Three days of preparation, and Marco refused to cut a single corner.On the first day, he drove to a hardware store two streets from the police station and loaded the system warehouse with chain link fencing, heavy gauge wire, and every roll of industrial zip ties the store had left on its shelves.On the second day, he hit a security supply shop and stripped it of motion sensor trip wires, the commercial grade kind designed for warehouse perimeters that triggered on anything heavier than fifteen pounds.On the third day, he found what he had been looking for in the basement of an abandoned restaurant supply warehouse. A fifty gallon drum of fish oil, rancid and overpowering, strong enough to make his eyes water through the filtered mask of his tactical vest."That smell could wake the dead," Natalie told him when he opened the garage to air out the SUV after transporting it. Her face twisted in disgust and she covered her nose with both hands."That's the point." Marco sealed the dru

Natalie was waiting at the basement door when Marco walked in. Her eyes moved across his body in a fast, practiced scan, checking for blood, for limping, for anything that suggested injury before her mouth opened."You're in one piece." She stepped back to let him through, her shoulders dropping half an inch with relief she would never admit to out loud."Barely." Marco pulled off the tactical vest and set it on the table. His face was grey with exhaustion, the kind that came from the inside rather than the muscles. "It's dead.""The animal?""If you can still call it that." Marco sat down heavily and Tank immediately pressed against his legs. "A mutated husky the size of a lion with enough intelligence to recognize traps and enough strength to dent reinforced steel doors. And it took every round I had stored in the system to put it down."Sophie came out of the back room with a bowl of instant noodles and set it in front of him without being asked. "So it's over?"Marco picked up the

Marco pulled up the surveillance feed on his system interface. The camera showed the interior of Building 4, still sealed behind his energy barriers. The hallways were dark and chaotic. Overturned furniture. Scattered debris. Bodies visible in the corners of rooms that nobody had bothered to move."Fights breaking out over the last scraps of food," Marco narrated, watching the feed with clinical detachment. "Someone tried to burn through a window on the third floor. The fire spread, filled four apartments with smoke. At least four people dead from inhalation before they got it under control.""They're killing each other in there." Sophie's voice was barely above a whisper."They were killing and eating each other before I sealed the building." Marco closed the feed. "The barrier just accelerated the timeline. Another week and it finishes itself without any help from me."That evening, the satellite phone buzzed on the kitchen counter. Marco picked it up and checked the caller ID."Gio

Marco spent two days pulling apart every scrap of information he could find about Derrick Colton. Sarah brought fragments from her rounds through the neighborhood. Giorgia relayed what she could over the satellite phone. And Marco dug through his own cached business files from before the apocalypse, piecing together a picture that got uglier the clearer it became."His firm had contracts with three major corporations and two foreign embassies." Marco sat at the kitchen table with his notes spread in front of him, talking through his findings while Natalie listened across from him with her arms folded. "That means his men aren't starving civilians swinging pipes. They're actual soldiers with actual combat training and probably actual weapons.""How many men?" Natalie asked, her chin resting on her knuckles."If he's running three compounds across the city, even a skeleton crew at each one puts him at fifty to sixty trained personnel minimum." Marco tapped the table twice with his index

The rain was dying.Marco noticed it during his morning walk with Tank in the garage, the way he noticed everything now, with the sharpened awareness of a man who had spent twenty seven days listening to the apocalypse breathe. The toxic droplets hitting the garage vents were smaller. Thinner. Less frequent. The constant hiss that had been the background noise of their existence since day one had softened into something that sounded almost like regular rain.He checked the system interface immediately. The original countdown had estimated the toxic precipitation would last approximately thirty days. Three days left. Close enough to plan around."Natalie." Marco walked upstairs and found her in the kitchen, organizing the pantry shelves with the quiet efficiency that had become her way of controlling the one thing she could control. "Get everyone in the living room. I need to talk to all of you."Natalie looked at his face, read something in it, and set down the canned goods without as