Survival/Apocalypse12 min read
I Quit My Job, Bought the City, and Waited for the Dead
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I quit my job on a Tuesday and woke up the next morning feeling like a person who had just broken out of a tight suit of obligations.
"I'll sleep for a month," I told myself, stretching on the couch. "No boss calls. No group chats. Just me, my couch, and bad drama on the screen."
My apartment was tidy. Old enough to have the small comforts, new enough to not be crowded. One-twenty square meters—cozy by a single person's standard. The estate had been built a year ago; only a few units were lived in because COVID had delayed everything. That made it perfect for someone who wanted quiet.
But there was one problem.
"There are no stores nearby," I said out loud. "If you want groceries, it's a five-kilometer pilgrimage."
So I dressed, unlocked my secondhand little SUV, and headed to the warehouse supermarket.
At the entrance a big man in a security uniform fastened his cap, waved, and said, "You look like you could use a hand."
"Thanks," I said. "I'm going to buy enough food to feed a small army."
"That's good sense," he said, and then his phone rang. He talked loud enough for me to hear.
"—what? A patient with—fangs? No, I'm not joking. The emergency says he's tearing at people. My boy says it's like a zombie. People are calling it zombie."
"Zombie?" I fished for a joke. "Now who plants that into a man's day?"
He barked a laugh. "My son's in med school. He texts nonsense sometimes. But—what if he's right?"
He paused. He saw me looking and added, "My son says they're seeing violent bites. Crazy strength. They had to strap them down and they still fought the straps."
The word "zombie" landed in my head like a cold pebble. My stomach flipped in a way that felt primitive. I knew too many horror shows. I knew the little tells. I also knew one more thing: when survival is a possibility, you stock.
"Hey," I said into the air, and to myself more than him, "buy more."
I pushed the cart and decided to empty reasons and fill it with anything that wouldn't rot tomorrow. Two big sacks of rice. Two sacks of flour. Oils, canned meat, noodles in boxes like a paper forest. Boxes and boxes: salt, bouillon, hotpot bases, canned luncheon meat, instant noodles, frozen dumplings, frozen chicken bites, sausages, bottled sodas, and ten cases of water.
"You buying for a family?" the cashier asked when I shoved two huge carts in front of the belt. She looked amused.
"Nope," I said. "Myself. I like to be safe."
"You single?" she teased.
"Single and ready to not regret anything," I said. I paid.
When I wheeled the trolleys out, the security man—broad-shouldered, honest face—helped me load.
"Where to?" he asked.
"Anywhere," I said. "My building is five minutes away."
When my car door closed, I cracked a can and sipped. I sat back, thinking about "what if." The older part of me whispered that this was silly. The inner survivalist said, "Do it now."
I called my parents.
"Mom, Dad, are you home?"
"Of course," Dad said, shouting in the background like he always did. "Why?"
"Listen to me carefully," I said. "I think something's happening in the city. Lock your doors. Reinforce windows. Stock water. If anyone knocks, don't open. Tell them it's renovations if they ask."
There was a beat of skepticism, as if my parents were weighing my panic against a child's habit of exaggeration.
"Is this a jobless paranoia?" Mom said.
"If it is," I said, "then you spent the afternoon doing extra work that will never hurt. If it's not, and I saved you—well, you'll thank me later."
They agreed. They sealed their house and called the neighbors they always trusted. I felt ridiculous and not ridiculous at the same time.
Two hours later, the seed of worry crawled from my head into the city's veins.
"Sir, what's going on?" I asked a parking guard when he walked by my car.
He waved and said, "My son texts me from the emergency room. Says patients are tearing at nurses. They bite and bite. They don't succumb to drugs. Looks like—" He stopped.
"—what?"
"—like something else."
When I turned the key in the ignition the city felt different. Sirens threaded the air with a fear I had never learned to decode. I kept thinking: be careful, don't be the story that ends badly. I had been ordinary and cowardly and the two combined to make a sharp, efficient self-preservationist.
By the time I finished unloading everything into my apartment, my place looked like a pantry had exploded. My living room became a stockroom. I taped single-vision privacy film across every window. The curtains sealed. I shut off lights.
