The ringing in Alex Mercer's ears was a high-pitched sine wave, drowning out the groans of the dying. It was a familiar sound, reminiscent of standing too close to a pile driver on a Chicago construction site, but this time, the cause wasn't progress. It was preservation.
The dust from the ANFO explosion hung in the stagnant air of the subway terminal, a gray fog tasting of ammonia and pulverized concrete. Alex didn't cough. He forced his breathing to remain shallow and controlled, sweeping the barrel of his rusted 9mm pistol across the smoke.
Visuals returned before the audio. The blast radius was a grotesque testament to the power of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil. The Dust Raider leader—a brute named Korg who had worn human teeth as a necklace—was gone. In his place was a crater of blackened tile and a spray of wet, red matter that slicked the subway platform.
The psychological impact of high explosives on primitive tribal minds could not be overstated. In 2025, an explosion was a news headline or a demolition job. Here, on Earth-88, it was the wrath of a vengeful god.
Four Raiders remained. They were on their knees or scrambling backward, their eyes wide, pupils dilated by adrenaline and terror. They were covered in the gore of their leader. Their weapons—heavy clubs made of rebar and a single, bolt-action pipe rifle—lay discarded on the floor.
Alex stepped forward. His boots crunched on glass shards. He kept his face impassive, masking the tremor in his hand. He had two bullets left. If they rushed him, he was dead. He had to rely on the "Engineer's Bluff."
He held up his left hand, revealing the detonator assembly he had cobbled together from a stripped radio circuit and a 9-volt battery. It was useless now—the circuit was open, the charge spent—but they didn't know that.
"The next one" Alex said, his voice raspy but projecting clearly through the ringing silence, "is under the floorboards beneath your feet. Move a muscle I don't like, and you join Korg."
It was a lie based on structural impossibility; he hadn't had the time to drill into the concrete substrate. But fear bypassed the logic centers of the brain.
The Raider closest to him, a wiry man with lesions on his face, pressed his forehead into the grime. "Mercy! Mercy, Tech-Lord! We yield!"
Alex didn't lower the gun. He analyzed the situation with the cold detachment of a project manager assessing a critical failure. These men were resources. Dangerous, volatile resources, but resources nonetheless.
"Strip" Alex commanded.
The Raiders hesitated.
Alex shifted his aim to the wiry man. "I need your gear, not your dignity. Clothes, armor, boots, weapons. Pile them. Now."
As the bandits frantically began to disrobe, shedding their patchwork leather armor and scavenged military fatigues, Alex's mind drifted for a split second. He remembered his apartment in Seattle. He remembered the walk-in closet, the smell of cedar, the rows of clean, pressed shirts. He remembered complaining when the dry cleaner used too much starch.
He suppressed the memory. Nostalgia was a calorie-wasting emotion.
"Miller" Alex barked without looking back.
A scrawny teenager emerged from the shadows of the ticket booth. Miller was one of the original residents of Hope Outpost, a kid who had never seen the sun without a radiation filter. He held a sharpened screwdriver like a talisman.
"B-Boss?" Miller stammered.
"Collect the weapons. Check the chambers. If any of them twitch, stab them in the neck."
Miller nodded, his face pale, and scuttled forward to drag the discarded pipe rifle and rebar clubs away from the Raiders.
Alex approached the pile of loot. His eyes scanned the items, categorizing them not by their current use, but by their material composition.
Leather armor: cured hide, useful for gaskets or belts.
Tires on the Raiders' trikes parked at the tunnel entrance: vulcanized rubber, a source of fuel or waterproofing.
The pipe rifle: low-grade steel, probably plumbing pipe. Dangerous to the user, but the spring mechanism in the bolt was valuable. High-tensile steel was rare.
He kicked a heavy canvas bag that had fallen from Korg's hip. It clinked. Alex crouched, keeping the gun trained on the naked, shivering Raiders, and unzipped it with his left hand.
Canned food. Three tins of "Dog Food" (which was actually luxury protein in this era) and a plastic bottle of cloudy water.
Alex's throat constricted. Thirst hit him like a physical blow. He hadn't realized how parched he was until he saw the liquid. The adrenaline crash was setting in, and his body was demanding hydration to flush the cortisol.
