Rebirth12 min read
Buy the Top Floor, Trust Your Wife
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I remember saying it like a dare.
"Buy the top floor. Trust your wife," Estrella said, eyes bright like she had some secret.
"Buy the top floor?" I laughed. "Are you serious?"
"Yes. Top floor comes with the roof terrace," she said. "We could grow things up there. We could — I don't know — be safe."
I argued. I listed heat problems, roof leaks, ladder troubles. I listed everything I could think of against the top floor.
Then everything happened the way I'd already lived it once, and I had ten days to change it.
"Stop joking," I told her. "You can't be back already."
Estrella touched my forehead like she always did when I was overdramatic. "Not April Fools?"
"Of course not."
"Good," she said, and then she pushed open the car door.
"Where are you going?" I called.
She didn't look back. "I'm renting the place across the hall. We'll make the entire terrace ours. I don't want to die again, Noah."
I remember the way the words landed inside me: die again. The memory of her falling, the teeth, the wet sound… it tightened my throat.
I sank down in the driver's seat and told her everything. I told her the dates, the warning signs, the videos I'd seen. I told her I'd woken up back on January 21, 2035, with ten days until the outbreak that had taken everything.
She listened the way she always did—quiet, precise—and then she moved like someone who already had a plan.
"Lock the contract," she said. "If you can get the place, we will have a roof. If we have a roof and a roof terrace, we have choices."
By afternoon the second apartment was ours. Estrella had the agent smiling at her like she was spending someone else's money. She came back holding a single page of contract paper.
"Done. They manage it. Pay one month, get the key," she said.
I called my parents.
"Hey, Dad," I said. I watched Estrella fill the car with boxes behind me.
"Hey!" Geoffrey said on the phone. "Don't call and interrupt my chess game. I'm about to take your grandfather's rook."
"Dad, I need you to listen. This is going to sound insane, but—"
"Son, my boy... will you stop right there? You read too many novels. If you say 'reborn' one more time I'm going to hang up."
"Please—"
"Of course I believe you. Who else am I supposed to believe—some soap opera? Your mother is finishing dumplings, hang on."
Geoffrey's voice was both mockery and warmth. He believed me the only way fathers believe children: a wink and then action. It felt like an old trick. Then he agreed to consider coming, and I felt luck for the first time since the dream-waking.
Estrella made lists.
"Water, extra. Food. Medicine," she read aloud as she wrote on her tablet. "Five-liter bottles, rice, canned meat. Also pillows, tools, a radio."
"This again with the radio?" I said.
"Your great-grandfather used one. Maybe it's goofy, but it's not a toy."
She organized supplies like a captain organizes a lifeboat. She negotiated with a supermarket under the pretense of a corporate party and reserved trucks of goods. She called the warehouse and said, "Deliver tomorrow afternoon, we will pay double if you must."
"I hate you when you make sense," I said.
"You hate me when I make mistake too," she said with a grin, and then she steamed a fish so bad it still managed to be dinner because it was ours.
We put chains on the windows—three-layer glass, metal barriers, soundproof curtains. I booked five solar panels for the terrace without asking whether they were overpriced. The words "this time I will not be helpless" sat between us like a vow. I changed the main door, fortified it, and installed makeshift spears out of broom handles and bamboo poles.
Renovation men called me a madman. "Boss, we will do this in five days," Fisher Werner promised, seeing me like a man with cash.
"Good," I said. "Five days."
At first the news underplayed everything. An escaped patient here, a scare there. Three days later there were videos on every app: people attacking other people in streets, bitten faces, a sound that shouldn't be human repeating.
"This looks like rabies," a news chyron read. "Officials: is under control."
That phrase died on the third day.
On the seventh day there were videos of the guard at our gate being pulled into the crowd. Estrella grabbed my sleeve, eyes gone wide.
"I can hear them," she whispered.
We drew the curtains. I put the curtains up and sealed them, and we watched the building below with a terrible precision. People ran then fell. The world thickened into a single thought: survive.
