Chapter 2: Garlic Butter and roasted vegetables
The silence was the worst part. It wasn't peaceful; it was an oppressive, heavy thing that pressed against Ethan's eardrums, making him aware of the blood rushing through his own head. For three days, he'd lived within the stark, new rhythm of his self-contained world. He had cleared most of the clutter, storing the originals meticulously in the cool vault of his space. The apartment was unnervingly tidy in patches—the kitchen counters lined with a single, deliberate row of cans and water bottles, a staging area—while other corners remained untouched, dusty monuments to Before.
Time bent around his experiments. He practiced until the familiar drain of energy became a manageable tide he could feel coming and receding. Replicating a glass of water cost almost nothing. A can of beans was a slight tug. A complex object, like his multi-tool with its dozen tiny components, made him break into a cold sweat and require a nap. He ate like a king from his timeless store: salmon seared in lemon butter, the cake (still decadently fresh), a perfectly crisp apple. The luxury of it was surreal, a private joke against the dead world outside.
He'd started cooking the fancier, perishable things first, the scents of garlic and herbs and sizzling fat filling the small apartment. It seemed stupid to let good steak go to waste. Tonight, it was a ribeye, the fat rendering in a scorching cast-iron pan, accompanied by asparagus he’d roasted with a little oil and salt.
The smell was rich, animal, impossibly normal. He was plating it, the savory steam fogging up his glasses, when he heard the first sound from the hallway in seventy-two hours.
Footsteps. Not the dragging, uneven gait of them. These were slow, hesitant, human steps. They stopped right outside his door.
Ethan froze, the plate warming his palm. His breath hitched.
A quiet knock. Three soft, tentative raps on the wood.
"Hello?" a voice called, a man's voice, thin and raspy with disuse. "Anyone in there?"
Ethan’s heart immediately began a frantic, painful slam against his ribs. He didn't move, didn't breathe.
"We smell food," another voice joined in, younger, a woman's. It trembled. "Please. We haven't eaten… it's been days."
"We're not… we're not like the ones outside," the man added hurriedly, a desperate edge creeping in. "We're from 2C. The Mendozas. You know us, right? We just… we just need a little. Anything. A cracker.Please."
Ethan’s knuckles were white around the plate. He knew them. An older couple. He’d held the door for Mrs. Mendoza and her grocery cart once. They’d always smiled. Now they were on the other side of two inches of wood, starving, while the smell of his steak fat filled the hall.
His eyes darted to his kitchen staging area. He could spare a dozen cans without blinking. He could give them steaks. He had an entire replicated herd of cattle in his head.
But what if they weren't alone? What if it was a trick? A thin, icy terror poured down his spine. Stories from before the end—horror movies, news reports about home invasions—flashed with cruel clarity. He had no weapon. He was lanky, weak. His space couldn’t stop a bullet or a blade. If they rushed him, if they were desperate enough…
The man knocked again, harder."Please! We can hear you in there! We know you're alive! Just… just open the door a crack. We don't want trouble."
"We have a child," the woman sobbed, the sound raw and awful through the door. "Our grandson. He's six. He's so quiet, he's so hungry…"
The mention of a child was a physical blow. Ethan's stomach twisted, a nausea that had nothing to do with hunger. He took a silent step towards the door, his hand trembling as it reached for the deadbolt.Then he stopped.
His mind conjured the scene: the door opening, their grateful faces. Then, behind them, shadows moving. Stronger men, lurking further down the hall, waiting for the chink in his armor. Or the Mendozas themselves, their civility snapping under primal hunger the second they saw his stocked kitchen, his healthy frame. They would take everything. They would shove him aside, or worse.
He was a coward. He knew it with a corrosive certainty. His good nature was a small, trapped animal inside a cage of pure, lymphatic fear.
"I'm sorry," he whispered, so low even he barely heard it. A tear, hot and shameful, tracked down his cheek. He stood there, statue-still, as the pleas continued.Minutes stretched. The knocking grew more feeble.
"Fine," the man's voice finally said, hollow with defeat. "Fine. God bless you anyway."
The footsteps receded, slow and heavy, down the hallway. They faded into the consuming silence.
Ethan let out a shuddering breath that was half a sob. He slid down the wall beside the door, the forgotten plate of steak cooling on the floor beside him. The smell of it now made him gag. He’d chosen his own safety over a child’s hunger. The calculation was sound, logical, and it made him feel monstrous.
He sat in the darkening apartment for a long time, the internal hum of his space a constant, accusing vibration. He saw their faces. He heard the woman's sob.
Finally, he pushed himself up. His movements were jerky, automatic. He went to the kitchen and scanned three cans of vegetable soup, three of peaches in syrup, three of beans. He replicated them. The energy drain was negligible, a faint pulse. He pulled out the duplicates, leaving the originals safe in his archive.
He took a black marker and wrote on a piece of notebook paper, his handwriting scrawling and awkward: FROM A NEIGHBOR. BE CAREFUL.
He didn't sign it.
He listened at the door for what felt like an hour, hearing only the distant, familiar moan from somewhere deep in the building's bowels. With a shaking hand, he disengaged the locks as quietly as possible. He opened the door a bare six inches, the hallway a yawning, dark maw.
The emptiness mocked him.
He placed the nine cans and the note on the worn carpet just outside his threshold. A pitiful offering. A bloodless sacrifice. He closed the door, threw the locks, and slid the chain home with a definitive, cold click.
Back in the center of his apartment, he wrapped his arms around his knees. He wouldn’t see if they took it. He didn’t deserve to know if it helped.
