Riley Kim was fixing a wound-care chart when the apocalypse started.

  She had the patient file open on one monitor, the agency’s documentation portal open on the second, and a cup of coffee she had already reheated twice sitting full beside a yellow legal pad of corrections no one had asked her to make. It was 6:12 p.m., which meant the day-shift nurses were dumping their unfinished notes into the system and pretending they’d charted in real time.

  They never charted in real time.

  Riley rubbed at the bridge of her nose and stared at the screen.

  SKIN TEAR — LEFT LOWER LEG

  Dressing changed. No signs of infection. Patient tolerated well.

  The attached photo was of a right ankle.

  She clicked into the note history and scrolled. Same nurse as last week. Same patient. Same error. This was the third time Janice Hadley had documented the wrong leg on Mrs. Baines, and if billing got audited again, Riley was going to have to spend another two hours writing a correction memo no one would read until it was attached to a denial.

  She typed into the internal messaging window.

  Riley K:

  Photo and note laterality mismatch again on Baines. Need corrected charting before lock.

  Three dots popped up. Vanished. Popped up again.

  Janice H:

  I’m in a home visit. Can it wait?

  Riley looked at the timestamp on the note. Submitted forty-three minutes earlier.

  She cracked her knuckles and typed back.

  Riley K:

  If she loses her wound-care auth because we documented the wrong limb, no, it can’t wait.

  She hit send, leaned back, and took a sip of coffee.

  Across the office, two cubicles over, Marisol from scheduling was arguing with someone on speakerphone about mileage reimbursement.

  “I’m not saying you didn’t drive there,” Marisol said, pinching the bridge of her nose hard enough to leave marks. “I’m saying you cannot put forty-eight miles to a patient who lives three streets from your apartment.”

  Riley almost smiled.

  The home health office was mostly empty this late—just admin, intake, and the people too behind to leave. Fluorescent lights hummed overhead. A printer somewhere coughed out paper in bursts. The break room microwave beeped three times and no one moved to stop it.

  Riley clicked into another chart.

  Mr. Lawson, post-op hip, blood pressure trending weird over three visits. Nurse note said “patient seems off” with no vitals attached and no escalation documentation.

  Riley closed her eyes for one long second.

  “Seems off” was not a nursing intervention.

  She reached for her pen and wrote, in all caps, on the legal pad:

  CALL LAWSON. GET ACTUAL NUMBERS.

  Her phone buzzed before she could pick it up.

  Dispatch group thread. The company’s after-hours line.

  AFTER HOURS COORDINATOR:

  Can anyone take a call with family on a med discrepancy? Field nurse still in visit.

  Marisol poked her head over the cubicle wall. “Don’t do it,” she said. “I can see your face from here.”

  Riley already had the headset on. “I’m just clarifying.”

  “That’s what you said the last time, and then you were on the phone for an hour because somebody’s nephew thought Lasix was a blood thinner.”

  Riley clicked Accept.

  “Home Health triage, this is Riley, RN,” she said, voice flattening into the one she used when she wanted people to stop panicking and answer questions. “Tell me exactly what happened.”

  There was crying on the other end. A woman, maybe forties, breathless, trying and failing to talk over someone shouting in the background.

  “He took the night pills and then he took them again because my brother said those were the morning ones and now he’s dizzy and I don’t know if he’s supposed to be that pale—”

  “Okay,” Riley said. “Slow down. I need the medication bottles in front of you. All of them. Put me on speaker.”

  Marisol gave her a look over the cubicle wall that said you did this to yourself.

  Riley ignored her and opened a blank note template, fingers moving automatically.

  Patient name. Date. Time. Family report. Suspected duplicate dose.

  “Read me the labels one at a time,” she said.

  The woman started with metoprolol, stumbled over the milligrams, then switched to lisinopril. In the background, a man was insisting the patient “just needed to lie down.” Somewhere farther away, a TV was playing a game show at full volume.

  Riley typed while she listened.

