Rebirth15 min read
I Died Twice and Built a Fortress: A Reborn Girl's Last Laugh
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I died in the third year of the zombie outbreak. We were out of gas, out of spare parts, and out of hope. I died because my fiancé and my best friend shoved me into the teeth of the swarm for a can of spoiled food.
I opened my eyes and it was morning. My phone said one month until the outbreak — one month. The same city, the same suburbs, but a clean slate.
"You're breathing," I told myself out loud.
My parents had left me a house in the suburbs. I lived at the university dorms in the ordinary life. The house had a basement, a garden, and a garage full of memories. In my last life I had been a hoarder with a hamster's appetite for supplies — and that saved me in the old timeline. In the waterproof room in the cellar there were sacks of rice and flour, barrels of oil, crates of frozen meat, and rows of shelves full of instant noodles and canned goods. I had bought electric freezers, pumps, filters, seeds, tools, everything.
I blinked at the phone screen and whispered, "One month? Good."
I did not want another life of being used and thrown away. I was small and obsessive and a little bit stubborn. This time, I decided to be smarter, colder, and, when needed, brutal.
I left campus early, enrolled a fake medical certificate — "critical condition" was a great excuse — and I asked no one for sympathy. The counselor took the paper, knelt like a saint in front of me, and waved me into leave with tears on his cheeks. "Take care," he sniffed. I shut my phone and blocked everyone.
"You're being dramatic," my own voice said. "Good. Be dramatic."
With the cash I had from family, 500,000 savings, and every coupon and credit limit I could squeeze, I had the house reinforced. Two meters of mesh and high-voltage wire crowned the perimeter. Spikes. A trench. The garden turned into beds and pens. The cellar was sealed in steel and rebar. I installed solar panels on the roof and dragged in a generator and motors. I bought seeds, drills, batteries, and three heavy freezers full of meat. I bought disinfectant, diapers, sanitary pads, and every single thing I could imagine a human might need.
The three days before the big shopping festival, I worked the checkout speed of a one-woman army. I set alarms and got promotions and won gifts. I spent four hundred thousand dollars and came back with almost ten million dollars worth of goods. I slept on the roof that night and dreamed of dry rice.
Then I went to find weapons. There was no reason to advertise a sudden arms order; better to find the twisted alleys. I found a black market in the third ring road, in a warehouse that smelled like oil and cigarettes. And there I met him: tall, dangerous, the kind of man who made me want to step away and then lean forward. His name tag? No name tag. He smoked like the world had only a few draws left.
I bought two pistols, five boxes of ammo, two knives, and two hand grenades. The boss lingered and laughed in the half-light. "Wait," he said, and handed me two grenades. I looked at them like hot coals.
"Why give me those?" I asked.
He smiled. "Because," he said, "if you're buying protection, you might as well have full measures."
He was handsome in a broken way. His smell made my ankle nerves buzz. He asked my name.
"Kori," I said.
He flicked ash. "Kori," he repeated. "Don't waste them, kid."
I went home, gripping the grenades in my jacket like talismans. My heart was hard, my hands steady.
On my porch, people were old habits. Emil Blake — my fiancé — and Dylan Bird — my so-called best friend — were there. Emil had been kind enough to call me "future wife" in the first life; Dylan had taught me about lipstick. In my last life they had smiled and eaten my canned goods while they lied and planned.
"Emil," I said coolly. "Why are you back so early?"
Emil and Dylan were pretending surprise. "Kori, we heard — we heard you were dying. We came to help." Emil's voice was syrup. "You should've told us."
He was touching my reinforced door like a thief admiring a vault. Dylan was fanning herself and smiling like a sunbeam. "You blocked us," she said. "We were so worried."
My fingers brushed the pistol in my waistband. I had learned a hard lesson: I would be soft to no one.
"How kind," I said. I opened the outer hatch a crack. I let them see the barricade and the traps and the electric wire humming. They froze.
"Why would you do all this?" Emil asked, in the voice of someone who'd only once thought about hard work and decided it required no sweat.
"Safety," I said. "You wouldn't understand."
