When I opened my eyes, the taste of blood was still in my mouth.
It wasn't the sharp pain of a zombie biting through the throat. The feeling was too clear, so clear that I remembered the depth of each tooth piercing the skin. But now I'm lying on a wooden bed with a peeling paint ceiling above me and birds chirping outside the window.
The sun squeezed in through the cracks in the curtains and shone warmly on the back of my hands.
I turned over my wrist.
No bite marks. The skin was intact, just covered with a thin layer of sweat.
The phone screen lights up and the time displays: September 15, 2024.
I stared at the date line and didn't move for ten seconds.
The end of the world comes on September 18th. Three days later.
In my previous life, I was bitten to death on the ninth day. I died in a highway service area. For a group of survivors I didn't know at all, I stayed and used my ancestral Feng Shui array to block the tide of corpses. The formation broke, but no one could escape. When the Corpse King bit through the back of my neck, the last thing I saw was the flash of bloody lines in its eyes.
I have an impression of that pattern.
