Chapter 3

"Damian took control, and the first thing he did was freeze the Richard Cross Medical Relief Program, the charity founded in your father's name."

"It costs eight million dollars a year. He is squeezing that too?"

"Not squeezing. He wants the program's three warehouses turned into wedding sponsorship assets. The first aid kits and the water purification tablets inside get written off as scrap tomorrow morning."

Last time, after the war started, I saw the same first aid kits in a collapsed clinic. A girl used the last clotting shot in one of them to save her father. I did not know then that all of it had belonged to us in the first place.

"Give me the warehouse addresses."

"You are not a director anymore."

"So I buy at market price."

I had the lawyers draft a purchase agreement on the spot and raised the price by twenty percent. Damian had just spent $2.4 billion on the company. He needed cash, and he would not care about disaster relief stock he considered garbage.

Ten minutes later he approved the sale, exactly as I expected, and used the email to sneer that I had finally found a business that suited me.

I looked at the inventory for the three warehouses. Antibiotics, suture kits, purification tablets, folding stretchers, thermal blankets for children.

Before the end of the world, they were numbers on a financial report waiting to be written off.

Seven days later, every one of them could save a life.

Once they left, I called the first purchasing agent.

"Under the name of a restaurant chain expansion, buy out the standing stock at three large cold storage facilities in the Bay Area. Staples, freeze-dried food, canned goods, meat. Plan for twenty years of use."

The second call went to the head of a disaster relief foundation.

"Water treatment equipment, medicine, cold weather gear and power generation systems. All of it through legal disaster reserve channels."

The third call went to a film production company.

"That disaster movie you are developing, I am funding it. Add riot gear, satellite phones, drones and wilderness survival equipment to the props list."

Last of all I contacted the auction agent for Northridge Estate.

Last time, that estate held out through the first two months of the war. In the end it was not broken open by monsters. It was opened from the inside by the people living there.

This time, I would choose both the estate and everyone entrusted with its doors.

My finance manager sent over the first list soon after and asked whether I really meant to buy twenty years of freeze-dried food in one go.

On the television, the expert was still saying the war would never reach American soil.

I sent back one line.

"All of it delivered within seven days."

Six days out, the first shipment reached Warehouse One at three in the morning.

Forty heavy trucks lined up outside the industrial park, loaded with flour, rice, beans, canned goods, freeze-dried vegetables and full pallets of drinking water. The drivers complained that the unloading window was too short, and the warehouse manager kept asking me why we were not waiting for the restaurant locations to confirm addresses.

I did not explain.

After the last dockworker left I locked the warehouse, put on gloves and started touching the first row of racks.

Whole pallets of canned goods vanished in front of me and went into the east side of the vault. Staples in the middle, medicine and medical consumables in their own zone, diesel and ammunition each isolated. Time was frozen inside, so the frozen meat that had just arrived needed no power at all.

In under two hours, sixty-five thousand square feet of warehouse was empty except for the racks.

I leaned against the door for a few minutes. Taking large loads back to back drained my focus, and my temples felt like something blunt was tapping at them. That was the price of the ability, and the reason I still had to keep a physical fortress and people to run it.

After sunrise, the second shipment went to Warehouse Two.

This time it was not food. Small machine tools, welders, filter cartridges, solar panels, storage batteries, greenhouse frames, agricultural seeds, and frozen livestock embryos.

Mark Dawson, the purchasing agent, looked at the list and finally asked, "Mr. Cross, I understand the canned food. But what do you need six small lathes for? Are you opening a factory in your basement?"

"Broken parts do not grow back on their own."

"And the toilet paper, the baby formula and the feminine hygiene products? Does your restaurant chain sell those too?"