The sky was the color of old ash.
I stood in the middle of a street that no longer remembered what it was meant to be. Buildings hunched over like weary giants, their glass eyes shattered, their concrete skin cracked and bleeding rust. Corpses lay where life had abandoned them—some curled up against the walls, others sprawled in the gutters as though even death hadn't granted them peace.
And I, Ethel, who just hours ago had been in another world entirely, found myself stranded here.
I knew it wasn't a dream. The weight of the air was too heavy, too foul with smoke and rot. My body ached in ways that didn't belong to me. A fever gnawed at my bones, my skin slick with sweat despite the chill. The flickering screen of a broken kiosk crackled nearby, replaying the same words on a loop:
"The virus has no cure. Humanity is falling."
My knees weakened beneath the weight of it all. To have died once already in another life only to awaken here—infected, trembling, breath ragged—it was almost laughable. If this was some kind of divine joke, it was cruelly told.
Then came the sound.
Boots, dozens of them, striking pavement in tight rhythm. The metallic hiss of rifles readied. I turned and saw them: soldiers in airtight suits, masks faceless and gleaming beneath the gray light. They moved like shadows, sweeping through the ruins, driving the infected from hiding like hunters flushing game from the brush.
Panic took hold of me. My fevered body screamed for rest, but instinct screamed louder. I staggered into the nearest house… a crooked thing with peeling paint and a door that barely held together. I slammed it shut behind me, pressing my weight against it, my breath coming in ragged bursts.
For a moment, silence. Only the hammering of my heart and the muted sound of soldiers outside.
Then—knock. No, not a knock. A frantic pounding.
"Please… please, let me in!" A woman's voice, thin with terror, sharp with desperation.
I froze.
Through the grime-caked window I glimpsed her—a young woman, her face pale and slick with fever. I saw the tremor in her limbs, the glassy sheen in her eyes. She was infected, as I was. Soldiers were already turning the corner, rifles gleaming in the gloom. If they reached her, she'd be dragged away, swallowed by whatever fate awaited the infected.
She looked at me, and in that moment her eyes weren't the eyes of a stranger. They were the eyes of someone begging for one more chance to breathe.
I don't know why I did it. Sympathy, madness, or maybe because death was already coiled around my throat and I no longer feared it. But I unlatched the door and pulled her inside.
The wood groaned as I bolted it behind us. Outside, the soldiers marched past, their voices muffled through their helmets as they searched each house. My breath caught as I peered through the cracked curtain, watching them sweep closer.
A hand tapped my arm. I turned.
She was there, standing in the dim light, her chest rising and falling in shallow gasps. But it wasn't fear that filled her eyes—it was something else. A fragile, desperate courage.
"Can you… can you accept one request?" she whispered.
My voice felt strange in my throat. "What request?"
She bit her lip, trembling, and for a moment I thought she might collapse. But instead, she spoke with a clarity that cut through the chaos outside.
"If we're going to die—if the virus will take us—then let me know a man before it ends. I've never… I've never been with one. I don't want my last breath to carry that regret. Please. Grant me this."
Her words struck me silent.
In my former life, I too had carried that same regret. Death had claimed me before I had known a woman, before I had known the intimacy others spoke of as if it were nothing. To hear her voice it now, trembling yet resolute, was like hearing my own unspoken thoughts from the grave.
It was absurd. It was reckless. And yet—it was the truest request either of us could have made.
My lips curved in something between a smile and a grimace. "Then let us regret nothing."
Her eyes softened, relief washing over her fevered face. And as the soldiers outside scoured the ruins for the dying, she and I began to claim what little life remained for us within these four crumbling walls.
Her name was Lira. I learned that as we fumbled toward each other, whispering our names as if they were passwords to a hidden place where the soldiers and the sickness could not follow.
The house around us smelled of mildew and dust. A single candle guttered on a cracked table, its flame trembling with every breath we drew. Outside, the boots of the soldiers faded to a distant rhythm, like thunder retreating across a dead sky.
Lira's hands were cold when they found mine. Not the chill of hesitation, but the cold of fever. Her skin was damp, her pulse racing beneath it. I could feel the sickness in her, the same that smoldered in my own veins.
We moved with a clumsy urgency, not out of passion but out of a need to feel alive before the dark closed in. Her lips tasted of salt and ash. My own heartbeat roared so loudly I almost missed the small sounds she made, the soft gasps that told me she was real.
Time fractured. I no longer knew if minutes or hours passed. All I knew was the warmth of her body against mine and the faint hope that, for a heartbeat, we had cheated death.
Then everything changed.
It began as a tremor deep in my chest, like a string pulled too tight. My heart slammed against my ribs, faster, harder, until it felt as though it would tear free. Heat flooded me—no, not heat, something stranger, as if fire and ice had braided together and now surged through every vein.
I broke away, clutching my chest. Lira's startled eyes met mine.
"Ethel? What's wrong?"
I tried to answer but the words dissolved in a low, feral sound I didn't recognize as my own. My vision blurred, edges sharpening in impossible clarity. Every drop of candlelight split into halos, every creak of the house thundered in my ears.
The taste of the air changed. Copper. Sweet and sharp.
I staggered to the small cracked mirror hanging crookedly on the wall. What stared back was not the man who had stumbled into this ruined world. My pupils burned crimson red, a glow pulsing like embers. When I opened my mouth to gasp, my teeth caught the light—long, sharp, predatory.
The fever was gone. So was the weakness. I felt… alive in a way I had never known. Strong. Hungry.
Behind me Lira whispered, her voice trembling. "Your eyes…"
I turned. And that's when I saw her.
The blotches that had marked her skin only moments ago were fading before my eyes, the fever-flush cooling, her breathing steady and clear. The sickness that had nearly claimed her was simply… gone.
I could not speak. The truth settled over me like a stormcloud and a crown all at once.
I had crossed a threshold. No longer human. Something else. Something that could burn a plague from flesh with a single touch.
A vampire.
Somehow, my very essence; my blood, my body, the act we had shared, had become a cure for not just me, but for Lira as well.