Anna’s words hung heavily in the air, stark and unforgiving. I swallowed hard, the metallic taste of fear thick on my tongue. There was no reassurance in her voice—only cold, blunt realism that sharpened my anxiety to a painful edge.

  Another gust of bitter wind cut through the broken window frames, carrying the faint, nauseating scent of rot and burning debris from the crumbling city below. My skin prickled with goosebumps as I scanned the darkening skyline, the shattered skeletons of buildings standing starkly against the blood-red haze of twilight. A chorus of distant moans and rustling sounds echoed hauntingly through the empty streets below, an endless reminder of the horrors lurking just beyond our sight.

  “Keep moving,” Anna hissed quietly, breaking my fearful trance. Her tone was tense, impatient. There was no comfort in her presence—only the grim understanding that survival was an unending nightmare.

  I followed her quickly, stumbling awkwardly over the scattered debris, pulse quickening with each cautious step further into the suffocating gloom. Anna paused at the entrance of another stairwell, her body tense, shoulders squared as she gazed up into the shadows. I stopped just behind her, struggling to catch my breath, the hunger and exhaustion gnawing at my insides like a living thing. My stomach had long since stopped growling—now it simply ached, a hollow, persistent reminder that my body was beginning to consume itself.

  “This is as high as we go,” Anna muttered, more to herself than to me.

  I blinked, trying to shake the dizziness creeping in from fatigue. “Why?” My voice was hoarse, raw from lack of water.

  She tilted her head toward the ceiling, indicating the levels above. The faint, eerie sound of wind howling through the broken skyscraper made my spine stiffen. “Wind,” she explained, barely above a whisper. “Past this point, it gets strong enough to suck you out of a window. Happens all the time. I’ve seen it.” She glanced at me, expression unreadable. “One second you’re stepping into a room, the next you’re gone.”

  I swallowed hard, my mouth bone-dry. The idea of being lifted off my feet and hurled out into the sky, flailing helplessly as gravity abandoned me, was almost worse than the dead things stalking the streets below. The mere thought made my knees lock in place.

  “Right,” I rasped, forcing myself to step back from the stairwell. “No higher.”

  Anna nodded, already turning away. She moved with quiet efficiency, picking her way through the debris of what had once been an office floor. The scattered remains of an abandoned world lay around us: upturned chairs, broken desks, scattered documents curled and yellowed with age. I hesitated near a cracked partition, running my fingers absently over the dust-covered surface, feeling the rough grit of neglect beneath my fingertips.

  That was when I saw it.

  A calendar, hanging crookedly on the wall, its pages faded and curling at the edges. My heart kicked against my ribs as I stepped closer, wiping a thick layer of grime away with the back of my sleeve. The image of a beach, an idyllic scene of rolling waves and golden sand, was faded with time. But it wasn’t the picture that sent a jolt of unease through me—it was the date.

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  June, 2018.

  I stared at it, my mind grinding sluggishly to catch up. My breath came slow and shallow, a sickening sense of wrongness unfurling deep in my gut.

  The year was supposed to be 2025.

  I took a step back, dizziness washing over me. I turned my head, glancing around the office floor as if expecting something—anything—to make sense of what I was seeing.

  For days, I had assumed I’d been thrown into another world, another dimension, something out of a nightmare. But this… this wasn’t another world. It was my world.

  Only—something had gone horribly wrong.

  The virus.

  The outbreak.

  The last thing Anna had told me about the infection rate flashed in my mind. 99.8 percent of the population wiped out. The world had unraveled, society collapsed, the future snuffed out before it could even happen.

  I was standing in the ruins of my own timeline.

  A twisted, shattered version of history where the world had ended seven years ago.

  My knees threatened to buckle. I swallowed thickly, throat tightening as panic clawed its way into my chest. This wasn’t an alternate dimension—there was no other world. The cottage, the key, the door—they hadn’t taken me to some foreign realm.

  They had taken me back.

  Back to a past that had been devoured before it could become my present.

  My fingers twitched at my sides, my skin suddenly clammy with sweat despite the cold air. My pulse roared in my ears, an overwhelming rush of terror pounding behind my eyes.

  It made sense.

  The money in the safe. It had been exactly the same as the money from my world because it was the same money. The buildings, the city, the landmarks—they were all identical because this wasn’t some other place. This was my city. Only—history had gone a different way.

  I had never left my world. I had left my time.

  I stumbled back another step, my breath coming too fast, too sharp. My head spun, thoughts whirling wildly, colliding into each other like broken glass.

  The realization made me feel suffocated.

  Had I—had I even been born in this timeline? Did I even exist here?

  My fingers dug into my scalp, nails scraping against my skin as I tried to ground myself, tried to hold onto something solid, something that made sense.

  The virus or whatever it was had rewritten everything.

  The world I knew—the world I had left behind—had never gotten the chance to exist. The virus had erased it. The roads, the businesses, the neighborhoods—gone before they could have evolved into what I had once known. I was a ghost walking through what could have been.

  And I was trapped.

  A loud crack echoed somewhere outside the building, making me flinch violently, my heartbeat spiking into a frenzied, erratic rhythm.

  Anna, who had been sifting through an overturned filing cabinet, glanced up at me sharply. “What the hell’s wrong with you?” she whispered, eyes narrowing.

  I swallowed back the bile rising in my throat, staring at her like she was the last familiar thing in a world that had turned completely foreign. “This… this isn’t possible,” I choked out, my voice hoarse, barely a breath.

  She frowned, stepping closer, her features sharp with suspicion. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

  I couldn’t tell her. She wouldn’t believe me. To her, this world—this horrific, shattered version of history—was the only reality that had ever existed.

  To her, there was no alternate timeline.

  No lost future.

  No other version of events where the world hadn’t ended.

  I shook my head quickly, forcing myself to breathe, to act normal. “Nothing,” I muttered, my voice tight. “Just—this place is getting to me.”

  Anna studied me for a long moment, her sharp eyes scanning my face as if she could see the chaos swirling behind my expression.

  Eventually, she let out a short, irritated sigh. “Yeah, well. Get used to it.”

  I forced a nod, my skin still cold, my stomach still twisting violently.

  This world—her world—had no future. No children. No generations to come.

  The last embers of humanity were fading.

  And I had to bear witness to it.