The moment the real heiress was welcomed back to her biological family, the zombie apocalypse began. She immediately hid inside our billionaire parents’ high-security mansion, kicking me out and sending me back to my biological parents’ run-down homestead in the middle of nowhere. She thought she was securing her own survival. What she didn’t expect was that the mansion’s bodyguards would turn on our wealthy parents, murder them, and take over the estate, turning the “real heiress” into their personal plaything in the wasteland. Meanwhile, I was living like a queen, eating and drinking to my heart’s content in the high-tech doomsday bunker built by my paranoid, prepper biological parents, safely waiting out the chaos until the rescue teams arrived. On the day of the evacuation, my half-dead sister begged to tell me her “final words.” But as I leaned in, she suddenly lunged forward and ripped my throat out with her teeth. When I opened my eyes again, we had both regressed. This time, Chloe beat me to the punch. She pushed our billionaire parents away, shouting that biology meant nothing compared to the people who raised her, and warned them not to stand in her way.
My adoptive parents, Richard and Eleanor Sinclair, stared at Chloe in absolute shock. You couldn’t blame them. Just a second ago, Chloe had been sobbing about how much she had suffered living with her poor parents in the countryside. She had blamed me for stealing the luxury life that was rightfully hers. The more Richard and Eleanor listened, the more they loathed me. Their venomous glares made me feel like they wanted to tear me to pieces right then and there. But before they could announce that they were kicking me out to let Chloe take her rightful place, Chloe suddenly changed her tune. She declared she wanted to go back to the countryside, to be with the parents who had raised her from dirt. She told the Sinclairs to get lost. As she finished her dramatic speech, she shot me a smug, gloating look. That was when I knew. She had regressed too. In our past life, Chloe had discovered she was adopted during a routine blood drive and immediately posted her DNA results online to find her real family. Because she looked identical to Richard, her identity as the true Sinclair heiress was quickly confirmed. On her very first day back, she was desperate to prove her loyalty to her new billionaire parents. She cut off all contact with my biological parents—the Millers—and had me sent back to them, claiming they were mentally unstable. She told me I had enjoyed her luxury for too long, that I owed her, and that letting me live was already an act of mercy. My biological parents were extreme doomsday preppers with severe paranoia. Any harmless action from me would trigger their delusions, making them think I was trying to poison them. They would beat me raw. Chloe couldn’t wait to escape them, and she wanted me to experience that exact living hell. But she didn’t expect the zombie virus to break out just days after I arrived at the Miller homestead. Before the apocalypse, the Sinclairs were the type of people who had organic produce flown in fresh daily. Once the world went to hell, their food supply lines were cut off. They hid in their mansion, throwing money at their bodyguards to go out and raid the nearby shopping centers. But after watching their fellow guards get torn apart by the infected, the remaining security detail formed a pact. They threw Richard and Eleanor to the zombies, hijacked the mansion, and lived like kings. Only Chloe was kept alive, dragged through a living nightmare every single day. Meanwhile, the moment I had returned to the Millers’ homestead, I was ushered into a state-of-the-art underground bunker. My paranoid parents had poured their life savings into building it. I survived in perfect safety until the military rescue arrived. The day we were transferred to the survivor camp, I heard about the Sinclairs’ horrific deaths. Grieving for the people who had raised me for twenty years, I wept bitterly and vowed to take care of their only surviving daughter—Chloe. But the moment she saw me, already secretly infected, she lunged at me and tore open my carotid artery. As my blood sprayed across the room, she stood there drenched in red, laughing like a maniac. In this life, she didn’t hesitate. She pushed Eleanor and Richard away as if they were plague-bearers and rushed out of the house, eager to get to the Miller homestead. Richard and Eleanor stood frozen for a moment. Then, Richard slammed his fist on the table, cursing his ungrateful biological daughter. When he turned and saw my eyes pooling with tears, his heart finally softened. “Forget her,” Richard sighed, looking defeated. “If twenty years of separation means she’s been corrupted by those people, then we don’t need her anyway.” I nodded, offering a gentle, compliant smile. Chloe had no idea. In our past life, even though the Millers had a bunker stocked like a grocery store, I ate worse than a stray dog. Despite the shelves being packed with canned goods and rations, my biological parents were constantly terrified that the apocalypse would last forever and we would run out of food. From the moment we sealed the bunker doors, they only allowed me one packet of Oreos and half a bottle of water a day. Even if the food was literally rotting or being eaten by pests, they refused to let me touch it. Yet, the day before the military rescued us, knowing the soldiers were coming, they suddenly shoved armfuls of food down my throat, forcing me to gorge.
