Day 1 of the Apocalypse.
Outside, the world was a freezing, toxic nightmare. The sky was permanently stained a bruised, swirling violet. The temperature had plummeted overnight, covering the ruins of the city in a thick layer of toxic frost. Millions were dead. The survivors were huddled in dark basements, fighting over stale crackers while monsters hunted them in the streets.
Inside the Ark, it smelled like maple syrup and expensive bacon.
Catrin stood in the massive kitchen, wearing a soft, oversized cashmere sweater and silk lounge pants. Her reddish-brown hair was pinned up loosely. She hummed a quiet tune as she pulled plates of perfectly hot food out of thin air.
Retrieve.
A platter of thick, crispy Wagyu bacon materialized on the marble island, steam still rising off the meat.
Retrieve.
A towering stack of fluffy blueberry pancakes appeared next to it, the butter already perfectly melted.
Because her Infinite Spatial Dimension froze time completely, the food was exactly as hot and fresh as the moment she had bought out the Michelin-star kitchens three days ago.
The elevator pinged.
Quinn stepped out into the living room, and she looked completely unrecognizable. The dirt, the exhaustion, and the paranoid tension were gone. She was wearing clean sweatpants and a thick wool hoodie she had found in her closet. Her choppy black hair was damp.
She stood frozen at the edge of the kitchen, staring at the feast on the island. Her eyes were wide, and she looked like she was about to cry.
"Is the water pressure okay?" Catrin asked smoothly, pouring a cup of dark roast coffee.
"I took a forty-minute shower," Quinn whispered, her voice cracking. "The water never got cold. The soap smelled like lavender. Catrin... I think I died in that tower. This is heaven, isn’t it?"
Catrin smiled, sliding a plate toward her. "Grab a fork, Quinn. Heaven has pancakes."
Quinn practically lunged at the island. She didn’t even sit down. She grabbed a piece of bacon with her bare hand and bit into it, letting out a groan that sounded entirely inappropriate.
Elias and Graves walked out of the lower-level stairwell a moment later. Graves looked like a new man after a full night of sleep in a real bed. Elias looked exactly the same, messy hair and manic energy, but he was holding a tablet with a massive grin on his face.
"Boss, the hydroponics are insane!" Elias cheered, grabbing a plate. "The ambient spore energy outside is actually feeding the quantum core! We have infinite power!"
"Good morning, Uncle Elias!" Nico chirped. He was sitting in his high chair, wearing dinosaur pajamas, happily smearing syrup across his cheeks.
"Morning, little boss," Elias grinned, tossing Nico a fresh strawberry from his pocket.
Graves poured himself a coffee and looked at Catrin. "Briar, what’s the plan for today? Do we need to fortify the lower levels?"
"The plan for today," Catrin said, taking a sip of her espresso, "is to eat breakfast, play video games in the media room, and watch the world burn on the security feeds. The fortress is sealed. We have nothing to do but live."
Quinn looked up from her fifth pancake, chewing rapidly. "Wait. Are you serious? We just... sit here?"
"I spent four billion dollars to sit here, Quinn," Catrin said. "Yes. We just sit here."
Down in the outer deployment rings, Commander Jax was sitting at a heavy metal table in the mercenaries’ mess hall.
The room was completely silent, except for the sound of fifty heavily armed men chewing.
Jax looked down at his tray. He had a massive breakfast burrito, steaming hot hashbrowns, and a fresh cup of coffee. He hadn’t cooked it. It had been delivered down the internal dumbwaiter ten minutes ago, courtesy of the Boss.
Briggs, the massive, bald machine-gunner, sat across from Jax. He took a bite of his burrito and closed his eyes.
"Commander," Briggs mumbled with a full mouth. "I will die for that woman."
A ripple of agreements echoed around the mess hall.
"Look at the screens," Jax ordered softly, pointing to the monitors mounted on the wall.
The external drone feeds showed the two-mile barricade. The purple fog was thick, but the thermal cameras were finally adjusting. Beyond the barricade, the mountain road was swarming.
There were at least thirty mutant wolves tearing at the frozen dirt, fighting each other for scraps. Further down the mountain, the drone picked up a heat signature of a family huddled in a broken-down car, slowly freezing to death.
"That was supposed to be us," Jax said, his voice hard. "If we stayed in the city, we’d be shooting our way through grocery stores for a can of beans right now. We’d be sleeping with one eye open in the freezing cold."
Jax stood up, looking at his men.
"We hold the line," Jax said, his voice echoing in the metal room. "Nobody breaches the outer perimeter. If a mutant touches the gate, you vaporize it. If a survivor comes begging, you tell them to turn around. We protect the Ark, and the Ark protects us."
The fifty men slammed their fists against the metal tables in unison. It was a terrifying, unified sound of absolute loyalty.
Forty miles away, in the ruined basement of a collapsed bank, it was forty degrees below zero.
Julian Vance was huddled in the corner, shivering so violently his teeth were chipping. He was wrapped in a filthy, torn designer coat. The air smelled like dust, blood, and human waste.
Across the dark room, his mother, Eleanor, was crying hysterically.
"I’m so cold," Eleanor sobbed, clutching her pearl necklace. Her expensive face-lift looked hollow and grey in the dark. "Richard, do something! Call someone!"
"The phones are dead, Eleanor!" Richard Vance snapped. He looked like an old, broken man. His tailored suit was covered in soot. "Everything is dead!"
When the meteorites hit the city last night, the shockwave had leveled the financial district. The Vance estate, Julian’s safe rooms, his luxury cars, all of it was buried under tons of burning, spore-infected rubble.
They had barely made it into the bank vault before the mutant hordes flooded the streets.
"Julian," Richard coughed, pulling his coat tighter. "The food..."
"There is no food!" Julian yelled, his voice cracking. He sounded deranged. "My accounts were frozen! Catrin took all the liquid cash! I couldn’t buy anything!"
"She took the money?" Eleanor gasped, looking up. "She has the billions?"
Julian stared at the dark concrete wall. His mind was racing, fractured by the cold and the terror.
He remembered the phone call.
I bought that mountain property up north.
The only thing that will matter is who is behind a steel wall.
Julian’s eyes widened. A sickening realization washed over him. Catrin hadn’t just stolen his money out of spite. She knew. Somehow, she had known the world was going to end, and she used his empire to build herself a utopia.
"She has a fortress," Julian whispered, his lips blue from the cold.
"What?" Richard asked.
"Catrin," Julian said, standing up on shaky legs. The sheer entitlement began to burn through the freezing cold. "She bought a private mountain before the grid fell. She knew this was coming. She has a bunker up there. She has food."
"She’s your wife, Julian!" Eleanor scrambled up, grabbing his arm. "She has to let us in! She has Nico!"
"She won’t let us in," Julian muttered, remembering the terrifyingly cold sound of Catrin’s laugh on the phone. "She left us to die."
"She is a woman, Julian," Richard sneered, coughing violently. "She is weak. If we get up that mountain, she won’t have a choice. I still have the security override codes for her old banking accounts. I can leverage her."
Julian looked at his father. In the old world, leverage mattered. In this new, frozen hell, he wasn’t sure if Catrin would even blink if they died at her doorstep.
But they had no other choice. If they stayed in this basement, they would freeze to death by tomorrow.
"We wait until the sun comes up," Julian said, his eyes darkening with a desperate, pathetic hatred. "Then we hike north. We’re taking that fortress back."