Apocalypse Calling

Zombie apocalypse hit without warning. My new husband was killed before my eyes, his blood on my face as he gave me time to flee.

I ran, gasping, until I found shelter in an abandoned high-rise, barely alive.

Next day, my parents called. My mom was in hospital with a heart attack, they said, demanding I go care for her.

Panicking, I yelled that the world was ending, streets swarmed with undead, begging them to hide.

They scolded me:

"Your own mothers in hospital, and you dont care! Thats a lie even a kid wouldnt believe!"

"What zombie apocalypse? You watch too much sci-fi!"

Cold dread filled mesomething was wrong. Desperate to check, I headed for the hospital.

I didnt get far. The horde saw me. I was dragged down and eaten alive, screaming till my throat broke.

Then I blinked.

Back in the abandoned building, when my parents first called. I had respawned.

Shaking, I asked carefully: "Mom, Dad, are you safe? Anything weird happening outside?"

They sounded confused but sure: "Top private hospitalnothing can happen. Come now, Harper!"

Covered in grime and dried blood, shivering in the freezing, unfinished tower, I froze at their words.

The urgency in my father's voice only escalated.

"You are our only daughter, Harper! When family is in crisis, you don't just turn your back!"

"And bring your credit cards. We're short three thousand dollars for your mother's cardiac procedure."

I stared out the panel-less window at the groaning, shuffling corpses in the street below, my knuckles turning white around my phone.

How was this possible?

We lived in the same city. How could I be trapped in a living hell while they were sitting comfortably in a hospital? If a zombie virus had broken out, the hospitals would have been ground zero. They should have fallen first.

I swallowed hard, looking at the monsters pacing below.

"Mom, Dad, it's not safe outside!"

"There are zombies everywhere where I am! Arthur... Arthur was bitten right in front of me! He's dead!"

"Are you telling me everything is completely normal on your end?!"

A heavy silence hung on the line for two seconds before my father's voice exploded in pure rage.

"What kind of garbage are you spewing, you ungrateful brat!"

"You just don't want to pay the medical bills, so you're spinning these ghost stories!"

My mother's weak, theatrical sobbing filtered through the speaker.

"Harper, my sweet girl... I'm at death's door, how can you be so heartless?"

Tears of pure frustration spilled down my cheeks.

"Mom, I swear to God I'm not lying!"

"There are monsters outside, there is blood everywhere! Please, just lock the doors and hide!"

My father was having none of it.

"Still making excuses? Your mother is having a heart attack, and instead of rushing over, you invent this absurd fantasy?"

"Let me make this clear. If you don't show up today, we will disown you. We'll pretend we never had a daughter!"

I stared blankly at the glowing screen, my brain short-circuiting.

Was I going insane?

The rotting creatures were right there, fifty feet below me!

With shaking thumbs, I opened my news feed. The headlines were about celebrity scandals, stock market surges, and a new pop star's album release.

Not a single mention of a biohazard or an apocalypse.

Twitter, Instagram, TikTok. Every platform was perfectly normal, filled with influencers and cat videos.

It was as if I was the only person on the planet who could see the end of the world.

My father delivered his final ultimatum.

"We worked our fingers to the bone to send you to college. Now that you've got a fancy job in Seattle, you think you're too good for us?"

"If you abandon us now, your mother and I have nothing left to live for. We'll just refuse treatment and wait to die in this room, so we won't be a burden to you anymore!"

I had no choice but to beg them not to do anything drastic.

"Okay, okay, just wait for me. I'll find a way to get there."

"Please don't do anything reckless, I swear I'm not lying..."

I barely managed to calm them down, but my family group chat was already exploding. An avalanche of aunts and uncles were tearing me to pieces.

Aunt Sarah fired the first shot.

"I hear Harper won't even cover her mother's hospital bills?"

"She was always a selfish child. Look at how she turned out!"

Uncle Robert chimed in right after.

"Her parents treated her like a princess, and now she leaves them to rot. She's soulless!"

My cousin Jessica added her own venom.

"Well, she married that rich tech CEO. She doesn't care if the rest of us live or die."

One by one, the entire family piled on, drowning me in digital vitriol.

Reading their messages, my body shook with rage.

Desperate to clear my name, I initiated a video call in the group chat. I was going to point the camera out the window and show them the nightmare.

Perfect timing. Below me, a pack of undead were currently tearing into a fresh corpse. The sight of the ripping flesh and spraying crimson made my stomach heave.

But on the screen, my relatives pointed at the gruesome display and burst into laughter.

"Oh my god, Harper, do you think we were born yesterday?"

"Is this some B-movie you downloaded?"

"You think playing a movie clip is going to fool us?"

"You're using cheap CGI to get out of paying a few thousand dollars? Are we a joke to you?"

Hot tears of desperation streamed down my face.

"This isn't a movie! It's real!"

"They are literally right outside!"

Nobody believed me.

Uncle Robert sneered. "Cut the crap, Harper. Go to the billing department."

"Your mother's heart is giving out, and you have time to play Hollywood director?"

Furious, I shoved my phone out the window, panning across the devastated street.

"Look closely! Look at the detail! These are real!"

The street was littered with overturned cars, some still billowing black smoke. Dismembered limbs and pools of gore stained the asphalt.

But Uncle Robert just barked at me.

"Enough! You're going to give your mother another stroke!"

"Stop this nonsense and get to the hospital, or just start planning her funeral!"

He disconnected the call.

I collapsed onto the concrete floor, overwhelmed by a suffocating despair.

Why didn't anyone believe me?

Had my mind completely fractured?

