The rhythmic squeal of the bicycle chain was the only sound in the cavernous dark of Sector 7. It was a monotonous, grinding noise, metal teeth biting into a rusted sprocket, driving the rubber belt that squeezed the sump water through the layers of charcoal and sand.
Squeak. Grind. Squeak. Grind.
Alex Mercer leaned against the cold tiles of the subway platform, watching the clear liquid trickle from the plastic tubing into a cracked five-gallon bucket. It was a beautiful sight. In 2025, water was something you took for granted. You turned a handle, and it flowed—hot, cold, filtered, sparkling. You flushed gallons of it down the toilet without a second thought. Here, watching the steady drip, Alex felt a reverence that bordered on religious.
"My legs are burning, boss" Miller gasped. The teenager was hunched over the handlebars of the cannibalized Raider trike, sweat cutting clean tracks through the grime on his face.
"Burn means it's working" Alex said, his voice flat. He didn't look up from the map spread out on a crate in front of him. "Keep the RPM steady. If you go too fast, you'll cavitate the line. Too slow, and the pressure drops. Consistency is efficiency."
"I just... I need a break."
"You need water" Alex corrected. "And the only way to get water is to pedal. It's a closed loop, Miller. Input, output. Welcome to thermodynamics."
Alex rubbed his eyes. He would have killed for a cup of coffee. A dark roast, maybe a little acidic, steaming in a ceramic mug. The phantom smell of it teased his memory, replaced instantly by the reality of the station: the copper tang of old blood, the musty scent of damp rot, and the sharp, chemical reek of the unwashed bodies huddled in the shadows behind him.
The residents of Hope Outpost—what was left of them—were watching him. Thirty-four faces, gaunt and hollow-eyed. They looked at him with a mixture of awe and terror. Before today, Alex had been just the weird guy who fixed the generator and muttered about structural integrity. Now, he was the man who had stared down a Raider kill-squad with a fake bomb and won.
But Alex knew the truth. He hadn't won. He had just bought a deferment on their execution.
He looked down at the map again. It was a crude thing, drawn on tanned human skin—a detail Alex tried to ignore—but the geography was undeniable. The Dust Raiders he had bluffed were just the scouting party. A jagged red arrow pointed directly at their location, labeled with a single, ominous glyph: a stylized gear crushing a skull.
The Harvest.
In his old life, a harvest meant pumpkins and corn mazes. Here, it meant the mechanized strip-mining of human resources. Flesh, bone, labor.
Alex stood up, the joints of his knees popping. He adjusted the scavenged leather holster on his hip. The weight of the Webley revolver was comforting, even if he only had six rounds. Six rounds to stop an army. The math didn't work.
"Miller, switch out" Alex commanded. "Hey, you. Big guy in the flannel."
A burly man near the front of the crowd flinched. "Me?"
"Yes, you. You have the quadriceps for this. Get on the bike. Maintain the rhythm. Don't break the chain, or we all die of thirst. Move."
As the man scrambled to obey, Alex grabbed the map and walked to the center of the platform. He needed to restructure this organization immediately. A democracy was a luxury for societies with surplus calories. This was a crisis management scenario.
"Listen up!" Alex's voice echoed off the arched ceiling. The murmurs died down instantly.
"The good news is, we have water" Alex began, gesturing to the filtration system. "The bad news is, the people who tried to kill us this morning were just the delivery boys. The main force is coming."
A ripple of panic went through the crowd. A woman near the back stifled a sob.
"They are coming from the north" Alex continued, his tone clinical, cutting through the emotion. "Based on the travel time of the scouts and the heavy tracks I saw on the perimeter, we have maybe forty-eight hours before the vanguard arrives. Maybe seventy-two if the terrain is bad."
"We have to run" someone shouted. "We can head into the deep tunnels!"
"The deep tunnels are flooded or infested with Mole-Crickets" Alex countered instantly. "And even if they weren't, you can't outrun a motorized convoy on foot carrying children and supplies. You'll be run down in the open. You'll be harvested."
He let the word hang there. He needed them scared. Fear was a motivator. Panic was useless, but controlled fear was high-octane fuel.
"We stay" Alex said. "We hold."
"With what?" an older man asked, stepping forward. He was leaning on a rusted pipe. "We have rocks and sticks. You have a gun with no bullets. You scared off the scouts with a bluff. You can't bluff a tank."
"We don't need to bluff" Alex said. He tapped the side of his head. "We have an force multiplier they don't."
"What's that?"
"Civil Engineering."
Alex turned and pointed toward the station entrance, where the wide concrete stairs led up to the surface sunlight.
"This station is a fortress, you just don't know how to use it. It's reinforced concrete, built to withstand the vibration of thousand-ton trains. The entrance is a choke point. In 2025... back in the old days, we called it a fatal funnel."
