A
MILLION
DAYZ
BOOK 4
CHAPTER ONE
December 15, 1986.
Snow drifted sideways across the upper rim of the Millionth State.
“WAHH! WAHH!”
In a hospital whose heat never worked, a newborn wailed beneath flickering lights.
The mother named him General Mosley—not a title, but a sentence.
By kindergarten, the name was already a joke.
“Fuck off, General,” the other boys barked as they shoved him into lockers, preparing to rebel against authority in the future.
General Mosley was a black man. Light brown-skinned, cock-eyed on his right, and always wearing a thick brown turtleneck. His mother made him look respectable.
It only made the punches hurt more.
He carried that bruised silence into every grade, until the day he met a barber named Prince Prince—a man who wore his ego louder than the clippers in his hand. Prince taught him how to fade a taper and how to fade the noise of the world.
But the world always came back louder.
Years blurred into neon and static. Mosley traded fists for technology, obsession replacing rebellion. In the sterile hum of circuit boards and passwords, he finally found a place where color didn’t matter—only code, only numbers, only results in “Million Technology.” He rose fast, climbing through cubicles and server farms until he could see the top of the world through a glass-walled office.
By December 31, 2018, General Mosley sat inside a concrete command center surrounded by monitors that painted his face in cold blue. On the screens blinked a small island west of the Millionth state—fifteen thousand souls trapped in quarantine.
A virus. Thousands of islanders dying.
A company-made miracle.
He’d designed the system that would cut the island’s power once the vaccine rollout was complete. The higher-ups called it a “containment protocol” vaccination.
Outside, commercials ran on every channel: mothers smiling, nurses holding syringes like wands, the word SALVATION was pulsing in gold. Liquid penetrated 99% of the islands' sick, healing, and living.
When midnight hit, confetti rained and people cheered.
For minutes, the world believed it had been saved.
“HAPPY NEW YEAR!” the island celebrated.
By January 1st, 2019, at 12:14 a.m., the coughing began.
By 1:24 a.m., nine out of ten bodies on the island hit the floor.
The rest ran away.
The army followed.
POW! POW! POW!
The survivors were gunned down with no crime committed.
The island was wiped out by gunfire. Mosley didn’t know he’d been hired to erase an entire section for tourism development. All he did was press the red button to save sick islanders. He told himself it was mercy, but it was a massacre.
The year 2019 changed him..
The CEO of “SALVATION Vaccination” made him and others help clean up the aftermath—thousands of corpses stacked under carnival lights so investors could imagine beach umbrellas in their place.
Months later, the world collapsed again.
2019 — The Fall.
No one remembers how it began. Some call it divine payback, others say that a chemical compound was destroyed.
In General Mosley’s situation, he was on the island, and a cruise ship battered the shore.
The dead carried their weight off of the ship and walked towards the island.
BAHHH!!!!!
Guns were confiscated now. They were taken by the President in early 2019. Workers, including General Mosley, had to fight with literal sticks and stones.
People rose after death—Greapers, the survivors called them.
Karma came for Mosley hard. While the “construction crews” rebuilt paradise, the dead stormed the island.
“AHHH!!!”
“HELP ME!!”
The workers went down first.
General’s family back home—wife, two kids—never stood a chance in his mind.
He escaped alone, drifting for days on a raft across a gray ocean that smelled of salt, sweat, and cigarettes.
When the mainland appeared, it wasn’t civilization anymore.
Streets burned.
The sky bruised purple.
The air tasted like battery acid and rotten flesh.
General Mosley fought through hordes with nothing but a splintered plank. By the third night, he’d forgotten what sleep felt like.
Cuts crusted over.
Muscles seized.
He felt dead inside.
After days, with chapped lips under his worn gas mask, he climbed north, up a giant hill, chasing the only place he still remembered—an old dried-up riverbed from his childhood. It was close to shore, yet far from his suburban neighborhood.
His new hiding spot.
He kept climbing, wearing an ivory colored trenchcoat, combat boots, and camouflage pants he stole from a soldier back at the island.
He reached the top by dawn.
Two days of climbing left him with blisters, mosquito bites, and torn attire.
The river he once knew had turned to bone-white dust, stretching across the mountain’s back like a scar.
Between rusted crates and torn tarps, something glinted.
