A survival horror novel by Damian Cross.
Nikki wakes up to a world overrun by the undead, certain of only one thing: Asa is still out there. What he doesn't know yet is how much of the world's fate was already decided by who they used to be.
When Nikki went away to college, he was lost — buried in video games, anime, and a self-imposed isolation that felt safer than the alternative. Then he met Asa: bright, magnetic, and carrying a darkness she never let him see the bottom of. What followed was wild, consuming, and impossible to walk away from clean.
Years later, Nikki wakes up to a world gone wrong — the dead are walking, the city is silent, and the only thing he's certain of is that Asa is still alive somewhere in it. He sets out to find her, becoming something closer to a hero than he ever thought he had in him.
But the apocalypse isn't what it looks like. Nothing here is what it looks like. And the answers were never in the present — they were in everything that happened before.
Every chapter opens on a timestamp and a label — Now or Then — the same way the story itself never lets you settle into one world for long. The apocalypse and the college years are cut against each other until you can't tell which one is haunting the other.
Nikki crosses a country overrun by the dead, gathering allies, enemies, and a sword named Rien — closing in on a truth far stranger than any virus.
The dorm rooms, the late-night fights, the relationship that made Nikki who he is — and the version of Asa that the present world is still paying for.
Awakens to the apocalypse with no memory of how he got there, and sets off to become a hero he never planned on being — not realizing how much of his fate was written long before the dead started walking.
Bright and magnetic on the surface, carrying a weight Nikki never fully understood. Their relationship pulled them together as hard as it tore them apart — and the world may be paying for how it ended.
Found sheltering in Nikki's own house as the dead rose. She's reluctant to explain herself, and more afraid of something else entirely than she is of the horde outside.
A gun-slinging survivor who becomes Nikki's guide through the new world, shouldering the burden of protecting what's left of humanity with practiced ease. So why does Asa's name make him go quiet?
Leads Nikki and Asa into the heart of the city back when none of this was supposed to matter. Unstable, occasionally brilliant, and never quite who he seems.