All Chapters of Before the End, I Sold My $3.8 Billion Stake to My Enemy: Chapter 11 - Chapter 20

The crowd finally hit the ground.Seconds later a second flash rose over the harbor. A mushroom cloud rolled up between the city towers and stained the night sky a dark red.The first shock wave crossed the ridge.The ground jolted like something enormous had struck it. An overpass in the distance snapped, a communications tower spat fire, and whole walls of window glass at the estate next door blew out at once. Guests were thrown down, and screaming, crying and flying debris ran together.Smoke from the city mixed with radioactive fallout and descended as thick black rain.Damian, his face covered in blood, still rushed to the glass and barked an order at me. "Open the inner door! These are the most important people in the Bay Area. We only need one night!""That was the last unconditional offer."I pressed the close button.The outermost visitor door started to come down.Selena finally stopped keeping up appearances. She threw herself at the glass and screamed my name. Damian ordere

Inside, the first nuclear mutant had already appeared.Lia spoke first. "He has to be moved into isolation."Tara had already drawn a weapon from Northridge stores and was standing outside the observation window."If he loses control, I can end it now.""We are not there yet." Lia glared at her. "He is conscious and his vitals are stable.""Stable people do not grow black veins."They both looked at me.I had seen the mutation take hold last time. Two hours at the fastest, a full day at the slowest. The early signs were high fever, crystal growth in the wound and increasing strength, and at the end most people lost speech and judgment and were left with nothing but the urge to attack.But nobody in the last life ever documented the first cases properly."Move him to the negative pressure room," I said. "Sedate, restrain, monitor continuously. As long as he can still communicate, he is a patient. Once he breaks the second layer of restraint, he is a threat."Tara did not object. She onl

I was not going to gamble for power when I did not understand the rules.Near the end of the night, Damian took men out to drag away the bodyguard Tara had shot. Fine black radioactive crystals had formed in the wound, and they went through his glove and into his arm.Damian shook his hand hard.The veins under his skin blackened fast and the muscle swelled out of shape. He stared at his own arm without calling for help and without any fear.He looked up at the Northridge cameras and smiled, genuinely delighted.If he could not ram the door open, he was ready to turn himself into something that could.At noon on the second day, Northridge served its first proper hot meal.Steak hissed on the griddle, vegetable soup steamed, and the bread that had just come out of the vault was still as soft as the day it went in. Several survivors sat around the long table and nobody picked up a knife first.On the external monitors, mutant beasts were feeding on corpses beyond the perimeter.One wall

"When the creatures migrate, set off every car alarm we have left," he told the ones who remained. "We go in through the main intake. Noah either holds the front gate or watches the mist fill his fortress."The drone sent back one last frame.Damian looked up into the lens as if he were already standing inside Northridge.He had finally found the weak point I left him on purpose.The migration came ten hours earlier than it had last time.At two in the morning, every infrared sensor on the Northridge perimeter lit up at once. Dozens of mutant beasts poured out of the deep woods, some still shaped roughly like dogs, some with limbs grown wildly out of proportion. The lights of the wedding estate, the smell of blood and the car alarms drew all of them toward the hilltop.Damian started every car he had left.The shriek of the alarms ran together in the dark and pulled the pack toward the main gate of Northridge. At the same time, thermal caught more than a dozen human shapes on the back

Most important of all, there was no passage between it and the living quarters.The thick steel plate that the drawings showed leading to the inner door was only a tungsten steel decoy that could be dropped out whole.I had Tara turn on the outer wall floodlights.Damian and Selena stood in the snow. Half of Damian's face still looked human. Selena wore the wreck of a wedding gown, and dark purple fluid kept weeping from her exposed skin.There were three stretchers behind them."I brought three ordinary survivors." Damian raised both hands toward the camera. "No mutation, no weapons. Let them in first and prove your good faith.""Look up," I said.The scout drone dropped off the ridge and brought its lens close to the stretchers. None of the so-called survivors were breathing, and something under their clothing was moving. Thermal showed all three abdomens packed with living mutant tissue, like a nest of eggs about to hatch.Emma's teeth clenched. "They want those things to burst open