Rebirth15 min read
Second Chance: My Rival Saved Me Twice
ButterPicks14 views
I woke to the sound of a distant, animal-like cry and smelled old blood and dust. I was holding someone I hated and loved and could not name with any single word—Francisco Brandt. My body ached in places I couldn't explain. My back felt raw. My head buzzed with images like a broken projector.
"Stay with me," Francisco said, and his voice was a surprise—ragged, real. "Don't close your eyes."
"I—" I tried to breathe and failed. "What happened?"
The world I remembered had been shredded into two halves: the life before and the life that ate people. In the hospital that day, in the previous version of everything, people woke up wrong. Movies spilled into real streets. There were bones and teeth and a thirst that smelled like old meat.
"Move," Francisco hissed once we were outside the hospital doors. "Run!"
I watched as he pulled me, as he covered me, as he risked himself between my foolishness and the animals that were still, in some sick way, people. I watched him die for me.
"I am sorry," I thought, but thinking meant nothing as the teeth tore at hot skin. I remember his face, the way fear opened there for a single second—like a window on a man who never let fear out.
Then there was white.
When I opened my eyes, a phone shrilled in my ear. "Jin, we are done. We're breaking up," said the voice, not kind: clean and precise.
"Okay," I said without understanding. I hung up. My apartment looked like it had always looked—normal. I was alive. I was at my own kitchen table.
I tried to stand and found that my right hand still throbbed from a wound that shouldn't be there. I moved the sleeve and found that a black ring-shaped birthmark had vanished. Something else had vanished, too—some memory of emptiness having to die.
"Am I… back?" I muttered.
I didn't cry. I only laughed, a short, raw sound, and ran to the kitchen.
The knife slipped. The cut opened like a small red mouth. White light poured from that wound and then I was not in my kitchen but inside a space so bright and still it could be a dream. There was a wooden cabin, a pond the size of a small square, and nothing else but white nothing.
"Is this a pocket space?" I said aloud, because I had read too many books and now life was suddenly a book that had my name in the margins.
I learned the rules quickly because survival makes a person sharp. The mark on my palm—my family’s mark—was the key. The space was mine and it could grow. It had a little pond of clear water that tasted like the marrow in old bones had been washed clean. It hurt and healed me both. It made me stronger in ways books had promised and hospitals had not.
I almost laughed again, because after twenty-five girlfriends stolen and one death where Francisco and I had both been finished off, life moved like a joke I did not get to the punchline of.
Two days before the world would explode into something I had seen only on screens, I began to prepare. I filled my apartment with boxes I ordered over the phone, paid with a card I barely used. I had to avoid questions. I had to avoid eyes that would notice a man buying a farm's worth of seeds and chicken fryers.
My heart climbed into my throat when the door opened and Francisco stepped inside with a carry bag of something warm and solid. He smiled the small smile he always used when he wanted to make peace with my taste buds.
"You didn't pick up yesterday," he said. "I brought your favorite—sweet and sour ribs."
"You're early," I said. I wanted to punch him and hug him at the same time. "What are you doing here?"
He shrugged. "You disappeared. I was worried."
"Don't be," I said, and ate. The past sat like an ugly photograph at the edge of my mouth. I told him nothing of the space yet. I didn't want to scare him. I had lived through what came next. He hadn't.
"Do you believe me?" I asked later. I set the question in front of him like a plate.
"Of course," he said, steady as a lamp. "What did you do?"
I told him some things and left others hidden like loose cash under a bookshelf. I told him the truth that mattered: "I have a space. I think the end comes in three days."
He didn't argue. He handed me his bank card like a customary offering to a friend in need. "The PIN is our birthday," he said, voice flat with trust.
We drove. I told him to keep going when we were almost full of chickens, fish fryers, and gas cans and his face still had that small joy at getting to stay close. He had no idea the story behind my sudden efficiency. He didn't need to.
"Move in with me," I blurted out once the last crate was stored.
He looked surprised and then, as if the decision had always been waiting in him, nodded. "Okay. We leave tomorrow."
