Chapter 285: Eight Feet Away.
I crossed to the door. Venna got up and came around to lean against the counter, watching me. The heat in the reception made every movement feel slower than it was.
"Careful," she said. "We don’t know if that connects to the outside."
"It doesn’t." I was already sure. Nobody hides a door that carefully if it leads to a street. The seam in the paint was too deliberate, too clean.
I pushed it inward. A refrigerator.
White, tall, a heavy glass front, standing alone in a small stone room that had been built to hold exactly that and nothing else. The air inside the little room was noticeably cooler, a sudden pocket of relief against the heat of the rest of the building. The glass reflected the pale morning light in a single hard sheet.
And behind the glass, food. Rows of it. Drinks stacked along the door shelves. Plastic-wrapped packages, bottles, things that still looked like they belonged to a world that had grocery runs and ordinary hunger. The sight of it hit harder than any of the infected outside.
"Venna." I didn’t even go in. "You need to see this."
She came around the counter fast. Bare feet soft on the boards, the wrap long gone, just the underwear and the heat-flush still in her cheeks.
Hope arrived on her face the moment she saw it—eyes widening, mouth opening on a breath that never quite became a word—and she came straight into me in the doorway and put her arms right around me and held on. Hard. The kind of hold that had nothing left to prove.
I held her back.
Neither of us said anything for a second. After the night we’d had and the morning after it, that fridge looked like somebody had left it there specifically for us. The cool air from the little room moved against our skin. For a few heartbeats the rest of the capital might as well have stopped existing.
We didn’t stay in the doorway long. We crossed to it together, both of us already deciding what we’d eat first, and everything else in the world could wait until after. The stone floor under our feet was cooler here. The glass was close enough to fog slightly from our breath.
I pulled the handle.
It didn’t move.
I pulled it again. The metal stayed exactly where it was. No give. No click. Nothing.
"It’s locked." My voice came out flat and hard. "It’s locked, Ven."
"Let me." She was already past me, both hands on the handle, hauling at it with everything she had. The muscles in her arms stood out. Her bare feet braced against the stone. "Fuck."
The door didn’t shift a millimetre.
And something about that struck me as genuinely funny.
I started laughing. The sound came up from somewhere under the disappointment and took over completely.
"What?" She was already going too, laughing before she knew why, the kind of laugh that arrives when the alternative is worse. "What’s funny?"
Both of us stood in a stone room in our underwear, laughing at a locked fridge. The sound bounced off the close walls and came back denser. Twenty years on the plain and I had never once been this disappointed by the apocalypse. Probably because out there I’d never expected anything from it in the first place.
"So what do we do?" she asked eventually, hands braced on her knees, still breathing hard from the laughing and the hauling both.
"Find the keys."
She looked at me and her face said everything her mouth hadn’t got to. The hope had gone out of it cleanly, leaving something thinner and more practical underneath.
"Or we break the glass."
I looked at it. Knocked once with my knuckles. It answered dull and solid, the sound of something that had been designed not to break easily.
"That’s thick."
"It’s still glass." She didn’t wait for the rest. "And it’s the only thing between us and staying alive."
"Okay. Let’s try."
I went back to the reception and picked up one of the wooden chairs. The wood was warm from the room. I carried it in. Venna was leaning against the wall waiting, arms folded, watching the glass like it might change its mind.
"Move back," I said. "If it goes, it’ll go everywhere."
The last thing I needed in an apocalypse was an injured partner.
"You’re right." She went round behind the fridge, out of the line of it, leaving me with a clear run at the glass. The little room suddenly felt even smaller.
She was starving. I could tell because nothing was coming off her at all. Not a single thought. Even her head had gone quiet. The ability that had been feeding me her private commentary all morning had simply stopped, as if the hunger had turned the volume all the way down.
"Okay."
I drew the chair back, all four legs aimed at the centre of the glass, and put everything I had into it.
The legs connected.
The sound filled the little stone room—hard, sharp, final. It bounced off the walls and came back denser.
The glass didn’t take a scratch.
I went again. Same result. A third time, harder, and a fourth, and by the fifth my arms were burning and the glass looked exactly the way it had looked when I found it. Not a chip. Not a white mark. Nothing. The chair legs had started to splinter instead.
I stopped.
Venna came back around from behind the fridge and looked at the chair in my hands and then at the glass. Her expression was almost clinical.
Holy shit.
She hadn’t said a word. The thought arrived in my head clean and quiet, the first one I’d caught from her in minutes.
"What do we do?" she asked out loud.
"We find keys. Or we find something harder."
"Like a stone."
"A stone would work."
She nodded slowly, because she’d already followed it to the end. There was no stone in this building. Stone was outside, on a street with twenty of them on it, and the forty metres between the front doors and the supermarket had just become a different kind of problem.
"We should do it while we still have the strength," she said.
I couldn’t have put it better.
We went back out into the corridor. The food was sitting behind glass eight feet away and we were going to search every room in this building one more time before either of us said the word outside.
The heat of the corridor hit us again the moment we left the little stone room. Behind us the fridge stood locked and indifferent, full of everything we needed and none of the means to reach it.