Chapter 9: The Shelter Plan Begins

Ada's POV

Just when I was about to roll up my sleeves and get to work, my stomach started growling again. Then, right in front of the two of them, I ducked into my space and came back out with a pack of pasta I'd brought from the apartment.

Ten minutes later, the three of us were on the living room sofa, eating Leo's cooking and talking.

"It's not much, but dig in." Leo said. "There's one pot in that kitchen. No idea what the previous owner ate while he lived here."

"Better than anything I ate in my last life." I shoved noodles into my mouth in big bites. It was the honest truth, before tonight, it had been a long time since I'd eaten anything this hot and this good.

The moment the words were out, both their forks stopped mid-air. Ray gave me a complicated look and said nothing.

Leo was the one who finally broke the silence. "In your last life… what did you eat?"

"Anything I could chew. Anything that wouldn't kill me. Whatever I could get." I answered offhandedly.

Neither of them asked anything else. But out of the corner of my eye, I saw them lift their hands and wipe at the corners of their eyes.

Fed and watered, we went back to the table and got down to the survival plan.

Just from what he'd seen outside, Ray had sketched the rough layout of the estate on paper. He'd even noticed the two cameras by the gate.

"If we're going to hold off an outside attack, the wall needs to come up to sixteen feet. The whole house needs better soundproofing, and the doors and windows should be swapped for the sturdiest ones we can get. Winter out here is colder than in the city . We'll need someone to install proper insulation, too."

I jotted down the key points, then turned to the other two. "Ray, you're on weapons and tactical gear, the more stopping power, the better. Leo, you're on gasoline. And we're ordering five modified off-road vehicles. We rotate them, so if one quits on us, we're not stranded."

As for me, on top of the food I'd already stockpiled, I still had to find fuel, everyday supplies, and most importantly, medicine.

We split up the work, put our hands together, and looked at each other. There was no doubt in anyone's eyes.

This time, I would not let the tragedy happen again.

We'd come on short notice and hadn't had time to prepare for a move, so we hadn't brought much. We divided up the rooms in a hurry and turned in.

I lay in bed, exhausted, still unable to shake the unreality of being reborn. Questions kept circling in my head until my temples throbbed.

To distract myself, I opened TikTok. A twisted, rotting zombie face filled the top of my feed. I tapped it, but the video had already been taken down for graphic violence.

The virus hadn't broken out on a wide scale yet, but the infected had shown up among people more than once, causing real disturbances. In one day alone, I'd seen two zombie attacks with my own eyes.

Things were sliding toward out of control. The government was trying to contain it, but some information was bound to leak online.

I searched other apps for "zombie," "cannibalism," "rabies." Eerily, every search came back empty.

I tossed the phone aside. I had my guesses. None of them surprised me.

Once the public found out about the virus, it would trigger global panic. The butterfly effect of that kind of mass panic was impossible to predict.

The government was throwing everything it had into hunting down the infected who'd slipped through, but it was as if an invisible hand kept working against them. The number of infected wasn't falling. It was rising. They were probably drowning in it by now.

Where had this disaster come from? And why had that strange dust storm rolled in a month later?

With those questions still unanswered, sleep finally got the better of me, and I closed my eyes.

The next day I woke to birdsong. It was still early. I glanced out the window and caught the streetlights going out.

The moment I stepped out of my room, the smell of food hit me — warm, and honestly still a little unreal. Leo had already made breakfast, and he and Ray were going over supplies and how to reinforce the house.

When Ray saw me up, he pulled my chair out for me without a word.

I ate and gave them the address of the storage units.

Leo was heading out later to buy gasoline and the modified off-road vehicles. Ray was still working on finding a source for weapons and tactical gear, so he'd stay at the estate today and get in touch with contractors who could retrofit the house.

I'd keep hitting the markets, stockpiling as much as I could of what we'd need down the line.

The night before, I'd gone over our inventory. Our water supply wasn't going to carry us. Water in the apocalypse was too precious. The virus and the corpses would contaminate most of the city's water sources in no time.

The nano folding space still had plenty of undeveloped area, but I wasn't about to bet our survival on it. We needed real preparation.

On top of that, my most important task today was one more thing: buying medicine in serious quantity such as antibiotics, anti-inflammatories, that kind of thing. In a world overrun by the dead, getting hurt was routine. An infected wound meant death. And people may come down with things now and then. A cold nobody thought twice about could kill you one day.

I went over the day's schedule with Ray and Leo, gathered my things, and decided to head back downtown first.