Free Web NovelChapter 3: The Plan For Now
The hallway light caught her chestnut hair first.
Then the bright brown eyes found mine, and something in my chest simply stopped.
Kara Woodbrew stood in the brightly lit hallway, her chestnut hair falling over her shoulders, wearing a loose hoodie and looking effortless.
While I stood frozen in the doorway, because I hadn’t seen my best friend in three years.
And the sheer, peaceful normalcy of her standing right in front of me completely short-circuited my brain.
Kara noticed my stunned silence.
Tilting her head, she let out a light chuckle. "You just woke up, Nikki? Don’t tell me you’re still half asleep?"
[Move, dude! Say something.]
I snapped myself back, stepped aside, and gestured her in. My hands were shaking badly enough that I shoved them into my pocket before she could clock it.
"Sorry..." I managed. "Still booting up."
"Clearly," she gave me a playful side-eye and walked straight into my apartment with comfortable familiarity.
I was still pulling the door shut when a small, treacherous shape exploded from under the desk.
Tikki crossed the room in zero seconds, skidded to a halt at Kara’s feet, and immediately began winding around her legs while rubbing his entire face against her jeans.
The same cat who had been biting and kicking me in the forearm ten minutes ago, mind you.
Kara laughed and scooped him up, and Tikki went completely boneless in her arms, pushed his face against her cheek, and closed his eyes while I watched this with a perfectly flat expression.
"Right, almost forgot... That little bogger is a pervert. He is never this affectionate with me."
Kara ignored this entirely, settled onto the sofa, arranged Tikki in her lap, and began scratching his chin while he cranked the purring up another twenty percent.
I leaned against the wall and watched her sit there.
[Three years...]
She had been the first person I’d looked for when everything collapsed, and the last I’d found.
We were both from the same small village, probably why we’d latched onto each other so fast in the first semester. Our shared love for webnovels played a huge part too.
She was a Vet student at the same university I enrolled in, and our friendship began with her moving into the apartment next to mine and her cooking unreasonably good meals in exchange for rides to and from university on my bike.
She was exactly the kind of person who seemed sharp and guarded right up until she’d quietly do something impossibly kind and then pretend it hadn’t happened.
And alongside those memories, a dark, suffocating one violently overlapped.
I remembered the exact day before the turning began in my previous life.
Kara had been sitting on that exact same sofa. We were discussing the strange, increasing cases of violence on the news. People were suddenly losing their tempers, cursing, and starting bloody brawls in the streets. We had debated if we were too late to properly stock up on groceries since rumors of a new pandemic were floating around online.
And then her phone rang.
She had received a frantic call from a ’distressed friend’.
The girl begged Kara for cash and told her to meet by the dark alley a few blocks from our apartment building. And Kara immediately agreed, grabbed her jacket, walked out that door, and never returned.
I remembered the agonizing horror of finally finding her eight months later.
She was a shambler. I found her roaming the ruined streets, naked and mutilated, right outside a massive fortress run by heavily armed survivors.
They used to be the local mafia and ran one of the largest gambling and prostitution rings in the city before the apocalypse hit.
I almost didn’t recognize her through the dirt and the rot and everything in between.
And when I finally did, I instantly connected the horrifying dots of exactly what she endured before the virus finally took her mind.
I remembered raising my gun with shaking hands and pulling the trigger to finally put my best friend out of her misery.
"Yeah. That’s not happening if I can help it."
Kara looked up. "What’s not happening?"
[Did I say that out loud?]
I pushed off the wall and pulled out the easy smile, the one I’d used to get out of conversational corners a hundred times before the world ended. "Just wondering if I had a shot with you."
Kara let out a loud scoff as she rolled her bright brown eyes in pure exasperation.
"Good thing Bella isn’t here to hear that. You’d have completely torched your shot."
Bella. The name landed, and I waited for that long forgotten flutter, but it didn’t come.
Three years of watching people survive, sacrifice, and fall apart had apparently done something clarifying to my ability to evaluate a girl who kept a backup orbiting her at all times and called it friendship.
"Yeah..." I let out a genuinely heavy sigh. "I’m over her."
Kara stared at me for one full second, then burst out laughing. "Dude, you wouldn’t stop talking about her through half the movie last night, and now you’re over her? Just like that?"
"Yeah, just like that."
She kept laughing. I let her. Because there wasn’t a version of the explanation that didn’t involve the phrase, so I lived through three years of the apocalypse.
"Alright." I grabbed a towel from the closet. "Going to wash up. We’ll head out after."
I shut the bathroom door, picked up the toothbrush, loaded it, and got to work.
The mint hit sharp and immediate on my gums, and it was so aggressively normal that I had to stop for a second just to let it register, because by month six of the last timeline, toothpaste had become a luxury barter commodity.
And I had been rising with rainwater and calling it good for months at a stretch.
So, I scrubbed harder, staring at my own reflection while I roll-called the events to come.
fгeewebnovёl.com
[Need to manage the first two weeks...]
