April 14. 11:58 PM.
Inside the logistics hub. 27°C.
Dust burned the tongue and lined the throat and settled in the lungs like fine abrasive snow, pure concentrated industry with cardboard fibers and shrink-wrap particles and diesel fumes from parked forklifts and the sharp chemical bite of mothballs and industrial preservatives coating every breath.
Pitch black with the emergency exit signs casting a faint bloody glow over the concrete floor, but the vastness of the building swallowed the light whole, the ceiling thirty feet high and lost in the shadows, while rows upon rows of industrial shelving stretched into the darkness like a maze of steel and cardboard.
Jae-min pulled a penlight from his pocket and clicked it on, the narrow beam cutting through the dark as he walked down the main aisle with his footsteps echoing huge and hollow like footsteps in a cathedral, the shelves towering over him at twenty feet high and loaded with pallets, thousands of them.
He stopped at the first row and shone the light on the inventory tag.
PALLET A-001: MRE (MEALS READY-TO-EAT) — CASES x 500.
125,000 INDIVIDUAL MEALS.
Five hundred cases with each case holding two hundred and fifty meals, one hundred and twenty-five thousand meals on a single pallet.
'In the first life, we ate cockroaches. We boiled leather belts. I beat a man to death with a pipe for half a can of expired beans.' Jae-min reflected, a bitter savage irony pressing against his ribs as he stared at the pallet. 'Now I'm standing in front of enough food to feed a city, and I'm going to put it inside my chest.'
He set down the penlight and placed his hand on the corner of the wooden pallet with the rough wood biting into his palm, and he focused.
The void opened.
His fingers pressed into the wood and found the fold point, the seam in space where the warehouse's coordinates met the void's, and for a fraction of a second the wood groaned and the concrete floor vibrated with a deep subsonic thrum rippling through the air like the heartbeat of a whale.
The air around the pallet's edges blurred, not invisible but translucent, the pallet existing in two places at once for a stuttering half-second before the fold collapsed and swallowed it whole.
The space where it had been was empty, just bare concrete with a faint heat shimmer hovering in the air for a second, then dissolving.
Jae-min gasped, and a sharp sting shot through his sinuses, his fingers touching his upper lip and coming away red with blood, the copper taste blooming on his tongue warm and metallic.
The void had pushed back, but it held.
'More. Keep going.' Jae-min drove himself, a ruthless, desperate urgency pounding through his chest as he wiped the blood with his sleeve. 'Twenty hours until the freeze. Twenty hours until Mom and Dad board that plane. Move.'
One down.
He moved to the next pallet with the same tag and the same weight and touched it, the wood groaning and the floor vibrating and the pallet vanishing with another nosebleed that he didn't bother wiping.
Pallet A-003 vanished.
Pallet A-004 vanished.
Pallet A-005 vanished.
The rhythm became mechanical: walk and touch and bleed and vanish, walk and touch and bleed and vanish, each fold point found faster than the last as his spatial sense sharpened with every object stored.
The void inside him was expanding not gently but violently, like a balloon being inflated with a fire hose, the walls of the pocket dimension pushing outward from one hundred cubic meters to two hundred to five hundred.
The pain started at the base of his skull, a dull throbbing ache that spread down his spine and into his shoulders, and he ignored it.
— • • • —
Row B.
Medical supplies.
PALLET B-001: STERILE BANDAGES — CASES x 300.
PALLET B-002: IV FLUIDS (SALINE) — CASES x 400.
PALLET B-003: SURGICAL KITS — CASES x 200.
PALLET B-004: ANTIBIOTICS (AMOXICILLIN) — CASES x 500.
He touched them, and they vanished, the medical supplies sliding into the void and settling into neat rows in the expanding darkness behind his ribs.
'Alessia can use these.' Jae-min calculated, a fierce protective focus sharpening his vision as the surgical kits disappeared into the dark. 'She can stitch wounds. Set bones. Treat infections. She can keep people alive when the cold tries to kill them.'
The nosebleed was a steady stream now, dripping off his chin and staining his shirt collar with the copper taste coating his tongue, and he kept moving.
Row C.
Water purification.
Portable filters and purification tablets and collapsible water containers vanished one after another into the growing dark.
Row D.
