The young man ran with his arms flailing, his shoes slapping against cracked dirt, and screamed at the top of his lungs that he was lost. Behind him came the crowd, dozens of them, dragging themselves forward with a patience that was worse than speed.
"I'm lost! I'm lost, I'm lost, I'm lost—"
Something hit him from the side.
He went down hard, rolling, and when he twisted his head he saw that one of them had been waiting for him behind a slab of broken concrete. It had not chased him. It had cut him off.
"They can set up ambushes?" he wailed into the dirt. "They can plan? I just got here! I just got to this world, I don't want to die right away!"
He tore himself loose, scrambled up, and ran on. Then he stopped dead.
There, far ahead across the grey plain, stood buildings. Low, patched, ugly buildings, but buildings, and where there were buildings there were people. Hope came back into his legs all at once and he rushed forward with a shout.
His foot caught a stone.
"Ow — no — no!"
He cried out from the pain and went straight over the lip of the slope, tumbling, screaming, elbows and knees hammering the ground the whole way down. He landed at the bottom flat on his face.
Right in front of him, close enough that he could count its teeth, was a zombie with its mouth wide open.
Tears ran down his filthy cheeks. "I swear," he sobbed, "I swear I will never travel to another world again—"
A shot rang out. It did not sound like any gun he had ever heard: a hard, bright, futuristic crack that went through the air like a needle. The bullet took the zombie in the head and sprayed green liquid across the stones, and the dead body dropped forward, right on top of him, its hands closing over his shoulders.
He stared up at the corpse in shock, not understanding what had just happened. Behind it, more shots came, one after another, and the rest of the approaching crowd went down where they stood. Whoever was shooting, he could not see them at all.
He sat on the ground with the corpse in his lap and let out a long breath. Saved. He was actually saved.
"Hey."
A girl came around the rock with an enormous gun braced against her hip. She looked down at him and grinned.
"How long are you going to cuddle with that thing?"
He looked down. The dead zombie's head had settled against his chest almost tenderly, one arm around his neck like an old friend.
"Get off — get off me! Don't touch me, don't touch me!" He shoved the body away with both hands, kicked at it, and scrambled backward until he hit stone.
Then he remembered his manners, turned to the girl, and gave her a wide, goofy smile. "Thank you so much, you saved my—"
The muzzle of the gun swung around and stopped a hand's width from his nose.
"Don't move," she said. "Name."
He raised both hands so fast his shoulders cracked. "Chen Yang! My name is Chen Yang!"
"And what are you doing near our camp, Chen Yang?"
"Ha ha. Well. It's a funny story, actually—"
"I heard you," she said, and her voice went flat and cold. "You were screaming about moving to other worlds. So don't laugh at me. Talk."
He opened his mouth and shut it again. If he told her the truth, she would decide he was insane and put a hole through his head as a mercy. If he lied, he would have to invent something good, and nothing good was coming.
His silence made her angry. She adjusted her grip and pulled the action back with a threatening click—
And stopped.
Her nose lifted. She sniffed once, then again, and her whole face changed.
"What's in your bag?" she demanded, suspicion sharpening into something else entirely. "Something in there smells."
Relief went through him like warm water. He reached slowly into his bag and drew out a small red packet.
"This," he said. "It's a Lachao snack. I was about to eat it when your friends out there interrupted me."
She stared at the packet. "That's food? That's real food?"
"Want some?" He held it out and smiled.
The girl looked at the red foil the way a soldier looks at an unexploded shell. It could be poisoned. It almost certainly was poisoned. Nobody handed food to a stranger in the wasteland for nothing.
But the smell kept reaching her, and she had not eaten in two days.
"Ah, whatever. I don't care."
She snatched the packet out of his hand. Eat first, think later.
She bit into it and chewed slowly, thoughtfully, and then her eyes went round.
"The flour — and the butter — and it's mixed with spices, all together, how does it—" She swallowed and took another bite. "How is it like this?"
Chen Yang watched her and grinned to himself. Out here in the middle of the wasteland, in the middle of an apocalypse, nobody on this earth would refuse food. Nobody.
Four days ago he had been nothing at all.
He had been an ordinary office worker, the kind who stayed late because there was no reason to go home early, and then one morning they had fired him without warning and cut off his only source of income. He had walked out of the building carrying a cardboard box of his own belongings, unemployed at the bottom of the stairs.
That evening, unpacking a case of snacks he had ordered off the internet to console himself, he had found something strange lying among the packets — a ring. Plain, heavy, and definitely not something a snack company put in the box as a prize.
He had not even thought about it. He had slipped it onto his finger.
The world around him had bent like a picture with a digital glitch running through it, and then it was gone.
He had woken in a destroyed world, and sitting in front of him was a rat the size of a large dog, with red eyes and fangs, and a human corpse in its jaws. He had screamed. The rat had dropped what it was chewing and rushed him. He had screamed again, from the bottom of his lungs, that he wanted to go home right now — and a bright vortex of light had swirled up around him and taken him.
He had come out of it standing in his own apartment, shaking, alive.
That was when he understood what he was wearing. The ring let him move between his world and the world of the apocalypse, freely, whenever he liked.
He had sat on his floor for a long time, thinking, remembering everything he had absorbed over years of watching shonen anime, and then the idea had arrived whole and shining.
Food. In an apocalyptic world, food was not food. Food was currency — stable, universal, always in demand.
If he used it correctly, everything was waiting for him. He had lain back on the floor and let himself picture it: money, comfort, luxury piled up around him.
"Oh." The girl looked at the empty packet in her hand with genuine dismay. "I ate all of it. Sorry. I'm sorry — it was so good I couldn't stop."
"Don't worry about it," Chen Yang said easily. "My organization has no shortage of food. They sent me out here to exchange supplies, that's all."
"Your organization." She narrowed her eyes. "There's no organization like that."
"You're looking at the proof," he said, and spread his hands.
She looked at him for a long moment. Then she planted the butt of her gun on the ground.
"Then hire me," she said. "As your guide. I know this whole area, every ruin, every road, who's living where. Whatever you want to exchange for, I'll find it. Fifteen packs of Lachao a month, and I'm yours."
Chen Yang smiled slightly. "You realize I don't know a single thing about you."
"Ask."
"Name?"
"Leelu."
"Gender?"
She gave him a look that could have stripped paint. "Is that not obvious?"
"Age?"
"Nineteen."
He blinked at that. Nineteen, and living in the middle of all this, and yet she was noticeably well-fed — plump, even, which was the last thing he had expected out here.
"All right," he said. "You're hired. Fifteen packs of Lachao a month."
"Yes!" Leelu punched the air. "Thank you, boss! You won't regret it, boss!"
"One question." He grinned at her. "Did you ever think about just killing me and taking all the food?"
"I'm not stupid," she said, offended. "Kill you and I eat once. Help you and I'm well-fed forever."
He laughed. "Take me to your camp."
"This way."
They walked, and before long they came to a settlement, and Leelu stopped and spread her arms with real pride.
"Here it is. Our camp."
Chen Yang looked at it and his heart sank. He had seen slums. This was worse than a slum.
Still — he was here now. It was worth a look around, and there might be something valuable in it.
The locals watched him come. Every face that turned toward the stranger carried the same distrust and the same tiredness.
"Don't take it personally," Leelu said cheerfully. "Around here, being careful with strangers is just normal."