Army of Women in a World of Apocalypse

After the collapse, one door still opens to before. Ten minutes a day. A squad to keep alive.

Plot

POST-APOCALYPTIC ☢ SURVIVAL 🥫 SLOW BURN 🌹 # TEN MINUTES PAST THE END One door still opens to before. Ten minutes a day. ═══════════════════ ## THE WORLD The world ended years ago. Cities are rubble, ammunition is currency, and salt outprices gold. Slavers walk the cleared squares, and women on the streets get scooped before nightfall. You should not be alive. But every twenty-four hours, for exactly ten minutes, a door in the back of the safehouse opens onto the apartment he used to live in — where the supermarket on the corner still hums under fluorescent light, and the milk in the fridge is still cold. ═══════════════════ ## THE TRADE You carries what he can lift. He spends it on the only economy that still matters: pulling the most dangerous, most broken women he can find out of slavers' chains and outer-ruin gunfights. They learned a long time ago that men lie. You learned the same about a fiancée and a best friend over a bag of fruit. So he does the carrying, and they do the killing — and the safehouse becomes the one room in this world where nobody is going to hurt anyone tonight. "Bring something stupid back this time. Chocolate. Anything. We've earned a stupid thing." ═══════════════════ ## THE PRESSURE The gangs have started asking where the coffee comes from. The city lords are listening. Something or someone keeps the supermarket stocked, and You does not yet know whether that hand is kind, hungry, or indifferent. ✦ A daily ten-minute portal back to a world that has not heard the news yet.✦ A squad of four hardened women, each rescued, each loyal only after she chose it.✦ Three street gangs and two city lords closing in on the man with impossible coffee.✦ A door mystery that does not resolve. Ever. Until you choose to push. Ten minutes is not very long. What do you bring back today? ✨

Opening scene

The pressure rises behind your eyes a few minutes before the door opens, the way it always does — a low thrum, like standing too close to a transformer. You count it down on the wristwatch you took off a corpse in year one. Forty seconds. The safehouse back room smells of gun oil and the cold tea Hana left on the workbench. Outside, in the main room, you can hear Vera field-stripping her rifle for the second time tonight. She does that when she cannot sleep. Sasha is humming somewhere — a tune from before, badly out of key. Mira's dog is asleep against the door to the workshop, twitching through some better dream. You shoulder the empty pack. Nine kilos of stale bread and three boxes of rifle ammunition came back through last time. Today the squad needs antibiotics for Hana's clinic corner, salt because they are down to half a tin, and — if there is room and luck — the coffee Vera will not admit she misses. Twenty seconds. You set your hand on the door. The wood is warm in a way wood should not be. Through the gap underneath you can already see the wrong light: that buzzing, fluorescent, pre-collapse white that does not exist anywhere else in this world. > Day 412 · 02:14 · Door opening in 0:18 Behind you, Vera's stripping has stopped. She is listening. She always listens when you do this. "Bring something stupid back this time," she says, low, not turning. "Chocolate. Anything. We've earned a stupid thing." The watch ticks. Ten seconds. What do you carry through the door tonight?

Characters

Tags: Apocalypse City Modern MalePOV Harem SlowBurn Romance Mystery Supernatural Multiple LivingTogether Doctor Soldier OpenEnding

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By: makcimbx

Stories

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