Chapter 33: The Day The World Went Away (5)

Ren’s pace faltered at the access road’s perimeter, his boots grinding against scattered rubble. He heard it before he saw it. A tinny pop song looped through broken speakers, warping and skipping as if the music itself were dying. Beneath this distorted melody were screams and the crack of gunfire.

The mall was teeming with the dead. They poured from every breach in the building’s shell. They hung from second-floor railings, clambered across abandoned vehicles, tumbled down dead escalators. A human flood surging. Dozens hammered against metal gates, others drifted aimlessly through open spaces, their vacant faces turning toward any flicker of movement or burst of noise.

“Impossible,” Mori breathed, retreating backward. The crunch of gravel betrayed him as he lost his footing, his composure crumbling visibly. “That’s suicide.”

A string of curses spilled from Tanaka’s lips. Neither man awaited Ren’s command. Terror seized them both—Tanaka fled toward the shadow of nearby structures while Mori followed, his frantic footfalls echoing briefly before dissolving into the surrounding bedlam.

Abandoned on the ridge, ice crystallized in his veins. Another gunshot echoed. Someone’s final cry stretched thin before snapping into silence. One step forward and the earth retreated beneath his feet, his form rising while the laws that anchored all else seemed to make an exception just for him.

Red streaks painted across the floor tiles, chairs and tables thrown aside in panic, medical supplies scattered. The dead were frozen in their final moments, while the nearly-dead jerked as the infection claimed what little humanity remained. Nothing remained.

Carnage squelched beneath his boots. Room after room revealed the same story. Storage closets stripped bare, sleeping areas, medical bays. Where there weren’t bodies, there were signs of flight.

Aki stood alone when he found her. Harsh light spilled from the control room, where dozens of monitors cast their blue glow across her. Each screen showed a different horror—infected pouring through corridors, barricades collapsing under waves of bodies. Where the monorail platform had been, the screen now displayed only churning limbs and jaws and torsos.

Aki remained still, back to him. “Forgive me,” she whispered.

Words failed him. He backed away and shut the door with a click. The mall distorted around him. Floors meant nothing—he glided across their surfaces in controlled bursts, flickering between existence and absence. Vertical surfaces offered no resistance. Railings, ceilings, empty space—all became his highway. He wove through the architecture at speeds beyond human perception. Any survivors would have felt only a whisper of displaced air, never knowing what phantom had passed them by.

His gaze darted through the man-made labyrinth, down broken escalators, across abandoned food courts, into darkened suites. He launched himself over toppled display cases, ghosted above the grasping hands of the infected below, and ricocheted from wall to column without leaving so much as a fingerprint behind.

He heard some shouts, desperate pleas for help. A chilling clarity had seized him, narrowing his world to a single point ahead. Nothing else mattered. Not the cluster of survivors who gasped as he streaked past their barricade of overturned tables, not the flicker of hope in their eyes. He kept his attention fixed forward, refusing to let their faces become memories he would carry.

Reality smeared into streaks of color and shadow as he moved, each bound pulling memories from the depths of his mind. The faster he flew, the more his past caught up with him, fragments of who he’d been rising to the surface. He’d stopped measuring his life by what remained and started counting only by what was gone. In that emptiness, he’d learned to exist. Not to live.

Until she appeared. Reina hadn’t stormed his life. She had infiltrated him slowly—a smile here, a moment there, until he found her occupying territory he’d sworn would remain forever empty. He’d resisted with everything he had, choking on guilt whenever Sera’s ghost whispered accusations from the shadows of his mind.

Yet every day without her became its own kind of torment. Her smile, and how it softened the rough edges of his world. The scent of sugar that clung to her skin, and the heat that radiated from her. The way his name sounded in her mouth. Without meaning to, he’d begun orbiting her back, saying yes when no had been his only language. Following her lead, watching minutes stretch into hours he couldn’t spare. He’d walled himself away from this world, brick by brick, and still she found a way in, even as the ghosts of his past hissed warnings, even as his own mind insisted he had no right to her warmth.

Sera had been moonlight—all silver edges and distant beauty. Reina was the sun—she burned. Their faces might echo each other, but where one had been cool, the other was heat.

She wasn’t Sera. She was Reina.

Gravity released him silently to the floor, his boots settling behind the horde. The infected swarmed the clothing storefront—its windows decorated with faded “Happy New Year 2012” banners—their bodies crashing against the metal security gate in a mindless rhythm.

Blood caught his eye first. A dark, wet trail smeared across the tile leading toward the entrance. He waved his hand. The infected lost their purchase to the earth, their bodies suddenly untethered before being violently propelled outward. They collided with concrete and steel, wet sounds of rupture filling the air as limbs twisted at impossible angles.

