The typewriter hummed with a quiet, mechanical malice. Jake had managed to produce three pages of absolute nonsense about psychological warfare and the strategic importance of high-ground surveillance, but his heart wasn't in the lie.
Every time he hit the return carriage, the sharp chime felt like a countdown. He was staring at the word infrastructure until it stopped looking like a real word when the heavy oak door groaned open.
He didn't look up. He assumed it was Silas coming to check on his investment or maybe a guard bringing him a tray of artisanal end-of-the-world crackers.
"I told the guy at the door I'm not hungry," Jake said, his eyes still fixed on the paper. "And tell Silas that the chapter on supply line sabotage is coming along, but it's hard to focus with a guy in body armor breathing down my neck."
The footsteps that entered the room weren't heavy like a soldier's. They were light, deliberate, and sounded like expensive leather on hardwood.
"You always were a terrible liar when you were under pressure, Jake. Your ears get red. It's a dead giveaway."
Jake froze. That voice was a ghost. It was a voice he had spent the last two years trying to drown in cheap bourbon and even cheaper paperback royalties.
He turned his head slowly, praying that his mind was finally snapping from the stress.
Standing by the desk, looking down at him with an expression of pure, frozen contempt, was Sarah. She wasn't wearing the sundress she'd had on the last time he saw her.
She was wearing a grey tactical jumpsuit, a sidearm strapped to her thigh, and her hair was pulled back into a severe, tight knot.
"Sarah?" Jake whispered. "What is this? Are you a prisoner too?"
Sarah laughed, and the sound was like a bucket of ice water down his spine. She walked over to the window, looking out at the burning horizon with the casual boredom of someone watching a dull movie.
"A prisoner? No, Jake. I'm the one who suggested Silas pick you up. I told him you'd be hiding in a grocery store. You always did have a romanticized idea of where the 'common man' would congregate during a crisis."
Jake stood up, his chair scraping loudly against the floor. "You're working for this guy? Sarah, he's a warlord. He's building a cult based on my worst ideas."
"And who gave him those ideas, Jake?" She turned to face him, her eyes flashing. "You wrote the book. You're the one who turned our breakup into a case study for 'The Manipulative Infiltrator' in Chapter 6. Did you think I wouldn't read it? Did you think I wouldn't recognize the way you described my 'predatory' habit of analyzing people's weaknesses?"
Jake felt a flush of genuine shame. "Okay, look, I was in a bad place. Every writer uses their life. I needed a villain for the social engineering section and... you were fresh in my mind."
"A villain," she repeated, stepping into his personal space. "You made me the blueprint for how a sociopath would dismantle a survival group from the inside. You took every private conversation we ever had and turned it into a tactical warning. You didn't just break my heart, Jake. You published a character assassination and called it a survival guide."
"I didn't think anyone would actually use it like this!" Jake shouted, gesturing wildly at the room. "It was supposed to be a warning! A 'what-not-to-do' scenario!"
Sarah leaned against the desk, picking up a page of his manuscript. She scanned it for a second before letting it flutter back down.
"Well, congratulations. You were so good at describing the 'villain' that Silas decided he needed one. He hired me to run his internal security because I'm exactly the monster you told the world I was. I'm just living up to my press release."
Jake sat back down, his head spinning. This was too much. The world ends, he gets kidnapped by a billionaire, and his ex-girlfriend is the head of the secret police. It was a bad parody of his own writing.
"Why is he really doing this, Sarah?" Jake asked, his voice dropping. "It's not just about the book. He mentioned my father. He mentioned the documents."
Sarah's expression shifted. The anger didn't leave, but it was joined by something colder. She looked at the guard by the door and gave a slight nod.
The guard stepped out into the hallway and shut the door, leaving them alone.
"Silas is a puppet, Jake," she said, her voice barely a whisper. "He thinks he's the king of the mountain, but he's just a beta-tester."
"A what?"
"The collapse, Jake. It wasn't an accident. It wasn't some random systemic failure."
Jake shook his head. "No, the math was there. The power grid was failing, the debt was peaking—"
"The math was accelerated," she interrupted. "There's a group—Aegis Logistics. They've been funding Silas for years. They're the ones who leaked the viral strain into the transit hubs. They're the ones who triggered the kill-switches on the satellite arrays. And do you know what they used as their sociological model? Do you know what they used to predict exactly how the public would react to each phase of the terror?"
Jake felt the air leave the room. He looked at the copy of The End Times Manual on the coffee table. "No."
"They bought ten thousand copies of your book before it even hit the bestseller list," Sarah said, a cruel smile touching her lips. "They used your chapters as a timeline. They followed your 'Stages of Societal Decay' like a choreographed dance. You didn't predict the future, Jake. You provided the script. Your father's documents gave them the technical 'how,' but you gave them the 'why.' You told them exactly how to break the human spirit in under a week."
Jake felt like he was going to vomit. All those hours at the coffee shop, typing away, thinking he was being clever, thinking he was the one looking behind the curtain. He hadn't been a prophet. He'd been a consultant for the end of the world.
"I didn't know," he croaked.
"Doesn't matter," she said. "You're the author. And now Aegis wants the rest. They know your father had the codes for the secondary government bunkers—the ones with the seed vaults and the communication hardlines. Silas thinks you're writing him a manual for conquest, but he's just the delivery boy. Once you finish that 'Volume 2,' Aegis will wipe Silas off the map and take the keys to the kingdom."
Jake looked at the typewriter. The keys looked like teeth now. "If I write this, I'm finishing the job. I'm helping them pave over whatever is left."
Sarah walked behind him, her hands resting on his shoulders. For a second, it felt like the old days, a ghost of a gesture from when they were happy. Then her grip tightened, her fingers digging into his collarbone.
"So don't write it for them, Jake. Write it for me."
"What?"
"Silas is an idiot, and Aegis is a corporation. Corporations can be dismantled. If you give me the real information—the stuff you're hiding in those chapters—I can take this place over. We can actually do what the book said. We can build a real community. We can stop the 'villains' you're so afraid of."
Jake looked up at her, seeing the same woman he'd loved, but draped in the cold ambition he'd mocked in his writing. He couldn't tell if she was trying to save him or if she was just the better predator.
"You want me to help you stage a coup?" Jake asked.
"I want you to be the man you pretended to be on that back cover," she said, leaning down so her breath was warm against his ear. "Give me the keys, Jake. Tell me how to take the grid back from Aegis. Otherwise, Silas is going to get bored of waiting, and I won't be able to stop him when he decides to see what's inside your head literally instead of figuratively."
She straightened up and walked toward the door. She paused with her hand on the knob.
"You have six hours until sunrise, Jake. Make sure the next chapter is a good one. I'd hate to have to write your ending for you."
The door clicked shut, and Jake was alone again. He looked at the blank paper.
The silence of the room was deafening, broken only by the distant, muffled sound of a building collapsing somewhere in the city below.
He realized then that he was in a cage within a cage. He was the architect of his own nightmare, and the only person who could help him was the woman he had turned into a monster on page 142.
He reached out and hit a key.
Clack.
He had to write. But for the first time in his life, he wasn't going to follow the manual. He needed to find a way to burn the script before the curtain fell.