All Chapters of This Time I Keep the Keys : Chapter 21 - Chapter 30

Thirty-nine days before the apocalypseBy eleven, the heated clothes rack had become the most expensive thing in the room.Nessa looked from the damp towels to the battery record. She had added the rack to the trial because wet bedding would be a problem after a storm. It was useful. That didn't make its appetite smaller.The electrician had set up the agreed test at nine, temporarily stopping charging so they could see what the stored supply actually supported. The repaired installation worked. The question now was how long it would work while people lived in the house.Gideon put the morning's readings beside her plan.“What needs to stay on while you're asleep?”“The freezer. Essential lights. The agreed charging points.”“And this?”She looked at the rack.“It needs to dry towels.”“Does it need to do that from the same reserve?”She wanted to say yes. She remembered clothes that never quite dried, the smell of damp wool in the shelter, the humiliation of putting cold socks back o

Thirty-three days before the apocalypseThe crash came before Nessa finished signing for her order.Metal struck concrete. Someone shouted for the forklift to stop.She turned toward the neighboring loading bay. A wheeled cage had gone over beside a stack of cases. A worker sat against the wall with his lower leg trapped between the fallen frame and the load.Rain blew beneath the canopy, turning the dock's yellow line dark.Gideon was there to collect a pump for his crew. They had booked adjacent collection slots to avoid two separate waits. Now he put his paperwork down and moved toward the injured man.“Keep this approach clear,” he told Nessa. “Stay behind the line. Call emergency services.”She made the call.Her voice came out too high on the first sentence. She stopped, gave the yard's full address, and answered the questions instead of trying to tell everything at once.The forklift operator shut down the machine. Gideon's crewman, Rory, stopped other workers crowding around t

Twenty-seven days before the apocalypseThe dentist asked Nessa when she'd last had the filling checked.She gave him a year. Then, reluctantly, a different year.“It's been catching on things,” she admitted.He nodded, examined it, and explained the repair. The filling needed work she had postponed while answering other people's urgent messages.There was a cancellation that afternoon.Nessa accepted it before she could decide another delivery mattered more.The remaining carton from the loading bay had been collected yesterday and entered as received. The house still worked. An ordinary morning could belong to her teeth without the whole plan falling apart.At noon, she took her medical folder to Etta's clinic.The waiting room contained a woman with a sleeping toddler and an elderly man reading a newspaper. Nessa sat among them with copies of records she had finally gathered in one place. She had bought equipment for frightening injuries before checking whether she could find the n

Twenty days before the apocalypseNessa recognized her shelves before she recognized the van.The photograph had been posted in the residents' group to complain about a courier blocking the service lane. It showed the narrow bend, the driver's open door, and the brightly lit interior of Highwater Eight's garage.Behind the van stood her food.Not every box. Enough labels to make the rest easy to imagine.The post was four hours old.Nessa opened the full photograph and felt the old, sick urge to explain it away. She had spent too much time making sure the supplies existed to think properly about what the open door advertised.Tamsin looked over her shoulder.“Ask her to take it down.”“The van really was blocking the lane.”“That doesn't mean everyone needs a look inside your house.”The neighbor was Mina Pell, two doors along. Nessa had spoken to her once about putting the rubbish out on the correct evening.She went to Mina's front door with the delivery schedule in her hand.Mina a

Fourteen days before the apocalypseThe coastal notice appeared between a train delay and a reminder to renew a parking permit.Nessa read it standing in the kitchen. Rough conditions along the outer harbor. Possible overtopping at exposed roads from late afternoon into the following morning. The notice carried today's date and a time for the next update.She checked the source, then read the actual warning rather than the headline someone had attached to it.It wasn't a forecast for June second. It was enough to change tomorrow's route.Behind her, the house held the small successes of the last three days. The carton left unopened after her fall had been inspected on the seventeenth. After rest, she'd returned the remaining test water to the ordinary shelves in short private sessions on the eighteenth. Her hands had stayed steady. She hadn't rewarded that by doing more.The notice stayed on her screen while she called Gideon.“Have you seen the coastal update?”“We're looking at it n