Chapter 162: What They Call Us Now

Chapter 162: Chapter 162: What They Call Us Now

The building’s entrance no longer resembled anything close to a lobby.

The storm’s wind had shattered the entire east-facing wall of windows weeks ago, and the group had long since adapted, guiding the boat through the jagged opening rather than any door, water sloshing over splintered glass and twisted frame as they eased inside.

They’d barely cleared the threshold before the shouting started.

"That’s them! That’s the boat!"

A dozen people had gathered near the flooded interior stairwell, drawn by the sound of the motor, faces gaunt with the particular hollowed-out desperation that three weeks of rationing and rising water had carved into nearly everyone left in the building. Some held makeshift weapons — a broken chair leg, a length of pipe — though none of it looked like it belonged to people who actually intended to use it, more like the last, brittle posturing of people too exhausted to feel anything except cornered.

"We need that boat," a woman called out, voice cracking. "Please. We haven’t eaten properly in three days. My kids are asking for food I don’t have, and we can’t reach anywhere with supplies left without something like that."

"We can’t lend it out," Erik said, already scanning the crowd, cataloguing threats out of old habit even as sympathy tightened something in his chest. "We need it for our own runs."

"You always say that." Another voice, angrier now, cutting through the pleading. "Every single time. You come back loaded down with supplies and you never once share the boat that got you there."

Penelope kept her expression neutral, guiding the boat carefully around a submerged reception desk, everything they’d gathered already swept into her space the moment they’d cleared the entrance — no visible haul, nothing for the crowd to see except four exhausted people and an empty boat, though the emptiness didn’t seem to slow the accusations at all.

"Where’s everything you took?" a man demanded, stepping closer to the water’s edge. "You went out with an empty boat and you’re coming back with an empty boat. You expect us to believe you didn’t find anything?"

"That’s not your concern," Killian said, voice flat, guiding the boat toward the stairwell landing where the water grew shallow enough to disembark.

"It is our concern." A different man shoved forward now, broader, younger, something reckless and cornered in his expression. "You people have a whole floor secured up there. Food, medicine, whatever the hell you’re not telling the rest of us about. And you want us to just what, starve quietly while you keep hoarding a boat that could save actual lives?"

"Nobody’s hoarding anything that belongs to you," Erik said, edge creeping into his voice now despite his effort to keep it level.

"Belongs to us?" The man laughed, short and humorless. "You cleared this building, sure. Nobody’s forgotten that. But you never once said any of what you brought back belonged to everyone. You just let us all assume it, and then you disappear behind that gate every night while the rest of us try to figure out how to make it through one more day on nothing."

"That’s not fair," Ben said quietly, though the words carried little conviction even to his own ears.

"Fair?" The woman who’d first pleaded stepped forward again, exhaustion cracking into something sharper now. "My kids haven’t had a real meal in days. I’ve been standing here for an hour asking, and all I’ve gotten is ’we need it for ourselves.’ Tell me what’s fair about that."

Erik’s jaw tightened, the weight of the accusation landing somewhere he clearly hadn’t fully braced for, even after weeks of watching this exact resentment build floor by floor beneath them. "I understand you’re frightened. I understand how desperate this has all become. But we don’t have the certainty to know who genuinely needs help and who’s using that need to justify taking something that isn’t theirs to take."

"So we’re all just liars to you," the broad man said, stepping closer still, water sloshing violently around his knees. "Every single person in this building who’s ever asked you for anything, you’ve decided we’re probably lying."

"That’s not what he said," Kai tried, though his usual easy tone had thinned considerably under the weight of the crowd’s mounting anger.

"It’s exactly what he said." The man’s hand shot out, grabbing for the boat’s edge with a suddenness that caught even Erik briefly off guard, clearly intending to either drag it toward himself or capsize it entirely in the attempt.

Killian’s reaction was instant, cold, and utterly without hesitation.

He raised one hand.

The man’s grip on the boat’s rubber hull simply stopped mattering. Something detonated beneath his skin with a sound like a wet crack of thunder, his body crumpling sideways into the flooded lobby before anyone around him had time to fully process what they’d just witnessed.

Silence, for one horrified second.

Then a second man surged forward, screaming something incoherent, water splashing violently around his legs as he closed the distance toward Erik with a length of rebar raised overhead.

Erik didn’t move. He simply reached out, two fingers extended, and lightning arced from his hand into the metal bar the instant it came within range, the current traveling instantly into the man gripping it. He convulsed once, violently, and dropped into the water without another sound.

