Chapter 1 : Cold Awakening
Colorado Rockies — January 2020, Pre-Dawn
The first thing Marcus Cole knew was cold. Not the kind that came from a window left open or a dead radiator in his Denver apartment. This was the kind that crawled inside bone and stayed there, the kind that turned breath into something visible and fingers into something useless.
His cheek pressed against wood. Rough, warped, gritty with frost.
Where—
He tried to push himself up. Arms buckled. Tried again. Managed to get his palms flat, elbows locked, and the world tilted sideways before righting itself. A cabin. Small. Dark except for moonlight cutting through gaps in boarded windows. His breath came out in pale clouds, each one thinner than the last.
His name was Marcus Cole. Twenty-eight years old. Emergency Management Coordinator for the City of Denver. Former Army Combat Medic, 68W, honorably discharged after four years. He'd been in his apartment. Sitting at his desk. His phone had buzzed—some email from HR about benefits enrollment—and then a pressure behind his eyes, a white-hot spike through the center of his skull, and nothing.
No hospital. No ambulance sounds. No waking up in a bed with someone explaining what happened.
Just this. Cold floor. Cold air. A cabin that smelled like mildew and old wood and something underneath both that he couldn't name.
His fingers found his face. Same nose. Same jaw. Same three-day stubble he'd been too lazy to shave. His body. His hands. But the clothes were wrong—a flannel shirt too big in the shoulders, canvas pants stiff with grime, boots that pinched at the heel.
Then the light came.
Not from outside. From inside his head. A translucent blue interface, faint as a reflection on glass, flickered into existence across his vision. Text materialized letter by letter, patient and precise, like a cursor on a screen nobody else could see.
[SYSTEM BINDING COMPLETE]
[PRIMARY DIRECTIVE: ESTABLISH SUSTAINABLE HUMAN CIVILIZATION]
[SECONDARY DIRECTIVE: ELIMINATE CORDYCEPS THREAT]
Marcus blinked. The text didn't go away.
Cordyceps.
He knew that word. Everybody knew that word, if they played video games or watched the right shows. A fungus that hijacked insects, puppeted their bodies, used them to spread.
But that was fiction. That was—
[WELCOME, HOST. DESIGNATION: MARCUS COLE]
[SYSTEM LEVEL: 1]
[ALL PRIMARY ATTRIBUTES: 10]
[SYSTEM POINTS: 0 | XP: 0/1,000]
The interface responded to his attention like a touchscreen responds to a thumb. When he focused on "Primary Attributes," the display expanded: Vitality, Strength, Agility, Perception, Intelligence, Charisma, Willpower, Luck. All sitting at a flat ten. Average. Across the board, painfully average.
"Establish sustainable human civilization."
His laugh came out broken, more cough than sound. He was on a frozen floor in a stranger's clothes with a heads-up display burned into his vision telling him to rebuild civilization.
Okay. Okay. Panic later. Information now.
The medic in him woke up first. Assess the patient—in this case, himself. He ran his hands down his arms, across his ribs, pressed his abdomen. No pain. No injuries. A dull ache behind his eyes where the spike had been, already fading. Body temperature dropping, though. The shivering had started in his jaw and was working its way down.
He got to his feet. The cabin spun, steadied. One room. A woodstove in the corner, cold and dead, a tin pot on top of it. A table with one leg shorter than the others. A cot pushed against the far wall, mattress stained dark with something he chose not to examine. Shelves along the back wall, mostly empty. A door. Boarded shut with two-by-fours nailed in crooked lines.
Marcus went to the shelves first. His fingers were clumsy, half-frozen, but they found what they found: a hunting knife in a leather sheath, blade still sharp when he tested it against his thumb. A box of matches—he counted twelve, shaking them to hear the rattle. A water bottle, plastic, half-full, the water slushy with cold. A torn jacket hanging on a nail, canvas lined with something that might have been fleece once.
He pulled the jacket on over the flannel. The extra layer helped. Not enough, but enough to stop the worst of the shaking in his core.
Newspapers on the table. He grabbed one, angling it into the moonlight.
COLORADO DAILY — September 14, 2003.
Headline: MARTIAL LAW EXTENDED — FEMA AUTHORIZES USE OF FORCE.
Subheadline: Cordyceps infection reaches 60% of major population centers.
September 2003. The outbreak. The one from—
Marcus set the newspaper down. Picked up another. October 2, 2003. EVACUATION ROUTES CLOSED. Another. November 19, 2003. COMMUNICATION WITH EASTERN SEABOARD LOST.
They stopped after that. No more papers. No more news.
He did the math. If the outbreak started in 2003, and these papers were the last dated artifacts in the cabin, then the world had been like this for years. Seventeen years, if it was roughly 2020 now. He had no way to confirm the current year, not yet, but the layer of dust on everything, the degree of decay in the wood, the particular quality of abandonment—it all pointed to a long time. A very long time.
I'm in the world of The Last of Us.
The System pulsed, a confirmation he didn't ask for.
