There was a quiet that hummed like a heartbeat.
Not silence—not really. Silence meant peace, and Jade hadn't known peace in weeks. No, this was the kind of quiet that presses against your eardrums like deep water. The kind that makes your own breath sound loud. Your thoughts, louder.
She no longer tried to scream. Her throat was raw. Her voice hoarse. She had screamed herself silent.
Now? She obeyed. She ate the meals they gave her. Sat in the same corner every day. Laid on the same thin cot, staring up at the same crack in the ceiling that curved like a smile, or a scar.
She didn't count the days. The days counted her.
The guards stopped locking the door.
At first, she thought it was a mistake. That someone had slipped. That maybe—maybe—she could get out.
But she didn't move. Not the first day. Not the second.
By the third, she crawled forward on unsteady arms, her muscles softening from weeks of disuse, from starvation, from whatever they'd injected into her. A single cup of water sat just outside the threshold. She reached. Dragged it to her chest. Drank like an animal. Then backed away.
It became routine. Test. Reward. Repeat.
She started scratching words into the wall with the jagged edge of a nail she tore down to the quick.
"GET OUT."
"REMEMBER CARL."
"YOU'RE STILL IN THERE."
But then the words started changing.
"SHE LEFT."
"YOU LOST."
"NO ONE'S COMING."
Her hand cramped. Her fingers bled. She wrote anyway, until there was no space left between the messages, until they overlapped like overlapping nightmares.
She didn't know what day it was. What hour. Time bent around her like warped glass.
She started talking to herself.
At first, it was just whispers. Fragments of stories. One about a squirrel that Daryl once chased across three counties. One about Rick teaching Carl to shoot tin cans off a stump. One about Michonne stealing the last can of peaches and denying it, smug as hell.
But one day, she forgot Rick's voice.
She froze. Couldn't breathe.
She clawed at her head, dragging her nails across her scalp, trying to force the memory back. It didn't come. Just a void where he used to live.
She screamed. Screamed until her lungs emptied. Then slammed the food tray into the wall until it shattered into jagged plastic. Her hands bled. She laughed. That high, unnatural laugh again. It echoed off the concrete and back into her own skull.
A mirror appeared one morning.
It hadn't been there before—she was sure of it. But now, it sat in the corner, propped at an angle.
She didn't crawl to it immediately. Not at first.
But by the third day, the curiosity gnawed harder than the hunger. So she dragged herself across the cold concrete and sat in front of it like a supplicant at church.
She looked in.
And found a stranger.
Hollow cheeks. Bruised jaw. Sunken, bloodshot eyes. Hair matted and greasy, a knot at the back like a dead thing.
She smiled.
It was wrong. Crooked. A parody of her old self. A war-painted ghost.
Then she whispered: "I missed you."
And the mirror-Jade whispered back.
The hallucinations got worse.
Sometimes it was Carol, rocking a baby that cried like a rabbit being skinned.
Sometimes it was Daryl, leaning in, whispering that he was sorry—he should've looked harder.
Sometimes it was Rick, holding out his hand, smiling, bleeding from the eyes.
Sometimes it was her younger self, that fifteen-year-old version of Jade who believed in survival like it was a religion, whispering:
"You always ruin everything."
She started believing it.
The cell began to shift. Subtle things.
The floor slanted. The corners of the room curved inward. The lights buzzed just off-frequency—enough to raise the hairs on her arms. Sometimes the walls pulsed like lungs.
She blinked—and the messages she'd carved into the walls were gone.
Then they'd reappear. Wrong. Different handwriting. Different words.
"STOP LOOKING."
"IT'S TOO LATE."
Sleep brought no relief.
She dreamed of knives. Of water rushing into her lungs. Of her friends calling her name in reverse. Sometimes she woke up in a different corner of the cell, unsure how she got there.
She stopped blinking. Her eyes stayed wide for hours.
She heard music once—soft jazz. Then a child singing "Ring Around the Rosie." Then static. Always the static.
She started begging for the voice again.
The one from the speaker in her last cell. The calm, male voice that told her Rick left her behind. That she was better off here. That there was no world outside this one.
She cursed it at first. Screamed. Now she missed it.
She whispered, "Say it again."
No answer.
She cried.
One night, she clawed open the soft part of her arm just to feel something. She counted each heartbeat as blood ran down her wrist, soaking the cot.
A guard came.
He didn't stop her.
Just stared. Then turned off the lights.
Jade laughed for two full hours. She counted.
By the time the door opened again, and a figure stepped in—she didn't look up.
Not until he crouched beside her, said her name.
She blinked.
Leo.
She didn't say anything. Just blinked again. Her voice was gone.
He cleaned her wound. Gently. Didn't speak.
And she cried.
Not because she trusted him. Not because she was grateful.
But because someone touched her without hurting her.
YOU ARE READING
When The World Ends
Action"What happens when the world ends?" He asks in my arms. "We build it back up again." Jade Jacklyn Joy is a 25 year old girl who had a rough upbring. She was the Grimes babysitter for 9 years before the apocalypse happened. Spending that much time w...
