Survival/Apocalypse13 min read
Seven Days and the Quiet Apartment
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1.
The countdown read: seven days.
"I dreamed about the dead again," I told the camera as I turned the light off. "It felt so real."
I, Layne Cotton, had been a streamer since college. Night shifts, late naps. That evening I woke to a flash of memory like a warned alarm. I couldn't tell if it had been a dream or a premonition, but one detail stuck: a scandal about a celebrity, then a news spike, then a tag I did not expect — "rebirth" and "seven days."
"Fans are going wild," I said to myself. "I need to focus."
At nine I saw the first trending post. It said the word in a way that made my stomach drop. "Then it's real," I whispered.
I called my parents.
"Hey, Dad, can you come over? I'm craving dumplings," I said. "Mom, help me make them?"
My father, Rafael Santos, was practical. My mother, Astrid Larsen, was patient. They lived in the next city. They had tried to move in with me before; I had refused. Not now.
"Of course we'll come," Rafael said. "Don't be silly."
"Bring the sausages I like!" I added, because I knew my father would laugh and then promise.
I made a checklist on a scrap of paper. Doors. Windows. Food. Water. Fuel. That paper filled fast. Habit had made me meticulous. Survival turned my busy mind into a machine that wrote, checked, and wrote again.
2.
"We need the door reinforced now," I told a repairman on the phone.
"You have a bank-level door," the man laughed. "But more isn't a problem if you pay."
"I'll pay," I said. "Do you do bulletproof glass and one-way film?"
"Yes. We can rush it today."
Money was a weird comfort. I had saved from streaming. It was enough. I moved fast. I told the installers to work until dusk. I paid cash when I could. "My mom's anxious," I lied. "We need noise control too."
Old fears can make you honest. My parents came with a truck. They brought a calm fury — the quiet energy of people who had lived through lack. They saw danger where I saw lists. "You're doing the right things," Rafael said, checking the locks.
Astrid added, "We will plant. Seeds, Layne. You forget to think of food."
"Plant? Here?" I laughed.
"Yes. Fish. Not chickens. Too noisy." Astrid's smile was small.
3.
I emptied a warehouse-style supermarket. "I will not run out of noodles again," I told the clerk. I filled two carts, then called my father for the truck. "Tell the driver to bring space," I said. "Tell him it's an event."
"An event," Rafael repeated and laughed. He became my anchor. He took a big grin and turned it to a plan.
We bought solar panels, freezers, huge water tanks, power banks, protein, cans, rice, flour. We bought cooking devices that didn't need gas. We bought soap. We bought medicine. We bought ridiculous amounts of toilet paper.
"They'll laugh at you," the cashier joked.
"Good," I said. "Let them."
I remembered the last time the world broke. Food had kept me alive for weeks. The memory of being chased to death at the gate stayed like a bruise. This time I wanted to be smarter.
4.
At home we changed the glass. The film made the windows one-way. We built a quiet entrance to the rooftop. Someone had been thoughtful when the building was built: the roof edge was high and hidden from street view if you crouched.
"We can live here," Rafael said quietly, watching the installers. "If we do this right."
We filled the rooftop storage with boxes, then moved the food into a small attic. We put the big freezers where they could be power-fed by the solar. We made the access silent.
"I can't drive," I confessed later.
"Then you don't have to," Rafael said. "You'll stream. You'll keep people calm."
I went to the local stores again. I bought more than I needed. I felt a tightness in my chest every time I left home. Every open street was a place someone else might fill with terrible things.
5.
On day one the radio said "this is not a widespread disease." By day three drones blared assurances. By day five the drones were gone. The lights went out on day four where I had lived before. This time I kept charge. We kept the solar running.
"We should tell fewer people we are done," I said.
"Yes," Astrid answered. "This is for us."
I lied to property callers, to neighbors. "We're out of town," I said in the group chat. "House is secure."
A week later, the first monsters showed up near our gate. I watched the security camera feed.
"Call 110!" someone screamed. The camera showed a security guard running. Two people chased him—then they stopped acting human.
"They bite," I said aloud, hands tight on the edge of the couch. "They bite and change people. This is the dream I had."
Rafael put an arm around me. "We have to keep our heads."
6.
We kept watch in shifts. I would stream when I could. Our building had a small cluster of early survivors. A couple returned from a raid with two trucks. I watched them unload supplies down the block. They were brave. They had a boy who flew a drone to scout. They left and came back twice. We thought them gods.
"They'll take more risks," Astrid said soberly. "Be careful who you trust."
