Free Web NovelChapter 7: A Home Is What Survives
I saw another man losing his senses two blocks from the park.
A fender bender, barely a scrape, the kind of thing that should have taken five minutes and an exchange of insurance details, except the man who had rear-ended the other car was out of his vehicle and screaming with both hands locked around the other driver’s neck, and the screaming had nothing in it that was still doing calculations, just a pure rage that had swallowed the man behind it completely.
The other driver was hitting him and trying to pry the hands off his neck, and neither of them looked like they were going to stop.
I kept the bike moving and watched it recede in my mirror.
[This is spiralling bad!] I gritted my teeth, going way faster than the speed limit. [It starts on day fifteen. Not day one!. Day fifteen!]
Except I had just watched a man in a park cry while he beat his wife, and I had just watched another man try to strangle a stranger over a scratched bumper, and my hands tightened on the bars while the knot in my chest pulled an increment tighter.
The second one was a police officer.
I caught it at a red light. It was a police officer with both knees on someone’s back and still swinging, and the person on the ground was begging him to stop, but the officer kept swinging while a crowd recorded the whole thing on their phones, with some trying to get the officer off the man.
The light went green, and I rode out of there fast.
The gas station two kilometers further had two women, one of them bleeding from a scratch across her cheek and still coming forward, a pump running unattended beside them with nobody thinking about it, while the attendants tried to break them up.
Five separate incidents in twelve minutes.
I wanted to call Kara. I wanted to call her right then and there, on the bike, tell her to get Nora and Leo and go somewhere and stay there, lock the door, and don’t go outside.
But I didn’t.
Because she would ask where to go, and I didn’t have an answer for her yet.
[I have nothing to offer them except fear right now...] I thought, pulling into the car park of Black Ridge Expedition Co. [So get them something to go to first. This should solve that...]
The interior of Black Ridge Expedition Co. was the kind of space that might as well cost money to stand in.
Polished concrete floors that caught the amber overhead lighting, exposed timber and brushed steel shelving running the full walls, a kayak mounted above the central display like a trophy, the ventilation system running at a volume precise enough that you registered it as atmosphere rather than noise.
The air carried the smell of leather, rubber, canvas, and the faint cold-metal smell of new gear still in its packaging.
A woman in her mid-twenties crossed the floor toward me before I had taken four steps, dark hair pulled back, lean build, with a kind of easy competence in her walk that comes from actually using the equipment rather than knowing its catalogue specs.
"Welcome to Black Ridge Expedition Co." She smiled, then clocked Tikki on my shoulder and stopped. "Oh, my god. So is adorable. Can I...?"
"At your own risk," I said.
Tikki fixed her with the gaze of someone who had recently been betrayed by the last person who handled him and had updated his policy accordingly.
"Fair enough." She laughed, reading it correctly. "I’m Maya. What are you looking for?"
"High-end RV..." I said, not able to stop the impatience in my voice, "Planning to buy, but I want to test first. A two-week rental. I need something that can run indefinitely off-grid near a fresh water source. Must have long-term comfortable livability for four people.... Not interested in anything built for weekends."
The easy retail warmth in Maya’s expression sharpened into focus. After all, she just heard her commission go from standard to significant.
"Come with me," she smiled.
The warehouse behind the main floor smelled of rubber and machine oil and upholstery, polished concrete under hanging industrial lights with expedition vans along the left wall and luxury campers filling the center floor and two enormous overlanding rigs parked at the far end like they owned the building.
Maya walked me through them with genuine knowledge and enthusiasm, and I moved quickly and looked at everything, keeping the expression of a man who has all the time in the world for shopping while my brain ran the actual calculation underneath it.
But nothing that I saw fostered confidence.
Thin body panels that would dent badly under impact load. Standard glazing with poor sightlines and zero resistance.
Suspension tuned for smooth sealed roads. Layouts optimized for photographs, but useless when four people actually tried to live in them under stress for longer than a week.