The first 2 weeks of the outbreak were the hardest.
Freshly turned were fully energized and fast sprinters operating on a complete tank of adrenaline and rage, capable of clearing more than ten meters in the blink of an eye.
By day 2, each would have an armor developing.
It was a semi-solid layer sitting beneath the first few millimeters of muscle, viscous and impact-absorbing like a non-Newtonian fluid, starting with the skull and spreading outward, bulging the head grotesquely before working down the neck and chest.
By week 2, when the adrenaline wore off and malnutrition truly settled in, the armor covered the torso.
By week 3, the thighs and arms.
Hell, a 9mm to the face became a joke by day 3 of the outbreak.
A 5.56 NATO would take 4 to 5 direct head shots to drop one by week 1, and that assumed the panicked you could land head shots on something sprinting at you through broken terrain with zero pattern, hesitation, and any form of self-preservation.
Body shots worked, yes, but unless you were hitting spine or heart, it could easily take ten or more AR rounds to drop a single infected, and you could absolutely forget about baseball bats and crowbars.
I spat foam into the sink and remembered that dumpster. East district, day 9. Two full days I sat crouched in complete darkness inside a dumpster, surrounded by the sound of the horde passing and re-passing outside, eating whatever I found at the bottom in the dark without even being able to see what it was.
Sitting there in the stench, I remembered genuinely asking myself why I was still holding on.
"It was just fear..." I rinsed and splashed cold water onto my face and held it there.
The airborne strain was the actual extinction event; it has already infected most of the world’s population and is currently inert.
90% of the population has zero resistance to it, and given its airborne nature, no real military response ever materialized.
It could survive in the air for days. So the military itself was compromised on day 1.
The remaining 10% weren’t safe either, because the evolved variant lived in saliva, and one bite rolled out a random clock that could run anywhere from seconds to weeks with no pattern and no way to predict it.
[Good thing blood and guts don’t carry it... and the variant in the saliva can’t last out in the open for more than a few seconds.] I thought, turning off the faucet. [Or I’d have turned a thousand times over.]
I grabbed the towel. Dried my face and stared at my reflection for one more second.
[Fortress. A month of supplies and ammo. Wait out the sprinters... That’s good enough for now...]
I stepped out, nodded once at Kara, grabbed a change of clothes, and went back,
Pulling off my shirt, I climbed into the dry bathtub and shoved that shirt into my mouth before reaching into my inventory and pulling out the Physiological Enhancer.
After all, the System did say the process is going to be painful. And with Kara sitting on the other side of the door, I couldn’t exactly shriek my lungs out.
It was smaller than I’d expected. A matte-black auto-injector, roughly the length of my palm, featureless except for a single raised button at the top and a capped needle at the bottom.
[System, where exactly do I shove it in? And how for how long?]
-Ding!
{Around the heart. Five minutes.}
I looked at the injector for one breath. Then I pressed the needle against the left side of my chest, angled inward, and hit the button.
-Kshk-!
The needle went in, and the compound followed, and for about two seconds nothing happened at all, and I almost thought the system had overstated it.
And the very next second, my heart rate tripled.
The heat came next, from directly behind my sternum, spreading outward through my chest and down my arms and up my throat in one unbroken wave while my heart slammed against my chest so hard I could hear it in my own skull.
I clenched the shirt between my teeth and pressed my back flat against the bottom of the tub as every muscle in my body began contracting simultaneously.
My legs thrashed against the porcelain, my fist found the side of the tub and I let it because I needed somewhere for it to go while the heat continued to build past even pain.
Every nerve firing at once while my heart kept hammering toward something that felt very much like a hard limit, while the shirt muffled the sound coming out of my throat into something that hopefully, hopefully, wasn’t audible from the sofa.
[Don’t scream. Kara is right outside. Do not scream!]
I held onto that. Just that one specific fact, Kara sitting ten feet away on the other side of a door, completely unaware that I was being rended apart in the bathtub.
The heat peaked somewhere around the three-minute mark and then just held there, right at the boundary of unbearable, for what felt like considerably longer than the remaining two minutes before finally receding, slowly, in stages.
I lay limp against the bottom of the tub, soaked through, the shirt hanging loose from my teeth, my chest heaving in long shuddering pulls, and waited for my heart rate to come back down to something that didn’t feel like an incoming heart attack.
It took a while, but eventually I got my arms under me, pushed upright, and stumbled in front of the mirror.
The difference was immediate and slightly disorienting to look at directly, like a heavily edited photograph of my current self.
The softness was gone, the kind that accumulates quietly during a life that hasn’t yet had to fight to the death, and what remained body that looked forged in battle rather than at the gym.
[Huh... I look like how I used to 2 years in the shit show...]
Looking at the remaining black injector sitting in the inventory grid, I could help but ask-
[Hey, System. Can anybody take these enhancers?]
-Ding!
{Yes.}
[Even Tikki?]