A third man reached for Penelope instead, perhaps assuming she’d be the easier target, hands grasping toward her jacket.

Her katana was already moving. Two clean strokes, and both his hands separated at the wrist, the man’s scream tearing through the lobby as he stumbled backward, staring in uncomprehending horror at the ruin of his own arms.

The remaining four men who’d gathered near the crowd didn’t wait to see anything further. They turned and fled, splashing frantically through the flooded lobby toward the nearest stairwell, disappearing from sight within seconds.

The rest of the crowd stood frozen, staring — not at the fallen men, but at the four people who’d dropped them with such terrible, effortless speed.

"You’re monsters," the woman who’d first pleaded for help finally whispered, backing away, one hand pressed over her mouth, eyes wide with something between horror and grief. "All of you. You’re actual monsters."

"We didn’t want this," Erik said, though the words came out rougher than he intended, some of his own composure visibly cracking for the first time in days. "They attacked us first. We didn’t have a choice."

"You always have a choice," the woman said, voice shaking. "You chose that. You chose the boat over us weeks ago, and now you’ve chosen this."

Nobody in the group had an answer for that. Erik guided the boat the final few feet toward the stairwell landing in silence, Killian’s expression unreadable, Penelope’s hands still faintly trembling around the hilt of her katana, blood mixing with the floodwater in slow, spreading ribbons around the man still clutching the ruined stumps of his wrists, his sobbing the only sound left in the otherwise silent lobby.

They climbed the first flight without speaking, the crowd’s stunned murmuring fading slowly behind them.

"We didn’t have a choice," Ben said quietly, once they’d climbed high enough that the lobby noise had fully disappeared.

"I know," Erik said.

"They were going to take the boat," Kai added, though his usual easy tone had gone entirely flat. "Or worse. We all saw it building for weeks."

"I know," Erik said again, though something in his voice suggested the words weren’t landing the way he needed them to.

"Do you think she’s right?" Penelope asked quietly, several floors later, breaking the silence that had settled over all of them since the lobby. "That we chose this?"

"We chose to protect ourselves," Erik said. "That’s not the same as choosing violence for its own sake."

"I know that logically," Penelope said. "It doesn’t stop the way she looked at us from sitting wrong in my chest."

"It shouldn’t stop feeling wrong," Killian said, quiet, from where he climbed a step behind her. "The day it stops bothering you is the day you’ve become something worth calling a monster. Feeling it and still making the same choice again tomorrow if you had to — that’s the difference."

Penelope didn’t answer, though something in Killian’s words settled a fraction of the weight sitting in her chest, even if it didn’t lift it entirely.

They climbed the remaining floors in heavy, unbroken silence, the woman’s accusation trailing after them the entire way — monsters — settling into the same quiet, unresolved place in Penelope’s chest where every other cost of survival in this building had gone to live since the day the world ended.

By the time they reached the twenty-first floor gate, nobody had spoken again for several minutes.

Killian keyed the lock, and the moment it swung open, the warm, lantern-lit quiet of home greeted them — Aunt Mary humming something soft in the kitchen, Aurora’s contented babbling drifting from the living room, all of it entirely disconnected from what they’d just left behind three floors below.

Penelope stood in the doorway a moment longer than the others, staring back down the darkened stairwell, the accusation still ringing in her ears.

Monsters.

She wasn’t sure, standing there, whether the woman had been wrong.

Aunt Mary looked up from the stove the moment they stepped inside, her welcoming smile fading instantly at whatever she read in their expressions. "What happened?"

"Trouble at the entrance," Erik said, setting down his weapon with more force than strictly necessary. "It’s handled."

"Handled," Aunt Mary repeated, something knowing and worried in the single word, though she didn’t press further, simply crossing to gather Erik into a brief, steadying embrace that he leaned into more heavily than Penelope had ever seen him allow himself before.

Kai sank onto the couch without his usual commentary, staring at nothing in particular. Ben disappeared toward the bathroom to wash blood that wasn’t his own from his hands, though none of them had actually touched the men who’d fallen. Killian remained near the door, watchful, still scanning the hallway out of habit even now that they were safely behind the gate.

Penelope crossed slowly to where Aurora sat babbling happily in her small nest of blankets, entirely unaware of everything happening beyond the walls of this one small, warm room, and knelt beside her, letting the baby’s tiny fingers curl around one of her own.

"I hope you never have to understand any of this," she murmured, quiet enough that nobody else could hear.

Aurora only laughed, delighted by nothing at all, and for the first time since the lobby, something in Penelope’s chest finally, briefly, eased.