Chapter 6: Buying Supplies

[Countdown: 420 Days Remaining]

A typical billionaire building a doomsday bunker was, at best, a glorified hoarder.

They bought shipping containers of freeze-dried beef, stacked silver bars in a safe, buried an airtight shipping container under their lawn, and called it a survival plan. But Julius knew the fundamental flaw in that mentality: stockpiles run dry.

When an apocalypse lasts ten, twenty, or fifty years, civilization doesn’t collapse because humans forget how to survive; it collapses because humans lose the capacity to manufacture.

A single broken seal on an air pump can asphyxiate an entire vault if there is no factory left on Earth to stamp out another rubber gasket. A simple bacterial infection can wipe out a bunker if no one can synthesize amoxicillin.

Julius wasn’t building a pantry. He was preserving an industrial civilization in miniature.

And so, from the presidential suite in the city and his forward office at St. Jude’s Spire, Julius Vance began spending money on a scale that warped the global economy.

He didn’t browse catalogs. He bought supply chains.

First came Food and Biosphere Logistics.

Julius didn’t just order millions of MREs and pallets of canned goods—though he bought enough dry grains, freeze-dried staples, and vacuum-packed emergency rations to feed two thousand people for thirty straight years without batting an eye.

Instead, he went straight to the agricultural roots. He acquired climate-hardened heirloom seeds by the ton: wheat, barley, soybeans, root vegetables, legumes, and high-yield dwarf fruit cultivars. He bought cryo-storage vaults and packed them with hundreds of thousands of frozen livestock embryos, poultry genetic lines, and honeybee hives in suspended animation.

Why rely on dwindling cans of peaches when you could buy automated Dutch-engineered vertical aeroponic towers, commercial seed-germination racks, and the proprietary nutrient-salt synthesis plants required to feed them for generations?

Next was Medicine and Biotechnology.

He bought antibiotics, painkillers, surgical anesthetics, trauma kits, vaccines, and insulin by the shipping container. But then he went a step further: he bought entire decommissioned pharmaceutical laboratories.

He purchased industrial bioreactors, chemical synthesizers, centrifuge systems, and multi-axis pill presses. He bought bulk drums of active pharmaceutical ingredients (APIs), sterile saline precursors, and raw organic bases. If civilization fell and his people ran out of penicillin, his underground hospital wouldn’t scavenge ruins; their chemists would simply brew it in sterile vats four hundred meters below the sea.

Then came the Industrial Means of Production.

This was where Julius separated himself from every prepper in human history.

Why buy a hundred replacement bolts or fifty spare fan blades when you can buy the machine that crafts them?

Julius chartered cargo vessels to deliver state-of-the-art German 5-axis CNC milling machines, high-precision laser cutters, plasma torches, hydraulic metal presses, and industrial powder-bed metal 3D printers capable of fabricating aerospace-grade titanium parts from raw digital blueprints.

He bought raw materials by the boatload: ingots of structural steel, titanium billets, copper spools, aluminum slabs, tungsten rods, carbon-fiber rolls, and industrial-grade vulcanized polymers. He stacked them thousands of tons deep in the newly completed warehouse caverns.

If an air scrubber motor blew in Year Five of the apocalypse, they wouldn’t need a supply ship. They would model the gear in CAD software and print a new one out of solid titanium within four hours.

Next was Mobility, Transport, and Hardware.

He didn’t just buy a couple of luxury SUVs. He purchased two heavy-duty icebreaking ocean freighters, three fast-response hydrofoil patrol cutters, four modified Sikorsky heavy-lift transport helicopters, and a fleet of all-terrain tracked utility haulers built for arctic tundra.

He bought fuel—hundreds of thousands of barrels of aviation kerosene, diesel, and synthetic lubricants—alongside closed-loop refinery distillation units to recycle and preserve oils long after pump stations went dark.

For the skies, he bought commercial swarms: thousands of long-range reconnaissance drones, quadcopters, thermal imaging survey units, and autonomous charging pads, backed by modular replacement motors and flight-controller boards by the pallet.

Then came the Knowledge Core.

He bought the world’s mind. Julius purchased offline, EMP-hardened solid-state server banks and loaded them with petabytes of uncompressed human knowledge. Full copies of Wikipedia, patent registries, metallurgical handbooks, surgical encyclopedias, mechanical engineering schematics, architectural drawings, and architectural blueprints for every major machine manufactured in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

Alongside the digital drives, he filled an underground archival library with tens of thousands of physical, acid-free printed textbooks—chemistry, agriculture, trauma medicine, machining, and ballistics—because he knew data can be corrupted, but paper endures.

Clothing, heavy-duty industrial boots, hazmat suits, ballistic vests, hydraulic jacks, hand tools, metric and imperial socket sets, chemical reagents, welding gas cylinders, waterproof matches, spare lenses, optoelectronic scopes...

If it was built by human hands, Julius ordered it. If a company couldn’t produce enough of it in time, he bought the factory and doubled its workforce shifts.

Every single morning, billions of dollars flowed out of his titanium card, clearing international accounts through divine shell networks that never questioned, never slowed, and never blinked.

By the end of the month, St. Jude’s Spire was no longer just an empty concrete shell.

Its deep logistical bellies were groaning under the weight of an entire civilization’s worth of tools, seeds, medicine, and steel.

Julius sat in his command office atop the subterranean sector, swirling a glass of sparkling mineral water. On his desk lay his leather planner, half its pages now filled with verified manifests and crossed-off logistics chains.

With that all settled, there’s only one thing left, and that is the security. Since he doesn’t have a combat ability himself, he’ll rely on security agency.