We had enough for a month, then more, then I found ways to top it up. Estrella took to the supermarket like it was a game she had to win. She bought frozen dumplings, rice, medical supplies.
"What about the radio?" I asked again.
"I'll tell you later why," she said.
When the power finally cut on Day Fourteen, the solar panels took a breath and kept us alive because she had bought them. I felt grateful and weak in equal parts.
We were not alone in the building—Camilla Booker on the first floor watched us with a suspicion softened by gratitude. Her grandson, Tomas Duke, looked at Estrella like she was a friend from school. I thought of the woman who had once given us hot food before the world went quiet and felt guilty that I'd almost forgotten her.
"We'll help," Estrella told them. "If you need, come to our door."
"It's our turn to be useful now," I said.
"Don't say things like that," she scolded, but she meant it, too.
For a while we survived in a small bubble. I called my parents every day until, one morning, the connection failed. The quiet that fell after the signal died felt like a hand closing over my throat.
We had security. We had food. We had plans. But when the armed strangers finally arrived, it was a shock like sunlight after underground dark: a hope that felt like a betrayal if it failed.
On the day firecrackers rang in the stairwell, I learned how fragile preparedness could be.
"Who would set off fireworks now?" Estrella asked, tense.
"An idiot," I said.
Then we heard screams, and shouts from below. A man, driven like a moth to noise, had set off fireworks inside the stairwell. The firework's echo drew the hungry toward the sound like iron to a magnet. People ran upstairs—some calling for help, some pushing, some panicked. One of them slammed at our door.
"Open! Please, just open!"
I stared at the locked bolt.
"Please! There's Mercedes keys! We will give you money!"
"I told you not to open," Estrella said.
"Please!" the voice begged again.
Then there were sounds. A tearing, a gurgle. The sound of lives ending for the sake of impulsive hope. Men calling to us had become a baited trap.
We did not open. We barricaded.
When the pounding subsided, the stairs were a river of blood.
We watched with the drone and we watched the building, and we vowed never to be caught unprepared.
"Burn him if you need to," Estrella said once the hysteria eased, not a command, but an old movie's advice tucked in her voice. "But I haven't become an arsonist."
We had neighbors who did terrible things for reasons thin as paper—greed, fear, panic. Some lied to get us to open doors. Others lit firecrackers to feel normal. One man—Jorge Cobb—was careless with incendiary explosives in the stairwell. He used the Chinese New Year as an excuse to scatter fire and sound for what he called "spirit-lifting," and the sound invited death.
His face was the kind that had never felt consequence before. He had been loud, a braggart, the one who sold novelty at the corner store. He thought drama was a game. When the building's stairwell filled with groans and shrieks, he tried to bargain, promising cars and money for shelter. When the doors stayed closed, he shouted at us for being selfish.
I remember the day he was punished. It was public, and it was not a legal procedure—it was the raw, old-fashioned justice of the people.
"Open this door!" he shouted once, still loud. "You think you're better than us? My wife needs help!"
We had enough food. We had barricades. We had a radio with a tattered instruction manual. We had made choices. But when Jorge's negligence killed three people on our floor, the building's anger focused like a blade.
We did not put him in the street—there was no law left to carry out formalities. We took his loud voice and we made the world see what the noise had done.
It began at dawn. The stairwell filled with residents who had not been heard from in weeks: Camilla Booker's hands shaking as she clutched Tomas; the two old men who had learned how to call animals different names; even children dragged by towel-blanket ropes held by mothers with hollow eyes.
"Why did you do it?" a voice said from the crowd—a father's voice that had no tremor.
"Why did you bring fireworks inside when everyone is hiding?" someone else said.
Jorge stood on the landing like a small king on his broken throne. "I thought—" he began.
"You thought?" Camilla said, voice brittle as thin glass. "You 'thought' what? That your noise would be a foolproof plan? That the sound would chase away death?"
Jorge's mouth moved. He made gestures as if gathering excuses into a coat.
"He had cigarettes," a woman from the sixth floor said. "He had a shop. He sold things. He thought he could show courage by being loud."
