[Outpost Alpha, City Commercial Strip, Collapse Day Unknown, Late Evening]
Clank. Clank. Clank.
Heavy steel rolled down over the smashed windows in sequence, blocking out the orange sky, blocking out the burning skyline, blocking out the specific quality of light that open fires made when they reflected off low cloud cover. The grocery store contracted into red emergency glow and the smell of old blood and recycled cool air, the bleach-and-copper smell still bleeding up from somewhere in the grout no matter how many layers of clean air the AC pushed over it.
"Safe," Ren said.
He looked at Chloe.
She was on the floor in aisle four, back against the bottom shelf of the cereal section, arms wrapped around a jar of peanut butter like it was doing something for her. Lid still on. She had not opened it. She was just holding it.
'She's not eating. She's comfort object-ing. At a jar of peanut butter. In an apocalypse.'
"You okay?" Ren asked.
Her eyes came up. Red at the rims, dry now, past the wet stage and into the raw stage. "You ate him."
"I know," Ren said.
He did not apologize.
"He was a bad guy," Chloe said. Her voice had the tone of someone testing a surface to see if it would hold weight. "He was going to kill us."
"Yes," Ren said. "Open the peanut butter. You need the protein."
He turned back to Arthur.
The man in the grey suit was still lying in the aisle where he had dropped him, the blood pool having spread and then stopped spreading as it started to congeal against the tile grout lines. The neck wound had pulled apart when Ren set the body down, wider now, and the red emergency light made everything look like the same color.
Ren crouched and searched the pockets with clean efficiency.
Wallet. Useless, the world having arrived at a consensus about paper currency approximately forty-eight hours into the collapse. Car keys, two sets. House keys on a leather fob that still smelled faintly of cedar oil, the kind sold in small glass bottles at overpriced home goods stores. A phone with a cracked screen that was already dead.
Then the inside jacket pocket.
A small black notebook, the kind with the elastic closure. And underneath it, folded into quarters, a tourist map of the city.
Ren unfolded the map on the floor next to the body.
Arthur had worked on it. Red marker, careful circles, notation in small precise handwriting that slanted slightly to the left. The university: Zone 1 Infestation. The city center: Zone 2 Hunting Ground. The grocery store had a star drawn over it and two words underneath. Outpost Alpha.
'He had a system. He had been building a system from day one.'
"He was organized," Ren muttered.
He opened the notebook.
Day 1: The sky changed. People turned. I killed the mailman. I felt stronger. Day 2: Found a sword. Killed three looting neighbors. Level 3. I am faster than them. Day 3: Cleared the store. This is mine now. The weak are just food.
The entries continued from there but the pattern had been set in the first three lines. Ren closed it.
'He wasn't crazy. He looked at the same situation I'm in and arrived at the same basic conclusions and then started building infrastructure. The cannibal thing is a methodology problem, not an insanity problem. That's somehow worse.'
He picked up the rapier from the floor. Forty inches, narrow blade, light in the hand in a way that good weight distribution made things light. He tested the edge against his thumbnail. It shaved a thin white curl.
[Item: Duelist's Rapier (Uncommon)] [Damage: +15] [Bonus: Attack Speed +10%]
The axe sat against the shelf where he had dropped it. He left it there.
He walked to Chloe and dropped the rapier onto her lap.
She flinched hard, both hands coming off the peanut butter jar.
She looked at the sword. Then at him. "I don't know how to use this."
"Learn," Ren said. "Pointy end goes into the thing trying to kill you."
"I can't kill people," she said. Quiet, not argumentative.
"You don't have to kill people," Ren said. "Just the things that aren't people anymore. For now." He moved toward the back of the store. "Come on."
The Employees Only door was steel, handle locked from the other side, hinges visible on the outside face. Ren raised one foot and kicked it flat next to the handle.
Bang.
The frame cracked. The door swung open and hit the interior wall and bounced back and he caught it with his forearm.
Not an office. A staircase going down, the smell rising immediately: cold concrete and cardboard and something that had been running on fuel for a while, clean combustion under the musty baseline.
He went down. Chloe followed, the rapier scraping along the concrete wall because she was holding it by the blade end. He didn't correct her yet.
The basement was large, the full footprint of the store above, lit by one bare overhead bulb that was still on for reasons that would need investigating. Storage racks to the ceiling on all three visible walls, stacked with boxes labeled in distributor shorthand: SPAM 24CT, SOUP ASST 36CT, WATER 40PK, TP 30PK. Batteries in a milk crate. Enough for months if only two people were eating.