[CURRENT DATE: JANUARY 12, 2020]
[YEARS SINCE OUTBREAK: 17]
[LOCAL THREAT ASSESSMENT: MODERATE]
Seventeen years. Society collapsed, rebuilt in fragments, devolved into quarantine zones run by military remnants and rebel factions chasing a cure that didn't exist. Joel and Ellie were out there somewhere—or would be, in three years, when the events he'd watched unfold on a screen would play out in flesh and bone and real blood.
And the System wanted him to build a civilization.
With what? Twelve matches and a hunting knife?
He opened the System Store on instinct—the interface responded to the thought—and a list appeared: Food Ration, 5 SP. Clean Water, 3 SP. Medical Kit, 25 SP. He had zero points. The store might as well have been a menu behind bulletproof glass.
A sound.
Marcus stopped breathing.
From outside. Against the door. A slow, rhythmic scratching, like a branch dragging across wood, except there was no wind.
He moved to the boarded window. Put his eye to the gap between planks. Moonlight on snow. Trees. And at the edge of the porch, a figure.
Human-shaped. Upright. Wearing what might have been a coat, or what was left of one. The head was wrong. Swollen on one side, split open by fungal growth that caught the moonlight in pale ridges and plates. The face—there was no face. Just Cordyceps. Layers of it, blooming outward from the skull, covering the eyes entirely.
It moved in a hitching, mechanical way, head cocking left, then right, then left again. Each time it paused, a sound came from deep inside its chest.
Click. Click. Click.
Echolocation. A Clicker. One of the mid-stage infected, blind but capable of mapping its environment through sound alone. Fast. Strong. One bite meant infection. One good grab meant a torn throat.
The hunting knife was in his hand. He didn't remember drawing it.
The Clicker pressed against the cabin wall. The wood groaned. Marcus counted his heartbeats because counting was the only thing keeping his legs from running and his mouth from screaming. The thing circled. Testing. Dragging its ruined fingers along the boards like someone reading braille.
It reached the door. Stopped. The clicking intensified—rapid, probing, a machine-gun staccato of sound bouncing off wood and bouncing back. Marcus was three feet from the door. The knife shook in his grip, and he clamped his other hand around the wrist to steady it.
Don't make a sound. Don't breathe. Don't—
The clicking slowed. The scratching stopped.
Footsteps. Moving away. Circling the cabin's perimeter again, testing the next wall, then the next.
Marcus lowered himself to the floor, back against the wall, knife across his knees. His hands were trembling, not from the cold anymore. In his old life, he'd been a medic. He'd treated gunshot wounds in a forward operating base. He'd done chest decompressions in a moving vehicle. But nothing—nothing in that training or the emergency management work after it—had prepared him for a thing that used to be human standing three feet away, hunting him by the sound of his breathing.
I push papers. I make spreadsheets. I coordinate evacuations and resource allocation. I am not built for this.
The Clicker completed another circuit. The clicking was slower now, less urgent. Still there.
Marcus pulled the torn jacket tighter around his shoulders and watched the door.
The matches sat in his pocket. The knife sat on his knees. The System sat in his skull, patient and silent, waiting for him to earn his first point.
---
Morning was a theory. The sky outside the window gaps shifted from black to deep gray, and Marcus tracked its progress with the kind of attention he used to reserve for quarterly budget reports. The Clicker had circled the cabin four more times through the night, each pass slower, each round of clicking more perfunctory. By the time the gray had enough blue in it to suggest dawn, the scratching had stopped entirely.
He hadn't slept. Couldn't.
The water bottle was still half-full. He drank a third of it, rationing by instinct. The cold water hit his empty stomach like a fist.
Food. Warmth. Weapons. Shelter. Transportation. Information. In that order.
The emergency management training kicked in before the fear could. Maslow's hierarchy, simplified for disaster response. Physiological needs first. Safety second. Everything else could wait.
He stood. Knees cracked. Back ached from the floor. He moved to the boarded window and pressed his eye to the gap again.
Snow. Trees. The Clicker's tracks—a meandering, aimless path stamped into the frost—leading away from the cabin toward the treeline. No figure. No clicking.
Gone. Or hiding.
Marcus picked up the knife, tucked the matches and water bottle into the jacket's inner pockets, and looked at the back of the cabin. A window, smaller than the front one, boards nailed across it from the inside. Two nails per board. He could pry them with the knife blade if he was careful.
He moved to the window and got to work.
The first nail screamed coming out. He froze, knife wedged under the board, listening. Nothing. The second nail came quieter. The third. He pulled the board free and set it down without a sound. Then the next board. Then the next.
Cold air poured through the gap. Pine and snow and something faintly organic underneath—spores, maybe, or just the smell of a world that had been rotting for seventeen years.
The opening was tight. He got his shoulders through, then his hips, and dropped into the snow on the other side. Two feet of it. His boots broke through the crust, and the cold seized his ankles immediately.
The forest stretched in every direction. No roads. No power lines. No sounds except wind in the pines.
Marcus checked the treeline. Checked behind the cabin. Checked the tracks in the snow—the Clicker's trail led northwest, weaving between trees before disappearing over a low ridge.
He turned southeast, away from the tracks, and started walking.
The knife rode in his right hand. The System pulsed quietly at the edge of his awareness, showing his stats, his empty inventory, his zero points.
Behind him, the cabin shrank between the pines.
Ahead, the mountains waited.