My stomach, shrunken to the size of a fist after six months of starvation, couldn’t handle it. I threw up violently. They told me that leaving any food behind would just benefit outsiders, and if the rescue team saw we had leftovers, it would paint a target on our backs at the survivor camp. But in this life, I had better options. Chloe was short-sighted. She didn’t understand that having one more ally is always better than having one more enemy. That was why she was so eager to ditch the Millers in her last life, and so desperate to ditch the Sinclairs in this one. I, on the other hand, seized the moment. While Richard and Eleanor were drowning in their hatred for Chloe and overwhelming guilt toward me, I asked them to build me my own high-security house. They stared at me, their mouths open in confusion. I looked around the room, mimicking the twitchy, paranoid behavior of someone terrified of invisible threats. “What if Chloe comes back?” I whispered, my voice trembling. “What if she brings a bad crowd to steal from us?” “What if my biological parents come looking for me? I can send them some money, but I don’t want them bringing trouble to your doorstep.” Richard thought it over. He assumed I had simply inherited my biological parents’ paranoia. Rather than arguing, he readily agreed and wired me the funds. With the Sinclair fortune at my disposal, I was going to live far better than I ever did in my past life. I purchased a villa in the very same gated community as the Sinclairs. I chose not to live with them because I had already seen through their cold, transactional nature. In my past life, when Chloe demanded I be sent to the Millers to suffer, they didn’t care. Later, they forced their bodyguards to risk their lives retrieving gourmet foods, complaining when things weren’t perfect, which ultimately cost several lives. Even though they chose me in this timeline and gave me enough money to secure my safety, I wouldn’t bet my life on their loyalty when a real crisis hit. Living alone was the only logical choice. My new villa faced a quiet lake in the front and a vast, open golf course in the back. The visibility was perfect. The gated community was sparsely populated, making its security top-tier. Even if the main security gates collapsed and desperate refugees tried to break in, I would spot them from a mile away. Still, that wasn’t enough. I began upgrading the house. I replaced all doors and windows with bank-vault-grade security materials and started panic-buying. Military-grade MREs, freeze-dried vegetables, medical kits, survival gear… anything that could be bought with money, I hoarded. When other wealthy neighbors questioned my massive shipments, I simply told them I was setting up a humanitarian relief initiative under our family foundation to prepare for global crises, aiming to boost my resume. They nodded in approval. Soon, they were even helping me coordinate shipments, asking only that our family company mention their names in our press releases. Wealthy people can never have too much good publicity. To me, these expenses were pocket change. Of course, I didn’t actually set up a real foundation. I had a portion of the supplies shipped directly to low-income families in nearby rural areas, counting it as a good deed to help them survive what was coming. The rest was packed tightly into my newly reinforced basement bunker. Next, I asked Richard to assign me Marcus, the head of our security detail. Marcus had been an MMA prodigy in his youth before serving in the military. He was an expert in close-quarters combat and tactical defense. In my past life, he had died trying to shield his men. He was a man of honor. He was someone I could actually trust. Richard looked at me suspiciously this time, demanding to know what I was planning. But my twitchy, paranoid act quickly made him sigh in exhaustion. He gave up trying to reason with me and signed Marcus over. The very first task I gave Marcus was to deliver a physical letter to my biological parents.
The letter warned them that a highly infectious zombie virus was about to sweep the nation. To a normal person, such a letter would be discarded as a prank. But I knew the Millers. Their paranoia was a sickness. Sure enough, the moment they read the letter, they wept tears of joy. It was as if all their years of being called crazy had finally been validated. They immediately rushed to inspect the hidden bunker they had spent decades building. They walked into their dusty old basement, cleared away the heavy junk concealing the floor, and unlocked the heavy steel door requiring a passcode, fingerprint, and retinal scan. But just as they opened it, Marcus, who had been tailing them in the shadows, struck. He knocked them both unconscious with quick, non-lethal blows, did absolutely nothing else, and left. When Arthur and Martha finally woke up, they frantically checked their bunker supplies. They found the hair-triggers they had left on the doorknobs and the meticulously aligned dust lines completely undisturbed. They fell into a tense, terrified silence. I knew exactly what was going through their minds. *Had someone bypassed their security?* *Had the food been poisoned or replaced?* *The fact that the markers were untouched—did it mean the intruder was a professional?* In the end, they stared at each other and reached one paranoid conclusion: “This bunker is compromised.” They abandoned their lifetime project without hesitation. In a panic, they hired local contractors to weld two extra layers of steel plating over their house’s main doors and rushed to grab whatever random supplies they could find. Chloe watched all of this play out with a smug smile. She genuinely believed this was the secret weapon that had kept me safe and comfortable in the previous timeline. She had no idea that the people Marcus hired to “install” the extra steel doors had already planted hidden cameras throughout the house. The Millers hadn’t even finished stocking up when the outbreak hit. Overnight, the world fell into silence. The streets were littered with the dead. Richard and Eleanor FaceTime’d me, panicked, asking where I was. They wanted me to cross the golf course to join them so we could pool our resources. I played the part of the dutiful, loving daughter. I told them I was completely safe, and that I had already stocked their kitchen with a massive supply of food the day before. I begged them to stay inside and lock their doors. This was only the beginning of the end. While I didn’t know the exact details of what happened to their mansion in the previous timeline, common sense dictated it wouldn’t fall this early. I pulled up the live camera feed of the Miller homestead. On screen, Chloe was lounging on a lawn chair, lazily licking a popsicle, while Arthur and Martha were sweat-drenched, desperately barricading the windows. “Arthur, Martha, stop stressing,” Chloe called out, trying to sound sweet. “You’re dripping sweat. Here, have a popsicle.” She was trying to play the loving daughter, to get on their good side. But the moment they heard her voice and saw her smiling with a half-eaten popsicle, they snapped. Arthur’s face turned bright red, veins bulging on his neck. He lunged forward and slapped the popsicle right out of her hand, sending it flying. “You brainless brat!” Arthur screamed, his voice cracking. “Do you have any idea what’s happening out there? All you do is eat, eat, eat! The world is ending and you’re already treating it like a vacation? Are you trying to starve us to death?!” They were already on edge after losing their main bunker, and facing the apocalypse with limited supplies had pushed their paranoia to the brink. Chloe’s carefree attitude was the spark that set off the powder keg. Chloe froze, her jaw dropping. She had always hated the Millers for raising her in poverty, and finding out she was a billionaire’s daughter had turned that resentment into pure rage. Her instinct was to strike back. But she caught herself just in time. She realized she still needed them to survive the winter. Her face contorted as she forced down her anger, muttering under her breath, “I’m sorry, Arthur. I’ll do better.” “But don’t worry too much. The apocalypse only lasts six months. We can easily make it through.”
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