We filled his car with things we could hide in the space: seedlings, fryers, small livestock. We bought sacks of rice and a chain of gas drums and bolts of cloth to make bandages. At every stop, when the clerks asked why we needed so many things, I lied with a new calm that did not belong to me. It belonged to someone who had used fear and learned the smell of the tide before it came.
The second morning, the world started to unravel. People who had once fallen asleep were not waking as themselves. Cells of those people rose from hospitals in the way that beasts become. The images were suddenly whole and true.
We went out.
"Don't be heroic," I told Francisco. He didn't answer. He never did when there were simpler things to do like lifting a crate or breaking a lock. He was used to carrying things for me, and to fixing things I broke.
On the stair landing we found one of them, a woman bent in on herself, clawed and thin. I raised my pipe and hit the back of her skull until something wet popped. I worried about his eyes.
"You're brutal," he said.
"Survival is ugly," I said.
He laughed. "You always hated the novels' neat fights. You preferred messy ends."
At our first raid on a small market, I found a thin crystal in a dead skull—a waste part left behind by some of the stamped creatures. It fit in my palm like a lighted tear.
"Do you see this?" I said.
Francisco looked at it and then at me differently. He let out a small sound like a match struck. "Where did you..."
"Don't ask," I said. I put it in my jacket and the air of the day shrank to what we could carry.
We ran into Kailey Ishikawa when she fell out of a corner store screaming for help. She smelled like cheap perfume and a red caramel of fear.
"Jin!" she called. Her voice used a name I had not heard in months.
I dove out of the way of her arms even though every part of me wanted to crush her throat. "Kailey," I said slowly. "You haven't changed your timing."
"Please," she said, breathless as if she had been running for a festival. "Save me."
Francisco's face closed. He raised the pipe like a conductor. "She was the one who pushed him into the crowd," he said quietly, when we were safe and alone.
"She changed," I said. And meant it. Her eyes looked softer. That frightened me more than rage. Was she damaged into kindness, or was she someone new wearing an old mouth?
She claimed she had been trapped in the store when the world changed. She claimed she had nowhere else to go. She asked to come along. I said yes, because I couldn't not. Because he had died for me. Because he came and I would not refuse the hands of someone who might save me again.
We survived the first weeks by moving from warehouse to warehouse, eating everything we put into the space and taking only what the space could hold. Francisco's lightning flashed and killed the slow, eating things. My vines, clumsy and green, could search for the small crystals and peel them from the skulls like a child finding change.
"Light and wood," Francisco said. "We fit like a bad joke."
"I like bad jokes," I admitted.
"Stop speaking like a book," he said. "It is distracting."
We joined a crew that called itself Blue Sun—a rough small band of people who had forted in an old grocery warehouse. Baptiste Fontaine was a quiet leader who carried a gun like he carried a secret; Giovanni Mills was the sober thinker; Wesley Sherman was the big-hearted strength; Alyssa Lam kept a calm like a small pond. They were all strange in their practical ways.
"You saved us the day we left," Baptiste said after we brought back stores. "Thanks to you, we didn't die when we thought we would."
"It was luck," I said. "A little planning."
Baptiste laughed. "Both are needed."
In the warehouse's corner, I found a thing hidden in a wall like a small worship object: a translucent statue carved so perfectly that it shone under a flashlight. It seemed to call. The room's air shifted when I touched it.
"Don't keep that in the open," Francisco warned. "If it draws, the creatures will follow."
"It calls," I said. The way my hands tingled was not entirely pleasant. We wrapped it in cloth and I carried it into the space.
We set our lives into movement, and the rockets of days burned. We learned to share. We learned to fight.
But trust is a currency that does not pay its debts. Kailey stayed quiet and soft, and the more she smiled into the team the more blood rose at the edges of my vision.
"Do you think she is safe?" Baptiste asked me one night by the fire. The rest slept. The wind creaked the roof.
"Some people get a second skin," I said. "Some people swap their faces. We'll see."
