2026-10-31 00:23:47
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Chapter 36
He closed the apartment door behind him with the care of a man defusing a bomb and took the stairs instead of the elevator because elevators had cameras and cameras had timestamps.Outside, the Denver night was warm and empty. The streets were quiet except for the occasional distant siren and the hum of air conditioning units on nearby buildings. Daniel walked four blocks north until he found what he was looking for. A shared electric scooter, unlocked, leaning against a bike rack outside a closed convenience store.He focused his mind and the scooter vanished into his Storage Space.Then he got in his car and drove south.He parked five miles from the target neighborhood, in the lot behind an abandoned strip mall where three of the four security cameras had been broken for months and the fourth pointed at the wrong angle. He had scouted this location on Google Maps that afternoon while Sophie was trying on jackets.Daniel killed the engine, sat in the dark for two minutes, and then g
Chapter 35
The memory hit Daniel like a freight train while he was doing cable rows at the gym that morning.In his previous life, just days before the apocalypse, the biggest arms smuggling bust in Denver's history had made every news channel in the state. Federal agents raided a rundown house in an old neighborhood on the south side of the city, a few doors down from his grandparents' former residence. They found over a hundred American-made rifles, dozens of handguns, and thousands of rounds of ammunition hidden inside a false basement under the kitchen floor.The smugglers were arrested. The weapons were seized. The neighborhood spent weeks crawling with FBI agents and ATF investigators.Daniel remembered the story because his grandmother had called him that week, complaining that the police had blocked her favorite shortcut to the grocery store.That raid happened in roughly four days.Which meant right now, tonight, those weapons were still sitting in that basement, guarded by nothing more
Chapter 34
"Zara, I have a hundred compound bows and three hundred crossbows. They're excellent weapons. But against a group of desperate, armed people breaking through a barricade, a crossbow that takes eight seconds to reload is not going to cut it. I need real firepower.""Daniel, I've told you twice. Sentinel Security does not deal in illegal weapons. I won't risk my license, my company, or my freedom." Her eyes were steady, her voice firm, her posture straight as a column of the same alloy she was installing on his walls."I'm not asking Sentinel to provide them. I'm asking you, personally, if you know any way, any channel, any connection that could help me source firearms without going through official channels."Zara studied him for a long moment. Her eyes moved across his face with the same precision she used to measure wall tolerances, reading him the way she read blueprints, looking for flaws, for weaknesses, for anything that did not line up."You already have enough firepower to hold
Chapter 33
They got home at ten and Sophie dropped onto the sofa like someone had cut her strings. Her shopping bags landed in a pile by the door and her shoes came off with two lazy kicks that sent them spinning across the hardwood floor."I'm dead. Officially dead. You killed me with shopping and steak and that hill we walked up from the parking garage." She pressed her face into the cushion, her voice muffled by fabric."Go to sleep then.""No." She said it with the stubborn finality of a child refusing bedtime. "You bought me eleven things today. Eleven. I haven't even thanked you properly yet.""Soph, you don't have to thank me every time I buy you something.""I don't have to. I want to. There's a difference." She lifted her head from the cushion and looked at him with eyes that were exhausted but burning with something warm and determined. "Give me twenty minutes."She disappeared into the bathroom. Daniel sat on the edge of the bed, checked his phone, scrolled through two supply delivery
Chapter 32
After dinner, they walked two blocks to the Cherry Creek mall. The evening crowd was thick, the air conditioning was arctic, and every window display was lit up like a small stage performance designed to separate people from their money.Sophie's eyes went wide the way they always did when she entered a mall, like a kid walking into a toy store with a blank check."Where do you want to start?" Daniel already knew the answer."Everywhere." Sophie grabbed his arm and pulled him toward the first boutique on the left.For the next three hours, Daniel played the role of the patient, generous boyfriend carrying shopping bags while his girlfriend tried on everything that caught her eye. It was a role that served two purposes. First, it made Sophie genuinely happy, and Daniel had discovered that making Sophie happy was one of the few things that still felt uncomplicated in his increasingly complicated life.Second, it gave him cover.While Sophie was in fitting rooms, while she was browsing r
Chapter 31
Eight days.Daniel woke up at six thirty with his internal clock running tighter than a Swiss watch. His body felt like a machine that had been tuned overnight by invisible mechanics. Muscles full, joints loose, zero soreness from yesterday's session that would have hospitalized a normal man.He rolled out of bed without disturbing Sophie, who was curled on her side with one hand tucked under her cheek and her dark hair fanned across the pillow like spilled ink. She looked peaceful. She looked normal. She looked like a woman who had no idea she was sleeping next to a man who had already lived through the end of the world once and was preparing to survive it a second time.Daniel stood at the window and ran through his mental inventory. Enough food to last years. Enough water to fill four hundred swimming pools. Five hundred tons of ice. A hundred tons of diesel. Weapons that could arm a small army. A fortress being built around the clock by the best security company in Colorado. And a
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