The world dissolved around me. I expected some lightning or portals, even those swirling vortex gate. But nope. It just... shifted. Like someone changed the channel on reality. One second I was in my apartment, the next I was standing in darkness.
The air hit me first. It was heavy, stale, carrying the faint stench of rust and something rotten underneath. The ground beneath my feet was concrete, cracked and uneven.
As my eyes adjusted, I made out the shape of a small room around me. It's walls of crumbling concrete, a collapsed shelf in the corner, a window blocked by debris with thin cracks of gray light seeping through.
A ruined apartment. Just like mine, except this one had the excuse of an apocalypse.
I carefully stepped over the rubble and pushed the door open. It groaned so loudly that I winced. Stealth was clearly not an option with infrastructure this old.
'I guess it's no Last of us.'
The hallway beyond was worse. Collapsed ceiling panels, exposed wiring, walls stained with something I refused to identify. Disgusting shit.
I made my way to what used to be a stairwell and climbed down three flights, each step testing whether the stairs would hold my weight or send me plummeting.
Fortunately, they held even if barely.
When I finally stepped outside, I froze.
The city stretched out before me in beautiful devastation. Skyscrapers stood like broken teeth against a pale gray sky, their windows shattered, their frames wrapped in overgrown vines that had spent decades reclaiming what humans built.
The streets were cracked open, with vegetation pushing through the asphalt in thick green veins. Rusted cars sat in rows like a ancient traffic jam, some overturned, some swallowed halfway into the ground.
It was hauntingly gorgeous. Like concept art from a video game, except I could smell it. And it smelled terrible.
"This is incredible," I whispered, genuinely awestruck despite the stench.
The writer in me was already composing descriptions. The skeletal remains of civilization draped in nature's slow revenge. Yeah, that was good. I should remember that for later.
'Wait! That sounds as if it's written by an AI. Fuck, those Ai hunters will hunt me down. Forget that, does this world have an AI? Gpt?'
I was so busy admiring the scenery that I almost missed the sound. A low, wet growl came from my left.
I turned slowly, and every romantic thought about the apocalypse evaporated on the spot.
It used to be human. That much I could tell from the general shape, two arms, two legs, a head. But the skin was gray and cracked like dried mud, pulled tight over muscles that looked way too defined for something dead.
'Did they open a freaking gym for zombies?'
Its eyes were milky white, and its mouth hung open, revealing teeth sharp as blades.
A zombie. An actual, real zombie. A very real zombie. Important things must be said three times.
And it was looking right at me.
"Oh shit."
It lunged at me as it's instant, explosive movement that closed the ten-meter gap between us in about two seconds.
'What the fuck! Aren't zombies supposed to be slow?'
I threw myself sideways on pure instinct and hit the ground hard, scraping my palms on the broken asphalt. The zombie sailed past me and slammed into a rusted car door, denting it inward like it was made of aluminum foil.
'That could've been my ribs.'
I scrambled to my feet and ran. I didn't have any plans, it was just blind, panicked sprinting down the cracked street. Behind me, I heard the growl again, followed by rapid footsteps that were way too fast for something with no heartbeat.
'Damnit!'
It was faster than me, stronger than me. I had no weapons, no training, and my best physical achievement was a decent bench press at the local gym.
I had forgotten everything in excitement of seeing a new world. My stupid ass!!
I was going to die. On day one in the apocalypse with instant noodles in my backpack.
My readers would be embarrassed to read this.
Then, just as the footsteps behind me grew close enough that I could feel the thing's breath on my neck, I heard a sharp whistle cut through the air.
Something blurred past me, a figure moving so fast that I only caught a flash of black hair and gray fabric. A sound like a watermelon hitting concrete echoed behind me, wet and final.
I stumbled, tripped over my own feet, and face-planted into the asphalt. Graceful as always.
Rolling onto my back, I saw her for the first time.
A woman stood over the zombie's crumpled body, one boot planted on its chest. She held a metal pipe in one hand, now bent slightly from the impact.
Short black hair and black eyes that sparkled with curiosity and amusement. A gray sweater with a shoulder harness pulled tight across her chest.
She was, without exaggeration, the most beautiful woman I had ever seen in my life. And she had just caved in a zombie's skull like it was nothing.
She looked at me...specifically, at the backpack that had fallen open during my graceful face-plant, spilling a few packets of instant noodles and a can of beans onto the apocalypse dirt.
Her eyes went wide in disbelief.
"Is that... food?" she whispered, like I was holding the Holy Grail.
"Uh," I said, still on the ground. "Yeah?"
She looked at the food. Then at me. Then back at the food. Then at me again, and this time her expression shifted into something that I could only describe as predatory delight.
'Yup, I'm done for.'
"You're coming with me," she said and it was not a request.
Before I could respond, she grabbed me by the collar, tossed me over her shoulder like I weighed nothing, scooped up my backpack with her free hand, and started walking.
"Hey! Wait! What the hell... put me down!"
"Nope," she said cheerfully. "You're mine now."
And that, dear friends, is how I met Zero. Certainly not with a romantic glance across a crowded room, not with a heroic rescue followed by grateful tears of a damsel in distress that I wrote so often.
Nope. I met my future sugar mommy face-down on the asphalt with instant noodles rolling away from me while she carried me off like a sack of the world's most pathetic potatoes.
Truly, a love story for the ages.