The dark in Kyon's apartment was absolute, a physical presence. He didn't sleep. Sleep was a vulnerability, a temporary death he couldn't afford. Instead, he sat in the chair by the door, his consciousness cycling between hyper-vigilant listening and a state of near-meditative stillness. The Makarov rested on his thigh, his fingers lightly tracing the checkering on its grip. The duffel bags of medical loot were tucked behind him, a tangible weight of potential.
The city's soundscape had evolved. The initial, explosive chaos had settled into a lower, more sinister register. Gone were the random shrieks and car crashes. Now, the night was punctuated by the distant, rhythmic thuds of systematic looting, by the short, sharp barks of gunfire that were closer than before, by the occasional, drawn-out scream that would rise, peak, and be cut off with a chilling finality. These were not the sounds of panic. They were the sounds of process.
The weeping woman next door, now the listing woman, had fallen silent. Kyon's ears, tuned to the building's micro-symphony of distress, caught a new sound from her apartment: a slow, scraping drag. Something heavy being moved. Furniture against the door, perhaps. She was fortifying. She had adapted from madness to strategy. He noted it, filed it away.
Just before the first grey smear of dawn polluted the sky, he heard the footsteps on the stairs. Not the frantic run of yesterday, but a deliberate, heavy tread. Two pairs. They stopped on his landing.
A fist pounded on a door. Not his. The meth cook's.
"Open up! Contribution check!"
The voice was male, loud, dripping with a newly-fashioned authority.
Silence from the meth cook's apartment. The dark smear under the door was now a crust.
The fist pounded again. "You have resources. The Block Committee is collecting for communal security. Open up, or we'll assume non-compliance."
Block Committee. The phrase landed in Kyon's mind like a stone in still water. It had begun. The organization of hell. Not just gangs, but bureaucracy. Taxation under threat. He remained perfectly still, his breathing inaudible.
A boot kicked the door, once, twice. The flimsy lock gave way with a splintering crack. The two men barged in. Kyon heard them moving through the small space, cursing.
"Christ. He's soup."
"Check the kitchen. Look for product, cash, anything stable."
"Just bags of powder and shit. You think it's worth…?"
"Take it all. Someone will trade for it. Or we can use it to motivate people."
They ransacked the place for a few minutes, then emerged. Their footsteps approached his door. Kyon's finger slid inside the Makarov's trigger guard, resting on the cold curve of the trigger.
The knock came. Three firm, solid raps.
"Wilson. Kyon Wilson. We know you're in there. We saw you return last night. Heavy bags. Open up. The Committee needs to assess your contribution."
Kyon didn't move. He didn't speak. He watched the thin line of light under his door, now bisected by two pairs of shadowed feet.
"Wilson, this isn't a request. We're building order here. You contribute, you get protection. You refuse…" The man let the threat hang. "We have a battering ram. And we have fire."
Kyon calculated. Two men. Confident, organized. They had a structure, however nascent. Killing them would make him a direct enemy of that structure. It would be profitable in the immediate sense—he would keep his supplies—but strategically costly. He needed data first. He needed to understand the new power grid.
He stood, silently, and moved the fridge just enough. He didn't open the door wide. He opened it a crack, just enough to see one man's face and a slice of the hallway. The speaker was in his forties, with the build of a former laborer going soft. He had a butcher's cleaver tucked into his belt. The other man, younger, lingered behind him, holding a tire iron. Both had the eager, unstable eyes of men drunk on tiny, sanctioned power.
"What's the Committee?" Kyon asked, his voice a dry rasp from disuse.
The leader, surprised by the question, puffed up. "Citizen's initiative. We're securing the building, the block. Organizing scavenger teams, setting watches. Can't have anarchy. But it takes resources. You came in loaded last night. Medicine, we heard. That's a premium contribution."
"Heard from who?"
"Doesn't matter. You sharing or not?"
Kyon's mind worked. Heard from who? The child in the alley? Unlikely. Someone else had seen him return. The listing woman? Possibly. It didn't matter. The fact was, he was already a marked node on their nascent network. Complete refusal meant war. Complete compliance meant slavery.
"I'll contribute," Kyon said, his tone flat, devoid of resistance. "But not all of it. And not to you."
The leader's face hardened. "You don't get to dictate terms, son."
