Survival/Apocalypse13 min read
The Call at Four A.M.
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"Don't open the door. Whoever comes—don't open the door!"
"Emersyn?" I murmured into the phone, then heard the scream that killed the rest of her words. The line filled with ragged breaths, a torn-off moan, then a wet, metallic tearing sound.
"Tear—" the sound ended in a busy tone.
I looked at the clock: 4:01 a.m. I yawned, wrapped the quilt around my shoulders, and tried to fall back asleep.
"Bang!" Something hit the ceiling like a fist. I shot upright.
"It's nine o'clock," I told the dark as if the building would answer me. I pulled the blanket up and then a second, louder crash shook the hallway. Then more sounds: "thump! thump! thud! thud!" and a high, pierced scream.
I dug the phone out, heart knocking. Emersyn's number. Off. My thumb hovered over the door handle.
"Don't open the door," Emersyn had said. I pressed my palm flat to the wood and swallowed.
"Who is it?" came a voice from down the hall. The knocks grew heavier. "Please—open, help!"
The voice sounded like the boy who stocked fruit downstairs yesterday. I peered through the peephole.
Two black eyes like coals, blood around the mouth and a pale face that moved wrong. It wasn't human breath I saw; it was the hollow of something else.
"Oh my God," I breathed. I stepped back, hand shaking. The boy—I tried not to think of his hair, which had been neat—and then a stupid, unkind part of my brain thought, If only he had stayed alive, I might have said hi.
I slammed the door closed and sat down with my back against it. My hands wouldn't stop trembling.
"Who else do I call?" I asked the phone to answer. Emersyn had once, laughing, written an emergency number on my phone and told me to use it if things went sideways. "In case you get lost, Kori," she'd said.
The number sputtered. It answered with a man's voice, sharp and annoyed. "You'd better have something way worse than this."
"I'm crying," I blurted. "Emersyn—"
"Stop! The world's not over." He barked it like a joke and then softened. "Where are you?"
"Cloudview Gardens, Building 5, Unit 806. 'SpongeBob'." I said the stupid delivery name because it came out of habit. He made a sound and then ordered, "Check your windows. Don't make noise. Text me at noon every day. We'll come in five days. Understand?"
"Un—understood." I could still hear the banging outside. I walked from window to window and locked every latch. Emersyn had taught me to do that—bulletproof lock, reinforced glass, bars on the balcony. She'd always said, "If you keep all the doors locked, at least you have time to think."
Outside, something was climbing the balcony.
I shut the balcony glass and cursed my cowardice for skipping the extra wiring Emersyn had wanted. The thing on the balcony reached and tried to pry the bars. It had an odd intelligence in the tilt of its head.
My phone stared at me. Twitter was a mess. "ZOMBIE BREAKOUT." "FIRST WAVE." "CAN'T KILL THEM." My feed shook with the same panic the city now exhaled.
At eleven-thirty, I sent the noon text the man had ordered. My stomach growled. I unpacked a packet of snail noodles and waited for the water to boil.
"It’s Eduardo," a message buzzed. "I'm Ignacio."
"Who?" I typed, then hit send. The name didn't mean anything at first. Ignacio Clemons. The text was short: "We'll pick you up. Don't open anything."
At noon, the news was a loop of empty squares and red banners. The government spelled out "combat status." My hallway's solitary figure downstairs paced like a shadow.
"Please." I stared at the balcony bars. I couldn't be brave forever. My thumb brushed the balcony curtain remote, an itch to see. I pulled it.
Three of them were there now—higher, meaner. They tested the bars together. I could practically hear the gears of their heads clicking.
A noise—metallic, far away—drew them away. I crumpled into the couch and clutched the remote like an anchor.
My phone vibrated. "We're almost there. Helicopter. Rope ladder. Go to the balcony. Wait for the sound to stop, then open." The sender signed, "Ignacio."
"Okay," I whispered.
I did as they told. A chopper appeared, a green shape in the gray sky. A ladder uncoiled down like a salvation. I opened the window, slid onto the sill, and climbed out.
The soldier who yanked me up into the chopper smelled like cordite and dust. He laughed breathless, "Grab my hand!"
He was the same man from the messages; Ignacio came up after, eyes narrowed at the balcony where my three nightmares had tried to climb. I saw another pair of hands holding the rope—Dale's—solid, broad, steady.
"Hold on!" shouted the man at the door. Below, one of the monsters leaped at the ladder. The rope stretched. Then—"Cut it!" someone screamed.
A knife flashed. The rope snapped. I watched in slow, awful motion as Dale let go and fell.
"No!" I shouted.
