The first thing Alex Mercer noticed wasn't the smell of rot, or the gnawing emptiness in his stomach. It was the structural instability of the ceiling.
He blinked, his eyes adjusting to the gloom. Above him, reinforced concrete cracked like a spiderweb, weeping rusty water. Based on the rebar exposure and the sheer weight of the earth pressing down from above, the load-bearing capacity was compromised by at least forty percent. In his previous life, back in 2025, he would have condemned the building instantly. He would have slapped a red tag on the door, called in a demolition crew, and gone to Starbucks for a double-shot espresso while filling out the paperwork on his iPad.
But there was no Starbucks. There was no iPad. And based on the phantom memories flooding his hippocampus like a corrupted hard drive attempting a reboot, there hadn't been a demolition crew in fifty years.
Alex sat up, a wave of vertigo slamming into him. He looked at his hands. They were wrong. Too thin. Too dirty. The fingernails were jagged and caked with black grime. He rubbed his face, feeling a beard that was patchy and coarse, not the groomed stubble he maintained for client meetings.
"Boss? You awake?"
The voice was raspy, sounding like two stones grinding together. Alex turned his head. Sitting by a dying fire fueled by old furniture legs was a boy. He couldn't have been more than sixteen, but his eyes were ancient, sunken deep into a skull wrapped in translucent, malnourished skin.
Jax. That was the name. The memory clicked into place. Jax was his runner.
Alex took a breath, tasting the air. It tasted like metallic dust and mildew. "I'm awake" Alex said. His own voice surprised him. It was weaker than he expected, lacking the diaphragm projection he used to command construction sites. He cleared his throat and tried again, forcing authority into the tone. "Status report, Jax."
Jax looked confused by the terminology but understood the intent. He gestured nervously toward a pile of crates in the corner of the subway platform. "It's bad, Alex. Real bad. The scavengers came back empty. Sector 7 is picked clean. We have three cans of dog food, maybe a pound of dried rat meat, and the water filter... the membrane cracked this morning. We have maybe two days of clean water left before we're drinking sludge."
Alex closed his eyes, processing the data. In 2025, a cracked water filter meant an Amazon Prime delivery the next day. Here, on Earth-88, it was a death sentence. Dysentery killed faster than bullets in this hellhole.
But that wasn't the immediate threat. The memories of the body's original owner—a desperate, scraping survivor also named Alex—surged forward.
"The Dust Raiders" Alex said, the name tasting like bile. "When is the tribute due?"
Jax flinched. "High noon. Today. If we don't give them fifty kilos of food or five healthy workers... they said they'll breach the barricade."
Alex stood up. His knees popped, and a wave of dizziness washed over him, likely hypoglycemia. He steadied himself against a graffiti-covered pillar. He was in a subway station, specifically the terminal of what used to be a major metropolitan line. Now, it was 'Hope Outpost,' a pathetic name for a tomb.
He walked over to the barricade at the station entrance. It was a joke. A pile of vending machines, loose rubble, and corrugated sheet metal. A structural engineer's nightmare. If the Raiders had a battering ram, or even just enough men to push, this wall would fold like wet cardboard.
"How many do we have?" Alex asked, staring at the weak points in the defense.
"Twelve" Jax said, shuffling up behind him. "Counting old man Miller and the sick ones. Only four of us can fight. And we only have the one gun."
Alex looked at the pistol tucked into his waistband. It was a pre-Collapse 9mm, pitted with rust. He checked the magazine. Three rounds. Three bullets against a gang of cannibals known for flaying their victims alive.
"So, we're dead" Alex muttered. "Statistically speaking, survival probability is zero."
"We could run" Jax whispered, terror leaking into his voice. "Into the tunnels?"
"No" Alex said sharply. "The tunnels are infested with gene-twisted rats the size of Golden Retrievers. I recall Miller losing a toe to one last week just ten meters from the perimeter. Besides, we have no water to travel. We stay. We hold."
"With what?" Jax cried, his voice cracking. "We have nothing!"
Alex turned to look at the boy. In his previous life, Alex had been a pragmatic man. He built skyscrapers that withstood hurricanes and bunkers for billionaires who feared the end of the world. He understood leverage, stress points, and material science. He didn't believe in magic, and he didn't believe in luck. He believed in physics and chemistry.
"Show me the junk pile" Alex ordered.
"The... the garbage?"
"The salvage, Jax. The stuff you idiots thought was useless because you couldn't eat it or shoot it. Show me."
