Chapter 15
Fifteen
Callan
Once we had a plan for the fish, we turned our attention to food.
Real survival. The practical kind that didn’t care about grief or shock or what we’d seen from the roof. This came down to calories and shelf life and how long two people could sustain themselves on what a mid-sized aquarium cafeteria had in its stockroom.
I grabbed a legal pad from the director’s desk and a pen from the cup beside the monitor and sat down.
The pen scratched against the paper in the quiet room.
FOOD, WATER, POWER, SECURITY
Four words. Four categories. Everything else was detail at this point.
The structure of it helped; lines on a page and filling them in made this seem like a problem that could be conquered. A problem with variables and constraints, and a solution somewhere inside it, if we were smart enough and disciplined enough to find it.
Sloane watched me as I wrote. A few feet away, arms crossed, her eyes on my hands as the list grew. She said nothing, but the question was there in the way she stood, the way her weight shifted forward and then back. How are you doing this? How are you sitting here making lists?
The truth was simple and not noble; I wasn’t holding it together because I wasn’t stronger or braver.
I was holding it together because if I stopped, she’d have no one.
And the part of me that had spent four years in places where falling apart meant people died—that part was still running, still doing what it had been trained to do, which was to keep moving until there was no reason left to move.
That part would break, just not yet.
We moved into the cafeteria kitchen together. The fluorescent lights flickered when I hit the switch—the industrial refrigerators lined the back wall, drawing power from the generators.
“Perishables first,” she said. Her voice was steady, hard with resolve, as if she were forcing herself into the part of her that solves problems instead of drowning in them.
I nodded. “Anything fresh. We eat it now. No waste.”
I opened the nearest refrigerator and stared at the contents. Eggs in trays. Gallons of milk. Produce still crisp. Meat sealed in bulk. Enough to feed hundreds. Seven days of usable life. Ten if we stretched it. Less if power failed.
Sloane opened the cooler beside me.
“It’s almost surreal,” she murmured. “Monday, this place fed three hundred people.”
“And today it feeds us.”
We inventoried everything. She wrote while I counted—perishables first, then dry storage; canned goods, pasta, rice, protein bars, shelf-stable supplies portioned for crowds.
“We could stretch the dry goods for years,” she said, scanning the numbers. She looked up, realizing what she had just said, and grimaced.
“If we ration,” I agreed, pretending not to have noticed the “years” comment.
Her eyes drifted toward the tanks visible through the kitchen doorway.
“And then the fish.”
I nodded. Neither of us liked that part.
* * *
We returned to the director’s office. I stood in the doorway for a moment before entering.
I spoke first.
“I’ve been thinking about the generators.”
Sloane looked up.
“They’ve got enough fuel to last over a month at full operational load.”
Her eyebrows rose. “That’s better than I expected.”
“It gets better. If we start shutting down nonessential systems, we can extend that. Significantly extend it.”
She straightened. “What would we shut down?”
“Everything that isn’t keeping us alive.” I stepped forward and traced the building blueprint pinned to the wall. “Tank lights off at night. No exceptions. They’re visible from outside. Even with storm shutters, light leaks. Anything out there that sees light will investigate.”
Her throat moved as she swallowed.
“We kill all visible indicators that we’re here,” I said.
“Hide,” she said quietly.
“Exactly.”
I moved to another section of the blueprint.
“We consolidate living space. Cafeteria. Locker room. This office. Everything else gets sealed off. And the AC goes.”
She grimaced. “It’ll get hot.”
“It’ll keep us alive longer.”
She didn’t argue.
“We also cook everything that’ll spoil,” I continued. “Use the kitchen while we still have stable power. Prepare it, portion it, freeze it. If the power fluctuates later, we’ve already preserved what matters. I know a trick for drying meat in the oven.”
She nodded slowly. “Reduces waste.”
“And risk.”
Silence settled between us. I watched her process it—the scope of what I was describing. Not a few bad days, or a rough week waiting for the National Guard.
Then she asked the real question.
“How long do you estimate we can stay here?”
I’d run the numbers enough times.
“With significant rationing,” I said, “months.”
The word thick between us; she leaned back, letting it settle.
“That’s a long time,” she said.
“Yes.”
Her eyes searched mine. “And you think we’ll need it?”
“I think we prepare as if we will.”
She was quiet for a moment, turning the pen over between her fingers.
“We need to have a plan beyond this place too,” she said. “There’ll be evacuation zones. Military response. Governments don’t just collapse overnight.”
I heard the hope in it. Dangerous, but probably necessary for Sloane to keep going.
“Maybe,” my voice was vague.
