The Apocalypse Exchange: I Can Trade Anything

Bang bang bang.

A frantic knock on the door dragged Ryan Cole out of his gloom.

He leaned toward the peephole and saw his neighbor from across the hall.

"Why are you knocking?" Ryan growled through the door. "You trying to bring the infected down on us?"

"It's me. I live right across from you."

"I know who you are. What do you want?"

"We haven't eaten in days. Please can you spare anything?"

"I don't have much left."

"Don't say that. I know you've got cases of instant ramen stacked up. I even asked you about it once, in the elevator how you managed to order so much."

Ryan remembered that day. The weather had been brutal, and the delivery driver had grumbled the whole time hauling boxes up to his floor. Bulk pricing had been too good to pass up.

While he was lost in the memory, the woman outside kept pleading.

"Please. I've got an old man and a little kid in there with me. I can't hold out any longer."

Ryan said nothing.

The family across the hall was five people a young couple with a toddler, and two grandparents living with them. But in all the time they'd been neighbors, Ryan barely knew them. A nod in the hallway, maybe a wave near the mailboxes. He didn't even know their names.

"Please. Just a little. Let the baby eat something, at least."

Ryan exhaled.

"Hang on. Stop knocking."

"Okay okay, I'll stop. Thank you, thank you so much."

Ryan wasn't a saint by any stretch. But the moment she mentioned the kid, something in him softened. He remembered that baby from the elevator the way she'd break into a gummy grin every single time she saw him. A kid's laugh had a strange way of patching you up, even after a brutal night of coding.

He dug through his stockpile and pulled out a few packs of the mild-flavored ramen, added some sausage links, sealed it all in a plastic bag, and knotted it shut. Then he walked to the door.

"This is all I can spare. I don't have extra."

"Okay, okay thank you so much."

Ryan was a software engineer who'd cleared over a million dollars in the last three years. His IQ ran well above average, and sharp logic was practically a job requirement. So instead of throwing the door open, he checked the hallway through the peephole first.

"Back up from the door before I put this out."

"...Huh?"

"Okay, okay, backing up now."

But in that brief pause, he caught her glancing down toward the gap under the door.

That single glance set off alarm bells. The peephole couldn't cover that blind spot. If someone was crouched down there, out of view, and he opened the door, they'd have a clear shot to force their way in. Ryan was good with a keyboard. He was not good in a fight. And the guy who lived across the hall her husband, presumably worked as a personal trainer.

Ryan glanced back into his apartment.

"Wait one second. Let me see if I've got anything else."

"Okay, okay, thank you so much."

He ignored her thanks and grabbed a folding chair, wedging one end against the wall and the other under the doorknob an improvised brace. Even if someone shoved from outside, the chair would hold.

Satisfied, he grabbed a paring knife from the kitchen and gripped it tight. He walked back to the door, took a few steadying breaths, and jabbed the blade through the air a couple of times to loosen his arm.

Then he slowly turned the deadbolt.

The instant the lock disengaged, the door lurched inward against the chair.

A tattooed arm shot through the gap.

"What are you waiting for? Push the door it's stuck on something!"

"...Oh."

The second he heard that, Ryan understood exactly what they were after. Without hesitation, he drove the knife into the exposed forearm once, twice, three times.

A howl of pain, and the arm yanked back.

The instant it cleared the frame, Ryan slammed the door shut and threw the bolt.

More than three months ago, a massive object had appeared without warning in the sky above Earth a meteor barreling toward the planet at terrifying speed.

At the time, nobody cared where it came from. All that mattered was the math: a rock that size hitting the planet meant humanity would end up as extinct as the dinosaurs.

There hadn't been time to engineer a real solution. Faced with catastrophe or catastrophe, the world picked the lesser one hit the meteor with everything in the arsenal.

It worked, in a sense. And it also didn't.

Debris rained down across North America. Meanwhile, Antarctica took no direct hits at all but its ice sheet started melting at an impossible rate anyway.

Extreme weather swept the globe within weeks. New York got hit with storms unlike anything in the city's recorded history.

That, it turned out, was only the opening act.

A virus that had lain dormant beneath the ancient ice woke up. It rode the storm fronts across the planet in a matter of days.

Then things got worse. Animals turned feral and bloodthirsty, attacking anything that moved. Then people started changing too most of them, into something that wasn't people anymore.

Zombies weren't a new idea. Every book, every show, every game had already imagined a version of the end of the world. So when it actually happened, Ryan like most people did the "smart" thing: locked the door and waited for help.

That decision made sense because, for a while, the infrastructure held. Cell service worked. The TV looped the same message on repeat: *stay inside, remain calm, help is coming.*

Waiting made sense for a few days. Maybe a week or two.

It had now been over a month. And the people with empty pantries couldn't wait any longer.

Three days ago, several families from Ryan's building had banded together and gone out to scavenge. They made it barely a block before a wave of the infected swallowed them whole and turned them into the same thing.

Ryan looked at the stacked cases of ramen and sausage in his apartment and made a decision: he wasn't leaving until he had absolutely no other choice.

Sometimes he couldn't decide if he'd been lucky or cursed.

Lucky, because as a programmer, all-nighters were just part of the job which meant a fully stocked pantry of instant food had always been standard equipment. He'd get so buried in a coding sprint that he'd forget to shop, so he'd started ordering in bulk just to keep himself from going hungry mid-deadline.

His last big grocery run had landed just days before everything fell apart.

As for the curse well, in a world like this, the six-figure balance in his bank account was worth exactly nothing. Three years of eighteen-hour days, gone, along with the future he'd built them for.

Ryan had one dream: retire early and never answer to an alarm clock again. He'd built an entire financial plan around it save three million dollars by thirty-five. Stagger it across CDs: the first million in a one-year term, the second in a two-year term, the third in a three-year term, rolling everything forward every year after that. Do the math right, and the interest alone would clear eighty thousand a year enough to live comfortably without ever punching a clock again.

To hit that number, he'd worked his day job coding for a fintech startup and picked up freelance contracts every night. Three years in, he was already more than halfway there. At his pace, he'd have hit the goal a full year ahead of schedule.

Instead, the world ended first.