Survival/Apocalypse18 min read
"I kicked the rusted door, and the world shouted back"
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I kicked the rusted door open and the house answered with a long, tired groan.
"I have to go," I told the dark hallway, breathing loud in my own ears.
The floorboards under my sneakers creaked like old bones. I shoved my shoulder into a closet door and dug through the jackets.
"I need a bigger bag," I said, hoarding scarves and a broken raincoat into a worn backpack.
A window glass broke three rooms away. Something heavy hit the kitchen glass.
"Stay calm," I said, and the voice sounded small in my throat.
I found a med kit, two cans, a flashlight with no batteries, a screwdriver, and a tiny travel sewing kit.
"This is better than nothing," I whispered.
Outside the street was a mess of cars, doors swinging, and the cold of early spring biting my ankles.
"I left too late," I said, stepping over a child's scooter.
A dog—rotted and toothy—lurched out and snapped at my calf. Hot pain flared and I fell.
"Shit!" I shouted, slapping my leg.
I crawled under a low fence and pulled myself through.
"Run, Kinsley," I told myself. "Just run."
I found a small yard with a sagging shed and climbed in through a kitchen window.
"Who left this here?" I muttered as I stuffed a steel pot, a roll of duct tape, and a camping stove into the pack.
My leg throbbed. Blood on my sock felt unreal.
"I need to clean this," I said, using antiseptic from the med kit.
The house next door had a poster of a fantasy game on the wall and a bookshelf full of dusty books. I pried a hammer free and crammed a folding knife into my pocket.
"Better than nothing," I said, tasting iron on my lips.
I listened. Close by there were shuffles and a heavy drag—zombie sounds.
"Time to go," I said, and slid out a window.
I moved along backyards, counting fences, listening for the heavy shuffles. My watch said 6:04.
"I have to get west," I said, remembering a map I had once seen in the city's old memory.
At a corner house I found a bicycle. The chain was rusted, but it rolled enough.
"I can't carry everything," I told the bike and myself. "I'll come back if I live."
A scrap of curtain tore under my fingers. I took three nails and a strip of cloth.
"This will do for bandages," I said.
At a small convenience store the door hangers clinked. A man in a dark coat was already there, but not breathing.
"Jesus," I said and took a can of orange soda left on the top shelf. "Sorry."
A window smashed and the air smelled like old metal and old fire.
"I can't stop sniffing this world," I told the empty street.
I kept moving west. The city's center was a torn-out mouth. Cars were piled. A crowd of corpses milled near a burnt bus stop. I hugged walls and slid between wrecks.
"If I make the highway I can get out of the city," I told my empty hands.
At noon I found a camping site tucked into some trees beside a solar truck. A big tent had been left. A fox sat near a cooler and watched me, curious and thin.
"You're alive," I said to the animal and the world. "Good."
Inside the tent there were preserves, a battered alcohol stove, and a few blankets.
"This is luck," I said, ripping open a can of tuna and heating it.
I ate with my hands and thought about the bite on my leg. It had stung then gone numb.
"Don't get infections," I told myself, as if I could bargain with a wound.
That night I stacked tents into a fence and tried to sleep. My system spoke like a low static in my skull.
"—System initializing," it hummed.
I sat bolt upright. "Who said that?" My voice made the canvas shiver.
"System?" I asked, heart pounding.
"—Hello, host," the voice buzzed. "Diagnostics online. Energy low."
"Do I have a system?" I whispered. "Are you the thing they write about in the stories?"
"—Partial. Core damaged. Functions limited," it said. "Choose rebirth point."
I laughed before I could stop myself. "Choose what?"
"—Options: grocery, garage, library, church, cemetery, zoo, gift shop, golf course," it listed with a dry beep.
"That's… oddly specific," I said.
"—Select now or default random."
"No way," I said and ducked outside, hugging my knees. "Systems don't exist. Not here."
But I was tired and the cold was deep. I dozed with the wind whispering through the tent walls.
Later the tent shook. Dogs—zombie dogs—raced the camp and tore through the outer tent wall. I fought, bleeding, fingers clawing at teeth and fur. A strong one tore my leg worse. I tasted copper.
"I am done," I said out loud as consciousness slid away.
