Because the rescue convoys on the radio weren't coming to you. Nobody was going to drive to wherever you happened to be and carry you out.
There was exactly one route. The broadcasts named a few relatively safe rally zones, and if you could get yourself to one of them, the convoys would scoop you up as they passed.
Which meant the road there was the dangerous part. The Reeves family balked the moment they realized the nearest rally point was a long drive away — what if something happened on the way? They were old and pregnant and soft, every one of them. What then?
I talked them around. Don't cling to a few days of comfort; get to the rally point and you'd actually be safe. There'd be government food distributions. Beth would have a safe place to have the baby. Grandma Carol would have a safe place to grow old.
Most important: I was almost certain this wave of rescue would not last. Get on it now, or later nobody would take them at all.
The family argued long into the night, then finally did as I said and packed up every scrap of supplies they had.
And every guess I'd made turned out right. The convoy they caught was the last one — the only one. After that, the city was written off entirely.
Too many of the dead, too much ground to hold. The best anyone could do was pull out one wave of survivors and carve out a safe zone to use as a base.
A base — a human stronghold holding out against the dead. That was the shape of the late world. Stage four of the apocalypse: the Age of Bases.
Getting in early had made them lucky beyond words — free supplies in the beginning, free housing. Everyone who crawled in later had to hand over everything they carried and sleep in whatever shanty they could raise with their own hands. The later you arrived, the worse it got.
By every measure, I had walked the right road my whole first life. I made exactly one mistake: I'd treated the Reeves like family.
I'd planned for them with my whole heart — and in the end, they'd shoved me out the gate to take the teeth of the horde in their place.
That kick was what woke me up. A person has to learn real self-love. To grow up. To stop reaching for things that were never mine. *Family* — that word had been my delusion from the beginning.
I'd survived out of that sea of corpses and blood, washed up at another base, and by then my heart had finished changing. No more loving, no more wanting to be loved. Absolute cold, and the rebellion that ran in my bones.
Stage five of the apocalypse — the Awakening, the era of abilities — and there I was: the only squad captain without one.
An ordinary woman — me — holding my ground among the gifted, with a squad that ranked first, year after year. Everyone knew: give me even one power, and forget the guard — the whole base would have been mine.
My strength had never come from anywhere but myself. Find the original chapter at g.com.
But late in the world, the war against the dead got harder and harder, the scattered bases carved themselves up into feuding fiefs thick with schemes, and I died in the siege of my own base — one more wall lost, one more light out.
"Enough. Doesn't matter — I'm never joining anyone else's base."
I rubbed the ache out of my brow and came back to the present.
Those carved-up bases were never sanctuaries. Early on they had no rules at all — everything grew wild, and it wasn't a heaven for ordinary people, it was the most law-of-the-jungle place on earth. Bases where a person could live in something like peace? You could count them. I clawed my way up in one the hard way, by being the most ruthless name in it. If you weren't ruthless there, you didn't survive.
"This is my base."
I looked at the bunker I'd built with my own hands, and my eyes lit. I would make it stronger. I would build it into a real fortress — my own steel castle.
I flipped through the remaining channels, confirmed every signal was dead and nothing useful was left, then got up and went back to work on my fortifications.
And I remembered — my construction reward period was still running.
Fed and watered, I took Summer out to the plot I'd fenced as a garden. In one corner, using the pile of branches and deadwood I'd been collecting for weeks, I threw up a simple coop and run.
When the coop stood finished, I waved a hand — and the two dozen chickens and ducks I'd bought weeks ago simply went in.
I'd set aside a separate pen too, and I moved the two lambs into it.
Ding — livestock detected: poultry and sheep.
Reward: breeding vitality and health raised to maximum. Free of disease, permanently.
I stared. Right in front of me, a hen came strolling past, squawked once, and laid an egg — warm and fresh, on the spot.
I picked a clearing over by the orchard — chosen for its water table, low ground near my well — and started digging a pond.
Digging a pond is labor. I dug the whole day through and came out with a modest square of water.
Then I cut a channel from the base of my well, and when it broke through, the water came rolling in on its own. Once the pond filled, I tipped in the fish and the shrimp — in separate halves, a divider down the middle, so the fish wouldn't eat the shrimp out of house and home.
Ding — fish pond and shrimp pond detected.
Reward: breeding vitality and health raised to maximum. Free of disease, permanently.
I'd honestly been worried — fish and shrimp take real technique, and I'd been afraid I'd botch it. Instead the system had simply handled it for me. A system like that is worth carrying. I only had to push forward; it cleaned up everything else.
With the birds, the lambs, the fish and the shrimp all settled, I got back to hardening the base itself.
I'd been a squad captain in my first life, and security construction was my trade. The basic works already stood: electrified fence with razor ribbon, steel gates, the bunker. What I needed now was something offensive.
The big stuff I couldn't get. Simple pits, though — pits I could dig.
I left Summer to watch the house and went out alone to the woods, five hundred yards past the wire, and started laying traps. Let anyone who came creeping in find out the hard way what kind of welcome this place offers — and let them run.
A full day of digging. Ten pit traps, laid across nearly every path a stranger could use to come at the place — right on their inevitable routes.
The moment the last trap was finished, the voice arrived.
Ding — pit traps ×10 detected.
Reward: trap lethality increased a hundredfold.
I hadn't even finished smiling when a second chime came through.
Ding — base foundational defense: complete.