General pulled them aside and stared.
Crates full of weapons—stacked, sealed, untouched. They were stretched miles along the riverbed.
Rocket launchers, grenades, rifles, pistols.
Everything banned when the government “restructured.”
Once, he’d been against guns.
Now they looked like scripture.
He fell to his knees and took off his gas mask, trembling hands brushing the cold steel. For the first time since the Fall, General Mosley smiled—a small, cracked thing.
On the ridge, surrounded by ghosts and turmoil, he stopped being a victim.
The boy they used to mock was gone.
What rose instead was the man the world would come to fear.
General Mosley—the shot heard around the Millionth State.
SUNNY JEAN
January 21st, 2024, snow drifted over the ruins of Davenport Zoo, once a refuge, now a graveyard. The metal gates still bore the carved letters “CODE-4 COMMUNITY”—half-bent, half-frozen. Once, this place was a sanctuary for the celibate faithful who prayed for a clean rebirth after the Fall. Now it was only silence and bones.
The massacre from the year before still lingered like a curse. The Siblings—seven of them, each wearing Sunny’s face like a mirror—had torn through the community until nothing moved but ghosts. The snow couldn’t hide the stains; it only made them shine brighter.
In the skeletal woods outside the zoo, a bear the size of a truck pranced through the snow, black fur twitching with hunger. Steam burst from its jaws, curling against the frozen air.
“RAHHH!!!!” It screamed.
Across the clearing, Fiona prowled—broad-shouldered Siberian husky, wolf-sized, muscles coiled under her silver coat. Her eyes burned a yellow fire. Tail wagging with her high-pitched hum piercing the frost. Behind her moved Wizard and Mac, two lions with manes like smoke.
Fiona had tasted the serum once—Project Alpha, a mutation of Sunny Jean’s own bloodline. It made her faster, stronger, and impossible to kill by natural means. Fiona had already died once before; now she was more myth than dog.
The bear spotted them. Its roar shattered the stillness.
RAHHH!
Fiona crouched low, teeth bared. Wizard’s tail flicked like a whip. Mac shifted sideways, circling for the flank.
Then the clearing exploded into chaos.
VOOM!
The bear lunged first—its paw the size of a shovel, striking both lions into a dead oak that split in half with the impact.
POW!
Fiona launched upward, catching the bear’s wrist in her jaws, teeth crunching through fur and bone.
The beast howled, thrashing wildly, raking its claws across Fiona’s face.
PEEM!
Blood sprayed against the snow like red fireworks.
Fiona hit the ground hard, jaw cracked, cheek split open.
But before the bear could lift another paw, her wound sealed itself—skin knitting back together, leaving only a faint shimmer of scar tissue.
Fiona growled through the pain, eyes blazing. The left color was red and the right green.
She attacked again.
ARGGH!!!
Her jaws clamped down on the bear’s ankle, ripping through tendons until the foot came off in her mouth.
Steam and blood filled the air.
Wizard and Mac surged forward, leaping onto the bear’s back, claws tearing at its spine.
ARGGHHHH!!
The grizzly tried to flee, stumbling through its own blood trail, but Fiona wouldn’t let go. She darted beneath its chest, slammed upward, and crushed its throat between her teeth.
“ROOOOO!!”
The sound was thunder muffled by snow.
Then silence.
The bear collapsed.
BAM!
The ground shook once. It didn’t rise again.
That morning, at the zoo, Sunny Jean had woken between Tilly and Layla—two women from the new world, ghosts in flesh.
Layla had been the leader at the Code-4 community once, before the Siblings’ massacre. Tilly ran with the Renegades biker club, mother to a tribe of outlaws and madame who now helped rebuild the zoo’s remains.
They’d been his company the night before—fourteen women with them. Whiskey, and whatever hope looked like after the end of civilization.
Sunny stood naked on the fifth-floor balcony, the wind biting at his skin as snow ghosted through the air. Below him, the city dissolved beneath a sheet of white—Million Bay fading like a photograph left too long in the rain.
His long curls were gone. Chezter had trimmed them into a jagged bald fade, uneven around the ears but sharp enough to feel the cold scrape of winter. The cut wasn’t clean, yet neither was the world anymore.
