SEVEN DAYS TO BUILD THE LAST SHELTER

Chapter 3: Every Can Has a Cost

I did not open the door.

I stood in the corridor for a full minute after the second thud, listening to the dust settle, and nothing struck the steel again. I backed away, wedged a steel pipe through the door handle, chalked an X across the frame,. Whatever lived behind that door would have to wait. Six days was not enough to fix everything, so I would fix what I could measure.

That meant supplies, and I had very little money to spend on them.

I wrote the list on the back of Pruitt's property records, sitting in the van I had borrowed from a former colleague named Rafe, who asked no questions when I said I was moving old equipment. Water containers. Water filters. Canned food and dry staples. First-aid supplies. Work gloves, hand tools, flashlights, batteries, tarpaulins, and basic sanitation materials. There was no line for a rifle or any of the flashy gear frightened men buy when the news turns bad. I did not know how to maintain an expensive weapon, and a tool you cannot maintain is only a heavier way to fail.

My first stop was a wholesale grocer at the edge of the industrial district. I bought rice, lentils, oats, salt, and sugar in sacks small enough to lift. Canned beans, canned fish, canned tomatoes. Cooking oil. Powdered milk. I checked every date on every label.

When the van was loaded, I opened the interface and tried the inventory panel for the first time.

[INVENTORY: 12 / 20 UNITS.]

A single sack of rice used three units. A crate of canned beans took five. The system measured weight and volume together, and it did not negotiate. I had barely started, and the list in my hand already looked heavier than the space I owned.

"A crate of food, or a crate of medicine and tools," I muttered. "Pick one."

I stood in the lot and rearranged my life, because a crate of food took space that medicine and tools needed. The beans stayed in the van, to be carried by hand. The rice went into storage. I swapped a box of canned fish for gloves and bandages, because a cut hand can end a repair job faster than hunger can.

The battery problem was worse. At a power supplier two streets over, I found a deep-cycle battery rated for a small generator, a dense black brick. The system quoted it at nine units. I could not store it. I could only haul it by hand, with a bent back and a lot of swearing.

That was the first real lesson. The system would never carry the cost for me. It would only tell me what the cost was.

The hardware store sat on a corner near the ring road, and I almost drove past it, because the car park was full.

It was a Tuesday afternoon, and nobody should have been queuing at a hardware store. Yet I counted fourteen customers pushing carts through the doors. Generators in boxes. Red fuel cans stacked like bricks. Portable lights, plywood sheets, rolls of sealing tape. A man in a work jacket wrestled three cans of fuel into a trunk that already held two.

I took a basket and walked the aisles. The flashlight shelf was bare to the metal, and the generator display held one scratched floor model with a handwritten sold sign taped over the price.

A young clerk with a name badge reading Dev was restocking a shelf of work gloves, and he looked like he had not sat down in days.

"Busy week," I said.

"You have no idea." He lowered his voice. "Some company has been buying us out since Sunday. One wealthy purchasing group, clearing whole shelves. Not the sort you can refuse. They send a truck, pay in full, and take every unit we have. Last night they cleared the whole lighting aisle."

"What company?"

"Wouldn't say. Nice suits, bad manners."

I thanked him, gave him my number in case more gloves came in, and bought what I could. Not a victory, just a basket. In the first life I had never noticed the early signs. Now someone else had, and they were buying faster than I was.

I did not shop in one place after that, and I did not shop loudly.

I spread my purchases across six stores, in four different districts, in small, boring baskets. A few water filters here, a box of batteries there, a bundle of tarpaulins from a camping store that was still stocked because nobody thought of it. I paid at different counters and kept every receipt. A man buying an ordinary amount of ordinary goods leaves no impression. A man clearing a shelf becomes a story.

I also kept a notebook, because the system's inventory was only half the problem. Each page tracked what I owned, when it expired, and where it had to sit. Canned food went at the bottom of the list, since it would outlast most things. Rice and oats needed airtight storage. The first-aid supplies had to stay near the entrance, where anyone could reach them in the dark.

By late afternoon I had spent more than I planned and still owned less than I needed. I drove south with the van sitting low on its springs.

The facility looked worse in the evening light.

At the complex, I hauled a hand trolley down the concrete ramp and began carrying things inside. Then I started on the main corridor, as the starter mission asked, one eye on the sealed door at the end of it. Rotted pallets, broken pipe sections, drifts of grey silt, a rusted cabinet that took every ounce of my strength to move. My hands blistered inside the gloves within the hour.

An hour into it, I noticed that my boots were wet.

I followed the water to its source and found it where I had first suspected, at a cracked drainage joint along the lower wall. A thin stream ran down the slope toward the lowest storage room, the one I had planned to use for the food. The first heavy rain would drown everything I put there.

I pulled on gloves, scraped the silt from the drain, cleared the channel, packed the joint with sealant from my supplies, and braced it with a scrap of timber until the flow slowed to a drip.

The interface woke as I stood up.

[MISSION UPDATE: WATER LINE REPAIR, STAGE ONE COMPLETE.]

[REWARD: +2 INVENTORY UNITS.]

Two units. Barely enough for a bag of rice. But it was proof that honest labor counted, and that the system paid for repairs, not wishes.

On impulse, I opened the shelter menu and selected a locked tab labeled LIVING QUARTERS: COMFORT.

[REQUEST DENIED: DECORATIVE LIVING QUARTERS UNAVAILABLE.]

[COMFORT UPGRADES LOCKED WHILE BASIC SAFETY REMAINS INCOMPLETE.]

I laughed, tired and cracked. "Fair enough." A good mattress would not stop water coming through a wall. It would only make me comfortable while the building failed.

It took me three trips to unload the van.

By the third, I was dragging crates down the ramp one at a time, my back burning, and the van was still half full. Six crates of canned goods. Two cases of bottled water. A box of tarpaulins. The deep-cycle battery. I could not unload it all alone, and I could not leave everything exposed. I had to prioritize, and I hated every item I left behind.

I moved the water filters, the first-aid supplies, and the tools into the dry room I had marked as sleeping quarters. I stacked the canned goods in the upper storage room, above the waterline. The battery and tarpaulins stayed packed in the locked van. Then I tore a clean page from my notebook and redrew the storage plan, because the one in my head had not survived a single night.

It was past nine when I finally sat down in the van, let my hands shake in peace, and checked the public notices, since the facility still had no signal. Several bus routes on the southern ring were suspended because of a fuel delay. A supply report said diesel distribution had slowed and two depots were rationing deliveries. A freight forum carried a quiet thread: a private logistics firm had reserved several delivery vehicles for the coming week, all booked through one contact, all paid in advance.

Fuel was slowing down. Trucks were vanishing from the roster. Shelves were emptying, and the pattern was repeating across the district, one shop at a time.

My phone buzzed against my palm.

It was a message from Dev, with a short video attached. *Thought you should see this. Please don't say who sent it.*

I pressed play.

The footage was grainy, shot from a security camera above a loading bay. Under floodlights, men in dark jackets were carrying crates into the back of a squat, armored vehicle. Generators. Fuel cans. Water drums. Behind them, a row of guards with rifles slung across their chests moved to the warehouse gates and began, one by one, to chain them shut.

They were not shopping for supplies. They were taking them, and they were making sure nobody else could.