Then the black market boss reappeared — Corbin Kaiser. He had followed me back without my asking. He stood at the far end of the lawn, his silhouette framed by the solar panels, not stepping forward. He smoked and watched, and there was a rigidness to him I had not seen at the market.
"Dylan," he said quietly, and it felt like a command. "You look older."
Dylan smiled into the wire, a little cracked. "Corbin," she said. "We were just passing by. Isn't that right, Em?"
Emil laughed thinly. "Of course, of course. Kori, let us in."
I did not give them a key. I did not throw myself under their feet. "No," I said.
Emil's mouth thinned. "You're cruel."
"You used me," I replied. "In my last life you shoved me to the wolves for a can of spoiled meat." I watched their faces, the small flinch of recognition at the accusation.
"Dylan, tell her! Tell her you would never—"
Dylan's eyes slid away. Emil's jaw clicked.
The memory of being shoved into a starving pack of infected burned in my chest like acid. The sound of their laughing faces, the smell of rot and betrayal. This life I had a rifle and a will. This life I had time. I closed the door.
I could have killed them the night they came begging. I had a moment where I held the barrel and thought, This time you're mine to hurt. But something colder crawled over me — a plan, a ladder. I would not be the blood-hungry saint. I would not let their blood be my warmth. Let the world do the work.
Corbin — the market boss — had made a business out of shadows. I met him again properly at the supermarket when I pretended to be a vendor. He worked there, hands in the cardboard, arranging boxes. He lifted a crate like it was nothing. When he smiled at me, something unclenched. He asked me gently, almost softly: "You sure about the brain tumor story?"
I almost answered yes. It would have saved me words.
"I lied," I said. "I lied to drive them away."
He kept his face blank but there was steel in his voice. "Good."
A few nights later, Corbin's men came and painted barrels with red paint near my gate — two drums they did not take. "Weight," his man told me simply.
"You mean to leave them as trash?" I asked.
"They'll learn," Corbin said. "Don't waste your bullets."
He kept visiting. He kept bringing small trophies: a chicken once, a head of cabbage another time. At first it felt like crushing debts. Later it felt like someone was laying a foundation.
"You don't owe me anything," I told him once. "Why do you do this?"
He leaned on the fence, the smoke curling between us. "There are many ruins. I pick things worth keeping," he said. "You keep things that matter."
He had a way of saying small things that put knots in my ribs. It was the quiet kind of care: he tightened my stove bolts, he stayed a little longer than necessary, and once he stopped a gang trying a back route and left without fuss. He was present without claiming me. That was dangerous in itself.
One day a squad of Corbin's people arrived with a small recorded file. "We have a debt to settle," Corbin announced. He set the device down and the recorded footage flickered: Emil and Dylan laughing in my basement in that other life, stuffing their pockets. Then it cut to the night of betrayal — shadowy arms, a shove, the pack of infected converging. No forgiveness there, only packets of guilt and panic.
I watched Emil's face, and in the live moment he had the audacity to step forward and deny. "We weren't— we were trying to help," he said, voice trembling. "We didn't—"
The crowd assembled around Corbin's base was ragged and hungry, but judgment-hungry too. There were windows, children, gruff men, women with stoves. The base smelled of smoke and canned tomato. They'd heard stories, and in a world where justice could be swift, people gathered to see it served.
Corbin rose and his voice cut like wire. "You two," he said, pointing at Emil and Dylan. "You thought you could survive by stealing someone else's last life. You thought because the world burned, you could roast on other people's wood."
Emil's face went white. Dylan's smile faltered. The crowd leaned in.
He produced a ledger. "You sold the plan to those who sold corpses," Corbin continued. "You laughed about how easy it was to push a girl into the teeth. You told jokes over her last breath. To your neighbors, you were charming. To your friends, you were faithful. But here—"
"That's a lie!" Emil barked. "You're lying! We—"
"Silence," Corbin said. He spoke to the whole square. "We have witnesses. We have this." He turned the screen to show other footage — the two of them in the market, changing clothes in alleys, counting coins in the light of a stolen lantern. "You hunted a pig that wasn't yours."
A woman in the crowd, old and toothless, spat. "I saw them near the gate the night of the swell," she said. "They followed them like hungry dogs."