He rarely touched his fedoras now; they felt like props from another lifetime. The sunglasses too—too dark for this pale light, too proud for what the world had become.
But when he suited up, he still carried fragments of the old Sunny Jean.
A black turtleneck tucked under a beige blazer, the wide-brim fedora angled just right, dark shades to hide the exhaustion in his eyes. Tailored navy dress pants replaced his usual black jeans. It was half-armor, half-memory—how he reminded himself he still existed.
Sunny thought of himself as somewhere between a cowboy and a king, wandering the ruins of his own kingdom, not sure which title felt like truth anymore.
His brown eyes tracked the snowfall glazing the southwest district of Million Bay, once the pride of the State before the Fall.
The winter of 2024 stretched below him like a graveyard waiting for a name.
Fiona’s breathing was heavy, fog drifting from her nostrils. Her coat was soaked crimson. She padded toward the zoo gates, tail wagging, tongue hanging from her mouth like she’d just fetched a stick instead of killed a god.
Inside the shattered lion den, Jessica “Skratch” Volkov stood knee-deep in rubble, a flashlight gripped between her teeth. Her dirty blonde hair was pulled into a loose ponytail—she’d stopped doing the twin pigtails after turning twenty-one. One scar cut down her right eye like a lightning bolt. Her tank top clung to her back, stained with soot and sewer dust, torn blue jeans hanging low on her hips. Two metal drumsticks rested in holsters at her bosom with a custom “X” holster her friend Chezter designed.
When Fiona appeared, Jessica spun—startled.
“Whoa, baby—did you just…?” she muttered. “Ugh, you’re covered in blood!”
From the shadows behind her came a voice, calm and electric.
“She’s a savage, remember?”
Sunny Jean stepped out from behind a crumbling enclosure. The brim of his fedora caught the faint light; his breath misted white in the cold.
He was in 2024 uniform. His black turtleneck catching flakes of snow.
Jessica smirked.
“Enjoying the penthouse, huh?”
Sunny rolled his eyes.
“It’s the old fifth-floor, Jess. Not exactly the Ritz.”
“Call it what you want,” she said, wiping grime from her cheek. “You were scared shitless about being up there before. What changed?”
He shrugged his shoulders and leaned on the wall.
“I guess I had to realize it wasn’t me who fell back in 2018, it was my fiancé, Jamie. Besides, we have to get Million Bay up and running again soon.”
“Well, next time you’re cleaning up,” she said, wiping muck off her forehead. “I’m tired.”
Sunny grinned.
“You’re on your way to becoming queen, Jessica.”
“I know,” she said. “I just didn’t expect my hands to literally get dirty.”
Sunny’s axe-guitar leaned near the door—a jagged hybrid of metal and wood, blade fused into the guitar body, scarred from years of blood and battles. It was a relic from Sket (pronounced SKAY), the late musician who had died saving the Underworld Kingdom. The weapon carried a curse—or a blessing—depending who told the story. The Underworld called it Thunder’s Will. One strike could turn flesh to dust.
The spell that bound it lived in Sunny now. His enemies didn’t bleed; they disintegrated.
Up above, the front gates creaked open.
A battered pickup rumbled in, coughing smoke.
Behind the wheel sat Cody—a broad-shouldered Middle Eastern man with a thick beard and a Renegades “President” patch sewn to his jacket. He parked near the lion pit, hopping out with a stack of wooden planks balanced on his shoulder.
“Hey, Jess!” he shouted, grinning widely. “Heard you might need some building material.”
“Always,” Jessica replied, brushing dust off her jeans. “We’re patching the dens, maybe fortifying the gates.”
He set the wood down with a thud, glancing sideways at the balcony where Sunny leaned, arms folded.
The air between them was heavy.
Sunny’s tone was flat.
“I’ma check on the tutes. Hopefully they ain’t still at my place.”
He turned, boots crunching on the snow, and disappeared into the corridor to check on Tilly’s escorts.
Cody waited until Sunny was gone before muttering, “You know he destroyed Project Alpha, right? The green serum that gave him all that power. He could’ve shared it.”
Jessica’s jaw tightened.
“He had his reasons, Cody. Last year was chaos. Mario, Code-4, all that fallout. We barely made it out alive.”
“Still,” Cody said quietly, eyes on the ground. “That gift could’ve saved more of us.”
