Doomsday Rebirth novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: The East Gate
Gillian dies at the shelter gate in front of four hundred people, wakes ninety-three days before the red rain, and drops her ring in her fiance's water glass, and her uncle texts that her father's money has been moved.
Four hundred people stood in the main hall of the shelter and watched my fiance walk me to the east gate.
It was the ninety-first day since the sky turned red.
I had cooked for every one of them, three meals a day, since the second week.
Lacey stood on a folding table with a clipboard and told the whole hall I had been selling the shelter's medicine.
She was my best friend, and she cried while she said it.
I had never touched the medicine.
Dexter put his hand flat on my back and kept it there.
"I've got you," he said, low, so only I could hear. "Just walk out with me. We'll sort it out at the gate."
I believed him for six more steps.
The east gate was a steel door in the ramp wall, under two floodlights.
Past it the ramp ran down to the lake road, and at dusk the hollows came up that road.
Hollows were what the red rain had left of the people it didn't kill.
They were grey, they never spoke, and they went toward any sound.
Dexter opened the door and shoved me through it with both hands.
I hit the ramp on my knees.
The bar dropped on the inside, and nobody in the hall said a word.
I put my back against the steel and watched the floodlights.
Through the little wire window in the door, I saw Dexter check his watch.
Then the lights went out, and the first of them came up the ramp.
I woke up with my face in a pillow and the sun on my back.
There was a bandage on my left palm.
I peeled it off.
The skin under it was whole, with no cut and no mark.
I had no idea where it came from, so I dropped it in the wastebasket.
My phone said Wednesday, July 15.
I did the math twice, my hands still shaking.
The sky had turned red on Friday, October 16, at 4:12 in the afternoon.
That was ninety-three days away.
The rain had fallen red all that night, and by morning half the people it touched were dead.
Four in ten had turned into hollows, and one in ten woke up lit, with a power nobody had asked for.
Dry people stayed exactly as they were, and I had been dry.
I was in a hospital kitchen under a roof, and that is the only reason I lived long enough to be thrown out.
I sat on the edge of my bed in my apartment in Tremont and made myself think.
The shelter was the Lakefront Terminal, an old convention hall on the lake.
For ninety-one days I had stood at a steel table in its kitchen and heard everything.
Who had hidden cases of insulin.
Who traded canned peaches for a place by the heater.
Which buildings on Lorain Avenue and in Ohio City stayed dry, and which ones the hollows emptied in a day.
Nobody else alive would know all of it, and I had ninety-three days to use it.
My phone buzzed with a text from Dexter.
"Lunch today, babe? Same deli. Whatever you decide about the dress, I've got you."
Under it was one from Lacey.
"Call me the second you're up!! I'm helping Dexter with the surprise. Love you!!"
I read it three times.
Then I got dressed, put my father's old watch on, and took the number 26 bus downtown.
Dexter ate lunch every Wednesday on the patio of the deli across from the county building, with the same three coworkers.
He sat at the head of the table in a county polo, with a glass of iced water and his phone face up beside his plate.
He saw me and smiled with his whole face.
"There she is," he said. "Guys, this is the woman who's going to make me a married man."
The three of them stood up halfway to say hello.
I stopped at the end of the table.
The ring was a one-carat oval his mother had picked out, and I had been wearing it for fourteen months.
It came off over my knuckle without any trouble.
"Gillian?" Dexter said. "What's going on?"
"I'm giving this back."
I dropped it into his water glass.
It sank to the bottom and sat there, with the lemon slice turning over on top of it.
One of his coworkers laughed, and then stopped.
"Babe." Dexter half stood and reached across the table for my wrist. "You're tired. You've been working too hard. I've got you."
"No," I said. "You really don't."
I took my wrist back.
He had said those same three words to me once before, with his hand on my back, and I knew exactly what came after them.
So I walked away from the table, and I didn't look back at the glass.
I was across the street, waiting for the light, when my phone buzzed again.
It was my uncle Gordon, who had run my father's money since the funeral.
"Gill, I closed your dad's account this morning and moved it somewhere safer. Don't call the bank. We'll talk Sunday."
My father had left me $340,000.
Gordon wasn't allowed to move any of it until I turned thirty.
Want to keep talking to characters like these? Chat with AI romance characters: AI Boyfriend · AI Girlfriend · Dark Romance · Fantasy Romance · BL (Boys’ Love) · Billionaire Boyfriend · Mafia Boyfriend · Possessive Boyfriend · Hockey Boyfriend · Older Boyfriend · K-Drama Boyfriend · Anime Boyfriend · Vampire Boyfriend · Werewolf Boyfriend · Demon Boyfriend · Fae Romance · GL (Girls’ Love) · Anime Girlfriend · Goth & Alt Girlfriend · Gamer Girlfriend · Tsundere Girlfriend · Fantasy Girlfriend