I stayed up until 3 a.m. roasting a zombie novel in its comment section. The doomed wife cooks for everyone, carries the bags and dies on a bridge so her husband and his mistress can run across it. I told the author the poor woman deserved better. Then I woke up as her. It is the sixth day of the apocalypse. The dead are walking the Turnpike, my husband sleeps in my best friend’s truck every night, and his family has me on my knees at a gas station for stealing medicine I have never seen. Tonight my best friend will steal my mother’s jade necklace, wake the healing spring inside it and become the chosen heroine. I am supposed to become the help. So I let her take the credit. The necklace was only the door. The real space opens for my blood, and it holds mountains, a river, a barn full of animals, a warehouse that never fills and a tree that grows stronger every time I feed it a crystal. While my husband’s family thinks I am carrying their bags, I am filling my space with food, medicine, fuel, weapons and everything else the end of the world will need. The book I read never mentioned the stranger my husband was supposed to shoot, the one who was bitten and never turned. It never mentioned that the dead walk past him as if he isn’t there, or that he can tell exactly when I am lying. When my best friend smashes my mother’s necklace rather than give it back, I take everything that belongs to me and drive away. They wrote me to die for them. I took the apocalypse instead.