Reborn before the outbreak, Now they beg at my gate

CHAPTER 2: FORTY CASES OF WATER

"You were talking in your sleep again," Vanessa said from the doorway, leaning against the frame with a mug of coffee in each hand. "Something about gates."

My heart slammed once against my ribs. I had closed the blue panel with a single thought a heartbeat before the door swung open, and now it hovered at the very edge of my vision, patient and glowing, as if it had been waiting for me all along.

"Did I?" I rubbed my eyes with the heel of my hand and let my voice come out thick and sleepy. "I had a terrible dream."

"Poor thing." She crossed the room and sat on the edge of the bed, close enough that I could smell the jasmine perfume she always wore. She pressed a mug into my fingers and brushed a strand of hair off my forehead with a tenderness that had once made me melt.

I held very still and let her do it. Every muscle in my body wanted to throw the hot coffee in her face. Instead I wrapped both hands around the mug until the ceramic burned my palms, and I used that small pain to keep my expression soft.

"You look pale," she said. "Maybe you should stay in today."

"I can't. I have a client meeting at noon." It was a lie, but it was a convenient one. "I will be out most of the afternoon."

"Of course." She kissed my forehead. Her lips were cool and dry. "Text me when you are done. I will make dinner."

The moment the front door closed behind her, I put the mug down so carefully that it did not make a sound. Then I picked up my phone and opened my banking app.

My own savings account, the one I had built from eight years of freelance design work, held eighteen thousand four hundred dollars. It was untouched. The joint account, however, showed a pending transfer request of ninety thousand dollars scheduled to clear in two days, and the destination was a business account I did not recognize.

I took a screenshot. Then I took a second one, for good measure.

The blue panel in the corner of my vision flickered, and a line of text appeared beneath the countdown.

Time remaining: 5 hours 41 minutes.

I dressed in a plain gray sweater and jeans, and slipped out of the apartment with my bag over my shoulder. The sun was bright and ordinary, and the street was full of people carrying iced coffees and complaining about the traffic. A boy on a scooter swerved around me, laughing. Not one of them knew that in forty-five days the pavement under their feet would be slick with something that was not rain.

I walked faster.

The warehouse club on the east side of town was nearly empty on a weekday morning, which was perfect. I took the largest cart I could find and rolled it directly to the beverage aisle, where pallets of bottled water were stacked as high as my shoulder. I picked up a case of twenty-four half-liter bottles, set it on the floor, and hesitated.

Then I placed my palm flat against the plastic and thought the word store.

The case disappeared.

There was no flash and no sound. One moment the water sat beneath my hand, and the next I was touching bare concrete. A small number blinked in the corner of my vision, and the panel updated quietly.

Storage used: 12 of 1000 liters.

I let out a breath I had been holding for nearly a minute. My knees felt unsteady, so I braced one hand on the cart and glanced around the aisle to make sure no one had seen. A man in a stock uniform was stacking boxes at the far end with his back to me, and no one else was in sight.

All right, I thought. All right. Let us do this properly.

I bought forty cases. I did it in stages, carrying them to the register in batches of four so that no single cart looked suspicious, and each time I stepped out of view of the cashier, I stored them. I paid with my own card, one transaction after another, and the cashier barely glanced up. By the third trip she was calling me "hon" and asking whether I was throwing a party.

"Something like that," I said.

On my fifth trip, I added a pallet of canned chicken, rice in twenty-pound sacks, and every box of iodine tablets on the shelf. My account balance dropped past eleven thousand, and the blue panel chimed.

Task 1 complete. Reward: storage expanded to 5 cubic meters.

New task available: Acquire 30 days of antibiotics. Time remaining: 71 hours.

Relief hit me so hard that my eyes stung. I turned toward the exit with my empty cart and walked three steps before I realized someone was standing directly in my path.

She was tall, with dark hair cut sharply at the jaw and a gray jacket that did not quite hide the straight set of her shoulders. She looked about thirty-five, and she looked exhausted in the particular way of someone who had not slept properly in years. Her eyes were a cold, clear gray, and they were fixed on me with a steadiness that made the back of my neck prickle.

"Excuse me," I said, and stepped to the left.

She stepped with me.

"Forty cases of water," she said. Her voice was low and even. "Twenty pounds of rice, six of them. Iodine tablets, all the stock. You have made five trips to the register in forty minutes."

My grip on the cart handle tightened until my knuckles went white. "I do not know what you mean."

"I am not accusing you of anything." She glanced at the cart, then back at my face. "I am a doctor. Occupational habit. I notice when someone's behavior does not match their circumstances. A man in a gray sweater walks in with a single bag and an ordinary face, and then he buys enough supplies for a small army. Yet when I look at the parking lot, there is only one car registered to a shopper this morning, and that is mine."

My pulse roared in my ears.

"I am trying to understand," she said, and she took one small step closer, lowering her voice until only I could hear it, "where all of it went."