"I do," Kyon said, his eye fixed on the man's through the crack. "Because I have antibiotics, morphine, and sutures. You have a cleaver. In a week, infections will kill more people than your little committee. I'll give you one bag. A show of goodwill. You take it, and you don't come back to my door. You tell your committee I'm a resource, not a repository. You need something, you negotiate. You try to take, you'll lose men. And you'll lose access."
He saw the calculation flicker in the man's eyes, mirroring his own. The brute-force approach was warring with a dim understanding of long-term utility. The younger one with the tire iron shifted, impatient.
"We could just take it all now," the younger man growled.
Kyon's gaze didn't waver from the leader. "You could try. The first one through the door dies. The second might get me. But you'll bleed out from a gut shot before you find the right bag of medicine. Is my stash worth your life, or his?" He paused, letting the cold logic settle. "One bag. For peace. Your move."
The leader's jaw worked. He was a bully, not a general. The offer provided a face-saving exit and a tangible gain. "Which bag?"
"The green duffel. It's by the door. It has enough to handle basic trauma for your people. Consider it an investment in your workforce."
After a long, tense moment, the leader nodded. "Slide it out."
Kyon kept the Makarov trained on the door crack with one hand while using the other to push the green duffel, heavy with bandages, antiseptic, and some basic oral antibiotics, into the hallway. The younger man snatched it up, peering inside greedily.
"Smart play, Wilson," the leader said, a hollow attempt at reclaiming authority. "We'll be in touch for… negotiations."
"Knock first," Kyon said, and pushed the fridge back into place.
He listened as their footsteps retreated down the stairs. He had paid a tax. He had established a perimeter. He had broadcast that he was dangerous, but pragmatically so. It was the first diplomatic exchange of the new world. A conversation conducted entirely in the subtext of violence.
He needed to move. His apartment was now a known location with a valued cache. He spent the daylight hours of the second day disassembling his most critical supplies—the hard drugs, the IV antibiotics, the surgical tools—and creating multiple, smaller stashes. Some in the walls, behind a loose baseboard. Some in the dank, abandoned basement, behind a crumbling coal chute. He kept only a day-pack's worth of essentials and trade goods with him.
By late afternoon, he ventured out. The city was transforming before his eyes. The bodies from the first day were mostly gone, dragged into alleys or simply removed. The streets were not empty, but the people moving through them had a new demeanor: furtive, purposeful, their eyes scanning not for police, but for threat and opportunity. He saw the first "checkpoint" two blocks from his building—a makeshift barricade of shopping carts and office furniture manned by three people wearing mismatched armbands. They were stopping people, demanding to see "allocated resource permits." They had forms. Hell was indeed getting organized.
He avoided them, cutting through a shattered storefront. His destination was a place he'd only heard whispered about in the frantic chatter of the first night: the Cedar Street Bridge. It was said to be where the barter economy was solidifying, where the flesh markets were setting up.
The bridge was a wide, concrete overpass spanning a polluted canal. It was already a hive. The air stank of unwashed bodies, smoke, and a new, sour-sweet odor he couldn't immediately place. Makeshift stalls lined the edges—blankets on the ground, card tables, the open trunks of cars. People were trading canned food for bullets. Batteries for bottles of water. A woman was sobbing, offering a gold necklace for a single dose of insulin.
And then he saw the new categories.
Near the far end, a group of people, mostly men but some women, stood with signs around their necks or simply with a hollow, defeated look. One sign read: "STRONG LABOR. WORK FOR FOOD ONLY." Another: "SKILLED ELECTRICIAN. EMPLOYER PROTECTION REQUIRED." Slavery, as promised, rebranded as employment. Potential "employers" walked the line, assessing muscle tone, checking teeth like livestock.
Further down, the sour-sweet smell intensified. Here, butchers had set up. Not for animals. Thick plastic tarps were spread on the ground, stained dark. Off-cuts of meat, pale and marbled with fat, were laid out on clean-ish pieces of board. Long pig, a part of Kyon's brain supplied, the old, grim euphemism rising from some deep cultural memory. Cannibalism, legalized under scarcity. The butchers worked with a chilling, professional detachment. No one met anyone's eyes. Transactions were conducted in hushed tones, cash or trade goods exchanged for wrapped parcels.
Kyon felt no nausea, only a profound, glacial cold settling in his gut. This was the logical endpoint. The body as resource. He moved past it, his face a neutral mask.
He found what he was looking for near the center of the bridge, where the traffic of people was thickest. A man with a face like a hatchet and eyes that missed nothing stood behind a folding table. On it were arranged boxes of ammunition, a few handguns, several knives. A hand-painted sign leaned against it: "MUNITIONS – MEDICAL SUPPLIES – INFO. BEST RATES."