He stood up. "Get out."
The Raiders looked up, confused. They expected execution. In the wasteland, prisoners were just mouths to feed.
"Leave the bikes" Alex said. "Run back down the tunnel. Tell whoever sent you that Sector 7 is under new management. Tell them the Architect is here."
He wanted them to spread the fear. A ghost story was a better defense than a wall.
The Raiders didn't wait for a second invitation. They scrambled over the debris, naked and bleeding, sprinting into the darkness of the subway tunnel, their footsteps echoing until they faded into the gloom.
Alex lowered the gun. He exhaled, a long, shuddering breath.
"Secure the entrance, Miller" Alex said, holstering the pistol. "Drag the bikes inside the barricade. Then get the bodies to the incinerator chute. I don't want disease spreading."
"Yes, Alex... I mean, Boss."
Alex turned and walked toward the station's utility room. The victory was hollow. He had secured the perimeter, but he was fighting a war on two fronts. The Raiders were the external threat. The internal threat was far more insidious.
Thermodynamics. Entropy. The inevitable decay of systems.
He pushed open the heavy steel door of the utility room. The air here was humid and smelled of rot. In the center of the room sat the outpost's heart: a jury-rigged filtration system built from scavenged swimming pool pumps and a series of plastic barrels.
It was silent.
Alex tapped the pressure gauge. Zero PSI.
He grabbed a flashlight from the workbench—a crank-powered LED model—and shined it into the translucent main tank.
Empty.
Panic, cold and sharp, pricked at his chest. He knew the levels were low, but the reservoir should have had at least fifty gallons left. Enough for two days of rationing.
He traced the PVC piping with his light, his eyes narrowing. There, at the base of the primary sediment tank. A hairline fracture in the joint, likely caused by the vibration of the explosion he had just set off.
"Newton's Third Law" Alex muttered bitterly. "For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction."
The blast that saved them had cracked the manifold. The water had leaked out into the sump below, mixing with the toxic sludge of the subway drainage.
It was undrinkable.
Hope Outpost had zero clean water.
Alex ran a hand through his hair, grit scratching his scalp. In 2025, a broken pipe meant calling a plumber and waiting four hours. Here, it meant death by dehydration in seventy-two hours.
He needed a solution. He needed to think like an engineer, not a victim.
Problem: Contaminated water source (sump).
Constraint: No functional filtration membrane. The existing reverse osmosis membrane was shot, clogged with algae and rust weeks ago.
Resources: The loot from the Raiders. The station's scrap. His brain.
He walked back out to the platform. Miller was struggling to push one of the Raider's trikes—a heavy, three-wheeled monstrosity welded together from a motorcycle front and a shopping cart rear—through the gate.
"Stop" Alex said.
Miller froze. "Did I do it wrong?"
Alex approached the vehicle. He ignored the bloodstains on the handlebars and knelt by the engine block. It was a combustion engine, likely salvaged from a pre-Collapse lawnmower or generator.
He wasn't looking at the engine. He was looking at the intake.
"Jackpot" he whispered.
Clamped to the carburetor was a conical air filter. It was filthy, caked in fifty years of dust, but the mesh inside... it was high-grade synthetic fiber. Pre-Collapse automotive standard.
"Miller, get me the toolbox. The metric wrenches."
"We don't have metric, Boss. Only the adjustable wrench."
"Right" Alex grimaced. "The adjustable wrench. And bring me the charcoal from the fire pit. All of it."
Twenty minutes later, the utility room looked like a mad scientist's lab.
Alex had disassembled the Raider's air filter. He had cut the synthetic mesh into circular discs using a sharpened piece of scrap metal.
"What are we doing?" Miller asked, watching Alex crush burnt wood into a fine powder using a hammer and a flat stone.
"Adsorption" Alex said, not looking up. "Activated carbon. This charcoal isn't perfect—it hasn't been treated with steam or acid—but it has a massive surface area. It will trap the chemical toxins and the heavy metals."
"Okay" Miller said, clearly not understanding a word.
"The mesh from the bike filter" Alex continued, pointing to the discs, "will catch the bacteria and the parasites. It's not a HEPA filter, but it's better than a t-shirt."