He didn't press. He had seen enough wolves to understand the smell of bones.
Two weeks in, I found myself on a makeshift platform before a gathered crowd of survivors at a town square where people had made a council.
They wanted an explanation. "Who left people's places empty?" a tall man asked. The questions were small faces with big teeth.
Francisco was at my side, his palms bright with recent lightning. Kailey was there too, pale and still like a guest from another world. Then a woman from the crowd screamed and pointed.
"That's her," the woman cried. "That's Kailey Ishikawa! She—she pushed a man into a horde. He and his friend—they died."
The square went still as if the world had inhaled. The oldest man present whispered, "This is a grave accusation."
I stepped forward, the first-person gate of a thousand lives.
"Speak," said Baptiste quietly. "Tell them what happened in your time."
"Last time," I said, and I said it where everyone could hear. "She pushed me into a crowd of the changed. She left me. Two men died because of that. Today she stood at my door and called me 'friend.' I chose to take her in because she asked for what everyone asks for when the world burns—safety."
A woman started to clap. A child shouted. The frost of silence broke like thin glass.
Kailey's eyes filled with something that looked like shame and panic. She opened her mouth and then stopped.
"I was scared," she said, voice like a small bird. "I—"
She tried to explain the office politics, the money, the way strangers can be a shorter route to things than the person you hurt. Francisco looked at her like a man who had seen a beautiful vase made of mud.
"You offered money?" someone called. "You sold him out?"
"He was a burden," she said. "Jin was a loser, always soft, always—"
Someone laughed, a low wet sound that last somewhere between contempt and relief. "And you were the prize. You wanted the winner."
"No!" she screamed. "I—"
Her story changed as many times as the moon. People called out. The crowd turned angry and then cold. One by one, the survivors began to record.
"Wait," Francisco said, and I heard steel in his voice. He pulled his jacket open. He was not angry for me alone. He was angry in a way that shone.
"You betrayed him," he said. "You pushed him into an army. You left him."
Her face, that moment, went through a shape like metal heating and bending. "I didn't know what would happen," she said. "I thought—"
"That it would be only a bad scene," Francisco said. "You thought we'd wake up. And you decided the fastest way out was the one that cost someone else."
People took out their phones. Voices rose. "She said it was for money." "She said he was useless."
"You had his life," Baptiste—Baptiste, always steady—said. "You gave it away."
She started to cry, weak and loud. The crowd pressed in like a tide. Someone who had a cheap camera zoomed in and streamed. Someone else shouted, "Tell us why you did it!"
"Because I wanted to live!" she said. She bent over like someone trying to catch her breath. "Because I—"
Then the moment that would become a turning place happened. The crowd, hungrier for a full confession, demanded a punishment. "She tried to kill him," a man shouted. "She tried to kill him for a house and a shiny promise. That deserves—"
I looked at Francisco. He held my hand without meaning to. His fingers were steady and warm, like a promise. I could have told him not to, but there was something else I had to do: I had to let the truth be seen. This was a truth that needed iron and cold.
"We do things differently now," I said. "We are not the old courts. But there are things a community must see if it is to survive. The world is honest. We will show her what her action looked like. If she lied and if she pretends she doesn't remember—then let everyone look at the truth."
They brought a screen. Someone uploaded the footage of the night months ago in the old world—security cam, choppy, cruel. The camera shook as it showed me leaning against a van. It showed Kailey with her hands on the railing. It showed a shove. It showed my body falling backward into the dark where small things ate like a feast.
"Turn it up," a man said. "Turn it up."
Her face went white as paper. She tried to cover her mouth. The live feed had multiplied into dozens of phones. Hands pointed. I felt the whole town holding its breath.
She did not deny the footage. She could not. Instead she fell to her knees in the middle of the square and slapped the dusty ground with both palms.
"Please," she said. "Please remember me as someone better. Please."
Then the crowd followed the script of survival: humiliation, exposure, the stripping of lies from the person who had made lies into currency.
They did not kill her. We are not beasts. But we made her pay in a way that would be remembered and could not be erased.