White light.
I opened my eyes to black, then words flashing in my head like a bad neon sign.
"Protection protocol active," the voice droned. "System revival sequence—partial."
"Is this hell?" I asked aloud.
"—Salvage successful. Select rebirth spot," the system said.
It listed the same spots. I chose "grocery" because my hands wanted cans and bandages.
"—Time freeze ability granted," it said.
My chest swelled. "Time freeze?" I whispered.
"—Pause allows status inspection, not movement. Cannot pause under direct attack."
A small mercy. I burst into the grocery store I had chosen and saw my hands full of food as if I had never left. But the store had a back door.
"Now practice," the system said. "Kill, gain points."
"Points?" The word sounded cheap and heavy. "What are they for?"
"—Exchange for items, classes, special modes. Earn points by survival."
I let out a half-laugh, half-sob. "Fine. Give me anything that helps."
"—Time freeze, one-hour limit, recharge on rest."
It gave little else. The voice went quiet again. I had to move. I took canned goods, a first-aid bottle, a flashlight that still had half a battery. I hid the best cans under a shelf.
Outside a police zombie lurched by. I froze, heart in my throat, then remembered the time-stop. I touched the center of my chest and felt nothing; my fingers felt normal; the world pulsed.
I tried the time pause.
"Pause!" I breathed.
The world hiccuped. A crow froze mid-flap. Dust hung in the sunlight like a film. I ran my fingers along the tins and counted.
"This is new," I breathed.
I could not move in pause, but I could look. It let me inspect one can, one bandage at a time. It was not a universal second chance, but a lens. It made me careful.
I spent days learning to fish with the pause, to scout doorways, to slip with no sound. Each corpse I removed, each small victory, gave me points in a grind that felt both cruel and fair.
"Three points," the system said once after I killed a lone scavenging corpse with a blunt pipe. The sound of the number was like a coin drop.
"How many points for a soldier?" I asked during a long night.
"—Soldier class yields more. Be careful."
The small town I found after two weeks had a military depot on the edge. It was a hulking thing, broken walls and a gate that still hung like an open jaw. Sheep bones lay along the perimeter. The town itself had a grocery, a gas station, and a small hospital. It smelled of bleach and old blood.
"You think you can clear it?" I asked my reflection in a shop window. I had taught myself to steel my throat. "We can try."
"—Caution recommended," the system said, its beep softer now.
I baited the ghouls in small waves. "Come on, come on," I whispered as I slammed a metal bucket and led one or two to a prepared coup: a pile of broken shelves and a heavy wrench. It took hours, patience, and boldness, but the bodies were falling.
"Two points," the voice said, meek and bright.
The soldier-zombies came last. They wore old plate and had helmets that half covered hollowed eyes. They were slow but hard to kill. I took one down after circling it for twenty minutes, luring it over a row of crates so it tripped. I beat it with a forged wooden pole until the armor split and it crumpled.
"This one dropped a good kit," I told myself, ripping open a rucksack. Inside: an M16 with a few magazines, a combat knife, a sealed pack of MREs.
"Don't mess up," I said, feeling the weight of the rifle like a new limb.
From that day, things changed. Firearms were different. My system had been small before, but points started to add up. I kept a ledger in my head: kills, food, water, bandages. I was collecting safety like a new habit.
"You're getting better," the system said once, when I had finished sewing my leg with crude stitches and a strip of cloth. "—New function unlocked: tactical overview."
"What's that?" I asked.
"—Passive awareness. Nearby threats highlighted when idle."
It made me feel less alone. It made the night less a knife.
Weeks blurred into a rhythm of hunt, sleep, loot. I cleared that town of its soldiers, worked the depot, and turned a small warehouse into a fortress. I dug trenches, stacked crates, and trained traps with nails and boards. I turned a small office into a storage closet for the food I had stolen from kitchens and grocery shelves.
"One year of canned food," I said once, leaning against a stack of MRE boxes. "I swear, I'm not going to waste this."
"You are hoarding," the system said like an old friend. "—Scavenge success increases point income."
I laughed then, a tired sound. "Fine. Then let me be a rich scavenger."
People never came. The town was quiet apart from the noises of the dead outside the walls. Sometimes I shouted into the square. "Hello! Anyone out there? I'm not alone!"
