Jack’s POV

While I was waiting for my father’s order to leave the base, I wrote down all the important events, accidents, places and people’s names that I could remember from the original timeline in a notebook and stored it.

At around nine-thirty at night, we received orders by walkie-talkie to assemble in the parking lot; I checked my gun and put a backpack with some clothes in it on my shoulder and left the room, I could hear footsteps running all around the compound.

I walked toward the nearest group and joined them, a young soldier with black short hair and green eyes looked at me, gave me a faint smile and said “Hey Jack, glad to see that you are fine.”

I nodded and asked “James, what the hell is happening here?”

“Who the fuck knows, the soldiers have gone crazy, they are eating each other, I even heard that it’s happening everywhere, maybe it has something to do with the freaking sun, anyhow, stay with us and don’t go near any crazy looking fucker.” He said to me quickly with confusion and terror written all over his face.

I just nodded and kept running, James is a very kind and trustworthy soldier, in the original timeline we were friends of some sort, unfortunately, he lost his life about five years after the start of the apocalypse, he went to scavenge with a new group of survivors and never came back, I’m planning to prevent it from happening this time around.

When we reached the parking lot, about two thousand soldiers were already there, most of the trucks were loaded with materials and soldiers and ready to go. I made my way to my father who was giving orders left and right, ‘Sure he is very busy’ I thought and greeted him. When he saw me, he nodded greeted me and directly ordered me to get in one of the trucks, I quietly went to the truck and sat there.

After a little while we started moving, our target was a small town to the north, about two hours away from the city; all the trucks made a line while the military cars with machine guns provided protection from both sides.

After a few minutes, we entered the highway at the outskirt of the city and picked up speed, fortunately, the number of the cars on the highway were minimum at the moment, the soldiers made a quick work on any parked cars on the way and we continued to move smoothly with a lot of civilians’ cars following us out of the city.

It took us more than three hours to reach the town; by the time we reached there, we had almost two thousand civilians on our trail.

After discussing and assessing the town’s situation, we decided to camp until morning on a flat land about five kilometers away from the town since the flat land is safer at the moment and easier to keep watch than the town. There were almost no zombies and the soldiers disposed of the few which were wandering at the perimeter and settled the camp.

The main problem was the civilians; they were very loud, unorganized and unsecured. The soldiers tried their best to keep them quiet to avoid attracting the zombies and settled them in a separated camp about five hundred meters away from the soldiers’ camp, but some of the civilians objected and tried to join the soldiers’ camp, but at the end, everything worked out.

The night was almost uneventful, some civilians and soldiers tuned into zombies but the other soldiers killed them quickly, some skirmishes and small fights here and there, but since it’s the apocalypse, I’m sure as hell it can be count as peaceful.

With the first a few rays of the blue light from the fucking blue sun, we started to move, the soldiers split into two teams, the first team went to the town to clear it from the zombies, while the second team stayed in the camp with the civilians and the supplies.

Since I wasn’t a soldier or had any real military training I was left behind with the second team, although my father made sure to make me join close combat and weapon training every summer with the army, but still, according to him the situation was too dangerous for me, and honestly, I had no objection in staying in the camp.

We entered the town at evening and split into the houses, there were still a few survivors from the original residents but they were more than happy to welcome the soldiers because it meant more protection.

Some soldiers kept watch all around the town while the rest of us settled in the houses, I chose an empty small old house at the outskirt of the town and settled myself in it.

During the next week, some of the civilians were relocated to the middle of the town while the soldiers occupied the houses on the outskirts to make it easier to keep watch, with the command center in the middle for safety measures.

They also made a list of all the survivors (soldiers and civilians) including their names, ages, jobs and fighting skills, and divided the work between them.

On the seventh day, chaos and ruckus spread through the town when the first ability user appeared, a teenage boy who accidentally shot water from his hands, the soldiers surrounded him while shouting and pointing their guns at him, the boy was terrified from the soldiers and I’m guessing, he was even more terrified from the fact that water was shooting from his hands, he was crying and screaming for the water to stop.

It was a funny situation, and just like that, before anybody could understand what was happening with this poor boy, another shouts and screams could be heard from another location, where a woman had a fire on her hands.

Everybody was scared, some civilians took their cars and left to god knows where, after a few hours, anybody who showed signs of having an ability were quarantined, the military doctors took blood samples and made some tests, at the end of the day they concluded that they were still humans, and since they didn’t have an appropriate laboratory to make full tests they decided to keep them separated.

The doctors theorized that the virus affected their DNA and mutated it to some level, but not enough to turn them into zombies. After three days of continuous observation and more tests, they released them from the quarantine and were allowed to move freely.

I decided to keep my abilities hidden at that time; because I was still not sure how many abilities I should reveal, I would prefer to avoid drawing attention to myself, like in the original timeline, but at the same time, the stronger you are the more privileges and power you will get, and I was going to need them to keep Sam safe, so I decided to wait and see how it will turn out, and then act according to the situation.

On the day that I was finally going to be able to see Sam again, I woke up early and wore some nice clothes, fixed my hair with a big grin on my face, and made my way to the teams which were responsible for gathering supplies and search for more survivors.

I spoke to the leader of one of the teams and tried to convince him to let me tag along, after a few minutes of arguing he finally gave up and allowed me to join, under the condition that I must stay with the group and never wander alone.

We made our way to another small town about a hundred kilometers away to the east-south; it took us about one and half an hour to reach it. After we entered the town, we were divided into five groups, with twenty people per group, two military cars and one truck to store the supplies and split into different places.

My group entered a mall and started to clear any zombie inside it to make sure it was safe before collecting the supplies. While everybody was busy, I took the chance and sneaked out of the mall from a window, I walked through an alley to go to the other side of the road while trying my best to avoid making any sound, I chose a car which still had the keys inside and drove out of the town.

It was almost nine in the morning and I still had to drive for nearly two hours to reach the woods at the outskirt of ‘A’ city, I drove as fast as possible, but I had to stop many times to clear the street from damaged and stopped cars, but thanks to my space-storage it didn’t take much time, I just dumped every obstacle in the storage and kept going until I reached the woods and cursed out loud “Fuck, we didn’t arrange a specific location or time, how stupid can I be.”

So, for two hours, I kept driving at the edge of the woods and contacting Sam every a few minutes, but with every passing minute, dark and bad thoughts were consuming me, what if he decided not to come? What if he didn’t make it? What if he died already? But that didn’t stop me from calling and begging him to answer me.

I could feel a bulb in my throat suffocating me, I held the walkie-talkie and tried for the hundredth time “Sam, are you there, please, answer me.”

“Hello, Jack.” Suddenly, the most beautiful voice I have ever heard answered me, I took a deep breath to calm myself down before saying “Hey Sam, glad you made it, where are you right now?”

It took him a moment but he answered back “Well, there are no signs around me, how about we meet at the front of ‘M’ store after thirty minutes? Do you know the place?”

‘Even if I don’t know the place, I will search every corner of the city to find it’ I thought before I answered him “Sure, see you in thirty minutes.”

I drove toward the store, it was on the other side of the woods, hence it took me over twenty minutes to reach there. As soon as I parked the car, I looked at the front of the store, and there he was, leaning against the wall, with his splendid body and a smile on his face.

I stared at him and got lost in that gorgeous smile of his but I came back to my senses when he motioned at me to come out, I quickly got out of the car and made my way to him.

He offered his hand yet again for a handshake, I took it gladly and pulled him to my chest, I put my other hand on his back and half hugged him, I kept reminding myself to control my emotions but I really couldn’t, at least I had to have that much.