They Fed Me to the Dead, So I Woke Up Before the End novel · Chapter 1 of 24
Chapter 1: Day Forty-One
Reese dies on the Anchor's roof while Keaton cuts the stone out of her and Bridget holds her hand, then wakes twenty-four days before the outbreak to a text that says: same plan as last time.
On day forty-one of the end of the world, a stone was cut out of my chest in front of two hundred people.
They stood on the armory roof in the evening light and watched.
Nobody looked away, and nobody stopped him.
The captain had told them I volunteered.
"Reese is giving the Anchor her gift," he said, loud enough for the back rows. "She wants every one of you to be safe."
I had said no for three days.
So they zip-tied my wrists to the supply table and called it a ceremony.
The stone sat under my breastbone where it had sat since day three.
It was the reason I could stop the dead with one open hand, and the reason this roof was full of living people.
Bridget knelt at my head and took my fingers in hers.
"It'll be quick," she said. "I'm right here. I'm not going anywhere."
Her thumb rubbed my knuckles, the way it did in college when I cried over exams.
I turned my face away from her and looked at Keaton.
He smoothed the hair off my forehead first, the way he did when I had a fever.
He had pushed his sleeves up to the elbow for the knife.
Black lines ran from his wrists up both forearms, just under the skin.
I thought it was rage.
I had never seen him that angry.
"Tell them you're sure, babe," he said.
"Keaton, please. I'm not sure. I'm not."
He smiled at the crowd, a small sorry smile, the one that had won over my mother's whole street.
"She's scared," he said. "Anybody would be."
Then he cut.
I won't write what that was.
I screamed until there was nothing left to scream with, and two hundred people watched my boyfriend lift something small and pale and wet into the light.
Someone clapped.
A few people joined in.
They carried me down to the east gate while I was still breathing, because the horde at the wall needed to be fed something that would keep it busy through the night.
The captain unbolted the gate himself.
The last thing I saw was Bridget on the wall, crying into her sleeve, and Keaton's arm around her shoulders.
Then the dead came in.
*
I woke up screaming.
The sheet was twisted around my legs and the ceiling was the ceiling of the apartment I had shared with Bridget for three years.
My hand went to my chest.
Skin. A little hollow where the bone met. No wound.
I lay there with my heart going hard against my fingers until the room stopped shaking.
My phone was on the nightstand.
Sunday, September 20. 7:42 a.m.
I counted forward on my fingers, because I did not trust my head.
The first dead man walked out of St. Anne's morgue on October 14.
That was twenty-four days away.
I made it to the bathroom before I threw up.
When I came out, the kitchen smelled of coffee, and there was a note on the counter in Bridget's loopy writing.
Gone to Keaton's, back for dinner. Love you!! 💛
Three years of notes like that one.
I held it until the paper creased.
She was alive, and she was warm, and she had drawn a little heart after Keaton's name.
I thought about the roof.
I thought about Bridget's thumb on my knuckles saying she wasn't going anywhere.
I thought about my mother, who I had not spoken to in two years because Keaton had said Ray was controlling and I had believed him.
My mother, her husband and his fifteen-year-old daughter had all been dead by day thirty.
I knew because the Anchor kept a wall of names, and I had read it every morning.
I put the note down.
I was not going to lie in bed and cry, and I was not going to tell Keaton or Bridget one true thing.
So I got dressed.
My phone buzzed on the counter while I was tying my shoes.
Bridget.
Can't wait to see you tonight, babe. Dinner at Keaton's. Same plan as last time. Don't be late!
I read it three times.
Last time.
Bridget had never once said those words to me before.
I typed back with steady thumbs.
Wouldn't miss it. 💛
Then I took my keys and went to find my mother.
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