Chapter 1: The End of the World

  3 Hours Until the Apocalypse

  Dave Thompson was losing a wrestling match with his nine-month-old daughter.

  "Emma. Emma, please. We're almost—"

  She flipped onto her stomach and started army-crawling toward the edge of the changing table. Again. Her chubby legs kicked against the pad with surprising force.

  She'd figured out this particular trick two weeks ago, and had apparently decided that lying still for diaper changes was beneath her dignity.

  Dave caught her by the ankle and pulled her back. "Come on, kiddo. Fresh diaper. Don't you want a fresh diaper?"

  Emma did not, in fact, want a fresh diaper. What Emma wanted was to explore the magnificent world beyond the changing table, which from her perspective must have seemed full of thrilling adventures. The fact that it was actually just a nursery floor covered in yesterday's laundry did nothing to dampen her enthusiasm.

  She arched her back and made the noise, that pterodactyl screech that roughly translated to Freedom!, and kicked both legs simultaneously.

  Her foot hit the baby powder.

  The container spun, popped its cap, and erupted into a white cloud that covered both of them. Dave coughed, got powder in his mouth, and Emma used the three-second distraction to roll toward the edge again.

  His hand shot out. Pure reflex, the same reflex that had kept her from rolling off this table approximately six hundred times. He caught her. "Gotcha. Nice try."

  Emma looked up at him through the powder cloud. She had it in her eyebrows. In the three wisps of hair she'd managed to grow. She looked like a tiny, angry ghost.

  Dave looked down at himself. White handprints on his college T-shirt. Powder in his beard.

  "I feel like you are taking advantage of the fact that your sitter is sick."

  Emma blew a spit bubble.

  He got the fresh diaper on her on the second try. Tabs secured. Onesie snapped. Victory.

  Emma immediately started crawling toward the edge again.

  Dave scooped her up and settled her against his chest. She grabbed a fistful of his beard and pulled, which was her way of saying I accept these terms.

  He carried her to the window while she tugged at his chin. The nursery faced the backyard: the oak tree with the tire swing he'd hung last month, the fence that needed painting, the Hendersons' yard beyond it where their ancient retriever, Biscuit, was asleep in a patch of sun. October in Ohio. The leaves on the oak were going gold at the edges, and the morning light came through them in a way that made the whole yard look like a photograph someone had color-corrected to be slightly warmer than reality.

  Emma pressed her entire face against the glass and fogged it with her breath. She loved doing this. Dave had cleaned the nose prints off this window so many times he'd stopped bothering.

  Dave made a mental note to get the place cleaned up before Sarah got home. He really could've used the sitter today, but he'd manage. He was fine. Just fine. Perfectly capable of watching Emma and keeping the house in order, all on his own. How hard could it be?

  In fact, that very morning, he’d looked his wife right in the eyes. Her tired, hasn't-slept-more-than-four-hours-straight-in-months eyes, and sworn with confidence that she could take a few hours for herself without the house burning down.

  Sarah had hesitated at the door, car keys in hand. "Are you sure? With Missy sick, I don't know. I can reschedule—"

  "Go," Dave had said. "You're gonna be late."

  She frowned.

  "The milk is in the fridge. Fresh bottles in the drying rack. Diapers in the—"

  "Nursery. I know. I live here too. And I'm perfectly capable of watching Emma, without any help, for a few hours."

  She raised an eyebrow at that. And then gave a look that was equal parts worried and hopeful. She hadn't taken time for just herself in months, despite Dave's many attempts to shoo her out. Between her job at the preschool and everything else that always seems to come up, there was just never a good time.

  Serenity Springs Spa had a half-day package that she'd been eyeing since Emma was born. Dave had booked it himself three weeks ago, had rescheduled twice, and wasn't going to let it fall through again. No matter what.

  "Go get your seaweed thing," he'd said.

  "It's a wrap." She took a deep breath but smiled this time. "You sure?"

  "Yes. Now go. A few hours away won't be the end of the world."

  Dave had not intended to lie in that moment. There was simply no way for him to have known that "a few hours" was, in fact, precisely when the world would end.

  She kissed Emma's head, then his cheek, and left before she could change her mind.

  That had been forty minutes ago.

  Presently, he was holding a freshly changed baby, still covered from head to toe in baby powder.

