Apocalypse Rebirth, From Trash to God

The man who bought the world

 Three days after Jax walked out of the hospital and left the Voss family behind, the whole wholesale market in the city knew his name because no one had ever bought so much food at once, and Old Man Finn kept telling his workers that Jax had gone crazy but in a good way.

 Jax stood in Finn's warehouse surrounded by mountains of rice bags and water boxes and oil drums, and Finn wiped sweat from his forehead and said, "Jax my boy, are you sure you need another five tons, you already bought enough to feed a whole street for a year, where are you putting all this, do you have a secret store somewhere?"

 Jax smiled and put his hand on a tall stack of rice bags and said calmly, "Finn, I am building something far away, a place where food will be more valuable than gold, trust me, soon everyone will wish they bought as much as I did," and as soon as Finn turned to shout at his workers, Jax let his power flow and the entire stack of fifty bags vanished into his endless space without a sound.

 Finn turned back and his eyes went wide and he said, "Where did the rice go, I just saw it here, did your workers move it already," and Jax said with a straight face, "Yes, my truck is outside, my people are very fast," and Finn laughed and said, "Your people must be ghosts then because I did not see anyone."

 Day after day Jax worked like a man possessed, he woke up before sunrise and went to different markets so no one would get too suspicious, in the morning he bought medicine from the pharmacy street where the lady asked, "Why do you need so many antibiotics and bandages, are you opening a hospital," and Jax answered, "Something like that, a hospital that will never close," and in the afternoon he went to the hardware market and bought solar panels, steel plates, water tanks, and heavy locks.

 At night he went to his bunker on the hill north of the city, the old war bunker that everyone had forgotten because it was covered in weeds and rust, and he cleaned it with his own hands until his palms bled, he fixed the steel door and welded new plates onto it, he installed the solar panels on the roof, and he carried water tanks inside with his own strength even though his spatial ability could have done it instantly because he wanted to feel his body getting stronger.

 While Jax was building his future, the Voss family was living their old life and laughing at him, inside their big house Ravena sat on her expensive sofa drinking tea and said to Selene, "That useless boy Jax will come crawling back in less than a week, he has no money and no family, he will beg us to take him back," and Selene crossed her arms and said, "Let him beg, I am already talking to Daniel from the company, Daniel has a car and a real job, Jax is just a warehouse rat."

 Kade laughed loudly and said, "That fool thought he could scare us with a magic trick, making his jacket disappear, I should have punched his teeth out that day," and Ravena nodded and said, "We don't need him, we have everything, let him die on the street."

 They did not know that Jax was watching their street from far away through binoculars and smiling coldly, because every time they laughed, he remembered the mud and the wire and the two bags of rice.

 On the fifth night something changed, Jax was inside his bunker trying to move a heavy steel beam with his space, he was angry because the beam was too heavy and his power only seemed to work for storage, he shouted in frustration, "Why can you only store things, why can't you cut, why can't you protect me," and at that moment the air in front of his hand rippled like water and the steel beam split in half with a clean silent cut.

 Jax stared at the two halves of steel on the ground and his heart beat fast, he raised his hand again and focused on a rock outside, he thought cut, and a thin invisible blade of space shot out and sliced the rock into two perfect pieces, and he realized his spatial ability was not just storage, it was control over space itself, he could store, he could cut, and maybe soon he could move.

 He laughed loudly in his empty bunker, his voice echoing off the concrete walls, and said to himself, "Come then, black rain, come, I am ready for you."

 The next morning he went back to the city to buy the last things he needed, fuel and guns, he met a man in a dark alley who sold guns without questions, the man opened a metal box full of pistols and shotguns and said, "You want to start a war, kid, no one buys this much ammo unless they want to start a war," and Jax counted out cash and said, "No, I want to end a war before it starts, give me everything you have."

 The man looked at the money and said, "You are strange but I like strange customers, take it," and Jax stored the guns and bullets into his space right in front of the man who blinked and said, "Did you just make them vanish, what kind of trick was that," and Jax said, "The kind of trick that will keep me alive."

 On his way back to the bunker he saw a girl being surrounded by three thugs near the old bus station, the girl had short silver hair and wore a soldier's jacket even though she was young, maybe twenty five, and she fought like a trained fighter but the thugs had knives.

 Jax did not want to get involved, in his first life he would have run away because the Voss family taught him to be a coward, but now something inside him said help her, so he walked closer and shouted, "Leave her alone."

 One thug turned and said, "Who are you, her boyfriend, get lost or we will cut you too," and Jax raised his hand and let a small space cut fly, it cut the knife in the thug's hand into two pieces without touching his skin, the thug screamed and dropped the broken knife and shouted, "What was that, what did you do!"

 The other two thugs ran away, scared of the invisible power, and the silver-haired girl looked at Jax with sharp eyes and said, "You cut his knife without touching it, how did you do that, who are you?"

 Jax said, "My name is Jax Cole, I live on the hill, who are you?"

 The girl wiped blood from her lip and said, "My name is Mira Lane, I was a soldier before I left the army, I live alone, I don't need anyone's help," and Jax said, "Everyone needs help sometimes, especially when the world is about to end," and Mira frowned and said, "What do you mean the world is about to end?"

 Jax looked at the sky, which was still blue and normal, and said, "In less than three months black rain will fall and half the city will die, the other half will become beasts, you can laugh now but remember my name when it happens, my bunker on the north hill will have food and light."

 Mira stared at him like he was crazy but she also saw the way he had cut the knife, so she said, "If black rain falls, I will find your hill, but if you are lying I will shoot you myself," and Jax smiled and said, "Fair enough."

 That night Jax could not sleep, he sat on the roof of his bunker and looked at the city lights below, his space was now almost full, he had ten tons of rice, thousands of boxes of water, oil, meat, medicine, fuel, guns, clothes, blankets, solar lights, everything a person would need for ten years, and his bunker was strong enough to survive bullets and beasts.

 His phone buzzed again, it was Selene, he answered and heard her annoyed voice saying, "Jax, my mother says you have one last chance, come home and apologize to Kade and sign the kidney papers and we will let you sleep in the storage room again."

 Jax laughed and the laugh was cold and echoed in the night, he said, "Selene, do you remember the last time I knelt in front of you and begged, do you remember how you looked at me like I was trash, in three months you will kneel in black mud and beg me for a sip of clean water and I will ask you how it feels."

 Selene shouted, "You are insane, you are truly insane, you have lost your mind, don't ever call us again!" and she hung up.

 Jax put the phone down and looked at the stars, he whispered to the sleeping city, "Laugh now, Voss family, laugh while you can, because when the black rain comes you will learn what despair really means, and I will be watching from my hill with a full stomach while you fight over crumbs like rats."

 Far below in the city, Ravena, Kade, and Selene were eating steak and drinking wine and laughing about how Jax would soon be homeless and begging, they did not know that their company building hid a secret laboratory underground where scientists had been working on a strange black liquid that would soon leak into the clouds and become the black rain, and they did not know that Jax already knew their secret.

 Jax closed his eyes inside his bunker, his spatial power humming softly inside his mind like a second heart, and for the first time since his death he felt peace, because this time he was not the victim, this time he was the storm that was coming.