Apocalypse Stockpiler: My Ex-wife gets nothing

Chapter 1

The knife was still in Jayden Hunter's side when his wife started packing his food.

He slid down the pantry door and hit the frozen tile hard. Blood soaked through his shirt, warm for a few seconds and then freezing against his skin. His breath hung in the air in short white clouds.

Summer Kessler did not even glance at him.

Not at his face, not at the wound, not at the red stain spreading across the floor. Her eyes moved only over the shelves, counting.

She was kneeling beside the shelves, filling the black duffel bag with cans. Rice. Beans. Peaches in syrup. Every label was written in his handwriting.

He had spent three months collecting that food. She had needed eleven minutes to find it.

"Summer," he whispered. "Why?"

"Don't talk," she murmured. "It only makes it worse."

Her voice was gentle. That was the worst part.

"I gave you everything," Jayden rasped.

"I know." She zipped the bag halfway. "That's why it was so easy."

"Easy?"

"You never once told me no, Jayden. Do you know how rare that is?" She tilted her head, almost curious. "Trevor told me he could only take one extra person into the shelter. But if I brought supplies, he would make room for me."

"So I was the supplies."

"You were the plan," she replied. "A good one."

He searched her face. For six years, he had thought of her as the woman he was building a life with. Now he saw the truth in her calm eyes. She had never been building anything with him. She had been spending him.

"Trevor Russo has a shelter," Jayden whispered, forcing the words out. "Underground. Heated. You've been messaging him for months."

Her hand froze on the zipper.

"You read my phone."

"The day the power went out."

"And you kept quiet?"

"I wanted you to tell me yourself." He coughed, and blood dripped from his lip. "I kept waiting. I even brought you the last of the antibiotics, because you had a cough."

For one second, something moved across her face. Guilt, maybe. Or maybe it was only math.

Then she smiled sadly.

"You were always so good at taking care of everything, Jayden."

She stood up and slung the bag over her shoulder. It was heavy. It held his flour, his water purifier, his spare gloves, and his mother's old medicine tin, which he had kept even after she died.

"Leave the tin," he begged. "Please. It's all I have of her."

Summer's gaze dropped to it. For a moment, he thought she might.

Then she shrugged. "It's just a tin."

She stepped over his legs. Her boots left wet prints on the tile, red at the edges.

His blood.

"I'm sorry it ended like this," she murmured at the door. "I really did love you at the beginning."

The door opened, and the storm roared in. Snow blew across the floor and settled on his hands like ash.

"Summer!"

She paused, and Jayden hated himself for hoping. He hoped she would turn back. He hoped she would kneel beside him and press her hands to the wound and cry for help.

He would have forgiven her. He had always forgiven her.

"Goodbye, Jayden."

The door slammed. The lock clicked from the outside.

She had locked him in so that no one would find him.

**********

Outside, the storm screamed against the windows. It had been howling for nine days. Somewhere in the building, glass shattered, and a man began shouting for help. A moment later he stopped shouting.

Nobody went to him. Nobody helped anyone anymore.

Jayden almost smiled at the bitter joke of it. Three months ago, the whole city had been arguing about the weather. Then the sky turned red, the cold came, and the world ended in less than a week.

He had survived the first ninety days by being careful. Summer had survived them by being patient.

Now he understood what she had been waiting for.

Jayden lay in the dark and counted everything he had given her.

His savings, when her father's restaurant failed. His promotion, when she complained that she hated the night shifts. His friends, his weekends, his plans. Every time she wanted something, he found a way. Every time she was disappointed, he worked harder. And he had never once asked what she was working for.

Six years of saying yes had bought him a frozen floor.

He tried to shout, but only a wet whisper came out. He tried to drag himself across the tile toward the door, and the wound in his side tore open again.

She had not even stabbed him in anger. That was what he could not forgive. She had done it quickly, the way a person cuts a thread.

His fingers went numb. Then his feet. He tried to crawl toward the door, but his body would not move. The blood beneath him had turned thick and cold, and the apartment was so silent that he could hear his own heartbeat slowing.

Thump.

Thump.

He thought about his mother. Before she died, she had pressed a small jade pendant into his hand and whispered, "Keep this close, my son. Someday it will keep you."

He had lost it in the move. Summer had promised to look for it. She never did.

He should have noticed that, too.

Every small warning had been right in front of him. He had simply never wanted to read them.

"I'm sorry," he whispered to the empty room. He did not know who he was apologizing to. His mother, maybe. Or himself.

A strange warmth spread across his chest. It felt soft and kind, like a blanket, and he knew what it meant. Everyone who froze to death knew that warmth.

It was the last lie the body told you.

His last thought was not about Summer. It was smaller and sharper.

I should have chosen myself.

Thump.

Then nothing.

No pain. No cold. No sound. Only darkness and the feeling of falling.

At least it's over, he thought.

He was wrong.

Because somewhere in that darkness, a phone began to ring.

It was a bright, impossible sound that he had not heard in months, not since the networks died and every phone in the city turned into dead glass.

He felt warmth on his face. Sunlight. He heard a refrigerator humming nearby, and the soft rustle of a blanket over his legs.

His fingers twitched, and for the first time since the knife, they obeyed.

He grabbed the ringing phone off the nightstand with a shaking hand and fixed his eyes on the screen.

One word glowed across it.

Summer.

The woman who had just killed him was calling.