Tools and hardware and construction materials, hammers and nails and shovels and axes and chainsaws and generators and solar panels and rolls of thick copper wire and boxes of screws and power drills and welding machines.
He walked down the aisle like a grim reaper, touching and erasing, the warehouse emptying behind him row by row and leaving nothing but bare concrete shelves and the smell of ozone.
— • • • —
1:30 AM.
26°C.
Jae-min stood in the center of the warehouse, drenched in sweat, with his shirt clinging to his chest and his arms trembling, the nosebleed having stopped but his head feeling like it was going to split open from the inside.
He had cleared Rows A through F, six rows, over four hundred pallets, millions of meals, thousands of medical kits, enough tools to build a small city, and he was only a third of the way done.
The void was massive now and immeasurable, just vast, an ocean of darkness inside his chest that churned and pulled at his insides with every pallet stored, feeling like swallowing a burning coal.
'Keep going. Push through the pain.' Jae-min urged, a savage, uncompromising will grinding through the exhaustion as his vision blurred at the edges. 'If I stop now, people die. If I stop now, Alessia dies.'
Dark spots danced in his eyes, but he kept moving.
Row G.
Clothing and blankets and sleeping bags, and he touched a pallet of thermal blankets and the void screamed with a sharp, piercing pain shooting through his right eye that made him stagger and grab a shelf to steady himself, the steel rattling under his grip as the pallet vanished.
He stood there panting and sweating with blood dripping from his nose again.
'Stop. You're breaking. The walls are cracking.' Jae-min warned himself, a desperate survival instinct surfacing through the pain, almost gentle, almost concerned.
'Fuck you. I decide when I stop.' Jae-min defied, a cold annihilating refusal crushing the instinct as he moved to the next pallet.
— • • • —
2:30 AM.
Row H.
Canned goods, tomatoes and corn and beans and Spam, thousands of cases disappearing into the void while the blood flowed freely now, not just from his nose but from the back of his throat, copper and iron, the taste of his own body failing.
Row I.
Grains, rice and flour and sugar and salt, enough to bake bread for a decade, his legs buckling with every step as the void screamed with a constant high-pitched whine in the back of his skull like a tea kettle boiling over.
'More. Just a little more.' Jae-min pushed, a reckless grinding determination forcing his legs to carry him forward. 'I can feel the edge. The void is almost full. Just push past it.'
— • • • —
3:00 AM.
25°C.
Row J.
Hygiene.
Soap and shampoo and toothpaste and toilet paper and blankets and towels.
Jae-min's legs gave out, and he dropped to one knee with the concrete cold against his skin and his palms slapping flat against the floor, blood dripping from his nose in a steady rhythm that was obscenely loud in the silent warehouse.
Pat. Pat. Pat.
'Get up. Get up get up get up.' Jae-min raged, a raw primal refusal burning through the exhaustion as his fingers curled against the concrete. 'I'm a Del Rosario. Del Rosarios don't kneel.'
He forced himself to stand with his vision swimming and the shelves tilting and the floor seeming to breathe underneath him, and he touched the next pallet.
The void swallowed it with no resistance, hungry now and greedy and taking everything he gave it and demanding more.
Row K.
Electronics, portable radios and batteries and flashlights and solar chargers and hand-crank radios and signal flares, each one vanishing with less fight than the last.
— • • • —
Row L.
Camping gear, tents and sleeping bags and stoves and lanterns and rope and tarps, the pallets disappearing one after another while Jae-min got weaker with every fold point he touched.
The blood flowed faster, and the tremors in his hands got worse, and his vision narrowed to a pinpoint, but the void kept expanding and swallowing everything, an endless black sea inside a breaking man.
— • • • —
3:45 AM.
Row M.
Miscellaneous, batteries and lighters and matches and first aid kits and sewing kits and fishing gear and water purification tablets and cases of iodine.
Jae-min moved toward the heavy loading bay at the back of the warehouse where the penlight swept over a different kind of inventory.
Vehicles.
Rows of machines sat strapped to heavy-duty steel pallets or parked directly on the stained concrete: snowmobiles, six of them wrapped in protective factory plastic with their runners glinting under the faint red emergency lights, and beside them two heavy-duty tracked UTVs designed for Arctic terrain, snow blowers and heavy-duty plows mounted on ATVs.
