Apocalypse: My Golden Vision Sees Every Drop

Chapter 2: Everything's a Deal

When someone fell behind, the Caravan had a habit of leaving trail markers along the route.

By the time Jake caught up, they'd already put nearly twenty miles between themselves and the ruined town.

The Caravan had settled for the night in a cluster of farmhouses, maybe a dozen buildings total, no other settlements for miles, and not a single infected in sight.

From the scattered debris on the ground, it looked like another group had already picked the place clean before moving on.

With daylight fading fast, the Caravan's leadership huddled up and decided to make camp there for the night.

Sticking with the group had its perks. Real walls and a real roof beat a tent in the open every time.

Jake scanned the Caravan's vehicles and quickly spotted the unmistakable shape of Old Man Reeves' converted school bus.

Word was, before the world ended, Reeves had spent decades as a mechanic. That kind of skill had earned him real standing with the Caravan's leadership.

With people backing him, Reeves didn't feel the need to hold back. He'd somehow gotten his hands on a full-size bus and now rented out space to anyone in the Caravan without a vehicle of their own, always in exchange for supplies.

Over time, that arrangement had padded his stash nicely. Reeves was living about as comfortably as anyone could in this world.

Supplies bought comfort. Simple as that.

The handful of women riding with him, the ones people quietly called his "favorites", were mostly women without transportation who'd noticed how well-stocked he was and decided to attach themselves to him first.

The second Jake cut the engine, Rachel hopped off the back seat without a word and bolted straight for Reeves' bus.

Jake didn't think twice about it. He wasn't worried she'd skip out on the deal.

A healing card was worth more than five liters of gas by a wide margin. If anyone should be nervous about this arrangement, it wasn't him.

He turned his attention to the farmhouses, where locals had already set up trading stalls along the dirt path. Remembering the haul he'd grabbed back in town, he found an open spot and laid out everything he didn't need right now.

Food wasn't his problem. Gas was.

"Hey, buddy, what're you asking for the beer?"

A round-bellied man and a bigger, thicker-built companion had wandered over, eyeing the cans lined up on Jake's cloth.

"Half a liter of gas per can."

The heavyset man's face soured immediately. "It's only eleven ounces a can. You want damn near a pint of gas for that? That's robbery."

"Robbery's a matter of perspective." Jake shrugged. He wasn't budging.

Old-world prices didn't mean anything anymore. Weapons, fuel, food, working vehicles, anything that kept you alive longer had its own value now, and that value shifted depending on who was standing in front of you and how bad they wanted it.

The man hemmed and hawed, clearly torn, but in the end his craving won out.

He'd loved this stuff before everything fell apart. And if the world was already this miserable, what was the point of denying yourself the one comfort you had left?

"How many cans you got total?"

Jake glanced into his duffel bag. "Seven, eight left. How many you need?"

Everything in that bag had come from a small corner store back in town, beer, cigarettes, sunflower seeds, spicy snack sticks, cola, a mess of odds and ends. He'd only managed to fill half the bag before the Anomaly woke up every infected within earshot and forced him to run.

None of it would fill a stomach, but it scratched an itch nothing else could.

Some people planned ahead. Others lived for the moment. That divide had existed long before the world ended, and it hadn't gone anywhere since.

The man muttered something to his friend, then turned back. "We'll take all the beer. Throw in two bags of those honey-roasted peanuts too."

Jake glanced at the bag the man was pointing at, considered it for a second, then nodded.

Satisfied, the man rolled over a heavy, army-green fuel drum without further argument.

"Eight beers, two bags of peanuts." Jake set the items aside, then handed over an empty one-liter bottle. The man filled it from the drum four times over, and Jake poured every drop straight into his motorcycle's tank.

Word of the trade spread fast. More people started drifting toward his stall.

"What're you asking for the sunflower seeds?"

"How much for the cola?"

"Got any more cigarettes?"

...

Half an hour later, Jake's bag was nearly empty, and he'd pulled in over thirty liters of gasoline — enough to top off his tank with more than ten liters left as backup.

He was just starting to pack up when he spotted Rachel making her way down from Reeves' bus, head down, shoulders shaking.

Her cheek was flushed red, like she'd been struck. Her hands were empty. She hadn't brought anything back with her.

She caught him looking and quickly wiped at her face, her expression a strange mix of resentment and quiet hope.

Jake didn't bother acknowledging her. He turned and went to find somewhere to sleep.

Her face went cold. Something ugly flickered behind her eyes, anger, humiliation, both.

She was starting to seriously question whether she'd lost her touch.

Reeves had gotten distracted by newer, younger faces lately, and his patience for her had been thinning fast. He wasn't even bothering to cover her basic needs anymore.

Whatever little she'd scavenged that day had been snatched away, the other women whispering in his ear until he took it from her himself. She had nothing left.

This wasn't sustainable.

Back before everything collapsed, she'd clawed her way up the corporate ladder without much shame. Now that her actual survival was on the line, she had even less reason to hold back.

There were plenty of men in the Caravan who'd jump at the chance to have her. If she could tolerate someone like Reeves, she could tolerate anyone.

Too bad the good-looking one from earlier was made of stone. Nothing seemed to work on him.

She swore under her breath and lowered her standards.

Scanning the crowd, she landed on a new target, her expression shifting on command, tears already welling up as she drifted toward her next mark.

...

Jake walked the length of the farmhouses but came up empty-handed.

He'd arrived too late. Every solid, livable building was already claimed.

Whatever was left was either falling apart and structurally unsafe, or stank of rotting bodies badly enough that no amount of desperation could make it bearable.

Eventually he settled for a burned-out shell of a house, four walls standing, no roof left and pitched his tent inside it.

Four walls were still better than nothing.

Once the tent was up, he strung fishing line around the perimeter of the walls and tied a few empty glass bottles along it in the shadows, a crude but effective early-warning system.

With camp secured, he finally had a minute to steam a pot of rice and crack open a can of braised pork to go with it.

That corner store hadn't just given him snacks. There'd been high-calorie canned meat and canned fruit too, things built to last, things worth holding onto.

He barely had enough of the good stuff for himself. No way he was trading any of that away.