The apartment went dark.
A scream came through the wall from somewhere outside. Below, maybe. Or across the street. It was hard to tell.
I set the glass down carefully on the counter.
Power outage. Happens every couple months. Transformer probably blew.
I stood in the kitchen and waited. One minute. Five minutes. The air conditioning had died with the power and the apartment was already getting warm, August heat seeping through the walls.
Fifteen minutes. Thirty. I lay down on the couch because there was nothing else to do.
At some point, I slept. Exhaustion pulled me under without warning and without dreams. When I opened my eyes, pale light was pushing at the edges of the curtains.
The power was still out.
I grabbed my phone off the counter. The screen lit up, 37% battery, but no signal. No data connection. Tried sending a text to Mom. The little spinning wheel turned and turned and went nowhere.
"No signal. Perfect."
I pulled up the phone's emergency SOS function. Even that was dead. No network detected.
Okay. That's actually weird.
Power outages didn't kill cell towers.
I slid my feet into my sneakers and went to the front door. The building had a front desk attendant who sat in the lobby and handled packages and complaints. If anybody had information, it'd be them.
My hand closed around the door handle. Turned it. Pulled.
The hallway was lit by the amber glow of emergency strips along the baseboards. At the far end of the corridor, morning light filtered through the window. But the air smelled wrong. Something like raw meat hung in it.
And then the blue box appeared. Hanging in the air about two feet in front of my face, glowing with a soft cerulean light. Exactly like the interface in Z Royal Defense.
I didn't move. I didn't breathe.
Sweat trickled down the back of my neck.
I'm crazy. Did I have a stroke? Or the ramen was past the date—
Another scream. This one closer. Somewhere below me in the building, maybe the tenth floor, maybe the twelfth. Wood splintering. And then the scream became a shriek, and the shriek became a wet, gurgling thing that was worse than silence.
I stepped forward and looked through the hallway window at the city's eastern quarter.
I was on the fifteenth floor. High enough to see for miles on a clear day.
The city was burning.
Plumes of black smoke rose from a dozen points across the skyline. To the south, an entire block was engulfed. To the west, something massive, a fuel depot or a gas station, had exploded, and a fireball of debris was still climbing into the sky.
And in the streets below, I could see them.
People running. Sprinting. Stumbling over each other, over cars, over things on the ground that might have been debris or might have been bodies. They ran in every direction.
Behind them, among them, moving through the chaos. Human-shaped but wrong. Too stiff. Too jerky. Some of them fast, horribly fast, loping on all fours like dogs. Others shambling in loose packs, heads lolling, arms reaching. One of them, a thing that might have once been a man, caught a fleeing woman by the ankle. She fell. It crawled on top of her. Its head descended and its jaws opened wider than any human jaw could open and it bit into her neck and tore away a strip of flesh that it swallowed without chewing.
I watched her legs kick. Once. Twice. Then stop.
That's an actual zombie. That thing just—
I jerked back from the window. My hands were shaking.
A grid appeared beneath the text. The options scrolled as my eyes moved. I caught glimpses as they passed.
[Soldier] — [Medic] — [Scout] — [Berserker] — [Alchemist] — [Pyromancer] — [Beastmaster] — [Paladin] — [Assassin] — [Summoner] — [Warden] — [Gunslinger] — [Cleric] — [Battlemage] — [Ranger] — [Artificer] — [Shieldbearer] — [Duelist] — [Plague Doctor] —
Hundreds. Maybe thousands. Each one with its own skill trees and synergies. Theory-crafting, in a glowing menu, while the world burned.
I didn't hesitate.
My eyes locked on the icon I knew, the one I'd played for two thousand hours.
I selected it.
There was no confirmation prompt.
The icon pulsed once, the grid vanished, and a warmth spread through my chest. My hands tingled. My vision sharpened.
God, I hope that wasn't a mistake. Engineer is a late-game class.
The forums were full of tier lists and build guides, and they all said the same thing: Engineer was S-tier at wave one-fifty and above, the single best class for pushing deep into endgame, but in the early waves it was borderline unplayable. No melee skills. No burst damage. You had a single turret that lasted forty-five seconds on a two-minute cooldown, a passive that made doors slightly harder to break, and a scavenging bonus. That was it. Every other class got something to fight with. Engineers got a deployable that disappeared in under a minute and a prayer.