"Dylan," someone shouted. "You sang lullabies while they robbed you." Insults ricocheted like thrown stones. The two of them tried to speak. Their voices were thin.
Emil straightened and fumbled for charm. "People make mistakes," he said. "We were scared — we did it for survival—"
"People like you make mistakes and then they keep breathing on other people's luck," Corbin said. "But the base decides. The community decides."
The sentence — whatever it would be — had weight not only from Corbin but because the crowd had fed on the story. They wanted a moral, a sign that some rules still stood. They wanted to know what happened to those who used others like stepping stones.
Corbin's right hand, Baptiste Sherman, stepped forward with a weathered canvas. He unrolled it slowly to reveal the gate of my house — wires, spikes, the trench. The canvas then showed clear footage of Emil and Dylan the night they attempted to break in in the old timeline. The sound when the sequence froze was a soft gasp.
"You don't have to die to be punished," Baptiste said. "You have to live. We will make life fit the crime."
Emil's expression crumpled like damp paper. He laughed at first, a high brittle laugh meant to hide fear. "This is insane," he said. "You can't—"
Baptiste stepped close. "We'll make sure you remember every time you look at the sky," he said. "You'll be fed things fit for thieves. You'll be exposed to what the rest suffer. You will not be killed quietly. You will be made to understand in public."
"You're insane!" Dylan cried. "We were in love with each other! We didn't—"
"Love isn't theft," someone in the crowd cried. "Love isn't pushing someone into a pack and laughing."
Corbin's voice softened like a blade folding. "Stand up," he said, and two of his men hoisted them to their feet. "You will be taken to the central square at dawn. You will stand on a platform and confess. You will be exposed. You will be humiliated. Then you will repair what you broke."
The crowd hissed. The two accused tried to bargain. "Please," Emil said. "I have a mother. We can pay. We'll work, we'll—"
"Work," Corbin echoed. "You will. For three months you will fix the roofs of the poor. You will till the gardens you helped starve. For every can you stole, you will rebuild three houses. For every lie you told, you will wake remembering the faces you used."
Dylan's proud posture bowed to a pleading one. The transformation was a small, human falter. "I didn't mean it to go this far," she said, voice small. "I never meant—"
"Intentions," Corbin said, "are not the story. Actions are." He turned to the crowd. "We will not kill, but we will not forget. We will turn their betrayal into labor, humiliation into repair."
At dawn, the square filled. The platform stood stark under an angry sky. A banner they dragged out read: "Truth and Repair." I thought the phrasing was almost cruelly genteel. Emil and Dylan were brought forward with their hands bound. Their faces were the colors of bad fruit.
"You look at the crowd," Corbin said, not unkindly, to Emil. "Tell them what you told Kori. Tell them why you did it."
Emil sputtered. "I— we wanted the house," he said, and the words fell out like confessions always do. He tried to reel them in. "But we loved her—"
"You wanted a house," someone offered from the crowd. "Not a wife."
Dylan's voice broke. "We used her. We thought we deserved it. I'm sorry." Her apology felt like a shadow pretending to be light.
Corbin had one more cruelly clever tool. He had them remove their shirts. "Let the crowd see," he said. Men and women stepped forward carrying the things they'd lost: a torn dress, a child's toy, a locket, a mother's scarf. "Wear these for your penance," he said, and the crowd jeered. The two of them stood like rag dolls.
"Every hour," Corbin said, "you will walk the path behind the gate where you shoved her, and each step you take you will carry a burden. Each burden will be another can. You will carry the weight you thought small and carry it through their memories. You will rebuild with those hands. When you finish, we will decide if you can stay among us."
The transformation in them was painful to watch. First they were smug — their faces had that brief arrogance of small predators. Then the cameras and the faces stripped that mask. Shock. They tried denial. "That's not how it happened," Dylan said. "You don't— you don't know—"
The crowd spoke up then. "We know," a woman said, with tears. "We were there. We heard them laugh. We heard a girl's scream that night — a neighbor's daughter."
The air turned hot with the smell of burnt meat and accusations. People began recording with crude phones, posting to a small network. Someone clapped. Someone praised. Someone spat.