"What you did," I said, walking to the center. "I suppose words in here won't help. But you will live in a world where people point at you and remember. You will carry this with you."
She looked up, and I saw not the mask of fear but the cracking face inside.
"You forced my hand," Baptiste said Kent calmly to hold balance. "The only other way is silence. You made a choice to give up his body to buy your future. We choose to remember."
"Do you want forgiveness?" Francisco asked.
Kailey coughed and said, "I—"
"Then tell them the full truth," I said.
She did not get to finish. The crowd was already there, the pitch and roll of judgment. They forced her into a chair in the center of the square. They demanded details. She coughed on them like a bad bloom.
A hundred voices called. "How much?" "Who else knew?" "Why?"
Her denials broke into sobs and then into screams. She moved through the steps: pride, denial, anger, pleading. The arc played out in public like a tool. At the end, the town did something simple: they did not let her sleep.
A dozen people drew circles in the dust. They placed cloth and food before her, but they called the people forward who had been her friends—those who had once used her or been used by her to gain money. Each one came and said a single sentence into a microphone that someone had placed in the square.
"You sold him for money," one said.
"You told him he was ugly," another said.
"You took what was not yours," said a third.
She crumpled under every sentence. Her hands covered her face. Folks closed in to make sure there were witnesses. Someone began to clap, a slow steady rhythm of shame.
"Get on your knees," a voice commanded, and people obeyed the voice without much argument. They asked her to face the crowd. They asked her to repeat the names of each person she had betrayed and say why.
Her face moved through the stages: arrogant, jealous, greedy, frightened, then devastated. She repeated names and reasons. People whispered and cried and shouted. Some recorded. Some pressed flashlights into her face as she read the names of the people—fifty, then a hundred—of the small betrayals, the bribes, the lies.
When she finished, the oldest man in the crowd stepped forward and spoke with a voice that was thin from age and steady from life.
"No one kills," he said. "No one goes to a mob. That is not who we are. But we also do not pretend wounds are not real. It will be a lesson. She will be made to stand in front of the mill every day at dawn and at dusk, and she will state the truth of what she did. We will remind her. We will ask her to make reparations. She will work without pay. She will tend the graves we have to tend. And when a new face comes to town, we will tell them the story. That is our punishment."
A thousand yes'es rose like a wave.
She looked at me with new hatred mixed with relief. "I didn't mean it," she said. Silence ate the words.
"Meaning is nothing in a wound," I said. "Action is everything."
The punishment that day lasted more than a week in the town's memory and more than an hour in the square. People came to watch—the curiosity of fifty souls. They recorded it. They shared it. Her reactions moved from the small ripples of denial to a tide of confusion, then a cliff of pleading.
"Turn it off," she said to anyone who would listen. "Please."
A group of women pressed a small stall near the square with bowls and cloth. They walked past her and spat silently. Children took pictures. A man who owned the butcher shop laughed and then turned away, embarrassed.
She went hot, then cold. She had imagined a world that would forgive easily, because the world we had been living in rewarded bright smiles and borrowed money. She had miscalculated. The town never forgot.
I walked away after that, hands empty but heavy. Francisco walked with me, his fingers splitting mine like the sun splits through clouds.
"You didn't kill her," he said.
"No," I said. "But we made sure no one in any town she meets will forget what she did."
"Did it help?" he asked.
"No," I said. "It did not make the wound disappear. It just told the wound that the town had seen."
He shrugged. "It is the best justice we could muster, given what we are."
And then the world opened again at our feet. We packed and we left. The space gave us more. The jade Buddha we found in the warehouse—my thumb fit the crack in its back like a map—had probably saved us from the horde more than once and it glowed now in the deep light of the pond.
We traveled with Baptiste, Giovanni, Wesley, and Alyssa. We met other groups, joined one larger band, then another. Cities fell like teeth.
Over and over the question came back like a stubborn cough: who could be trusted? Who was a friend? Who would stab you for a handful of coins?
