Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 8:59 AM
Countdown to Extraction: 65 Hours, 42 Minutes Remaining
The linoleum floor of the fourth-floor corridor rushed up to meet Troy Barlow's face violently.
It wasn't the concussive shockwave of the thermobaric bomb that put him on the ground. It was Dr. Sharon Leesburg. The self-righteous, goodie-two-shoes bitch had grabbed him by the collar of his shirt and physically hurled him downward like a disobedient dog.
Troy's shoulder—the bad one, the one that had ruined his entire fucking life—slammed into the hard tile. A sickening flare of white-hot agony shot straight up his neck, blinding him for a split second.
Then, the bomb actually hit.
The air pressure violently dropped, sucking the oxygen straight out of his lungs. The thunderclap ruptured the silence, the ceiling tiles rained down in a choking avalanche of grey dust, and the entire hospital physically heaved. The lights flickered and died.
But as Troy lay there in the dark, choking on pulverized drywall, his brain didn't process the apocalypse. His mind didn't immediately go to Kimmie, who was shrieking in a puddle of her own fluids right next to him.
The sudden, brutal impact to his ruined rotator cuff forcefully short-circuited his present reality.
The ringing in his ears morphed. It wasn't the high-pitched whine of a shockwave anymore. It was the heavy, thumping, synthetic bass of Club 309 on River Street.
Seven years ago.
Troy closed his eyes in the dust, and suddenly, he was twenty-two years old again. He was the absolute king of Savannah. He wasn't some pathetic, shivering junkie hiding in a dark hospital. He was the Golden Boy of the Southern circuit.
He was a rookie on his very first major golf tour, and he was destroying the competition. Sports journalists were literally following him to the clubhouse. Sponsors were actively throwing crisp, uncashed checks at his feet just to get their ugly corporate logos stitched onto his pristine white visors. His swing was a thing of violent, mathematical beauty. A scout for Nike had cornered him in the locker room after a staggering fourteen-under-par finish and told him, straight to his face, that in three years, Troy Barlow was going to be better than Tiger Woods himself.
Troy believed it. Hell, he had met Tiger that exact same year at a charity pro-am. He had shaken the legend's hand. He had an authentic, signed Titleist glove perfectly framed in a heavy mahogany shadowbox to prove it. He had it, anyway, before he had to pawn it to a greasy dealer named G-Bone for three bottles of Roxycodone.
But back then, Troy was untouchable.
The bass thumped in his memory. Club 309. The VIP section. The velvet ropes separating him from the nobodies. The air smelled heavily of expensive vodka, cheap perfume, and sweet, burning marijuana.
That was the exact night he met Kimmie.
He had spotted her across the flashing strobe lights of the dance floor. She had on a ridiculously short, tight, electric-blue bodycon dress that left absolutely nothing to the imagination. Troy hadn't cared how she had gotten past the bouncers, and he certainly didn't care that she was fifteen-and-a-half years old. Almost sixteen was close enough for a guy who had the world by the balls.
She was gorgeous, she looked at him like he was a literal god, and most importantly, she was incredibly useful. While the other groupies just wanted his money, Kimmie had slipped a plastic baggie of high-grade weed and three stamped ecstasy pills into his palm with a sly, wicked little smile.
Troy had taken her back to his luxury, high-rise apartment overlooking the Savannah River that exact same night. They had popped the X, smoked the blunt on his balcony, and he had fucked her until the sun came up over the Talmadge Memorial Bridge.
As they laid in his massive, California king bed the next morning, tangled in thousand-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, Kimmie had spilled her guts. She told him all about her miserable, trashy life. The single-wide trailer. The meth-addicted mother who sold her food stamps for hits. The hard-ass, suffocating older sister who worked double shifts scrubbing toilets and tried to run Kimmie's life like a drill sergeant.
Troy had stroked her blonde hair, high on his own ego and the lingering Molly, and promised to take her away from all of it. He was going to be a millionaire. He was going to save her.
And for four incredible, blurred years, he actually did.
Troy dominated the minor tours. The money flowed in like a busted fire hydrant—at least, that's what his agent, a slick-talking bastard out of Atlanta named Vance, told him. Troy didn't look at the spreadsheets. He didn't care about taxes or investments. He just swiped the platinum cards.
