Chapter Three

In an abandoned industrial oil depot on the outskirts of Denver, twelve heavy-duty tankers, each capable of holding 50,000 gallons each, stood silently in the night. The pungent smell of diesel fuel mingled with the odor of industrial antifreeze, a scent more alluring than the world's finest perfume to anyone preparing for the apocalypse.

"Collect!"

I stood in the clearing, my right hand, gloved with tactical gloves, casually waving. The convoy before me, along with millions of gallons of special diesel fuel sufficient to withstand polar temperatures, vanished instantly, precisely teleported into my absolutely still folded space.

With that, my frenzied sweep of the past few days came to a complete end. The entire black market and storage network of North America had been thoroughly drained.

I tightened my collar and got into the SUV. The temperature outside had already dropped below 0 degrees Fahrenheit, and the eerie leaden cyclone in the sky was churning wildly at an abnormal speed, even the wind howling with a tearing shriek.

This was a behemoth about to devour all of North America, taking its final deep breath.

I rubbed my stiff hands, opened the tablet on the passenger seat, and performed my usual routine—fingerprint and retinal dual authentication—to log into the "Eagle Eye" security system network, the highest level in the United States.

As the green progress bar finished loading, the internal surveillance footage of my villa in Aspen was evenly distributed on the screen.

From the night I handed over the spare key and drove away from the snow-capped mountains, the every move of these two clowns had been exposed.

I dragged the recording progress bar on the tablet with a cold smile.

In the footage, as soon as my SUV drove out of the blind spot, Ryan rushed to the center console on the first floor.

He rudely entered the password, completely locking the half-meter-thick bulletproof door on the outside of the villa, and changed the access permissions of the external alarm system. At that moment, the greed in his eyes could no longer be concealed, like a stray dog that had finally sneaked into the master bedroom.

"System takeover successful! The villa is ours now!" Ryan in the video excitedly pumped his fist, then turned and hugged Vera tightly. "Baby, we won! This most secure disaster shelter in all of Colorado is now Ryan's!"

The scene then cut to my temperature-controlled wine cellar.

Ryan, like a nouveau riche, smashed the glass of the combination lock, roughly running his fingers over the rows of vintage wines I'd bought from Sotheby's. Finally, he pulled out the 1945 Romanée-Conti, a family heirloom priced at $150,000.

Without any decanting, he didn't even bother with a corkscrew, simply smashing the neck against the corner of the table. The dark red, top-quality wine splattered onto the expensive handmade carpet.

Utterly vulgar.

The video fast-forwarded to the master bedroom.

This was exactly what had happened here just hours before. The fireplace glowed on the velvet bed. Ryan, half-naked, held a Romanée-Conti with a broken neck and frantically sprayed the wine onto the sheets and Vera.

Vera wore extremely revealing black lace lingerie, her red lips luscious. Where was the tender, worried fiancée she had been when she saw me off at the airport? She straddled Ryan's lap without restraint, their laughter jarringly loud through the empty high-definition microphone.

"Cheers! To that idiot ATM who went to feed the polar bears!" Ryan roared, raising his glass. "According to top-secret weather data, in 72 hours, Fairbanks, Alaska will drop to minus 90 degrees Celsius, the airport will be paralyzed, and even helicopter rotors will freeze into ice. Our noble young master Ed is probably a rock of frozen meat by now!"

"You're so mean, Ryan." Vera giggled, drawing circles on Ryan's chest, and downed her drink. "But speaking of which, the way he looked so touched when he handed over the entire villa system to you before he left, I almost couldn't help but laugh. This blockhead whose mind is only on engineering and mining, he's been sold out and he's still counting the money for us."

Looking at the two intertwined on the screen, I felt no emotion.

From the initial anger when I saw the comments, now all that remained was a cold, twisted pleasure of watching maggots perform from a high place.

I zoomed in on the first-floor storage room on the screen, clearly seeing the survival supplies this "doomsday couple" had prepared: several large boxes of cheap, discounted microwave pizzas from Walmart, ten dozen cans of instant coffee, thirty tubs of high-calorie macaroni, and several unopened condoms.

This was the source of their confidence that they could survive the last train to this epic, frigid winter.

They naively believed that as long as they controlled the heating system on the first floor of the villa, which was connected to the municipal natural gas pipeline, and stockpiled some cheap dry food, they could become local tyrants in this so-called new ice age of minus 100 degrees Celsius.

"What a bunch of hopeless idiots,"

I shook my head and turned off the screen.

It was time to go back and perform a magic trick for those two doves who thought they'd taken over the nest—a magic trick they'd never forget.

An hour and a half later, I braked two kilometers from the villa, in a blind spot of the surveillance cameras halfway up the mountain. I got out of the car, and with a flick of my wrist, stored the multi-million dollar off-road vehicle, equipped with snow and mine protection armor, into my storage compartment.

I changed into a military-green polar all-purpose cold-weather suit, put on night-vision goggles, and, trudging through a meter-deep layer of snow, like an invisible ghost, bypassed the two sets of cameras at the villa's main entrance.

Ryan and Vera would never have guessed that the true heart of this villa, known as "Fort Aspen," wasn't in that mere 400-square-meter living room and master bedroom on the first floor, but right beneath their feet.

I walked to the edge of the snow-covered cliff behind the mountain and dug out an alloy cover disguised as rock. Below, a highly concealed double keyhole for retinal and vein recognition was revealed.

"Beep—Identity verified. Welcome home, sir."

With a faint mechanical whirring sound only I could hear, the heavy titanium airlocks slid silently open in the snow. I descended twenty meters underground via a fully enclosed elevator shaft.

When the elevator doors reopened, soft, warm lighting instantly illuminated the space.

This was my private, nuclear-grade gas-proof bunker. Exceeding 1,000 square meters, an independent geothermal heat pump system kept the temperature a comfortable 78 degrees Fahrenheit. Leather sofas, a massive 8K home theater screen, an entire wall of expensive red wine, and a control panel capable of controlling the entire mountain's firepower and energy.

I took off my winter coat, tossed it casually onto the sofa, walked to the control panel, and poured myself a chilled glass of single malt Scotch whisky.

Looking up at the large control screen, I saw two idiots still fast asleep in their warm blankets in the bedroom upstairs.

"Tick-tock…tick-tock…"

The mechanical clock on the wall struck midnight.

Suddenly, the sky outside collapsed. A cataclysmic cold wave, suppressed for countless days, finally ripped the North American night sky apart. Endless blizzards transformed into white death serpents, and temperatures plummeted at a terrifying rate of two degrees per minute, heading straight for -100 degrees Fahrenheit.

The apocalypse had arrived.

I leaned back in my heated office chair, raised my amber-colored whiskey, and smiled slightly at the figure on the screen.

"The game begins, you scum."