No one answered. Only a crow made noise.
I learned to listen to the depot. The depot had guns in a locked room, and a stair down to an armory. I picked lock after lock with a hairpin and a small crowbar I had reshaped. The armory had M16s, boxes of five-five-six ammo, a mounted Browning heavy machine gun on a failing frame, and one Barrett .50 with a dirt-smudged case next to it.
"Jackpot," I breathed, not out loud.
I made plans. I would not be the one to simply die in the doorway. I turned the armory into a storehouse. I built a concealed bunker under a floor stack and hid what I could. The system rewarded me with small perks—one more pause second, an extra med kit in a run, better red dot sight calibration.
Then the day came when I heard the roar of engines and a blast smashed the southern wall.
"What the—?" I said, grabbing my rifle.
A cloud of burning smell rolled over the depot. I saw a wall of dead crowd like a tide leaning toward the street. Something had detonated out by the south gate. The soldiers on the other side—the ones that had been crawling out—suddenly moved in a new heartless way. The alarm I had not known how to fix screamed and I was surrounded by pressing bodies.
"Points," the system hissed. "—High density event. Earn more."
"Not helpful," I shouted while looping a strap over my shoulder and running to the armory's closet for more mags.
I shot and shot. Bullets ate the air. The sound filled the warehouse like a second storm. For a while the guns were my answers. They fell in numbers and I counted each groan as a point. I reloaded and ran like a ghost around corners, slamming big doors shut after waves of them.
It grew late and my arms shook. I had cut through at least a dozen. My rifle was hot. The machine gun I had mounted stuttered and fed a chain of empty casings like a mechanical rain. I thought I could hold it. I thought the points would buy me more time.
Then the monsters changed. A hulking thing, draped in melted armor, punched through the gate and slumped in, a creature that moved heavy as a wrecking ball—Kevlar fused to skin. A spray of bright acid spat from a broken tank on its back. It walked like a tank and smelled like rusted teeth.
"That one will kill you," the system said, every word clipped like a warning.
"I know," I said to the muzzle light. I fired and the rounds dotted its hide, but it barely staggered. I threw grenades. They burst and left more angry flame.
I ran out of magazines. I ran into a corridor and tried to lock a door, but the monster hit the frame and it came down like paper. I felt claws on my shoulder. Pain, as real as the ground itself. I am not graceful. I screamed once, a clean sound, and woke in white light.
"Points adjusted," the system said.
I had died. Again.
"Redeem?" it asked. "You have points."
I had few. My ledger was emptying into new wounds: the depot had been a goldmine but not a fortress yet. I chose a random card because my chest felt raw and I wanted change.
"—Random card: field medic," the system said.
I woke in a bunker that smelled of oil and hot metal, in a set of armored clothes that fit like they were waiting for me. My hands were callused and steady. I had a new skill: "Field Medicine." My system hummed steady.
"New world," it said. "Full: military facility. Objective: survive, protect generator."
A new map flashed in my head. There was a generator in the center that had to be kept running. A city was seeded around it. The system gave me a countdown to survive for a week. Points would multiply.
"Okay," I said, because I always said yes.
But anything the system gave, it could also take. The next world was foreign. Instead of zombies, plants moved like low branches, and strange mobile machines thudded in the gravel. My hands were used to cutting flesh; now they cut vines that bled sticky sap. I learned the pace like new math.
Once, while defending the generator, a plant spike jabbed my thigh and I slumped. Two vine-bats tore toward me. I used medics' tricks—tourniquets, quick saline, pressure points—and lived. The system rewarded me with five points this time.
I kept falling, kept learning. I died again, twice, in quick, embarrassing ways: once suffocated by spores because a breeze brought them through a half-closed vent; once crushed under a door I thought I had bolted.
Each death bled points and gave me new options to spend them. I learned the system's worst rule: death is never free; it costs something in exchange for new knowledge. Repeated failure deadened me sometimes and taught me other times.
"Learn from pain," I told myself aloud during the quiet shifts between worlds.
After three deaths and a hundred small, careful victories, I had enough points to buy the "Defense Mode" card the system offered at a discount once. It was a mode that would, temporarily, let me create a mini-safe zone—walls and traps could be erected automatically around a chosen building. It cost fifty points. I bought it.