The silence returned, thicker now, filled with the phantom echoes of their voices and the low, steady hum of the infinite space within him—a vault of plenty in a world of want, guarded by a terrified boy who was starting to hate the sound of his own heart.
Ethan drew a sharp, ragged breath into lungs that felt tight and small. The steak was a greasy lump on the floor, its scent now cloying. He looked at his shaking hands, the faint silver-light of the blood moon glinting off the coiled scars from the electrical burn. You didn’t even eat it yourself, he thought. You cooked a feast while a kid starved twenty feet away.
He stood up, his knees popping. Something was wrong. The thought struck him with the cold, simple clarity of a math problem. He leaned his forehead against the cool wall.
He needed to calm down. Think.
It had only been three days, four at most. The power went out on Sunday night. This was… Wednesday?Maybe Thursday. His mental calendar blurred. It didn't matter. The point stood.
It was almost impossible for a survivor in their own home to have run out of food already. The Mendozas in 2C. They had groceries. Everyone had groceries at the start of a week. Cans, pasta, something. His neighbors weren’t doomsday preppers, but they weren’t fools either.
“It’s only been a few days,” he whispered to the empty room. The words clicked into place, locking a dread more specific than general fear. A cold sweat prickled across the back of his neck and down his spine, soaking into his t-shirt.
The image re-formed, not of desperate grandparents, but of shadows waiting. Strong men, hiding around the corner of the hall, using the plea of a child and the smell of his steak as bait. They would have heard his electric generator’s low rumble days ago. They would have noted his light under the door when the whole building went dark.
Or maybe they were that unfortunate. A pipe burst, flooding their pantry. A family emergency had cleared their fridge before the collapse. Maybe they were telling the simple, terrible truth.
He’d already put out the cans. An anonymous offering. A transaction with no witness. He didn't want to think about it anymore, about the speed at which humanity could go astray. It was a double helix of rot: his refusal to open the door, their potential lie to get it open. Which was worse?
Still not in the mood to eat, he pushed the plate away with his foot. He needed warmth, something that didn’t taste of guilt or steak. He reached into the quiet infinity of his space, his mind touching the phantom shelves. A familiar ceramic handle met his grasp.
He pulled out a mug of hot cocoa. It steamed, perfect, the marshmallows still buoyant and soft.
He moved to the window, avoiding the lethal sightline of the peephole. He nudged the blackout curtain aside with his elbow.
The city was a shattered jawbone of concrete and glass, lit in bruises of moonlight and fire-glow. Below, shapes moved with that familiar, lurching patience. The walking dead. A river of them flowed down the center of Main Street, a slow, mindless migration. He saw one stumble over a curb and fall, only to be trampled by the others without pause.
He sipped the cocoa. Its sweetness was a memory, a ghost on his tongue. He couldn't be softhearted. That was the calculus of it. Compassion was a calorie burn he couldn't afford, a door unlocked a crack. To live, to survive behind his seal, he had to cauterize that part of himself. He needed to believe his own fear was wisdom.
He became a bit pessimistic about everything, then. What future did this hold? An eternity of loneliness and silence, eating luxuriously and infinitely refueling his generator, while watching the world rot from his third-floor perch, a king in his own world until something smarter than a shambler figured out how to climb stairs?
A braver man, a different man, would be out there now. That man would have secured a vehicle, would be cutting through the shambling crowds toward the highway, toward rumors of military blockades or survivor enclaves at the stadium. He’d be looting stores, clearing houses, building a community. Doing something.
Ethan just stayed locked away at home. A curator of his own museum of plenty.
He finished the cocoa, the last dregs lukewarm and grainy. He wondered, not for the first time, if the whole world was in this state, or just their country. Had the blood moon risen over Tokyo, over Paris? Were there islands untouched, governments functioning in bunkers, broadcasting news on frequencies he couldn’t reach? Or was it everyone, everywhere, all at once, leaving no clean place to dream of reaching?
The thought was too large. It made his apartment feel like a shoebox suspended in a void.
He needed a smaller void. A comforting one.
He walked to the bathroom, the tiles cold under his feet. He placed his hands on the edge of the old porcelain tub and closed his eyes. In his space, there was a perfect, scanned quantity of water—heated by his constant boiling of water and stored in containers before storing it in his space. He pulled.
Steaming hot water gushed from nowhere into the tub, a miniature waterfall defying reality. The air filled with a damp, clean warmth. He stripped and slid in, the heat a sharp, then enveloping, embrace.
Submerged up to his chin, he closed his eyes. The silence here was different, muffled by the water in his ears. He tried to empty his mind.
Instead, he missed. The loss wasn't a single thing but a cascade. He missed the dull, specific anxiety of a midterm exam. He missed the glow of his laptop screen late at night, watching pointless videos. He missed the weight of headphones, the private universe of a song's crescendo. He missed the boring, safe rhythm of a Tuesday. He missed his life from before with an ache so physical he let out a soft groan into the steam.
He soaked until his fingers pruned and the water cooled. When he finally rose, dripping and pink-skinned, he felt hollowed out. Clean, but empty. The hum inside him was a constant. He’d done all the comforting he could.
He looked at himself in the fogged mirror, a pale smudge of a person. “So survive,” he said to the blurred reflection, his voice flat. He had food. He had water. He had a roof.
He had a power nobody understood, least of all him. He wondered if other people had powers as well.
Walking back into the dark living room, his eyes went not to the window, but to the door. The cans would be gone by now. His transaction was complete. He listened, pressing his ear to the wood.
From the other side, very faintly, he heard a new sound. Not a knock. Not a plea.
It was the soft, unmistakable scrape of a knife—or maybe a crowbar—being slowly, patiently worked into the seam of the doorframe.