Jax led him to the far end of the platform, away from the huddle of shivering survivors who watched Alex with a mix of fear and apathy. There was a heap of refuse scavenged from the surface ruins over the last few months. Broken toasters, tangled wires, plastic bottles, and bags of industrial waste.
Alex knelt, ignoring the pain in his joints. He began sifting through the pile. His mind shifted gears, overlaying his modern engineering knowledge onto the scrap before him.
*Broken microwave.* Magnetron could be useful later, useless now.
*Car battery.* Dead. Lead plates could be melted for slugs.
*PVC pipes.* Schedule 40. High durability. Good.
His hand landed on a heavy, tear-resistant bag. The label was faded, barely legible under fifty years of grime, but the chemical symbol was universal.
NH4NO3.
Ammonium Nitrate. High-grade agricultural fertilizer.
Alex felt a grin tug at the corner of his mouth. It was a cold, predatory expression that felt alien on this starved face. "Jax, where did you find this?"
"The garden center ruins" Jax sniffled. "We thought maybe we could grow mushrooms, but it just burned the soil. It's poison."
"It's not poison" Alex murmured, dusting off the bag. "It's the wrath of God, if you know how to ask nicely."
He looked around. He needed a fuel source. Ammonium nitrate was an oxidizer; it needed a fuel to become an explosive. In the mining industry, they used fuel oil. ANFO. Ammonium Nitrate Fuel Oil.
"Do we have any oil?" Alex asked. "Lamp oil? Diesel? Anything?"
Jax shook his head. "We burned the last of the lantern oil two nights ago. But... there's the generator room. The maintenance locker had some drums of black gunk. Too thick to burn in the lamps. It just smokes."
"Show me."
Five minutes later, Alex was standing over a 55-gallon drum of ancient, viscous motor oil. It had degraded, thick as molasses, but it was carbon-heavy. It would work. It wasn't the clean diesel of 2025, but thermodynamics didn't care about cleanliness. It only cared about energy release.
"Listen to me closely, Jax" Alex said, his voice steady. "I need you to get the PVC pipes. Cut them into one-foot sections. Can you do that?"
"I... I think so. Why?"
"Because we're not paying the tribute" Alex said, dipping a finger into the black sludge and rubbing it against his thumb. "We're going to renegotiate the terms."
*
The process was slow, agonizing work. Alex's new body fatigued quickly. His hands shook from low blood sugar, forcing him to stop every ten minutes to breathe. He cursed the weakness. In his old life, he ran marathons. Now, lifting a bucket of fertilizer felt like bench-pressing a Buick.
He had set up a workspace on a flat concrete slab away from the open fire. Safety protocols were non-existent, but he adhered to them as best he could.
First, the prills. The fertilizer pellets were coated to prevent moisture absorption. That coating inhibited the absorption of the fuel oil. He needed to grind them down. He used a flat stone and the concrete floor, crushing the white pellets into a finer powder to increase the surface area.
"Don't breathe the dust" he warned Jax, who was sawing through the PVC pipe with a rusted hacksaw. "It'll burn your lungs."
Once the nitrate was crushed, Alex measured the oil. The ideal stoichiometric ratio for ANFO was roughly 94% ammonium nitrate to 6% fuel oil by weight. He didn't have a scale. He had to do it by feel and sight, relying on twenty years of handling materials.
He poured the thick sludge into the powder, mixing it with a wooden stick. The white powder turned a sickly pinkish-grey. It looked like wet oatmeal.
"That looks disgusting" Jax commented, wiping sweat from his forehead.
"It's beautiful" Alex corrected. "This is potential energy waiting for a catalyst."
He packed the mixture into the PVC pipes. He didn't pack it too tight—dead-pressing could prevent the detonation wave from propagating—but tight enough to ensure density. He capped the ends with duct tape and rags, sealing them tight.
Now came the hard part. The detonator.
ANFO was a tertiary explosive. You could shoot it, set it on fire, or hit it with a hammer, and it wouldn't explode. It needed a primary shockwave to set it off. He needed a blasting cap.
Alex looked at the pistol. He had three bullets.
He ejected a round. Using a pair of pliers, he carefully wiggled the bullet head free from the casing. He poured the gunpowder onto a piece of paper. It was old, clumpy, but it smelled of sulfur and charcoal.
"What are you doing?" Jax whispered, eyes wide. "That's a bullet! We need those!"
"A bullet kills one man" Alex said, his eyes focused on the delicate work. "This will kill ten."