  Emma tugged on his beard. "Ma, ma."

  "She'll be back soon, my love."

  "Mmmuh."

  Dave checked the time. "Oh, you getting hungry? Milk?"

  "Ba," Emma said.

  "I'll take that as a yes. Right this way to Casa De Papa."

  The house was quiet in that specific way it only got when Sarah wasn't home. The silence of a space that was used to being full. There were bottles prepped in the fridge. Sarah had shown him twice and left a note on the counter with instructions, which he “didn't need” but also didn't throw away because he wasn't stupid.

  He pulled a bottle out, warmed it, and checked the temperature against his wrist. Perfect. Sarah had pre-measured everything. God, he loved that woman.

  Emma grabbed the bottle with both hands and went to work. She was an efficient eater. No messing around. Dave respected that.

  He leaned against the kitchen counter and took in the morning. Tuesday. October. The windows were open and the air had that clean fall bite to it. The Johnsons' kids were playing in their yard next door. He could hear them arguing about something. A dog barked somewhere down the street.

  Normal morning. Good morning.

  2 Hours Until the Apocalypse

  His phone buzzed. A text. Sarah.

  How is she?

  Dave took a selfie. Both of them still covered in baby powder. Emma mid-bottle, one hand gripping the nipple, the other still tangled in his beard. He looked like a man who had survived something.

  We're thriving, he typed.

  Three dots. Then: Oh my God, Dave.

  Routine diaper change. No casualties.

  I can come home.

  You are going to sit in that spa and you are going to relax. And don't come back until you've gotten the full experience. Have them cover you in granola and coconut oil or whatever they do.

  Three dots. A pause. Three dots again. Then: I love you. Kiss her for me.

  Dave kissed the top of Emma's powdery head. She didn't look up from the bottle.

  Done. Now go relax. We're fine.

  He put the phone down. They were fine. He had this.

  Emma finished the bottle, and he got a solid burp out of her on the second pat. She settled against his shoulder, fingers finding his beard again, and made the soft humming sound that meant she was content.

  "What do you want to do now?" Dave asked. "We've got a while until Mama gets home. I'm thinking tummy time, then maybe the play mat, then you can watch Daddy play video games."

  "Da," Emma said.

  "Great point. Tummy time after milk is a recipe for disaster. Let's start with the play mat."

  He carried her back toward the nursery. The hallway was full of morning light. Emma's hand patted his chest. Pat, pat, pat.

  It wasn't more than a few moments later that Emma was asleep in his arms.

  Dave Thompson, thirty-four years old, former college linebacker turned IT technician, dad-bod, six-foot-two, two-twenty, beard full of baby powder, carried his sleeping daughter down the hallway of their three-bedroom home in Millfield, Ohio.

  8 Minutes Until the Apocalypse

  After her nap, Dave and Emma had managed to accomplish quite a lot. They’d gotten themselves cleaned up, though the rest of the room could wait until later. They’d eaten a snack, by which he meant that he'd taken three bites of toast and another cup of coffee, while Emma systematically relocated her oatmeal from bowl to high chair to floor to face to hair. They'd played their game, meaning Dave had farmed trash mobs in World of Witchcraft while Emma watched from his lap with the intense concentration she usually reserved for bowel movements.

  He was working on his Level 77 Protector, solo grinding the new frog monsters from the latest expansion. The Protector was a tank class: high defense, low damage, built to stand between the party and whatever wanted to kill them. Dave had played tanks exclusively since college. His buddies had always wanted him to try DPS, but there was something about the role that fit. Stand in front. Take the hit. Keep your people alive. It wasn't glamorous, but Dave had never been particularly interested in glamorous.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  Emma loved watching him play. Would stare at the screen, making little sounds. A part of him felt bad for it, but that part was quickly drowned out by how much he loved hearing her laugh. Lately she'd started pointing at the frog monsters and dissolving into fits of giggles. Dave had no idea what a nine-month-old found so funny about amphibian monster death, but he appreciated the support.

  He had managed to play for all of eight minutes when the power went out.

  "Crackers," he said. He was trying to get in the habit of swearing in non-swear words, which he found easier if they were slightly amusing to himself.

  He stood and something thumped outside.

  Deep. Dave felt the vibration in his chest. Like someone had dropped something enormous a few blocks away.

