It was past midnight when Cora finally returned to her dorm room.
She dropped her heavy backpack onto the floor. It was packed tight with high-calorie protein bars, water purification tablets, and heavy-duty flashlights she had bought at Costco.
She locked the door and pulled the thick blackout curtains shut, making sure not a single sliver of light could escape the room.
She stood over the backpack. She reached out her hand. The air shimmered, and the heavy bag vanished, instantly transported to the corner of her quantum space.
Cora sat down at her desk and opened her laptop. She didn't go to Amazon yet.
She clicked on a hidden folder labeled 'System Diagnostics'. Weeks ago, when she still foolishly trusted him, Declan had asked her to fix his laptop. She had secretly installed a high-grade keylogger and remote mirroring software out of petty jealousy. Now, it was her greatest asset. She opened the remote dashboard and accessed his live text logs.
He had texted Hailee.
Declan: The idiot didn't get a dime. The old man cut her off. I'm wasting my time.
Hailee: I told you she was useless without the trust. Whatever, don't dump her yet. Her birthday is next week. You need to make her buy that Tiffany necklace for me first.
Cora stared at the screen. She didn't feel angry. She felt a cold, clinical detachment, like a surgeon examining a tumor.
She took screenshots of the entire conversation and dragged them onto a secure USB drive. The social execution was going to be flawless, but it could wait. Survival came first.
She closed the folder and opened the Tor browser.
The dark web loaded slowly. She routed her connection through three different proxies before accessing an underground agricultural forum.
Normal seeds sold at Home Depot wouldn't survive the irradiated, mutated soil of the apocalypse. She needed first-generation, non-GMO, mutation-resistant seeds bred by military labs.
She found a highly-rated anonymous vendor going by the name Demeter.
Cora opened an encrypted chat box. She typed out a massive list: wheat, potatoes, medicinal herbs, fast-growing vegetables. She wanted the entire vault.
The vendor replied immediately, demanding payment in Monero, an untraceable cryptocurrency.
Cora used an offshore exchange to convert fifty thousand dollars into Monero and sent it to the escrow account. She gave the vendor the address of the P.O. Box she had rented in Pennsylvania and paid extra for overnight shipping.
She closed Tor and opened a standard browser, logging into Amazon.
Her fingers flew across the keyboard. She bought medical supplies in bulk: gallons of rubbing alcohol, iodine, hundreds of rolls of gauze, tourniquets, and surgical staples.
She split the orders into thirty different packages, routing them to the ghost warehouses.
Next was hygiene. She bought out three different sellers' entire stock of tampons, pads, and heavy-duty deodorant. In the apocalypse, the scent of blood attracted things far worse than zombies.
Suddenly, she heard the sound of a key sliding into the lock of her dorm room door.
Hailee was trying to get in.
Cora's hand slammed down on the keyboard shortcut, minimizing the browser. A boring PDF about macroeconomics popped up on the screen.
The door handle rattled, but the deadbolt held.
"Cora?" Hailee's voice came through the wood, laced with suspicion. "Why is the door locked?"
Cora took a deep breath. She aggressively rubbed her hands through her hair, making it look wild and messy. She slouched her shoulders and walked to the door, unlocking it.
Hailee stood in the hallway wearing a silk slip dress, her eyes darting past Cora, trying to see into the room.
"What are you doing?" Hailee asked, trying to sound casual.
"I took my meds and fell asleep," Cora lied, her voice raspy and annoyed. "I didn't want anyone walking in."
Hailee scanned the room. Seeing nothing but the textbook on the screen, the suspicion in her eyes faded into disappointment.
"Oh. Okay. Night," Hailee muttered, turning away.
Cora shut the door and locked it again. She leaned her back against the wood. In the dark, her eyes were wide and sharp.
