“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 footstepsfading 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 agunshot.
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.
Sixteen
Sloane
Iwalked slowly through the aquarium, scouring rooms and supply closets, trying to figure out what counted as useful now. The problem was that I had no idea what the rules were anymore.
Yesterday, useful meant specimen jars, salinity kits, and filtration pumps.