He looked at the group, assessing them not as people, but as labor units.
"I need three teams. Team A, you're with me on fabrication. We're going to strip the steel rebar from the collapsed section in Tunnel B. Team B, you're on fortifications. We need to move the ticket booths and the vending machines to the top of the stairs to create a barricade. Team C, you're on logistics. Count every scrap of food, every bolt, every piece of scrap metal. If it exists, I want to know about it."
"Why should we listen to you?" the older man challenged, though his voice was wavering.
Alex walked over to him. He moved with the efficient, predatory grace of someone who had spent the last year surviving in the ruins, overlaying it with the authority of a site foreman who was behind schedule.
"Because I'm the only one here who knows how to calculate the tensile strength of a barricade" Alex said quietly. "And because I'm the only one who knows how to turn that water filter into a bomb if I have to. Do you want to be in charge, old man? Do you want to decide who eats and who starves? Do you want to hold the gun when the Harvest comes?"
The man held his gaze for a second, then looked down. "No."
"Good. Then get moving. Team leaders, step forward."
*
Three hours later, the station was a hive of activity. The lethargy of starvation had been replaced by the frantic energy of survival.
Alex stood by a workbench he'd improvised from a heavy steel door laid across two concrete blocks. Sparks flew as he worked an angle grinder—powered by a daisy-chain of car batteries scavenged from the Raiders' second trike—against a length of rusted rebar.
The noise was deafening in the enclosed space, a high-pitched shriek of metal on metal that set his teeth on edge. He missed OSHA regulations. He missed safety goggles. He squinted against the sparks, grinding the tip of the rebar into a needle-sharp point.
"Sir?"
Alex powered down the grinder. The silence that rushed back in was heavy. Miller was standing there, holding a clipboard Alex had given him.
"Report" Alex said, wiping grease from his forehead.
"Inventory is done" Miller said, handing over the clipboard. "It's... it's not good, Alex."
Alex scanned the list. His handwriting was chicken-scratch, but the numbers were clear.
* *Canned Beans: 42 tins.*
* *Dried Rat Meat: 15 lbs.*
* *Dog Food: 3 tins.*
* *Water: 50 gallons (accumulating).*
* *Scrap Metal: 400 lbs.*
* *Ammo: 2 rounds (9mm), 6 rounds (.455 Webley).*
* *Medical: Rags, 1 bottle of moonshine (rubbing alcohol).*
"It's enough for a siege of three days" Alex muttered. "If we ration strictly. 800 calories a day per person. It's starvation rations, but it keeps the motor running."
"And the weapons?" Miller asked.
Alex looked at the pile of finished rebar spears. There were twenty of them. Crude, heavy, and brutal.
"Phalanxes" Alex said, more to himself than Miller. "If we pack the stairs tight enough, the rebar gives us reach. But if they have automatic weapons, we're just meat in a grinder."
He looked at the Raider gear they had stripped from the scouts. Leather jackets reinforced with tire treads. Motorcycle helmets. It was decent protection against knives and teeth, but useless against ballistics.
He picked up the map again. His eyes traced the red line of the Harvest's approach.
"Where did they stop?" Alex whispered.
"What?"
"The scouts" Alex said, tapping the map. "Logic dictates they wouldn't carry all their loot with them on a forward recon mission. It slows them down. They would have a rally point. A drop site."
He traced the path back from the station. About five miles north, there was a mark on the map. A small 'X' near the ruins of what used to be a shopping mall.
"The Depot" Alex read the scrawled text next to it.
"You think they left stuff there?" Miller asked.
"Raiders are pack rats" Alex said. "They steal everything. But they can't fight effectively if their bikes are weighed down with toaster ovens and copper wire. They drop the heavy loot at a forward cache and come back for it after the slaughter."
Alex's mind raced. If it was a cache, there might be weapons. Or at least gunpowder. Or gasoline.
"We need to go there" Alex said.
Miller's eyes widened. "Outside? Now? But the main force..."
"Is forty hours away" Alex cut in. "The scouts are gone. That cache is sitting there. If we wait here, we're betting everything on rusty spikes and a concrete staircase. I don't like those odds. I prefer to cheat."
Alex grabbed the Webley and checked the cylinder. The brass casings glinted dully.
"I need two volunteers. Not you, Miller. You're essential for the water systems. I need someone who can move quietly and isn't afraid of the dark."
"Sarah" Miller said. "The girl with the scar. She used to run messages between the sectors before the tunnels collapsed. She's fast."
"Get her. And get the guy who fixed the trike chain. He has mechanical aptitude."
Alex looked at the rebar spear in his hand. It felt heavy, unbalanced. It was a tool of desperation. He needed better tools.
