The vault, vast and silent as a cathedral dedicated to a dead god, stretched away into the gloom, its ceiling lost in shadows that seemed to drink the light from their torches and glowing auras. The air was tomb-cold and tasted of ancient dust, oil, and the faint, sweet tang of rotting wood. Rows of massive crates, like the coffins of forgotten technological titans, stood in silent regiments, shrouded in a pall of neglect.
Miguel moved through the aisles, his boots crunching on grit, the beam of his flashlight a nervous, darting eye. The sheer scale of the place was humbling, a monument to a world that had the luxury of planning for a future it never saw. He felt like a grave-robber in a pharaoh's tomb, a small and grubby thing amidst silent, slumbering power.
And then, just as he'd dared to hope, they found it.
They had explored less than a third of the cavernous space when Zhang Tiezhu's choked-off cry echoed from behind a stack of particularly large containers. Huddled together, as if for comfort in the perpetual dark, was a collection of several dozen crates of varying sizes. The markings, stenciled in fading but precise block letters, were clear: Cryogenic Suspension System – Components A through M.
Miguel's heart began to hammer against his ribs, a frantic drumbeat of desperate hope. He pushed past the others, his fingers clumsy as he traced the lettering on the manifest nailed to one crate. Auxiliary Fluids & Reagents. This was it. With a grunt born of equal parts fear and anticipation, he jammed a crowbar into the seam of a long, rectangular crate. The old wood protested with a shriek, then gave way with a puff of foul-smelling spores.
Inside, nestled in pristine, custom-cut white foam that seemed blasphemously clean in this dusty underworld, lay three canisters. They were beautiful in a sterile, functional way, crafted from a brushed aluminum alloy that gleamed dully in the torchlight. They were about a meter long, each sealed with a complex valve mechanism. A label, still legible, was affixed to each: Bio-Stasis Thawing Solution – 20L Standard Volume.
Three canisters. Sixty liters. Miguel stared at them, the weight of the last brutal hours pressing down on him. This, this, was the reason for the blood, the fear, the loss. He turned to Zhang Tiezhu, whose face in the flickering light was a mask of such acute longing it was painful to behold. "Three canisters," Miguel said, his voice sounding unnaturally loud in the silence. "Sixty liters. Is it… will it be enough?" He braced himself for disappointment, the thought of this all being for naught a physical sickness in his gut.
Zhang Tiezhu did not answer with words at first. A tremor went through his frame, and he reached out a calloused, dirty hand, hovering it over the nearest canister as if it were a holy relic. When he spoke, his voice was thick, choked with an emotion too powerful for the bleak surroundings. "Enough," he whispered, then stronger, "It's enough. More than enough. We could… we could revive two. Maybe more, depending on the protocols." A tear, cutting a clean track through the grime on his cheek, betrayed his stoic demeanor.
A shuddering breath Miguel hadn't realized he was holding escaped his lips. The tight band of anxiety around his chest loosened, just a fraction. The ledger of this horrific venture, which until this moment had shown only a devastating column of losses, finally had an entry on the other side. It had meaning.
He gestured to John, who lumbered forward with a surprising gentleness, hefting one of the heavy canisters onto his broad, furred shoulder with ease. The other two were secured by other survivors. The precious cargo, the physical proof of their suffering's purpose, was secure.
But as the immediate, life-saving goal was achieved, another, more mercenary instinct, born of a leader's grim accounting, stirred in Miguel. The bank vault, the original target, was now a fantasy. The digger and the dozer were twisted, hydraulic-bleeding skeletons on the surface. The very idea of returning to that slow, nerve-shredding excavation made his skin crawl. His people were battered, his resources bled dry. This vault, however… it was a dragon's hoard.