Kyon approached. The man's eyes flicked over him, assessing the quality of his stolen jacket, the solidity of his boots, the alertness in his posture.
"What's your need?" the man asked, his voice gravelly.
"I have supply. Primarily medical. Need information, and maybe a trade." Kyon kept his voice low.
"Show."
Kyon unzipped his daypack just enough for the man to see the boxes of amoxicillin, the roll of sterile gauze, the vial of morphine syrettes. The man's eyes gleamed for a fraction of a second.
"Private chat," the man said, nodding to the shadowed alcove of a bridge support pillar. He gestured to a hulking youth loitering nearby to watch the table.
In the relative quiet of the alcove, the man extended a hand. "Call me Mercer."
Kyon ignored the hand. "Kyon. Who runs the bridge?"
Mercer grinned, a thin slash of yellow teeth. "Direct. I like it. Right now? A temporary council. Me, for the hard goods. A woman named Elara, who runs the… protein market." He jerked his head toward the butchers. "And a psychopath who calls himself the Foreman, who's organizing the labor pool. We have an understanding. We keep the peace here, we all profit. Outside the bridge? Different story. Gangs are carving up territories. Cops are either dead or have joined the biggest gangs. Rumors say some of the old corporations are setting up fortified compounds, calling in private security. They'll be the new kingdoms."
"The cameras?" Kyon asked.
Mercer's grin faded. "Yeah. The fucking cameras. Still on. Still blinking. No one knows who's watching, or why. Some think it's the government, studying us. Some think it's some rich fucks, getting their kicks. All I know is, they see everything, and they do nothing. It's like God is a pervert with a surveillance fetish." He spat. "You get used to it. Or you go mad. Your medicine. What do you want for it?"
"Information first. Who's the strongest power forming near the North End industrial park?"
Mercer rubbed his chin. "North End… that's becoming Reaver territory. Led by a piece of work named Silas. Used to be a bail bondsman. Now he's got a crew of maybe thirty, heavily armed. They've taken over a old meat-packing plant. Rumor is they're not just scavenging. They're… processing."
"Processing."
"Yeah. They bring in people. The weak, the alone. The ones who can't pay 'protection.' They go in. Cuts of meat, tanned hides, and whatever they had on them come out. Silas runs a tight ship. Industrializes the horror." Mercer watched for Kyon's reaction.
Kyon showed none. "And the Block Committees?"
Mercer snorted. "Small-time. Wannabe warlords. They'll either get absorbed by someone like Silas, or they'll become his suppliers. A bag of meds for that info is plenty, friend. Now, for the goods themselves… I'll give you a fair weight in 9mm ammo, a good knife, and a clean water filter for the lot in that pack."
"The ammo and the filter. Not the knife. I want a map. Your knowledge, of safe routes, contested zones, and water sources, drawn out."
Mercer raised an eyebrow. "Knowledge is expensive."
"So is morphine," Kyon said, tapping his pack.
Twenty minutes later, Kyon left the bridge with a heavier load of 9mm rounds for the Makarov, a compact water filter, and a crude but detailed map drawn on the back of a candy wrapper, annotated in Mercer's tight script. He also carried a new, chilling understanding. The world wasn't just surviving. It was specializing.
He took a circuitous route back, following one of Mercer's "quieter" paths that wound through a series of connected backyards and over fences. He was scaling a chain-link fence into an alley when he heard the voices below.
"Please, no, we gave you everything already…"
"The fee's gone up. Inflation, sweetheart. Your building is now in a high-risk zone. Requires more security."
Kyon peered over the top of the fence. In the dead-end alley, two men from the Block Committee—the younger one from the morning and a new guy—had a woman and a teenage boy cornered against a brick wall. The woman was the one from the family in his building. The boy was her eldest, maybe fifteen. Both were trembling. The younger committee man, the one with the tire iron, was clearly enjoying himself.
"We have nothing left!" the woman pleaded, her voice breaking.
"Then you work it off," the man leered. "The boy looks strong. He can join the sanitation crew. You… you can provide comfort services. Committee's gotta stay motivated."
The boy stepped in front of his mother, fists clenched, face pale with terror and rage. "Leave her alone!"
The committee man laughed and raised his tire iron. "Or what, kid? You gonna—"
Kyon dropped from the fence, landing in a crouch behind them with a soft thud. Both men spun around. The younger one's eyes widened in recognition.