  He paused. Listened. Nothing. Emma briefly looked for the source of the sound. The room was still bright from the late morning light. He guessed the power outage was because of that tree again.

  "Probably the Hendersons," he said. "They're getting that tree removed, remember? I told you about it. You were very interested. Probably just turned it off so they could work near the lines."

  Emma set to chewing on his shirt collar in response.

  He set her down on the play mat in the nursery. Her toys were arranged in a loose circle: the stuffed elephant she liked to chew on, the crinkly book she liked to chew on, the stacking rings she liked to knock over and then chew on, and Raf, the stuffed giraffe she'd chosen as her ride-or-die. She grabbed Raf by the neck and stuffed his head in her mouth.

  "Good choice," Dave said.

  He started cleaning up the powder mess. It was everywhere. He grabbed the wipes, the unscented ones Sarah bought in bulk because Emma had sensitive skin, a lesson Dave had learned exactly once, and started wiping down surfaces.

  Another thump. Closer. The windows rattled.

  Dave looked up. Through the nursery window, the sky looked off. Too orange for noon. Wrong shade, wrong direction.

  "Huh," Dave said.

  Emma banged Raf against the floor and screeched happily.

  He pulled out his phone to check the weather. No signal. That was weird. They had solid coverage here. Sarah had specifically made that a requirement when they bought the house because she needed to be reachable for school emergencies.

  He tried again. Nothing.

  "Great," Dave muttered. "Carrier's out too."

  The rational part of his brain assembled the data points the way he'd assemble a trouble ticket at work: two unusual sounds, unusual sky color, loss of cellular signal. At the office, three correlated anomalies meant escalation. At home, on a Tuesday, with his daughter eating a stuffed giraffe, it meant nothing. It meant the Hendersons and a weather system and a tower outage. Normal things that happened to line up.

  And yet, he couldn’t shake a terrible feeling.

  He took a step toward the window.

  A third thump that wasn't a thump. A sound like the earth splitting its spine. The whole house lurched sideways, before suddenly and rapidly down. The floor dropped six inches and stopped with a jolt that buckled Dave's knees.

  Then the ceiling gave.

  The support beam came through the drywall directly above the play mat. Directly above Emma. Dave saw it in the fraction of a second that it takes a brain to process the worst thing it has ever seen. The beam was thick as his thigh, cracked and jagged, falling straight toward his daughter.

  There was no thought. Just movement. Three steps. The fastest three steps of his life, faster than any sprint he'd ever run on any field, and he was over her, around her, his body curled into a shell with Emma underneath and the beam hit him across the back like God swinging a baseball bat.

  Something broke.

  Dave heard it before he felt it. A wet crunch somewhere in his spine, and then his legs went wrong. Full of static, a signal cutting in and out. The beam pinned him to the floor. Plaster and insulation rained down. A section of wall folded inward. A shelf came with it. The window exploded outward, frame and all, ripped out into a sky that was now the color of a deep purple bruise.

  He couldn't move. The weight on his back was enormous. His arms were locked around Emma and he could feel her screaming against his chest, feel the vibration of it, but he couldn't hear her over the ringing in his ears and the sound of his house coming apart.

  More of the ceiling fell. The roof. A chunk of something hit his head. His vision went white. Came back. Went gray at the edges.

  Stay awake. Stay awake. You go out, she's alone.

  Through the hole where the window had been, Dave could see the backyard. The oak tree, the one he'd hung a tire swing on last month, had tripled in size. Its trunk had split and reformed, twisted, bark spiraling upward in filigree patterns. The sky flashed a deep, burning orange from horizon to horizon. The Hendersons' house sat at a twenty-degree angle across the back fence, like a picture frame knocked crooked.

  He registered all of this in the detached way of a man whose body was shutting down and whose brain hadn't gotten the memo. Interesting. The world is ending. Noted.

  "Em," he tried to say. His mouth was full of dust. "Emma."

  She was crying. He could feel her, warm and alive against his chest, and that was the only thing that mattered and also the only thing keeping him conscious. His legs were going numb. The static was spreading. The beam across his back was settling, pressing down, and something in his spine was very, very wrong. The breath left him.

  Dave Thompson, at approximately 12:07 PM on a Tuesday in October, in the ruins of what had been his daughter's nursery, began to die.

