The world outside still looked peaceful.
That made it worse, considering what was going to happen.
There's something deeply upsetting about walking through a city that has no idea it's about to end. People moved around me like it was just another Thursday.
A guy in a suit talked loud into his phone about a meeting that would never happen. A couple argued outside a coffee shop about something small and stupid and completely meaningless. A kid on a bike cut across the crosswalk and nearly clipped a woman pushing a stroller, and she yelled at his back as he pedaled away.
Normal. All of it so relentlessly, painfully normal.
I knew what it looked like in about three hours. I'd seen it. I'd lived through the first day more times than I could count — or maybe more accurately, died through it. The streets cracked. The sky split open. The screaming started and didn't stop for weeks.
Most of the people around me right now would not make it to sundown.
I pushed the thought down hard and kept walking. No time for that. Grief was a luxury I couldn't carry today.
First thing I needed was a gun. My Second Amendment shall not be infringed.
In my original run through this day — the real first time, when I didn't know any better — I hadn't gotten a weapon until two days after the Veilfall.
I'd spent those days hiding in a parking garage with a broken bottle and a fire extinguisher, which had worked exactly as badly as it sounds. By the time I found an actual firearm, I'd already lost two fingers and a lot of blood.
Not today.
I knew a gun store about ten minutes away on foot. A small place, a little cramped, with a handwritten sign in the window and a guy behind the counter who clearly loved his job. I'd passed it a couple hundred times before the world ended and never once gone in. Funny how things work.
I walked fast, keeping my head down, resisting the urge to look at every face I passed and do the math.
The bell above the door gave a small jingle when I pushed it open.
The clerk looked up from something he was reading. Older guy, thick-armed, the kind of calm that comes from spending a lot of time around weapons. He had a neatly trimmed beard and reading glasses pushed up on his forehead.
"Morning," he said. "Need some help?"
I made myself slow down, breathing steadily.
"Yeah," I said. "Something reliable. Something I can carry."
He set his magazine down and came around the counter without rushing. He had the easy manner of someone who liked talking about this stuff, which worked in my favor. I didn't want to seem like I was in a hurry, even though every second felt like it was burning off the clock.
He walked me through a few options. I let him talk. I already knew what I wanted — something with a solid grip, easy to reload under pressure, dependable when everything around it was going wrong.
He pulled out a few pistols and laid them on the glass case, explaining each one like I had all the time in the world.
I picked one up, checked the weight, and said I'd take it.
He nodded, approving.
"Good choice. Magazines?"
"As many as you have."
He raised an eyebrow but didn't comment. Started pulling boxes.
"Ammo too," I said. "A lot of it."
That got a small chuckle out of him.
"Planning for the zombie apocalypse or something?"
I looked at him for a second. 'You old jinx.'
"Something like that."
He laughed like I'd made the best joke he'd heard in ages. I paid in cash — I'd grabbed what I had from the apartment before leaving — and he bagged everything up without any fuss.
Good man. I hoped he made it. I'd never found out what happened to this particular block in the first hours, and I didn't let myself think about it now.
Outside, the sun was sitting high and ordinary in the sky.
I stood on the sidewalk for a moment and just breathed.
Everything still looked fine. Still looked whole. But I'd learned a long time ago that the Veilfall doesn't announce itself with fireworks. It sneaks in first. You have to know what to look for.
The air felt different — heavier than it should be, like the atmosphere itself was holding its breath. The kind of pressure you feel before a bad storm, except there wasn't a cloud in the sky.
The birds had gone quiet. I noticed it without meaning to — that sudden absence of background noise that you never pay attention to until it stops. There were no pigeons, no sparrows, nothing.
And there was a shimmer at the edges of things. It was not obvious. Not something you'd catch if you weren't looking for it. Just a faint wrongness in the air, like heat haze but without the heat.
Reality was getting ready to break.
I checked the gun. Loaded the magazine, chambered a round, clicked the safety off. I kept it low at my side, partially hidden by my jacket. Nobody on the street looked twice. People in this city had seen stranger things on a Tuesday.
I exhaled slowly.
"Here we go," I said, to no one.
The sky cracked.
It wasn't subtle. It never was, looking back — but people always described it afterward like they'd thought it was something else at first. Lightning, maybe, or a reflection. Their brains trying to fit it into something that made sense.
A line of violet light split across the clouds, sharp, like someone had drawn it with a pen that shouldn't exist. It held for a second, then spread, branching out, fracturing the sky into a pattern that looked almost geometric.
People noticed and stopped walking. Someone nearby said, quietly, "What the hell is that?"
Then the electronics died. It happened all at once — phones going black mid-sentence, car engines cutting out with a sound like a sigh, traffic lights blinking off. A bus coasted to a stop in the middle of the intersection. The city went weirdly, deeply silent.
Then the screaming started.
The first tear opened directly above the street about thirty meters ahead of me.
It looked exactly the way it always looked — like someone had grabbed the air and pulled it apart, edges burning violet-white, a darkness behind it that wasn't quite darkness. More like the absence of everything. And through it, moving fast, came the first one.
A Chitter Scout.
Small for a Chitter — maybe the size of a large dog — but fast. Faster than anything that size had any right to be. Six limbs, all of them bladed at the ends, a flat body designed for speed, and that clicking jaw sound that I had heard in nightmares for ten years.
The people around it froze solid. That's always what happened. Your brain just stops for a second, trying to process something it has no category for.
I didn't freeze. I raised the gun and fired.
Bang.
The bullet caught it clean in the head and it dropped without another sound. One moment it was moving, the next it wasn't. People stumbled back, shouting, pressing against walls and car doors.
I was already looking up.
Second tear, maybe twenty meters to the left. Two Scouts came through this one, hitting the ground at a run.
Bang. Bang.
Both of them went down before they'd made it three steps.
The street went quiet again for about half a second.
Then everyone really started screaming, after having completely processed what was happening.
I moved toward the center of the street, scanning. My heart was going fast but my hands were steady. Ten years of this, I guess — your body learns to keep working even when your brain is loudly telling you that everything is terrible.
I dropped the magazine to reload. Then stopped.
I looked at the magazine in my hand. It was surprisingly full.
I stared at it in shock. I remembered clearly that I had fired three shots. I'd felt them fire — the recoil, the sound, everything. But the magazine sitting in my palm was completely full, like I hadn't fired a single round.
I slid it back in. Aimed at a chunk of debris on the road and fired once.
Bang.
Checked the magazine again. It was full.
My stomach did something complicated.
I fired four more times in quick succession, just to be sure.
Still full.
I stood there in the middle of a collapsing world, bullets bouncing off the laws of physics, and had to take exactly one second to just stare at the gun in my hand.
"What. The. Actual. F*ck!" I said out loud.
Not a question exactly. More like my brain checking whether it was still attached.
Then, quietly, I started to laugh.
It came out low and a little unhinged, which felt appropriate given the circumstances. This sudden ability that he'd gained was Infinite Ammo that required no reloading. The gun just kept going, endlessly, like it had decided the normal rules didn't apply to it.
"Okay," I said. "Okay, that's new. That is a completely new thing."
More tears split open across the sky. Five. Six. Eight. I lost count.
Scouts poured out of them, and behind the Scouts came the Runners — bigger, faster, the ones that went straight for people who were trying to get away.
I'd spent years dreading the first wave. Dreading that first hour when the numbers were still small enough that one person with a gun and enough nerve could actually do something, if they'd only had the bullets.
Well.
Now I had the bullets.
I moved into the chaos with the gun raised, and this time — for the first time in ten years of losing — I didn't have to stop. Guns-a-blazing.