Chapter 1: Awakening
[Abandoned Office Building — Late October 2010, Early Morning]
The floor tasted like chalk and copper.
I gagged, rolling onto my side, and my cheek scraped against something gritty. Concrete dust. Old carpet fibers. The kind of filth that collects when nobody's cleaned a place in months. My lungs burned like I'd been underwater too long, and I sucked air in ragged pulls that echoed off walls I couldn't see yet.
Where—
My hands pressed flat against the floor. Wrong. The fingers were wrong. Too thin, too young, callused in places mine never were. I lifted them in front of my face, turning them over in the gray half-light bleeding through a cracked window. A watch I didn't own sat loose on a wrist narrower than the one I remembered.
The last thing I remembered was the truck. The eighteen-wheeler drifting into my lane on I-94 outside Detroit, headlights swinging wide, and then the sound—metal screaming, glass turning to rain, and a pressure in my chest like God had put His thumb on me. Then nothing. Then this floor.
I pushed myself up to sitting. My body moved different. Lighter. Younger. I wore a red polo shirt with a logo stitched over the heart—Domani's Pizza—and khaki pants stained at the knees. The uniform clung to a frame that was wiry, not the desk-job softness I'd carried for five years.
A cracked mirror leaned against the far wall, propped between an overturned office chair and a filing cabinet with one drawer hanging open like a broken jaw. I crawled toward it on hands and knees because my legs didn't feel trustworthy yet.
The face staring back wasn't mine.
Korean-American. Mid-twenties. Short black hair matted with dust. Jaw sharper than mine had been. Eyes dark and alert in a face I'd seen a hundred times on a television screen, on merchandise, in YouTube compilation thumbnails titled "Best Glenn Moments."
Glenn Rhee.
I touched my cheek. The reflection touched its cheek. My breath fogged the glass and I watched it clear, and the face was still there, still not mine, still his.
My stomach lurched. I turned and dry-heaved onto the carpet, producing nothing but spit and a thin line of bile. My—Glenn's—body hadn't eaten in a while.
"Okay," I whispered. My voice came out different. Younger. A pitch I didn't recognize from inside my own skull. "Okay. Okay okay okay."
I sat back on my heels and pressed the heels of my palms against my eyes until colors bloomed in the dark. Counted to ten. Then twenty. Opened my eyes. Same dusty office. Same cracked mirror. Same wrong hands.
I was in The Walking Dead.
The thought arrived whole and certain, the way you know you're awake and not dreaming. I was in the body of Glenn Rhee—pizza delivery guy, supply runner, the heart of the group. The man who would kneel in a clearing and take a baseball bat to the skull while his pregnant wife watched.
I stood up. My legs held.
The building around me was a gutted office space—cubicle partitions knocked sideways, ceiling tiles hanging like dead skin, fluorescent fixtures dangling by wires. Through the window, Atlanta's skyline squatted against a pale sky. No lights. No movement except for distant shapes that shuffled with the boneless gait of things that used to be people.
A groan drifted up from somewhere below. Low, wet, mindless. The sound of a throat that still worked attached to a brain that didn't.
Cold shot through me.
Not metaphorical cold—not fear, not dread. An actual physical sensation, like someone had pressed an ice cube between my shoulder blades and dragged it down my spine. Every hair on my arms lifted. My stomach clenched into a fist.
I didn't think. I moved. Pressed my back flat against the wall beside the doorway, held my breath, and waited.
Seconds crawled. The groan grew louder. Shuffling footsteps scraped across linoleum in the hallway outside—slow, arrhythmic, dragging. A shadow crossed the strip of light at the bottom of the door. It paused.
My heart hammered so hard I could see my polo shirt trembling.
The shadow moved on. The shuffling receded. And the cold sensation—that impossible, sourceless chill—faded like steam off a mirror.
I stayed against the wall for a full minute after the sound disappeared. Then I let out a breath that shook from my chest to my teeth.
What the hell was that?
Not the walker. I knew what walkers were. Every season, every rule. Destroy the brain, everyone's infected, bites kill through bacterial fever, not the virus. I knew all of it.
The cold. That warning. That wasn't from any episode I'd watched. That was something inside this body—or something that came with me into it. Some kind of instinct, a built-in alarm that had screamed danger before my eyes or ears registered anything.