  “Did he take insulin?”

  Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

  A pause. Rustling.

  “I—I don’t know. Maybe? There’s a pen thing—”

  Riley sat up straighter. “I need you to find that pen. Do not guess.”

  Fluorescent light flickered overhead.

  Not unusual. The fixture above intake had been dying for two weeks. Marisol looked up, frowned, and slapped the side of her monitor when it dimmed too.

  A second later, every screen in the office blinked black.

  “Seriously?” Marisol said.

  The emergency lights kicked on, dim and yellow.

  Riley kept her voice level into the headset. “Are your lights out too?”

  The woman on the phone started crying harder. “Everything just went off.”

  In the cubicle behind Riley, someone swore. A keyboard clattered to the floor.

  Then every monitor in the office came back on at once.

  Not to the charting software.

  Not to Windows.

  A black screen filled both of Riley’s monitors, edge to edge, with white text in a clean, joyless font.

  For half a second she thought malware.

  Then the text changed at the exact same moment on every screen she could see.

  On Riley’s desk. On Marisol’s monitor. On the wall-mounted TV in the waiting room. On the receptionist’s tablet. Through the front windows, on the gas station sign across the street and the giant pharmacy display beyond it.

  White text. Black field. No logo.

  No branding.

  No cursor.

  [WORLD UPDATE 0.0.1 — DEPLOYING]

  Someone laughed, a short confused bark. “Is this a prank?”

  More text appeared.

  Global Event Detected

  Regional Rule Sets Initializing

  6 Primary Zones Established

  Local Zone: 1 — BASELINE

  Location Tag: Kansas City, Kansas

  Tutorial Window: 10:00

  The number at the bottom started counting down.

  09:59

  09:58

  Riley heard the woman on the phone screaming.

  Not words at first. Just sound.

  Then, “He fell—he just fell—”

  Riley yanked the headset tighter. “Listen to me. Can you hear me? Is he breathing?”

  No answer except sobbing and somebody in the room shouting What is that on the TV?

  Across the office, the printer started spitting pages. Fast. Too fast. A continuous mechanical shriek.

  Marisol backed away from her desk. “Riley.”

  Riley looked up.

  Every device in the office with a speaker—phones, tablets, the waiting room television, someone’s little desktop radio—emitted the same soft chime.

  A pleasant, customer-service chime.

  Then a voice began to speak.

  It was calm. Genderless. Precise.

  “Welcome, participants. You have been enrolled in the Regional Adaptive Survival Program. Failure to comply may result in penalties.”

  The countdown kept ticking.

  09:41.

  09:40.

  Riley was already writing.

  Not because it helped. Because if she stopped moving, she was going to listen to the screaming.

  On the legal pad, in block letters:

  GLOBAL — SAME MESSAGE EVERYWHERE

  6 ZONES

  LOCAL = BASELINE

  10 MIN TUTORIAL

  The voice continued.

  “Please remain calm. Review local guidance. Avoid clustering during initialization. Submit all urgent requests through approved channels.”

  Marisol stared at the ceiling like she was trying to find a camera. “Approved channels?”

  The printer jammed with a hard thunk.

  Then it resumed.

  Paper poured out onto the carpet in a curling white ribbon. Riley stood, crossed the cubicle gap, and grabbed the stack before it hit the floor. It was warm from the machine.

  Forms.

  Not random pages—formatted documents with crisp black borders and heavy headers.

  At the top of the first page:

  BASELINE ZONE — EMERGENCY OCCUPANCY COMPLIANCE NOTICE

  Revision 0.0.1

  Riley’s mouth went dry.

  The paper stock was wrong. Thick. Smooth. Not office copier paper.

  Marisol took one from the stack and held it up. “This is not funny.”

  “It’s not a joke,” Riley said.

  “How do you know?”

  Riley pointed at the footer.

  “Because whoever made this versioned it.”

  Marisol blinked. “What?”

