The silence after the alley felt like a held breath. Jonah and I sat across from each other at Mr. Chen's counter, a single camping stove between us burning with a tiny blue flame. It was the only new sound in our world. We were heating soup. Chicken noodle. The smell should have been comforting. It just smelled like salt and fear.
Jonah's hands were wrapped tight around his can. He hadn't taken a sip yet. He was staring at me like he was trying to solve a math problem that didn't have an answer.
"Silas," he said. The name came out flat. "He lives above the flower shop. This whole time we've been here, he's been watching us."
"He was," I said. I stirred my own soup. The noodles swirled. "He has an axe. He knows we have supplies."
Jonah set his can down. It made a soft, final sound on the Formica. "So what's the move? We can't just let him in. Did you see what he did to that kid? That wasn't defense. That was rage."
"He killed a Walker," I said. My voice sounded calm. Too calm. "Does the method matter if the thing is dead?"
"It matters if he's a psychopath!"
"He's alive." I met his eyes. "In a dark alley with two of those things, he came out swinging. He's not hiding under a bed. He's surviving. And he's right about one thing."
Jonah waited. His knuckles were white.
"We're two college students in a store full of food," I said, nodding at the shelves around us. Cans of beans, bags of rice, a whole little world of calories. "If someone with real bad intentions finds this place, what's our play? The shotgun? I don't know how to use it. You don't know how to use it. It's a loud bang that tells every hungry thing for ten blocks exactly where the pantry is."
"So we trade one potential lunatic for another?"
"I didn't say we trust him." I took a sip of the broth. It burned all the way down. "I said we talk to him. We figure him out. Information is a weapon, Jonah. Right now, he knows we're here, well supplied, and probably scared. We know he has an axe and a bad temper. That's a losing position."
Jonah leaned back and ran a hand through his hair. It was getting greasy. Mine was too. "I don't like it."
"I don't either. But I like the idea of getting jumped in our sleep even less." I stood up. "I'm going to talk to him. You're on overwatch."
His eyes got big. "What? No. You can't go out there alone."
"I'm going twenty feet. To his front door. You'll be at the window with a clean line of sight. If anything looks wrong, if he makes one wrong move, you show him the shotgun. You don't have to fire. Just show it."
"And if he has friends hiding?"
"Then we learn that," I said. "And we lock the gate and we rethink our entire situation."
He looked like he wanted to fight, but the logic was a wall. He just nodded. It was a tired, broken motion.
I gave him fifteen minutes. I helped him get set up at the front window, hidden behind a rack of cheap sunglasses and phone chargers. I broke the shotgun open, showed him the two red shells nestled in the barrels.
"Just snap it shut," I said, demonstrating. The action was smooth but heavy. It closed with a solid, metallic clack-clunk that seemed to echo in the quiet shop. "Then you point it. This little bump on the end is the front sight. You put that on what you want to hit. Your finger stays off the trigger until you have decided, completely, to end a man's life."
Jonah took the gun. His face was pale but his hands were steady as he laid it across his knees. He looked up at me. "What are you going to say to him?"
"The truth," I said. "Or just enough of it."
I picked up the baseball bat. The grip was familiar now. The weight was a promise. I stood at the gate, took a deep breath of our stale, safe air, and slid it open just wide enough to slip through.
The street was empty. The dead mechanic was gone from the alley mouth. Silas must have dragged the bodies away. The thought was cold and clinical. It bothered me that it didn't bother me more.
The flower shop, "Petals on the Pavement," had a shattered front window. Someone had swept the glass into a sad, glittering pile on the sidewalk. The door was boarded from the inside with a fresh sheet of plywood. There was a narrow gap at the top, like a medieval archer's slot.
I stopped a few feet back. "Silas. It's Alex. From the alley."
Nothing. Then a shadow passed over the gap. A heavy bolt slid back with a gritty scrape. The door opened just a crack. One dark, sharp eye looked out at me.
"You're alone," he said. His voice was a low rasp.
"You're observant." I kept my tone neutral. Flat. "We need to talk."
He opened the door wider. He'd changed. No blood on his grey sweatshirt. The axe was gone. "Come in. Fast."
I stepped inside. The smell hit me first. Sweet and thick and wrong. A garden left to rot. Dead flowers filled metal buckets, their petals brown and slumping. Soil was spilled across the tile floor. He'd pushed the display coolers against the walls to make a clear space in the middle. A sleeping bag was rolled tight in one corner. A backpack. A couple of gallon jugs of water. It was sparse. Neat. Like a soldier's camp.