  A fact he had no time for at the present. He was aware of his daughter's body against his chest. Her small hands fisted in his shirt. The hitch of her crying. He tightened his arms around her, which hurt more than it had any right to, and pressed his face into hers.

  "S'okay," he mumbled. "Daddy's here. Daddy's got you."

  The world darkened.

  “It’s okay.”

  The pain grew distant.

  “Daddy’s here—"

  Emma's crying changed. Got quieter. Focused.

  She put her hand on his chest, right over his heart, and the world turned gold.

  “Ba!”

  It started in her palm. A warmth, spreading outward, soft as sunlight through a nursery window. Dave felt it pour through his shirt, through his skin, into his chest. Into his spine.

  It felt like the world moved backwards. No, not the world. Just his body. The crunch in his back un-crunched. The static in his body flared and cleared. The darkness at the edges of his vision burned away. Something that had been broken, re-set, and then kept going, kept building, pouring strength into places that had been merely normal a moment ago.

  Dave's arms, the ones that had been shaking, locked solid. His elbows, pressed against the floor on either side of Emma, stopped trembling. His back, the back that had been broken seconds ago, felt like it was made of something new. Something that had never been broken and couldn't be.

  He pushed.

  The beam, six inches thick, solid oak, the structural heart of his house, shifted. Lifted. Dave pushed harder and it moved, scraping across his back and crashing into the far wall with a sound like a cannon shot.

  Emma in his arms, he stood up.

  The golden light was still glowing faintly around Emma's fingers. She'd stopped crying. She was looking up at him with huge brown eyes. She had the expression she always got when a frog monster died on his computer screen.

  Delighted.

  Something flickered in his vision. Like a pop-up on a screen, except there was no screen. Just text, floating in the air about two feet in front of his face, glowing faintly gold.

  NAME: Dave Thompson

  Level 1 Dad

  Dave looked at his hands. They were his hands. Same calluses, same wedding ring, same baby powder caked under the nails. But they felt different. Denser. Like someone had upgraded the hardware without changing the case.

  He didn't have time to process this, because it was precisely at that moment that the remnants of the wall that pointed at the Johnsons' house blew inward in a shower of drywall and splintered studs. Dave moved faster this time, twisting to block Emma from the debris. Something came through the hole on all fours, fast, scrambling over the brick.

  “Todd?”

  It was wearing Todd Johnson's clothes. The Ohio State hoodie. The cargo shorts Todd wore every single day of the year, a fashion choice his wife, Linda, had long since stopped fighting. It was Todd's height, Todd's build.

  But it definitely wasn’t Todd.

  Todd's jaw didn't hang open that wide. Todd's eyes weren’t usually milky and dead. Todd's fingers didn't end in points. And Todd didn't make that sound, wet and gargled and hungry, as he locked onto Emma and charged.

  Dave's body moved before his brain caught up.

  He turned, shielded Emma with his left arm, and hit Todd Johnson in the chest with his right.

  An open palm. A shove. The stiff-arm he'd thrown a thousand times in college, muscle memory so deep it was practically genetic. A move that, on the football field, could put a two-hundred-pound linebacker on his back.

  Todd went through the wall.

  A new hole. On the opposite side of the room. Todd hit the drywall and kept going, through the insulation, through the exterior siding. Dave heard him tumble across what was left of the front lawn.

  Dave stared at his hand.

  He'd thrown that stiff-arm a thousand times. It had never put anyone through two walls before.

  A sound from outside. The gargled, wet sound. Getting louder. Todd was coming back.

  Dave looked around the ruined nursery. He needed a weapon. His eyes swept the room. The hatchet by the fireplace, too far. The kitchen knives, too far.

  Todd came back through the first hole. Faster this time. Learning. Those milky eyes locked on Emma and the thing that used to be Dave's neighbor coiled its legs and launched itself across the room.

  Dave caught it.

  Both hands. One on the hoodie, one on what passed for Todd's throat. He caught the Todd-thing mid-air, and the momentum that should have bowled him over barely rocked him back on his heels.

  He was holding his neighbor off the ground with one arm.

  This was not, Dave reflected in the small part of his brain still capable of reflection, normal.