"Activate," I commanded.
The ground hummed. Rubber-and-metal walls sprouted like a bad dream around the depot's yard. A generator coughed and then sang. Lights came on in a ring. The system said: "—Mode enabled. Duration: forty-eight hours. Points multiplier active."
I slept beneath stacked crates that night and dreamed of an old life which included office chairs and bad coffee. Morning came with a new kind of quiet. My "Defense Mode" kept the worst off the yard and allowed me to work. I dug deeper into the depot, and found rooms I had not noticed: a small engineering lab, a locked crate with smoke grenades and signal flares, and an old, dust-slick manual on remote detonators. I hid these in a dry locker.
One day while I was patching the generator, I heard a voice over a radio—faint, angry, human.
"This is Sergeant Alder," a male voice said. "Is anyone alive at Depot Eight?"
I froze, every hair on my arms standing up. Sergeant Alder was a name. A voice was proof.
"Hello!" I called into the radio, fingers trembling.
"Who's there? Identify!"
"Kinsley," I said. The name felt like a foreign coin. "I— I'm at the main yard. I have a working generator. I need help."
"Hold position," the voice said. "We're on route. Mark your position with flares."
"Wait!" I cried. "There are—"
Static. Then: "Hold. Don't fire unless they fire on you. Move to coordinates when we arrive."
I set a flare and watched the smoke curl up like hope. Hours dragged. I checked the locks five times. I loaded magazines. I sang stupid songs in my head to keep the panic down.
Dust and then the sound of trucks. Real, heavy trucks, and men who still felt military in the way they held their shoulders. A four-man team climbed down and moved like they knew how to sweep a perimeter.
"You're Kinsley?" the sergeant asked first, wiping sweat from a face not yet turned to rot.
"Yes," I said. "I was holding this place."
He looked me up and down. His eyes were tired. "You kept it running?" he asked.
"A few generators," I said. "I kept the food in the bunker."
"Good work. You had us on the radio about three days ago. We couldn't make it then."
"Then... you're real," I said, letting a laugh out that was part cry.
"You can call us luck," he said. "Or you can call us stubborn. Either way, get out of that yard when we tell you to."
They worked fast, like insects that know their roles. They shoved me into a rusty Humvee and told me to breathe as they drove me out of the depot in a tight convoy.
"Where are we going?" I asked.
"Fort Haven," Sergeant Alder said. "Small base. Survivors. We take in people who can pull weight."
I felt ridiculous and grateful. I wanted to say more—about the system, about the cards, about the nights—but the convoy's radio was alive with static and commands. The world beyond our trucks looked burned and raw, but it was the first time I had seen a dozen people moving without the dead between them.
Fort Haven was a ring of old shipping containers and a muddy earthwork with solar panels on a watchtower. Men and women looked up when we rolled in. Children—alive and real—peered from behind crates.
"Welcome," Sergeant Alder said to me, in front of everyone. "We owe you a watch. You kept a generator alive, you kept food from rotting. That matters."
"Thank you," I said. My voice was small and polite. I felt like a liar holding a card of hidden rules inside my head.
They gave me a place near the generator and a cot. The system hummed, content in the background. I started to feel like I could belong. I patched wounds from old fights and traded sewing tips for coffee grounds. I found myself teaching a young mechanic how to use a field dressing.
"You're good with steady hands," she said.
"You make me tea and I teach you stitches," I bargained.
They introduced me to a list of tasks, and for once my days had a cadence that wasn't all danger and escape. I rationed our stores and repaired the solar rigs. Each small success fed the ledger of my mind.
On a late afternoon, while checking a water filter, a man came to the generator with a photo in a plastic sleeve.
"Found this," he said, handing it to Sergeant Alder.
It was a photo of a woman with a young boy. Bright smiles, sun on their hair.
"That's Lieutenant Kline's sister," Alder said softly. "She went out with a team and never came back."
"Do you want me to help look?" I asked before I could think.
He looked at me the way you look at someone asking to step into a storm. "We will send a small team next dawn. If you want in, you're welcome."
It was the first time I felt a pull that was not about points or cards. I nodded.
