Chapter One: The End of the Before

  I was gardening when the System arrived. Covered with sweat underneath my long sleeves, heavy pants, gloves, face mask, and hat, a sheen of dirt layered over everything. I was totally in the zone, music blasting through my earbuds.

  And no, it wasn’t some gentle, peaceful gardening playlist.

  I had declared war on my bougainvillea, and I was listening to music commensurate with my goals. Angry percussion and hard rock, anything with a pounding beat that would spur me on to greater heights of destruction.

  Maybe that saved me. It’s hard to say.

  You probably think bougainvillea are pretty, with their bright colors, appealing flowers, and deep green leaves. The way they flourish almost all year round and make the world just that much more beautiful.

  No, they are not pretty.

  They are evil.

  Spikes hide amongst those pretty flowers, and those spikes carry a toxin. For sensitive people—aka, sadly, me—a tiny scratch from a bougainvillea is akin to having a line of fire carved into your skin with a sharp needle.

  So admire the pretty, avoid the plant, no big deal, right?

  But the darn things also grow like weeds. Mine were taking over my entire fence line, and I was sick of chopping them back on an almost weekly basis. I’d decided enough was enough. That morning, I’d covered every bit of bare skin and headed out to do battle. I was going to dig those bougainvillea up by the roots, drag them to the abandoned pasture behind my house, and light ‘em up.

  So when the System message began—you know the one, that grandiose “Welcome to the multiverse, you poor saps!” thing—I heard it.

  Technically.

  But I didn’t really hear it. I didn’t listen to it.

  If I thought about it at all, I would have thought my playlist had ended and some random audiobook had started playing. Maybe a podcast intro. The words were just background noise.

  At the time, I was half-jumping on my shovel, trying to hack through a root that was almost as thick as my arm. My brain was busy with the question of whether I needed a different tool.

  A pickaxe, maybe? A chainsaw? A bomb?

  Gardening wasn’t really my thing.

  I’d moved back into the house a few years earlier. I kept the area around it clear because a) wildfires and b) the riding lawnmower was surprisingly fun. Apart from that, my version of gardening amounted to “throw some seeds at a pile of dirt and hope.”

  As a result, I hadn’t exactly spent a lot of time considering the right tool for my destructive impulses. I’d opened up the shed, poked through the stack of garden implements my dad left behind, and grabbed a sturdy old shovel with a solid wooden handle and a dinged-up steel scoop. I think I’d imagined the plant’s roots would be in a big ball, easily dug up, like the plants you could buy at garden stores, instead of spreading through the ground like tentacles.

  But then Zelda barked, followed by a snarl, and that sound broke through my concentration like nobody’s business.

  Zelda’s my Jack Russell terrier, the smallest of my dogs, with, I gotta admit, the biggest piece of my heart. Contrary to stereotypes, she is not a barker. People think Jack Russells are yappy little dogs, but that’s not her, never was.

  Maybe she figured the other dogs had the noisemaker job covered. Her job was to be my shadow. While the others were doing their own things, her thing was to keep attentive eyes on me. Her preferred position was within three feet of me at all times, ideally closer, but given the flying dirt, the swearing, and the moving shovel, she’d taken up a position halfway between me and the front porch.

  So I looked up, away from the bougainvillea roots, to possibly the craziest sight I’d ever seen.

  A giant squirrel—maybe ten times as big as a normal squirrel—was attacking my dog.

  I should maybe mention here that I’d seen some crazy stuff in my life.

  Literally. As a certified nutjob with the psychiatrists, prescriptions, hospital visits, and general history to prove it, I was not unfamiliar with hallucinations. And maybe if I’d actually been taking my meds the way I was supposed to, I would have hesitated for a minute or two to question my own sanity.

  But a squirrel was attacking my dog.

  A gigantic squirrel. One that outweighed my girl by at least a few pounds. Zelda was fighting back, but the squirrel had claws and fangs, and the blood was already flying. Plus, two more squirrels were dashing across the yard in our direction.

  I had a shovel in my hand, with fighting music in my ears, so I did what any possibly not-so-sane person would do: I hurtled toward them, screaming, shovel raised.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  Okay, yes, kinda stupid.

  In my defense, I’m sure I believed the squirrels would scatter. I was bigger than them. I was loud. I was waving a shovel in the air! And they were squirrels. Cute little prey animals, smart enough to scamper up the trees when they saw my dogs in the yard, much less a screaming human charging at them.

  Also in my defense, I was screaming pretty much the smartest thing one can scream in circumstances like that.

  “Bear! Riley! To me! To me! Bear!” I howled at the top of my lungs.

  Yeah, the squirrels might have outweighed Zelda, but Zelda wasn’t the biggest dog in my little pack. Not even close.

  Riley was a Rottweiler/pit bull mix and the sweetest, softest, gentlest soul on the planet. He was seventy pounds of lap dog whose idea of the perfect day included snuggling in bed, snuggling on the couch, a bit of cheese, then more snuggling, maybe with some dog-friendly video playing on the TV. He liked the nature shows.

  Bear, meanwhile, was… well, a little less gentle.

  I didn’t know anything about her background, but the vet figured she was nine, maybe ten months old when she sauntered out of the woods onto my property a couple years earlier. Someone—curse their name and existence, may they burn in hell eternally—had dumped her. There was really no other explanation for how a puppy could wind up alone in my forest.