He bought them a massive, five-bedroom brick mansion in The Landings—the most exclusive, gated, old-money community in Savannah. They threw epic, sprawling parties that lasted for three days straight. They flew first-class to Vegas on a Tuesday just because Kimmie wanted to see a Cirque du Soleil show.
He was at the absolute peak of the mountain.
The only dark cloud in his perfect, blue-sky life was her bitch-ass sister, Renee.
Renee never liked him. From day one, she looked at Troy like he was a piece of shit stuck to the bottom of her cheap, sensible work shoes. It didn't matter that Troy was actively paying for her sister's designer clothes. It didn't matter that he had moved Kimmie out of a trailer park and into a mansion with a saltwater pool. Renee had a fucking problem with everything.
Stop spending recklessly, Renee would constantly nag, standing in the foyer of his house, refusing to take her shoes off. Stop throwing these drug-fueled parties. Troy, you need an independent attorney. You can't just blindly trust your agent with millions of dollars.
Troy used to literally laugh in her face. He would pour himself a glass of three-hundred-dollar scotch, smirk at the exhausted physical therapist who was barely scraping by on thirty grand a year, and tell her to stay in her lane.
The bitter irony tasted like battery acid in the back of Troy's throat as he laid on the dusty hospital floor.
Renee had been right about Vance. She had been right about the money.
But Troy hadn't found that out until the fall.
It happened on a pristine Sunday afternoon in Augusta. Troy had just sunk a miraculous forty-foot putt on the 18th green to completely secure a massive, sponsored tournament victory. The crowd erupted into a deafening roar. The adrenaline surged through Troy's veins, thick and intoxicating. He was untouchable. He was immortal.
In a burst of sheer, arrogant exuberance, Troy had thrown his putter into the air and attempted a celebratory backflip right there on the manicured green.
He had rotated slightly off-axis.
He landed awkwardly on his extended right arm.
The sound was something Troy would never, ever forget. It wasn't a crack. It was a sickening, wet, heavy pop.
His rotator cuff didn't just tear; it violently ripped completely off the bone. The pain was so absolute, so blinding, that Troy had immediately vomited all over the 18th hole while the cameras broadcasted it live on national television.
Three reconstructive surgeries. That's what the world-class orthopedic surgeons told him it would take. They prescribed him heavy, eighty-milligram Oxycontin to manage the agonizing recovery.
But the physical therapy was a torturous, humiliating nightmare. Troy wasn't used to struggling. He wasn't used to weakness. When the pain became too much, he just took another pill. When the physical therapists pushed him, he fired them.
Then came the day he tried to swing a 9-iron six months later. His arm had zero power. The beautiful, violent mechanics of his swing were completely, permanently broken.
The sponsors dropped him immediately. Nike stopped returning his calls.
That was when Troy called Vance, demanding a withdrawal from his investment accounts to cover the mounting surgical bills and the mortgage on The Landings.
Vance's phone was disconnected.
The slick bastard had drained absolutely everything. The "millions" on paper were entirely gone, funneled into offshore LLCs that the FBI told Troy would take a decade to untangle.
The foreclosure notice came three months later. The cars were repossessed in the middle of the night. The parties stopped. The "friends" vanished.
The only thing that didn't leave was the pain.
The excruciating physical agony in his shoulder, combined with the suffocating, crushing weight of losing his entire identity, was entirely too much. The Oxycontin was the only thing that made the screaming in his head stop. It wrapped his brain in a warm, heavy, synthetic blanket. It made the reality of Kimmie crying in their empty, foreclosed living room manageable. It made Renee's smug, "I told you so" face disappear.
When the doctors finally cut off his legitimate prescriptions, Troy hit the streets. He transitioned from eighty-milligram Oxys to whatever he could get his hands on. Roxycodone. Percocet. Vicodin. He washed them down with cheap vodka to make the high hit the back of his skull faster.
He stopped being Troy Barlow, the next Tiger Woods. He became Troy Barlow, the guy who gave golf lessons to rich assholes at the municipal club just to steal out of their golf bags when they weren't looking.