Emil's face started to lose color. He said, "You can't make me— I'll run, I—"
They tried to escape at one point that afternoon. Baptiste and Corbin had foreseen it and the crowd's response was instant. People swarmed, not to kill but to tie. Children watched, mouths gaping. The two begged. "Don't make us—" Emil cried. "Please, please—"
They were dragged back. The crowd whooped and hissed like a single animal. "You wanted to be cruel," someone said. "Now live the cruelty you chose for others."
For the next week they worked on roofs. For the next month they dug, planted, hauled. Each day, people brought them cans that had been salvaged and labeled them, "Stolen" with a black marker. They were forced to eat from them when their shift ended. Their humiliation was small, vicious, and public: songs were made of their greed, kids put on skits.
The arc of their descent was not dramatic in the Hollywood sense. It was small-scale, granular torture: the way people watch someone melt into their consequences. Emil went from denial to anger to bargaining to desperate pleading. Dylan tried to smile, and each smile was met with a bucket of rotten fruit.
One day, months into their toil, Corbin brought me to the square. "Look," he said, "look how they rebuild what they took." I stood at the edge and watched them lift a beam that had once been mine, now repurposed into a neighbor's roof. Emil's hands shook as he set the nail. Dylan's eyes met mine and for the first time there was a raw, small apology, not a scripted performance.
"Will you forgive them?" Corbin asked quietly.
I thought of the girl I had been, shoved and bleeding, the coldness of neighbor's cheeks as they watched. I thought of the little chicks and the sprouts I'd coaxed into life in the spring. I thought of a man who had quietly cleared the ring road of the dead and left my property untouched. I felt a strange thing — not mercy now, not hatred exactly, but a straight, clear calm.
"No," I said at last. "I won't forgive them for what they did. But I won't let them die to make my life lighter."
Corbin nodded, and for a second his eyes went soft.
That was not the only time the world altered the script. The truth about Corbin unfolded later: all the loans, the ledger, the "rob-loan" business — they had been a construction. He had staged debts and sent men to collect, made me '001' on a ledger so he could come to my door. All of it, he told me, was to have a reason to follow me, to keep me safe, to make sure the world did not swallow me whole again.
"You set me up?" I demanded when he told me, incredulous and oddly grateful.
"I gave you an excuse to not ask for help," he said. "I gave you enemies so you would build walls. I gave you debt so you would not trust anyone except yourself. And when they came, I had my men ready. I did what the city refused to do: I kept you whole."
There were moments of tenderness, small and precise, that stitched my heart shut and then opened it again. He came to check on my water pumps at dawn, a cold bowl of soup in his hands. He fixed my generator all night once when I could not sleep. He laughed once, small and surprised, when my chicken — Reserve One — pecked his shoe. He never touched me without asking.
"You're stubborn," he told me the night we shared a simple dinner in my kitchen. "You're loud inside, even when you sit alone."
I looked at him and then at the hand that had once shoved me into crowds of the dead in the old timeline — and laughed. "You're not supposed to be here," I said.
"Maybe I'm not supposed to be anywhere," he said softly. "But I want to be beside you."
We had three heartbeat moments in the months that followed that still make my ribs flutter when I remember them. He had a way of doing small things — the kind that accumulate into storms.
The first moment: He never smiled for anyone as he smiled for me that night when he repaired the broken hand crank on my old freezer. My hands were greasy and my forehead hot; he sat on a milk crate and looked at me like I'd won the sun. "There," he said, and for a second he grinned. "You did this."
The second moment: Winter came sharp. I had forgotten the small ache of being cold. He took off his coat and placed it over my shoulders without ceremony. I hadn't asked. He said, "You can't wear my coat forever, Kori. Just tonight." I felt that small, private heat of being seen.
The third moment: Once when the city crackled with shelling in the distance, he sat until dawn with me on the rooftop. I had my chin on my knees. He said nothing for a long time, and then he said, "If anyone comes for this house again, they won't find my back turned." His words, small and flat, made my throat close.
We were both different because the world had been different. We were both shaped by trenches and drums.
There were nights when the base had parades of justice and the people wanted blood. Corbin taught me that cruelty is easy. Justice is harder. "We are an outpost," he said once, "not a court. We cannot afford to be cruel and expect to be better."
