The Soldier

The Soldier

John Emmett was nineteen when the world ended. One moment he was sitting on a porch with the girl he loved, promising her a ring, matching plates, and a life together. The next, he was standing behind a military barricade with a rifle in his hands as civilization collapsed in front of him. His unit fought until there was nowhere left to retreat, and John disappeared beneath the dead with a promise he never got the chance to keep.

Months later, something beneath the bodies moves.

John gets back on his feet, but death did not leave him untouched. His memories come and go, his thoughts slip through muddy water, and sometimes the man he was disappears almost completely. His military training remains carved into his body, but something deeper keeps pulling him forward: a woman's laugh, a squeaking porch swing, fragments of a life he cannot quite remember, and the certainty that someone, somewhere, mattered enough to come home to.

The Soldier is a post-apocalyptic horror novella about duty, memory, love, and a dead man fighting to hold on to the pieces of himself that death couldn't quite take.