His flashlight beam played over the neighboring crates. 1nm Lithography System. Quantum Mainframe Cluster. Molecular Assembler Prototype.Words from a lost lexicon of miracles. Each represented not just a machine, but a fortune that could rebuild his community a hundred times over. He remembered, with the peculiar clarity of his old-world knowledge, the staggering sums paid for far inferior technology. A 7nm machine for over a billion. What price for a 1nm? The thought of adding one, even two zeros to that figure made him dizzy.
But the euphoria crashed against the brutal, physical reality. The lithography system crate was the size of a shipping container. It would weigh tons. How in the name of all that was crumbling could they possibly move it? The same problem applied to almost everything of real value here. They were mice who had found the crown jewels, only to realize they couldn't even roll a single diamond back to their hole.
A new idea, a sly, desperate hope, flickered. The journal. The researcher's half-burnt journal had mentioned data. Technical schematics, research papers, blueprints—knowledge, not machinery. Knowledge was weightless. Knowledge could be carried in a satchel. And knowledge, especially of the sort buried here, was arguably more valuable, and certainly easier to fence discreetly, than a city-block-sized piece of hardware. A single data core could be worth millions. His mind began to race, plotting avenues of sale, of discreet brokers in the hidden markets of the wasteland.
"Zhang! Li Hao!" he called out, his voice gaining a new urgency. "Forget the big stuff. Look for data storage. Servers, hardened drives, anything that looks like it holds information! The plans are as good as the machines themselves!"
He was about to join the search, to tear into the crates marked Archivalor Data, when the sound reached them from above. It was faint, muffled by ten meters of earth and rubble, but unmistakable: the sporadic, brittle chatter of automatic gunfire.
No.
The thought was ice in his veins. Not now. Not when they were so close to salvaging something more. The gunfire wasn't the sustained roar of a full-scale assault, but it was a death knell for his ambitions nonetheless. He saw it instantly, the grim equation: his battered remnant of a force above, their ammunition depleted to the dregs, facing even a probing attack. Every second they lingered here, looting for dreams, risked condemning those above to death.
The treasure around him seemed to shimmer and recede, transforming from a promise of wealth back into inert, heavy boxes in a dark hole. The ache of leaving it behind was a physical pain, a wrenching sense of opportunity slipping through his fingers. He had come into a treasure vault and would leave with only the three canisters he absolutely needed. The feeling was one of the profoundest, most bitter disappointments he had ever known.
"We go," he ground out, the words tasting of ash. "Now."
He didn't look back as he sprinted for the rope dangling from the hole to the world above. He didn't let himself. The climb was a furious, scrabbling affair, his mind a whirlwind of frustrated curses. Only once, as he heaved himself over the lip of the crater back into the smoky, blood-stained reality of the surface, did he allow himself a single, fleeting glance downward. The cavern yawned below, a mouth full of shadows and lost potential. I'll be back, he promised it silently, a vow made more to himself than to the darkness. Somehow.
On the surface, the brief skirmish was over. Five stray Infected, drawn by the scent, lay twitching in the dirt. It was nothing, a triviality, and yet it was everything. It was a reminder that this place was not done with them.
"Move! Move!" Miguel's voice cut through the stunned silence, taking on a sharp, commanding edge that brooked no argument. "Get a plate, anything metal, over that hole! Bury it! The rest of you, grab the wounded, grab the ammo, leave everything else! We are leaving! Right now!"
The word leaving, spoken as an order, acted like a galvanic shock on the exhausted survivors. A final, desperate energy was summoned. A mangled piece of the dozer's blade was dragged over the opening. Dirt was kicked and shoveled over it with frantic haste. An empty ammo crate was half-buried as a crude marker, a promise to a future that felt uncertain. The wounded, groaning and pale, were loaded into the waiting trucks with as much care as haste allowed.
It was then that young Li Hao approached, his face pale beneath the grime, his eyes red-raw. He looked even younger than his years, a boy who had seen too much. "Sir… Michael," he began, his voice trembling. He wrung his hands, struggling to form the words. "I know… I know it's an ask. But… Captain Liu. The others who fell. We can't… we can't leave them for the crows and the rats. Please. Let's bring them home. To the cemetery. With the others."