After all, the kind of closeness RVs have doesn’t produce teamwork; it produces friction, especially under constant high pressure, and friction under that pressure produces worse problems than the external ones do.
I’ve seen more than enough groups fall firsthand that I will not risk that, even if I’m short on time.
[We can’t survive in these even for month one... even without the infected banging at them.]
Maya was explaining the battery management system on a German-built conversion van, and I was half-listening and half-watching how easily those large windows would break.
And that’s when the thought struck me.
[I have had the system for six hours, and I have not opened any tabs... Don’t I have a crafting tab?]
[System, what does crafting actually do?] I immediately went inward.
-Ding!
{Crafting allows the creation of items using purchased schematics and compatible materials.}
[What about modification? Can I modify a car or maybe a gun?]
-Ding!
{Assets stored within inventory may be modified through compatible upgrade pathways. Material and installation costs apply separately.}
I stopped moving as, within a span of a second, my entire perspective changed.
The van in front of me did not change, yes, but the way I was looking at those same thin panels, same inadequate glazing, same suspension that would fold on a bad road changed entirely.
Because none of those things were fixed anymore, they were just the starting figures, and the distance between the starting figure and what I needed was a function of credits and schematics rather than a hard wall.
[So just to make it clear, anything in my inventory can be modified. Any component. Any system.]
-Ding!
{Affirmative.}
[I could take a standard sedan and turn it into a battering ram!] frёewebnoѵēl.com
My eyes went to the two overlanding rigs at the far end of the warehouse, sitting wide and heavy on their chassis, and the thought that followed arrived with such momentum that it took a full second to complete itself.
[So what the hell could I build with one of those as the starting point?]
"Sir?"
Maya was looking at me with the polite, patient expression of someone waiting for a customer to come back from wherever they just went.
"Sorry." I looked at the van. "None of these is what I need. I want complete off-grid independence with four people aboard... money is not a problem."
She studied my face for a moment, and something in it apparently answered a question she hadn’t asked out loud.
"Actually," she said, "... we might have just that. Come with me."
"You should’ve started with that..." I could help but sigh.
She took me to the far end of the warehouse, past the overlanding rigs, to where a large vehicle sat under a fitted cover that reached the floor on all sides.
She took hold of the cover in both hands, pulled it away in one long, clean motion, and stepped to the side.
And my breathing immediately went shallow.
A beast sat beneath the warehouse lights with the low, planted presence of something built for places where roads are nonexistent.
Matte graphite bodywork, off-road tires nearly reaching my hip, the suspension sitting high and wide over the chassis without looking top-heavy for even a second.
Floodlights sat integrated into the front corners. Side storage compartments ran with the body with zero protrusions anywhere along the exterior.
Everything about it looked built for function first and appearance second.
Which somehow made it look even more expensive.
Maya looked back at me and immediately caught the expression on my face.
"Yeah..." she grinned. "That was pretty much my reaction too, when I first saw it."
I walked closer slowly, eyes tracing the body lines. "What the hell is this thing?"
"27North Ascender," she said, and there was obvious enthusiasm in her voice now. "Built on a Ford F-550 4x4 chassis. 6.7 liter Power Stroke V8 Turbo Diesel Engine.... A fully custom expedition platform."
She walked toward the side of the vehicle while talking, one hand brushing along the matte bodywork.
"And honestly?" She laughed lightly. "This thing was basically designed for exactly what you described wanting."
I looked at her.
"You get long-term off-grid living... perfect for four people. Full independence." She tapped the side panel lightly. "You’ll have... durability and luxury combined."
"Each Ascender is custom-built," Maya continued. "No two are identical, and base models already go upward of 1.2 million depending on configuration."
She pointed upward toward the roof.
"This specific unit crossed 1.4."
That finally pulled my eyes off the vehicle. "Really?"
"It stopped being just an RV somewhere around the point our owner started treating it like a luxury apocalyptic vessel... It’s the owner’s passion project, let’s say," she chuckled.
[Yeah, shows...]
