Thirty days before the Great Scorch

Chapter Four

Vivian stared at her phone screen, her fingers trembling so bad the phone nearly slipped out of her hand.

She shoved it toward Gavin.

The two of them pressed their heads together, eyes locked on those two lines of text. The color drained from both their faces at exactly the same speed.

Daniel was going to take "their" twenty million and disappear across America? Over their dead bodies.

"He's lost his mind! He's completely lost his mind!" Gavin's voice came out in a hiss, low but vicious. His knuckles went white around the phone.

"What is a brainless cockroach like him going to do with twenty million? That money should have been ours from the start!"

In Gavin Rourke's head, Daniel's inheritance had already been mentally deposited into his own account. Daniel trying to leave was like someone pickpocketing his own wallet.

"Vivian, hurry! Hurry up and hold him down!" Gavin grabbed Vivian's wrist, his voice cracking with urgency. "You're the only thing that idiot cares about. He'll listen to you. We cannot let him run!"

Vivian's fingers shook as she typed, her heart hammering not from concern for Daniel, but from the terror of watching twenty million dollars walk out the door.

"Daniel, what's going on? You're so young, why would you suddenly want to travel? Did someone hurt you? Don't be impulsive. This is way too sudden. We just got married. Gavin and I aren't ready for this. We want to know what you're really thinking."

Three messages in a row, each one dripping with fake tenderness, designed to hook the same emotional soft spot that had kept Daniel on a leash for years.

Daniel looked at his phone and almost laughed out loud. Their panic was exactly what he predicted.

He typed back one more line to keep them dangling: "Vivian, don't worry about me. Just focus on work. Don't let my stuff affect your jobs."

Typing that made him want to gag.

Gavin leaned over Vivian's shoulder, read the reply, and his voice shot up three notches.

"Vivian, ask him to dinner tonight! You have to get him out. We can't let him take our money and disappear!"

His voice carried too far. Heads turned.

"Gavin, what are you and Vivian whispering about over there? You two seem pretty worked up." A coworker two desks away raised an eyebrow.

Gavin caught himself. He straightened up and switched his voice to performance mode, loud enough for the whole section to hear.

"What else? Daniel got fired and now he's talking about leaving Vivian. He wants to buy an RV and run off, and he's only been married three weeks. I told her to be careful. The man isn't well. As his best friend, I'm worried sick."

The coworkers pounced on it like dogs on fresh meat.

"Oh, Vivian, I'm so sorry. You don't deserve this." A woman across the aisle shook her head with theatrical pity.

"Gavin is a good friend to stick by him. Honestly, Vivian, you can do better than a man who yells at his boss and runs away."

"Exactly. Some men just can't handle a little pressure."

"Gavin, keep an eye on her. Don't let him drag her down with him."

Just like that, Daniel was painted as the unstable husband while Gavin played the loyal friend.

Vivian jumped in right on cue.

"Everyone, please don't judge him. He's going through a hard time. Gavin and I are just trying to help."

She knew company gossip traveled faster than email. If anyone started to suspect they were more than friends, by tomorrow they would both be transferred for violating the no-dating policy.

After the crowd scattered, Vivian fired off one more message, her tone switching to wounded-wife mode:

"Daniel, can you please stop throwing a tantrum? Let's have dinner tonight. Gavin already booked a table at that firewood-roasted chicken place we always go to. We're your family. You must need someone right now. You can't even spare us one meal, right? You're not that heartless."

The words "firewood chicken place" and "heartless" were chosen with care. They knew Daniel was sentimental. They knew he could never refuse guilt.

Daniel read the message and spat toward the trash can on the sidewalk.

These two were good. Really good. No wonder they played him like a puppet for years. It was not that he was stupid. It was that they were masters.

He hated himself too. He had not seen through their act in the previous life until it was too late. He had handed Vivian his entire savings. He had starved himself so she could eat during the apocalypse. He had opened his door and welcomed Gavin inside like a brother. He shared every last crumb he could not afford to eat himself.

And when he had nothing left to give, they looked at him like livestock.

A cold sneer cut across Daniel's face.

This was exactly the effect he wanted.

"Alright then. Since Gavin is treating, I'll definitely be there."

Gavin and Vivian read the reply and both exhaled at the same time, relieved grins spreading across their faces.

Gavin muttered under his breath, "When did I say I was treating?"

But then he thought about it. Every time they ate together in the past, no matter who booked the table, Daniel ended up paying. This time would be no different. After all, Daniel was the loyal, stupid, rich "good brother" who would never let his friends pick up a check.

After dismissing the two parasites, Daniel took a cab to the nearest supermarket.

Cool air hit his face as the automatic doors slid open. Shelves stretched from floor to ceiling, packed with every color of packaging imaginable. Under the fluorescent lights, it looked like a treasure vault.

Daniel's eyes lit up. These were not groceries. These were survival rations for the end of the world. His fingers twitched. The urge to suck every item on every shelf into his Storage Space hit him hard. But he forced himself to breathe. Cameras hung from every ceiling tile. If products started vanishing wherever he walked, the cops would have his face on every screen in the city.

"Can't rush it. Slow and steady."

He grabbed a shopping cart and began his sweep. First stop: processed foods. Ham, instant noodles, compressed biscuits, self-heating rice, self-heating hot pot. If it had a shelf life longer than six months, it went in the cart.

While loading the cart, he kept his eyes moving. The second nobody was looking, he focused his mind and pulled five or ten times the quantity of each item directly into his Space. One pack of noodles in the cart, ten packs in the Space. One tin of ham visible, five tins invisible. The shelves were fully stocked and the gaps were too small for anyone to notice.

The second cart went to the meat section. Pork, lamb, chicken, fish, shrimp. One of everything. With his Space's time-freeze, none of it would ever spoil.

The third cart was for cooking essentials. Oil, rice, flour, salt, sugar, soy sauce. In the apocalypse, hot food was the difference between holding on and giving up.

Beyond food, he started thinking about shelter. At a hundred and sixty degrees, regular houses would turn into ovens. If anyone found out he had food, starving mobs would tear his walls apart with their bare hands.

"I need a security company. Reinforce the penthouse. Turn it into a fortress."

His current duplex had the space, the location, and the advantage of being close to Vivian and Gavin. When the time came, those two would deliver themselves right to his door.

Building an underground bunker out in the countryside was his backup plan, but buying land as a private citizen was a bureaucratic nightmare, and he only had thirty days. There was no time for that kind of project.

An old man with a cloth grocery bag had been watching Daniel load his third cart with obvious fascination.

"Son, are you trying to open your own supermarket?" The old man's eyes were wide with genuine curiosity. "It's not even a holiday. Why are you buying so much?"

Daniel looked at the old man's kind face and felt something stir. He wanted to warn him. Just this one person.

"Sir, I'd suggest you stock up on extra food too. There might be a natural disaster in about a month. It can't hurt to be prepared."

The old man's face went from curious to offended in half a second. He glared at Daniel like he had just been insulted.

"Young man, what kind of nonsense are you talking? Natural disaster? I think you've been reading too many of those trashy web novels. Go delete that novel app off your phone and stop filling your head with this foolishness."

Daniel blinked. This old man knew about novel apps?