Chapter 25: Hidden Preparations
[CDC Interior — Day 13 Since Transmigration, 4:22 AM]
The hallway lights had dimmed to their nighttime cycle — blue-white strips running along the baseboards, casting the corridor in the cold spectrum of a hospital after visiting hours. My socks made no sound on the tile. The shoes were in my bunk room, left behind for the same reason I'd left the door open a crack instead of closed: alibi. If anyone woke and found me gone, the story was simple. Couldn't sleep. Went for a walk. The open door and absent shoes sold the picture of a man wandering, not operating.
My danger sense pulsed at the low-grade frequency it had maintained since the blast doors sealed — a persistent, muffled pressure behind my eyes that the enclosed underground space reduced to something between signal and noise. Sleep deprivation wasn't helping. Twelve hours since my last rest, and the powers document had been clear: sleep-deprived operation degraded the sense by thirty percent. I could feel the degradation as a softening of the edges, the distinction between ambient threat and approaching danger blurring into a general unease that colored everything the same shade of wrong.
I worked systematically. Left from the residential corridor, down the main hallway, past the sealed elevator, to the stairwell.
The emergency supplies were exactly where institutional design said they'd be: mounted on the wall beside each emergency exit door, in red-painted metal cabinets marked with white crosses. I catalogued three cabinets between the residential level and the operations center. Cabinet one: two water bottles, a flashlight, a first aid kit, an expired fire extinguisher. Cabinet two: same configuration, minus the flashlight. Cabinet three, nearest the operations center: three water bottles, flashlight with a cracked lens, first aid kit, and a fire blanket still sealed in its plastic packaging.
I memorized locations, contents, and access routes. Didn't touch anything. Didn't rearrange. Jenner might not be monitoring the security cameras at 4 AM, but might not wasn't a margin I could afford. The photographic memory locked each cabinet's position into the spatial map of the building — a growing overlay of corridors, rooms, exits, and obstacles that my brain organized with the precision of an architectural rendering.
The operations center was dark except for the countdown display.
07:14:33
Seven hours. The number had dropped six and a half hours since I'd last stood here, which meant the timer was counting real-time seconds, not accelerating, not decelerating. Linear. Predictable. Seven hours until the high-impulse thermobaric fuel-air explosives converted the building and everything inside it into superheated gas and structural debris.
The emergency windows were on the upper level of the operations center — the mezzanine ring where the secondary workstations were arranged. Three large panes of reinforced glass, each approximately six by four feet, set into the exterior wall. Reinforced but not blast-rated — designed to withstand accidental impact, not deliberate breaching. A fragmentation grenade would shatter them. The show had proved it.
I turned from the timer and climbed back to the residential level.
---
Carol's room was three doors from mine. The door was closed but not locked — the CDC's residential quarters had privacy latches, not deadbolts, and the latch was in the unengaged position. I could see the hairline gap between door and frame where the latch tongue sat retracted.
I waited outside for thirty seconds. Listened. Carol's breathing was audible through the thin door — steady, deep, the rhythm of genuine sleep. Underneath it, the smaller, lighter breathing of Sophia, sharing the bed or the cot beside it.
The door opened without sound. The hinges were institutional — heavy-duty, self-lubricating, the kind that operated in silence because the CDC's designers had built a facility where quiet was an operational requirement.
The room was small — government-issue, a single bed, a cot, a desk, a chair. Carol lay on the bed, face turned toward Sophia on the cot, one arm extended across the gap between them as if maintaining physical contact even in sleep. Sophia's hand rested on Carol's forearm, their connection visible in the posture of bodies that had learned to seek each other in the dark.
Carol's bag was on the desk chair. Canvas, olive-drab, the kind of pack that the military surplus store had been selling for twenty dollars before the world had ended and which now constituted the entirety of a woman's portable possessions.
I moved to the chair. The pack's front pocket was secured with a brass snap — I opened it with my thumbnail, the metal parting with a click so quiet that the ambient hum of the climate control system swallowed it completely.
The grenade was there.
M67 fragmentation. Spherical body, safety lever, pull ring. Standard military issue, olive-drab, weight approximately fourteen ounces. Rick had taken it from the gun bag recovered on the Atlanta rooftop — callback: Daryl's crossbow clearing the way, the bag weighing twenty-plus pounds, the mailbox where it had landed — and passed it to Carol before surrendering the group's weapons to Jenner's security locker. A hedge. A contingency. The instinct of a man who trusted structures less than he trusted people.