  The Todd-thing thrashed. Clawed at Dave's forearm. The points of its fingers scraped his skin and left white lines but didn't cut. Couldn't cut. Whatever Emma had poured into him, it had changed the skin, too.

  Todd snarled. Snapped his too-wide jaw. Strained toward Emma.

  "No," Dave said.

  He said it the way he said no when Emma reached for an electrical outlet. Calm. Firm. Absolute.

  And he threw.

  Up. Through the hole in the ceiling, the one the beam had made. Todd went up and out and—

  Popped.

  There was no other word for it. Midair, at the apex of the throw, Todd Johnson stopped being Todd Johnson. His body came apart in a silent burst of light, gold and pink and violet and green, and where Todd had been there was instead a cloud of glitter. Rainbow glitter, catching the orange light of the ruined sky, drifting down in a slow, sparkling shower that covered everything it touched.

  It landed in Dave's beard. On Emma's onesie. On the wrecked play mat and the toppled crib and the stuffed elephant and the crinkly book and Raf the giraffe, who now sparkled like he'd been bedazzled by a toddler with a vendetta.

  Emma watched the glitter fall with her mouth open.

  "Buh," she said softly.

  Glitter settled on his eyelashes. He blinked it away. More of it drifted down, catching the orange light, landing on everything. It was going to be in this carpet forever. That was the thing about glitter. Sarah had once opened a glitter card from a student and they'd found it in the shower drain six months later.

  Sarah.

  Dave pulled out his phone. The screen was cracked, spiderweb fracture across the glass. No signal. He tried calling anyway. Nothing. Tried texting. Nothing.

  She was at Serenity Springs. Twenty-minute drive. Due back around three, which meant, he checked the clock, almost three hours from now.

  If the roads were still roads, she'd drive home and find him here. That was the smart play. Stay put. Be where she expected him to be.

  The house groaned.

  A long, structural sound, deep in the bones of the walls. The floor shifted under his feet. Just slightly, just enough to notice. Plaster dust sifted from what was left of the ceiling.

  Dave looked up. The crack from the beam had spread down the hallway, branching like a river delta. As he watched, a chunk of drywall the size of a dinner plate detached and shattered on the floor.

  So much for staying put.

  Emma tugged his beard. "Ma."

  "I know, baby. I know."

  Another flash of text in his vision.

  ~*~

  Don't be scared! Everything's okay!

  ~*~

  Dave stared at it.

  More text. Scrolling up.

  ~*~

  NAME: Dave Thompson

  TITLE: Protector of Emma

  CLASS: Dad

  LEVEL: 1

  ~*~

  He read it twice. Then a third time.

  He looked at the floating text. He looked at his daughter. He looked at the nursery where he'd changed her diaper a thousand times and sang to her at 3 AM and fell asleep on the floor next to her crib on the nights when she wouldn't stop crying and neither would he, secretly, because being a new parent was the most terrifying and wonderful thing that had ever happened to him and he hadn't told anyone about the crying part, not even Sarah.

  Class: Dad.

  Emma looked up at him. She smiled, big and gummy and delighted, the same smile she gave the frog monsters on his screen.

  "Ba!" she said, and clapped her powdery, glitter-covered hands. A small puff of rainbow sparkles burst into the air between them.

  ~*~

  WELCOME TO THE SYSTEM

  ~*~

  The house cracked again, sharp, from the attic, like a gunshot, and the hallway floor tilted slightly to the left.

  Dave looked at the floating text. Looked at his daughter. Looked at the house falling apart around them.

  "Okay," he said. "Okay. We're not staying here."

  He didn't know what any of this meant. The text, the class, the golden light, the fact that he'd just thrown Todd Johnson through a ceiling with one arm. He didn't know what had happened to the world or what was happening to him.

  But he knew three things. The house was coming down. Sarah wasn't here. And Emma needed to eat again in about two hours, which meant he needed diapers, formula, bottles, and whatever else he could grab before this house finished the job of becoming a pile of lumber.

  The front closet: Sarah's go-bag. The garage: tools. The kitchen: food.

  "All right, baby girl," he said. "Before we go anywhere, Daddy needs to pack."

  Emma grabbed his beard. Glitter fell from his chin. Outside, the sky burned orange, and he had about fifteen minutes before this house finished becoming a pile of lumber.

  Dave started toward the closet.