My credit score was 782.
I knew this because at 7:04 in the morning, sitting in the cab of my truck outside the cave with Summer's head on my thigh, I checked it — the way you check the odometer on a car you're about to drive off a cliff. Thirteen days left. Excellent credit. It was, objectively, the most valuable thing I owned. And I was about to spend every last point of it on canned peaches.
In my first life, I had been terrified of debt. Mom raised me on one rule and one rule only: never owe anybody anything. She'd died with a paid-off mortgage and a savings account earning 0.8% interest, and the drunk driver hadn't spared either a glance.
This life, I changed the rule: owe everybody everything. Because in thirteen days, the entire concept of "owing" was going to be repossessed along with civilization — and when that moment came, I intended to pull that lever as far as it would go, and make it look beautiful doing it.
· ·
The bank approved the personal loan over the phone while I was in the drive-through lane. Twelve thousand dollars, "for home improvement," at the branch whose parking lot I'd cried in eleven years ago, when the scholarship refund cleared and Beth's hand was already out. This time I took the money. I did not cry.
The car loan was even easier. The dealership approved me for a late-model crew-cab diesel truck with a gooseneck hitch, a truck built for people who pull horse trailers through mountain passes, and the finance manager shook my hand for a full four seconds as if I'd personally rescued his quarterly numbers.
Then came the credit cards. Four approvals before lunch. Every approval chime on my phone sounded a little more like the system's ding, and by three o'clock the two chimes had started to blur together into one long, beautiful tune: money exists, take it, money exists, take it.
[OBSERVATION: SUBJECT ACQUIRING DEBT AT ABNORMAL VELOCITY]
Query: is this wise?
"It's only wise for thirteen days," I said, signing the last screen. "After that, ask my creditors."
[OBSERVATION WITHDRAWN.]
· ·
The hard money man's name was Marv Denton, and his office was a prefab trailer perched above a check-cashing shop, with a desk plaque that said WE SAY YES WHEN BANKS SAY NO and, beneath it, in smaller letters, ASK US HOW.
He was sixty, suntanned like a lifelong golfer, and he counted out the second tranche — eighty grand, cash-grade — while explaining the interest rate with exactly the swagger other men save for their fishing stories. "Two points a month. That's twenty-four a year, compounded, so in practice, missy—" he'd been calling me missy for ten minutes, "—you'll want to pay me back quick."
"I'll pay you back never," I said pleasantly, and watched the smile drop off his face like a mitten off a clothesline.
He recovered the way a shark recovers: instantly, and without a shred of guilt. "Everybody says that the week they sign. Come the third month, they remember they own a name, a Social Security number, and a future."
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I signed where he told me to sign. His paperwork was a masterpiece of gray — not quite legal, not quite not, the kind of document that only ever gets tested in rooms without judges. In my first life I'd watched men like Marv inherit the ruins. This time I was happy to leave them the paper.
"Pleasure doing business," Marv said.
"It really was," I said. And I meant it. It was the last honest conversation either of us would ever have.
· ·
Marv's money went to work the same afternoon: a pallet-load of MREs from a surplus dealer in the next county, two hundred pounds of salt and sugar, a chest freezer I'd never plug in, and the copper wire, pipe fittings, and hand tools that would, in three years, be worth more per pound than silver.
That was when Marv's man came knocking at the cave door.
He was in his early thirties, a gym tank under a collection-agency windbreaker, and he walked like a man paid by the visit: fast, loud, and always angled toward an audience. He was slapping the steel door with the flat of his hand and shouting his pitch through it before I'd even reached the vestibule.
"Ma'am? Ms. Reeves? Need to have a little conversation about your account—"
I opened the door. I was holding a twelve-gauge pump in the exact posture of someone who scrubs hers weekly and knows it jams on nothing. Summer stood at my hip, ninety pounds of professional silence, doing the thing where she looked at a stranger the way a judge looks at a case file.
The windbreaker recalculated his entire afternoon.
"Payment's not due yet," I said. "First payment's in thirty days. Your boss knows it. You know it. So let's skip straight to why you're really here: go back and tell Marv his interest rate is a crime, his paperwork is decoration, and the next time he sends one of his people down my county road, he'd better call first — or we'll be having this conversation with the door open."
He looked at the gun. He looked at the dog. He looked at the county road behind him, forty minutes from the nearest sheriff's deputy, and did the kind of math Marv never taught him.
"Have a good one, ma'am," he said, already walking.
Note for the record: American debt collectors are a species domesticated by law — no paint-splashing, no rough stuff, and paperwork thicker than a dental claim. That's exactly why men like Marv recruit outside the law; and it's exactly why men like Marv's boy don't argue with a farmwoman whose guns are legal, registered, and kept spotlessly clean.
I went back inside and finished racking the copper wire. The system slipped into that analytical silence I knew so well.
[DEPOSIT: COPPER WIRE & TOOLS — VALUED AT $3,400]
[STORAGE TOTAL: 203 CUBIC FEET]
Remark: the debt collection specimen fled at 1.4 meters per second. For the record.
"He wasn't fleeing," I said. "He was making an efficient exit."
If you say so.
· ·
The call from Beth came at dinner, her syrup dial turned all the way up past eleven.
"Sweetheart, your father heard you took out some loans, and we're just worried — you're all alone out there, and money troubles, they weigh on a girl, and your brother said if you ever need help managing—"
There it was. They'd heard. Small towns hear everything, and Beth's church network hears it twice. Somewhere between the dealership and the gun show, I had become a rumor: the Reeves girl, borrowing money like there's no tomorrow.
I looked at the cave around me — the diesel tank, the filter bank, four hundred pounds of rice sleeping in the dark — and I thought, with the serenity of a woman holding all the cards and most of the ammunition: there isn't a tomorrow. That's the whole point.
"Tell Chase thanks for worrying," I said. "And tell your Bible study group I said hi. I hear they're praying for me."
A pause, the exact length of a woman realizing the fence talk has a hole in it. "…You know about that?"
"Small town," I said, and hung up first. Again. That made it two for two.
Outside, the evening news was doing a segment on "emergency preparedness" that spent four minutes mocking preppers and then, in the last thirty seconds, quietly told viewers to keep two weeks of water on hand. The red circle had grown again. Twelve days now.
Twelve days, four banks, one shark, and a cave full of everything that matters.
Tomorrow, we buy trees.