"You're being paranoid," I said to myself in the dark. "You're fine. Just—be quiet."
Over the next day, the news became a thin, panicked whisper: hospitals overloaded; emergency vehicles racing south; an explosion at a gas station; ambulances with blue lights screaming past; the sky thick with smoke columns. The high-rise across from mine bore the black shadow of burning cars. At once, the fictional concerns from shows became live images. People fleeing were not heroic in many clips—some scrambled, others fought, some were eaten. A video hit my phone of a man on a bridge launching himself into the void to shield a child. I sat numbly, watching the child crawl away, clutching a ragged doll.
"I can't do anything now," I told the empty room. "But I can keep us alive."
Two nights later, around midnight, the howl started.
It was a new sound to the city—an animal's steady, hungry groan that rose and fell as if it had a throat full of gravel.
"Do you hear that?" I whispered to the thin wall. "Do you hear them?"
The first week, I learned to be a ghost. I ran water and stored steam. I charged every device. I taped locks, installed more locks. I made sure every battery was full. I set simple traps, not because I expected to get into a fistfight with a mutant, but because making plans relieved the itch.
"Don't open any doors," I told my parents every other hour. "Wait for official channels. If anyone tries to force entry, don't answer. If you have to run—"
"Claire, you'll get us both killed," my father snapped once, fear and stubbornness tangled.
"Then you follow instructions," I said. "Promise me."
"Okay, okay. Promise."
I learned quickly that survival required small, ugly self-discipline. It required being the person your past comfortable life never trained you to be. It required being absolutely calm when nothing made sense.
One evening, I sat by the window and watched the city skitter. Highways were lit by blinking brakes, a trail of red. The bridge looked like a ribbon of suffering. Police and fire units were still running toward the south. "If they can't stop it at the hospitals," I thought, "then it's going to spread along the transit veins."
Then the loud explosion echoed. The bridge nearby lit like sunrise on fire. When I raised my binoculars higher, the scene on the bridge tore open my belief barrier. Cars piled, people trampled, and the first waves of those things—once people—were on the street, faces turned hollow and animal, mouths stained dark.
"Jesus," the security man had said the day before. "This isn't a drill."
I grabbed the radio I had bought and listened like it might tell me a bedtime story. The city didn't. In the morning, I watched videos of a woman on a bridge jump to her death. She'd done it to save a child. The child survived.
"Some people are better than others," I said to the sky. "Not me. But I'm alive."
It wasn't long before the mean people of the city revealed themselves.
"Get out!" a voice shouted below. "This place is empty. C'mon!"
A group of men in four old Jeeps had parked in the plaza. They popped tents, unrolled tarps, and began to laugh. They made a roaring camp of the small square.
"They're scavengers," the security man told me later when I called to ask. "They say it's safer with more of them, but—they look like trouble."
They were trouble. The men—tall, careless, tattooed—made jokes about "turning this place into our private market." They stripped the area around the property management office. They made a fire. They sang. They were loud.
I kept my curtains closed.
Days later, they had a new trophy: a group of women they'd rounded up from the highways and the edge of the city. Women dragged and terrified, eyes hollow, hair torn. The men laughed and ran hands where they should never be.
I sat at the window and watched through a barely open slit. I watched as those men greeted the newest arrivals like spoils. I watched as one woman—there was something about the way she moved that suggested she was not broken—walked stiffly but with a clarity. The men laughed and taunted. The women were used as objects. They were used to sate something darker than hunger: the brutality of men who had shed any vestige of law.
I felt powerless. I am not brave in real life. I do not rally crowds. I'm the type who buys supplies and labels them neat. But something in me ached.
Then one night the city witnessed a punishment that felt like thunder.
It began when the men, drunk on their power, led a woman out and brought her to the center of the square. They jeered, tore at her clothes, and the group jeered like savages.
"Do it," someone shouted.
"She came to us," another said. "She begged."
"Anyone else hungry?" a man slurred.
The woman—Annabelle Roux—could hardly stand. She had been tossed around like a thing. When the leader, Sergei Pena, leaned close and sneered, "If you play the coy card, we'll make you talk," she spat something at him—a gnashing of contempt that made him clutch his jaw, not because of respect, but because he was insulted.