I met them through the window. The husband was Georg Cruz. His wife was Eve Yamada. Their boy was Nicolas Hoffman. Georg was a trainer. Eve was a doctor. Their house spanned several floors, clever thinking, and they used silent rooms and hidden lights. They helped us. We shared seeds and eggs.
7.
Day six passed with shouting, then a car slammed into our gate. A gang came in loud and fast. I watched with my family from the window as men in plain clothes and masks drove in, blocked the road, and forced two women out of a car.
"They have guns," I said. "They look like robbers."
Rafael slammed his fist into the counter. "We stay quiet."
The gang had no fear. They cut across the yard. One of them kicked a woman while another pulled at a girl. I heard a gunshot. I saw a thug shoot a zombie dead and then begin to loot a corridor. They were cruel. They took food. They laughed. They did things that made all of us want to vomit.
8.
We kept silent. The gang left with cars full of food. "They have guns," Georg said later when he returned from scouting. "They shot at a crowd. They dragged people."
"Why would they do that?" I asked, and the question was small and useless.
"Because some people want to own every scrap," Rafael said. "This is when the worst of us show."
I slept badly. I watched the footage. The faces of the two women they took were burned into my mind. We told no one. We couldn't.
9.
Time passed in small motions. We learned to plant in half-pots, to raise fish in a tub on the roof, to use waste water carefully. We made watchesets. We shared with Georg's family. We borrowed drones to send vegetables between floors. We traded favors. Every day was a quiet battle.
We watched the city die piece by piece. Snow came. Then heat. Then rains. Each climate change brought new fear. We watched a "wave" move south, a tide of the dead. We learned they could be herded. We learned they could be tricked with smells and sound.
10.
Then one day the men who had been looters came back. They came faster, louder. They crashed through a different gate. We watched them at the perimeter as they unloaded more stolen goods into a line of trucks.
"They won't stop," Georg whispered.
"Let them," Rafael said. "If they bring noise, the dead will come."
"It may save us all," I said.
11.
Everything changed that night.
We had found a way to lure the dead away: a scent mix my mother cooked up from old lab knowledge and hot-blooded courage. She soaked rags and fed small drones to hang from trees. We set them as bait down the block. We listened from the roof. The baits worked. The dead gathered, turned away, left the buildings.
"Now," Rafael said, "we move."
We didn't move to attack. We moved to watch. But the looters left a weak pattern: they were loud and they cared about what they took. They listened to the radio when a drone dropped a false promise of help. They believed that a convoy would bring them safety.
12.
One bright morning, weeks after the first gang hit, they came through our gate again. The town had thinned. Their trucks choked the street. They thought they were kings.
That's when the rescue convoy arrived. It wasn't a military unit like in the movies. It was a small group — maybe eighteen people — with uniforms, bikes, and a discipline that showed.
They pulled up, checked the perimeter, and saw the gangs. There were voices, then shots. A crash. The gangs raised weapons and stared. The rescue team moved slow but precise. They took the gate and searched the area. People watched from windows. We watched with a silence that was heavy.
13.
We heard shouting. In the courtyard, a man in a gas mask walked forward and pushed a man — Leonardo Palmer — into the white snow. He was the leader of the looters. He had a blunt face, a cruel grin. He had taken the two women. He had shot at strangers. He had broken things just to see them fall.
"Leonardo," the man in uniform said. "You will answer."
Leonardo laughed. "Who are you to tell me anything?"
"You know the rules," a voice said. "Not now. Not like this."
The rescue team had brought some civilians from other safe blocks. They formed a ring. The courtyard became a small stage.
14.
I watched from the window. Around me, neighbors gathered at other windows too. Georg had come up to my floor and peered down. "We didn't do this," he whispered. "We just watch."
But watching would be a witness. I set my camera on a tripod and turned it on. I had to record the face of a man who thought he could end others.
Rafael sat next to me and touched my shoulder. "We will not be quiet this time," he said.
The crowd in the courtyard started to chant. "Justice!" someone cried. "Justice for the women!" another voice added. The chant grew. The rescue team had Leonardo pinned. He had handcuffs. They didn't call it a "trial." There was no judge. There was only witnesses: neighbors, the two women who had been dragged from the car, and a ring of people who had seen death and would not let their quiet be taken.
15.
Leonardo's expression changed fast. He smiled at first. "You can't do anything to me," he said. "You think you can?"
The rescue leader answered, "You stole from the weak. You used a gun to scare and to kill for sport."
