Chapter Text
Prologue
Toronto, Ontario
September 2024
Three Days Before
Rain tapped against the apartment window.
Rainn sat cross-legged on her bed with a medical textbook balanced on her knees, highlighter clenched between her teeth, notebooks scattered about. The words blurred together after a while. Arteries. Veins. Blood flow. It all looked the same after six straight hours of studying.
A notification buzzed on her phone.
Amber, a classmate.
[You alive?]
Rainn smiled despite herself.
[Barely.]
[You still studying?]
[Maybe.]
[Liar.]
[Okay yes.]
[Go outside before your eyeballs fall out.]
Rainn rolled her eyes and tossed the phone beside her.
Outside, downtown Toronto glowed beneath the evening rain. Headlights moved through crowded streets. People hurried along sidewalks with umbrellas overhead. Somewhere below, a siren wailed in the distance.
Normal.
Everything looked normal.
She couldn’t have known she was looking at a world that only had three days left.
The apartment across the street still had lights on.
The coffee shop on the corner would open tomorrow morning.
The subway and streetcars would run.
Students would go to class.
Parents would drive their children to school.
People would complain about work and traffic.
People would make plans for next week.
Next month.
Next year.
None of them knew those plans were already dead.
Rainn closed her textbook and stretched.
Her phone buzzed again.
This time it wasn’t Amber.
Dad. Her parents moved to a small farming town in Italy after they retired. Her dad hunted for months until he found a nice little farm house on a decent plot of land, they were growing crops and even got a dairy cow and some chickens. Rainn was planning on visiting them next Summer.
She answered with a smile.
“Hey.”
For a moment she listened to the familiar sound of his voice.
A sound she would spend the rest of her life trying to remember.
Outside, the rain continued to fall.
Three days later, the dead would begin to rise.
—————
The world didn’t end in a scream.
It ended in silence.
Not all at once, but in pieces—sirens that stopped ringing, cities that stopped humming, hearts that stopped beating. Rainn Maddox had watched it unravel from behind a glass hospital door, trembling hands wrapped around textbooks and borrowed scalpels while the streets filled with the dead. That was weeks ago.
Now, the silence was constant.
Not peaceful. Just absence of sound.
She crouched behind the rusted shell of a delivery truck, breath shallow. Her hands were filthy—scraped raw from falling while she ran, bloodied from someone else’s injury, or maybe her own. She couldn’t remember anymore. The air was thick with rot and smoke. Ash drifted from the sky like snow, clinging to her lashes.
Her fingers tightened around the pocketknife she’d stolen from a pharmacy. It wasn’t meant for fighting. It barely qualified as a weapon. But it was all she had.
A distant groan twisted through the air.
She didn’t dare peek. Not yet. Instead, she swallowed the knot in her throat and forced her thoughts back to the hospital—her last memory of normal.
The chaos had begun the same day the power grid failed. Medical students were pulled into the ER, thrown into madness with barely any instruction. She remembered helping a nurse stitch a bite wound after it was disinfected, hands shaking from the sheer madness in the ER as blood soaked the sheets as other bite wound patients were rolled in. Only too late did they realize the man wasn’t healing.
He was changing.
That was the first time Rainn saw someone die and then reanimate.
She hadn’t stopped running since. There were others with her in the beginning. Other nurses, patients. But somewhere in the weeks since the collapse, Rainn was beside herself.
A shadow shifted across the pavement.
Rainn froze. Her heart hammered so loudly she was certain it would give her away. Slowly, she edged toward the truck’s corner and looked out.
One of them.
Its skin hung in wet patches from its skull. Lips torn. Eyes vacant. It dragged a booted foot behind it—someone’s boyfriend, maybe. Or a teacher. Or a bus driver. Once.
Not anymore.
A Hollow One.
Rainn held her breath and counted.
One.
Two.
Three.
It shambled past without seeing her. She clenched the knife so tightly her knuckles burned.
Then a hand grabbed her shoulder.
She yelped, spinning with the blade raised—but a strong grip caught her wrist mid-swing.
“Easy,” a voice growled low.
She stared into the face of a man—tall, broad-shouldered, a rifle strapped across his back. Ash smeared his skin, but his eyes were sharp. Alert.
Alive.
“Are you alone?” He asked.
Her throat was too dry to answer. She nodded, barely.
His gaze swept the street. “You’re lucky. That thing almost spotted you.”
“I’ve been running,” she whispered. “Since the city. Since the hospital.”
“You a doctor?” His eyes narrowed.
“Third-year nursing student.” Rainn replied with a shaky voice.
He nodded once. “Good enough.”
Before she could ask his name, he grabbed her hand and pulled her from the truck’s shadow. “Come on. You don’t want to be out here when the sun drops.”
Rainn followed because she had no choice.
Because being alone meant dying.
And maybe—just maybe—strangers were less dangerous than monsters.
———-
They reached the camp just before dusk, where the scent of pine fought against the sour tang of smoke. Rainn’s legs nearly gave out beneath her—her body was bone-tired, muscles trembling with every step. Still, she followed the man who introduced himself as Reid as he picked through a narrow trail between trees.
Below them, nestled in the trees, was a primitive campsite. A few tents—cheap, sun-bleached nylon barely clinging to their poles—circled a small fire.
Smoke curled up through the branches. She saw backpacks, makeshift bedding, a cooler half-buried in the dirt. There were people down there. Six? No, Seven.
This wasn’t a base.
It was a refuge. Temporary.
