novelraw Chapter 126: A House Of Wonder
Chapter 126: A House Of Wonder
They came in with the smell of the winter wind still on their clothes.
Lachlan was already coiling the rope back up before putting it in the hall closet. Boots were already stacked by the wall to dry on the mat by the door. The guy’s rifles had been cleared and laid with the muzzles to the corner... ready to be grabbed at a moments’ notice.
The massive glass windows went dull behind them, the outside world pressing flat as if the day had only been a thought.
"We need to do an inventory," Zubair grunted when everyone had met back in the living room. It wasn’t a bark, so much as just a line drawn. He set his palms to the windowsill behind him; frost thinning under the heat that bled from him when he wasn’t watching. "Actual numbers, not hope."
Elias already had their go-bag haul in a neat line on the floor: MREs counted by touch, ammo in rows of five, med kit splayed and repacked like a heart surgeon’s tray.
"Food: six days if we’re complacent," he said, double checking his numbers. "Twelve if we’re strict. Water is whatever we can melt and boil or drink through a LifeStraw. Exposure is the real threat—glare, wind. The cold is a bitch I never wanted to meet."
"And yet, here we are... in the great wide white," Lachlan said from the chair he was sprawled on. It would have been an oversized chair to anyone else, but it fit him a bit too well. "Cannibalism on day thirteen. Dibs on Alexei. He looks well marbled."
"You could not chew me," Alexei said mildly, propping a boot on the coffee table in the middle of the living room. "You’ll choke on me." He was watching Sera instead of the snow and ice outside, his head tilted like he was waiting for a song to start.
The creature purred, pleased: they were where they should be. The day had settled right in her bones—test, map, return. Balance held. Law was beginning to feel like habit.
Sera swallowed the last of the MRE crackers. She wasn’t hungry, in fact the very human food was sticking in her throat, but it was making her creature happy, so she went along with it.
Dusing off the salt from her fingers, she rose to her feet. "Come on," she said, not bothering to hide the slight smile on her face. "I guess when you guys were stuck here the first night, you didn’t really explore all that much."
Four heads lifted, and she could feel all of their eyes on her. Zubair’s eyes didn’t leave her face for a beat, weighing her words, then he nodded once and pushed off the sill. The others fell into step without questions.
Lately, it seemed like they always did.
She led them down the hall, past the rooms they’d claimed for sleep, to a door no one had tried because it had her jacket thrown over the knob and an old habit of privacy hanging from it. She pulled the jacket free, turned the handle, and pushed the door wide.
They stopped dead on the threshold.
Shelves climbed the walls: metal units bolted into studs, every level neatly stocked and stacked.
Cans turned label-out in soldier-straight lines. Beans and tomatoes and peaches. Stacks of pasta, sacks of rice, flour in sealed buckets. Jars of salt, sugar, instant coffee. Boxes of tea. Vacuum-packed spices. Two blue water cubes sat in the corner, full and capped.
It was clear that this wasn’t thrown together hastily. It was planned.
Elias stepped in like a man entering a chapel, his head spinning around as he took everything in.
He reached for a label and stopped himself, fingers hovering. "Calories," he said softly. "Protein. Fiber. Sodium. Vitamins." He pivoted, eyes tracking quantities with the care he used on wounds. "This... Sera, this is almost a year’s worth of food."
"Depends how we eat," she replied with a shrug. Zubair’s mouth had gone tight the way it did when relief wanted to be visible and he refused to show it. "It buys us some time."
"Time is what we don’t have to waste," Zubair said, echo flat and satisfying to himself.
He dragged a hand over a shelf, the heat under his skin fogging the metal for a heartbeat. "We ration on a schedule. And not matter what happens, we do not advertise this."
"Who would we advertise to?" Lachlan asked, peering at the top shelf like he could will a bottle of whiskey to appear between the beans and the evaporated milk. "The snow?"
"The people who will come out of the woodwork looking when their pantries run out," Zubair said.
He wasn’t wrong. The ice and snow didn’t mean that they were the only ones left alive; it just made distance harder to meet people.
"But wait... there’s more," Sera smirked, because they were all still standing like the room had changed gravity. Leaving the excess pantry, she pushed open the next door.
Here, freezers lined the wall. They were the old chest kind, humming softly thanks to a backup generator she had installed awhile ago. She popped the first freezer and cold vapor rolled across her boots.
Packages lay stacked inside, labeled in grease pencil. Venison. Salmon. Bear. Each and every last one of them had the dates of when they were packaged.
Another chest held wrapped roasts, vacuum-sealed. A third was fish, fillets cut and bagged. Meat enough to run a restaurant if restaurants still existed.
Alexei laughed, low and pleased in his throat, like a wolf finding a cache it had hidden from itself. He reached in and lifted a slab of venison against the plastic, breath fogging it. "Lapochka," he said, not a tease. A verdict. "You had feast under our noses."
"It’s not for a feast," Sera replied, rolling her eyes. "It will still need to be rationed."
"Of course it does." He slid the venison back into its slot with careful hands. "It is for doing what we do and not dying."
Lachlan whistled an appreciative little line. "And here I was planning day thirteen’s menu. Cancel the cannibalism, boys—Peaches had steak night planned."
Sera ignored him. The creature rubbed against her mind like a cat along her shin, smug. They provided for you, and the center would keep them fed, keep them close.
Elias leaned over the lid to scan dates. "Pre-cut, portioned. Seal looks good. No freezer burn. Backup power’s holding." His head tilted. "How?"
"Don’t worry about it," Sera sighed, thinking about all the nights she had managed to sneak out of the cabin.
She had made sure the building’s lines could carry what she needed when the grid was gone, and she had more than one way to keep the freezer going. Then again, there was always outside if necessary, she just didn’t trust others not to take what was hers.
Zubair straightened. He didn’t press. He cataloged. That was his job. "We prioritize perishable first," he said. "Protein rotation. We don’t power up everything at once—we cycle to keep draw low."
"Copy," Elias said, already adjusting silent math.
"So satisfied, over just this," purred Sera, taking more of a delight in their happiness than she should have. "There is still more."
They climbed to the second level. The air changed at the stairwell—a soft slip in temperature, a whisper of damp. She slid the greenhouse door open and the smell of living green walked out to meet them.
The guys stopped again, and this time it was with a sense of complete wonder.