Leonardo's laugh cracked. "You are nobody."
"You are wrong," a woman shouted from a second-floor stairwell. "We are the people you hurt."
I remember the sound when a man named Leo Peterson — one of the rescue team runners — read the list. "You took food. You took children. You shot to scare, not to protect. You killed for power."
Leonardo's grin flickered. "I needed to survive," he said, and it sounded small.
"No," the neighbor said. "You needed to take because you enjoyed it."
16.
They made him stand in the middle of the courtyard. The two women who had been dragged were brought by. Their faces were raw. There were cuts. The little girl watched with a blank stare. She climbed onto a crate and pointed at him.
"That's him," she said. "He hit my friend."
Leonardo looked at her. For the first time he seemed to shrink. "I... I didn't—"
"Silence," the leader said. He turned to the crowd. "We will not kill him. We will make him face what he did."
The rescue team led him to a small platform. They had not planned theatrics. They just wanted him seen.
17.
"Say their names," a woman demanded. "Tell the world what you took."
Leonardo's jaw worked. He was surrounded. The courtyard was full of people who had watched their friends die, listened to the silence of empty buildings, and mourned. They did not want blood. They wanted to take from him the power he had used so cruelly.
"Tell us," someone whispered. "Tell them."
Leonardo's mind spun. He had thought he could laugh them into fear. He had thought he could own the silence. Now the silence was full of watches.
He started to speak. "I did what I had to do," he said.
"We have names," a woman said coldly. "Tell the parents you took the bread from. Tell the mothers you scared. Tell the little girl he dragged."
Leonardo stared at the sea of faces. He had never seen so many people who would look back.
18.
The punishment was public and drawn out. It lasted an hour, then two. It did not use torture or fire. It used truth. Each person he had wronged was invited to speak. The two women came forward. The girl took a shaky breath.
"You took my sister's bread," the first woman said. "We had three days left of food. You came at night and you took what her kids needed."
"I found other food later," Leonardo said, but his words were thin.
The girl nodded, not looking at him. "We slept in one bed," she said. "My sister died."
The courtyard had an intake of breath that sounded like a wind. A neighbor cried out. The man who had lost his wife spat at him. Someone photographed Leonardo with a phone. The vision of him — not in armor, not bluffing — in daylight with a face that could crumble popped into millions of small screens.
"You're a coward," said Georg from behind his hands. "You thought power lasted. It doesn't."
Leonardo's face changed. First it was pride, then surprise, then denial. He opened his mouth. "No," he said. "I can—"
A dozen voices told him the things he had done. He tried to fix his story. He shifted blame. He said the government had failed him. He said he had no choice.
The crowd hissed. "You always had a choice," Rafael said.
19.
The leader of the rescue team spoke last. "You hurt people. You created terror. You will be judged by those you wronged."
They stripped his coat in public, left him shivering in jeans in the morning cold. They placed his weapons on a crate and lit a small torch near them, showing that his tools were now just objects. He had no friends to hold him. He had nothing but his chest.
"Do you regret?" asked one of the women.
Leonardo's eyes filled. For a moment he looked truly young. He looked like a man who had made his life small by taking from others to stay big.
"I—" he began and then his voice failed.
20.
Then something swift happened. A neighbor who had lost a brother stood forward. He had a handle of flour in his hand. He opened his arms like someone offering forgiveness in a single heavy parcel.
"Work it off," the neighbor said. "We are not beasts. If you are to live among us, you will give back. You will mend what you broke."
Leonardo fell to his knees like a man whose armor had been removed. He started to apologize. His tone went from bravado to pleading. "Please," he whispered. "I can help. Please."
Around the courtyard, people reacted. Some spat. Some turned their faces away. The two women watched with a guarded calm. The rescued had no need for revenge anymore than they had need for more fear. They needed their lives back in small measures.
He was assigned to move water drums, to carry frozen boxes, to fix fences under the watch of those he had hurt. He would do it with witnesses. He would do it barefoot, and the crowd watched each load he carried. He would meet the people he had wronged and look at them while he worked.
21.
"You should have been ashamed long ago," the woman said as he lifted boxes. She stood with her arms folded and watched his face contort with effort.
"I am," he said. The word sounded hollow.
"You have to be more than ashamed," Rafael said. "You have to be small enough to learn to be kind."
Leonardo's reaction moved through the stages I had to watch hard: first dignity and arrogance, then shock, then denial, then bargaining, and finally collapse into pleading. He tried to shout away the shame, then tried to bargain like a lawyer, then finally broke into small, wet apologies. People filmed. People whispered. Some cried. "Do it," the leader said. "Face it all."
