Eighteen
Callan
By the time we made it back to the director’s office, the building had settled into its nighttime rhythm—generators running low, water moving through pipes somewhere behind the walls, and the occasional distant splash from one of the tanks.
I set the marine radio on the desk and rubbed the back of my neck. My shoulders ached. Everything ached, actually. The kind of bone-deep tired that comes from running on fear indefinitely.
“Are you hungry?” Sloane asked.
I let out a breath that almost passed for a laugh.
“Yeah. Actually, I am.”
She nodded toward the hallway. “Tomorrow, when it’s light, we should start cooking through the perishables. Get everything prepped and into the freezers before it goes bad.”
“Agreed.” I paused. “And we need to finish dealing withthe rest of the fish situation, too.”
Her face tightened at that. The unspoken list of everything that still needed doing—the tanks, the species we didn’t have the ability to save, the ones we’d have to let go.
“Yeah,” she said quietly. “I know.”
For a moment, neither of us moved. Tomorrow was going to be brutal, and we both knew it.
I clapped my hands lightly against my thighs.
“Alright. Let’s go raid the cafeteria.”
Sloane gave a tired smile with a half-hearted laugh. “Raid. That makes it sound exciting.”
“Everything sounds exciting when the world’s ending.”
We kept the lights off as we moved through the corridor, navigating by the dim red glow of the emergency strips along the baseboards.
The cafeteria seemed enormous in the dark. I grabbed a flashlight but kept the beam angled low, careful not to let it catch the shutter seams.
“What are we thinking?” I asked quietly.
“Snack foods,” she said. “Low commitment.”
“Low commitment food. I can respect that.”
We went through the cabinets and drawers with quiet efficiency: granola bars, bags of chips, trail mix. A couple of plastic-wrapped muffins that were probably stale before the world ended. Sloane grabbed sodas from the vending machine.
Then I found a jar of peanut butter in the back of a cupboard and held it up.
“Oh, hell yes.”
Sloane laughed softly—a real one this time. “That might be the most emotion I’ve ever seen from you.”
“Peanut butter is a cornerstone of survival.”
“That is absolutely not true.”
“It is in my world.”
She rolled her eyes but pulled two spoons from the drawer anyway.
A few minutes later, we were back in the office with our haul spread across the desk. The second couch sat pushed against the wall where I’d dragged it in earlier from the employee lounge, and the two formed a loose L-shape—a strange little living room in the middle of everything.