“They won’t like a stranger,” Reid warned as they approached. “But they’re more scared than mean.”
Rainn didn’t answer. She couldn’t trust her voice not to crack.
They entered the camp with cautious steps. Every head turned.
A man in a stained flannel shirt and cargo pants rose from the fire pit. He looked older—late fifties, maybe. His beard was patchy and graying, and his glasses were missing one arm.
“Reid,” he said, voice rough from smoke or shouting. “You bring trouble?”
“No,” Reid said. “Just a girl. Says she’s a med student.”
That got a reaction. A couple of the group stood straighter.
“I—I was in school. I mean, I am,” Rainn stammered, “or I was, before… all this.”
The older man studied her. “You patch a wound?”
“Yes.”
“Stitch a deep gash?”
“I’ve practiced it.”
“You ever hold a heart in your hands?”
She flinched.
He nodded, satisfied. “Dr. Amos is the name, and I don’t give a damn about your degree. If you can help people, you help people.”
One of the women, older, dark skinned with kind eyes and flour on her hands, stood by the fire and offered a bottle of water. “I’m Mara. You look like you’re starving.”
Rainn hesitated, then took it. Her hands trembled as she drank.
Another figure approached—a wiry young man with dark hair and too many layers of clothing. “Name’s Joey,” he said, offering a shy, lopsided smile. “You’re lucky he found you.”
“Or unlucky,” muttered someone behind him.
The voice belonged to a teenage girl, barely fifteen, sitting cross-legged near a cooler. She was sharpening a stick with a Swiss Army knife, eyeing Rainn like a threat.
“That’s Ellie,” Joey said quickly. “Ignore her. She’s… processing.”
“She’s aware,” Ellie snapped, not looking up. “You bring the wrong person in, it’s everyone who pays.”
“Easy,” Mara warned.
They were unraveling. Rainn could feel it in the air. These people weren’t soldiers or survivalists. They were clinging to scraps of normal.
A woman with long blonde hair emerged from a nearby tent, rubbing her pregnant belly. She looked worn but alert.
“Harper,” she said. “Don’t worry—I’m only six months in, not about to drop a baby on you.”
Rainn smiled faintly, overwhelmed. Her head swam from hunger, from shock, from not sleeping in two nights.
Rainn managed a faint smile, but her gaze drifted again—counting tents, counting bedrolls.
None of them were empty.
The realization settled quietly but heavily. She had nowhere to go when night fell. No place to lie down that wasn’t dirt or cold stone. Her shoulders tensed as if bracing for another rejection, another scramble.
Harper followed her line of sight.
“…You don’t have a tent, do you?” She asked gently.
Rainn shook her head. “I can—sleep by the fire. I won’t be in the way.”
Harper frowned. “No. It’s too dangerous without any cover.” She glanced toward the tent behind her. “You can share mine. It’s tight, but it’s dry. And warmer.”
Rainn blinked. “I don’t want to—”
“Not up for debate,” Harper said, already turning. “We’ll make room.”
Something in Rainn’s chest cracked. She nodded, afraid if she spoke she’d cry.
Then came a tall man with a drawn face and haunted eyes. He lingered at the edge of camp, a hunting knife tucked into his belt. He didn’t speak. Just watched her.
“That’s Silas,” Reid said quietly. “He doesn’t talk much.”
“Can any of us afford to anymore?” Harper muttered.
Dr. Amos clapped his hands once. “Alright, enough gawking. You’re one of us now, Rainn. Get warm, eat something, and don’t wander off. Things are worse at night.”
She nodded and lowered herself onto a log by the fire. Her limbs felt like lead. The flames blurred in her eyes.
“Do you know what’s happening?” Joey asked her in a whisper, as he sat down beside her. “Like, medically? The ones that… get back up?”
Rainn swallowed hard. “I’ve seen three people turn. All after being bitten. They die. Then—then they come back. Their muscles don’t seem… damaged right away. They can run. One of them lifted a man off the ground.”
Joey went pale. “So they’re strong?”
“At first. I think the decay starts after a while. They slow down… I would think”
“And how do you kill them?” Joey asked, fiddling with the zipper on his sweater.
She met his eyes, her voice barely audible. “The brain, that’s the only way I’ve seen them go down. I’ve seen people shoot and stab in the chest, neck, stomach, and back. Nothing takes them out, but I saw a man shoot one in the head, once…. That thing didn’t get back up”
The woods groaned in the distance.
Night was coming.
—————
Later, when the sky had darkened and the woods pressed closer, a smaller fire crackled nearby. A few of them sat around it in silence—Joey poking at the embers, Mara mending a strap, Ellie watching the tree line.
Reid crouched beside Rainn and handed her half a can of baked beans, a dented spoon tucked inside.
“Eat,” he said.
She stared at it like it might disappear. “Are you sure?”
“I already ate.”
That was probably a lie. She accepted it anyway, hands shaking as she took slow, careful bites.
“You’re wearing scrubs,” he said after a moment.
She glanced down at herself—blood-streaked nursing blues, torn at the knee, stiff with grime. Over them, a thin jacket she’d grabbed in a panic, sleeves too short, fabric worn.
“It’s all I have.”
Reid shrugged out of his sweater and handed it to her. It was thick. Worn soft. Still warm. Smelled like him.
“Take it.”
She hesitated, then pulled it over her head. The sleeves swallowed her hands.
“Thank you,” she said, turning—
But he was already gone, melting into the trees, checking the perimeter as if kindness were something he hadn’t meant to show.