This isn't a game.
The thought was ice water in my veins. In Z Royal Defense, a bad wave meant a retry. Here it meant death.
Brilliant, Scott. Absolutely brilliant.
The timer kept counting.
Something moved in the stairwell.
The emergency exit door was twenty feet down the hall from my apartment, a heavy steel fire door with a push bar and a small wire-mesh window. Through that window, I saw nothing. But I heard it. A wet, dragging sound. Bare feet slapping against concrete, ascending the stairs. More than one set.
Ten zombies. In the stairwell.
I looked at the blue box.
Forty-five seconds. That's all I've got.
The stairwell door shuddered.
Something hit it from the other side. The push bar rattled. The hinges groaned.
Another hit. Harder this time.
I raised my hand and focused on the floor in front of the stairwell door. The skill felt like a thought. A clear, sharp image in my mind of what I wanted and where I wanted it.
"Emergency Turret."
The floor cracked.
Concrete split along invisible seams and something rose from underneath. Metal plates folded outward. A barrel extended. A targeting array, a small rotating sensor on a gimbal mount, swiveled, calibrated, and locked onto the stairwell door.
The turret was the size of a fire hydrant. A squat, brutal little thing. It hummed.
A 0:45 counter appeared in my peripheral vision and started ticking down.
The stairwell door burst open.
The first zombie came through sideways, as if it had been leaning against the door and the door gave way. It stumbled into the hallway and found its footing and stood there, and I saw it clearly.
It had been a man. Late forties, maybe. Receding hairline, beer gut, wearing a torn polo shirt with a company logo I couldn't read. One of his arms was gone below the elbow, torn off, the remaining stump ragged with dangling tendons and exposed bone the color of wet chalk. His skin was gray-green. His eyes were open, wide open, but the pupils were blown, irises invisible, just two black discs. His mouth hung slack, jaw slightly dislocated, a rope of dark saliva connecting his upper and lower teeth.
He saw me.
His head snapped toward me. His lips peeled back. A sound came out of him, a hoarse, rattling bark of aggression that was more animal than human.
He lunged.
The turret fired.
The sound was deafening in the enclosed hallway, a rapid, hammering staccato. Muzzle flash strobed the corridor in white-blue bursts. The rounds punched into the zombie's torso, chest, sternum, gut, and each impact jerked him backward. Black fluid erupted from the exit wounds and spattered the wall behind him. He staggered. Took a step. The turret adjusted, tracking upward, and the next burst caught him in the throat. His head snapped back, and he went down.
He didn't get back up.
But the door was still open, and they were still coming.
The second zombie was faster, a woman in a hospital gown, barefoot, her face a ruin of torn flesh that exposed the orbital bone around her left eye. She scrambled through the doorway on all fours, low and quick, and the turret swiveled to track her. Rounds chewed into the tile beside her, then found her shoulder, then her spine. She collapsed mid-stride and slid across the floor, twitching, still reaching for me with fingers that had no nails left.
Third. Fourth. They came through together, two men, both large, both wearing the tattered remnants of construction workwear, orange high-vis vests shredded and hanging in strips. The turret split its fire between them and that was a problem. One went down with half his skull caved in by concentrated fire, but the other absorbed round after round in his torso without slowing, his bulk soaking the damage, his legs still churning forward.
0:22 on the turret timer.
Two more behind the construction workers. A teenager in a hoodie, fast, spasming in directions that made the turret's tracking lag a half-second behind. Behind it, gray shapes jostled in the stairwell, pressing forward in a tangle of dead limbs and snapping jaws.
0:14.
The turret caught the surviving construction worker with a concentrated burst across the chest that finally dropped him, rounds punching through the high-vis vest and shattering his sternum. He hit the tile face-first and didn't move.
But the teenager was still jerking sideways, still dodging, and behind it the remaining zombies were clambering over their fallen, shoving through the doorway in a grotesque bottleneck of grasping hands and slack mouths. The turret's barrel swept across the press of bodies and two of the gray shapes caught the arc of fire, a shirtless man whose ribs were visible through a gaping wound in his side, and something smaller behind him, a shape I didn't want to look at closely. The rounds stitched across them both and they crumpled into the pile, sliding over the bodies already stacked in the threshold.
