There was another thing, and it was the part he still did not fully understand himself.
He had acquired abilities. Not the sort anyone had ever heard of before — his was quiet and enormously convenient. Whatever he put away, he could keep in its original form. Nothing spoiled. Nothing warmed. Nothing aged.
In the last world, abilities had only begun to awaken in people after the apocalypse had already started. Our hero, apparently, was too special to be like everyone else.
Next on the plan: a shelter. Cold storage. Weapons. Energy reserves. There was still a great deal to do, and he was listing it in his head when the phone rang and a girl's voice came onto the line, warm and unhurried.
She really was too beautiful for him. The fact that he had never once wondered why said everything about the boy he had been. He had been too stupid to see that the girl was simply using him. She talked, that first time around, about how if he wanted to marry her he ought to be making plans now — and what she had actually wanted was to sell the family house he had somehow come into, and after that she had handed him over to a crew of bandits as raw material. When the apocalypse came he had protected her, or so he told it. Then she found a better offer and left.
Given the maturity of our hero, he of course intended to take revenge on her.
"I was out walking with my friends," Ila said, "and I lost my gold chain. My favourite one."
Shawn kept the anger out of his voice entirely. "Then I'll buy you a new one," he said. And then, because one was not enough for a girl like her: "Ten, actually. You can change them one by one."
There was a pause on the line. Even in his past life he had never understood how that scam worked, considering the difference between them, but the girl was quick.
"Since when are you so generous?"
"I got lucky. Put some money into crypto and it came in."
"You didn't get scammed, did you?"
"Don't worry about it," Shawn said.
Somewhere behind her a man's voice complained that she was taking a very long time to wash. Ila hid the phone against her shoulder and called back sweetly that he should wait a little.
For a night with the old geezer it was only five thousand. If she simply put her name on a piece of paper for Shawn, it would be fifty. And Shawn, she thought, would definitely never leave her.
That was how Ila made her plans, and that was how Shawn made his.
It was time to build the shelter.
He had decided to turn the apartment into a bunker. The windows were already bulletproof; he had specified that himself. He walked the contractor through the rest of it in the empty front room, pointing as he went. Cover the entire roof with solar panels. Generators. Locks. In short, within a month this house needed to be converted into a shockproof fortress with a full life support system.
Naturally the contractor decided that his client was either paranoid or had simply watched too much science fiction.
"You did read my résumé," the man said carefully. "I'm a security specialist. I've designed shelters for people at the very top."
"Then you know how to do it."
The contractor mumbled something about deadlines and budgets, and then arrived at a happier thought: if the man was this paranoid, there was more money in it.
Shawn showed him the bank balance. It worked on him exactly as it had worked on the girl in the ice cream shop.
"A million as a deposit," Shawn said. "You name the rest."
It seemed to the contractor that this account had no bottom to it. In fact the bandits had given him three and a half million and not a coin more, but the contractor agreed to build everything, all of it, on the spot — and privately decided that it was his turn now to fleece this fool down to his last coin.
Shawn watched him make his notes and sneered inwardly. The apocalypse was coming soon. The man would never see the rest of that money in his life.
So: a fortress. Now the supplies. Medicine, food, household goods. That part was simple; it was only a question of buying enough and buying it early.
The most dangerous thing in a post-apocalypse is not the natural disasters. It is human nature with the law taken off it. You can find blades in any hardware store. Firearms — the kind that kill outright, the kind that make a crowd of desperate men stop where they stand — are considerably harder to come by.