Through the mangled entrance, he found her at last. Reina’s body had collapsed against the wall, her pallor winter moonlight, chin resting on her chest as though she’d simply paused to rest.

The gates vanished in a second—metal bending, glass exploding as invisible hands crushed them. Before the first shard hit the ground, he was already inside.

“Reina?!”

Her chest lifted against the bloodied fabric of her shirt. Just once. Just barely. A flutter of life so faint he might have imagined it. Her head lolled sideways, chin rising just enough to show she still lived. Her eyes were pools of shadow, struggling to focus. The corner of her mouth twitched upward.

“Ren… I messed up…”

He caught every detail at once—red painting her chin, dark fingerprints where she’d clutched herself, purple shadows blooming beneath torn fabric, and there, at her center, a perfect, ugly hole where life was pouring out.

“Don’t talk,” he said, voice cracking. He thrust his hand forward, fingers quivering above the ragged opening in her flesh. Power answered his desperate call, flowing through him. The air wavered and distorted around his palm as the wound began to obey—torn edges creeping toward one another, tissue rebuilding itself molecule by molecule. “Stay with me,” he choked out.

Air rushed in and out of his lungs in shallow bursts. Moisture gathered at his hairline, one droplet breaking free to trace a path down the curve of his face. Inside his skull, a single thought crashed against itself.

Not again.

Not again.

Not again.

Not again.

Not again.

Not again.

Something brushed his skin—her fingertips, impossibly gentle, coming to rest against his jaw. The contact pulled him back. “Why so grim?” Words. She was forming words. His power knit her flesh together, cell by cell, the wound yielding to his desperate command. “That look doesn’t suit you.”

“This? Come on. This is just my face. You know that.”

She huffed a breath that might’ve been a laugh. The color returned to her face. Dawn breaking across winter fields. Her heartbeat steadied, each pulse a defiance against death itself. His mind raced ahead, the route out, the others waiting.

“My sister… is she safe?”

The lie came easily. “She’s safe. She’s waiting for you.” He leaned closer. “Hey. Hey! Look at me. Stay with me.”

The wound bled again, refusing his power. A violent spasm rocked her body. Her mouth opened in a wet gasp as crimson bubbled past her lips, streaming from the ragged wound beneath his palm. It splashed his face.

A sound tore from his throat. He forced more power through his palm—dangerous amounts, whatever he had left to give—into her failing body. The wound remained. Time had run out. Just as it always did, slipping through his fingers, no matter how tightly he tried to hold on. He was too late. He was always a little too late.

Her fingers trailed down his forearm, leaving warmth that faded with each inch. “Promise me… you’ll keep her safe…” The blue of her eyes clouded.

“Wait,” he said. Wait.

Please wait—

Don’t go.

Don’t—

Her fingers slid from his palm. The light dimmed to nothing.

Sometimes the world contracts until there’s nowhere left to run. The beast that’s been stalking you is suddenly everywhere at once, its breath hot on your neck, teeth gleaming, claws already piercing skin. The walls press inward. Your lungs forget their purpose, throat closing as if invisible hands were squeezing, squeezing, squeezing.

He had known that feeling before.

It didn’t make it any easier.

Reina…?

He gathered her against him. Saltwater stung his eyes, the corners dissolving into watercolor smears.

It doesn’t matter anymore.

What happens to me. What happens after. His eyelids lifted to reveal his own face fractured across the broken glass of the storefront. Her blood streaked down his cheek. From within the shattered mirror-image of himself, an unnatural glow leaked from his irises. I’ve nothing left.

She no longer weighed anything in his arms. Her body drifted upward, suspended before him. Her face composed in death’s perfect mimicry of sleep. Thin lines etched themselves outward from where he stood, a web of destruction racing through tile and concrete. The building itself seemed to cry out, its joints failing as walls began to separate at their seams.

His feet abandoned the earth as dust motes and fragments of debris began to spiral around him. The infected lifted from the floor as if something were pulling them up by a rope. Furniture, glass, portions of ceiling and wall breaking away, all drawn inexorably toward some cruel focal point hovering above.

Mizuhana Mall gave voice to its own destruction. Steel twisted with shrieks that mimicked human agony. Support beams wrenched free with deep, resonant moans. Whole segments of the building rose, crumbling into suspended ruins. Countless bodies, specks against the enormity of devastation, hung in the storm of circling debris.

Suspended in the eye, Ren gazed at the fractured landscape—a world so familiar, yet so alien—and felt a bitter, hollow thought settle in his chest.

It felt the same way about him.