Emergency alert. The global heat crisis is completely out of control. Several climate tipping points have been crossed. The ecosystem is on the brink of collapse.
But the real nightmare had not started yet. Very soon the heat-resistant mutant beasts would come and eat everything civilisation had ever built, and the awakened who were beginning to appear among ordinary people would split into factions and destroy each other over what was left of the resources. Shawn's world turned entirely on selfish people, and he was one of the more accomplished ones in it.
He understood that simply sitting inside his shelter forever was not going to work. He decided instead to turn it into the last bastion of survival in the apocalypse — to build a dictatorship, that is, and not to help anybody. He said the words "bastion of survival" out loud to himself while ignoring the suffering going on directly beneath his window.
People had begun to complain that one man had taken everything for himself. They came up the stairwell and beat on his door demanding supplies and an explanation. They had decided among themselves that Shawn's shelter should be shared.
Shawn ignored them harder. Then he thought of something better, and photographed his lunch, and posted it in the residents' chat so that starving people could look at it. Then he sat happily reading the replies, every one of which told him to go to hell. Somewhere downstairs a man smashed his phone on the asphalt in rage.
Then Shawn went out to look for the medicine.
The heat hit him in the face the moment the door opened, and a second later so did a knife — badly thrown, and it missed. Unfortunately for the men on the other side of the road, Shawn survived.
"We'll kill him! He can't hide in that apartment forever!"
Three of them came at him at once. Not one of them managed to touch him. They had knives and he had nothing, and it made no difference whatsoever; he counter-attacked, took a knife off the first, and went down the line of them. Each one received a deep wound and fell onto asphalt that should already have been melting at that temperature.
He looked like a real villain, standing over them. He behaved like one too.
After he had finished with them he went on to the laboratory Hank had described. Soon, with heat like this, it would be infection that killed people — necrosis, sepsis, a scratch that went bad in a day.
He noticed the camera above the door and broke it. And the moment he stepped inside, he found himself in a room filling with poison gas.
A trap.
Someone came up behind him and put a needle in his arm, and his heart went off like a hammer, and a calm voice asked whether the young man was feeling better now.
"The nerve gas isn't lethal," the man said. "But the effects are unpleasant."
Sadly, Shawn survived. "Who are you? Hank never said anything about you."
The man was wearing a long coat and a turtleneck in fifty-degree heat. His name was Liam, and he was a biomedical researcher; his work, he explained, concerned human evolution under extreme conditions. Current conditions, in general, were ideal for him.
What interested Liam very much was how, exactly, Shawn had cut his camera.
Beside him stood a girl who was, for some reason, dressed in almost nothing at all. His student, Ren.
Shawn looked around the room, and Liam followed his eyes and told him to consider it an apology for their security measures, and a welcome gift besides. It is strange to hand out precious things so freely at a time like that. Shawn took the medicine anyway and left.
It did not appear that Liam was in any way finished with him. Liam was interested.
At home, Shawn found that thinking about the professor gave him goosebumps. It was the man's gaze. It had frightened him.
In the chat, people were writing that they needed medicine, that children were dying. Shawn read all of it with pleasure, and it was while he was gloating over it that he opened the bag of medications and found the bug.
The professor must have attached it in the moment he had. So Liam wanted to play cat and mouse. Fine — Shawn would play by himself. Though there was arguably no point, since he was already sitting at home, which meant Liam already knew perfectly well where home was.
Shawn went outside and fixed the bug to a cat, which was, surprisingly, a healthy-looking animal. In heat like this every animal in the district should have been dead a fortnight ago.
The chaotic movements on the tracker puzzled Liam considerably. Why would anyone run that much, in this, and in those directions?
People went on dying. They begged for medicine. They explained, to anyone who would read it, that their families were dying in front of them. Small children had not had clean water for two days and their mothers were offering jewellery, watches, wedding rings for a bottle.
And Shawn watched all of it with joy, and believed that they were the bad ones and he was still the good one. No empathy. No morals. Nobody had ever asked him to be a hero, and he went out of his way to mock people who had never done anything to him. He thought every one of them was a hypocrite and that he himself was a saint. He was the same hurt little boy he had always been, only now with a system in his head and a fortress at his back.
The men in the street had become furious enough to start robbing each other, with brute force, naturally. They stripped what was left, dragging boxes of food away by the armful.
And the man who had attacked Shawn earlier had lost his friend. People stood in a circle discussing what to do with the body. They could not simply leave it lying there.
That was when the professor appeared and asked everyone not to panic and to remain calm. They were the medical team of the city's disease control centre, he said. They had come to help.
It was a lie from the first syllable, but the people were desperate, and desperate people do not drive a doctor away.
They had moved out as soon as the order came, Liam explained, but the roads were blocked and so they had arrived too late. Even so, the situation could still be brought under control.
He handed out disinfectant tablets and basic medicines, and the people took them gratefully.
Shawn watched the whole performance from his apartment, of course. Liam had come here for one reason: he knew that Shawn was somewhere in these buildings.
Then Shawn's phone buzzed. A message from a number he did not know.
Beware of the doctor.
Which meant that somebody was watching Shawn as well, and that this somebody was close by. The news did not make him happy. It was the first time he had understood that he might not be holding all the cards. Calling the number back was, naturally, impossible; whoever had sent it had already gone dark.
A warning, then, Shawn decided.
Down in the courtyard, people took to Liam quickly, which is not surprising — in a situation like theirs, what they wanted most in the world was a doctor. Liam told them it was his duty to help, and spun it out well, and then began to talk about how important it was to be careful in this heat, while standing outside in a long coat.
And Shawn, watching him, noticed the bloodstains on that coat.
And remembered that in his past life, certain supposed doctors had gone around taking blood samples — and that soon afterwards the strongest survivors had begun to disappear without a trace.
Liam must have been one of those doctors.
The next morning Liam put up a sign. He would provide the residents with medicine and with water, and — most importantly — with a medical examination.