Chapter 102: There is no economy to thrive
Alexander’s breath hitched, the color draining from his face as the sheer weight of the words landed.
Zombies.
It sounded like a cheap horror movie trick trying to scare him. There was no way Zombies were real, but... Coming from the lips of the woman who held the city’s future in her hands, it wasn’t a joke either.
"Swarms," April continued, her eyes growing distant and cold as the memories of the wasteland threatened to surface. "There are going to be thousands, then millions of them flooding every major global sector. No one is coming to save you. The governments will collapse, the military lines will fall, and only those who take definitive action will survive."
"Miss April," Xavier called out, his deep voice remarkably calm despite the catastrophic data. "You already foresaw this a long time ago, didn’t you? That is why you have been aggressively hoarding supplies and purchasing appliances." He said. "That is also why you were desperate to get that hill side bunker."
April nodded slowly, her fingers tracing the edge of her plate. "Let’s just say... I saw the catastrophe the exact day I acquired my abilities. The very same day I met you at the party thrown by the Morgans."
It wasn’t the entire truth, but it wasn’t a lie either. She couldn’t tell them about her death and then waking up ten years into the past, or the ten years of torment she had already endured.
She would just play it out as what she sees coming and not what she lived.
"I don’t see every single branch of how the chaos will play out," April lied smoothly, "but I can assure you that with a heavily fortified shelter, and an abundance of fundamental resources, you can live through it. The end of the word won’t be your end."
Xavier’s eyes narrowed, his jaw tightening into a rigid line. "When exactly were you planning to disclose this to us?"
April paused for a second, the question taking her by surprise but it wasn’t like she didn’t expect it either. "Two weeks later," she replied without a shred of guilt. "The countdown hits zero exactly seven weeks from now. Let’s just say... I wanted to ensure you wouldn’t get distracted by the panic. If I told you the truth too early, you wouldn’t have been able to hand me money so easily or help me secure my wholesale supply lines efficiently."
Selfish. The word rang in her head but she remained calm.
She never proclaimed herself as a righteous saint to begin with. Everything was strictly business and everyone was doing whatever they wanted in their own interest.
This was her putting her own interest before anything else.
Xavier went entirely silent. A heavy, suffocating wave of quiet anger rolled off his broad shoulders.
He was furious—not at the apocalypse, but at how tightly she had controlled the data, keeping him in the dark while using his corporate network to build her own safety nest.
He trusted her, and he still did, but he could not simply take this information like it was a light pill. It was just too much.
But he swallowed the rage, his analytical mind forcing him back into a state of pure business thinking.
"In the future you saw..." Xavier began, his voice tight. "Did you see any major corporations thriving? Did Reed Industries remain functional?"
April let out a short, bitter laugh, the sound entirely hollow. "Mr. Reed, the world ends. This entire city gets severely devastated and completely overrun within the first forty-eight hours. There are no businesses. There is no economy to thrive. There are only desperate, screaming people who will violently bang on your high-security corporate doors, begging for help, and you will have to sit behind the glass and watch as the zombies tear them apart. If you aren’t lucky, those same desperate people will breach your front lines, and your pristine buildings will burn to the ground. There is no safe zone. It all turns to ash."
"What if we start modifying our infrastructure now?" Xavier asked sharply, his eyes locking onto hers with an unyielding intensity. "We have seven weeks. We can reinforce our primary corporate facilities, convert our logistics lines, and secure our workforce."
The terrace fell into a stunned silence. Alexander and Samuel looked at the tycoon, completely speechless. What was he thinking right now?
April froze, her fork dropping back onto her plate with a sharp rattle as she stared at him in utter disbelief.
"Wait... you’re not trying to... save everyone, are you?" She asked but he did not respond, confirming her suspicion. She thought he was just being money and business minded but he was actually... "Mr. Reed, whatever idealistic corporate savior complex you are currently entertaining, get rid of it right now." She hissed, her brows furrowing heavily. "It will never work, and those people will only drag you straight into the grave."
"Then what am I supposed to do?" Xavier countered, his voice rising by a fraction as his composure cracked. "Am I supposed to just sit back and watch every single one of my employees die? The people who built my empire with me?"
"Then will you gladly sacrifice your own life for those exact same employees?" April spat back, her words bursting forth with a biting, heavy bitterness that stunned the entire table.
Her chest heaved, her heart hammering against her ribs as the ghosts of her past life screamed in her ears.
"The good ones always think that way at first. They want to be heroes. They want to save the world." It never ended well. "But it is completely impossible to save everyone, especially when society is too stubborn to believe the warning signs until the teeth are at their throats!"
She leaned forward, her eyes flashing with the terrifying trauma of her past that left them completely breathless.
"Before the virus even spreads globally, it will already be too late. There is no cure. There is no stopping it." She explained. "I told you before, no one knows how or where it starts so how do you expect to save everyone?"
Her breath hitched for a second and she had to take in a shuddering breath to calm herself. "I have seen the absolute desperation, Mr. Reed. I have seen exactly what fear can do to a civilized human being. The moment the food runs out, or the anxiety level spikes, those very employees you tried to protect will have absolutely zero problem stepping over your corpse to steal a single bottle of water. They will turn their backs on you the second it benefits their own survival."
April abruptly folded her arms across her chest, turning her face away from them to stare blankly out at the sunlit mountains.
"In the apocalypse, you trust absolutely no one," she whispered, her voice trembling slightly before locking back into ice. "That is precisely why I was planning everything alone from the very start. I was planning to lock myself away in my fortress and leave the rest of the world to figure out its own survival. Because... I cannot trust anyone. Not even my highest-paying clients."