He needed a high-velocity shock. Gunpowder deflagrates (burns fast); it doesn't detonate (explode supersonically). But if confined tightly...
He found a small copper tube from the refrigeration unit of a broken vending machine. He crimped one end. He packed the gunpowder into it, compressing it dangerously tight. Then, he took the filament from a broken lightbulb and wired it to a 9-volt battery he'd salvaged from a toy car in the junk pile.
It was crude. It was dangerous. It was something that would have gotten him arrested by the ATF in seconds back home. Here, it was engineering.
He inserted the copper blasting cap into the center of the wet ANFO mixture in the first pipe bomb. He sealed it.
He made three of them.
"Boss" a voice called from the barricade. It was Miller, the one-legged watchman. "Movement in the tunnel. They're early."
Alex looked up. His heart hammered against his ribs, not from fear, but from adrenaline. He grabbed the three pipe bombs and the battery rig.
"Jax, get everyone back" Alex commanded. "Move them to the lower platform. Now!"
"What are you going to do?"
"I'm going to welcome our guests."
Alex walked to the barricade. He didn't hide behind it. He climbed up the pile of vending machines and stood in the open, facing the dark maw of the subway tunnel.
He could hear them before he saw them. The hooting. The clanging of metal on metal. The Dust Raiders didn't use stealth. They used fear. They wanted their victims to know they were coming.
Shadows detached themselves from the darkness. There were about twenty of them. They wore armor made of tires and road signs. Their skin was painted with white ash. The leader, a brute of a man standing nearly seven feet tall, dragged a sledgehammer behind him. His face was a ruin of scar tissue, and he wore a necklace of human ears.
The leader stopped twenty yards from the barricade. He grinned, revealing teeth filed into points.
"Fresh meat" the leader bellowed, his voice echoing off the tile walls. "Little Alex. Did you bring my tribute? Or do I have to come in there and peel the skin off your boys?"
Alex stood calm, the heavy PVC pipe in his right hand. He looked at the leader, analyzing the spacing of the group. They were bunched up. Cocky. They assumed the people in the station were sheep.
"I have your tribute" Alex shouted back. The acoustics of the station carried his voice well. "But I'm afraid there's been a change in policy regarding resource allocation."
The leader laughed. The raiders behind him chuckled, a wet, ugly sound. "Policy? You think you're still a city man? There are no policies here, meat. Only hunger."
The leader took a step forward, raising the sledgehammer. "Open the gate. Or everyone dies slowly."
Alex looked down at the pipe bomb. He held the wires connected to the 9-volt battery. He needed perfect timing. The fuse was electric; it would be instantaneous.
"I'm from a time when we built things" Alex said, more to himself than the raider. "Bridges. Skyscrapers. Civilizations."
He looked at the leader. "And we knew how to tear them down, too."
Alex threw the pipe bomb.
It wasn't a graceful throw. His arm was weak. But the cylinder tumbled through the air, heavy and awkward.
The leader watched it come. He didn't flinch. He probably thought it was a rock or a piece of scrap metal. He actually reached out his free hand to swat it away, a gesture of supreme arrogance.
"Catch" Alex whispered.
Just as the pipe reached the apex of its arc, hovering directly above the cluster of raiders, Alex touched the wires to the battery terminals.
The copper tube inside the pipe detonated. The shockwave slammed into the ammonium nitrate mixture, moving at 2,700 meters per second. The solid matter instantly converted into superheated gas, expanding at supersonic speeds.
The explosion wasn't a Hollywood fireball. It was a dirty, violent crack of thunder that shook the dust from the ceiling. A shockwave of overpressure ripped outward, shredding the air.
Alex ducked behind the vending machine as shrapnel—pieces of PVC and jagged rocks from the tunnel floor—screamed through the air like angry hornets.
The boom deafened him instantly. A cloud of grey smoke and concrete dust billowed up, filling the tunnel.
Silence followed. Not the silence of the void, but the ringing silence of stunned ears.
Alex stood up, peering through the smoke.
Where the leader had been standing, there was now a crater. The front line of the raiders was... gone. Mist. Red paste painted the walls and ceiling in a gruesome abstract art piece.
The survivors in the back, those who had been shielded by the bodies of their comrades, were on the ground, screaming, clutching their bleeding ears and concussed heads.
Alex looked at the two remaining pipe bombs in his hand. He felt a cold, hard resolve settle in his chest. The engineer was gone. The architect of the wasteland had arrived.
He stepped over the barricade, walking toward the smoke.
"One down" he said to the empty air. "Sector 7 is under new management."