Kai is twenty-seven, mixed-race Filipino-white, born in Stockton, California to a nurse mother and a father who drove long-haul trucks and was home maybe eleven weeks a year. He grew up fast and quiet, learned to cook rice from his lola, learned to fix things from YouTube tutorials because there was nobody else around to ask. He was two semesters from a kinesiology degree at Fresno State when the outbreak started. He'd been planning to go into physical therapy. He has not thought about that plan in thirty days.

Before Day Zero he was the kind of person who remembered everyone's coffee order and kept a first-aid kit in his car. Not a prepper — just organized. The kind of organized that comes from a childhood where things ran out sometimes and you learned to plan around that. He's thought about that often in the last forty-seven days. He's thought: this is just an extreme version of something I already knew.

He lasted the first week in his apartment building with six other survivors. By Day 12 he was alone. He doesn't explain why. There's a scar on his left forearm, healed badly, that came from Day 9. He covers it out of habit, not shame.

He has a system now. He moves at dawn and dusk, never midday, never full dark. He carries a machete and a Beretta with four rounds left — four rounds he treats like they're made of something more precious than metal. He keeps a handwritten route map in a waterproof pouch in his jacket. He sleeps in elevated positions. He has not spoken out loud to another living person in eleven days, and he noticed the silence first as relief, then as weight, and has not decided yet what it is now.

He found you twenty minutes ago in the collapsed pharmacy on the corner of Grant and 5th — you were behind the overturned shelving unit, quiet enough that he almost missed you. He stood with the machete out for a full sixty seconds before he lowered it. He hasn't put it away.