Reborn Before The End

CHAPTER 8: THE SUPPLIES THAT SHOULD NOT EXIST

Soren's Pov

I spun around.

Nothing.

The apartment was empty except for Nadia standing a few steps behind me, watching my face with sharp concern. No one else. No footsteps. No shift in the air. Only the low hum of the refrigerator and the distant sound of traffic that still pretended the city was normal.

Inside the spatial space the photograph remained exactly where it was, resting on the wooden table in that impossible room. I forced myself to look at it again, slower this time, fighting the instinct to pull away.

The image showed a ruined street. Collapsed buildings leaned against each other like drunks. An ash-gray sky pressed down without mercy. In the foreground stood a figure that looked like me: older, thicker through the shoulders, face carved into something harder and colder than I currently wore. And directly behind that figure, close enough that it should have been impossible to miss on the first glance, was another presence. Partially obscured by shadow and angle. Same general build. Same posture. Watching.

I could not explain it.

I pulled my awareness out of the space and shut the connection down as far as it would go. The pressure behind my eyes faded, but the image stayed burned into my thoughts.

“Soren?” Nadia’s voice was low. “What did you see?”

“Something that doesn’t matter right now.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“It’s the only one you’re getting until we finish what we started.” I turned toward the remaining crates stacked against the wall. “Survival first. Mysteries later.”

She studied me for a long second, clearly weighing whether to push. Then she nodded once. She didn’t like it, but she accepted the boundary. That was becoming one of the quiet reasons I still allowed her in the room.

We escalated the stockpiling that same day.

I drained nearly everything left in the accounts that were still fully under my control. What remained after the separation from the Harringtons was not a fortune, but it was enough if spent with precision. Nadia proved useful immediately. She caught gaps I had overlooked in my original lists; bulk water containers that stacked more efficiently than the ones I had been buying, broad-spectrum antibiotics with longer documented shelf lives, heavy-duty tarps and industrial fastening systems for temporary shelters, hand-powered communication gear that would not rely on any remaining network, basic tools chosen for repair rather than replacement, spare parts for the camping stove, extra filtration membranes, seeds that could actually grow in poor soil.

We moved in overlapping circuits across the city. Different stores. Different payment methods. Different times of day. I never let the quantities look panic-driven. A few cases of water here. Medical supplies split across three pharmacies. Batteries purchased in ordinary household amounts from four different retailers. Every item vanished into the spatial space within minutes of leaving the store. By the end of the second day the volume I had hidden already surpassed everything I had managed to scrape together in the final desperate months of my first life.

For the first time I could feel the difference in my bones. In the original timeline I had been reactive, always one shortage behind, always risking exposure for the next critical item. Now I was building a foundation large enough to survive the first wave without leaving cover. The knowledge sat in my chest like a cold, steady weight, equal parts relief and residual anger at how unnecessary my original suffering had been.

That advantage almost ended the same afternoon.

We were loading the last of a hardware-store run into the back of a rented van when Nadia went completely still. Her hand paused on a crate of fasteners.

“Same vehicle,” she said quietly. “Three cars back. Dark blue. Tinted windows. It was outside the pharmacy this morning. And two days ago near the industrial supply yard.”

I glanced in the side mirror without turning my head. She was right. I recognized the plate. One of the cars that occasionally sat outside the Harrington compound when Bennett wanted someone watched without making it official.

Bennett had moved from suspicion to active investigation.

Nadia’s jaw tightened. “We should confront them. Make it clear we know they’re there. Force the issue.”

“No.”

“They’re already following us. Letting them keep doing it only gives them more information. At least if we confront them we control the moment.”

“I don’t want them to understand what I’m preparing,” I said. “If they think I’m building a real long-term stockpile, they’ll dig harder. Or they’ll decide the supplies are worth taking before the world makes them valuable. We feed them something else. Something smaller.”

She didn’t like it. Her eyes said she wanted the cleaner confrontation. But she accepted the logic. That was the second quiet reason I still worked with her.