"Don't look!" someone grabbed my shoulders. A younger officer—Ambrose Russo—muffled my face to his chest and covered my eyes with his hand.
"Not yet," Ambrose said softly. "Don't. Please."
I heard Dale scream. I heard static. I heard the chopper tilt. I knew what I'd seen in the gap. I couldn't breathe.
When Ambrose set me down inside the chopper later, he folded his arm around me like a shield.
"He's gone," Ignacio said quietly. "Dale pulled the line. He saved us all."
Ambrose's hands trembled as he brushed my hair from my face. "Are you hurt?"
"No." I said, but my shoulders shook. His eyes found mine like someone searching a map for a place he'd lost. "Why—"
"You should rest," Ambrose said, and he didn't kiss me, but the air of his hand on my forehead was an apology and a promise mixed.
That was the first time his mouth curved—just once—into a smile for me. It was small. It felt huge.
At the base, a factory turned fortress waiting room, they brought me to Emersyn's room. It smelled like her soap. A photo on the table made me freeze.
There I was in the photo—my old face—short hair, fierce grin. Emersyn had been closer in that picture than I remembered. There was a boy with her in the photos. Ignacio was in the corner, smiling. Ambrose was there too. They looked like family.
I flipped the album. The eyes staring back at me were my eyes. I felt a cold, ridiculous surge: I had been someone else before, and I had been lost.
"You found something?" a voice asked.
"Harriet?" I guessed. Harriet King—Emersyn’s colleague—stood in the doorway. She was lean and practical, the sort of person who could file a screw into place and make it belong.
Harriet sat on the bed. "You used to be…someone. Emersyn kept it quiet to protect you."
"Protect me from what?" My voice sounded small in the big room.
From the corner of the hallway, Ignacio overheard me. He sat down heavily in a chair and lit a cigarette, a bad habit he probably tried to hide.
"Many things," Ignacio said slowly. "There were enemies. People who would see you as leverage. We moved you. We changed details. We kept you safe."
"Why doesn't anyone tell me?" My hands tightened on the photo. "Why did my face change?"
Ambrose came up behind me and rested his hands just above my shoulders, palms warm. "You had burns. You were hurt bad." He didn't ask permission to touch me; he just did, the way someone takes hold of a drowning hand.
"You were in a crash when Emersyn was with you," Harriet said. "There were enemies around then, too."
Ambrose's voice came low. "We thought we lost you. Emersyn—" He stopped and swallowed. "She kept you alive."
My mapping of the past was a tangle. Watching surveillance footage at Harriet's prompting, I saw Ignacio's team in motion. I saw them argue about a plan to send residents south—"It looks like a trap"—and then I saw them pivot to something else: a bank, a set of tunnels, a night of fighting.
"Ignacio wanted us to use the north as a lure," Ambrose said. "It was a plan to gather them away. We never meant to hurt civilians."
"But people died," I said. The video showed bodies and blood and a bank manager with a tight face.
"Eduardo sold out people to keep his job," Harriet said. "He thought power meant he could choose who lived."
A name I tasted like something sour: Eduardo Copeland.
The footage showed Eduardo in the bank office shouting at a clerk, someone handing over a file to the wrong hands. Ignacio's men had an old grudge with him. Now, trapped under initial panic, it was all pouring out.
"Eduardo profited," Ignacio said. "He cut a corner. He made a deal that sent people into danger. That can't go unpunished."
"We should bring him to a court," someone said.
"No," Ambrose answered before anyone could think. "We will bring him to the world. Let people see him. Let them feel what he made them do."
They arranged a public gathering at the base's main square—an open space made from shipping containers—where survivors queued for food and news. They dragged a screen and a speaker. Word spread and people came, drawn like they always are to the taste of someone else's guilt.
At noon the next day, they brought Eduardo out.
He stood wearing the same crisp suit he had when the virus began. His face was clean, his hair carefully parted. He walked with the confidence of a man who'd never had to beg on his knees.
"Eduardo Copeland," Ignacio said into the microphone, voice clear, "you made choices that cost lives. You profited from that. You chose a boardroom over people. Tell us why."
Eduardo laughed, first soft, then brittle. "You have no right—" he began.
"Tell them what you did, Eduardo. Tell them why you betrayed an evacuation," Ambrose said quietly.
"Because I had a family to feed," Eduardo answered. "Because—"
"Because you made a choice," Harriet interrupted. "Because you signed, at midnight, an order to delay bus routes. Because you took a bribe. Because the man you sold was my brother."
The crowd shifted. A woman screamed. A young man with a burned sleeve spat at Eduardo's shoes. A dozen phones lifted like iron lanterns. The cameras roared with their small red lights.