I confirmed the pull ring was intact, the safety lever was in position, the body showed no corrosion or damage. The grenade was functional. It would work.
I replaced it in the pocket. Closed the snap. The click was identical to the one it had made opening — the sound of brass engaging brass, inaudible beyond arm's length.
Carol's breathing hadn't changed. Sophia's hand still rested on her mother's forearm.
I left the room, pulled the door to its original position, and walked back to the main corridor with the specific gait of a man who'd just been to the bathroom and was heading back to bed.
---
[5:45 AM]
The kitchen was institutional — stainless steel surfaces, commercial-grade appliances, walk-in refrigerator, and a coffee setup that included a drip machine, a grinder, and sealed bags of whole beans stored in a cabinet above the counter. The beans were Colombian, medium roast, the kind of product that the CDC's procurement department had purchased in bulk and that the building's occupants had consumed until the occupants had died or left and the beans had sat in their sealed bags waiting for someone who still cared about caffeine.
I ground the beans. The grinder's noise filled the kitchen — mechanical, rhythmic, the sound of civilization's morning ritual performed in the basement of a building that was going to kill everyone inside it in seven hours. The smell that rose from the ground coffee was extraordinary. Rich, dark, carrying the specific aromatic compounds that the human olfactory system was wired to interpret as comfort and warmth and the morning is manageable after all.
My hands trembled around the grinder. Not from fear — from exhaustion. The sleep deprivation was manifesting in the fine motor control now, the fingers losing their precision at the margins, the specific degradation that preceded the cognitive fog that would follow if I didn't rest soon.
I couldn't rest. Not yet. Not until the grenade broke the window and the group was outside and the building was behind us.
The coffee brewed. I poured twelve cups — one for each adult in the group, plus one for Jenner, plus one for me — and arranged them on a tray I found in the cabinet. The tray was heavy. My arms held it steady through an act of will that the tremor in my fingers tried to undermine.
I carried the tray to the cafeteria and set it on the table where they'd drunk wine and laughed and pretended safety was a place you could stay.
Dale appeared first. His hat was on, his face carried the soft puffiness of a man who'd slept deeply for the first time in weeks, and his expression when he saw the coffee was the expression of a man encountering an unexpected kindness.
"You're up early."
"Couldn't sleep." True. "Made coffee." Also true. "Figured everyone could use some."
Dale picked up a cup. Sipped. His eyes closed. The expression that crossed his face was the one I'd been hoping for — the simple, uncomplicated pleasure of a man drinking good coffee in a warm room, a moment of normalcy that cost nothing and delivered everything.
"Glenn Rhee," Dale said, opening his eyes. "You may be the most thoughtful person in this building."
"Low bar. There's one other person in this building."
Dale's mouth twitched — the almost-smile that was his version of a laugh — and he took another sip, and for thirty seconds we stood in a cafeteria underneath Atlanta and drank coffee and the building's countdown timer lost another minute and neither of us mentioned it.
The others woke in ones and twos. Rick, then Lori and Carl, then T-Dog, then Daryl. Each took a cup. Each made some version of the sound that meant this is good in the pre-verbal language of people whose mornings had been deprived of ritual.
Jenner descended from the upper level at 7:15 AM. His lab coat was the same one he'd worn yesterday, his face was drawn, and his eyes carried the specific quality of a man who'd slept in a chair beside a countdown display and woken to find the numbers smaller and the decision unchanged.
He took a cup from the tray. Sipped. Looked at me.
"Thank you," he said.
"You're welcome."
His eyes held mine for a beat longer than the exchange required — the professional assessment of a scientist evaluating a data point, measuring something in my response that he couldn't yet classify. Then he turned to the group, cup in hand, and the mask of hospitality settled back into place.
"When you're ready," Jenner said. "I have something to show you."
Note:
Please give good reviews and power stones itrings more people and more people means more chapters?
My Patreon is all about exploring 'What If' timelines, and you can get instant access to chapters far ahead of the public release.
Choose your journey:
Timeline Viewer ($6): Get 10 chapters of early access + 5 new chapters weekly.
Timeline Explorer ($9): Jump 15-20 chapters ahead of everyone.
Timeline Keeper ($15): Get Instant Access to chapters the moment I finish writing them. No more waiting.
Read the raw, unfiltered story as it unfolds. Your support makes this possible!
👉 Find it all at patreon.com/Whatif0