The wood gave way on the second impact.
I heard the creak of rotten planks and knew it was the end. Four hundred and eighty-seven days. That's how long my second chance lasted, my struggle to survive in a world that had become hell. Four hundred and eighty-seven days hiding, rationing food, listening to the screams outside.
And now, the damn planks were giving way.
The first one through was a man. Or what used to be a man. His lower jaw was missing, and he dragged his left leg. Behind him, more. Too many.
I didn't have the strength to get up. I hadn't eaten in three days, just sips of putrid water dripping from a broken pipe. My body, always weak, always thin, had reached its limit. I weighed maybe fifty kilos, maybe less. My arms trembled just from propping myself up on the floor.
But my mind... my mind was full.
In all those months of confinement, I devoured everything that fell into my hands. A first aid manual found in a looted pharmacy. Hydroponic cultivation treatises from a collapsed library. Fortification guides, electricity manuals, yoga and breathing books, even an old Krav Maga text with faded drawings. I read everything, over and over, because it was the only thing keeping me sane.
I knew how to make a tourniquet in thirty seconds. I knew which plants were edible in urban environments. I knew how to purify water with charcoal and stones. I knew how to immobilize an attacker if I had the strength to do it.
I knew so much.
And it was useless.
The jawless zombie lunged at me. I felt his rotten teeth scrape my neck, the hot pain, the blood soaking my dirty shirt. I closed my eyes, and my last thought was ridiculously simple:
"I knew so much... and it was useless. I wish I'd had someone. I wish I hadn't been alone. I wish... I'd been stronger."
---
"Robert! Sleeping in class again, dude!"
Someone slapped my shoulder.
My eyes flew open.
Light. Too much light. I blinked, blinded, and when my vision focused I saw a window, trees outside, a blue sky... and a classroom full of students. A blackboard. A professor talking. Computers. Young people in clean clothes.
"You okay?" The voice came from my left. A dark-haired guy, acne on his face, was looking at me with a frown. "You look like you've seen a ghost."
I opened my mouth. Closed it. Looked at my hands.
Thin. Pale. Nails dirty with... ink? And that? I moved my fingers. They were whole. Without the scars from cuts I got opening a tin can. Without the broken nails. Without the caked grime of months without clean water.
My heart started beating so hard I thought my chest would explode.
"What... what's today's date?" My voice came out hoarse, strange.
"Seriously?" The dark-haired guy laughed. "Dude, you were totally out of it. September 15th. Why?"
I grabbed the phone on the desk. Unlocked it without a password (how did I know it had no password?). The screen lit up.
September 15, 2024. 11:47 AM.
Twenty-something days. Barely a month.
The screen blurred with a tear I didn't remember shedding.
"Going to the bathroom," I muttered.
I stood up on shaky legs. The classroom, the classmates, everything spun around me. I walked as best I could to the hallway, to the restrooms, to a sink to hold onto.
I looked in the mirror.
I was twenty. Twenty-two, sorry. Twenty-two years old in 2024. Thin, yes, very thin. Sharp cheekbones, dark circles from pulling all-nighters as a student, messy hair. But it was me. The me from before. The me who hadn't gone hungry, who hadn't seen his neighbor eat his own wife, who hadn't listened for hours to the scratching at a rotten wooden door.
I turned on the tap. Splashed water on my face. The water was cold and clean and didn't taste like rust.
And then, like a wave, the memories came. Not the memories of my life before the apocalypse, but of my life during. The manuals, the books, the treatises. Every page, every diagram, every word. I had read everything so many times, over so many months of confinement, that my brain had burned it all in.
I knew how to make a tourniquet.
I knew how to purify water with charcoal.
I knew how to grow tomatoes on a rooftop with plastic bottles.
I knew how to immobilize someone in six moves.
I knew how to pick a lock with two paperclips.
I knew how to identify a bite infection before symptoms showed.
I knew so many things...
"Holy shit," I whispered.
And then, something else. My body. Not just the memory of my weak body, but a feeling. Something that had always been there but I never knew how to name. A warmth, an energy, an absurd endurance that let me push past normal limits when I tried.
Doctors called it "hyperandrogenism" when I was a teenager looking at my test results. I just knew that since I was a kid, I could run longer than others if I pushed myself, that I recovered fast from hits, and that... well. That I had certain physical characteristics that were embarrassing in high school and, later, led to a few furtive encounters.
In the apocalypse, that didn't help me at all. Because my body was weak, because I didn't train, because I spent my days hiding.
But now...
I clenched my fists on the sink. Looked at my reflection.
I was still a skinny piece of shit. 65 kilos, maybe. Twice as wide in the shoulders as in the waist, like a pear. But I had one month. Thirty days to turn this body into something useful. Thirty days to prepare. Thirty days to do what I didn't do the first time.
And above all: thirty days to find the right people.
Because this time, I wasn't going to die alone in some fucking basement.
I left the bathroom. The dark-haired guy, whose name I struggled to remember (Javi? Jorge? Didn't matter), was waiting at the door.
"You sure you're okay?" he asked.
"Never been better," I replied, and it was the absolute truest thing I'd said in my life. "Hey, do you know if the clinic infirmary is still open in the afternoons?"
"The infirmary? What for?"
"I need to meet a nurse," I said, already walking toward the exit. "Her name is Lucía."
---
That afternoon, I started.
I couldn't waste a single second. Every hour was a resource more valuable than gold.
First, search. Lucía worked at the clinic near campus. I'd seen her only once in my past life, when I passed by days after the outbreak and saw the bodies piled up. Someone told me she was the nurse who'd been tending to people until the end. I didn't know her, but I knew she existed.
I got to the clinic at five. Few people. At reception, I asked about her with some excuse: a relative who needed care, wanted to thank her for something. They said she got off at seven.
I waited.
When I saw her leave, my heart jumped.
Brunette, hair tied back, white coat, tired eyes from a long workday. Twenty-six, twenty-seven maybe. In my past life, she'd been another corpse. Now she was walking toward the bus stop, not knowing the world was about to end.
I didn't approach. Not yet. I just watched her, memorizing her face, the way she walked, her backpack. I needed a plan to earn her trust before the chaos.
Then, the secondhand bookstore. I spent almost all the savings in my account on books. Advanced first aid manuals, fortification treatises, survival guides, urban farming texts, locksmithing and electrical books. I devoured them that same night.
I read them once and remembered them forever. I'd always been like that, but I never gave it importance. Now I understood it was my greatest gift.
While I read, I did push-ups. Ten, twenty, thirty. My arms trembled. My chest burned. But I kept going. Because my body, even weak, had something others didn't. An absurd recovery. I'd rest a minute and do ten more. Rest another and do twenty. My heart pumped, my muscles screamed, but I didn't stop until I'd done a hundred and fifty.
That night, with my arms wrecked and my head full of new knowledge, I looked out the window of my student apartment. The city glowed. People walking, cars, distant laughter.
None of them knew.
I did.
And in twenty-something days, all of this would burn.
"Not this time," I murmured. "This time I'm going to live. This time I'm going to be strong. This time..."
I remembered the basement, the darkness, the scratching, the pain in my neck.
"This time, I won't be alone."