  “Look.” Riley tapped the bottom line. “Supersedes prior guidance on issuance. Effective immediately. They’re expecting revisions.”

  The overhead lights flickered again, harder this time, and a crash sounded from outside—metal on metal, loud enough to shake the front glass.

  Everybody in the office froze.

  Then came the horns.

  Not one car horn. Not a few, but dozens of them, wailing in different pitches and patterns, all going off in one loud cacophony.

  Riley moved to the window before she consciously decided to.

  The street outside the office had turned into a knot of stopped traffic. Two cars had jackknifed trying to avoid each other at the intersection. A delivery van sat halfway onto the curb with its airbags blown. People were out of their vehicles, pointing at the sky, at their phones, at nothing Riley could see from here.

  Above the road, about forty feet up, a line of heat-shimmer had appeared out of empty air.

  It cut across the intersection like a vertical seam in glass.

  As she watched, the shimmer brightened. Pixel-like static crawled along its length, drifting downward like ash.

  A woman in scrubs in the parking lot stumbled backward and fell.

  Three people rushed toward her at once.

  The voice from the speakers chimed again.

  “Reminder: Crowd events may cascade.”

  Riley felt something cold settle into place in her chest.

  Not panic.

  Pattern.

  She looked at the forms in her hand. Looked at the countdown. Looked back at the parking lot where more people were converging on the woman on the ground because that was what people did when someone went down.

  Clump up. Talk over each other. Block access. Make everything worse.

  She dropped the stack of forms on Marisol’s desk and grabbed a marker from the supply cup.

  “Get everyone away from the front windows,” Riley said.

  Marisol didn’t move. “Riley—”

  “Now.”

  Something in Riley’s voice finally cut through. Marisol spun and started shouting for people to move back.

  Riley capped the marker in her teeth, snatched the top form, and scanned it one line at a time.

  Occupancy thresholds. Radius limits. Escalation triggers.

  There.

  Unmanaged concentration of 12+ participants within 20m may trigger a Crowd Event during initialization.

  Mitigation: establish visible role assignment, spacing markers, and command authority.

  She laughed once, sharp and unbelieving.

  “They gave us a compliance form for a riot,” she muttered.

  Outside, someone started screaming again.

  The countdown hit 08:52.

  Riley uncapped the marker and wrote across the back of the form in letters big enough to read through glass:

  DO NOT CLUSTER

  MOVE BACK

  ONE SPEAKER ONLY

  She shoved the paper at Marisol. “Tape this to the door.”

  Marisol stared at her like she’d grown a second head. “You think a sign is going to stop—”

  A shape dropped out of the shimmer line and hit the hood of a sedan hard enough to crater it.

  The horn cut off.

  For one second, nobody outside moved.

  The thing on the car roof unfolded itself on too many joints.

  Riley saw a slick gray back, a mouth where a face should be, and limbs that bent wrong as it raised its head toward the crowd.

  Then the crowd lurched as one.

  Not away. In.

  People nearest the thing stumbled forward first, shoes skidding, arms pinwheeling like the air had turned into a slope. The ones behind them surged after, pulled by panic and momentum and something else Riley felt even through the glass—a pressure, a drag, like the center of the parking lot had become a drain.

  No pattern. No lane. Just a human tide folding toward the trap.

  Riley shoved a roll of tape into Marisol’s hands.

  “Sign. Door. Now.”

  She was already turning back to her desk, reaching for the headset, for her legal pad, for anything she could use to make sense of a world that had just announced itself in compliance language and monster drops.

  On her monitor, the black screen had changed.

  The countdown still ran in the corner.

  A new window had opened beneath the world update, white text on black, bordered like an intake form.

  Provisional Role Tag Available

  CLINICAL ACCESS DETECTED

  Would you like to review MEDICAL ADDENDUM?

  At the bottom, in smaller text:

  Deep-read access may increase System Attention.

  Riley stared at the line for exactly one heartbeat.

  Then she clicked YES.