When Emil and Dylan had to look at the faces of those they'd wronged every day while they hammered roofs and planted seedlings, the lesson sank in like old salt. We did not need to make them monsters; their suffering impressed upon them a tiny, awful humility.
I never forgot the night I died in the other timeline. I kept a silver ring in my drawer as a memory, a ring I'd not worn. I used it to trace circles on a page when I worried. Each night Corbin learned my rituals and grew careful around them.
A year after the explosion of the city, the central towers were quiet. People were searching for ways to reopen markets. We had food and a garden that hummed and a coop full of clucking survivors. I had Reserve One, a small flock, a duck named Big-Bill, and a house that still smelled like oil and books.
On one late spring day, Corbin took my hand in an ordinary way. "Kori," he said, and I looked up, startled.
"Yes?" I said.
"I built you a home," he said simply. "Not a fortress. A home. If you want it."
I looked at him, at the wire, at the trench, at the garden where tiny chicks pecked at seeds. I thought of myself, the girl who had been shoved and who had learned to erect walls. I thought of what I'd wanted from life and what I feared losing.
"I built it twice," I said. "Once for fear. Once for living."
He smiled like a man who'd found something he'd been missing his whole life. "Then stay," he said. "Stay and make it messy."
I laughed. "You want messy?"
"I want the sunrise to wake you and the duck to steal your pillow," he said.
We didn't speak promises. We spoke small things and argued over seeds and ration codes and who hogged the warmest blanket. The world around us still burned in distant places. The city center was a scar of noise. When I sent my old drone into the clouds, it came back with images of men in helmets clearing the worst of the dead. People cheered around my radio. The world was getting rough edges sanded.
I went to Corbin's base once. Baptiste handed me a ledger. "This is the last of the old debt," he said. He had ripped up the record months ago, but he wanted me to see.
"You set me up to protect me," I said, risking the truth.
"I wanted you to be safe," Corbin said. "I took small sins and turned them into reasons to keep you from repeating them. I was selfish. But I'm done hiding behind excuses."
We stood under an orange sky when he told me this. Later that night, when he left, he kissed my hand like he was sealing a treaty.
"I will keep you safe," he said. "Not because I own you, but because I want to."
He saved my house from being raided. He told the community about the two who had almost taken it and made sure they repaired what they'd broken. He kept the wolves at bay. And once, long after the punishments and the work and the winter, he brought me a small, painted sign that said "Ayala Home" and hammered it on the gate.
"You wanted a home," he said. "Here it is. Messy, noisy, and probably full of chickens."
I put my hand to the wood and laughed, the sound messy and true.
"Stay," he said again, quieter.
I did.
My life after resurrection was a patchwork of gardens and small forgivenesses, of stubbornness and sharper kindness. I learned to hold a gun and a spoon with equal care. I learned to be wary of hands that reached for me, and I learned to let one man reach and stay. Corbin taught me how to be steadier than fear.
Sometimes the world still asked me to be cruel. Sometimes my old instincts whispered to hoard and to burn. But when I looked at the chickens, the garden, the ring of mesh, and the tiny duck who owned my morning, I understood the difference between survival and living.
One day, as I closed the gate and the high-voltage hummed low like a lullaby, I took the silver ring and slipped it on my finger. I looked at Corbin who stood across the yard, tall and patient, and I smiled.
"Come on," I called. "The soup's getting cold."
He walked toward me, and for the first time I let myself be warm.
At the edge of the yard, the sign swung gently. Reserve One pecked at the dirt, and the gate's little bell chimed at the wind. I pressed my palm to the cold wire of the fence and felt the hum that had once been a threat become a promise.
This house bore scars from my two lives. It was wired for survival and full of the noise of living. It had a trench and a compost heap. It had a man who had come from the shadows to teach me about small kindness. It had chickens that made me laugh in the morning.
I used to think death was tidy. It is not. It is messy, the way life is. I was lucky enough to get a second turn. I used it to build a house that would keep me whole. I used it to make one man keep his back turned so my back could rest.
I died twice, but I learned finally how to live.
The End
— Thank you for reading —