She sighed.
“Let it go. We’ve got enough problems.”
Cody nodded, forced a small smile, and pulled her into a hug.
“All right, Jess. Take care.”
He walked away, boots crunching down the long, frozen road, leaving Jessica alone with Fiona and the lions. They weren’t together anymore, but needed each other to help build a new world.
The snow began to fall harder—soft, endless, almost peaceful.
But somewhere above them, behind the cracked windows of the fifth-floor lounge, Sunny Jean poured himself another shot of whiskey and whispered into the cold glass:
“A new empire starts from the ruins.”
GENERAL MOSLEY
General Mosley came downhill with winter chewing at his coat and iron tucked against his ribs. Two pistols rode his hips, a stubby Tommy gun sagged the trench at the beltline, and a heavy Desert Eagle slept under his left arm like a heart that kicked back. He jacked an abandoned pickup truck and drove it until the needle kissed empty, until the road turned mean and the signs fell away.
He went to his old home. His family was ruined.
Confirmation he didn’t want to witness with his own two eyes.
Months later, Southwest.
Renegade territory.
A Nomen woman’s scream snapped across the asphalt.
“—No!”
Two Renegades had a captive wedged against a cinderblock wall—Nomen insignia torn on her sleeve, hands bound, a crossbow tilted at her mouth like a dare. Renegades loved crossbows; quiet weapons for loud men.
Mosley didn’t break stride.
His gas mask hid the ruined left eye; the trenchcoat made him a moving shadow.
“Hey!” one of the Renegades barked. “Hey, homie—what you doing over here?”
Silence hung between them.
Wind and the squeak of a loose sign chain.
“Nobody’s quiet anymore,” the first growled. “I asked you a question.”
The captive cried out.
A backhand cracked the air.
“Shoot this moth—” his buddy started.
The subgun spoke.
BDDDDATTT!
A ragged, metallic roar—brief, surgical—then both men hit the ground like the day ran out under their boots.
Mosley ejected the magazine with a nod, like punctuation.
“Run,” he told the trembling woman, voice carved from frost.
One Renegade tried to sprint. Mosley drew the Eagle and put thunder in the man’s spine.
POW!
The echo crawled along the concrete and died in the weeds.
The woman spoke.
“Thanks for helping me. My name is Veronica Majors. The Nomen call me “Vulture.”
Power felt honest in General Mosley’s hands. He found another pocket of Renegades fast—one in a stolen coupe, lip-locked with a tute (prostitute) who’d clawed her way through ten winters too many.
“C’mon baby, give me a kiss,” the Renegade charmed her.
The car was showroom clean; the world around it wasn’t.
TAP TAP TAP!
Mosley tapped the window. The Renegade man rolled it down, already halfway through an insult.
“What do you w-”
POW!
He never finished it. Gas mask and trench coat was a different design than the Nomen business suits they’re used to seeing.
The Desert Eagle sent glass and teeth into the back seat. The Renegades' half skull lay on the horn.
“BEEEEEEEEEEEP”
The woman screamed.
“Run,” Mosley whispered again.
She ran.
General took the coupe. The Nomen woman, Vulture, climbed in on shaking legs. They hunted the street in an angry loop—passed a cluster of Renegades at a burned-out bus stop and stitched them to the morning with fire.
POW! POW! BDDDAAT!
Five went down.
Steam rose from bullet holes like ghosts exhaling.
The tute didn’t get far. Fear turns to gravity when you see which side lives longer. She found her way back to General Mosley before Renegades did, and slid into the back seat like a confession.
By sundown, the three of them rolled past iron gates into an unknown block: a hilltop mansion straddling the border of North and South Million State. Eyes watched from behind curtains.
Knees found floors.
People bowed to the silhouette of the man with the guns.
One tried to be brave. He didn’t finish the first step.
POW!
Inside, Mosley counted thirty-five residents. He tied them with thick wire strips, wrists and ankles, humming with panic. Afterward, he disappeared into a bedroom with both Vulture and tute with a bottle; the house went quiet except for the small, cruel noises people make when they don’t think they’ll see morning.
When he came back, he smelled like smoke and winter sex. He spat a string of mucus onto the marble, reloaded without looking.