"He thinks he owns the night," I whispered, too close to the glass. "He thinks he can break anything."
"Don't!" one of the other women screamed. "Stop it!"
The men laughed. They thought they had already won.
Annabelle, for reasons I could not fully see from my high window, suddenly smiled.
"Are you mocking me?" Sergei growled. He pushed her down, but she kept smiling, as if she had made a plan.
At that moment, two of the other women—Gwen Mancini and Kailey English—ran toward the tents like ducks toward water. There was an arrangement, a pre-planned fury. I couldn't hear the words, but the movement was precise, a choreography that implied practice.
The square exploded into chaos. Annabelle leaped like a struck animal, writhing and suddenly biting down on Sergei's forearm. He shrieked, staggered. The men tried to restrain her, but others had risen. A woman with a shard of glass in hand slashed at a knee, another used a wire cutter to free herself. The captured women were not the same as the ones the men thought they'd subdued.
"What the hell—" Sergei choked. "You bit—!"
"How dare you!" another man screamed, swinging a makeshift club.
The women's eyes glinted like iron. They moved with a practiced brutality.
"It was a plan," I whispered. "They planned this."
They dragged Sergei to a car, shoved him in, and revved an engine. Another woman, who'd until then been quiet, peeled away and sprinted toward a tent with a torch. Annabelle and two other women had already opened trunks and were handing out small, sharp objects.
In less than a minute, the scene had flipped. The men—once loud and cocky—were panicked. Sergei's face, heavy with smug certainty minutes before, changed. First, disbelief.
"What are you doing?" he bellowed. "You're animals!"
"You're criminals," Annabelle said, calm and terrible. She held his arm like a soldier pointing a wound. "You thought you could make us entertainment. You thought the world owed you our bodies."
I saw their faces change—smugness to confusion, then anger, then fear.
"You're sick!" Sergei screamed. "You're insane!"
"You're thieves," Gwen said as she lunged, "and tonight we take what you stole."
That night became a public unmaking. They didn't drag them off quietly. They confronted them in the square, under an angry moon, with dirty tents and crushed beer cans as witnesses. The men begged in an ugly chorus, then shouted, then tried to bargain.
"Please—" Colt Campbell begged, fingers trembling. "We won't—"
"No one will call the cops now," Baptiste Lam bleated. "There are no cops left!"
"Then who will stop us?" Cyril Doyle yelled as he struggled against two women who had found a knife.
Around them, other small groups of people—neighbors who had not wanted to involve themselves before—clustered at safe distances. Some filmed on their phones like surgeons watching an operation to learn the technique. Others watched with mouths open. The air was taut.
Annabelle stepped forward. She had blood on her hands from earlier wounds. "You have to feel everything you put on others," she said. "You have to feel fear and loss. You have to face that no one owes you anything."
"Don't—" Sergei tried to say.
They made them kneel. They took their wallets, their watches, their phones, their knives—the very tools they'd used to terrorize. They forced them to look at the faces of the women they had degraded. Then the punishment: not private, not quick, but methodical and public.
They doused the tents and one car with gasoline—the men watched as their property became the instrument of their own undoing. The women's hands shook, not from hesitation but from the weight of responsibility. They had a plan. The plan was ugly and legal—no court, no process—but it answered with immediate force.
"Please," Sergei said, voice thin and broken. "I can change. I can—"
"You will change in ways you cannot imagine," Annabelle said. "You'll remember."
Then they set light.
The flames licked, greedy. The sound of roaring made the hair on my arms lift. Sergei's face went through several stages: confusion, then a hard, cartel-style arrogance, then the white of panic, then pleading.
"No—no! Not like this!" he cried when the first heat hit him. He lunged for water like a man flinging himself at a mirage. The onlookers stepped back. Some clapped; some hissed. Phones buzzed with live streams and shocked messages. A neighbor from the next building shouted, "Good riddance!"
"How does it feel?" Annabelle demanded, voice steady.
Sergei's voice became small. "Please—people—"
They watched as the things that symbolized their control burned. They screamed, they begged, they cursed. The crowd's mood shifted like a weather front: from stunned silence to a roar of retribution. A man from three buildings over snapped a photo. A child, hidden at a window, pointed and asked "Why?" A neighbor down the street turned his head away, eyes wet.