The building's faces closed around him. The stairwell's air smelled of wet cardboard and boiled coffee. We had no law enforcement. We had hunger, fear, and the raw power of chosen consequence.
"Do you understand that three people are dead because of a spark and a sound?" Estrella said. She was quiet. Her hands were steady. She had the air of a woman measuring and never letting herself be fooled by rationale again.
Jorge tried to step forward. "I didn't mean—"
"You didn't mean to feed their mouths with the last breaths," said an old man—a neighbor who had carried a stretcher two blocks to fetch help the first week.
"You're not the only one who made dumb choices," Jorge tried, and for the first time I saw the beginnings of panic. He looked smaller. His bravado cracked, and his eyes were suddenly like a child's.
"We don't have prisons," I said. "We have community. We will do what we must so the same mistake is never made twice."
They made him stand in the main corridor, under the cracked fluorescent lamp that still hummed. They took his keys, the tiny tokens of the life he had thought transferable—the things he had promised for help—and distributed his small savings to the families of the three dead. They took his firecracker crackers and lined them on a plastic tray.
"Look at him," Tomas said. "This was his doing."
People took out phones where they'd learned to record anything that shocked them. Someone pushed a chair under Jorge's feet and made him stand on it like a failed leader on a platform. They told him to describe where he had put the fireworks, to show where the matches came from, to show every part of his small planning. When he stammered, when he tried to deny the scale of his impact, they read messages from neighbors who'd warned him. They played a short clip of the stairwell on repeat: the popping, the bright flame, then a body sliding.
"You see these faces?" a mother said, showing a photo of the three who had died—one young man who had tried to carry a child, one woman who had lost her step, and a father with raw knuckles from pounding on doors. The building's silence pressed on Jorge.
His voice changed. "I didn't know they would—"
"You didn't take care," Estrella said. "You gambled with lives so you could feel like a man for three minutes."
There was a small rush of hands. People spat words like salt. The punishment was not a beating—it was something more corrosive to a man like Jorge. They took his right to trade in the building: his shop's small inventory was donated to reimburse the relatives. They posted his image on the communal sheet taped to the elevator wall: "No Trust. Reckless."
Then they sat him in a chair in the corridor and made him listen—listen to the accounts of the dead. They asked him to write the names of the people he had harmed, to spell them out on paper. While he wrote, Camilla walked up and steadied his hand with trembling fingers. "Write it down," she said. "Say their names. Keep them with you. Never forget them."
The crowd watched him wilt. He shifted from denial to pleading. "Please," he said. "Forgive me. I'll do anything."
"Then do it," the mother said. "Do the actual anything. You will work every day on the roof, for free. You will deliver water to those who cannot leave. You will mend what you've broken. You will teach your children not to hold noise as a game."
He agreed. He had no choice.
The real punishment happened in the days that followed. The building's trust evaporated. When he tried to hand out a spare can of food, neighbors turned away. Children would not take sweets he offered. A small life—measured in the ability to be accepted—vanished like smoke.
At first Jorge fumed. "You can't treat me like this!" he would shout.
"You're right. We can," Camilla would say, in that same thin voice. "Because you taught us something: the sound of fireworks is the sound of death."
Then he collapsed. Not from a blow, but from the weight of empty streets. He learned humiliation as a daily diet. He learned to do small, humble labor under everyone's watch. He learned to carry buckets and to scrub where the dead had spilled their lives.
It felt like justice. The people around him were merciful but unforgetting. They forgave only when he could prove that he was no longer the man who thought a noise was a party. He never regained the light in his eyes that said he could bargain life away for cheap theatrics.
"I had to work every sun for seven weeks," he told me once, softer. "You never know what it's like to live with the sound."
"Yes," I said. "We do now."
What I liked about the way justice happened was how it involved everyone. It wasn't a display of rage alone; it involved names, remembering, doing the work to repair what had been broken. The crowd did not celebrate his fall. They made him into something smaller and then watched him grow again slowly by doing what he'd stolen: protecting others. The punishment had the shape of a teaching.
We survived, somehow. We learned to fight and to hide, and we learned to be precise with mercy.
