Day 2.
Sauget, Illinois.
06:00 Hours.
Dawn cracked weak and grey through the shattered windows of the Coldwell factory, feeling less like morning and more like a hangover scraping against the inside of a skull.
The news feeds were screaming. They were pushed directly to the AR overlays of every functional phone on the site, bypassing the dead cell towers.
SINGAPORE DEATH TOLL: 40,000.
CDC DECLARES LEVEL 5 EMERGENCY.
O'HARE AND JFK GROUNDED.
"I can see the headlines," Helen Voss muttered, staring at her phone screen with bloodshot eyes. She lit her third Marlboro of the morning, the cherry glowing bright in the gloom. "But I can't dial out. No dial tone. No texts. Just... the news. Like they want us to watch the world burn but not talk about it."
"System traffic only," I reminded her, checking the load on the generator. "The network is optimized for the Cull. Say goodbye to Instagram, Doc."
The panic was real. But inside the fence, the grind was the only thing that mattered.
Paige—the corporate shell of Vanessa finally cracking—was dunking her raw, bloody hands into a bucket of rust-colored water. Chips of her manicure floated in the pail like confetti from a murdered career. She didn't complain. She just stared at the water, her corporate armor stripped away by forty-grit reality.
Travis was shirtless in the October chill, stacking cinderblocks two-high. He moved with a foam-light ease, the veins in his massive arms bulging under a sheen of concrete dust and sweat.
And Boyd? The kid was a ghost. He hadn't surfaced from the Level 2 vents since the midnight System activation. A distant humming echoed up the shafts—a constant, mechanical lullaby. The kid was synchronizing with the generator, twisting the machine's heartbeat into his own.
My Reaper's Fang rode low on my hip. It was basic aluminum right now, thirsting for upgrades locked behind System Points I didn't have yet.
My Decay Sight pulsed, overlaying the half-built structure with data. Ghost-blue perfection layered over the rough concrete reality. Red glitch-marks flagged the failure points.
The eastern wall section glowed warning-orange:
`[STRUCTURAL VULNERABILITY: HIGH. REINFORCE OR BREACH DAY 15.]`
Not in this timeline.
`[ADMINISTRATOR: MUDROOM CONSTRUCTION 34%. EFFICIENCY: ACCEPTABLE.]`
`[ROOT: BORING. WHEN DO WE GET TO THE MURDER, ARCHITECT?]`
I ignored the stereo commentary. I swept my gaze over the crew. The appraisal tags floated next to their heads:
PAIGE: LOYALTY 38% | BREAKING POINT: 18 DAYS
TRAVIS: LOYALTY 68% | COMBAT: MEDIUM
GARY: LOYALTY 15% | BREAKING POINT: 36 HOURS
HELEN: LOYALTY 82% | ESSENTIAL MEDIC
MILLER: LOYALTY 8% | MUTINY: CRITICAL
Helen flicked her ash, the cigarette never leaving her lips.
"Decon system uses what, exactly?" she asked, squinting at the blue schematic hovering in her vision. "Bleach? Hydrogen peroxide? That blueprint shows pressure nozzles. Industrial grade. That's a chemical cocktail that'll peel skin if exposure exceeds ninety seconds."
"Eighty-seven seconds," I corrected. "Nulls rotate through in waves. You strip topside, enter the airlock, get hit with high-pressure foam for forty seconds, rinse cycle for thirty, dry blast for seventeen. Clothes are incinerated. Fresh gear issued inside. Nothing infectious gets past the Mudroom alive."
Travis paused mid-lift, his massive frame backlit by the morning sun filtering through the broken glass.
"Boss," he said, his voice unusually small. "That mystery flu on the news... CDC says incubation is seventy-two hours. We building this for the flu?"
"Flu is just the start," I said flatly. I looked at the death timers hovering over their heads.
Paige: 31% survival.
Travis: 4%.
Miller: 2%—preventable if I stopped his mutiny on Day 22.
Gary: 0.3%. Statistical noise. A dead man walking.
My own timer blinked in the corner of my eye: `[MORTALITY INDEX: 94%. DAYS REMAINING: 28]`
"Keep building," I ordered. "Mudroom operational by dusk or we're exposed when things go bad."
