Doomsday Rebirth: Building the Ultimate Shelter

Chapter 6: The Secret

Drew leaned back against the dining table, staring coldly at the paper resting in front of him.

Water droplets trickled down the condensation of his cold beer can, pooling into a small puddle on the wooden surface.

He was twenty-one thousand dollars short.

With exactly ninety-one days left before the atomic bombs dropped, where could he get that kind of clean, untraceable liquid cash without leaving a paper trail or drawing the cops?

Drew ran the calculations in his head at lightning speed.

Get a job? Even working high-risk illegal labor, three months wouldn't yield a fraction of what he needed. Invest or play the stock market? He didn't remember winning lottery numbers from five years ago, nor did he have the patience to gamble on market volatility. Rob a bank or a convenience store? How much cash was actually sitting in a register? Four or five grand at most—and triggering a city-wide manhunt over peanuts was peak stupidity.

He needed hard cash. Dirty money, hidden in the shadows, where its owner wouldn't dare call the cops even if he died.

In the deep, bloody archives of his memory, Drew rapidly filtered through every raider and warlord he had personally put down in his previous life. The scumbags who had died by his hand were pulled up like file folders in a mental cabinet.

Vince Rourke.

The name hit him like a round to the chest.

Drew remembered Vince vividly. Three years into the post-apocalyptic wasteland of his past life, Drew had broken into a semi-abandoned house in the east end of town while searching for clean canned goods and antibiotics.

It was a single-story place with white vinyl siding and a rusty chain-link fence.

Drew had slipped inside with an entrenching tool, only to find Vince passed out drunk on a rotting couch. Without a second thought, Drew drove a steel pipe straight into the back of Vince's head, shattering his skull on impact.

From the corpse’s blood-soaked wallet, Drew found a card scribbled with a combination: 38-24-38. In a hidden compartment deep within the garage, he unlocked a heavy black safe and found thirty-five thousand dollars in crisp, rubber-banded hundred-dollar bills.

Right now, in this peaceful timeline, Vince was still alive and kicking.

He was still running his local drug trade out of the east side, and that thirty-five grand was sitting quietly under the floorboards of his garage, waiting to be taken.

Stealing from a notorious drug lord carried zero moral weight for Drew. In the wasteland, people killed over half a bottle of stagnant water—taking a dead man’s stash was just standard protocol.

But he needed firepower first. He couldn't just walk into a drug house bare-handed.

He needed rifles, handguns, and plenty of ammunition.

Every other Saturday, the city hosted a massive gun show at the suburban expo center. This coming Saturday happened to be one of those days.

Drew grabbed his pen and outlined a crystal-clear sequence of events at the top of his pad:

1. Step One: Hit the gun show this Saturday, using his remaining nine thousand dollars to buy baseline firearms and bulk ammunition.

2. Step Two: Case Vince’s house in the east end to map out his schedule and surrounding blind spots.

3. Step Three: Slip in under the cover of dark, claim the thirty-five grand, and eliminate Vince.

4. Step Four: Go on an aggressive purchasing spree with forty-plus thousand dollars, packing his safehouse with high-calorie rations, medical kits, generators, and body armor.

5. Step Five: Barricade every window and door, then wait for the mushroom clouds to rise.

6. Step Six: Settle the score with Madison and Gregory once the world burns.

Just as he finished the plan and reached out to grab the plastic water bottle on the table—

An anomaly struck!

A faint yet distinct tingling sensation, like a high-frequency static charge, instantly crawled up his palm and arm.

Drew glanced down sharply.

His hand was empty.

The plastic bottle he had been holding just a second ago had vanished into thin air.

"Huh?!"

Drew’s eyes narrowed into a razor-thin slit. There was no panic—only the cold, hyper-vigilant reflex of a apex predator. He didn't move an inch, instead closing his eyes to track the strange energy surging through his veins.

Deep within his consciousness, an invisible, dark void about four cubic meters in size had materialized out of nowhere.

The plastic bottle was floating silently inside the void, the tiny droplets on its outer plastic frozen completely in place, showing zero signs of dripping or evaporating.

With a single thought—

SWOOSH.

The cold touch returned to his palm as the bottle materialized back into his grip.

Not a millimeter out of place.

Drew stashed the bottle back into the void space, mentally counting the seconds: ten seconds, thirty seconds, sixty seconds... Then he summoned it back out.

The temperature of the water remained identical, and the faint condensation on the rim hadn't shifted at all—time inside this pocket space was completely frozen!

He tested the load capacity: it could easily hold around two hundred pounds, with a capacity of roughly four cubic meters.

"Heh... hehehe..."

A low, guttural laugh escaped Drew's chest, vibrating through his ribs as a cold, fanatical light gleamed in his eyes.

In his previous life in the wasteland, he had heard whispers about "mutants." Under extreme radiation and harsh environments, a tiny fraction of survivors underwent genetic mutations, gaining superhuman physical traits or even unexplainable anomalies.

He never expected that bringing five years of wasteland memories back through time would manifest an interdimensional storage space before the nukes even fell!

Four cubic meters of time-frozen space!

What did that mean?

It meant he no longer needed to haul a bulky, suspicious tactical backpack to carry a month’s worth of emergency rations, thousands of rounds of ammo, medical supplies, or even disassembled heavy rifles anywhere he went!

He could walk casually into any supermarket, pharmacy, or hardware store and strip their most vital inventory clean right under the nose of security cameras.

If he was ever cornered or searched by enemies, he could conjure lethal force out of thin air and pull off a execution before they could react.

With this absolute trump card in his hands, his odds of surviving the end of the world shot up by a whole order of magnitude.

Drew stashed the bottle back into the space, gripped his pen tight, and drew a heavy circle around the top of his list.

The gun show.

Vince Rourke.

The storage space.

The ninety-one-day nuclear countdown.

The hunt, and the hoarding, had officially begun.