Over the next day and a half I deliberately created a false trail. I sold a few remaining pieces of furniture from the old life at a second-hand shop and made sure the transaction was easy to trace. I inquired, just loudly enough, about long-term storage units on the outskirts of the city. I bought a used car with cash, nothing fancy, reliable enough and left it visibly packed with a modest amount of camping gear, a couple of boxes of canned food, basic water, and a single tent. It looked exactly like the preparations of a man planning to leave town permanently with limited resources, not someone preparing for the collapse of civilization. I made sure the activity was visible enough for Bennett’s people to notice and report.

He took the bait.

The following morning one of his men approached me outside a mid-sized supply store. Polite. Professional. The kind of measured approach that was designed to feel casual and non-threatening.

“Mr. Whitaker. Mr. Harrington asked me to extend an offer. He’s willing to purchase some of the items you’ve been liquidating. Fair market price. Saves you the trouble of finding individual buyers and dealing with lowball offers.”

I let the conversation run longer than necessary. Asked about timelines. Asked about preferred items. Acted like a man who was simply cutting ties, simplifying his life, and preparing to disappear to some quieter place with a modest stash. In return I learned something far more valuable than the offer itself.

Someone had already given the Harrington family information about shortages expected in the coming weeks. Specific categories; water purification, certain antibiotics, fuel additives, long-life carbohydrates. Specific timelines that aligned too closely with the early failures I remembered. The information was too accurate to be ordinary market speculation or a lucky guess from one of Bennett’s analysts.

Someone else was preparing. And they were selectively feeding pieces of that preparation to Bennett, either to use him or to steer him.

I declined the offer politely, citing already-arranged buyers, and walked away. The man didn’t follow. He simply watched me leave, then returned to his car.

When I told Nadia later, her expression darkened.

“So the Harringtons aren’t the only ones moving,” she said.

“No. And whoever is talking to them knows enough to be dangerous. They’re giving Bennett just enough truth to make him useful or predictable.”

That night, while we were organizing the newest batch of supplies inside the spatial space: shifting clusters, tightening the mental inventory. Nadia went quiet for a long stretch.

“I remembered something else,” she said finally.

I waited, hands still resting on a crate of medical kits that existed only in the darkness.

“The Harrington family. I saw them. Not here. After. Inside a compound; high walls, generators, armed people on the perimeter. They looked like they still had resources when most people didn’t. Food. Power. Organization. And I saw you.”

She hesitated, choosing the next words carefully.

“You weren’t inside with them. You were standing outside the walls. Not begging. Not asking to be let in. Just standing there. And they were afraid of you. I don’t have the full memory of why. Just the feeling of it. The way they watched you. The way the people on the wall held their weapons a little too tightly.”

The words settled heavily in the quiet apartment.

In my first life I had died before I could become anything the Harringtons needed to fear. I had been the disposable one, the useful body traded away when the numbers stopped working. In this life the path had already diverged far enough that Nadia carried a fragmented memory of a version of me that had survived long enough to stand outside their walls and make them afraid.

I opened my mouth to ask what happened next in the memory, whether I had walked away, whether I had forced the gate, whether the fear had been justified.

My phone vibrated with a news alert.

I almost ignored it. The early failures had already begun. More would follow. Then I read the headline and the cold weight in my chest tightened.

A major regional food distribution network had shut down without warning. Multiple warehouses locked down. Scheduled trucks halted mid-route. Officials citing “operational failures,” “system-wide technical issues,” and “temporary supply chain disruptions.” The language was calm. The implications were not.

I checked the date against my notebook, flipping pages with controlled urgency.

This event was not supposed to occur for another thirty-one days. In the original timeline it had been one of the clearer early markers, a moment when ordinary people first started to feel the shortage in their local stores instead of just reading about distant problems.

Nadia leaned over and read the screen. Her face went still.

A second notification stacked on top of the first before either of us could speak.

*Emergency warning: unexplained incidents reported across multiple regions. Authorities advise residents to remain calm and await further information.*

No details. No list of locations. Just the vague, carefully managed language of people who did not yet want to admit how wide the cracks had become.

I looked at the alert.

Then at the volume of supplies now hidden inside the spatial space, far more than I had ever possessed at this stage in the first life.

Then at Nadia.

The three-month buffer I had been counting on since the moment I woke up in that familiar bed was collapsing in real time.

The apocalypse was no longer approaching on the schedule I remembered.

It might already have begun.