Chapter 4 The First Cart

Fifty-nine days before the apocalypse

Leila found Nessa in a wholesale aisle comparing two cases of drinking water as if one might tell her the future.

“Are we shopping or moving into the store?” she asked.

“Starting small.”

Leila looked at the flatbed trolley. “Your definition worries me.”

Nessa had bought enough for a short interruption, not the whole disaster. Water. Familiar food. Cleaning supplies. A few practical things she remembered needing when the city first stopped working. She had left the expensive emergency bundles on their brightly advertised shelf.

“If you hate the food now, being frightened won't improve it,” she said.

Leila added the lentil soup Ada liked.

They had talked in the car. Nessa described a need to be prepared without claiming the right to make Leila believe everything she said. She offered to help her assemble a modest reserve for herself and Ada.

“I can pay for our own groceries,” Leila said.

“Then let me help you choose them.”

That had been acceptable.

At checkout, a man ahead of them complained that a weekend delivery slot cost extra. Behind him, a little girl asked for strawberries. Nobody was counting how many days water would remain this easy to buy.

Nessa wanted to tell all of them.

She also remembered what happened when someone believed you had food and they did not. A warning without evidence could make her a spectacle long before it made anybody safe.

She paid, loaded the hired van, and took Leila home.

Before getting out, Leila reached across the console and squeezed her shoulder.

“He'll tell you this was a mistake,” she said. “Remember the part where he asked you to pay for it.”

Nessa laughed, then cried so abruptly she had to put both hands over her face. Leila stayed. She didn't ask Nessa to forgive anyone, or suggest that a useful lesson might make six wasted years feel better. She passed her a tissue and complained about the van's terrible radio until Nessa could breathe again.

For five minutes, no list mattered more than having someone beside her.

“Dinner tomorrow,” Leila said before shutting the door. “Actual dinner. You can't live on lists.”

Nessa agreed.

Back at the hotel, she used the service entrance with permission and brought up only what belonged in her room. Most of the supplies would stay in the locked van until she arranged storage that afternoon.

She was lifting a sealed water bottle from the first carton when the bottle disappeared.

Her hand closed on air.

Nessa stopped breathing.

No impact. No roll beneath the desk. Just a cold grey opening against her palm, there for a moment and then gone.

She backed away and checked the floor anyway.

After returning from death, she should perhaps have been harder to surprise. She wasn't.

Nessa sat on the bed until her pulse slowed. Then she held her hand where the bottle had vanished and thought about its ridged cap.

Grey opened again.

She saw the bottle inside, reached for it, and brought it out.

For a long moment, she forgot Adrian, the wedding, and the messages waiting on her phone.

Then she opened her notebook.

Touch. Attention. Two steady breaths.

She repeated the process with her own packet of crackers and folded towel. The bedside lamp, fixed to the wall, stayed where it was. A container holding a fly she had caught at the window would not enter. She released the fly and wrote a warning to herself: no living things. Never test on a person.

The opening did not lead anywhere she could step into. It held things, not a rescue route.

Nine attempts left her hands shaking.

Nessa stopped and ate. An advantage she didn't understand could become another way to make a bad decision with confidence. She would measure it slowly and keep storing most of her supplies in ordinary places.

She named it the Stillroom.

The water bottle returned cool, exactly as she had put it in. That proved nothing about how long food would last. She set aside two matching food samples for a comparison and made another note.

No assumption of perfect preservation.

At five, Dalia called.

“The settlement team has paused your payout instructions,” she said. “Someone has challenged your right to receive the money.”