The men tried to claw their way out of the blaze. The women held them until police never arrived. Someone called it "justice" on a live feed. Someone else called it "not justice at all." It did not matter; the city had watched, and the men who had laughed last were learning the language of being powerless.
When it was over, when the tents were charred wicks and the cars were black, the crowd stood, breathless. The women had changed. The look on Annabelle's face was not triumphant. It was exhausted. She had not come to exult. She had come to settle a scale.
"Now they know what it is," Gwen said, voice like gravel. "They know."
Some residents shouted "Shame!" Others clapped. A few started to clean the debris out of a raw human need to restore. The women, bloodied and breathing hard, walked away like soldiers.
In the days after, no one said Sergei or the men were saints. They had been replaced by the memory of that public fire—an example stamped into everyone who saw it. The men who had instigated terror were gone in an awful, roaring way. Those left in the plaza were changed, and the story of their end passed around like a cautionary tale.
But public punishments don't fix everything. They settle immediate threats and mark the moral horizon. After the fire, the city grew quieter. The people who used to think it was "fun" to be cruel were gone, and the women who had fought returned—wounded but alive—to find small ways to rebuild. They made a pact: never again would they be delicious entertainment for any man.
I held my breath as I watched them walk away. I had wanted, in my small brave way, to help. Instead, I had watched and stocked and stayed. That night I realized the world is not clean. Survival sometimes requires crude instruments.
Weeks turned into months. The military flew, once, in a line of helicopters and told everyone through loudspeakers that a global operation to clear the infected had started. They said "stay put" and that gave the whole city a fine line of hope.
One day I climbed to the roof for the first time in months. The view of the city was a wound healed with scars. I set up rain barrels and raised a small garden. I set the water traps and solar panels on a tilt. I planted greens and mushrooms. The city below moved slower and with fewer of those things. The sirens became intermittent. The alarms rang, sometimes, and then the silence returned.
Time wore grooves into my days. I kept a strict schedule: check barricades, water the plants, collect rain, watch the horizon, cook something good. I preserved the good things of life where I could.
One morning, a year after the first screams, a helicopter hovered overhead and the loudspeaker voice told us: "The city is cleared. Survivors, please come out." People went to the streets and hugged. I packed a bag and rode a shared bicycle toward the meeting point—toward C City, toward the clock tower we'd secretly chosen before the world changed us.
When I reached the plaza where we were to meet family, I slowed. The clock's face was dusty but still ticking. I looked at the tiny privacy film on my window in my mind, the taped locks, the sixty barrels of water catalogued and labeled, the single pot of mushrooms I'd learned to coax to life.
I turned the corner.
From across the square, someone shouted a name I recognized.
"Claire!"
It was my father. He looked older by a decade but fierce as always. My mother had a bag of dried herbs clutched in her arms. We hugged until we both held each other tightly, like two boats tethering to the same dock.
"I was so scared," he said into my shoulder.
"I know," I said. "So was I."
In the crowd, people were telling each other their stories. The woman who lit the fire with her friends—Annabelle—stood a few dozen meters away. I caught her glance. She didn't smile. She nodded once, the way two soldiers do after a hard campaign.
"Thank you," I mouthed to her, though she didn't need me to.
As we walked away from the clock, my hand brushed the small worn rag doll that had been swept from the bridge scene months ago. A child had found it near a burned-out car and given it to me when we evacuated. It was the only thing in the whole world that reminded me of someone else's bravery: a woman who had leaped to save a child, a child who lived.
I folded the shopping list I had written the night before the first sirens and I tucked it inside the manual of the solar panel I'd repaired. It felt like a talisman.
The city would rebuild in ways I could not imagine: alliances, factions, small gardens on rooftops, neighbors who shared stories and guarded each other's doors. There would be bad people—always—but there would also be people who learned to fight back in ways that were terrible and, sometimes, necessary.
"Where to now?" my father asked.
"Home," I said, touching the patchwork of single-vision film in my bag—the last small thing that had kept me invisible for so long.
We walked toward a future that smelled of wet earth and burned tents and, impossibly, of hope.
The End
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