0:07.
Seven seconds. Four left. Not enough.
0:03. 0:02. 0:01.
The turret fired its last burst, catching the hoodie-zombie square in the face, punching through teeth and bone and brain, dropping it in a heap, and then the mechanism whirred, clicked, and went still.
The barrel retracted. The plates folded inward. The turret sank back into the floor and was gone, leaving only cracked concrete and shell casings.
Three zombies remained. They stumbled over the pile of bodies in the hallway, slow but relentless, dragging themselves through the carnage, fifteen feet from my door and closing.
I ran inside.
The apartment was dim, curtains drawn. I crashed into the kitchen counter, bounced off it, and yanked the broom closet open. A mop. A dustpan. A broom with a wooden handle and stiff bristles, the cheap kind you buy at a dollar store.
I grabbed the broom. Snapped the brush head off against the counter edge. The break left a jagged, splintered point at the end of the handle. Four feet of wooden with a crude spear tip.
A broomstick against the apocalypse.
I slammed the front door shut and threw the deadbolt. The lock clicked into place, and for one second I allowed myself to believe that would be enough.
It wasn't.
The first impact shuddered through the wood. Then another. Then three at once, fists hammering from different heights, different angles. The door was hollow-core, pressed wood, the cheapest thing a landlord could install. Spiderweb fractures spread from the center.
A gray hand punched through the hole. Fingers clawed blindly at the air, nails black and split. I stabbed the broomstick through the gap and felt it punch into meat. The hand spasmed and withdrew. Dark fluid oozed through the splintered wood.
They didn't stop. More hits. More cracking. The door was disintegrating.
I backed away. Planted my feet. Gripped the broomstick in both hands.
The door caved in.
The deadbolt held but the wood around it didn't. The panel split apart, fragments scattering across the entryway, and the first zombie shouldered through the wreckage. A gaunt, eyeless thing in a shredded business suit, its fingers bent the wrong way at every joint. It stumbled over the threshold and lunged.
I drove the broomstick into its face.
The splintered wood punched through its open mouth. I felt the crunch of something harder, the base of the skull, before the resistance vanished and the point sank deep. The zombie's body went rigid, every muscle locking at once, and then it collapsed, sliding off the broom handle.
The second was already through the door. A woman, middle-aged, nightgown soaked black with blood, one arm chewed to the bone from wrist to elbow. She came at me faster than I expected, her remaining good hand outstretched and grasping.
I swung the broomstick like a bat. The jagged end caught her across the temple. The wood bit into bone but didn't penetrate. It opened a flap of gray skin that peeled back. She lurched sideways but didn't fall, and her hand found my shirt, grabbed a fistful of fabric, and pulled me toward her snapping teeth.
I twisted, wrenched free, felt the shirt tear, and reversed the broom handle, driving it point-first into her eye socket. The wood sank with a sound like stepping on a rotten apple. She shuddered, mouth still working, teeth clacking together once, twice, and then she went limp and dragged the broom handle down with her as she fell.
The third zombie was on me before I could pull the weapon free.
Its hand closed around my forearm and pulled me toward its open mouth. Brown, cracked teeth, some of them missing, snapped shut an inch from my face. I could see the black of its throat. Rot poured out.
The broom handle was buried in the other zombie's skull. I had nothing.
I wrenched my arm sideways, trying to break its grip, and my foot hit the lower half of the broom, the piece I'd snapped off earlier, the end with the bristles. I stomped on it, snapping the bristle head free, creating another jagged point. I bent, the zombie's grip on my arm turning the movement into an agonizing wrench of my shoulder, grabbed the broken half with my free hand, and rammed it upward into the zombie's mouth.
The wood drove through into the brain stem.
Its jaw locked shut around the broom handle. Its eyes, milky, unfocused, went still. The grip on my arm loosened, finger by finger. It slid off me and hit the floor with a dull thud.
I stood there. Breathing. Bleeding from a dozen small cuts. My apartment was destroyed. The front door was gone. Broken dishes crunched under my shoes. Three bodies lay crumpled across the entryway and kitchen floor.
The apartment went quiet.
Three options appeared in front of me, each one framed in that same clean, cerulean light.