After a successful robbery the three of them went back to the apartment, and Min was still celebrating on the stairs.
"Shawn is a legend! That old dog is probably in a rage right now, tearing his own house to shreds."
"If it weren't for the two of you," Lena said, "I don't know how much longer I would have lasted in that hell."
"We were classmates," Shawn said. "There's no need to thank me."
But Min was interested in something else entirely. "How exactly did you pull that off? You cleared out an entire warehouse single-handed. What kind of magic is that?"
"That's personal," Shawn said. "It's better to think about how we're going to keep that much water from going bad." Then he turned to Lena. "By the way. After we finished school you disappeared completely. What happened?"
Lena looked at her hands for a moment. After graduation, she said, something happened to her family. Her parents both vanished at the same time —
She did not get to finish, because there was a noise outside, and when they got up and went to the window the whole street was on fire.
"This gang again?" Min shouted. "What now, do they want to burn everyone here alive?"
It is funny how easily a man sees the speck of dust in someone else's eye and misses the log in his own. Hank genuinely believed that Shawn could be moved to pity by the killing of innocent people. He had no idea that Shawn killed innocent people left and right and mocked the starving for entertainment. In that respect the two of them were not different animals at all.
"How long can he hide?" Hank was howling in the street below. "I'll burn this entire block to the ground!"
"We can't just leave it like this," Min said. "The fire's coming through the walls."
Shawn looked at him. "In a terminal apocalypse, did you really think I'd build a shelter without a fire suppression system?"
There were outlets set into the walls all around the building. They opened, and what came out of them ran down the brick and the panels and put the fire out in under a minute.
"What is that?" Min shouted. "Is that a gel? How did he even get hold of this? That's military technology!"
Down in the street Hank had understood that getting Shawn out of that shelter was not going to be easy. He needed a new plan. In the meantime he ordered his men to keep throwing the bottles, on the theory that nobody can hold out forever — until one of them ran up to him and reported that they were running low on fuel, and that this white gel was a nightmare, and that nothing they threw was working.
Then Shawn came out onto the step.
"Has the boss finished playing with fire? Would he like to come inside for a glass of ice water? It might help him calm down."
And at that Hank changed his mind about the whole thing.
Simply killing Shawn would be letting him off far too easily. That house — fireproof, fortified, entirely self-sufficient — was the perfect refuge in a world that was ending. Hank wanted it. Not the water. The house.
Brute force had not worked. Fire had not worked. So Hank decided to take it out on civilisation instead.
"If he doesn't come out right now," he bellowed at the windows, "I start burning these people!"
Which is funny, because Shawn would not have minded doing the same thing himself.
"The bastard," Min said furiously. "If he pushes them, they'll break loose and smash him to smithereens."
"Is he going to keep hiding in his shell like a coward?" Hank shouted. "Fine. Then I'll start with this old man."
Shawn had never in his life been known for kindness, so there was no obvious reason to start now. Nevertheless, for reasons entirely his own, Shawn decided that this was the moment to go out and help the people he had spent the last week tormenting.
"Stay here," he told Min and Lena. "I'll go and talk to the boss."