Miller rolled in at 9 AM sharp. His cruiser crunched over the gravel, hostile and heavy. His belly spilled over his duty belt like dough over a pan edge, his cop-stache twitching under the sodium floodlights.
He'd clocked out at midnight, driven home, slept four hours, and come back. Debt obligations had teeth.
"Kincaid," I said.
He spat a stream of tobacco juice at my boots. It missed by inches. "Worked your chain-gang shift. Debt paid for the day. I'm gone."
His appraisal flashed instantly: LOYALTY 8% | AUTHORITY COMPLEX: CRITICAL | MUTINY 87%.
"Mudroom perimeter weld," I said. "Eastern wall reinforcement. Four-hour shift minimum." I pointed at the glowing structural vulnerability only I could see. "That wall needs doubled rebar before Day 15. Or a Pus-Bomber melts through it like butter."
His hand twitched toward his service weapon. Off-duty carry. Loaded. Safety on.
"Sheriff doesn't take orders from washed-up construction managers playing doomsday prophet," Miller snarled. "I saw that... whatever happened at midnight. Mass hallucination. Government weapon test. I'm filing reports—"
"You can't file shit, Sheriff," Helen said, not looking up from her suture work.
Miller's face went purple. "That's... that's martial law. Federal takeover. I'm a sworn officer—"
"You're a Null with debt obligations," I cut him off. Cold. "Work the shift or I call the loan. Bankruptcy, asset seizure, pension garnishment. Your choice, Sheriff."
His loyalty dropped to 5%.
The gun twitch intensified. My brain ran the calculation: if he drew, Decay Sight gave me twelve seconds to close the distance. Regression Echo could spike my speed, borrow combat reflexes from the first timeline, and drop him before he processed the movement.
The cost? Massive System Point drain. Physical backlash. A cooldown lasting hours.
`[ROOT: DO IT. PAINT THE CONCRETE. I'LL GIVE YOU BONUS POINTS.]`
`[ADMINISTRATOR: VIOLENCE PREMATURE. LABOR EFFICIENCY REDUCED 22% IF EXECUTED.]`
Miller stared at me, then at the paperwork I held. He holstered the undrawn weapon, snatched a welding torch from Ronnie's kit, and stalked to the eastern wall, muttering "Walking Dead wannabe tyrant" under his breath.
Loyalty: 5%. The bomb was ticking. I'd have to deal with him before Day 22.
Noon brought Yana.
She arrived like smoke—a bike messenger slipping through the gaps in the chain-link fence. Cropped black hair, hazel eyes assessing everything with tactical precision, a lean frame wrapped in courier gear that hid more knives than a casual Appraisal could count.
She'd found me three days early in this timeline. Not for debt collection. Curiosity. Survival instinct recognizing the only kingdom being built while the world started dying.
"Jack Monroe?" Her voice carried a military cadence under the courier casual. "Heard you're hiring. Cash work, no questions, room and board included when the flu goes hot?"
Decay Sight read her clean: LOYALTY 12% (CAUTIOUS) | SURVIVAL 68% | USER POTENTIAL: SHADOW CLASS CONFIRMED.
She would sync tonight. Pixel Fever class activation. Shadow-cloak abilities. In the first timeline, she'd saved my life four times before dying in the eastern wall collapse.
This timeline, I'd keep her alive.
"Perimeter security," I said. "Scout rotation. Combat capable?"
"Did courier runs through Southside at 2 AM for three years," she replied. "Combat capable enough."
Her eyes tracked the ghost-blue Mudroom overlay, visible to everyone post-System activation. "That glowing building real or shared psychosis?"
"Both. System blueprint. We build it exactly to spec, it'll hold when zombies start walking Day 3." I gave her the facts. No sugarcoating.
She didn't laugh. Didn't flinch. She just nodded once, slowly. "Zombies. Right. Singapore flu is a zombie virus. CDC hasn't announced that part yet."
"They won't until reanimation is confirmed. By then, it's too late for ninety-eight percent of the population." I pointed at the Mudroom's airlock system. "We're the two percent. You in?"
Her hazel eyes held mine, calculating. "Room, board, combat pay, and you don't ask about my record?"