  I say “my forest,” but that’s just what it felt like. Technically, the wilderness that surrounded the house was part of the Ocala National Forest. I owned about ten acres of it, give or take, most of it wild, but I lived far enough down a dirt road that no one ever came my way unless they meant to.

  Between bears, Florida panthers, coyotes, wild hogs, alligators, hawks, snakes, and scorpions, a puppy didn’t stand a chance out there.

  But Bear had somehow survived, maybe for months. When she wandered into my life, she was skinny, dirty, crawling with fleas and ticks, but tough. Her first greeting was a snarl.

  If Riley hadn’t been Riley, able to say a firm “No” in dog, both politely and not, and fully capable of training an almost feral pup in the virtues of domestication, I’m not sure she would have made it. I’m not sure she could have made it.

  But that was then, and this was now, and now Bear slept at the foot of my bed, took her bits of cheese with delicate grace, and would still make mincemeat of these goddamn squirrels.

  Before she could respond to my call, however, I was on the first squirrel.

  And it wasn’t running.

  It turned on me, chittering like any ordinary squirrel might when chased into a tree, only deeper, angrier, and with this vibration around the sound that almost froze me in place.

  Almost.

  I felt the fear wash over me, but it was the weirdest thing. It wasn’t real fear. It didn’t come from inside, the way fear does. Instead, it felt like an attack. Like the squirrel was spitting fear at me with its voice.

  I hauled off with the shovel and smacked it.

  No squirrel was going to threaten my dog. My girl.

  The shovel connected with a solid thump, enough to knock it sideways. It hit the ground, rolled once, then sprang back up like it was made of rubber.

  It lunged at me.

  I swung again, this time lower, catching it in the ribs. I felt the impact all the way up my arms. It shrieked, claws flailing, and I followed through with a stomp. My work boot hit fur and bone and something softer, and the squirrel went still.

  Just for a second.

  Then it twitched and tried to rise.

  I brought the shovel down, full force, using the edge the same way I’d been trying to cut that bougainvillea root. Then again and again. Finally, the blade bit in, and blood spurted from the mangled body.

  The squirrel’s black eyes were already glazing over.

  I tried to catch my breath.

  For some reason—maybe adrenaline?—tears were spilling out of my own eyes.

  I’d never killed anything before. Well, years ago, I’d held my first dog, Spice, while the vet slid the needle into her vein and I sobbed my way through the hard goodbye, but, you know, that wasn’t really the same thing.

  A screen appeared in front of my face. That voice was still talking in my head, the “welcome to the system” message not even over yet, and music was still playing in my earbuds, but white words in a blue box were appearing before my eyes.

  “Congratulations,” it started.

  “Go away, go away, go away!” I yelled, swiping at it as I dropped to my knees. If I was going to be hallucinating, I wanted to be hallucinating the damage done to my girl, not some stupid error screen blocking my vision.

  Of course, what I should have been paying attention to were the other squirrels, because that squirrel I’d just slaughtered had friends. Fortunately, I had friends, too, and while I was busy with Zelda, Bear and Riley had reached the front yard and were taking care of business.

  Zelda, though, was hurt.

  I think it was the claws. I didn’t glance back at the squirrel to see if its paws were tipped with bloodstained daggers, but the rips through Zelda’s skin, the ones that were seeping blood at an alarming rate, looked more like claw damage than tooth damage to me.

  Not that I would know! I was no expert in forensic animal attack analysis. But some crazy cold part of my brain was processing what I was looking at while most of me was gibbering in panicked misery.

  The vet. We needed to get to the vet. Obviously, that was the right thing to do. Stop the bleeding first, wrap her up in a towel, carry her inside, get the car keys. Wait, was that the right order? No, I should carry her inside first, then find a towel…

  Oh, wait. I needed to put the shovel down. Maybe take out my earbuds. My legs were shaking and tears were still dripping out of my eyes, but I was trying to make a plan.

  Zelda whimpered.

  “Oh, honey,” I said to her, feeling so helpless. Her tail lifted, patted the ground twice in a feeble wag. She panted, eyes wide with shock.

  The rips were on her back, not her belly. That was good news, the cold processing part of me thought. Maybe, the gibbering miserable part of me responded, but what kind of bacteria did that squirrel carry on its claws?

  I fumbled at the earbuds in my ears with one gloved hand, dropping them on the ground without care.

  I couldn’t bring myself to let go of my shovel, though. I was holding it like it was the last thing keeping me tethered to reality, but I forced myself to open my fingers and release my white-knuckled grip. I set the shovel on the ground, and then carefully, so carefully, slid my hands under Zelda and picked her up.

  I didn’t stand right away though. Moving with infinite care, I set Zelda against my chest, head over my shoulder, like you’d hold a baby, and grabbed the shovel again.

  Did I need a shovel to take my dog to the vet? No. But I wanted it anyway. I could hear Riley barking, Bear growling, squirrels chittering.

  If the squirrels outnumbered the dogs, the shovel was the best weapon I had. The only weapon I had.

  Another blue screen popped into existence before my eyes.

  “Go away,” I hissed at it. And then—like an idiot, but an idiot thoroughly indoctrinated into the language of cell phone alerts—“Hide notifications!”

  The screen disappeared.

  And then so did my house, my yard, my dogs...

  Everything except me and Zelda and my trusty shovel.

  Very minor edits were made to this chapter on February 17th, 2026, mainly revising the opening paragraphs because they didn't fit the overall story tone anymore.