Eduardo's slick face changed. The practiced smile narrowed into a thin line. He tried to step back, but a circle of people hemmed him in.
"I didn't realize—" he started, voice high.
"You did realize," Ignacio said. "You knew if you delayed the notices, the north would be prey. You chose your bonus over their lives."
Eduardo's hands fluttered. He glanced to the crowd as if searching for a friendly face. There was none.
"Put him on the screen," Ambrose ordered. The giant monitor showed the archive footage: Eduardo signing a document, a name circled, a shuttered bus depot. The footage cut to a ringing phone and the call that came too late. The crowd watched in a hush.
"Do you see?" Harriet said, and she spat his name like a curse into the microphone.
Eduardo's expression shifted from denial to anger, then to fear. He shouted, "You can't—this is slander. I was following orders—"
"Orders?" someone yelled back. "Whose orders?"
"I had to keep my job," Eduardo croaked.
"That's not an order," Ambrose said. "That was greed."
The crowd's mood changed like weather. Faces hardened. Someone who had lost three brothers lifted a video and replayed a clip on his phone where Eduardo spoke coldly in the boardroom, "Risk is acceptable."
"Stand up," Ignacio said. "Tell everyone what you thought you were saving."
Eduardo straightened his shoulders and tried to speak like a man defending a verdict. He started naming excuses: debts, reputations, the company.
"Do you have a mother?" a woman asked from the crowd.
Eduardo blinked, flustered. "Yes—yes."
"Tell her what you did," the woman demanded. "Tell her you chose a spreadsheet over her son's life."
He hesitated. His voice broke. "I—" He started to cry.
"No," another voice cut in. "Don't let him make it about pain. Make it about truth."
They had built a stage. Now they built a trial.
"Eduardo," Ignacio said, "you will face the community you hurt. You will tell them everything, and the world will decide your fate. Not a court, because court needs lawbooks. The people need to see you."
"You're savage," Eduardo blurted. "You can't—"
"Oh, we can," Ambrose said, voice a steel wire wrapped in velvet. He stepped in close enough that Eduardo smelled of coffee. "You sat in a room and watched charts. These people watched their children fall. Which do you think is worse?"
The crowd hissed. The woman with the burned sleeve stepped forward and held up a charred toy. "This was my daughter's," she whispered. "You saw a graph. She saw a father."
Eduardo lurched like someone had punched him.
"I didn't mean—" he tried.
"You didn't mean to." Harriet's voice was small and cold. "You meant to keep your bonus."
Eduardo's shoulders slumped. He tried denial, he tried to manufacture excuses, but the footage kept playing. The names kept appearing. The survivors kept lining their testimonies like beads.
Someone in the crowd, a man with a camera, asked loudly, "What punishment do we want?"
"We want the truth!" shouted a woman.
"We want restitution!" cried an old man. "We want him to show us how to get our families back!"
"No one can bring them back," Ambrose said. "But you can take away what he valued."
"Strip him," a voice suggested. "Strip his title. Take his access. Put him on record. Make him answer for every check he signed."
They decided his punishment there: public stripping of rank and privileges, permanent ban from aid allocations, and a day placed at the square to answer every survivor who lost someone. They would make him sign a confession on camera, and every major settlement would have the recording. He would be required to work food lines until the survivors said otherwise.
The way they did it was not cinematic—no guillotine, no grand speech. It was ordinary and therefore, to many, worse. They made Eduardo kneel in the dust and apologize while a hundred cameras stared. They took his company badge, burned it in a small tin, and poured the ashes into the water bowls the volunteers used to wash utensils.
Eduardo's reactions were a map: first pride, then indignation, then stunned disbelief, then bargaining, then raw, ugly pleading. He begged names, pleaded for mercy, tried to place blame on subordinates. People shouted back. Someone laughed. Someone cried.
"Don't make me a villain," Eduardo cried, voice thin, as if he had been assigned the role and had no idea how to improvise.
"You are the one who chose this," Harriet said. "You signed the plan."
Someone in the corner recorded his plea and posted it. In seconds the clip made the rounds on every device in the square. The crowd booed, and then they turned on him not with knives but with their presence, with their questions. They asked about bus numbers, about the people he had sent, about promises he had broken.
The crowd's reaction shifted Eduardo further. Where he expected cowering and control, he found clarity: people had not come to humiliate him endlessly; they had come to drag the truth into the open.
"Why did you do it?" a man asked simply.
Eduardo's eyes found the sky. "I thought it was safer."
"For who?" Harriet asked.