'In minus seventy, wheels are useless. Tires freeze solid and crack on the ice.' Jae-min calculated, a cold tactical reasoning guiding his feet toward the nearest snowmobile. 'We need tracks. We need runners. If we're going to scout or haul supplies or survive outside those walls after the freeze, we need these.'
He placed his hand on the hood of the nearest snowmobile and the void roared, a tidal wave of dark energy crashing against his skull with the machine massive and dense and full of metal and engine and fuel.
He pushed.
The blood vessels in his eyes felt like they were going to burst, and his ears rang with a high-pitched screaming tinnitus; the snowmobile shuddered and vibrated, the air cracked with a shockwave of distorted light rippling outward, shelves rattling and a forklift twenty feet away sliding a foot across the concrete.
The snowmobile vanished.
Jae-min collapsed to one knee, and Alessia caught his shoulder, holding him upright.
"Jae-min!" Alessia gasped, a terrified shock gripping her voice as her fingers dug into his jacket.
"Need all of them." Jae-min choked, a wrecked, unyielding will pushing the words through bloodied teeth.
He stood and staggered to the next snowmobile and touched it, the void screaming but swallowing the machine.
He moved to the tracked UTV and the heavy metal resisted the fold, fighting him, the membrane of reality tearing rather than folding before the UTV vanished.
He moved to the next and the next, the snow blowers and the plows, each one feeling like swallowing a boulder until by the time the last ATV plow vanished Jae-min was blind with his vision entirely white then black then sizzling static, navigating purely by touch and the cold map of the void inside his head.
— • • • —
3:50 AM.
He stood in front of the final pallet in the warehouse, a massive cube of sealed battery cases, two tons of lithium and alkaline.
His legs were shaking so badly he could barely stand, his shirt was soaked in blood, and the dark spots in his vision were getting larger with every blink.
"Jae-min." Alessia pressed, a tight medical urgency sharpening her voice as she shone the flashlight in his face. "Your pupils are unequal. Left is dilated. Right is constricted. That's a sign of increased intracranial pressure."
She grabbed his arm.
"If you do this, you could have an aneurysm." Alessia warned, a fierce, desperate fear pulling her closer.
"I know." Jae-min whispered, a quiet accepting dread settling over him.
"I'm serious. You could die right here." Alessia pleaded, a fierce, desperate warning cracking her voice.
"I know." Jae-min breathed, a bare, fragile whisper carrying the words.
He reached out with his hand, trembling, and the battery cases felt heavy, impossibly heavy, like pushing against a mountain.
He focused, and the void roared.
'TAKE IT.' Jae-min commanded, the thought ripping through his mind like a bullet as he pushed harder.
The pallet shuddered and vibrated, and the air cracked with a shockwave of distorted light rippling outward, the shelves rattling and the forklift sliding another foot across the concrete.
The pallet vanished.
Jae-min collapsed with his knees hitting the concrete hard, his vision gone and his hearing gone, just the ringing and the pain and the cold, falling forward face down on the bare concrete with the smell of dust and diesel filling his nose.
The last thing he felt was Alessia's hands on his shoulders rolling him over, her voice distant and muffled.
"Jae-min! Jae-min, stay with me! Open your eyes!" Alessia screamed, a shattered medical terror gripping her voice as her hands pressed against his chest.
He tried, and the darkness pulled at him while the void inside him went quiet, sated and full.
He opened his eyes and looked up at her.
The warehouse was empty, completely empty, just bare steel shelves stretching into the dark without a single box or a single pallet or a single vehicle, millions of meals and thousands of medical kits and snowmobiles and UTVs and plows all gone.
"Did we get it all?" Jae-min whispered, a bloodied, broken hope searching her face.
Alessia looked around with her flashlight beam sweeping across the vast hollow space, nothing but empty shelves and bare floor.
"Yes." Alessia exhaled, a shaking, incredulous relief flooding her voice. "It's all gone."
Jae-min smiled, a bloody broken smile.
"Good." Jae-min whispered, a faint, exhausted triumph softening the word.
His eyes closed.
— • • • —
4:30 AM.
The Ford Raptor. 25°C.
Rico was out of the driver's seat before Alessia even finished screaming.
"Help me get him in!" Alessia shouted from the back seat, a commanding medical urgency pulling Jae-min's limp body across the seat.