"Good," he said.
The search took them along a river road and into skinned fields. I walked with a band of five. We picked through ruins and shouted names like prayers. When we found a shallow grave under a willow, with a small shoe on the dirt beside it, the whole team grew quiet.
"This was near where you kept the depot?" Alder asked, his jaw tight.
"Yes," I said. "I remember seeing a burned spot near a field."
We buried what we could and left a marker. In the quiet after, standing on a ridge while the sun sank, Sergeant Alder asked me, "Why did you go out alone?"
"Because no one else could," I said, too quick. "Because I had to."
He nodded without judgment. "We all had to, once."
Fort Haven became home for a while. It was not the depot, not my fortress, but it had people who ate with their hands and laughed like it was beating something back. I taught the kids how to suture a simple wound. I helped set up a small greenhouse. Slowly, I grew used to the weight of a human life again.
But the system is not like the weather. It waits. One night while I patched the generator, its voice came like a thought underwater.
"—Score tally available," it said. "—Fifty-one points."
"That's it?" I asked.
"—Two deaths reset bonus deducted. Points net: fifty-one."
I gritted my teeth. Fifty-one wasn't enough for most cards, but I had something that the system liked: consistency. I spent fifteen points on a "mechanics primer"—a small module of knowledge that let me understand the depot's battery bank more clearly.
I used the new knowledge to set up a charging station for radios. I taught people how to make a field incision and clean it correctly. My value grew. And with that, my life here gained a new kinship.
Months passed. We fortified the place. We farmed. We scrounged. We mourned. I learned to make syringes sterile with a pressure cooker, to knit fine stitches, and to park the Humvee under tarps that did not look like food to the eyes of a passing marauder.
Still, the system rattled its coins. It flashed a list of local "objectives" now and then when I paused in the dark. "Complete a salvage," it would suggest. "Rescue one survivor."
I did. Each time, points trickled in. I saved a boy with a broken arm, and the system rewarded me with twenty points because I had been at the depot, at the generator, and had made a net-positive survival decision.
Later, the system presented something new: an offer with a real cost but a rare payoff. "Extreme advancement: Secure military armory permanently," it read. The price was high—three hundred points.
"Not possible," I told the air.
"—Alternate: Defensive boon for base for seventy-two hours. Cost: fifty points," it said.
I clicked and burned the fifty. The boon gave Fort Haven an automated external alarm and a two-day reinforcement of supply delivery from a nearby ally. The system had its own ways of changing fate.
On a bright morning after the boon took effect, we heard engines on the horizon. Trucks rolled up with crates and tired men who had been weeding the same map we had been planting. They were allies with a flag brand we did not know well. They came with supplies and trade goods and a man in a clean armor jacket who asked for Sergeant Alder.
"He's not here," we said, handing him coffee.
"May I see your medic?" he asked. He had a bandage on his forearm with a neat stitch work. He looked at me like someone who had read something he trusted.
I treated his arm and he watched my hands. When I finished, he told me a secret. "There's a map," he said quietly. "A big safe place. North. The axis of a surviving network. We have a route. We can move survivors there. We need someone to coordinate medical supply. We need someone like you."
I felt the room tilt. For the first time in months, my life offered a road out of small survival—maybe to a life that was about saving more than just my own skin. The system chimed faintly: "—Opportunity detected."
"How many points?" I asked, because the system had taught me to ask numbers like prayer.
"None," he said. "You ask for nothing. You come with us as a medic and you will have resources."
It was a different offer. No points required, only trust. I looked at the faces of people who had camped here for so long—the mechanic, the kids, Alder—and I felt my chest ache with loyalty.
"I can't leave you here alone," I said.
"You won't be leaving without a plan," Alder said. "We can take a security team. We can move the generator."
A week of planning ensued. We trained, checked radios, and packed. The system hummed, approving and silent. It had given me things and now it let me give things away.
When we left Fort Haven, the convoy was long and slow, but between the trucks and the hikers we were more than just a handful of people with canned food and hope. We had a plan, a mapped route that took us past old farms and across a low mountain range. We encountered pockets of dead and pockets of living.