He didn't offer me a seat. He just stood there, arms crossed over his chest, waiting.
"You killed the one in the coveralls clean," he said. "One swing. That's not beginner's luck."
"It's not luck," I said.
"Martial arts?" He sounded skeptical.
"Taekwondo. But that wasn't a spinning kick. That was physics. A lever. A pivot point. Timing."
He grunted. It sounded like approval. "You and your friend. How much food you got in there?"
"That's between us."
"It's between us if I'm gonna help you keep it."
"Did I ask for help?"
He smiled then. It was a thin, stretched thing that didn't touch his eyes. "Kid, you're what, twenty? You're sitting in a gold mine in the middle of a city that's now a free-for-all. How long you think that lasts? A week? Two? Until someone bigger finds you?"
"We've managed so far."
"Because you've been lucky." He took a step closer. I didn't move. My feet were planted, my weight balanced. "Luck runs out. I've been listening. Three days now. The gunshots. They're changing. Fewer of them. But when they happen, they come in bunches. Pop-pop-pop. That's not people shooting the dead. That's people shooting each other. Over a can of beans. Over a dry place to sleep."
He was right. I'd heard it too. The rhythm of violence was changing. "What's your point?"
"My point is you got a sweet setup. A steel gate. A back room. But you got two pairs of eyes. You sleep in shifts. You're tired. I can see it in your shoulders. What happens when you both crash at the same time? Or one of you gets the flu? Or cuts himself?"
He was reading my fatigue like it was written on my face. It was unsettling.
"What are you offering?" I asked.
"Partnership. Not me moving in. A deal. I watch your back from over here. You watch mine. We share what we see. If real trouble comes, we stand together. Two fronts are harder to break than one."
"And the cost?"
"The cost is, when you go out looking for things, you keep an eye out for what I need. Antibiotics. Painkillers. Double-A batteries. And you don't let me die of thirst if my jugs run dry."
It was reasonable. Too reasonable. "Why not just take what we have? You saw us. You have an axe. We saw what you can do with it."
His face hardened. The friendly pretense dropped. "Because I'm not an animal. Not yet. And because a war over a bodega gets us all killed. The noise would bring every walking corpse in a twenty block radius down on this street. We'd all lose."
There it was. The real reason. Cold, mutual survival. He wasn't being a good Samaritan. He was being smart.
"I need to talk to my friend," I said.
"Sure." He walked to the door and pulled it open for me. Daylight flooded back in. "But don't talk too long. The world outside ain't pausing for a committee meeting."
I stepped out. The door closed behind me. The bolt slid back home.
When I got to our gate, Jonah was there, the shotgun held too tight in his hands. "Well?"
"He wants to be allies. Watch each other's backs. Trade information."
"And you believe him?"
"I believe he doesn't want to die in a noisy, messy fight any more than we do." I took the shotgun from him. It was still loaded. I broke it open, just to be sure. "He's a tool. A sharp, dangerous tool. But a tool."
Jonah looked past me at the flower shop's boarded door. "So what do we do?"
"We do the math," I said. I led him back to the counter and pulled out the inventory notebook. The pages were filled with Jonah's neat handwriting. "We have food for maybe three weeks for two people. Less for three. Water is the real clock. We have about ten days of drinking water if we're stingy."
"The church," Jonah said. "The basement with the tank."
"It has a tank," I agreed. "It also has a basement full of Walkers who aren't making any noise. Clearing it alone is a death wish. Clearing it with a guy with an axe who might stab us in the back is also a risk. But maybe a smaller one."
"You want to team up with him to get the water?"
"I want to use him to get the water," I said, correcting him gently. "Then, once we have it, we see who he really is."
Jonah was quiet for a long time. He stared at the lists, at the numbers that were supposed to give us control. Finally, he let out a breath. It was the sound of something soft in him giving up. "Okay. What's the plan?"
"The plan is we don't trust him. We use him. We watch him closer than he could ever watch us. And if he becomes more trouble than he's worth..." I didn't finish. I didn't need to.
The afternoon light was slanting through the gate slats now, painting long, distorted bars on the floor. I thought about Silas, alone in his shop of dead things. I thought about the Walkers, standing silent in the dark places, waiting. I thought about the gunshots. Pop-pop-pop. Closer together.
People were fighting people now.
And we were about to shake hands with the devil. Not out of friendship. Not out of hope.
Out of cold, brutal, simple math.
Survival wasn't just about what you could destroy anymore.
It was about what you were willing to hold onto, even if it burned your hands.