22.
The public changed him in a way that the dead could not. He was not devoured by monsters. He was devoured by truth. The witnesses were cruel in a new way: they asked the right questions, they forced him to confess details. He had to answer where he had put stolen cans. He had to admit who he had hurt by pushing a mother from a stair.
When the crowd dispersed, he was barefoot and thin and carried three boxes to the rooftop by himself while ten people watched. He moved slowly, and every time he put a box down, an exclamation spread like a small thunderclap. He had to meet looks. He had to look back. It was worse than the night he felt safe with guns.
23.
Over the days, people changed their faces when he passed. Some pointed. Some looked. Children learned to call out the story like a school lesson. Leonardo grew careful. He worked. He tried to be useful. He failed at times. He begged. He learned.
"Mercy is a hard thing to earn," Rafael said as he cut bread and handed a piece to Leonardo's shaking hands. "But it's not impossible."
Leonardo wept. He looked small and broken and I think he had finally learned that no one gets to be king of others just because they are loud. The crowd had punished him not with death, but with exposure, service, and the slow erosion of his power.
24.
After the punishment, the courtyard felt quieter. The windows opened again, but in cautious hope. People spoke about food-sharing, about rules, about which doors could be opened for help. We had built something new: a fragile contract among neighbors.
Back in our apartment, Georg and his family came up. "We did what we could," he said.
"You did enough," I said.
Eve, Georg's wife, hugged her boy. "We are careful. We'll keep the alarms on."
25.
Time moved forward by small rituals. We celebrated small things. We made dumplings and call them tiny victories. We sent unmanned packages to the team that cleared ruins. We shared seeds with Georg. We taught Nicolas to read. We learned to cook in tiny solar stoves. We laughed softly at night.
"Remember the first winter?" Georg asked one night.
"I dream of that first night," I said. "But I also dream of small green shoots."
26.
Months passed in tiny steps. The world outside burned and died and sometimes healed. Rescue teams cleared neighborhoods and left rations. The government called and told anyone with a car to move to safe zones. Many did. Many didn't.
We did not leave. We had roots: food planted on the rooftop, a fish basin, a neighbor who could fix solar panels. We had a team of people who would help clear dead when needed. We had rules. We had a life too small to be a kingdom, but big enough for a family.
27.
On the two-hundred-eighth day, a small unit rode in and said the city was being reclaimed. "We have found ways to clean the infected for good," the leader said. People who had been in the dark for months felt a new light cut across their faces.
I sent them canned cakes and a jar of honey—something small and human. They thanked us, bowed, and promised to keep the area secure for a season longer. They left supplies and left instructions.
28.
The season changed and the plants grew. Georg and Eve kept teaching. Rafael and Astrid kept repairing. The rescue team kept feeding. Leonardo — the man who had been a thief — kept working under watch. He planted. He learned to be small and useful.
One evening we celebrated my mother's birthday quietly. We made a small cake. We lit stale candles. We ate in silence and then laughed. It was a fragile joy.
"To the seeds," I said, raising a spoon.
"To the living," Rafael answered.
29.
There were nights the nightmares returned. I woke with a start, reaching for an empty space. But the living were alive in the room: Georg's family down the hall, the rescue team patrolling the street, the sound of a kettle. That sound was a bell I had not heard in a year. It told me someone still cared.
Sometimes I thought about the men who had stolen. Some had been eaten. Some had been forced to serve. Some had changed. The community decided who to forgive and how. It was messy. It was right.
30.
The last line of my notebook read: "We kept quiet. We willed seeds to grow. We kept each other alive." I set the page down and turned off the camera. My voice for the stream had become softer. I no longer spoke for fame. I spoke to the few who listened, saying simple truths:
"Take care of each other."
"Save water."
"Plant seeds."
We still counted days. We still worried. But we found small ways to make a life. We learned that being brave could mean closing the door at the right time, running a drone, growing a seed, or making someone who had done harm answer to those they had hurt.
One morning when snow turned to green, I walked to the rooftop. The little bed of radishes and spinach had grown. Nicolas waved a small flag he'd made. Georg smiled.
"We did not become heroes," Rafael said. "We did what we could."
"And that's enough," Astrid said.
I picked a green leaf and ate it cold, smiling. Then I turned the camera on and told the small audience, "Remember: it takes one small brave thing to change a life. Start with a seed."
The End
— Thank you for reading —