“Can’t run,” he whispered.
They didn’t.
Gunshots rang. General Mosley, Vulture, and the Renegade prostitute all had firearms.
POW! POW! POW!
They killed all thirty-five people.
The city swallowed the sound and did not return it.
By dawn, the guns were light again.
General needed more.
The mountain called like a prayer that never asked permission. He drove north with Vulture and the tute dozing against the window, mouths parted, the engine’s rattle the only lullaby left in 2024.
At the base of the ridge, they climbed. Mosley took the slope like it owed him breath. Vulture kept time with his boots; the tute coughed blood and cursed into her sleeve, palms blistered, shoes slick with scree.
At the top, the tarps pulled back to reveal iron heaven—ammo cans lined like tombstones; rifles sleeping in crates like wolves. The women stared, pupils blown wide. In the old world, diamonds did that to people. In this one, power did.
POW!
A single crack split the air.
The tute folded at the knees, rolled over the lip, and pinballed down the white rib of the dry river until she vanished into the grave of guns.
Vulture gasped.
Mosley’s face didn’t change. The math was simple: enemies of his allies lived shorter. Trust hardly anyone in this game. To him, women were easier to confuse.
He lifted an old Colt .45, tested the weight, and turned his back on the echo.
They descended the mountain fast, feet slipping on powdered stone. The tute body stayed buried under firepower uphill.
Near the bottom, Vulture caught a rock and went sprawling.
POOF!
A pistol slid from her jacket—older, oiled, not his.
She took a breath, froze under the look he gave her with his right eyepatch covering his straight face.
“I’m sorry! I’m so sorry! Please don’t kill me, I just...I needed protection!”
Two options bloomed in his head:
She kept a souvenir for herself.
Or she meant to kill him and take everything.
General held out the Colt, barrel steady, eyes flat behind the tint.
“Run.”
She didn’t.
Tears made mud on her cheeks. She begged with both hands up in the air—one trembling a little more than the other.
“Don’t kill me please!” she pleaded. “My mom died after the Fall. I joined this asshole army for safety, making me wear these stupid suits. I just want to go home. Please...don’t kill me.
She shivered with guilt.
Urine ran down her pant leg.
General Mosley watched her cry for help. It was a tricky move, but the spirit of his wife told him to let the woman go.
“Run,” he whispered again.
She ran. Never looking back at him or whatever sins they committed together in the last few days.
SKRATCH
January 21st, 2024, on the wind, a radio fizzed to life and coughed an old hook into the afternoon. Somewhere far from the mountain, Jessica was still at Davenport Zoo—cloaked in dust, rummaging through the dungeon shelves for anything not ruined by mold or memory. She’d been down there for hours, eyes gone red from the cold air. Sunny Jean found her by the half-collapsed doorway, the axe-guitar humming in his palm like a live wire that remembered thunder.
“Are you still going to be able to perform with us in the next ten sunsets?” he asked.
“Of course,” she responded. “I think with Mario, Fiona, hell, I don’t even know where that bitch Violet is. I just feel...at ease. Maybe it’s the cold.”
“You’ve been through a lot, Jess,” Sunny added. “It’s okay to feel that. Don’t let the cold make you numb.”
Jessica put her head down. She lifted up.
“I think it started at the Crazy House, my first day. Seeing those people. Their lives were worse before the Fall. Josie...her eye? Gerald touching me? I guess we’ve never got to talk about anything since our first car ride together back in 2020. I feel like I’ve lost everyone.”
Sunny walked up to her and gave her a hug like a sergeant to a marine.
“Everyone is here for you, Jess. I don’t know about you, but I’ve never been this popular. I mean, granted, I’ve been a successful musician, entrepreneur, prisoner. That shit vanished when I got ran away from Ironside. The serum was my comeback moment, a chance to really see people for who they are. Then you came around, and Chezter, and everyone that’s helping Layla put this this place together.
Jessica forced a smile.
“Seems like forever ago. 2020.”
“Don’t hang on to the ghosts that loom around here,” Sunny said. “That’s unhealthy.”
She nodded once and slipped into the pale light. Frost hissed under her boots. The sky was a thin blade over the lion enclosures; the memory of a gorilla’s last breath haunted the tall weeds. Peace was new to her—an unfinished language. She practiced anyway.
