The deadline Chase gave me to move out was sunset.
Not because he was eager for me to be homeless. Because Ashley's mother was coming to walk through the house tomorrow, and God forbid the shadow of that little brat show up inside it.
Fine. Sunset it was.
There are a lot of things Chase doesn't understand — and this is one he never figured out in two lifetimes: when I move, I'm the kind who moves out down to the last drop.
[SYSTEM ONLINE: STOCKPILE PROTOCOL]Deposit goods valued at $1,000 or more to earn 10 cubic feet of personal storage space per deposit.Days remaining: 15 — Suggested use: don't waste a single one.
The system had made one thing beautifully clear overnight: anything I deposited was safe, quantified, and mine. The catch was the volume — twelve cubic feet couldn't hold the rest of one person's life. So the plan was simple: strip the house, sell nothing, deposit everything, and turn every object in my mother's home into cubic feet of future.
I started in the kitchen, and the system started appraising my things item by item, like a pawnshop broker with a smart mouth.
[DEPOSIT: KITCHEN SET — VALUED AT $340]
[DEPOSIT: STAND MIXER — VALUED AT $299]
[ITEM: APPLES, 3 BAGS — VALUED AT $2.00]Two bucks. For rotten apples. These people.
That one was Beth's doing, of course. She'd left the "gift" on the counter on her way out, the way you leave a tip for bad service. I was tempted to stash them somewhere Chase would stumble over them in fifteen days, but the system wouldn't take garbage, and I wasn't planning on feeding anyone.
By noon, both bedrooms were empty. By two, the garage was too. Summer lay in the truck bed supervising the whole operation, tail going like a windshield wiper in a hurricane, deeply convinced this was the best game ever invented.
The last thing to go was my mother's rocking chair. I sat in it for exactly one minute, then deposited it.
[DEPOSIT: ROCKING CHAIR — VALUED AT $80][STORAGE TOTAL: 24 CUBIC FEET]Observation: emotional attachment detected. Recommendation: more cubic feet.
"Yeah, yeah," I told my own skull. "I'm getting to it."
The money was the easy part — $600,000 in total: $300,000 from the house, $200,000 from a hard money lender who came running the moment he heard the words "we don't ask what the money's for," and the rest wrung out of my credit lines until my phone couldn't even be bothered to warn me anymore.
A hard money lender, for the record, is a man who charges you two hundred percent interest and calls it "bridge financing." Beth would have hated him. So I liked him on sight.
The warehouse club opened at ten. I was fourth in line, with Summer, a borrowed flatbed trailer, and a list that read like a doomsday poet's grocery run.
The rule I'd written on the drive over: coffee is the end-times currency. Not gold, not ammunition — those came later, in bulk. But the man who owns coffee in year three of the apocalypse owns the neighborhood.
So: fifty-pound bags of rice and beans, stacked to the ceiling. Cases of coffee — whole bean, ground, instant, all of it. Canned meat, canned soup, canned vegetables, a canned mountain. Freeze-dried buckets — the kind survival companies sell with a twenty-five-year shelf life, and yes, I read the label twice, because a woman who once ate ten-year-old crackers has opinions about shelf life.
The checkout girl looked at my cart, then at me, then at the cart again. "Big camping trip?" "Something like that," I said. She rang up eleven thousand dollars without changing her expression. Small town. Everyone's seen weirder. Probably.
[DEPOSIT: RICE & BEANS — 480 LBS — VALUED AT $640]** **[DEPOSIT: COFFEE, ASSORTED — VALUED AT $2,150][STORAGE TOTAL: 31 CUBIC FEET]
The system's tone hadn't changed, but I could have sworn the panel lingered on the coffee line, the way a sommelier eyes a good vintage.
"We're going to be rich," I told Summer through the open truck window.
She barked at a shopping cart. Close enough.
One more stop before dark: the hardware store, and the row of gun cases at the very back of it.
Last lifetime, my arsenal had been a snow shovel and a length of rebar, and I had learned — the hard, permanent way — that a blade is a promise you have to keep up close. This lifetime, I intended to keep my promises from across a room.
The man behind the counter had a mustache you could lose a nickel in and the gentle patience of a man who talks first-timers through their first shotgun every single Saturday. "Twelve-gauge," he said, when I told him home defense. "Pump. Never jams on nerves. Anything else?" "A .22," I said. "For hunting. Small game." He nodded, already reaching. "Ammo with that? People are buying it up lately. Something on the news has everybody on edge."
There it was. The atmosphere line I'd been waiting for, delivered free of charge by a man with a mustache you could lose a nickel in.
I bought the shotgun and the .22 that day. The AR came three days later, from a gun show two counties over, from a man who did not ask questions — the paperwork at gun shows has a way of… breathing. That's a joke. Mostly.
And because a wise woman prepares for the day the bullets run out, I added a pry bar, a hatchet, and a machete to the cart. In this world, a pry bar opens doors. In the next one, it closes arguments.
That night, I drove out to see the mine.
Forty minutes out of town, down a county road that hadn't seen fresh paint since the Nixon administration, sat a decommissioned limestone mine with a steel gate, a ventilation shaft, and a previous owner who'd left behind a hand-dug well and a half-finished mushroom growing operation. The realtor sounded almost apologetic as he showed the place.
"It's, uh, niche," he said. "Most folks call it a grave with a driveway."
Behind his back, he was already texting another client about it. I could tell by the way his thumbs moved — the exact same rhythm Beth's had when she texted her sister about my house behind my back.
"I'll take it," I said. "Cash. And I want the mushroom gear left exactly where it is."
He looked like a man being handed a live grenade with the pin already gift-wrapped.
Here's the thing the realtor didn't know, and the internet half-knows, and I knew for certain: in this country, there are real, working farms — inside caves. Constant temperature, constant humidity, no sun required. The previous owner hadn't been insane; he'd simply been early.
I signed the papers by flashlight in the cab of my truck, with Summer's chin heavy on my knee.
[LOCATION REGISTERED: BASE CAMP — SUMMER DELTA]Recommended: stockpile, harden, and stop naming things after the dog.
"Too late," I said. "It's the Summer Delta now."
She thumped her tail against the gearshift. The system could file a complaint.
The last call of the night came at eleven, from Beth, her voice doing that thing where every syllable is dipped in warm syrup.
"Sweetheart, we were thinking — now that the paperwork's settled, maybe you'd like to come to Sunday dinner? Family should stick together during… well, everyone's so worried about this flu."
If it had been two days ago, I would have accepted the invitation with gratitude. Two lifetimes ago, I'd have driven over with a pie.
"I'll pass," I said. "Tell Chase I left the apple bags on the counter. They were a hit."
I hung up on her silence. It was, by my rough count, the first time in two lifetimes that I'd hung up on this family before they hung up on me.
Outside, the wind was picking up. Fourteen days left. The coffee was in the cave, the guns were under the tarp, and the dog was asleep on my feet like she already knew the plan.
Tomorrow: diesel. Real, red, off-road diesel — and the beginning of the part where I stop being polite.