All Chapters of Before the End, I Sold My $3.8 Billion Stake to My Enemy: Chapter 1 - Chapter 10

I died on day forty-three of the end of the world.Selena pinned my wrist and pushed the drug from the syringe into my vein. It came from a vial of my father's heart medication, still bearing a dosage label in my own handwriting."Stop fighting it, Noah." Her voice was as gentle as ever. "What is in that storeroom is enough for me and Damian. You staying alive only wastes medicine."My limbs quickly went limp. I collapsed outside the makeshift camp, and through the half-open iron door I saw Damian take my storeroom keys. He was wearing my hazmat suit and holding my last case of antibiotics."You had everything handed to you from the day you were born." He crouched down, smiling, and patted my cheek. "The company, the money, Selena, even the time to get ready for the end of the world. Too bad you were never any good at reading people."The iron door closed in front of me.Fallout settled on my skin like scalding ash. Farther off, mutant beasts were snarling in the black rain. I heard Se

"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

The note under it was two lines long.Keep pushing for a mental guardianship and the complete recording goes to the prosecutors and every outlet in the state.You can bet that this is the only piece I have.Seven minutes later the bank called to apologize. The fuel payment went through.Selena did not reply. Her silence said she did not dare take the bet.That afternoon I went to Northridge Estate.It sat in the hills north of the Bay Area, under two hours from the city. Above ground stood a dated stone-and-timber mansion, with paint peeling from the window frames and a pool long since drained. Most bidders balked at the upkeep, and the auction house had set the opening price at only seven million dollars.Emma Wilson was waiting at the door. She was the structural engineer the previous owner had employed, and she was carrying a thick stack of drawings."If you are shopping for a vacation house, I would look somewhere else." She skipped the pleasantries. "The roof leaks, the west wall

"We have a complaint that you are carrying out unpermitted military conversion." He held out a stop-work notice. "All exterior and underground work halts immediately, pending fire, structural and land use review."If the contractors stopped, a full day would come off my five-day count.Damian was standing on the terrace of the estate next door, raising his glass in my direction. Beside him stood one of my own subcontractors, a man who had just walked a roll of drawings out of Northridge.Emma kept her voice down. "Should we call the police? Those drawings show the real location of the old shaft.""No. Let him take them."The people who broke into Northridge last time came in through that old vent shaft. If Damian wanted to steal a weak point, I would give him one he could believe in.I had Emma prepare two sets of drawings. On the real set, the old shaft was sealed for good and the true intake was hidden on the far side of the hill. On the false set, the old shaft was still marked as t

"I am already at Northridge."At 7:46 the electric truck came through the gate. Ben's wife carried the two boys out, and the four of them did not hug me or waste time thanking me. They went straight into the outer decontamination zone the way the message had told them to.Before Ben picked up the detector, he said one thing. "Once the door is shut, I am responsible for the power."The first name on the list finally turned green.Emma stayed.She had planned to leave on the afternoon of the wedding, until she saw military families quietly evacuating, strategic bombers going up one after another, and National Guard convoys moving toward the edge of the Bay Area."You knew all along?" she asked from the control room door."I knew something big would happen tonight.""How big?""Big enough to turn every networked device in this place into scrap. Big enough that most of the people in the city never go home again."Emma went pale. Her first reaction was to call her brother, but he was on shi