Chapter 286: The Last Way to Eat.
The sun had climbed and the room was full of hard light now.
I sat on the floor with my legs bent, looking at the stone. Venna’s laughter filled the room.
"It genuinely cannot get worse than this." She sat down near me, her legs bent the same way, both of us staring at the same object. Then she laughed again—short, disbelieving, the sound of someone who had decided the only remaining option was to find it funny.
We’d gone through every room in the building twice more. No keys. Nothing hard enough to matter. And the one stone in the entire place was sitting in the room furthest from the fridge.
That would have been fine on its own.
The problem was the size of it. About the size of a twenty-litre jerrycan, and it had the weight to match. The thing sat there like it had been placed specifically to mock us—flat on three sides, corners rounded by age, the surface rough and warm from the room’s heat.
"So what do we do?" Venna asked, still laughing. I couldn’t tell whether it was my face doing it or whether laughing was simply the way she’d chosen to handle the situation.
"We move while we still have the strength."
I got up. She got up with me.
Both of us still down to underwear because the building had turned into an oven and neither of us had the energy to care anymore. Sweat had already started again between my shoulder blades. The air felt thicker than it had an hour ago.
"So what’s the plan? We carry it?"
"Yeah."
"Bram." She looked at the stone, then at the doorway. "We’ll get there and have nothing left. We’ll carry it all that way and then be too tired to lift it."
She was right and I hated it. The arithmetic was simple and completely against us.
"You’re right." I crouched at the base of it. The stone was warm under my palms. "We don’t carry it. We roll it."
"We? That thing is flat on three sides."
"I roll it." I got my hands under the edge. The weight made itself known immediately, deep and absolute. "You walk."
The stone was heavy in a way that got worse the longer I touched it. Gravity felt personal.
I got it up on an edge and tipped it forward. It landed with a dull, solid thunk that travelled up through the boards. I got it up again and tipped it forward again. Then again. Each cycle cost more than the last. My shoulders started to burn early.
Venna came along behind me.
"You can rest if you need to," she said. The words were light. The worry underneath them wasn’t.
I didn’t stop.
Because I’d worked it through and there was only one version of this where we stayed inside these walls and lived, and that version had the fridge open in it. Everything else ended with us weaker, slower, and still hungry when the infected finally came through a window.
I rolled it. Tipped it. Rolled it. Tipped it. Out of the room, down the corridor, one length of stone at a time. The walls of the corridor seemed to close in with every metre. By the time we were in the reception my arms had started shaking and the sweat was running freely down my back and into the waistband of my underwear.
"I love this diligence." Venna was behind me, breathless herself from a walk that should have cost her nothing. "One more step. You’ve got this."
"Stop that."
She laughed at the way I said it and then she actually roared.
"COME ON, BRAM."
It should have been ridiculous. It hooked something in me anyway. The last of whatever I had left answered the noise. I got under it and pushed and we were past the counter and through the door, and the stone came down flat on the floor of the little room with the fridge standing over it. The impact was solid and final.
I sighed and stayed bent over my own knees. My arms hung useless. The cool air of the little room felt almost cold against the heat coming off my skin.
Outside, the crows were cawing.
That sound again. On the plain it meant the infected were close, because crows follow the dead. Here it just meant the day was still moving whether we managed to eat or not.
"We lift it," I said, when I had enough air. "And we put it through the glass."
Everything in me was down to the last of it. Last night had taken more than I’d realised at the time. The extraction, the vision, the hours of holding her, the morning of heat and empty cupboards—all of it had been spending from the same account.
"Is it going to break?" A little doubt in her voice. She was looking at the glass the way a person looks at something that has already refused them once.
I looked at the stone. Then at the glass.
There was no version of physics where that glass held that weight. The stone was denser than any chair leg. The glass, however thick, was still glass.
"It is." I looked at her. "Trust me."
And I watched her decide to. The decision moved across her face and settled. She nodded once.
We got either side of it and lifted together, Venna on the left and me on the right, and I could see what it was costing her in her forearms and her jaw. The tendons stood out. Her breath came short and sharp through her nose. This was the last move either of us had in us. It had to finish it.
"I count to three. We throw it and we move. I don’t want it coming back down on our feet. Understood?"
"Yes." The weight was already too much for her. I could feel the tremble travelling through the stone from her side.
"One. Two. Three."
We threw it with everything we had and both of us went sideways. The stone left our hands in a short, ugly arc.
It hit the glass.
And bounced off it, back onto the floor, landing with a sound that filled the whole building—a heavy, final, almost insulting thunk that travelled up through the stone and into the walls.
One scratch.
One thin white scratch across the face of the glass, no deeper than a fingernail, catching the light like a single hair.
"Fuck."
My eyes stung and I let them. The disappointment arrived complete and absolute, the kind that has nowhere left to go except outward.
I sat down where I was. Venna sat down against the opposite wall. The little room was suddenly quieter than it had any right to be. The fridge stood there, locked, almost untouched, full of everything we needed and completely indifferent to the effort it had just cost us.
Neither of us said it.
There was one way left to eat, and it was on the other side of the front door.