Miguel stared at him, and then, to his own surprise, he brought the heel of his palm up and smacked his own forehead with a solid thwack. Not in annoyance at the request, but at his own catastrophic thoughtlessness. In the frenzy of survival and the sting of lost treasure, he had forgotten the dead. The men and women who had bought this retreat with their lives.
"Everyone!" he roared, his voice carrying across the ruined plaza. "We take allof our fallen! Every last one! They are not baggage, they are your brothers and sisters! Now move!"
The final loading took on a new, somber rhythm. The precious canisters of thawing fluid were secured. The few remaining crates of ammunition were loaded. And with a reverence that contrasted sharply with the earlier panic, the shrouded bodies of the dead were carried and laid gently in the beds of the trucks, wrapped in whatever cloth or tarp could be found.
Half an hour later, a convoy reduced by a third of its number and bearing the brutal scars of its passage, lurched and bounced its way through the corpse-strewn streets of Detroit. The word homehung in the air, unspoken but felt by every soul in every vehicle. It was a talisman, a spell against the darkness pressing in from the ruins. Drivers, their eyes wide and adrenaline still coursing, stamped on the accelerators, making the heavy vehicles slew and crash over the broken asphalt. Inside, passengers were thrown about, the wounded biting back cries of pain. No one complained. Every jolt, every spine-compressing drop into a pothole, was a step away from that terrible place.
Miraculously, the way out remained clear. No shambling horrors lurched from alleyways. No coordinated ambush awaited them. It was as if the city itself, having taken its bloody tithe, had decided to let them go. The breached perimeter fence, the mangled opening smashed by the Sherman tank a lifetime ago, came into view. A sigh, collective and profound, seemed to pass through the entire convoy.
As the lead truck bumped over the rubble and out of the official confines of the inner city, passing from the canyon-like streets into the relative openness of the outer ruins, a ragged, disbelieving cheer went up. It was raw, born of sheer, undiluted relief.
Miguel, riding in the passenger seat of the lead vehicle, felt the tension in his shoulders begin to unknot. He glanced back at the receding skyline, a jagged silhouette of black against the bruised purple of the pre-dawn sky. Never again, he thought, the sentiment fierce and absolute. I am never setting foot in that hellhole aga—
The thought froze, uncompleted.
A prickle, cold and instinctive, ran down his spine. He snatched the battered binoculars from the dash and raised them to his eyes, scanning the rooftops of the district they had just fled.
There. On the crest of a partially collapsed office building, about two miles distant, a figure stood silhouetted against the paling sky. It was the Man in the Suit. His earlier, impeccable black suit was gone, replaced by a formal tailcoat that looked absurdly pristine. His face was a pale blotch in the lenses, but the terrible, focused aura of him was unmistakable. The grotesque spear of tank barrel that had impaled him was gone, leaving no visible sign of injury save for that corpse-like pallor.
He was not pursuing. He simply stood, watching the convoy crawl away like insects. Then, with a slow, deliberate grace, he turned his gaze. Even across the distance, Miguel felt it lock onto him, personally, individually. The figure raised a hand, not in farewell, but in a slow, unmistakable gesture. The edge of his palm drew a line across his own throat. The meaning was universal, a silent oath carved in the morning air.
A hot, defiant anger surged in Miguel's chest, burning away the last of the fear. He leaned out of the truck window, the wind whipping at his hair. He raised his own hand, extending the middle finger in a gesture just as ancient and just as clear.
You wait,he thought, the words a venomous promise in his mind. You just wait. I'm coming back for that vault. And when I do, I'm coming for you.
The truck hit a bump, jolting him. When he looked back, the figure was gone, swallowed by the dark bones of the city. The convoy sped on, putting the terrible, precious, haunted ruins behind them, mile by painful mile.