While she kissed him, Rivan moved behind him. He drew a serrated hunting knife. With methodical, almost bored precision, he sliced through the back of Arthur's parka, then the wool sweater beneath, then the thermal underwear. The cold air hit Arthur's spine like a second blade.Sera broke the kiss, laughing as Rivan ripped the shredded clothing from Arthur's body, leaving him bare chested and shivering. She looked down at his exposed skin, at the ribs showing through, and shook her head. "So pathetic.""Strip him," Rivan ordered.Sera knelt, her delicate fingers the same fingers Arthur used to kiss goodnight unbuckled his belt and yanked his pants down around his ankles. She pulled off his boots, then the pants, leaving him standing in nothing but his underwear in the sub zero tomb of the store. Arthur's body began to shake uncontrollably, a violent, bone jarring tremor."Please..." Arthur stammered. "Sera... I love y ""Shut up," she spat, tossing his clothes to Rivan, who began putt

"Why?"The question hammered in his skull, a relentless, pounding drum."Why didn't I fight back?"He saw it again. Rivan's sneer. The MRE bag smeared with shit. Sera's cold, laughing eyes as she pulled his pants down. He had just stood there. He had pleaded. He had said "I love you" to the woman who was helping to strip him for his execution. He had been a good man. A kind man. A man who gave his food to others and believed in the best of people.And that man had died screaming, naked and alone, in the snow.Arthur unclenched his fists. He looked at the four crescent shaped wounds in each palm, wells of red filling and overflowing. The pain was sharp, clean, and real. It anchored him. It reminded him that he was alive.Good men die first, a voice whispered in the back of his mind. It was his own voice, but it sounded older, harder, and stripped of all mercy. Good men are meat. They are stepping stones for the Rivans and Seras of the world. You were a good man, Arthur. And look where

Arthur stood in the parking lot, the envelope of cash heavy in his jacket pocket. Almost nine thousand dollars. In thirty days, it would be worth less than the paper it was printed on. Today, it was a ticket to survival.He walked across the lot to a wholesale club a cavernous, warehouse sized store that sold everything in quantities meant for restaurants and large families. The kind of place where you needed a membership card just to breathe the recycled air. Arthur didn't have a membership. He didn't need one. He walked through the entrance with the confident stride of a man who knew exactly what he was doing, and the teenager at the door, distracted by his phone, didn't even look up.Inside, the scale of the place was almost obscene. Pallets of goods stretched toward a distant ceiling crisscrossed with steel rafters. The air smelled of cardboard, industrial cleaner, and the faint, sweet rot of produce that had been sitting too long. In his previous life, Arthur had shopped at a cor

The second day of Arthur's borrowed time dawned grey and humid, the sky a pale, washed out blue that promised nothing but the slow, suffocating heat of a world still clinging to its last month of normalcy. Arthur stood at the window of his apartment, a cup of black coffee growing cold in his hands though the temperature of the liquid was a distant, irrelevant sensation now, muffled by the thin layer of frost that had taken up permanent residence in his nerve endings.One hundred kilograms of food sat stacked in the corner of his living room like a monument to his new obsession. Rice. Beans. Canned goods. It looked like a fortress of sustenance, a bulwark against the coming famine. But Arthur's mind, sharpened by forty seven days of starvation and the cold clarity of near death, had already moved past it.A hundred kilos is nothing.The thought was a cold, clinical fact. In his previous life, he had watched people consume their own body weight in desperation, gnawing on leather and boi

Sera's voice was soft, slightly breathless. There was a faint rasp to it, a huskiness that Arthur had once found alluring. Now, it sent a spike of ice through his veins. He knew that voice. He knew what it meant. He had heard it a thousand times in the dark of their shared bedroom, when she would whisper his name and pull him closer. But there was something different now. Something off."Hey, you," Arthur replied, his tone affectionate. "You okay? You sound a little out of breath.""Oh, I'm... I'm fine." There was a pause, and Arthur heard it the faint, wet sound of lips parting, a barely stifled gasp. "Just... been feeling a little under the weather today. You know, the usual."The usual. Arthur's mind, cold and analytical, filled in the blanks. He could picture the scene with horrifying clarity. Sera, sitting on Rivan's lap in the back corner booth of their favorite café, the phone pressed to her ear. Rivan's hand, hidden beneath the table, working with a practiced familiarity betwe