Chapter 3

Hanah's POV

The man showed me the place. Then the question came out, "so, what are you going to do with a place like this?"

"Start a business," I said. "Grow mushrooms."

He laughed once and didn't take it seriously. What was running through my head was something different.

In the life before this one, I had learned this city's shelters inside and out. There were three kinds.

The first kind sat under the department stores downtown, in the garages beneath the condo towers, on the basement level of the hospital—excellent locations, two steps from a corner store and a subway entrance. And every single one of them had become a nest by the third day, because that is where people ran, and the zombies go where the people are.

Then there were the tunnel shelters cut into the hills and the real military works. I could not rent a military installation, and no one was going to hand one over to a strange woman who walked in carrying cash. That left this: far enough from everything that nobody would come looking, big enough to hold a whole lifetime, with a ventilation system still turning and a blast door thick enough to take a charge.

I watched him leave with a blank expression. Not a word of my real purpose would I tell him. The first rule the apocalypse had taught me was that stupid people are themselves a disaster; my work this time was only to stay far enough away from them.

He took the money, signed the papers, and left. I walked Summer in deep, one section at a time. The ventilation stack turned overhead, loud and ragged, and I stood under it long enough to decide it was air and not a leak—which meant the whole air-raid shelter could breathe without touching the outside atmosphere.

Deeper in, a concrete ring set into the floor, capped with a sheet of plywood and a rock on top of that, and I stopped.

I moved the board. The water lay still and black as a pane of glass and did not seem to have an end. I went flat on the concrete and scooped a mouthful up in my hand. Cold, and sweet—the way stone is sweet.

It had nothing to do with the city, not one pipe of it—a spring that fed itself, underground and independent. In the last life, the water plant was polluted. There was nothing that came out of a tap you could put in your mouth.

I set the board back and put the rock on it, and I did it gently. Eleven meters past the well, a wire ran along a cable tray into the dark, its end stripped and its copper gone green. Though it carried no current, it told me the whole place had been wired once. Buy a generator, and the fortress would run.

Out at the mouth of the tunnel, I looked along the fence line. The old wire ran the length of the firebreak, most of it down and rusted through, the posts leaning at every angle. But the line itself was unbroken from one ridge to the other. Repair it, and I could run current through it. The verdict came down flat inside me: this can be done.

Super Bunker System activated.

*Reinforce the original base — rewards will be issued in proportion to the work.

Countdown: fifteen days.*

It was the same voice that had read me prices three days earlier, and it still came from the inside of my own skull. I turned around to look at Summer.

Ding — one base war dog detected.Reward: combat strength increased a hundredfold, physical constitution increased a hundredfold.

This kind of reward? I'm not missing out on it.

I took my mother's old sedan out to a fencing yard on the edge of the city and walked in. A man behind the counter stood up. I told him what I wanted: two thousand meters of razor coil and ring fencing, spec'd to be laid over an existing line.

"Seven dollars a meter, fourteen thousand dollars," he said, and then offered to have his own truck run it out with me. I let the truck come exactly as far as the open gravel lot where the county road turned to dirt.

"Unload it on the shoulder," I said. "I'll have somebody come get it."

He turned his truck around. After dark, there, nobody in a car ever looks at a shoulder full of fencing. Summer went up on the slope to watch, her ears laid back toward the highway.

I checked my space and found it had 289 cubic meters. My own furniture only took up a few cubic meters. So I used the space to store all these wire meshes. After clearing everything out, I drove back to the base with Summer.

I didn't sleep that night. There was no point in it. Summer walked the two ends of the line and never once wandered, and every few minutes she brought me something—a pair of pliers, a spool of tie wire—laying it down at my feet. I wrapped the new fencing over the old, section by section, twisting the seams tight until my palms went numb from the wire and my fingers worked by feel alone. The sky went gray at the horizon, and the last section closed.

Ding — fence reinforced.Reward: defensive effect increased a hundredfold.

The whole line moved once in the morning light, and it grew the way: thicker, denser, teeth lengthening along every strand, the blades taking on a white and quiet shine. The thin gate at the tunnel mouth was gone. In its place stood a steel lift gate set flush into the rock, with a seam so tight no wind could find it.

I walked up and put my shoulder into the mesh and pushed until my boots slipped on the gravel, and the mesh did not move a millimeter. What I had judged yesterday—that it would stop a zombie but not a truck, not a few thousand zombies at once—was void. A thousand of them against that line would not tear it open.

My stomach turned over then, and I remembered the Canned soup I had cleared out of the condo refrigerator the day before. And there they were, right in front of me. They were still hot.

I released the refrigerator next, standing there in the dark, and the whole box was cold—no cord, no current, a skin of frost on the inner wall that stung my fingertips. I stood between the two of them and realized the answer. No heat left this space. Whatever went in came out exactly as it went in. Food wouldn't spoil, medicine wouldn't expire, and a year from now I could eat today's Canned soup.

So, I decided my next stop would be the warehouse. An idle farm building out past the county road where a truck can back right up to the door, where the Costco and Home Depot orders can land and be moved up here in batches without anyone ever learning where "here" is.

After that, I started gathering a few things, like food and ammunition, seeds, chickens, ducks, sheep. Seventy grand! I didn't even realize it, but I blew nearly seven hundred thousand today.

Then I pulled out my deed, and just like that, a good plan started forming in my head.