Marcus had been typing for forty-five minutes. Kevin knew this because Karen was timing him, apparently out of some primal accounting need to quantify all human activity.
"Forty-six minutes," Karen muttered, marking something on her clipboard. "That's forty-six minutes of battery life we won't get back."
"Karen, he's trying to figure out who's spying on us through the security cameras."
"And I'm trying to figure out how long we can run that laptop before it dies. Both are important, Kevin. Resource management doesn't pause for cyberwarfare."
Kevin pinched the bridge of his nose. He'd been doing that a lot lately. His nose was going to have permanent finger dents.
"Got it." Marcus pulled back from the screen, cracking his knuckles. "I traced the active session. It's originating from the IT department server room. Third floor, east wing."
"The IT department," Kevin repeated.
"Makes sense, right? That's where the main network infrastructure lives. Whoever---or whatever---is logged in has admin-level access. They can see every camera, lock or unlock any door, control the HVAC system, the whole building management suite." Marcus chewed his thumbnail. "This is high-level stuff. Not zombie-types-password-on-keyboard territory."
"Could it be automated? A system running on its own?"
"Maybe. But the session has active inputs. Someone's clicking around in there. Making decisions. Real-time inputs, not scripts." Marcus pulled up a log file, scrolling through entries that meant nothing to Kevin but clearly meant everything to Marcus. "See these timestamps? Irregular intervals. A bot would be consistent. This is a human pattern---click, pause, click-click, long pause. Someone thinking. Someone making choices."
Marcus paused, his thumbnail back between his teeth. "And that connects to the phone call, right? 'They're keeping us.' Somebody alive is in this building, and they have access to the entire network."
The conference room went quiet. Seven people processing the same impossible calculation: there were survivors somewhere in the lodge, survivors with access to every security system, and they hadn't tried to help.
"We need to get to that server room," Marcus said. His leg was bouncing under the table, nervous energy buzzing through him like a current. "If I can get physical access to the network, I can see everything. Camera logs, door access records, email traffic, everything. I can figure out who's in there and what they're doing."
"The third floor is zombie territory," Priya said from her post by the monitors. "IT department is deep. We'd have to go through at least three corridors with no alternate exits."
"I know the layout," Marcus insisted. "I was there last Tuesday. My first day. Jeremy from IT gave me the tour---showed me the server room, the cable closets, the whole deal." A shadow crossed his face. "Jeremy's probably one of them now."
Kevin looked at the security feeds Marcus had managed to restore. The third floor cameras were still locked out, but the second floor showed the continuing horror show of organized zombie activity. The sales huddle had reformed near the stairwell. Drone patrols maintained their routes with mechanical precision.
"There's another problem," Karen said. She'd set down her clipboard, which meant this was serious. "I told you we have roughly five days of food. That was optimistic. I recalculated this morning with accurate consumption data." She glanced meaningfully at Bradley, who was eating a granola bar. His fourth. "It's closer to four days. Maybe three and a half."
"That's not enough," Rachel said.
"No, it's not. But I've been thinking." Karen pulled out a hand-drawn floor plan---cruder than Rachel's but annotated with Karen's meticulous accounting shorthand. "The main kitchen pantry was wrecked. We saw that. But the lodge is a conference facility. Big operations. There should be a locked dry storage room behind the main pantry---commercial operations always have secondary storage for bulk goods. It wouldn't have been in the path of the initial breach."
"You think there's more food back there?"
"I think any facility designed to feed two hundred people has more storage than one walk-in pantry. I ran banquets for my church for eleven years. I know how these kitchens are built."
Kevin looked at the map. The kitchen was on the first floor, south wing. The IT department was on the third floor, east wing. Opposite directions. Two critical missions, and their group of eight included one elderly CEO who thought the apocalypse was a labor dispute and one manager whose most dangerous skill was scheduling.
"We can't do both at once," Derek said. "We don't have the numbers."
"We can't afford not to," Kevin countered. "Every hour we wait, the zombies get more organized. Whatever's controlling them, it's getting smarter. If we don't move now---today---we might not be able to move at all."
The argument that followed was the closest thing to a real meeting they'd had since the world ended. No Robert's Rules, no agenda, no Derek trying to facilitate with a whiteboard and a set of colored markers. Just seven scared people debating how best not to die.
Derek, to his credit, kept his mouth shut for most of it. He stood by the window with his arms crossed, processing. Kevin could see the gears turning behind his eyes---the manager's instinct to take charge warring with the fresh, humbling memory of his own freeze. When he finally spoke, his voice was quiet.
"Kevin should make the call," Derek said. "He's earned it."
The room went still. Kevin looked at Derek. Derek looked back. Something passed between them that wasn't friendship, exactly, and wasn't respect in the traditional sense. It was the acknowledgment of a man who'd run out of pretense and found something more useful in its absence: honesty.
Marcus argued passionately for the IT mission. "Information is power. We're blind right now. Someone has eyes on us and we can't even see them."
Rachel countered with logistics. "Information doesn't matter if we starve in three days. Food is the priority."