"He explicitly extended off-grid deployment capability. Like... genuinely extended." Maya gestured toward the roofline. "That solar array is oversized for the platform and tied into an upgraded lithium battery bank... It’s got full climate control, can run for multiple days without sunlight if power usage is managed properly."
"The water system was expanded too..." she continued, clearly enjoying herself now that she had someone actually listening. "One hundred fifty gallons fresh water capacity."
I blinked once. "One-fifty?"
She nodded proudly. "Triple the standard configuration. Even greywater storage is scaled to match. Full filtration system too."
[Whoever configured this thing was either paranoid... or very, very smart.]
Maya crouched slightly beside one of the storage compartments.
"Reinforced external storage... Recovery equipment mounts. Full insulation package rated for extreme climates. We got upgraded refrigeration. Suspensions are custom-tuned for long-duration expedition use instead of recreational road travel."
She looked back up at me with a grin.
"You can disappear with this into the wilderness... and never come back."
She opened the main entry and stepped back, gesturing me in.
And the moment I stepped in, I was greeted with warm lighting, matte wood panelling, and soft leather seating.
It smelled clean, and most importantly, I felt actually livable.
I had spent most of the last three years in ruined buildings, barely working RVs, drainage, cold stairwells, and once, eleven consecutive hours flat on my stomach in a petrol station crawlspace, face against concrete, listening to a horde pass and repass on the road outside.
These luxuries, considering what was about to come, do seem like things I should not have my focus on.
But it’d exactly be these luxuries that’d keep the group from falling out.
After all, humans are not built to live like rats. And if I want them functioning at their best, I need luxury.
So, I stood in the entryway of the Ascender and took one slow breath while Maya got in and began walking me through it.
It had a leather dinette that converted to a queen-size bed in under a minute, and I mentally put Kara and Nora there immediately.
The over-cab sleeping area had a king-size bed with memory foam, storage running on both walls, and a charging strip the full length of the headboard.
The kitchen was an induction cooktop with a full refrigerator and a separate freezer, water filtration plumbed directly into the main tank, and deep drawers that closed flush silently.
The bathroom had hot water from the onboard tank, greywater recovery in the plumbing, and insulated pipes.
[Hot food... Hot water... Real sleep... with enough physical space between people to stay functional under conditions that would otherwise start producing cracks inside the first month... Yeah, I want this!]
And underneath all of it was the crafting tab, which meant the weak points in the body paneling were no longer weaknesses. The windows could be made Level 10 Bulletproof. The suspension was a foundation instead of a limitation, and the end state of what I was looking at was somewhere I couldn’t even fully imagine yet.
"I’ll take this one."
Maya’s face stayed professionally level, but her breathing changed.
"Excellent choice," she smiled wide. "Shall we get the paperwork sorted? We can look at outdoor packages after."
"Yeah... let’s get the paperwork first," I said.
[I need to be able to run it at any moment.]
The office she led me to was small, a desk, two chairs, a printer, and a wall-mounted television running a news broadcast on low volume.
Maya pulled up the rental contract on her tab and began walking me through it while I sat in the chair across from her and watched Tikki climb from my shoulder to the desk and sit with his tail wrapped around his feet.
I was barely listening to anything, running the next step in my mind when the news ticker at the bottom of the screen registered.
BREAKING: Actor James Calloway shoots his wife at Greenfield estate. Barricaded inside. Armed standoff ongoing. Police negotiators are on scene.
I stared at it, feeling my heart kick up its pace.
Even Tikki’s head turned toward the television as though he understood what was going on.
[Why?] The word floated up. [I had a week... should’ve had a full week, I built everything around it... I needed that week, damn it!]
[No, stop,... just think. The timeline shifted, yes... but you have the money. You have the system. You have the Ascender. You have Tikki. I can still do this!]
"Sign here when you’re ready," Maya’s chipper voice broke through my thoughts as she slid the tablet across the desk.
[Yeah... I can still pull this off!]
