The storm rattled the windows hard enough that I thought the glass might shatter. Lightning cracked over Austin's skyline, plunging the street into light, then shadow, then light again. Neighbors cursed the power outages, dogs barked, and kids cried.
I sat at my kitchen table, alone, hands wrapped around a mug of coffee gone cold hours ago. My fingers were thick and scarred, not the kind you get from construction or farm work. Gun oil and desert sand leave their own kind of permanent marks. The jagged line on my left cheek itched, a permanent reminder.
Sixteen years in uniform. Special Operations. Different patches on the arm, same flag on the shoulder. Some things I'll never talk about not because I can't, but because it doesn't matter anymore. The heat of Fallujah, the dust of Kandahar. The weight of the rifle and the weight of the decisions. The face of Mateo Ramirez, quick to laugh, faster to cover his brothers, his last word a wet, choked "Commander...!" in the dust of a nameless village. The girl, no more than ten, the dark red bloom on her yellow dress. My fault. Always my fault.
People thank you for your service, then they move on. Clara tried to get me to move on, too. Her softness was a stark, beautiful counter to my hard edges. But the deployments stretched longer, the silence between us grew heavier. "You're already gone, Michael," she'd said over a staticky satellite phone. The last thing she ever said to me. Veterans move on too, if they're lucky.
Problem is, I never trusted the word "lucky."
That's why the basement looked the way it did. Shelves lined with cans, water filters, medical gear, spare parts, rolls of duct tape. Not some doomsday nut-job's bunker. Just enough to sleep at night knowing I wouldn't be the first to starve if the world went sideways. A Beretta M9 in a locked box, cleaned every Sunday like a ritual. An olive-drab duffel by the door, always packed.
And in my gut, I always knew it would. The world was always one bad day from going sideways.
The storm outside should've been the worst thing that night. But it wasn't.
A voice cold, mechanical, clinical slipped into my skull like someone had wired a radio into the back of my head.
[Survival Protocol Activated.] Choose a Scenario: Fallout • 7 Days to Die • The Last of Us. Warning: This choice is permanent.
I blinked. My pulse spiked. My first thought: aneurysm. Stroke. PTSD flashback. But the words didn't fade, didn't distort. They hovered at the edges of my vision like a heads-up display from some videogame I hadn't played.
"Jesus Christ," I muttered, rubbing my eyes. But when I opened them, the words were still there.
Choose.
Three names. Three nightmares.
Fallout. Nuclear fire and radiation sickness. I'd seen enough of what uranium did to kids overseas. No. 7 Days to Die.Endless hordes, sprinting in waves. Unrealistic, chaotic. I'd last longer than most, but still a death sentence. The Last of Us.
That one made me pause. Because Cordyceps wasn't fiction. It was a real fungus. Took over insects, rewired their brains until their bodies became spore factories. I'd read obscure papers during deployments, long nights trying not to think about missions. Most scientists laughed at the idea of it mutating into humans. I didn't. It felt insidious. Possible. A slow rot rather than a quick bang. A kind of hell a soldier used to endurance might just survive.
I stared at the words, jaw tight. If this was some hallucination, fine. But if it wasn't…
"Realistic enough to kill me," I said under my breath.
The letters flared bright.
[Confirmed: The Last of Us Selected.] Timeline Placement: Five Years Before Outbreak. System Integration: Partial.]
I shoved my chair back, heart hammering in my chest. Five years? Outbreak?
My instincts screamed to grab my rifle from the safe, gear up, prepare for contact. But the voice kept going.
[Tutorial Quest Activated.] Objective: Stockpile 30 days of clean water. Reward: Basic Blueprint – Improvised Bandage.
I stood in the middle of the kitchen, storm roaring outside, trying to make sense of it. PTSD didn't give you quest logs. Brain damage didn't hand you hydration checklists.
Slowly, my breathing steadied. This wasn't panic. This wasn't combat.
This was an briefing. An impossible, insane briefing. And the Army taught me one truth I'd never shake: survival doesn't belong to the strongest. It belongs to the most prepared.
And if I really had five years…
Then maybe, just maybe, I could outlast the end of the world.
The pressure built in my skull, the world folding in on itself. Memories fractured: Mateo's last grin, the girl's wide eyes, Clara's tears all splintering into a blinding white fog. I blacked out.
I woke up gasping, face-down on unfamiliar linoleum, the air thick with the smell of cedar and heat. A Texas driver's license on the floor next to me. September 2008, it said. Michael Foster. Austin, Texas. A duplex key in my pocket, a welding job lined up at a place called Hector's, a beat-up sedan parked outside.
The memories of my old life lingered but were altered, seamlessly edited. I'd mustered out. I'd chosen to move here for a fresh start. The system's voice was gone, the truth of my transportation sealed away behind a wall of manufactured nostalgia. I wasn't home. I was a ghost in a machine, dropped into a prologue.
I told myself it was a breakdown. But the prepping started that very week. It was the only thing that felt real.
The five years that followed blurred into a routine, a fragile armor. The welding shop became my monastery. The hiss of the gas, the blinding blue-white flame of the torch, the smell of hot metal and ozone it was a meditation. Hector, a bear of a man with a kind heart, called me his best artist. I just nodded, grateful for the silence.
But the paranoia was a thread woven through it all. A delivery truck backfiring would see me on the concrete floor, heart hammering, before I could process the sound. I always chose the booth facing the door. I wasn't just building railings; I was reinforcing my own walls.
I drank alone, avoided entanglements no dates, no buddies. The neighborhood was my only anchor, a small world of nods and fleeting glimpses. It was a picture of unremarkable suburban life. The guy across the street, Joel Miller, was a contractor with the squared shoulders and watchful eyes of a man who'd seen trouble. We'd exchanged maybe two dozen nods over the years, a silent recognition between men who preferred silence. I never pried. I kept to myself.
The family across the street a father and his daughter were just part of the scenery. The sound of a kid laughing as she rode her bike, the smell of a family cooking dinner these were the echoes of a life I'd lost, a world I'd failed to protect. They were reminders, not connections.
But the nightmares persisted. Sand turning to blood. Mateo shouting. The girl's hand slipping from mine. Clara's voice: "You let them die."
Lately, the world felt thinner. Mr. Reyes next door, the old man who'd sweep his driveway every evening, had vanished a week ago. The local news mentioned a new, aggressive flu strain. The radio crackled with reports from overseas hospitals strained in Jakarta, something about fungal infections in the crops.
Today, the storm had passed. The air hung thick and damp, broken branches littering the street like bones. I stepped onto the porch, automatically scanning the block. No Reyes. Joel's pickup sat in the driveway, hood up, the steady clink of tools a familiar sound. The normal sounds of a family evening drifted from across the street.
My gaze was distant, not on them, but on the horizon. Five years of waiting. The duffel bag by the door seemed to hum.
The radio inside crackled: weather cleared, but health alerts escalating. I walked in and turned it off, the silence that followed somehow louder.
I grabbed my jacket from the hook and stepped outside. The rain had stopped, but the air was still charged. It didn't matter.
The countdown had begun five years ago. And now, it was finally running out.