"Why not both?" Carl asked quietly. Everyone turned. The anxious accountant shrank slightly under the attention but held his ground. "Two teams. Two missions. We cover both objectives simultaneously."
Silence.
"He's right," Priya said. "Splitting up is tactically risky, but failing to secure either objective is worse. Two small teams moving quietly are harder to detect than one large group."
Kevin made the call. He hated it. But Karen's numbers didn't care about that.
"Okay. Two teams. I'll lead the IT mission---Marcus, I need you for the tech work, and Priya, I need your... skills." He chose the word carefully. Whatever Priya's background actually was, she was their best fighter, and the third floor was the more dangerous route. "Rachel, you lead the food team. Take Derek and Carl."
"Why am I not on your team?" Rachel asked. Her voice was neutral. Her eyes were not.
"Because I need someone I trust leading the other group. Derek won't question you---" this was probably untrue, but Kevin was committed to the fiction "---and Carl knows first aid if anything goes wrong."
"And if something goes wrong with *you*?"
"Then I'll have a woman who once dislocated a man's shoulder using a clipboard and a twenty-two-year-old who can hack a building's security system. I'll be fine."
Rachel held his gaze for a long moment. Kevin could feel the rest of the room watching them.
"Fine," she said. "But if you die, I'm putting 'told you so' on your tombstone."
Karen would stay at the base with Bradley. Someone had to monitor the cameras Marcus had restored, maintain the barricade, and---critically---prevent Bradley from eating their entire food supply in a single unsupervised afternoon. Karen had already made it clear that she considered guard duty an extension of her asset management responsibilities. "Nobody touches the supply closet while I'm on duty. I've implemented a lock."
"You locked our food?"
"I *secured* our resources against unauthorized consumption." Another glance at Bradley and his granola bar. "It was necessary."
---
They prepared in the tense, efficient quiet of people who understood that preparation might be the difference between coming back and not coming back.
Kevin checked his chef's knife. The blade was still sharp, still stained despite his best efforts to clean it. Tom from sales had left a permanent mark on the steel, a shadow that wouldn't come off no matter how hard Kevin scrubbed. He'd stopped trying.
Marcus loaded diagnostic tools onto a USB drive, muttering a checklist under his breath like a pre-flight sequence. Priya selected weapons with the discerning eye of a sommelier choosing wine---a heavy flashlight, a letter opener she'd honed on the conference room's stone windowsill, a length of ethernet cable that Kevin tried not to think about too hard.
Rachel's team gathered supplies for transport: empty backpacks, a dolly they'd found in a supply closet, reusable shopping bags someone had brought for the retreat. Carl tucked the first-aid kit into his pack with trembling hands that steadied as he focused on the task.
Derek stood by the conference room door, gripping a chair leg he'd broken off and sanded down to a crude club. His knuckles were white. His jaw was set. He looked like a man walking himself to the gallows through sheer willpower, and Kevin respected the hell out of it.
"Derek."
"Yeah?"
"You've got this."
Derek's eyes flickered with something---surprise, maybe, or gratitude. "You really think so?"
"You survived this long. That's not nothing."
It was the kind of thing a manager might say to a struggling employee, and Kevin hated that he recognized the technique. But Derek straightened slightly, and the death grip on his chair leg loosened just enough to suggest blood was flowing again.
The two teams gathered by the barricaded door. Eight people about to become two groups of three, with Karen and Bradley holding down a fort built of office furniture and anxiety. The air was thick with things unsaid.
Kevin turned to Rachel. She was wearing a determined expression and carrying a fire extinguisher in one hand and a kitchen knife in the other. Her hair was tied back with a rubber band she'd found in a desk drawer. She looked ready. She looked scared. She looked like someone Kevin couldn't afford to lose, in any of the ways that phrase could mean.
"Be careful," he said. The words were inadequate. Two syllables when he needed about forty thousand, but six other people were watching and Kevin had never been good at vulnerability on a stage.
He reached out and took her hand. Her fingers were cold, and they wrapped around his and squeezed. Hard. The kind of squeeze that said *I know* and *you too* and *we're not done yet* all at once.
"Don't die," Rachel said. Her voice was steady, her eyes bright. "I'd have nobody to complain to."
"You could complain to Derek."
"I said *nobody*, Kevin."
He almost laughed. Almost. Instead he held her hand for one more second, memorizing the pressure of her grip. Then he let go.
"Move quiet," Priya instructed both groups. "Stop at every corner. Listen before you look. And if you encounter anything you can't handle, you run. Pride doesn't matter. Alive matters."
They dismantled part of the barricade. The hallway beyond was dark and silent, the emergency lighting casting everything in that sickly amber glow that made shadows look alive.
Kevin's team went left. Toward the stairwell. Toward the third floor and whatever was hiding in the digital nervous system of the building.
Rachel's team went right. Toward the kitchen. Toward the food that might keep them alive long enough for the food to matter.
Kevin glanced back once. Rachel was already moving, her steps light and deliberate, the fire extinguisher balanced in her hands like she'd been born carrying it. She didn't look back.
He turned forward and walked into the dark.