"For me," he said, and then suddenly, humiliatingly small, he realized the shape of his choice.
The punishment lasted the day. It lasted into the next. Eduardo cooked rice, washed pots, wore a white plastic apron and answered until his voice was gone. He had to read aloud the list of names he had helped put at risk and then recite the ethics policy he had signed and broken. Volunteers stood behind him and offered corrections. Children asked him questions. An old woman demanded he scrub the same pan until he cried.
When he finally sat down, utterly spent, he looked softer, as if someone had sanded off the edges.
"Do you regret it?" Harriet asked quietly.
Eduardo hiccupped, "Yes."
"Then do something for the people you hurt," she said. "Work with us. Help rebuild. Use the contacts you still have."
He nodded, voice thin. "I will."
It wasn't a perfect ending for a man who had traded lives for numbers, but it was public, substantial, and it stripped him of the safety he'd hidden behind. The crowd watched him bend to daily labor and told stories to his new charges when he refused. They recorded everything and uploaded it. They watched his discomfort. They absorbed his apology. They let him redeem—if he could.
After the punishment, Ambrose stayed close to me for days. He would bring me water without asking.
"It's only because you looked frightened," he told me, and I could hear the faint smile in his voice. "You slept badly."
"Did I?" I said.
"Yes." He sat near the window and picked at the hem of his sleeve. "You woke me up when you shivered. I couldn't sleep again."
He turned his hand over and brushed the back of my wrist with his thumb—light as air. "You shouldn't be alone."
"They brought me here so I'm not," I said.
"But they didn't bring your past." He looked at me, unexpectedly earnest. "If you want to know about your life, ask. We'll tell you."
He reached for my hand and hesitated, then laced his fingers with mine. The touch was small, but it landed like something hot and true.
Someone cleared their throat nearby. "Ambrose has never done that before," Harriet whispered to me later, loud enough that our neighbor could hear. "He never touches anyone like that."
"He did it once," a woman replied. "When he was eight, he gave his sandwich to a stray."
I laughed, because the thought of Ambrose sharing a sandwich was ridiculous and tender.
Ambrose kept showing me little mercies. He would take my coat from me and fold it when I was asleep. He would steal a smile at me in the mess hall and then hide it. Once he stepped in front of me to shield my view when a boy started to argue. "He's mine," he muttered like a dare.
Other people noticed too. "He only gets fierce like that when someone matters," Ignacio said, watching us. "Don't let him make you soft."
"Make me soft?" I said, and he smiled that tired, small smile.
Days outside the base blurred into tasks. We watched more clips. We found old friends. Emersyn was still missing. We feared the worst. But among the fear, little warmth started to knit itself.
One night Ambrose came to my cot. He had a bandage on his knuckle and the softest look I've seen. "Do you remember the rooftop garden?" he asked.
"I remember nothing," I said honestly.
"You used to steal the tomatoes," he said. "You called them brave."
"Brave tomatoes?" I smiled.
"You once said everything brave deserved a bonnet," he said. "You made silly names for things."
He took my hand and pulled it to his mouth and left the shadow of his lips on my knuckle like a promise. "I will keep looking for Emersyn," he said. "We will find her."
"We will," I promised, and meant it.
Soon after Eduardo's punishment, they assigned us a mission to escort goods to the south — a convoy mission. We moved like a small, careful machine. We watched the ruined city and learned its ways. We met a dozen people who had stories like mine: pieces missing, faces changed, hearts carrying holes.
One morning, as we crawled past a row of burned cars, I saw the frayed knot on a rope ladder and remembered Dale's sacrifice. I touched it with my fingers like one might touch a relic.
That late at night, as Ambrose sat beside me and the base hummed, I thought about the photo album on Emersyn's table. I thought about the woman in the pictures who was me and the life now folded into other people's pockets. I thought about the day Eduardo pleaded, the crowd's faces, and how public truth had a way of unmaking lies.
"It isn't the end," Ambrose whispered.
"It's not," I said.
"I'll keep you from falling." He smiled then—soft, private, a smile he had used on me when the world had shook.
I lay my head on his shoulder and listened to him breathe. Outside, the city's wind carried a smell of smoke and washed metal. I closed my eyes and let the sound of his breath stitch me back together.
When I woke up, the rope on the wall had been taken down and replaced with a new one—strong, braided, with a fresh knot. It sat on the shelf above the door like a promise.
At the next town, I would finally ask the one question I had been saving: where was Emersyn? And Ambrose—Ambrose would answer with a hand in mine and a patience that did not rush.
We walked out together, and the frayed piece of rope found a place in my palm.
The End
— Thank you for reading —