During the journey, we camped in a cracked motel where, in a laundry room, I found an old hard drive with a half-dead battery that cycled a file showing a clean room with gases pumped for cultivation. It was a map to something like a lab. I tucked the drive into my jacket like a secret.
"What's that?" the young mechanic asked.
"A map," I said. "Maybe a place with tools."
"Good," she said.
The road ended at a place called the North Array: a cluster of warehouses that had been sealed and guarded by a small, fierce group of survivors who welcomed us for the value we brought. They fed us and offered work. The network was real. People traded clean water and shoes and lessons. Someone gave me a worn-out paperback I read in the nights between watch shifts: a dry story of a city that once had more lights.
Life was not perfect. Sometimes we raided, sometimes we buried. The system was always there, the little hum behind my frontal lobe. I could feel it like a shadow measure. I used the points sometimes, sliding them into small upgrades: "Auto-suture skill," "faster sterilization," "longer time pause by one second."
More importantly, I learned to give points away, to buy tools for people who had none. The system's logic bent when I bent toward others.
Years blurred. I stopped counting deaths. I started counting small victories: a greenhouse producing enough for twenty, a child's laughter brought back by a new toy, a battery bank fixed. These were points in a ledger no system could measure.
One morning I was alone in the main clinic, writing labels and counting pills, when the system offered me an option that made my throat tighten.
"—Special card: World Jump. Cost: 5 points," it said.
Just five points. Cheap.
"What's it do?" I asked.
"—Random new world. New rules. New role."
I looked around at the people who had become my family. I saw the kids and the weathered hands of those who had kept the engines running and thought about choice. The system had made a game of survival for me at first, but it had matured into a tool—for healing and for building. The thought of leaving prickled like an ache.
"I—" I started.
"Take it," the system urged and then, almost quietly, "or don't."
I pressed the command and felt the familiar white heat at the edge of my vision. I had used cards to grow, to buy time. I had used them to buy life. Now I chose chance.
The light crashed and the sound of my clinic dissolved into the smell of damp rock and the tinny scrape of a pickaxe.
I was cold in a new way. I opened my eyes and the system's text filled my head.
"—Random profession: miner," it said.
I was in a shaft that smelled of wet stone and old dust. The pick in my hands felt comfortable and honest—like a tool that had a job and expected nothing more. My boots were thick, my jacket heavy. Around me, men and women moved light but sure. They spoke in low tones, faces shaded with soot. One of them looked at me and grinned.
"You Kinsley?" she asked.
"Yes," I said. "I think so."
"Good," she said. "We don't have many medics down here, but we could use steady hands."
The system flickered: "—Advantages: steady hands bonus. —Disadvantages: isolation risk."
I breathed in the stone air. It smelled of iron and the echo of hammers. The miner handed me a lamp.
"You'll live by the lamp," she said.
I pressed the lamp to my chest and felt its small, steady light like a heart. I touched my own chest with a fingertip.
"Where's Fort Haven?" I asked, absurdly.
"What's that?" she laughed.
"Never mind," I said.
In the dark shaft I thought of all the things that had landed in my hands: a broken system, a cold world, a rifle and a scalpel, a child's laughter, an M16, a photo of a lost sister, a generator humming at midnight. The system had been a machine that handed me keys and asked for coins. I had spent its points and watched life grow. I had bought defense and taught stitches and watched the sun set over a small garden.
"Are you afraid?" the miner asked quietly, as we both leaned on our picks and the shaft hummed like a living thing.
"Terrified," I said. "And ready. And tired. And hungry. Mostly hungry."
She laughed and hit her knuckles on the rock, sending a small shower of dust into the light.
"Good. That will keep you alive."
I thought of the system's voice and the ledger of kills and points. I thought of the little girl I had taught stitches to, who now ran a small greenhouse that smelled like spring. I thought of the sergeant who had taught me how to listen for danger and how to be honest with people.
"I will make it matter," I said to the miner, and to the stone, and to the faded world I was carrying inside me.
"Then swing," she said. "We have a seam to find."
I slung the pick over my shoulder, knuckled my lamp, and met the rhythm of a place that moved by steady, honest labor. The system hummed, patient, in the back of my skull.
"—Session saved," it said.
"Good," I said. "Save often."
I swung.
The End
— Thank you for reading —