"Wilson. This isn't your business. Committee affairs."
"You're in my route," Kyon said, straightening up. "You're blocking it. That makes it my business."
The new guy, bigger and dumber-looking, hefted a pipe. "There's two of us. Piss off."
Kyon didn't argue. He didn't posture. In one fluid motion, he drew the Makarov, aimed not at the center mass, but at the bigger man's leading knee, and fired.
The report was deafening in the confined alley. The man screamed, a high, animal sound, and collapsed, his leg folding grotesquely beneath him. He dropped the pipe, clutching his shattered knee, his screams dissolving into wet sobs.
The younger man with the tire iron froze, his bravado evaporating. He stared at his writhing companion, then at Kyon's utterly impassive face, the gun now centered on his own chest.
"You… you shot him!"
"He was blocking the route," Kyon repeated, his voice still that terrifying monotone. "He was also a liability. Loud. Unpredictable. You, you're a bureaucrat. You understand negotiation."
The man's throat worked. The tire iron trembled in his hand.
"Drop it. Take your friend. Go back to your committee. Tell them the tax for using my route is one functional man. Consider him paid. If you come down this alley again, or bother this woman and her son again, the next tax will be you."
The tire iron clattered to the asphalt. The young man, moving with jerky, panicked motions, struggled to haul his wailing compatriot to his feet. They stumbled out of the alley, leaving a slick trail of blood behind.
Kyon turned to the woman and her son. They were pressed against the wall, staring at him with the same awe and terror they'd shown their tormentors. The boy was breathing in sharp, ragged gasps.
"They'll come back for you," Kyon stated. "Not today. Maybe not tomorrow. But they will. You're a mark of weakness on their ledger now."
"What… what do we do?" the woman whispered, her eyes wide.
"You leave. The boy looks strong. Go to the Cedar Street Bridge. Find the labor line. Sign on with a crew going out of the city, maybe to one of the corporate compounds. It's slavery, but it's structured. It has rules. Here, you're just meat."
The boy found his voice. "You killed that man… for us?"
"I didn't kill him," Kyon corrected, ejecting the spent casing and chambering a new round. "I removed an obstacle. Your situation was a coincidental variable. Don't make a story out of it. Stories get you killed." He looked at the woman. "You have ten minutes to get whatever you can carry from your apartment. Then you run. Don't look back."
He didn't wait for their thanks or their questions. He holstered the Makarov, the smell of cordite clinging to him, and continued down the alley, leaving them in the gathering dusk. The encounter was not mercy. It was maintenance. Unchecked predation by small-timers like the Committee created unpredictable chaos. Chaos was bad for business. By enforcing a crude rule—don't block the route—he was, in his own way, contributing to a darker, more stable order.
As he neared his building, he saw a flicker of light in a third-story window—the listing woman's apartment. A candle. And for a moment, he saw her silhouette. She was standing perfectly still, looking down into the street, looking directly at the spot where he had turned into the alley earlier.
She had been watching. She had seen him leave. She had likely seen him return.
She was data collection. A human camera.
Kyon entered the silent, dark foyer. The door to the meth cook's apartment was now wide open, the room picked clean. The building was a skeleton being stripped.
He moved his fridge and entered his tomb-like apartment. He lit no light. He sat in the dark, listening. The city's new sounds filtered in: the distant, organized clang of what might be a patrol, a single, echoing gunshot from the direction of the bridge, and from the apartment next door, the soft, steady scratch of a pencil on paper.
The listing woman wasn't just listing supplies anymore. She was logging events. She was bearing witness.
Kyon leaned his head back against the wall. The grammar of this new world was becoming clear. Nouns: Flesh. Bullets. Medicine. Verbs: Take. Trade. Break. Kill. The adjectives were all variations of necessary.
He had spoken it today in bullet and barter. He had negotiated with a bureaucrat of brutality and a merchant of death. He had begun to map the economy of suffering.
He closed his eyes. Somewhere, a man named Silas was industrializing horror in a meat-packing plant. Committees were writing their own tyrannical bylaws. Cameras blinked, recording the descent.
And Kyon Wilson, a man who felt nothing, understood everything. He was not fighting the system. He was learning its syntax, so he could one day write his own sentence with it.
A sentence that ended with a period, not a scream.
Outside, under the indifferent red eyes of the cameras, Hell was not just real. It was open for business.