Chapter 3: Seed Run

Chloe's POV

Before daylight I walked the yard and counted what had come in overnight. Boxes from the porch out under the carport, the F-150's bed still loaded so deep I couldn't see the floor, feed sacks stacked to the barn crossbeams.

The system runs three separate modules. The safe house is shelter and defense — already active, three floors, filter system, the works. The tactical vault handles category-specific storage: weapons, fuel, medical. Both of those were locked in when I came back. What I didn't have yet was bulk capacity — the storage bay, the raw square footage for food and supplies. That slot was still empty, and the panel made sure I knew it.

[Storage Bay: 1 unit unlocked — one standard TEU footprint, vertical stacking at no loss. Complete a Midnight Scavenger run to expand.] One unit. Food, medicine, ammunition for three days: I could do that arithmetic myself, and it came up short.

[Task: Collect seeds (0/100). Type and quantity open. Reward: Storage Bay, one additional container.]

I looked at it for two seconds. Last time around the system had locked onto me on the third day of the rain, when I had nothing left to trade and nowhere left to run. This time it came early — three full days before anything fell out of the sky, with not one drop on the ground. I didn't call that luck. I called it one thing: the timeline no longer matched the one I remembered.

Keys in hand, I drove. By the time the sun was up I was on the east side, working the farm-supply strip along Route 99.

Crimson rain fell on people and it fell on dirt. Whatever it touched died standing, and the ground wouldn't grow anything again for years. The second round of killing in Oakhaven hadn't been over water or pills. It was over seed. Whoever had seed got to talk about rebuilding. Today I wasn't going to fight for it. I was going to buy it.

I didn't dare place a big order in one store. I ran the whole strip end to end — seed company, feed store, garden center, co-op outlet, seven or eight of them — ten-pound bags at each, rung up mixed in with potting soil and fertilizer.

The cashier scanned the last load and asked what I was planting. I told her my grandfather's place was going back into rotation. She said it was a wet year, good for putting something in the ground. I carried the bags out and thought about how ugly that would sound in three days.

An hour in, the panel stuck at seventy-eight and quit moving. The Pacific Northwest only carries so many varieties; once I'd cleared the staples and the common vegetables, the gap was all in things nobody thinks of. So I changed course — fruit saplings, and herbs that double as medicine, echinacea, calendula, chamomile, down on the flower rack where anybody would take me for a gardener. The system counted anything that would grow, roots as well as paper packets, and the number climbed past a hundred and forty.

[Task complete.]

A new line dropped under the panel.

[Related quest chain detected — Wasteland Gourmet (0/1).]

I knew exactly what it wanted. Hot food, and enough of it to matter.

Half the afternoon went to loading. I swept a hand over the bed and the back seat and the whole load went into the new bay. I stacked and did the math at the same time: three days of food, medicine and ammunition in this one bay.

On the last bag, the burlap scraped coming off the tailgate, and my hand stopped in the air. I'd done this before, bag after bag, all the way down to the last slot, with Brad Danforth standing behind me and my inventory sheet in his hand, telling me it all belonged to the group now, for distribution. I pulled my hand back and shut the tailgate.

Antibiotics are prescription, so the counter was a dead end; I filled that gap on the livestock shelf at Tractor Supply — fish amoxicillin, poultry oxytetracycline. Every prepper in the country knows that aisle, and the clerk didn't look up once when I carried two bags out. I grabbed a box of purification tablets on the way through.

Buying it in pieces had a second purpose. In my last life there was an outfit called the Shadow Syndicate that worked the dark web looking for people who knew things early. When they found one, they took him, and nobody ever tracked where he went after. What I'd bought, added up, was the list of somebody who knew something early. Either way, I wasn't going to leave a complete purchasing profile in any single store.

Which left food. The Wasteland Gourmet line was still at zero, and the timing was almost funny. I was already heading for a truck stop.

The truck stop north on Route 99 was a big one, pumps in two rows, rigs idling in the lot with that diesel rumble that never quite stops. The taqueria trailer sat in the corner, a string of bulbs over the hitch, three folding tables beside it. Menu taped to the window: birria tacos, carne asada, al pastor, elote, horchata.

I ordered birria tacos and an elote and took the table farthest back. First bite, and my shoulders finally came down.

Then I got up and walked to the window. Twenty of everything on the menu, plus ten quesabirria with consommé, to go. The father worked the flat top, the son ran the register, both of them calling ahorita, ahorita, foil folded one order at a time, salsa in little cups, consommé sealed separate, the whole ticket boxed into four cartons. While I waited I put in a pickup order at the gas station next door, coffee and hot food.

"Chloe. Long time."

My fingers stopped. Just once. I turned with nothing on my face but confusion. "Do I know you?"

Zach Rusk. In my last life his own family had cut him loose to draw the Blighted off, and I was the one who came along and hauled him out of a ditch. I figured a debt like that would stick. He hadn't spared me either.

"So Brad wasn't lying." He sat down across from me like we were old friends.

I let the shock show. "You know Brad too?"

The base had barely been standing when he threw his weight around and got two women into bed with him, killed one of them by accident, and I had the men break his leg for it. So that was the debt, and it had been running against me since that night.

"Course I know him." He settled back in the chair. "I also know he's got somebody else now. You'd be better off with me. You won't regret it."

I didn't answer. He dropped his voice. "Something big is coming, Chloe. Next couple of days. I can keep you safe."

It was almost funny. He figured I knew nothing, so he figured I could be handled. That was his old habit, and it was the habit that killed every plan he ever had.

He looked at me and his eyes heated up, and he caught my wrist and pulled me toward him.

"Are you out of your mind? I don't know you."

Instinct took over.I rolled his wrist and drove it into the corner of the table, then let go of it at once. Panic, half a second late — I grabbed the metal condiment rack off the table and held it against my chest, backed off a step. To the men at the other tables it must have looked like luck and a bad temper, which was the way I wanted it. The folding table went over, foil and salsa across the pavement, a couple of truckers standing up out of their chairs.

"Zach. Enough."

Emily came out of the light at the edge of the lot, jeans and a hoodie, a shopping bag in one hand. She'd brought him out here to stock up, and she clearly hadn't expected to run into me, and she definitely hadn't expected that hearing I hadn't come back would put an idea in his head.

She stopped at the table and moved her eyes off the foil on the ground, up to my face. I knew that look. She was pricing it out: what a fight here would gain them, what it would cost, and whether it was already too late to walk it back.