Chapter 13 JACE HANDLED
The restlessness started before dawn.
Karl noticed it the way you noticed a background sound that suddenly needed being checked. Not pain. His wounds from the patrol battle were closing faster than they should have been, the Level 2 Healing doing its quiet work beneath his skin. Not hunger either, though he hadn't eaten enough.
It was something else. A low, building pressure behind his ribs that had no name he could reach for yet. Like his body was waiting for something it needed and wasn't getting.
He shoved it away and stood.
The bunker was sleeping around him in the thin hours before first light. He moved carefully through the space, stepping over outstretched legs and around sleeping shapes, until he reached the supply inventory Holt had put together the previous evening. He read through it twice. Then he went to find Holt.
They spoke quietly at the corridor entrance for ten minutes.
"There is a distribution warehouse on Carver Street," Karl said. "Three blocks northeast. Secondary storage point, not a main hub. Most people won't know it exists." He looked at the rough map Holt had drawn of the surrounding area. "It should still be intact."
"Should be," Holt said.
"I know it is." Karl tapped the location. "Food and water for thirty days at current numbers plus some medical stock as well I suppose."
Holt studied the position. Then he looked at Karl with the particular expression he had been wearing since the radio broadcast. The one that had stopped asking how and started asking what next.
"We go at first light," Holt said.
"Five people. Any more and we draw attention."
Karl already knew who the five would be.
The team assembled in the corridor an hour later. Torres, a lean woman with closecropped hair and a calm that suggested she had worked emergency response before everything changed. A young man named Fen, too eager but quiet when directed. A heavyset man called Drask, also a construction foreman before the world ended, who carried a reinforced pipe like a natural extension of his arm.
And then, Jace.
He appeared last, jacket patched at the torn shoulder, the cut above his eye sealed into a dark line. He looked at the assembled team without looking at Karl, which was its own kind of statement.
Karl distributed the route he had drawn overnight. Entry point, exit point, two fallback positions if they encountered contact.
"Torres with me at point," he said. "Fen and Drask behind. Jace, rear guard."
A pause.
"Rear guard," Jace said. Flat.
"Rear guard," Karl said.
Nothing else.
They moved out into the gray city morning.
Outside was different from the chaos of the previous day. Quieter, in the specific way that meant the surface had reorganized itself rather than calmed down. The emergency broadcast bots were gone. Vehicles sat cold across every road. Twice Karl heard distant machine activity somewhere north, a deep rhythmic pattern suggesting a coordinated sweep rather than a response to contact.
He kept them off the main roads, cutting through alleyways and a gutted parking structure that smelled of burned rubber and old oil. Torres matched his pace at point, pipe gripped loosely. Nobody spoke.
They were one block from the warehouse when the scout drones appeared. Two of them on the far end of the street. Karl stopped immediately and raised a closed fist. The team froze behind him.
He watched the drones for five full seconds.
Standard scout behavior in his past life had been wide sweeping arcs covering maximum ground. These two were covering a narrow field. A specific corridor.
The corridor Karl had planned to walk through. He felt the cold thread move through his chest and didn't let it reach his face then redirected the team without a word, gesturing them back and around to the warehouse's eastern service entrance. The drones continued their pattern, watching the approach Karl had intended, seeing nothing because Karl was no longer there.
He filed what he had seen. Said nothing about it. Those drones looked like they were studying him specifically.
The warehouse interior was dim and smelled of concrete dust and sealed goods. Shelving units ran across the area fully packed and most still stocked. Karl confirmed what his memory had stored. Water containers. Canned goods. Two medical supply crates near the back wall.
"Load what we can carry," he said. "Twenty minutes before another sweep could reach this sector."
The team moved. Torres and Drask pulled water containers. Fen stacked canned goods into their bags. Karl broke the sealing on the first medical crate and worked through it quickly.
He was midway through the second when Jace spoke.
"We should take the main road back." His voice carried across the warehouse with a deliberate volume, directed at the team rather than at Karl. "Faster. More room to move if we hit contact."
Karl didn't look up. "We take the route I marked."
"Your route goes back through the parking structure." Jace moved toward Torres and Drask, positioning himself where the full team could see him. "Enclosed ground. If machines follow us in there we have no exit."
Torres glanced at Karl.
Drask stopped loading.
"The main road is exposed," Karl said. "Scout drones are working the open streets. The parking structure has three exit points and overhead cover." He closed the crate. "We take the route I marked."
"I have been fighting out here longer than you." The confidence in Jace's voice was fully rebuilt now, standing on the ground it had spent the night reconstructing. "I know open contact. I know what keeps people alive."
Karl looked at him.
He set the medical crate down and walked toward Jace with the unhurried, completely even pace of someone who had already calculated how this ended before it started.
Jace set his feet and threw a serious fist first. It was a good punch. Heavy, committed, the kind that had put a lot of people down before.
Karl slipped through, sidestepping the first without stepping back. He let the fist pass his ear, caught Jace's extended arm at the elbow and drove him sideways into the shelving unit with a force that buckled the steel frame. Cans hit the floor across a wide radius. Before Jace could process the impact Karl had his arm locked hard behind him, face pressed into the bent shelving, grip leaving absolutely no room for anything except stillness.
Everything happened within four seconds from start to finish.
Jace struggled. His free hand clawed for something to grab. Karl increased the pressure on the locked arm by a precise fraction. The sound that came out of Jace was low and involuntary, pulled from somewhere past the point where pride had any say.
Karl held the position for three full seconds more.
Then he released him, stepped back and turned to the team.
"Load the rest," he said.
Nobody moved for a moment until Torres moved to pick up a water container and Drask followed.
Fen had pressed himself against the far shelving at some point during the whole commotion and didn't move but he moved now.
Karl went back to the medical crate. Behind him he heard Jace pull himself off the bent shelving. Heard him breathing in hard, controlled pulls. Heard him get upright.
He didn't turn around.
Jace was handled. There was a route to run and supplies to carry and fifteen minutes had become twelve. That was all Jace was in that moment. Something handled and set aside.
They made it back in thirteen minutes.
The team unloaded in silence. Survivors moved forward to receive the supplies. Holt worked through the inventory with quiet efficiency. The bunker had the specific atmosphere of people choosing not to discuss something they had all felt arrive when the team walked back through the door.
Karl set the last crate down and stood.
The restlessness from the morning was still there beneath everything. Sitting lower now. Slightly heavier than before. He pressed it down and reached for a canteen.
He stopped.
Jace sat against the far wall across the room. Back straight. Damaged arm resting across his knee. The cut on his face had reopened from the shelving impact and a thin line of blood had dried along his jaw.
He was looking directly at Karl.
Not with the hot, reactive anger from the warehouse. No. What sat in its place was something that had cooled and hardened into a different shape entirely. Flat. Deliberate. The specific look of a man who had finished deciding something and was now simply waiting for the right moment.
Karl held his gaze for one second.
Then he turned away and drank from the canteen.
But the thing he had seen in Jace's eyes followed him across the room like a shadow that didn't need light to exist. It was bloodthirsty.