Arthur had built a corner for himself on the fourth wall.
Leather couch, the real kind, dark brown, worn soft at the armrests from use. A generator, silent but full on visual inspection. A lamp on a crate. Three sleeping bags still in their compression sacks.
And against the couch on the floor: a shotgun, barrel pointed safely away, a cardboard box of shells beside it. A baseball bat with nails driven through the barrel end at intervals, dried something coating four of the six nails.
Ren stood in the middle of the room and breathed it in. Cold air, cardboard, the faint diesel smell off the generator, and underneath it the specific ghost of Arthur's cedar-oil cologne, the smell of a man who had maintained personal hygiene during an apocalypse out of something that was either discipline or denial.
'He had time to stock all of this. He was thinking weeks ahead from day one.'
"Jackpot," Ren said.
He checked the generator fuel tank. Full, or close enough. He pulled the cord.
Vroom.
The generator caught on the second pull and settled into a steady hum, and the lights in the basement came on properly, real warm yellow light flooding the space after two days of red emergency glow and Night Vision green, and Ren stood still for a moment while his eyes adjusted.
Normal. It looked almost exactly like a stockroom in a functioning grocery store.
He sat on the leather couch. The cushions took his weight and then kept going, the good leather giving in a way that cheap foam never did, and the ache in his ribs from the snake fight two days ago made itself known now that he was no longer moving. He looked at his hands. Blood, dried, layered in colors: green from the sap, purple from something in the drain, red from Arthur, dark red-brown from the rats, the whole history of the collapse caked into the lines of his knuckles.
"We have water," Ren said. "Food. A door that locks from the inside."
Chloe was standing in the center of the room, still holding the rapier by the wrong end, turning slowly to look at all of it. Her face had the expression of someone doing arithmetic on something too large to fit in one calculation.
"We can sleep?" she asked.
"You can," Ren said. "Take the couch. I'll take the first watch."
"Where will you sleep?"
'Nowhere. Probably. Not with this city still making sounds like that.' "I don't sleep much," Ren said. "Go."
She set the peanut butter on top of one of the storage boxes. She sat on the couch and then lay down sideways without taking her shoes off, pulling both knees up, and the rapier she balanced along the edge of the couch cushion because apparently she understood that much at least. Her eyes were closed in under a minute and her breathing changed over the following thirty seconds.
[Chloe (Lvl 1)] [Status: Exhausted]
'She didn't run when I ate him. She threw a pickle jar at a Duelist-class Player while shaking hard enough that her teeth were probably chattering, and then she said "okay" and took the chips. That's not nothing.'
He watched her for another few seconds and then stood up.
The hunger was there. It was always there, a low specific hum that occupied the same chest-space where anxiety used to live before the collapse had rearranged his internal geography. The spam had put a five-percent dent in it and nothing else.
He went upstairs.
Arthur's body was where he had left it.
Ren grabbed both ankles and dragged the body across the tile to the industrial freezer in the back, the heels of Arthur's dress shoes leaving two parallel smears through the blood pool. The freezer latch was cold under his palm. He pulled the heavy door open and cold air rolled out over his feet and up his shins, and the smell was frozen chicken fat and ice and the recycled nothing-smell of a deep freeze.
Frozen chickens. Frozen steaks. Bags of peas.
Ren shoved the body in against the far wall.
"Leftovers," he said.
He latched the freezer and went back to the front of the store and sat on the counter with the tourist map spread across his knees and Arthur's lamp balanced on a display case beside him. The city diagram was detailed, pre-collapse tourist grade, showing streets and landmarks and the small restaurant icons that meant nothing now. Arthur's red marker had turned it into something else.
Zone 2. City Center. The word Dragon in Arthur's small left-slanting handwriting, circled twice.
[Name: Ren] [Level: 6] [Class: Gluttony (Hidden)] [Strength: 15] [Agility: 18] [Vitality: 12] [Intelligence: 9]
Outside, through the steel shutters, something screamed in the middle distance. Not human, or not fully. Then wind moved trash down the street with the same indifference it had always had, and after that only the burning.
'Not enough. Not close.'
Ren traced Arthur's red line from the star at Outpost Alpha to the double circle at the city center, and the generator hummed its steady note in the basement below him, and the hunger hummed its own note underneath that, and he pulled out the black notebook and started reading from the beginning, going through every entry with both index fingers pressed flat against the open pages, taking inventory of everything Arthur had known.