Chapter 3 Four Days to Go, Protect My Last Family

Evelyn’s POV

I left the real estate office with a signed contract and a ten-thousand-dollar wire receipt on my phone. The short positions would close Thursday — combined with what I'd already pulled from Carter's loan and the island house deposit, that gave me enough to lock down the I-5 storage units and fund the second procurement round.

Today was March 18, Tuesday. Four days until noon on the twenty-second.

I glanced at my return flight details, headed for the rental dock, and three blocks from the ferry terminal put a crew-cab Ford F-250 under Tyler's company name. He held a commercial license, so a man hauling building materials across the islands looked like nothing at all.

By eight-fifteen in the morning — Wednesday — I was parked two blocks from Kane Metal & Fence, engine off, watching the sign. The letters stood half an inch proud of the panel under all that old paint, and the sky was the color of a wet paper bag. I had already spoken to Tyler once, back on the seventeenth, to plant the idea. This call was different. This call was the trap closing.

"Hey, sis? What's with the phone call, you never call me — ha!" Tyler said it all in one breath, pleased and completely unguarded, and something behind my eyes went hot before I could stop it. This body had reset all of it, tear ducts included. Ten years of ash and blood had burned the crying out of me. I pressed the heel of my hand against one eye and put the half-second away.

"Ty," I said. "You got a minute?"

The chop saw cut aluminum and stopped. My uncle called out from the back: "Whose phone is that? Tyler? Marianne, it's Evelyn!" Chairs scraped, boots crossed the floor, and then it went quiet enough that I could hear the compressor ticking — all three of them standing around that phone waiting for me to speak.

"Morning, Aunt Marianne," I said, and I had no idea why I said it.

Eighteen months earlier I had been three weeks into my first quarter at UW when a state trooper told me my parents had died on I-5 near Tumwater. Sixty-five miles an hour, same guardrail, neither of them touched the brakes. What came after was their house, the insurance payout, a little over four hundred thousand dollars, and a flock of relatives who suddenly cared very much about how I was doing.

They stood in my kitchen and said it so kindly: my uncle Greg and aunt Marianne ran a broke-ass little shop, sweetheart, what do you think they were after. I believed them. Grief is stupid, and being warned by someone feels like being cared for. For most of a year I gave the only three people who actually loved me a cold face and short, nasty little sentences. Greg handled the funeral, the probate, the title transfer and the furnace inspection, on his feet, in the rain. I never thanked him.

The last time I heard their voices was in the other life. The whole dorm floor had been one long scream of people calling home, and I, an orphan with nobody left, got exactly two calls. Marianne first, shaking so badly the words fell apart: "Evie, is it bad where you are, your uncle and Tyler are coming to get you." Then Tyler, four minutes later, over horns and a siren: "Stay in your dorm. Don't move. I'm coming into the city right now." Ten years later I walked back into that shop twice and found nothing but a burned door frame and an overturned welder. I spent a decade looking for a body I could put a name to and never found one.

I lifted my eyes to the sign. "Ty. I got you guys a job."

I laid it out fast: a classmate's family, an empty waterfront house on San Juan Island, parents overseas. Security steel on the ground-floor windows, the front door and frame reinforced, high-voltage wire along the yard wall. Good money, one rule — speed.

"Yeah, sure," Tyler said. "Send me the address, me and Dad'll run over and take a look."

"Not when you get around to it. Today."

"Today today?"

"Four days. Two hundred thousand. I already took the deposit — a hundred thousand, on my word."

There was a pause, a real one. "Four days? Why's it got to be four days?"

"Because I gave him my word and he put up a hundred grand on it," I said, and hung up before he found the seam.

I sent him the photos and a deposit screenshot. The screenshot was built from yesterday's ten-thousand-dollar wire receipt — the one from the house sale, not Carter's loan, because that transfer had a cleaner paper trail. I had opened it in a parking lot, retyped the amount, and it took four minutes. It read as a hundred thousand dollars.

The house itself was real. Right after the sale closed I had walked two doors down to a property management office handling long-term island rentals. Four bedrooms, waterfront, owner relocated to Seattle. I paid the first month and the security deposit in cash, signed a three-year lease, and asked one question: could I add reinforced window inserts and a secondary steel door frame, both fully reversible? The manager called the owner and came back with a yes.

I knew what the San Juans would look like six months after the Demon Seeds fell. The channel ran cold enough that newly turned Fiends couldn't swim it, and once the Guard blew the ferry pilings, the island was sealed off. I needed my family behind a reinforced wall before noon on the twenty-second.

Greg called back at ten-forty. He stepped away from the shop floor so Tyler wouldn't hear, and said the money wasn't the point. The job felt wrong — a big house wanting steel plate on the door and jail-bar windows that matched nothing, four days, double rate.

"This family," he said quietly. "You think maybe something's not right with them?"

Greg Kane was not a stupid man. His instinct had already found the edge of the truth. "He's a classmate, Uncle Greg. His grandfather's a retired three-star, still sits on the National Guard advisory board. Family's as squared away as it gets. Maybe the guy just likes that style."

Three seconds of silence. Then a sigh — the lifelong deference of a sixty-two-year-old working man raised to trust the uniform more than his own eyes.

"All right. I'll go over and take a look, and I'll set those windows in so they won't come out in an earthquake."

I put my shoulder against the wall and closed my eyes. Yesterday I had borrowed Carter Whitfield's money. Today I had borrowed his name. The first leverage I would ever use against Apex BioTech started here, in this alley, with this lie.

"Owner's away, house is empty," I said, flat again. "Show your ID at the property management office by the marina for the key — your name's on the list. Bring the saw, the welder, plenty of wire. Bring Aunt Marianne; food's scarce out there but the power and water work and she can cook. Grab blankets and sleep there nights, don't waste four hours a day on ferries. Done before the twenty-second."

"Should I send the balance today?"

"I've got exams. I'll send it when the work's done."

I would never send it. Every dollar needed to become food, fuel and ammunition, and after the twenty-second money would be worthless paper. Marianne took the phone from Greg.

"Focus on your exams. No rush. We've got enough material in back."

I looked two blocks down at the little shop and hung up on her.

At eleven-twenty they came out. Tyler backed the pickup to the roll-up door and loaded while Greg handed up aluminum bundles, the welder and two coils of steel cable that pressed the truck down on its springs. Marianne carried out two thermoses and a quilt that Greg wedged behind the seat. They worked in the cold with their breath in clouds, arguing about something and laughing at it — a family heading to a job on an ordinary Wednesday in March.

I watched from the shadow between a coin laundry and a closed paint store, longer than was safe.

I didn't walk over. No explanation survived contact with a rational world, and I had no guns, no wire and no food stockpiled yet. Lying to their faces a third time bought them nothing. I turned back to the truck and placed orders on the way: canned goods, fifty-pound rice sacks, water filters, a diesel generator, MREs — everything to the island house, everything marked for the basement.

Then one last message to Tyler. Lots of packages coming this week. Put them in the basement. Don't open them.

I pointed the truck south and drove. I didn't look in the rearview mirror.