Chapter 3

The sour bite in the air was getting stronger, like wet metal rubbed raw and left to linger in the back of my nose. The city was still functioning—buses still ran, banks were still open—but more people were wearing masks now.

I kept the store open as usual. I restocked as usual.

The shelves looked full. The coffee machine beside the register still hummed. I’d even replaced the entrance mat.

From the outside, everything had to look normal. The more normal it looked, the less attention it drew.

When the doorbell chimed, I looked up and saw Claire walk in.

She hadn’t come alone. Two regular movers followed behind her in reflective vests, pushing flatbed carts. Outside, a white box truck sat in the short-term parking spot with its cargo door already open, like the whole routine had been rehearsed.

Claire didn’t bother with small talk. She stepped up to the counter, set her phone down on the surface, and left the screen on a transfer page. Her tone was calm—calm like she was signing paperwork.

“I’m buying everything you have in stock,” she said. “What’s on the shelves, what’s in the back room—anything you can sell.”

I met her eyes. “Are you out of your mind?”

That was what I said out loud, but I knew exactly what she was doing. Claire didn’t want the goods. She wanted the result: strip my inventory so that when the disaster hit, I’d be the first to run out of food, the first forced to bend.

She wanted to flip last time’s ending—when she’d knocked on my door and begged—so that this time I’d be the one begging her.

“You won’t sell?” she asked.

She studied my face, trying to read whether I knew what was coming—whether I’d come back too.

“I’ll sell,” I said. “Money’s money.”

I wasn’t stupid enough to hand her everything that mattered. The shelves up front, the boxes in the back room—those could go. What mattered was what I’d already secured underground.

Last time, she and Derek cornered me with a knife. This time, she was using money instead.

I nodded. “Fine. How are you paying—cash or card?”

“Card.”

I pulled up the point-of-sale system and opened the bulk checkout screen. I tapped a few keys, then looked up at her. “Prices aren’t the shelf prices today.”

Claire’s brow twitched. “What does that mean?”

“It means,” I said, not rushing, making sure every word landed, “if you want to clean out my stock, you pay my price.”

She stared at me for two seconds, like she was checking whether I was joking. Then her voice dropped. “Ethan, you’re raising prices on the spot?”

“Yes.” I didn’t offer her any room to argue. “You can buy. Or you can leave.”

Her eyes cooled, but she didn’t snap right away.

Claire worked in finance. Her first instinct wasn’t to curse—it was to calculate.

She glanced down at the new unit prices on my screen. They were clearly higher than usual, especially for the basics: bottled water, canned food, batteries.

She looked up again, disbelief sharpening her words. “You think I’m going to pay that?”

I rested a hand on the edge of the counter, expression neutral. “I don’t know. If you don’t want it, walk out.”

“You’re doing this to me.”

“You’re my ex,” I said.

I framed it like a petty breakup problem—something personal and small—so she wouldn’t start thinking too hard about what I really knew.

In the end, the corner of her mouth lifted. The smile was thin, like contempt dressed up as a decision. “Fine. I’ll pay. Consider it the last bit of dignity I’m willing to leave you. When you can’t hold out anymore, you’ll remember who gave you money today.”

She took out her card and swiped it through the reader. The confirmation beep sounded. The screen flashed PAYMENT APPROVED.

I tore off the receipt and handed it to her. “Since you paid, we’ll do it your way. Everything on the shelves and in the back is yours.”

The moment I said it, her gaze loosened. That was what she wanted most—the sense that the deal was done.

She raised a hand and signaled the movers. “Start loading. Move fast.”

Only then did they really get to work. They began with the most obvious items—drinking water, canned goods, crackers—lifting whole rows onto the carts. The wheels rattled and scraped over the tile in a steady rhythm, and gaps started opening across the store.

I didn’t stop them. If anything, I cooperated.

Everything they hauled away was surface inventory—what was on display and what was stacked in the small ground-level storage area, the kind of stock I could always replace later.

I even held the back room door open to make it easier, like I was afraid they might miss something.

Claire stayed by the counter and watched the shelves empty out, as if she were watching a victory she could already taste.

Her shoulders gradually relaxed. Her breathing evened out. She didn’t keep her eyes on me—she stared at the emptiness itself, as if the moment the shelves went bare, I was already dead.

My month’s worth of food underground didn’t move an inch.

The door leading downstairs was tucked deeper inside the storage area. From the outside it looked like any other utility door, and I wasn’t letting anyone near it today.

Claire was buying what I was willing to let her see—not my real hand.

The loading went on for nearly an hour.

The drink cooler was stripped down to a few scattered sodas. Paper products and batteries were wiped out. Even the gum beside the register disappeared. The whole store looked like it had been cleaned out, almost too clean, the empty metal and glass glaring under the lights.

The last cart rolled toward the entrance. The movers lifted boxes into the truck, corners thudding against the metal floor of the cargo bay.

Claire walked over to an empty shelf, flicked one of the price tags with her finger, then turned back to me. Her voice was cold and certain.

“You won’t make it through the first week,” she said. “Wait. You’ll come begging.”

I didn’t argue. I didn’t tell her she’d regret it. I just stood behind the counter and watched the shelves become empty, watched the carts roll out again and again.

Claire looked more and more at ease.

Just as she was about to turn and leave, her phone rang.

She glanced at the caller ID. Her finger hesitated for a fraction of a second, then she answered. “What is it?”

Derek Hale’s voice came through the line, loud and sharp, like he was shouting across an empty warehouse. He spoke fast. “We’ve got a problem. The stuff in the warehouse is going bad.”

Claire’s brow snapped tight. “Going bad? What do you mean?”

“Water’s getting in. It smells sour. Some of the packages are swelling, and there’s mold,” Derek said, anger packed into every word. “You need to get over here and see it. Now.”