Present day.
Troy's eyes snapped open.
The memory dissolved, replaced by the choking, grey reality of the fourth-floor hospital corridor.
The ringing in his ears faded, quickly replaced by the horrific sounds of Kimmie screaming.
"Make it stop!" Kimmie shrieked, her voice tearing at her vocal cords. "Give me the fucking drugs!"
Troy pushed himself up onto his hands and knees, spitting drywall dust onto the linoleum. His entire body was shaking, but it wasn't from the thermobaric shockwave. It was the terrifying, icy grip of opioid withdrawal violently clawing at his nervous system.
His skin crawled with a million invisible insects. His stomach cramped so hard he thought he was going to shit himself right there in the hallway. His bones felt like they were made of shattered glass. He hadn't had a pill in over twenty-four hours.
The panic rising in his chest had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that the city was burning. It had nothing to do with the fact that his wife was laying in a puddle of her own vomit and amniotic fluid, begging for her dead mother and her bitch sister. It had nothing to do with the unborn child preparing to enter the apocalypse.
Troy Barlow didn't give a fuck about the baby.
He just needed his fix.
He scrambled backward on his hands and knees, slipping on the dust and the blood, desperate to get away from Dr. Leesburg's shouting and Kimmie's agonizing wails. He scrambled into the deep, dark shadows of a recessed alcove near the nurses' station, panting like a cornered animal.
His knee bumped into something hard plastic.
Troy stopped. He blinked through the dust and the gloom.
A heavy, multi-tiered emergency crash cart had been violently overturned by the concussive blast. The plastic drawers had completely shattered on impact. Sterile gauze, intubation tubes, and saline bags were scattered uselessly across the floor.
But there, lying right in the center of the debris, was the narcotic lockbox.
The heavy metal hinges had completely sheared off when the cart slammed into the cinderblock wall. The reinforced lid was hanging wide open.
Troy's breath caught in his throat. His bloodshot eyes went entirely wide.
He didn't check the corridor. He didn't look back at Kimmie, who was currently being hauled off the floor by Dr. Leesburg and Dr. Reyes, screaming in pure, unadulterated agony as they dragged her toward the operating room.
Troy dove into the spilled medical supplies like a starving dog on a fresh carcass.
His shaking hands dug frantically through the scattered ampoules of epinephrine and vials of lidocaine. He shoved aside boxes of syringes, his fingernails scraping against the linoleum.
Please. Please. Please.
His fingers brushed against a crinkling foil sheet.
Troy yanked it out from under a pile of sterile wraps.
It was a full, unbroken blister pack of heavy-duty, pharmaceutical-grade Oxycodone. Thirty milligrams a pill. Pure, synthetic heaven.
A low, whimpering sound of absolute relief escaped Troy's throat. A single tear tracked down his dust-caked cheek.
His hands were shaking so violently he couldn't even manage to pop the pills through the thin foil backing. He didn't care. He brought the blister pack directly to his mouth. He bit down hard, his teeth tearing through the plastic and the foil, ripping the packaging completely apart.
He dumped three of the small, white pills directly into his sweaty, trembling palm.
Ninety milligrams.
He didn't have water. He didn't need it.
Troy violently slapped his hand over his mouth, throwing his head back, and aggressively dry-swallowed all three pills at once. The thick, chalky coating scraped harshly down his dry throat, but he forced them down, gagging once before swallowing heavily again.
He collapsed back against the cinderblock wall of the alcove, pulling his knees tightly to his chest, hiding completely in the shadows.
Out in the hallway, the world was actively ending. The military had leveled the Southside. The barricade was groaning under the weight of the rotting dead. Officer Daniels was shouting orders to bleeding, terrified men. His wife was locked in Room 402, screaming as her body ripped itself apart to deliver a child into a graveyard.
Troy Barlow closed his eyes, ignoring all of it.
He just waited in the dark, his breath hitching, waiting for the heavy, chemical warmth to hit the back of his skull and finally wash the apocalypse away.
Wednesday, December 10, 2025, 9:28 AM
Countdown to Extraction: 65 Hours, 13 Minutes Remaining