Leaving Lucy's place, Bryan ran through his mental checklist. Only Anna and Marlene's clinic remained unvisited.
But then he remembered Sarah's plan to visit Anna tomorrow, so he shelved the clinic trip. They'd go together.
With that settled, Bryan headed to the apartment building where Amir lived—but didn't knock on the door. Instead, he followed the hallway to the far end and descended the stairwell.
Amir's unit was on the ground floor, far right side. The staircase above it had collapsed during the early days of the outbreak, and Amir's status as a patrol soldier was enough to keep the other residents from wandering this way. Nobody had any reason to poke around the dark stairwell below.
The narrow, unlit passage funneled cool air upward. When Bryan reached the landing at the bottom, he found himself blocked by a locked iron gate. A sturdy brass padlock hung from the latch.
He fished a key from his pocket, opened the lock with ease, and pushed through. Beyond the gate stretched a dim corridor flanked by ruined basement rooms on both sides. Water dripped from the ceiling in a steady plink, plink, plink.
Flashlight in hand, Bryan illuminated the path ahead, sweeping the beam left and right as he checked each room. He walked until he reached a gap in the wall.
On the other side was a wider corridor. A faded Emergency Exit sign clung to the right wall, above a sealed roll-up shutter. The left wall had just two doors, both fitted with combination locks. Ahead, the passage disappeared into a wall of rubble.
Aside from the way he'd come in and the shutter on the right, this was a completely sealed space—and it was where Bryan's group stored their supplies.
The place had originally been a small supermarket's storage area. When the corridor above collapsed, this section had been buried underground. Bryan had stumbled upon it during his early survey of District A.
Its concealed location, combined with the roller shutter's direct access to a hidden exterior passage, made it an ideal cache. The proximity to one of Norsen's smuggling entry points meant supplies could be received and moved quickly. Factoring in everything, they'd chosen this as their primary stash.
Once Amir had secured his patrol assignment in District A, he'd volunteered to cover this area specifically—giving them convenient access for transport and inventory.
Bryan crossed the debris, entered the corridor, and punched in the combination on the left-hand door. Metal scraped against metal as it swung open.
Inside, he lit the kerosene lamp kept by the entrance. The weak flame gradually illuminated a room of roughly 350 square feet, lined with rows of metal shelving. Each shelf held carefully sealed crates, elevated above the damp floor. Two years of accumulated supplies filled the space.
The left shelves held weapons and ammunition—rifles and handguns packed in large wooden crates cushioned with straw. The center shelves stored medical supplies and pharmaceuticals. The right side was stacked with canned food, miscellaneous equipment, and spare parts, all sorted by category.
At the back sat a rusted desk. The drawer contained an emergency radio for contacting the others in a crisis. Everything in this room represented the sum total of their assets—and their lifeline.
Bryan grabbed a backpack from one of the shelves, walked to the food section, and loaded it with sealed provisions until it was about half full. Then he stopped.
He left the room, locked the combination lock, secured the brass padlock on the stairwell gate, and exited the building.
Since the checkpoint between districts inspected the belongings of everyone passing through, Bryan couldn't walk through carrying a backpack full of canned goods. Canned food wasn't part of the QZ's standard rations—if someone connected the dots to his role as a supply squad leader, he'd be charged with embezzlement and everyone on his team would go down with him.
But navigating between legal and illegal was Bryan's specialty. Back on the street, he headed straight for the next block over, where an abandoned government office building sat near the QZ perimeter wall.
The building's entrance stood open. Two men who looked like ordinary QZ civilians lounged near the door, chatting. Inside, several middle-aged women sat on hallway benches, watching their children play.
This was one of Norsen's smuggling outposts. Everyone here worked for him. Generous bribes to District A's officials had allowed him to relocate his people—families and all—into the building. The entire complex was his territory.
Bryan walked in with his backpack. The men at the entrance gave him a friendly nod and stepped aside without a word.
Once he disappeared around a corner, one of them slipped into a small side room, radioed the information inside, and logged the visit.
"Hey, Bryan."
As he walked deeper into the corridor, a door swung open ahead of him. A bald Black man wearing glasses stepped out and, recognizing Bryan immediately, greeted him warmly.
"Morning."
Bryan nodded back. When the man fell into step behind him, Bryan glanced over his shoulder with mild amusement. "What, slow day? You've got time to walk me out?"
The man was Jeffrey—Norsen's "manager" for the District A operations and Bryan's regular contact. All smuggled supplies came through Jeffrey's hands for inventory, so the two had built a solid working relationship.
"You know how things are. Fewer squads going out means fewer shipments coming in. Finally getting a breather." Jeffrey shrugged, eyeing the backpack. "Where are you headed with all that?"
"District E black market. Got a friend to visit, too."
They chatted as they walked, winding through a maze of corridors until they reached an unmarked junction and stopped at a closed door.
Click.
Bryan pushed it open and they both stepped inside. An ordinary L-shaped office space—the right side cluttered with dusty desks and chairs, the left side furnished with a fireplace, a couch, and a small sitting area.
Two men occupied the couch. An older man with graying hair and reading glasses was absorbed in a pre-outbreak newspaper. Beside him sat a man in his forties. The resemblance between them suggested father and son.
The younger man tensed when the door opened, but relaxed when he recognized Jeffrey.
Jeffrey waved him off and walked to a storage cabinet against the far wall. He grinned at Bryan. "Need a hand?"
"If you're offering."
Bryan moved to the cabinet's side and braced his shoulder against it, nodding at Jeffrey.
"One, two, three—push!"
They heaved in unison. The heavy cabinet slid sideways, revealing a hole in the wall just large enough for a person—dropping straight down into darkness like a well, the bottom invisible.
"Heh. You really need to start working out." Bryan smirked at Jeffrey, who was wheezing from the effort of moving furniture.
"Get out of here!"
Jeffrey, privately aware his fitness had deteriorated alarmingly since taking this desk job, wasn't about to admit it. He rolled his eyes and jabbed a finger toward the hole. "Move your ass!"
"Haha." Bryan laughed and gave him a wave. "Thanks. Drinks on me next time."
He crouched at the edge of the hole, stared down into the pitch blackness, took a deep breath—
And jumped.
...
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