"Do you regret saving her?" Francisco asked me one night when we bedded down near a ruined highway.
I thought about his question for a long time. "I don't know," I admitted. "I think I saved both of us. She got the chance to become new. I got to see if a man could change when he had a second life."
He laughed. "You sound like a prophet now."
"Don't make me sound like a book," I said.
He smiled. Then he asked what people ask when they fear losing something safe: "Do you trust me?"
"Yes," I said. The answer felt like a small hot stone in my throat. He squeezed my hand and then let it go.
One night, months later, we were in the hills above a town—a town with a lake and a church and people who had built barricades from books and the bones of the old world. We had traded food for information. Someone told us there was a supply cache beneath an old mill. We went.
Below the mill in a small room carved of old masonry we found a box. Inside it was a stack of journals, each one labeled with a name. On the top was a small letter with the neat handwriting of someone who had believed in a world that could be saved. The letter spoke of guilt and of small retribution. It mentioned a case similar to mine.
I read it aloud. Everyone listened, including Kailey. She had been allowed to come with us on the condition she worked without pay and spoke the truth every dawn.
"She was never as simple as she gave herself credit for," Baptiste said. "But she endured what she deserved and kept going."
Kailey was quiet when I read. Her mouth moved. She made no sound, but she seemed smaller and less brave. She had learned submission before us. Maybe she had learned shame.
The war of survival lasted a long while, and we lasted through more because of tiny things. Francisco improved faster than anyone expected. He worked hard in silence. I had the space and a little wood power and two thin abilities that could become a chance.
At times I remembered my twenty-five girlfriends like a list of small failures I had not yet learned from. At times I thought of Francisco falling into the teeth and my blood boiling with the memory. We moved forward. We scavenged. We saved the weak from the greedy.
And Kailey worked at making the town prosper. She carried water and scrubbed the square clean. Sometimes when we were alone and the moon dropped silver like dust over the ruined highway, she would look at me and mouth "I'm sorry" without sound.
I never answered her apology with more than a nod. Forgiveness is a small business. It can be earned, but it cannot be purchased.
Months later, in a much bigger city that smelled of diesel and canned peaches, a town court convened for a traitor who had sold a child to a man for fuel. His punishment had been to stand in public like a mirror and read aloud his harm. People filmed it. I watched from the crowd as the man went through the very stages Kailey had gone through.
We had learned to judge in public because secrets had become the currency of the world and secrets cost lives. Justice was messy and remembered.
One last night, under a thin rain, I stood by the pond in the space and wound a small string around the jade Buddha. "I put you in here to stop the pull," I told him. The Buddha did not answer, except perhaps by fitting into my hand in a way that felt like a latch.
I had been given back a life I thought was gone. I had been given a man who risked everything for me and who accepted me and my flaws. I had been given a chance to live without being a burden.
Above us, the world would still burn and mend and burn again. Below, the little space would stay hidden like a seed.
"I am not the same Jin Benjamin who walked to death," I said to Francisco as we packed the last of our seeds.
"I'm glad," he said. "I like the version of you who knows how to fight and how to forgive."
"Don't get poetic," I said.
He grinned. "Too late."
We closed the hatch, sealed the jar, and the jade's glow dimmed like a promise.
One evening, years from that first day, when I had more things to protect than the two of us—when we had a ragtag map of places we considered home and a ledger of names we would owe—Francisco pulled me into the light and said, "Do you remember the Buddha that pulled the horde away?"
"Every day," I said.
He smiled the steady smile of a man who had once been afraid to die for another and had chosen to do so anyway.
"Then don't forget," he said. "The pond keeps its own time."
I looked at the small place in my palm where the final crystal had once lived, and I felt the space thrum. The world had lost many things, but it had kept a shape for me to hold onto: a little house, a pond, a jade Buddha that drew hungry things away.
I put my thumb to the jade’s seam, and the pond shivered. "Tick," I said softly, the sound small as white water running down a drain.
That sound was mine now—the sound of a pocket space and of a heart that had learned to weigh its debts.
The End
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