The Plan
Chapter 12
"So what do you suggest?" Chase asked. It was the first real, two-sided conversation they'd had since Kaito arrived, which put him on guard.
"It's simple. Get a bunch of vehicles, build a blockade — buys you enough time to stock up on supplies. Then you leave once everyone's ready."
"How long do you think that blockade would actually hold?" Chase asked.
Kaito tilted his head, considering. "Three, four weeks. Roughly."
Everyone was stunned — who was crazy enough to try something like that? He could read the doubt on their faces easily enough.
"There's a mall five minutes north of here. It's got everything you'd need for now. If we move first, we beat every other group of survivors to it before they pick it clean."
"Isn't that kind of greedy?" Cinna asked, uneasy.
"Let me ask you something — how long have you been wearing those clothes?" Kaito said, driving the point home. Even if they wanted to hoard everything in sight, they physically couldn't carry it all. It would just slow them down.
At first they hesitated, debating the whole idea, but Fred sided with Kaito. Between what he'd been through and the news about the virus, his morals were already in question — he couldn't think straight about much of anything anymore.
Soon enough, everyone agreed: they'd start hunting down vehicles for the blockade.
Just as everyone headed off to their rooms, Kaito did the same — only to be pulled back by Chase and Cinna.
"We still have business to discuss," Cinna said, though the look on her face didn't match the seriousness of the words. She dropped into one of the cafeteria chairs like her legs had finally decided they were done for the day.
"Business," Kaito repeated, sitting across from her. "Sounds important."
"It's not," Chase admitted, grabbing the last three biscuits off the counter before Doria could complain about it. He tossed one to Kaito, one to Cinna, and kept one for himself. "We just didn't feel like going back to our rooms yet."
"That's the whole business?"
"That's the whole business."
Cinna broke her biscuit in half and didn't eat either piece. "Can I ask you something? Not about the plan. Just — before all this. What'd you actually do? Like, before."
"College. Business major, if you can believe it." Kaito turned the biscuit over in his hand like it might improve with inspection. It didn't. "Freshman year. Barely finished the first semester."
"Business," Chase said, deadpan. "Explains a lot, actually."
"What, the trucks?"
"The trucks. The way you talk. The whole 'let me walk you through the value proposition of not dying' thing you've got going."
Cinna almost laughed — the first real one in a while, short and a little rusty, like she hadn't used the muscles for it in days. "What about you, Chase? What'd you do?"
"Construction. Foreman, actually, for about two years before this." He shrugged. "Turns out yelling at people to do things they don't want to do is a pretty transferable skill."
"You don't yell at me," Kaito pointed out.
"You'd ignore it anyway. Why waste the breath."
They sat there a while longer, not really talking about anything that mattered — whether the biscuits tasted like cardboard because of the flour or because everyone's taste buds were just shot from stress, whether Doria had been a chef before all this or just really committed to the bit, whether the vending machine on the third floor still had anything in it worth the climb. Small, useless things. The kind of conversation that doesn't fix anything and isn't supposed to.
"We should get some sleep," Cinna said eventually, standing, brushing crumbs off her lap. "Big day tomorrow. Truck hunting."
"Living the dream," Kaito said.
Chase snorted, and for a second — just a second — it almost felt like an ordinary night, in an ordinary building, with ordinary people who didn't have anything larger to worry about than bad biscuits and a broken vending machine three floors up.
It didn't last. It never did, these days. But for a second, it was nice.