Driven by a frantic need for validation, I uploaded the videos everywhere. Facebook, Twitter, local forums.

Within minutes, my coworkers started texting me.

"Harper, nice prank. The makeup effects are sick."

"But posting this stuff during work hours? HR won't like it."

Then, my manager called.

"Harper, you've been AWOL for two days. Have you been playing video games this whole time?"

"People covered for you, saying you were sick from overtime. Clearly, we were mistaken."

"You're fired. Come clean out your desk and get the hell out of my company."

I tried to explain the quarantine, the zombies, the fact that I was barricaded in an abandoned construction site, but he just called me a lunatic and hung up.

Refusing to give up, I dialed Lily, my best friend since college. I asked her to look out her window.

Lily's voice was bright and cheerful. She said it was a beautiful, sunny day in downtown Seattle.

"Harper, are you under too much stress?"

"Do you want me to help you find a therapist? What you're saying is really scaring me..."

My arm fell limp, the phone dropping from my ear.

Lily was my soulmate. She would never gaslight me.

But the bites from my past life. The memory of the teeth sinking into my neck. The blood of my husband currently crusting under my fingernails.

My senses screamed that the apocalypse was real.

Yet the rest of the world insisted everything was fine. Why?

My phone buzzed. It was Mom.

"Honey, please... please come to the hospital..." Her voice was a fragile whisper, terrifyingly weak.

"The pain in my chest is unbearable. The doctors say I need the stent right now."

"But without the deposit, they won't take me into surgery."

"You're my only hope, Harper. Don't let me die..."

She broke down into a wretched, gasping sob.

Listening to her cry, the tears I'd been fighting back finally broke free.

"Mom, I'm not lying to you."

"I am in real danger!"

But her crying only grew more heartbreaking.

"Do you hate me, Harper?"

"Is this because I was too strict with you when you were little?"

"I know I made mistakes. I'll never pressure you again."

"Just have mercy on your mother. Come see me one last time before I go."

I bit my lip so hard I tasted iron, my entire body quaking. Her words were like daggers in my chest.

Doubt began to rot my certainty. Was I schizophrenic?

Maybe I was having a psychotic break.

Maybe there were no zombies.

Maybe Arthur was still alive, and I had hallucinated his death.

I pinched my arm, digging my nails in. It hurt.

I looked out the window. The monsters were still there, gnawing on bones.

They were real.

But why was I the only one who could see them?

To find the truth, I had to bet my life. I had to go to that hospital.

If I was crazy, they could lock me up. If I wasn't, at least I would die knowing what was real.

I took a deep, shuddering breath and spoke into the phone.

"Hold on, Mom. I'm coming."

Her sobs quieted into breathless relief. "Okay... okay, Mommy's waiting..."

Before leaving, I scavenged. I found heavy-duty construction canvas and duct tape, wrapping my arms and legs in makeshift bite armor. I gripped a rusted steel pipe tightly in my hands.

To anyone normal, I looked like a deranged patient escaping an asylum.

But I knew I wasn't crazy.

I crept out of the unfinished building. The air was thick with the metallic tang of blood and decay.

Every step was calculated. The undead had hypersensitive hearing. The crunch of gravel could be a death sentence.

Weaving through back alleys, I relied on the muscle memory of my past death, avoiding the choke points that had doomed me before.

But as I neared the city center, the horde grew too dense. There were no blind spots left.

Just as a pack of biters cornered me in a dead-end alley, a manhole cover at my feet slid open.

Another survivor.

The creatures lunged, their jaws snapping inches from my face. In a blur of motion, the man grabbed my ankle and yanked me down into the darkness.

The heavy iron cover slammed shut above us.

The screeching and clawing against the metal echoed above.

I leaned against the damp brick wall, hyperventilating.

The man stared at me in disbelief. "Are you suicidal? Running toward the city center alone?"

"That's where the infestation is the worst!"

He looked to be in his thirties, wearing grease-stained maintenance coveralls.

I looked at him, and a wave of pure euphoria crashed over me.

My mind wasn't broken! This was real! At least one other person in this godforsaken world saw the monsters too.

"You see them, right? The zombies!" I grabbed his arm, my voice trembling with manic relief.

He recoiled. "What kind of question is that? The streets are flooded with those freaks. A blind man could see them."

I nearly collapsed in gratitude. "But I called my family! My friends! They all said the world was fine! They said I was hallucinating!"

The man furrowed his brow, confused. "Where is your family?"

"Seattle General. My mom's having a heart attack. I have to get there." I reached for my phone to show him the texts, but the battery was dead.

The man fell silent, shaking his head grimly.

"Hospitals were ground zero. They're dead zones now. No living souls left."

"I'm telling you, don't throw your life away."

But I couldn't stop. "I have to. She's waiting for me."

He looked at me with a mix of pity and frustration. "Did you not hear me? The hospital is a slaughterhouse! Your mother is either a corpse or one of them! You can't save her!"

I offered him a sad smile, thanked him for saving me, and ventured alone into the subterranean labyrinth. I had to see the truth for myself.

Using the sewers, I bypassed the blockades and surfaced right outside the hospital gates.

Just as I climbed out, the hospital's glass doors shattered. A horde of patients in pale blue hospital gowns poured out, their guttural roars piercing the air.

The stench of rotting flesh hit me like a physical blow. They were sprinting toward me.

I hesitated, considering retreating into the sewers. If I stayed, I would repeat my brutal demise.

But then, my eyes locked onto their clothes. I noticed the pattern of the dried blood.

In that split second, my brain detonated.

I finally understood why this apocalypse had happened.