Alessia and Ji-yoo hauled Jae-min's bloody frame while Rico grabbed his legs and hauled him the rest of the way in.
"Move!" Rico barked, a sharp military command slamming the rear door.
He jumped back into the driver's seat and turned the key, and the Raptor's engine roared to life, throwing it into drive with tires screaming against the asphalt and spraying gravel as he tore out of the industrial park.
"His pulse is thready!" Alessia reported, her hands pressing against Jae-min's neck with a clinical, desperate focus. "He's going into hypovolemic shock. Drive faster!"
Rico didn't respond and just pressed the accelerator harder with the speedometer climbing, 80 and 90 and 100, driving by moonlight without headlights and weaving through the empty pre-dawn streets of Pasay like a ghost in a black truck.
"Left here!" Ji-yoo directed, a sharp tactical alert pointing at a turnoff. "Avoid EDSA, there are cops at the intersection!"
Rico wrenched the wheel left, and the Raptor took the corner on two wheels while Alessia braced herself against the back of the front seat, one hand holding the IV bag she had improvised from Jae-min's emergency medkit pulled from the void.
"Hold him still!" Rico ordered, a gruff commanding authority carrying through the cab.
"His pupils are unequal! Left dilated, right constricted! Increased intracranial pressure!" Alessia reported, a tight surgical alarm tightening her grip on the IV line.
"Can you fix it?" Rico pressed, a grave, focused concern turning his head slightly.
"Not in a moving car!" Alessia snapped, a fierce medical frustration hardening her voice.
"Then keep him alive until we stop!" Rico commanded, an iron battlefield pragmatism settling over his shoulders.
The Raptor skidded to a halt in the basement parking of Shore Residence 3, and Rico killed the engine and jumped out and wrenched open the rear door, pulling Jae-min out over his shoulder like a sack of rice in a fireman's carry.
Ji-yoo ran ahead and slammed her palm against the elevator button.
"Come on, come on, come on!" Ji-yoo screamed, a raw fracturing panic shaking her hand against the button.
The elevator dinged, and Rico stepped inside with Jae-min's limp body hanging over his shoulder and blood dripping onto the elevator floor.
Fourteenth floor. The doors opened, and Ji-yoo ran ahead and swiped the keycard, and the steel bulkhead groaned open.
"Master bedroom!" Alessia ordered, a commanding surgical authority directing them down the hall. "Put him on the bed!"
Rico carried Jae-min inside and dropped him on the mattress with the springs groaning under the weight.
Alessia tore open her handbag and pulled out her medical kit, scissors, IV line, saline bag, and tape, cutting away Jae-min's blood-soaked shirt with the fabric peeling away with a wet sucking sound.
Underneath his chest was pale and sticky, a map of burst capillaries painting his skin like red spiderwebs.
She found a vein in his arm and slid the needle in, and the saline bag started to drip.
"His blood pressure is dropping." Alessia muttered, a focused clinical concentration keeping her hands steady on the IV. "Internal bleeding. The stress on his blood vessels."
"Can you fix it?" Ji-yoo asked, a breaking, desperate fear pulling her voice thin.
"I can stabilize him. The rest is up to his body." Alessia answered, a steady surgeon's composure anchoring her voice.
Rico stood in the doorway with the M4 in his hands and his eyes scanning the hallway outside, making sure no one followed them.
"He emptied the whole warehouse?" Rico murmured, a quiet, heavy disbelief settling over his face.
"Every pallet." Alessia confirmed, a shaken, awed certainty steadying her hands on the IV. "I watched it. Thousands of cases. Millions of meals. Vehicles. Gone."
Rico looked back at Jae-min's pale, bloody face and the shallow, rattling breaths.
"Stupid kid." Rico muttered, a gruff, reluctant pride warming his voice with a ghost of a smile crossing his weathered face.
— • • • —
12:00 PM.
Unit 1418. 28°C.
Jae-min opened his eyes to a white ceiling and the hum of the HVAC and the smell of lavender soap and antiseptic.
He tried to move, and his body screamed in protest with every muscle aching and his head feeling like it was filled with wet cement, but he was alive.
He turned his head, and Alessia was asleep in a chair beside the bed with her head resting on her arms and dark circles under her eyes and blood still under her fingernails.