It had been right.
I catalogued that and filed it away. Whatever it was—gut instinct, sixth sense, transmigrator bonus—it worked. I'd trust it until it didn't.
---
I searched my pockets methodically. The pizza uniform yielded: an empty leather wallet with a Georgia driver's license reading GLENN RHEE and an address I'd never visited, a set of car keys for what was probably a beater sedan parked outside some apartment across the city, and a stick of spearmint gum. That was it. No knife. No phone—or rather, there was a flip phone in the back pocket, dead, the screen cracked.
The office had more to offer. I moved quietly, testing each footstep before committing weight, and found a break room at the end of the hall. The vending machine stood against the wall, its glass front reflecting a face I was already starting to think of as mine.
A chunk of concrete from a collapsed ceiling panel sat nearby. I picked it up, wrapped my polo shirt's hem around my fist, and punched the glass as low as I could manage. The crack was sharp but brief. I froze, listening.
Nothing came.
The bottom row held Coca-Cola. I grabbed a can, popped the tab, and drank. Warm, over-sweet, and flat from God knows how many weeks sitting in a dead machine. It hit my empty stomach like a bomb and I almost threw it right back up.
I sipped slower. The sugar worked its way into my blood and the fog in my head thinned. I grabbed three more cans and lined them on the counter.
One week.
The timeline arranged itself in my memory with a clarity that bordered on uncomfortable. Rick Grimes was lying in a hospital bed in King County right now, comatose, kept alive by a generator that would fail soon. In roughly seven days, he'd wake up, find his way to Atlanta, get trapped in a tank on the main drag. And in the show, Glenn Rhee—me, now—would reach him by radio and save his life.
That was the fixed point. Everything flowed from Rick.
But before that, there was a survivor camp at a quarry outside the city. Shane Walsh running things. Lori and Carl Grimes, alive and mourning a husband and father they thought was dead. Dale Horvath with his RV and his binoculars and his conscience. The Dixon brothers. Andrea and Amy. Carol, Sophia, Ed.
I knew where to go. I knew who I'd find when I got there.
I also knew that roughly sixty percent of those people would be dead within two years if things played out the way I'd watched them play out from a couch with a beer in my hand.
I finished the Coca-Cola and crushed the can.
That wasn't going to happen. Not all of it. Maybe not any of it.
I was Glenn Rhee now. The pizza delivery kid with the map of Atlanta burned into his brain. The one who always came back from runs when nobody else could. The one whose reward for six seasons of loyalty and courage was a bat to the skull in front of his pregnant wife.
No.
I pocketed two cans, left one behind—couldn't carry too much, not when I'd need to move fast and quiet. The break room had a utility closet. Inside: a mop, a bucket, cleaning supplies, and a length of steel pipe that had been part of some shelving unit. I tested the pipe's weight. About two pounds, two feet long, threaded at one end. Not a weapon. But it could crack a skull if I swung hard enough.
I took it.
The building's stairwell was dark and stank of something organic and rotten that I chose not to investigate. I descended one floor at a time, pipe in my right hand, left hand trailing the rail, stopping at each landing to listen. The cold didn't come back. Whatever early-warning system lived inside me stayed quiet.
At the ground floor, I pressed my ear to the exit door. Distant groans, but nothing close. Through the narrow window beside the door, I could see a parking lot choked with abandoned cars and, beyond it, a four-lane road leading south.
South toward the quarry.
I pushed the door open, stepped into daylight that made me squint, and started walking.
Seven days until Rick Grimes crawled out of a hospital bed. Seven days to reach that camp, earn my place, and start building something worth a damn.
I tightened my grip on the pipe and moved.
Note:
Please give good reviews and power stones itrings more people and more people means more chapters?
My Patreon is all about exploring 'What If' timelines, and you can get instant access to chapters far ahead of the public release.
Choose your journey:
Timeline Viewer ($6): Get 10 chapters of early access + 5 new chapters weekly.
Timeline Explorer ($9): Jump 15-20 chapters ahead of everyone.
Timeline Keeper ($15): Get Instant Access to chapters the moment I finish writing them. No more waiting.
Read the raw, unfiltered story as it unfolds. Your support makes this possible!
👉 Find it all at patreon.com/Whatif0