Chapter 3
The blast door was forced all the way open. Tactical flashlight beams swept through the cold storage.
Under the cover of [Novice Shadow], I slipped back into the depths of the Section A shelving without a sound. Through infrared vision, seven human heat signatures stepped over the mutant corpses and entered my territory.
"Meat! It's all meat! Wall-to-wall Angus beef!" One of the raiders' voices broke with giddy disbelief. "We're rich! Take even a tenth of this to the Eden warlords and we're walking out as officers!"
They tore at the packaging and bit into frozen beef raw. Near the back of the group, two raiders were dragging a woman by her arms — ragged clothing, body covered in bruises — like a sack of garbage.
"Cry one more time and I'll strip you naked and hang you on a meat hook right now!" The bald raider backhanded her to the floor. The woman hit the ground with a muffled cry of pain, hair splaying across her face.
When her face came into view, I nearly laughed out loud from the shadows.
Jessica.
My former supervisor. The woman who used to look down on everyone from a very deliberate altitude, the cold storage facility's beautiful and imperious senior manager. The day before the apocalypse, she'd spent ten straight minutes jabbing her finger at my nose and calling me "useless" over a sneeze, and threatening to have me fired. And yet here she was — not only alive, but returning to this place in the most humiliating fashion imaginable.
"Stay sharp! Flush the rats out!" The scar-faced leader raised his rifle and directed the group into a tactical formation, advancing deeper in.
I watched them with no trace of the fear I once felt. Just the flat contempt a merchant reserves for customers who walk in with empty pockets. In my exchange, those who bring nothing to the table are pure dead weight.
And dead weight needs to be cleared out.
One raider broke off from the group, flashlight sweeping along the shelves. I didn't need a weapon. I dropped from the shadows behind him without a sound — [Agility +10] made him look like a gear grinding to a halt in slow motion. I reached forward and closed my hand around his throat. [Intermediate Titan Strength] did the rest.
Crack.
I snapped his cervical vertebrae without effort and folded the body into an empty cardboard box.
The brutal power that had been building in my blood since the last trade began to boil. I was done playing hide-and-seek. I stepped out of the shadows.
"There! Open fire!"
Two raiders squeezed their triggers without hesitation. Tat-tat-tat. The rounds tore through my thermal underlayer — and rang against my skin like metal striking metal. [Novice Petrified Skin] held. The cheap bullets didn't even break the surface.
"He's an Awakener —"
Before the scream finished leaving his mouth, I drove off both legs and split the distance between them in a single stride. I grabbed both heads and slammed them together. The sound was short and very final. Red and white spread across the packaging crates.
"Bastard — die!"
The scar-faced leader charged from my flank, eyes bloodshot, combat shotgun leveled at my back at point-blank range. Even [Petrified Skin] couldn't stop a close-range blast. Without turning, I snatched a titanium meat hook off the shelf — seven or eight kilograms of solid metal — and hurled it behind me in a single backhand motion.
Thud.
The hook punched through his body armor and carried him off his feet. He hit the metal door behind him with a clang that echoed through the whole storage block, pinned fast to the steel.
Seven raiders. Under a minute.
The cold storage went quiet again. I picked up a wide-bladed machete from the floor — classic wasteland aesthetic — shook off the blood, and walked toward Jessica, who was hyperventilating in the corner.
She stared at my blood-smeared face and her pupils contracted to points. "V— Victor?!"
Recognition hit, and then something almost impressive happened: the woman's instincts kicked back in. Old hierarchical logic, still running. She pulled herself to her feet, tugged at her torn collar, and tried to reassemble whatever remained of her former authority.
"It was you this whole time! You survived — why didn't you step in sooner?!" She bit the words out, and underneath the anger, the condescension was still unmistakably there. Then she shifted into the tone she used to use when assigning me tasks beneath my dignity. "Forget it. The highest-level access to this cold storage is still mine. You're going to pack enough meat and escort me to the North District right now. Once we reach the Eden warlords, I'll personally get you a position as a personal guard. You won't have to be a bottom-tier waste of space anymore —"
Bottom-tier waste of space. Out of pure muscle memory. World ending around her, and she still thought the old workplace power plays worked.
A flash of old anger surfaced — quickly dissolving into something that felt a lot more like entertainment. I found myself genuinely curious what her face would do when I dismantled that ridiculous filter of hers. How spectacular would the expression be?
She didn't get to finish the sentence.
I raised my hand and pressed the flat of the blood-wet machete against her throat. The cold edge broke the skin. A thin line of red appeared.
Jessica's legs gave out.
"Manager Jessica," I said, looking down at her with a smile that didn't reach my eyes. "There's no painting rosy pictures here." I tapped the blade lightly against her trembling cheek. "In the wasteland, meat is currency, and I control all of it. Starting today, you're a complimentary item that came with the inventory."
"Now. Clean up the blood on the floor. If I can still smell it in five minutes, I'll have you cut up and fed to the mutants outside. Understood?"
Looking up at the man standing over her — eyes flat and cold as standing water — Jessica's last line of psychological defense shattered. The arrogance drained out of her face and was replaced by raw, naked fear.
"U-understood! I'll start now!"
She dropped to her knees, grabbed a sheet of packaging paper, and began scrubbing at the blood with the shaking, frantic energy of someone performing the most degrading work of their life. I watched without expression. The satisfaction of crushing a power structure felt, if anything, more addictive than absorbing another ability.
Then —
Kssshhh — crackle —
The tactical radio on the scar-faced leader's chest — the corpse still pinned to the door — burst to life with a burst of static, followed by a voice laced with casual authority.
"Hunting Dog 04, this is Eden Command. Drone surveillance shows your unit entered the old West District cold storage facility. Have you located any high-value resources? Come in."
The cold storage offered no response. Only Jessica's ragged breathing and the wet scrape of paper on concrete.
After a silence of perhaps fifteen seconds, the voice on the radio cooled noticeably.
"No response. Hell. Those wasteland hyenas probably got chewed apart by whatever's living down there."
"Doesn't matter." A second voice cut into the channel — rougher, carrying the texture of metal scraping metal. "The drone's thermal imaging swept the ventilation shaft on that cold storage. The heat signatures inside don't read like rotting meat. There's a real chance that facility is sitting on a stockpile of premium, uncontaminated biological resources."
"General Jack." The first voice shifted immediately into deference. "Awaiting your orders."
"Orders? The hell do you need orders for. I'll go myself with the Third Heavy Awakener Battalion." The man called Jack let out a short, cold laugh — a sound with genuine menace packed into it. "Go verify in person. If there really is prime stock in there, we take everything — meat, bones, and all. And if there's some mutant or stray dog in that cold storage stupid enough to get in our way —"
"We run them over with the treads."
The channel cut with a sharp, flat tone.
Jessica — halfway through pulling herself back up — crumpled again. The cloth dropped from her hand into the blood pooling on the floor. She clamped both hands over her mouth, shaking so hard she could barely hold herself together. "Eden warlords... 'Steel Bones' Jack... the half-mechanical lunatic who turns living people into blood bags... they're coming here... we're dead. We are completely dead."
I slid the machete back into my tactical belt and turned to look at the shelves behind me — floor-to-ceiling, wall-to-wall, deep into the darkness. A hundred thousand tons of inventory.
My eyes lit up with the cold, precise hunger of a man who had just spotted an opening.
"Go open the maze gate to Section B." I kicked the bloody cloth out of the way and issued the order without looking at her.