He reached out and touched her hand.
She woke instantly with her blue eyes snapping open and focusing on him.
"You're awake." Alessia murmured, a quiet, guarded relief softening her voice.
"I'm alive." Jae-min replied, a faint, tired smile crossing his face.
"Don't sound so surprised." Alessia chided, a soft, exhausted reproach raising her eyebrow.
"How long?" Jae-min asked, a hoarse, disoriented curiosity roughening his voice.
"Eight hours." Alessia answered, a measured clinical calm steadying her gaze.
Jae-min tried to sit up, and Alessia pushed him back down.
"Stay down. Your blood pressure is still low. You lost a lot of blood." Alessia instructed, a firm medical authority pressing her palm flat against his chest.
"I need to check the storage." Jae-min insisted, a stubborn driving need pulling him upward.
"You need to rest." Alessia countered, a gentle protective insistence pushing him back.
"I need to check the storage, Alessia." Jae-min repeated, an unyielding quiet steel holding his voice flat.
She stared at him with those blue eyes, stubborn and fierce.
"Fine." Alessia yielded, a reluctant, worried surrender dropping her hand from his chest.
She helped him sit up slowly with the room spinning and his vision blurring before stabilizing.
Jae-min closed his eyes and reached into the void.
It was vast, unimaginably vast, not a room and not a building but a cavern, an ocean with rows upon rows of pallets stretching into the darkness. Medical supplies stacked like skyscrapers and canned goods arranged in neat grids and water filters by the hundreds and tools and hardware and blankets and clothing and snowmobiles lined up in the dark and tracked UTVs and plows.
Enough to sustain a civilization.
He opened his eyes.
"It's all there." Jae-min whispered, a trembling, profound relief loosening the tension in his chest.
Alessia let out a long, shaky breath.
"How much?" Alessia pressed, a cautious probing curiosity leaning forward.
"Enough." Jae-min answered, the word catching in his throat.
"How much is enough?" Alessia demanded, a steady searching persistence holding her gaze.
Jae-min looked at her. "Enough to outlive the apocalypse." Jae-min declared, a quiet absolute certainty carrying the words.
Alessia stared at him and stood up and looked down at him and then shook her head and laughed, a wet, exhausted, incredulous laugh that broke through the tension like sunlight through clouds.
"You're insane." Alessia murmured, a warm disbelieving affection softening her face.
"I know." Jae-min replied, a faint warm smile tugging at his mouth.
"Completely, utterly, irredeemably insane." Alessia continued, a fierce, trembling admiration brightening her blue eyes.
"I know." Jae-min whispered, a soft, intimate acknowledgment holding her gaze.
She didn't leave but kicked off her shoes and pulled the blanket back and climbed onto the bed beside him with her body pressing against his side, warm and soft and alive.
Jae-min reached for her and his hand found her hip and squeezed with a possessive, deliberate pressure, then slid down to cup her through her jeans with one firm, greedy handful that pulled her flush against him.
Alessia's breath hitched, but she didn't pull away and pressed closer.
"Don't ever do that again." Alessia whispered against his jaw, a fierce protective command pressing her lips to his skin.
He turned his head and found her lips and kissed her slow and deliberate, the taste of chamomile and salt and something that made the void inside him go quiet.
Alessia kissed him back with her fingers curling into the fabric of his shirt and her body melting into his, not desperate this time but grateful.
They broke apart with their foreheads pressed together and their breathing the same air.
'She's warm. She's here. She didn't leave.' Jae-min grounded himself, a quiet anchoring gratitude settling over him as her pulse beat against his ribs. 'Don't let go.'
His hand stayed on her hip and her leg draped over his while the void hummed inside him, full and heavy and powerful.
'In twelve hours, the world ends. In twelve hours, Mom and Dad board that plane.' Jae-min calculated, a heavy grinding weight pressing against his chest as the numbers ran. 'In twelve hours, the tape starts playing, and I can't skip the track.'
'But Alessia is right here. Ji-yoo is across the hall. Uncle Rico is on watch. And I have enough supplies to feed an army for decades.' Jae-min affirmed, a cold crystalline resolve hardening beneath the gratitude.
'The tracks are fixed. But we can survive them.'
Twenty hours left.
He was ready.