Running man
Chapter 13
The blockade held better than anyone expected.
Getting the trucks staged around the mall's perimeter took the better part of four days — longer than Kaito had told Chase, though he kept that number to himself. Once it was up, the group moved fast: raiding what was left of the mall's stockrooms, then branching out block by block for anything the initial sweep had missed. Canned goods first. Water next. Batteries, blankets, anything with a working battery in it after that.
Word travels strange in a dying city. It didn't take long for other pockets of survivors to notice a stretch of Dune City that wasn't actively on fire — a mall ringed by dead trucks, guarded, quiet, still standing. People started showing up in ones and twos at first. Then in groups. Some came with something to offer: a mechanic, a nurse, someone who used to work security and still had the instincts for it. Others came with nothing but hunger and the good sense to knock instead of just breaking in.
Chase wanted to turn most of them away. Cinna wouldn't hear it.
"We don't get to decide who deserves to survive," she told him, the same night a family of four showed up soaked from the rain with a baby that hadn't stopped crying in an hour. Chase let them in. He let the next group in too, and the one after that, until the mall's underground level — colder, safer, easier to seal off than anywhere above ground — filled with more people than any of them had bothered to count.
Kaito counted. By the end of the first week it was around sixty. By the second, closer to a hundred and thirty. By the time the trucks needed refueling for the second time, it had crossed two hundred, and Kaito had stopped being surprised by anything with a pulse walking through the gate.
Most of the newcomers were fine. Grateful, even, in the specific and slightly suspicious way people get when someone else has already done the hard part of surviving for them. A few weren't. A man named Brad showed up in the second week with a group of four, ex-warehouse workers looking for someplace with walls, and he had opinions almost immediately — about the rationing, about who was in charge and why, about the small print nobody had bothered explaining to him regarding those twenty-five trucks parked all around the building like a fence made of scrap metal and busted headlights.
Nobody had told him where the trucks came from, or what they were actually for. Nobody had really told most of the newer arrivals much of anything — there hadn't been time, and Kaito, if he was honest with himself, hadn't seen much use in it. Not yet.
That was going to be a problem eventually. He knew that. He just didn't expect eventually to arrive quite this fast.
Three and a half weeks after the blockade first went up, with the shelves finally stripped bare and the trucks' fuel gauges creeping toward empty, Kaito gathered everyone into the underground lot before sunrise, the same way he always did when something needed deciding.
This time, there were two hundred people waiting to hear it.