Alex grabbed a plastic two-liter bottle scavenged from the trash. He cut the bottom off.
"Invert the bottle" Alex narrated his actions, partly to teach Miller, partly to keep his own mind focused. "Layer one: cotton from the Raiders' bandages. Layer two: fine sand. Layer three: crushed charcoal. Layer four: gravel. Layer five: the automotive mesh."
He packed the materials down tight, creating a density gradient. It was a gravity-fed bio-sand filter, supercharged with the automotive mesh.
"Now, the hard part" Alex said.
He moved to the sump pit. The water down there was black and oily. It smelled of death.
"We need to pump this through the filter. But the electric pump is dead."
Alex looked at the Raider trike again. He looked at the rear axle.
"Miller, strip the rear wheel off that trike. Bring the chain and the pedals."
"You want to... bike the water?"
"Mechanical energy" Alex said, a grim smile touching his lips. "We convert kinetic energy into hydraulic pressure. We're going to rig a peristaltic pump."
It took three hours.
Alex's hands were raw and bleeding by the time they finished. He had used a length of flexible rubber hose from the Raider's fuel line and wrapped it around a circular drum attached to the bike pedals. As Miller pedaled, rollers would squeeze the hose, forcing the water up from the sump and into the filter tower.
"Pedal" Alex ordered.
Miller climbed onto the makeshift stationary bike. He was sweating, his ribs showing through his rags. "I'm thirsty, Boss."
"Pedal, and you'll drink."
Miller pushed. The chain clanked. The rollers groaned against the rubber hose.
Alex watched the clear plastic tube exiting the filter.
Nothing at first. Then, a gurgle.
A stream of water trickled out. It wasn't crystal clear—it had a slight yellowish tint—but the suspended solids were gone. The charcoal should have stripped the worst of the nitrates.
Alex caught the flow in a tin cup. He held it up to the light.
"Is it safe?" Miller asked, panting.
Alex looked at the water. In 2025, he wouldn't have washed his car with this. He would have sued the city if this came out of his tap. He thought of the ice-cold water dispenser in the break room at his firm, the little blue lever, the cone-shaped paper cups.
He took a sip.
It tasted like smoke and rubber. But it didn't taste like sewage.
He swallowed. He waited a moment to see if his stomach would revolt. It held.
"It's safe enough" Alex said. He handed the cup to Miller. "Drink. Then keep pedaling. We need to fill the reserve tank."
Miller drank greedily, water spilling down his chin. "Oh, god. Thank you, Alex."
"Don't thank me. Thank the Otto Cycle engine and the properties of carbon."
Alex walked away from the machinery, his legs feeling like lead. He sat down on a crate of rusted bolts and rubbed his face.
He had solved the immediate crisis. They wouldn't die of thirst today.
But as he sat there, the adrenaline finally vanishing completely, the reality of his situation settled in like a heavy blanket. He was the leader of twenty starving people living in a hole in the ground. He had just declared war on a Raider gang that likely numbered in the hundreds. He had two bullets, a half-broken generator, and a water filter powered by a teenager on a bicycle.
He pulled the Raider leader's revolver from his belt—the loot he hadn't inspected closely yet.
It was a heavy, ugly thing. A Webley break-top replica, probably machined in some wasteland workshop. He cracked the cylinder open.
Six rounds.
He snapped it shut. Eight bullets total now.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the other item he had taken from Korg's corpse. It wasn't a weapon. It was a crumpled, grease-stained piece of paper.
Alex unfolded it carefully.
It was a map. A topographical map of the sector, hand-drawn over an old subway schematic.
Sector 7—Hope Outpost—was circled in red.
But there was something else. A jagged black line drawn from the north, cutting through the ruins, leading directly to his location.
Next to the line, scrawled in crude, block letters, was a single word.
HARVEST.
Alex stared at the word. The Raiders hadn't just come for tribute. They were scouts for a harvesting operation. They weren't just taking food; they were coming to take the people.
The water pump squeaked rhythmically in the background, the sound of survival. But to Alex, it sounded like a ticking clock.
He folded the map and shoved it into his pocket.
"Miller" Alex called out, his voice hard, shedding the fatigue instantly.
"Yeah, Boss?"
"Pedal faster. We have work to do."