idle

Chapter One: The First Breath of the Apocalypse

There was no warning. No countdown, no flash of light to soften the transition. One moment Furuya Rei had been standing at the sink in his apartment, a glass of water halfway to his lips-and the next, the world had been torn away from beneath his feet and replaced with something else entirely.

He hit concrete. Hard. The glass shattered somewhere in a life that no longer existed, and in its place was the acrid smell of rot and rust, the distant moan of something inhuman, and a sky the wrong color-a bruised, sickly violet that no sun had ever produced.

He rose in a single fluid motion, hand already reaching for a weapon he didn't have, training overriding shock. Around him: overturned cars rusted with disuse, storefronts shattered and looted, a city that had been alive once and was now a corpse wearing the shape of Tokyo, or something like it. Quarantine tape fluttered from a barricade nearby, faded and torn.

This isn't Tokyo. This isn't anywhere.

Across the globe, in a modest brick house outside Chicago, Diana De Alger Obelia had been kneeling beside a client's file spread across her coffee table, humming softly to herself, when the floor beneath her simply ceased to exist.

She did not scream. She had spent too many years training herself into stillness for that. But her heart slammed against her ribs as she found herself standing on broken asphalt, the wind carrying a smell she recognized instantly and hated-decay, old blood, and something else beneath it, something wrong. Her cardigan was still soft blue, incongruous against the gray devastation around her. Her waves of golden hair lifted in a hot, foul wind.

Where-

Then, above every rooftop, every skyscraper, every phone screen and every television across the entire world, reality itself seemed to buckle.

Every screen on Earth went black simultaneously.

In Times Square, pedestrians froze mid-step as the massive electronic billboards flickered and died, then reignited with a single searing white symbol-an eye within a broken circle. In Shibuya, the crossing stopped entirely, thousands of faces tilted upward toward jumbotrons suddenly hijacked. In London, in Beijing, in São Paulo, in every home with a television or a phone or a screen of any kind, the same interruption occurred at the exact same instant, defying every law of broadcast and satellite delay that should have made such synchronicity impossible.

Then a voice. Neither male nor female. Neither warm nor cold. A voice like a held breath given sound.

"ATTENTION, INHABITANTS OF EARTH."

The words appeared in every language simultaneously, subtitles blooming beneath the feed no matter what device displayed it.

"TEN REPRESENTATIVES HAVE BEEN RANDOMLY SELECTED FROM EACH PARTICIPATING NATION. THEY HAVE BEEN TRANSPORTED TO THE FIRST TRIAL LOCATION. THIS TRIAL IS DESIGNATED: SURVIVAL PROTOCOL ONE - EXTINCTION SIMULATION."

The feed cut to an aerial view-an entire city, quarantined and dead, split into distinguishable zones by faint colored barriers of light that shimmered like heat mirages: a Japanese zone glowing pale red, an American zone glowing pale blue, and others besides, dozens of colors threading across a metropolis built like a patchwork of every nation's worst nightmare.

"WIN CONDITION: SURVIVE UNTIL DAWN. ELIMINATION IS PERMANENT. THIS BROADCAST CANNOT BE STOPPED, BLOCKED, OR IGNORED. HUMANITY WILL WATCH."

And humanity did.

News anchors abandoned their scripts mid-sentence. Reporters in Seoul, in Paris, in Nairobi, stared into cameras with open mouths as the feed took over every station simultaneously. Government emergency rooms lit up with contradicting orders no one could execute, because there was nothing to execute against-no missile to intercept, no enemy to negotiate with. Only a voice, and a countdown, and ten thousand comments per second flooding every platform still functioning:

is this real

this has to be a hoax right????

my phone won't turn off the feed I can't close it

那是我弟弟吗？？？ (Is that my little brother??)

OH MY GOD THAT'S A REAL ZOMBIE

In the red-tinted Japanese zone, Furuya Rei's sharp eyes cut through the wreckage and found movement-shambling, wrong-jointed movement, dragging itself between two overturned delivery trucks. A groan tore from something that had once had a human throat.

He didn't hesitate. He seized a length of rusted pipe from the rubble and closed the distance in three strides, driving it through where an eye had once been. The thing convulsed once and went still.

A virtual panel bloomed beside him in the broadcast, rotating slowly, gold-edged and immaculate despite the horror surrounding it.

...