I should have stayed up these st few days and gotten as many supplies as I could, but it would be fine. The main thing being born back now provided was me; I was the most important thing to humanity. Saving cows and chickens was a priority, though. The flood happened too fast, and millions of cows and billions of chickens died in the process of America being hit by the flood.

  I wanted milk and eggs for my breakfast in the future, and that would take dozens of both to make sure it would be possible. I needed to find high ground to store vehicles, if I could, then I could fill semi-truck shipping containers and just move them to a pce that would be dry. The flood didn’t hit some parts; if it was on a hill, the wave wouldn’t reach, and it would bypass, with only the rain and hail being able to do damage to it.

  I had an idea of where I wanted to bunker down, but it would take betraying one of my closest friends in this timeline… Thankfully in the other timeline, he already betrayed me, and he was kind of a dick so it was fine. I made another call, it was weird holding a phone to my ear again after all this time. I hadn’t noticed it the first day because I was still shell-shocked by what happened, but it felt nostalgic after so long.

  “Hey, Jake isn’t here right now. Danny, what do you need?” Hearing her voice without the hoarse scratchy pain was odd, but I pushed forward. “Hey, Vicky. Can I come over and talk with you about Jake? I have a possible business deal going forward, too.” She sounded skeptical. “Business… I’d rather not get into business with friends.” I fake ugh. “Well, let’s talk about it first, then you can decide.”

  Before I headed over, I needed to empty my storage. I had the two corpses, which were taking up about half of the space, closer to forty percent actually, but I couldn’t get rid of them yet. I didn’t want to get rid of Melissa’s anyway. It still had the tier nine core. As someone with a zombie core, I could convert it with no risk to my health. If a normal human or even someone with fresh powers tried, they’d overload on the power and die.

  I unloaded ten spatial rings and two more backpacks. Thankfully, the spatial products didn’t have negative effects like they did in DND. It was more like, since it was my unique brand of spatial magic, they could be stored, but I wouldn’t be able to store someone else's special storage item in mine. They were on the expensive side. The spatial rings took tier three cores while the backpacks took tier five. The truck I had took a tier-seven and five tier-five cores to expand. That was like the earnings of a survivor city for a month, ten years into the apocalypse. It would be years before we got any tier fives, let alone the tier seven, it also took.

  I still needed more space. I took out the ten vials of enhancement liquid and ten power activation syringes. The enhancement liquid also functioned as the zombie cure; if a person took that, they couldn’t gain power ever again, so only those who gained powers normally took them. The power activation syringes were like flipping a coin. It would forcefully activate your power, but your body might not survive the process.

  There was a trick you could try to get better chances, but I didn’t need to worry about that for a while. Unloading all my guns… There were a lot of guns to unload. Almost all of my storage was guns. I wish I knew I was going to be sent back, a brick of gold would be killer for making money to buy items right now. I was going to have to steal most after I bought food today unless I got access to more money.

  I looked at my phone again, seeing that my brother managed to make it to Las Vegas already and bet. The bet won, but he already spent four hundred of the thousand he won gambling, which was right up my brother’s alley. At least he was safe, I messaged him to take that thousand he still had and buy food with it today. I told him if he bought two hundred and fifty dolrs of high shelf life food, then he could keep the rest. After the news comes out tomorrow, I’d tell him to buy cigarettes and make sure everything was stored on the second floor but I wasn’t even sure Nevada got hit by the flood. It was better safe than sorry, though.

  My power had utility outside of combat, but so did some other powers. There was an enhanced sword in my space I forgot about so I tossed the crappy ornate one I stored yesterday back out and kept the good one inside. The st item was acid. I started keeping some in my inventory along with a gun with at least one bullet, just in case I ended up in another situation where the leader imprisoned me and was like torturing people.

  That was what happened in my previous life, and it was when I met back up with Jake and Vicky. She was already far worse off; the rich and happy socialite I knew from before the apocalypse was gone and repced with a skittish mess of a human who listened to her boyfriend when she really shouldn’t have. I wanted to help them out, so I started smuggling items and had Jake keep watch for me. He thought he could get more from ratting out my power to the leader of the city.

  That was the case. I bet he didn’t think he’d be rewarded by having a hundred metal spikes pushed through his body while his girlfriend got carted off and brutally assaulted by the rest of his gang. That was the Negan wannabe who happened to have metal manipution powers. He could also turn his skin into metal, and it made him think he was untouchable… Well, a year of torturing me ter, he finally dropped his guard and let me get close enough to throw acid in his face.

  If I had access to a gun at that time, I’d have most likely killed myself. Since I got this zombie power I knew one of the zombies I was going to convert was that fucker as soon as he could metalize his body. I pulled into the gated area where she lived. Vicky was rich, not Richy Rich rich but pretty damn close. She lived in a mansion by herself but also had vacation mansions near every coastline or ski resort. Her father might have known about the oncoming disaster, but he’d have definitely let his daughter know… Unless she did know and didn’t care because she wanted to stay behind with her boyfriend…

  Or I was wrong and he didn’t know about it beforehand, it could be either way, but I’d be able to tell when I mentioned it to Vicky. Opening the door, I couldn’t help but be amazed at how clean the building was. I forgot how things looked before people stopped caring about that stuff, as they were too focused on surviving to care about cleanliness. I yell out. “Yo!”

  She responded. “In here!” The house was so big that you needed to yell out to find where someone was. She was in the entertainment room right now. Sitting on a probably several-thousand-dolr couch, she was pying a shooting game, one that probably came out recently, but I didn’t recognize it because it wasn’t CoD or Halo. She asked. “What did you need to talk to me about?”

  We weren’t really that close. She was my friend's girlfriend, and I was too loyal to ever make a move on her. I thought she was beautiful but only now looking at how much of a piece of shit he was to her do I know that breaking them up was the best thing I could ever do for her. I queued up the messages I found and stored them in an ‘evidence’ folder as I handed the phone over to Vicky.

  She finished the round before she started looking and didn’t say anything as she read through them. Tears began to fall from her eyes as she finally said something. “So… Jake’s been cheating on me?”