She studied me. “You don’t believe that?”
I let out a sigh. “If they were going to stop it, they would have.”
Her jaw tightened. She didn’t want that to be true. Neither did I.
“So we hold here,” I said. “We conserve what we can. We wait for a government response, and if no one comes—”
“They will,” she finished.
We settled the food plan—rationing, preservation priorities, system shutdowns—and the room grew quieter in a different way. Sloane glanced toward the small couch along the office wall, then back at me.
“So where are we supposed to sleep?”
I followed her gaze. The couch would barely fit one person, let alone two.
“I thought about that,” I said. “There’s a second couch in the employee lounge. We can drag it in here and set them across from each other.”
It wasn’t perfect, but it was a plan.
I remembered something else. I crossed to the director’s closet and pulled out what was inside: a battery-powered lantern, a rolled sleeping bag, two pillows, and a stack of paperback books with yellowed edges.
Sloane watched from across the room.
“What’s all that?”
“Hurricane Isolde,” I said. “Eight years ago, the storm surge flooded the lower access roads. The director got trapped here for two days, no power, no one able to reach him.” I set the items on the desk. “He swore he’d never get caught unprepared again.”
Her fingers brushed the sleeping bag.
“There’s only one,” she said.
“Yeah.”
The room was quiet for a beat too long.
“We can push the couches together,” I said. “If we open the sleeping bag flat, we can use it as a shared blanket.”
She stared at me, thoroughly unimpressed with the arrangement.
I kept my face neutral.
She crossed her arms. “I’m going to look for other supplies,” she said, and turned toward the door.
Her footsteps faded down the corridor, and I stood there in the office alone for a moment, listening to the building around me. This was it: this office, these supplies, these walls.
Whether or not she liked it, we were going to survive it together. She vanished down the hallway, her footsteps fading as the tile kept time long after she was gone.
I wasn’t sure what she expected to find. This place held towels in the locker room and lost-and-found sweatshirts, not a home with blankets and comfort.
It was built for visitors, not for survival.
Still, if it gave her something to do, to focus on besides the burning city outside our walls, then so be it. And I needed to move too.
So I grabbed the flashlight from the director’s desk and headed for the stairwell. The lights we’d shut off left long stretches of hallway dim and shadowed, with only the emergency strips along the floor glowing red, guiding like runway lights.
The deeper I descended, the louder the mechanical heartbeat of the building became, water rushing through miles of pipe as if the place breathed like a living thing.
I descended to the lowest level—the service corridor that connected to the parking garage. The air was cooler there, with its concrete walls and bare pipes along the ceiling.
I walked toward the door to the parking garage. It was secure, an automatic lock in place, but that meant little once the power went out. The locks might trigger a safety release. I did not know how that worked, or if possibly someone could force it.
Near the maintenance lockers, I found what I hoped for: chains. Thick steel ones used to secure equipment during storms, and a handful of heavy padlocks.
“Perfect,” I muttered as I dragged the chains to the door and looped them through the steel support bars, threading them through the anchor brackets along the wall. The metal clanged in the empty corridor, each sound echoing like a gunshot.
It took a few minutes to wrap it. When I finished, the door wouldn’t open without bolt cutters—or a truck.
I stepped back, breathing a little heavier than I had expected, but there was now one less way in. I moved through the lower corridors after that, checking every service entrance I found: maintenance doors, emergency exits, loading dock access.
The work was physical and repetitive, but each locked door felt like a small victory, a line drawn between us and the chaos outside.
Now and then, I’d hear something faint through the walls—a muffled scream carried on the wind.
Once, something slammed against the exterior of the building somewhere above me, and I froze in the hallway, flashlight beam steady on the door in front of me.
The sound stayed in my chest, a twisted reminder that this place seemed safe, but outside… outside, the world had ended.
And the only other living soul inside these walls was a five-foot-tall marine biologist with freckles and a stubborn streak a mile wide.
The same marine biologist whose lips I’d claimed in that unforgivable moment upstairs, my hands still burned where they’d touched her, still tasted her in my mouth—salt and fear and something sweeter; the memory made my cock twitch.
What terrified me wasn’t the regret, but how desperately I wanted to do it again, even knowing she might never forgive me for the first time.
I tightened the last chain around a maintenance door and snapped the padlock shut; the click echoed down the corridor. I leaned back against the cold concrete and exhaled.
One thought kept circling in my mind, not about the monsters outside or about the city burning, but about her.
Sloane was strong. Smarter than most gave her credit for. But she wasn’t ready for what this world was becoming, and that meant one thing.
I would have to be.