"We leave in ten minutes" Alex said. "We take the remaining trike. We hit the Depot, grab anything that goes boom, and get back before sunset. If we're not back..."
He looked at the filter system, the lifeline of the outpost.
"...seal the blast doors and pray."
*
The surface world was a blinding wash of gray and brown. Even after a year in this hellscape, Alex still expected to see blue sky. Instead, the cloud cover was a perpetual bruise of ochre and charcoal, the legacy of the atmospheric destabilization that followed the Rift.
The air tasted of ash.
Alex sat on the back of the Raider trike, clutching the rebar spear. Sarah was driving, her knuckles white on the handlebars. The third member of their party, a quiet man named Silas, clung to the cargo rack, holding a crowbar.
"Keep to the shadows of the buildings" Alex instructed. "Engine off if we see dust clouds."
They moved through the skeletal remains of the city. Skyscrapers, stripped of their glass, stood like rotten teeth against the sky. Cars were rusted husks, fused to the asphalt.
As they approached the shopping mall, the tension spiked. The structure had collapsed in on itself, forming a jagged mountain of concrete and rebar. But the parking garage was still standing.
"There" Alex pointed.
Parked on the second level of the garage, visible through a crumbled wall, was a heavy transport truck. It was painted in the blood-red colors of the Harvest.
"That's not a cache" Silas whispered. "That's a troop transport."
"It's disabled" Alex noted, his eyes narrowing. He analyzed the vehicle with an engineer's gaze. The front axle was shattered. It had been left behind.
"Jackpot" Alex breathed.
They ditched the trike and moved in on foot, creeping through the debris. The silence of the garage was oppressive. Every scuff of a boot sounded like a gunshot.
They reached the truck. The back doors were padlocked, but the lock was a cheap iron mechanism.
"Silas, the crowbar" Alex signaled.
Silas jammed the bar into the hasp and heaved. With a screech of tearing metal, the lock popped.
Alex pulled the doors open, the Webley raised, ready to fire his precious bullets.
The truck was empty of troops. But it wasn't empty.
Stacked floor to ceiling were crates. But not just random loot.
"Ammo" Sarah whispered, her voice trembling.
Alex pulled the lid off the nearest crate. It was packed with green metal boxes. 7.62mm rounds. Thousands of them.
"And rifles" Alex said, prying open a long, flat case. Inside lay four assault rifles, greased and pristine. Old world tech. Reliable. Deadly.
It was a miracle. It was everything they needed to turn the subway station into a slaughterhouse for the invaders.
"Load up" Alex ordered, his heart hammering against his ribs. "Take as much as the trike can carry. We leave the rest."
"We can't leave it" Silas said, reaching for a rifle. "This is a gold mine."
"We take what we can carry!" Alex hissed. "Greed kills. Efficiency survives."
He grabbed a rifle, checking the action. It felt good in his hands. Heavy. Real. A tool of power.
Suddenly, a sound froze them all.
*Click.*
It wasn't the click of a gun. It was the mechanical click of a relay tripping.
Alex looked down. A thin, translucent fishing line was stretched across the floor of the truck, right where Silas had stepped.
"Don't move" Alex said, his voice dropping to a terrifying calm.
He traced the line. It ran to a bundle of red sticks taped to the wall of the truck, wired to a small digital timer.
C-4. And a lot of it.
The timer didn't start counting down. It was already at zero. But nothing happened.
"It's a dud?" Sarah asked, breathless.
"No" Alex said, his mind racing through circuit diagrams. "It's not a timer. It's a receiver."
A static crackle erupted from a radio sitting on the dashboard of the truck cab.
*"Unit Four to Base. We have a signal from the bait truck at Sector 7 perimeter. The scavengers have taken the lure."*
Alex's blood ran cold. It wasn't a supply drop. It wasn't a broken-down truck.
It was a mousetrap.
*"Detonate"* the voice on the radio said.
Alex didn't think. He didn't calculate. He reacted.
"RUN!"
He shoved Sarah and Silas toward the ramp, diving over the concrete railing of the second floor just as the world turned white.
The shockwave hit him in mid-air, a physical hammer that crushed the breath from his lungs. He slammed into a pile of garbage bags on the ground level, debris raining down around him like deadly hail.
His ears rang with a high-pitched whine. He coughed, spitting dust and blood.
He looked up. The second floor of the garage was gone. The truck was a burning skeleton. The rifles, the ammo—all vaporized.
Sarah was groaning nearby, clutching her arm. Silas was unconscious but breathing.
Alex dragged himself to his feet, the Webley still gripped in his hand. He looked at the burning wreckage.
They had lost the guns. They had lost the element of surprise. And now, the Harvest knew exactly where they were.
Alex spat a glob of bloody phlegm onto the concrete.
"Okay" he rasped, his eyes cold and hard as flint. "We do it the hard way."