The cabin was packed to the rafters.
Lee Mi-joo stared at the mountains of supplies, enough to send any hoarder into a religious experience, and looked at Leon like she was staring at a man who had completely lost his mind.
Leon stood in the basement, surveying his stockpile.
Military rations.
Canned goods.
Medicine.
The foundation of any fighting force worth keeping alive.
But it wasn’t enough.
Not even close.
What he wanted was the entire prison.
The absolute, uncontested power to hold it in his grip even after the world stopped making rules.
Seizing the prison meant deaths.
He’d probably have to cut down a significant number of resisters, and that would gut the population.
He accepted that.
But feeding this many people on expensive canned goods?
They’d burn through everything in under a month.
Half a month if they weren’t careful.
He needed staples.
The cheapest, most filling food on earth.
The kind that could keep a person from starving for a full year.
Flour.
Corn.
Beans.
Americans might turn their noses up at rice , until they were hungry enough.
Then they’d come around.
And weapons.
Over in Ashley’s block, the daggers her women had ground from toothbrush handles were good for one thing: a quiet kill when nobody was looking.
Easy fights on favorable terms.
If he wanted those women to crack open Block A and Block B , territory held by male heavies like Marcus , and storm the Armory past armed officers, they needed real gear.
Arming everyone with firearms wasn’t realistic on his budget.
But against opponents who were equally unarmed, he only needed melee weapons.
Mass-produced, standardized, enough to kit out a squad of a hundred.
Against the officers who did carry guns, firearms were non-negotiable , but officers were a minority.
He didn’t need to arm every inmate.
Guns were leverage, and leverage pointed the wrong direction could end him.
So the math was simple: enough guns to overpower the guards, all of them in the hands of people he trusted.
No more, no less.
Which meant Shane was off the table for now.
Getting him to spend a hundred thousand dollars on survival supplies had been Leon’s payment for a service rendered , a service involving a body and no witnesses.
Going back to Shane with more money, asking him to buy a dozen tons of flour and a few hundred machetes?
That was just writing I played you in permanent marker across his own forehead.
This run, he’d handle himself.
Leon reached into the travel bag, the one that belonged to Shane and Lori, and pulled out thick stacks of cash.
He stuffed them into a plain, unremarkable backpack.
He needed a truck.
The next day, Leon called in and took the day off.
He rented the largest U-Haul box truck available in town and drove straight to the Atlanta suburbs, to a warehouse membership store called Cost-U-Less , the kind of place that supplied restaurants and institutional kitchens, where everything came in industrial packaging and the aisles were wide enough to drive a forklift down.
Leon grabbed a massive flatbed cart and pushed it straight to the grain and oil section.
“Hey there, need any help?”
A Black manager in a red vest walked over, built like a brown bear who’d decided to pursue a career in retail.
“I’ll take everything on that flour shelf.”
Leon pointed at the wall of 25-kilogram bags.
Mike’s smile locked up.
“Sir…
are you serious?
That’s close to five tons of flour.”
“No offense, but you probably couldn’t get through five tons in ten years.”
“I’m serious.” Leon pointed to the shelf beside it.
“And I’m starting to think it might not be enough.” He moved his finger.
“The rice over there.
Same thing.
Salt, sugar, cooking oil — twenty boxes of each.”
The look on Mike’s face shifted.
He took an involuntary half-step back and studied this soft-spoken Asian man with entirely new eyes.
“Sir, we don’t extend credit here.”
Leon unzipped his backpack.
Neat stacks of Benjamins stared back at them both.
Mike stopped breathing for a second.
“You…
what exactly are you buying all this for?” He tried to keep it light.
“Is the world ending or something?”
The suspicion underneath wasn’t light at all.
“I work for a church charity.” Leon’s expression didn’t flicker.
“We’re building a new food bank on the west side of the city.
Free meals for the unhoused.”
It was an airtight story.
“But—”
“I know this is unusual, Manager Mike.”
Leon pulled a thick stack from the backpack , at least a thousand dollars , and pressed it into Mike’s hand.
“That’s yours.
For your time.”
“All I need is for you to help load everything onto my truck.
Quietly.
No questions from anyone.”
“You do that, you keep the tip and you earn the commission on the sale.”
“That works out well for both of us.
Doesn’t it?”
Mike felt the weight of the bills.
The suspicion dissolved off his face like it had never been there, replaced by the warmest, most genuine smile Leon had seen all week.
“God bless you, sir.
You are truly a good man.”
“Serving God is my honor.”
Mike slipped the cash into his pocket without looking down, lifted his walkie-talkie, and bellowed across the warehouse floor.
“Jerry!
Bring the forklift over!
Clear A-7 and A-8!
Move it!
We’ve got a VIP!”
Thirty minutes later, the U-Haul sat so heavy the chassis had visibly dropped.
Leon pointed it toward the suburbs.
Next: weapons.
He pulled into the parking lot of a large outdoor sports and hardware chain called Outdoor World.
He walked straight past the gleaming fishing rods and camping displays, past the tents and the kayaks, and went directly to the gardening tools and hardware section.
Collins brand.
Eighteen-inch jungle machetes.
Thirty of them hanging on a pegboard rack.
“I’ll take all of them.”
Louisville Slugger hardwood baseball bats.
Fifty in the sporting goods aisle.
“All of them.”
Fire axes.
Crowbars.
Framing hammers.
Pipe wrenches.
Every shelf Leon pointed at got stripped bare.
The cashier working the register was a high school kid on a part-time shift.
His hands shook as he scanned item after item in a relentless parade of machetes, axes, crowbars, and bats, each one rolling down the belt like a production line of violence.
He kept his eyes down and didn’t say a word.
When Leon settled the bill in cash and peeled off a hundred-dollar bill for a tip, the kid took it with trembling fingers and stared at him.
He looked at Leon the way you’d look at someone who’d just announced they were going to war with a neighborhood.
“Sir…
have a…” He swallowed.
“Have fun?”
Leon didn’t bother responding.
He loaded the truck alone, trip after trip, hauling steel and hardwood until the suspension groaned under the weight.
Night had fallen by the time he pulled back up to the cabin.
Lee Mi-joo watched him carry the machetes and baseball bats up to the second floor in armload after armload.
Her face had gone the color of old ash.
She didn’t ask a single question.
She just quietly helped him sort everything , stacking, organizing, putting it all where it needed to go.
The cabin wasn’t a cabin anymore.
It was an armory.
It was a granary.
It was the beginning of something that had no name yet.
Leon surveyed what he’d built and gave a single satisfied nod.
Everything was in place.
Now he needed the right moment to get these weapons into Ashley’s hands.
And he needed to find a reason to pay a visit to the “King” of Block B , Marcus , and take his measure up close.
His prison-issued phone went off in his pocket.
It didn’t ring once or twice.
It vibrated frantically, like someone was hammering the call button on the other end.
Ashley.
Leon answered.
He didn’t get a word in.
Her voice came through tight with suppressed panic, sharp with anger, words tumbling over each other.
“Leon!
Something happened!”
“Frank — that old bastard Frank!”
“He’s dead!”
➤ Next: Marcus Refuses to Cooperate