"Why won't the broadcast tell us everything?" Estrella asked the first time the old radio crackled and an official voice said, "We have established a base in B City. Travel with caution."
"They think we can go," I said.
We didn't go.
We had food. We had solar power. We had each other. The world beyond the cardboard barricades looked like a land of pitfalls—snowstorms, roving mobs, the unpredictable cruelty of others. The radio said there was a safe city. Estella and I sat on the terrace and argued for an hour before deciding to stay. It was a choice like all others: a risk measured in what we already had.
The winter turned colder than I'd remembered. Our little greenhouse of plastic bowed under snow and collapsed. The sprouts I'd babysat and the leaves we'd hoped would feed us later crumpled. I cursed. Estella took the shovels and turned the soil, and by the time the sun came back we had another thin set of seedlings.
We learned to be creative with equipment. We used the drone to lure the zombies away, a tactic that saved us once when the stairwell was full. I launched the little camera craft down the stairwell and watched the pack of shambling figures follow the machine until a wall ate our drone and gravity tore a few of them out of the building. It was ugly and effective.
We scavenged. We trained using the ridiculous video file Estella joked about—"Grandpa's fight club"—a zipped bundle of terrible tutorials and a text called "Criminal Law" that had been among my late-grandfather's old files. It made a joke of survival training, but it worked. We practiced camp-fighting, watched form after form, and learned to hit where it counted. Estella, who had been a terrible cook, became good enough for us to feast without disgust.
When the official rescue came, it arrived with drones and flags and the precise voice of orders. Soldiers came into our street and the scene was a relief like waking from long fever: men in uniforms, helmets, quiet, not perfect, but very human.
"You're safe," one of them said to us.
We walked out of the building with other families. The street was full of people whose faces had grown old and young at once—from grief, from loss, from the work of staying alive. I saw Camilla and Tomas, and they smiled like the light had returned. I saw Geoffrey and Kathy—my parents—step out of a truck a little frayed but laughing as they always did.
"Look at you two," my father said when he hugged me. "You survived. Again."
"I didn't do it alone," I said. "Estrella didn't let me."
She pressed her head to mine the way she always did. The orange cat we had taken in stretched in her arms and yawned. "Meow," it said, as if that was enough.
After the vaccine drops and the cleanups and the small celebrations, we stayed together and rebuilt. We planted again. We repaired the stairwell and the memory of the three dead became a reminder taped to the wall like instructions: quiet at night, no fireworks, no loud toys.
"Promise me one thing," Estella said one evening, and this time there was no sweeping vow or future-tense drama. "Don't ever let me do bubbles in the stairwell again."
"Weird things happen when you say 'promise,'" I said.
She laughed and kissed me like she'd done since we were kids in the bank's housing compound. It was simple and slow and human.
Years later we would tell the story of the fireworks and the man who had been punished not to extol punishment, but to show what a community could do with consequence. People would point at the name on the communal sheet taped near the elevator and say, "Remember."
I would nod and say, "Yes."
And the orange cat would stretch and purr.
That last winter, I stood on the roof with Estella. The snow had finally melted, and the small greenhouse had new leaves. The radio—our old relic—had stopped crackling news and had become a holder for postcards. A drone buzzed in the distance, redundant now.
"Do you ever regret you made me buy the top floor?" she asked, fingers laced with mine.
"No," I said. "I don't think I would survive without your plans."
She smiled. "Neither would I without your bad jokes."
We leaned into the sun then, and the orange cat crawled between our knees and purred. The building below us held its scars and its names, but it buzzed with life and with the quiet habit of people who had learned to be careful with noise and with each other.
"Enough fireworks," I said.
"No more," Estella agreed.
The drone dipped to deliver a small package—an official drop—and for a second the city looked like it could be put back together.
The orange cat opened its eyes, stretched a paw out, and meowed like someone announcing tea.
"Hey," Estella said. "That's the sound of home."
"Yeah," I said. "That, and the sound of the terrace wind."
We sat there until the light vanished and the stars came out like tiny promises.
The End
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