It started so subtly that I almost missed it, like the slow decay creeping through the world around us. Sarah had always been a little cautious—nervous, even. But lately, there was something different. Something unsettling. It was in the way her eyes would drift, hollow and distant, to the cracked watch she hadn’t worn in months. The watch that had stopped ticking long ago, on that day... the day everything fell apart.

I watched her again tonight, sitting at our table, or at least I was sitting. Sarah stood in the doorway, swaying like a shadow caught in the wind, her gaze locked on something far beyond the walls of our crumbling house. Her hand rose again, out of habit, to glance at her wrist where the watch used to be, her fingers tracing the pale outline it left behind. There was no need for time anymore. Not here. Not after what happened.

The cold knot that had settled in my stomach days ago tightened as I watched her. She hadn’t said much lately, hadn’t really been here at all, if I was being honest. But tonight, something felt even worse. Her movements were slow, almost mechanical. And her eyes—those sharp, loving eyes that used to dance with life—were dull now. Glassy. Like they had been hollowed out.

"Sarah?" I said, my voice betraying me with a slight tremor. I reached for the remote, shutting off the television that hadn’t played anything but static for months now. The silence that followed felt suffocating, heavy with the weight of everything left unsaid. "What’s going on?"

She didn’t answer right away. She didn’t blink, didn’t even seem to register my voice. She just stood there, fingers twitching at her side, her lips parting in a faint, barely audible sound—a sigh, maybe. Or a growl. The kind of sound that made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Her head turned toward me, slowly, jerkily, like she wasn’t in full control of her movements.

That’s when I noticed it again. The way her skin seemed to have taken on an unnatural pallor, mottled and gray in patches, as if something underneath was... wrong. Like it was waiting to break free. I swallowed hard, the cold dread spreading through me like ice.

"You’ve checked that watch three times now," I muttered, even though we both knew it wasn’t about time. Time didn’t matter anymore, not in this world. My pulse quickened, and I stood up, my chair scraping against the floor, the sound too loud in the stillness. "Sarah, are you... okay?"

Her mouth twitched, her jaw clenching and unclenching as if she were trying to form words. But when she spoke, her voice was hollow, guttural. "Fine," she said, though it sounded anything but fine. Her hand twitched again, hovering just inches from her face, fingers stretching toward something unseen.

I took a step closer, even though every instinct screamed at me to stop, to turn around, to run. But I couldn’t. Not after everything. Not after what we had been through, what we had done. "Sarah," I whispered, my heart pounding in my chest, "you’re not yourself."

Her head jerked, too fast, too far, the tendons in her neck snapping with a sickening sound that made bile rise in my throat. Her eyes met mine, but they were wrong. Empty. Void of anything that resembled the woman I had once known. The woman who had held our child—our little girl—as we watched everything we loved burn down around us.

"I... don’t know," she whispered, her lips curling into a grin that twisted my insides. It was a grin that didn’t belong on her face, something predatory, something inhuman. "Something’s wrong. But I don’t feel it... anymore."

The words hung in the air, cold and distant, and I felt my stomach turn. I remembered the day it all started. The day the panic had taken over the streets, and we had made a choice. A horrible choice. Our little girl had been right there. And we... we had failed her. Failed to save her, failed to protect her. That was the day everything changed, the day we both started to unravel.

And now, standing in the doorway, I realized it wasn’t just me who had spiraled. It was both of us. We had stayed in this house, clung to it like it could hold us together, even as the world outside crumbled into chaos. The stores around town had long since been looted, but food still scattered the streets, cans of beans and boxes of pasta littering the ground like some cruel reminder that survival had no meaning anymore.

The watch—her watch—had stopped ticking that day, too. I hadn’t noticed when it happened, only that afterward, everything was wrong. Everything felt like it was... falling apart. I reached for her, my hand shaking, but she flinched, her body jerking away from my touch like it burned her.

"Sarah, please," I said, my voice barely more than a whisper. "Talk to me. We can fix this... we can—"

But her gaze drifted away, back to that empty space in the room, her fingers tracing the invisible line on her wrist again. That damn watch. The one that hadn’t ticked in years. And then I saw it—her skin, pale and cold, pulling tight over her bones like it was ready to split open.

I stepped back, the cold realization hitting me like a hammer.

It wasn’t her anymore.

Not really.

And maybe... maybe it never had been.