"Deal."
She spat in her palm and extended it. I shook. Her grip was callused steel.
LOYALTY: 28% (PRAGMATIC ALLIANCE).
Yana joined the labor chain immediately. She fell in with Ronnie on the scrap-welding assist. The two women synchronized fast, gap-toothed grins meeting tactical nods, a flask passing between sparks.
The green Labor Chain threads in my vision pulsed brighter: 1.6x efficiency multiplier humming through the concrete vibrations.
Then, 3 PM brought the first casualty.
Gary dropped his cinderblock stack. It was the fifth time that hour he'd fumbled, but this time, gravity won.
The block crushed his left foot.
The sound of bones crunching was audible across the worksite—a wet grinding noise. Gary screamed—a high, corporate-soft sound—and collapsed into the mud, clutching his shattered foot.
Helen was on him in seconds, cigarette still dangling, vet kit cracked open.
"Compound fracture," she announced, her voice clinical. "Three bones minimum. Needs hospital, surgery, pins..."
"No hospitals," I said. My voice cut through Gary's sobbing.
"He needs a surgeon, Kincaid—"
"Field. Stabilize." It wasn't a request.
I looked down at Gary. His utility was minimal. Loyalty: 15% and dropping. Breaking point: thirty-six hours.
Sending him to an ER meant losing him to quarantine. Wasting morphine on a liability who would panic-bolt at the first real crisis was inefficient.
Helen's jaw set hard. She looked at me, seeing the cold calculation in my eyes.
She injected the morphine anyway—half dose, not full. She splinted the foot with scrap metal and duct tape, tying it off brutally tight.
Gary whimpered through the drugs, his taped glasses cracked from the fall.
"You're off heavy labor," Helen told him. "Light duty. Sorting scrap. Inventory. Stay off that foot or you lose it to infection."
Gary nodded weakly, morphine glazing his eyes.
APPRAISAL UPDATE: LOYALTY 12% | UTILITY: SCRAP SORT ONLY | BREAKING POINT: 18 HOURS.
He would run tonight. I could see it in the probability branches Decay Sight showed me—multiple futures where Gary limped to his Civic at 2 AM, drove off in a panic, got caught in the first wave of Shamblers on Day 3, and died screaming in his car on Highway 40.
Object lesson loading.
Dusk fell with the Mudroom sixty-eight percent complete. The airlock frame was solid, pressure nozzle mounts installed, chemical feed tanks positioned in the Level 1 underground.
`[ADMINISTRATOR: CONSTRUCTION EFFICIENCY: IMPROVED. TIMELINE PROJECTION: MUDROOM OPERATIONAL DAY 3, 14:00 HOURS.]`
`[ROOT: BORING MATH. SPICE IT UP. SACRIFICE SOMEONE. I'LL UNLOCK MUTATION SERUMS EARLY.]`
"Not yet," I muttered.
Helen glanced over, ash falling from her cigarette. "Talking to the voices?"
"Administrator and Root," I said. "Dual System entities. They ride every User's skull commentary-track style." I tapped my temple. "You're a Null. You see the AR overlays, the countdown timer, but you don't hear them. Lucky you."
"User," she tested the word. "That's what you are? System-compatible? And Boyd?"
"Boyd's syncing now. He'll activate User status probably tomorrow when he surfaces from the vents. High technomancer potential." I watched Boyd's location marker pulse deep in the factory guts. "You're Null. Eighty percent of the population. No direct System interface, but you're still valuable. Medics, engineers, heavy labor—Nulls are the foundation."
"Expendable foundation," she rasped.
"Essential foundation," I corrected. "You die, I lose triage capability. Chain breaks. Efficiency drops. People die preventable deaths. I need you alive, Helen. Your survival probability is forty percent. I'm going to push that number higher."
She exhaled a long plume of smoke. "And Gary? What's his number?"
"Zero-point-three percent. Statistical noise."
"So when he runs tonight—because that kid's going to run—you let him?"
"Object lesson." I met her pale eyes. "Panic breaks chains. Chains breaking kills everyone. Gary runs, Gary dies, everyone else learns the cost."