GENERAL MOSLEY
December 2023, tires hissed on gravel a county away. The pickup truck coasted to a stop in front of the Crazy House—Renegade waystation, hospital, shelter, rumor mill, Jessica’s Queen-dom.
Mosley pulled a blood-stiff map of South Million State from the pocket of a dead Greaper and scanned the scrawl he’d marked in the margins.
First stop: supplies.
Second: message.
Serj—Renegade jacket, fresh patch—paced the porch with a crossbow at low ready. Mosley stepped out and put a bullet through his chest, then two more through whatever was left.
POW!
“Ahh! What the fuck, b-” Serj crumbled.
POW! POW!
Serj flopped toward the railing and didn’t learn anything from it.
General grabbed Serj’s body and dragged it into the woods. During this time, in December 2023, the Renegades were off fighting the Sunny Seven.
Time bent.
Weeks shuddered past.
January 21st, 2024.
Beards grew.
Eyepatches faded.
The Renegades, once a tool, calcified into an obstacle. Mosley opened the trunk; guns grinned back at him. He lifted an AR-15 and felt the breath even out in his lungs. Sometimes violence was the only inhaler that worked.
Inside the Crazy House, the bandage racks were thin and the adrenaline thicker. The Renegades shouted orders that sizzled into panic the second they left their mouths.
“Renegades! Attack!” Cody shouted. He woke up out of his slumber to the madness.
Arrows rattled the doorway. Mosley returned punctuation—the machine gun clattered like July fireworks, and it had been a long time since the nation had earned any.
PAPAPAPAPAPAPA!
A doctor cracked the door with a stammer; a double-barreled shotgun broke the doctor.
BANG!
The trenchcoat lifted, four guns whispered against the lining like a choir.
Asthma hit. Mosley ran into the room and shook his inhaler, drew it to his lips, and pressed it into his lungs until the edges stopped fuzzing.
The door swung wider.
SUNNY JEAN / CHEZTER / SKRATCH / GENERAL MOSLEY
Back at Code-4, Sunny leaned into a whetstone, drawing a silver crescent across the axe-blade’s edge. He felt war gathering like storm pressure in the sinuses—an ache behind the eyes you can’t rub away. Chezter sat with Josie in the lounge at the Nu Kingdom, the stitched X across his mask a black star that said keep out. She tried to peel the armor off his shoulders; the suit said no, so she lit a cigarette and watched the smoke rewrite the ceiling.
At the Davenport Zoo, Jessica walked the field alone, palms combing the high grass where a gorilla had bled in 2020. Mario was gone, Fiona carried new scars under new strength, and even Sunny’s jokes earlier felt thin around her ribs.
Peace scared her because it required trust; she didn’t know where to find any.
Far south, Mosley butchered the Crazy House with method and reloads.
Arrows thudded.
His reply was automatic—measured, merciless.
PAPAPAPAPAPA!
One of the Renegades was hit. He ducked off into the shadows of the hallway.
Cody, the Renegade president, tried to rally a flank and watched men and women arrow backward into walls, the floor slickening under boot soles.
The Renegades surrendered.
Outside the Crazy House patio, eleven captives knelt in a line—hands bound, eyes on a moon that hadn’t climbed the sky yet. Mosley searched the cabinets inside for gauze, iodine, anything that made a wound quieter. He came back out with his Desert Eagle and a decision.
Easy decisions.
POW! POW! POW! POW!
The executions were slow enough to be a lesson and fast enough to be inevitable. He spared three disabled clients: Darius, Thumbs, and Chucky.
General Mosley holstered the Eagle. He looked up and saw nothing looking back.
Cody tilted his head to the same blank sky Jessica watched from the field the same night—two bodies under one silence.
He never saw the Eagle rise.
General Mosley squeezed the trigger.
POW!
The round punched a neat hole through the front of Cody’s head and a messy one out the back; the body folded into the red dirt like it had always meant to be there.
Mosley checked the gun.
Dry.
He let it clatter onto Cody’s chest—message delivered—and slid back behind the wheel of his pickup truck.
VROOM! VROOM!
The engine coughed, found itself, and carried him toward the next address no one wanted to be on.
The song on the radio wound down.
The night took its place.
A new war has officially started.