Helen's loyalty ticked up: 84%. Essential recognized essential. Cold math respected cold math.
Midnight came. Ration break.
Protein bars and water jugs. Miller ate alone by his cruiser, his empty holster twitching.
Gary got half rations.
He sat with his splinted foot propped on the hood of his Civic. The morphine was wearing off, pain was mounting, and the panic in his eyes was visible even from fifty feet away.
02:47 Hours. Exactly on timeline projection.
Gary's Civic engine turned over quietly. Headlights off. He reversed slowly, trying for a stealth exit through the chain-link gap.
I didn't stop him. I stood watching from the Mudroom shadow, Fang loose in my palm.
Yana appeared beside me, silent. Her shadow-cloak flickered faintly—pre-class activation, instinctive stealth she didn't know she had yet.
"You're letting him run?" she whispered.
"Lesson's loading," I said. I pointed at the tree line where Decay Sight showed me the futures branching. "He makes it eight miles. Highway 40. Runs out of gas because he panic-drove on empty. First Shambler wave catches him at the Shell station. Dies in his car. Door locks jam. They peel him out through the sunroof like canned meat."
Her hazel eyes tracked the Civic's taillights disappearing into the dark. "You can see that? Future sight?"
"Decay Sight. Regressor ability. I see failure states, death timers, probability branches." My own timer blinked: `[MORTALITY INDEX: 94%. DAYS REMAINING: 28]`. "I died once already. Got sent back. This time, I'm building it right."
She absorbed that silently.
"That's cold."
"That's survival," I said. "He panics, he runs, he dies, everyone left learns: the Silo is the only safe place. Chains hold or everyone dies."
Yana's jaw set. "I don't have to like it."
"You don't. You just have to survive it."
Gary was gone. The lesson was in motion.
Day 3.
The sun rose on an empty parking spot where the Civic used to be.
The crew stared at the gap in the chain-link fence. No one said his name. They didn't have to. The news feeds were doing the talking for us.
"Global Pandemic Declared. U.S. Borders Closed."
"Civil Unrest in St. Louis. National Guard Deployed."
We worked in a grim silence. The Mudroom hit eighty-two percent completion by dusk. The airlock frame was solid, the pressure nozzle mounts installed.
But the real change happened at midnight.
Yana collapsed near the perimeter fence. She didn't scream—she wasn't the screaming type—but her body arched like a drawn bow, muscles seizing in a violent, silent spasm.
"Seizure!" Helen shouted, dropping her cigarette.
"Back off," I ordered, stepping between the medic and the convulsing courier. "It's a Sync. Pixel Fever."
"She's dying, Jack!"
"She's upgrading."
I watched the AR overlays flicker around Yana's body. Blue wireframes tore through her skin, knitting into her nervous system. It looked like electrocution without the lightning.
00:00 to 02:47 AM.
She thrashed in the mud for nearly three hours. Travis had to hold her shoulders down to keep her from cracking her skull on the concrete.
When she finally stopped, she didn't gasp. She just opened her eyes.
They were glowing. Faint, hazel slits backlit by an internal orange fire. Shadows seemed to pool around her, clinging to her courier gear like smoke.
`[YANA "SHADOW" - USER CONFIRMED. CLASS: SHADOW. LOYALTY: 34%.]`
She sat up, looking at her hands. She moved, and the air seemed to blur behind her.
"Welcome to the two percent," I told her. I pulled a combat knife from my belt and tossed it to her.
She caught it out of the air. The motion was too fast to track.
"Day 3 complete," I announced to the terrified crew.
My phone pinged. A System Alert.
`[FIRST REANIMATION CONFIRMED: DALLAS GENERAL HOSPITAL]`
`[SHAMBLER VARIANT: ACTIVE]`
I looked at the darkness beyond the fence. The silence of the Sauget woods felt heavier now. Hungry.
"Sleep fast," I said. "Day 4, we go loud."
FOUNDRY PROTOCOL - DAY 3
SECTOR 1 (JACK MONROE) █░░░░░░░░░ 1/10 Nodes
MUDROOM: 82% COMPLETE
Next Spawn Event: 8 HOURS
Users: 2 | Nulls: 6 | Loyalty: FRAGILE