Cashing Out

"Good. If you get any new products, sell them to me first. Money isn't a problem." Harper smiled, feeling an imaginary glow of solid gold radiating from her pockets. She was loaded.

Leaving the wholesale market behind, she ducked into a public restroom to change her outfit. She slid a sleek black face mask over her mouth and pulled on a pair of thin leather gloves. She had a mountain of gold sitting in her dimension. Turning a small fraction of it into untraceable cash was the next necessary step to funding her apocalyptic survival plan.

Harper walked into a high-end pawn shop in the glittering jewelry district. She casually placed two heavy gold bars onto the glass counter. "Sir, these were passed down through my family. Unfortunately, the certificates were destroyed in a house fire. Take a look and make me an offer."

The seasoned owner picked up the heavy metal. He grabbed a small jeweler's torch from a drawer and tested the surface, his eyes widening slightly as he noted the incredibly high purity and quality. "Nice quality. They've been stored well. At least ten years old, I'd say."

Harper laughed lightly, playing the part of a naive, desperate daughter perfectly. "If my dad hadn't lost all our money on a terrible investment, I wouldn't be sneaking around trying to sell these. Give me a fair price. If I have more in the future, I'll definitely come back here."

The owner saw a prime opportunity and leaned against the glass counter. "The international gold price is five thousand dollars an ounce right now. I can only offer you forty-two hundred. Take it or leave it."

"Deal." Harper agreed immediately without a hint of hesitation.

The two gold bars weighed about four pounds total. At that rate, they brought her eight hundred and forty thousand dollars. She specifically requested cold hard cash. Ashbourne's richest man had just been robbed overnight. The inevitable, aggressive bank scrutiny would track any large electronic deposits. Cash was the safest, most untraceable route.

The owner called into the back room. A few minutes later, an employee carried out a sturdy metal suitcase packed with banded stacks of hundred-dollar bills. Harper snapped the latches open, did a rapid visual count, closed the lid, and walked out the door.

As soon as she exited the shop, a greedy employee leaned over the counter. "Boss, should we make a move on that kid? We could easily jump her."

The owner didn't even bother to raise his head from his ledger. "Don't get any stupid ideas. That kid may look young, but her hands are insanely strong. Look at this."

He tapped the gold bars with his pen. Deep, distinct fingerprints were pressed directly into the solid metal by bare fingers. Pure gold was soft, but leaving indented marks like that required a terrifying display of raw grip strength.

"She is brave and careful. Didn't you notice? She wore a mask and gloves the entire time to leave zero forensic clues behind." The owner shook his head, quietly praising her extreme caution.

Just then, a frantic phone call came through on the shop line. The owner picked it up and listened. "What? You're saying Arthur Winston, Ashbourne's richest man, had just been robbed? Exactly fifty tons of gold are missing overnight?"

The voice on the other end rattled off more details. The owner gave a vague hum of acknowledgment and hung up the receiver. He looked down at the indented, impossible fingerprints on his counter. He simply smiled quietly, choosing self-preservation over greed, and locked the bars in his floor safe.

Using the exact same trick at multiple different shops across the district, Harper rapidly amassed nearly twenty million dollars in physical cash. She changed her jacket, mask, and posture between each stop. Eventually, she calculated that her risk of exposure had grown far too high to continue.

She immediately pivoted her strategy, launching into a massive, city-wide shopping spree.

First on the list were pharmacies and specialty health stores. She paid heavy cash deposits on staggering quantities of vital health supplements, vitamins, and first-aid supplies. Next came massive pallets of industrial alcohol and cheap liquor for bartering, alongside expensive spirits for herself. She bought everything she could lay her eyes on.

She swept through department stores next. She ordered ten sets of basic durable clothing in every single size, covering men, women, children, and seniors. She bought out stocks of everyday survival necessities: kitchen tools, disposable dishes, toothbrushes, massive boxes of toothpaste, dental floss, water flossers, heavy jugs of shampoo, conditioner, body wash, laundry detergent, thick towels, toilet paper, sanitary pads, wet wipes, tissues, candles, kerosene, flashlights, and glow sticks.

For skincare products, she ordered ten sets of everything from facial cleansers and sheet masks to toners, lotions, serums, essential oils, sunscreens, and perfumes. She didn't care much about brands. She just wanted the base items secured so she could use her duplication ability on them later.

She bought two sets of every electronic device available at the major tech outlets. She kept her heavy wooden furniture and home appliance purchases minimal. Once society broke down, she could source those things for free. She just needed a solid starter set to furnish her impending bunker.

For all these purchases, she used her fat stacks of untraceable cash to pay deposits, arranging for delayed deliveries.

While aggressively ordering heavy winter gear on her phone as she walked—heavy winter coats, down jackets, insulated pants, thermal leggings, thick winter boots, and snow boots—she headed straight for the sprawling hardware district. She didn't buy a single thing there. Instead, she meticulously scouted the layout of the massive supply yards. She took mental notes of where the generators, power tools, and building materials were kept in preparation for a post-apocalyptic free shopping trip.

Exhausted from running non-stop day and night, Harper finally caught a cab back to her apartment in Sunstone Residences. Her legs felt like lead. She barely managed to kick off her shoes before crashing onto her mattress.

She woke up abruptly in a pitch-black room. Checking her phone screen, she saw it was exactly midnight.

Her stomach growled. Hunger sparked a new, frantic idea.

Harper grabbed her phone and opened a food delivery app. She rapidly tapped the screen, ordering a mountain of takeout from every single late-night restaurant in the city still taking orders. Fried chicken, spicy noodles, burgers, barbecue skewers, pizza, and massive vats of hot soup. She ordered five of everything on every menu and set the delivery location to the ground-floor garage.

She didn't miss a beat. Wrapping a thick winter coat around her shoulders, she headed down to the dark, quiet garage to wait in the dead of night.

The late hour meant the delivery drivers arrived in rapid succession, moving quietly to avoid waking the wealthy neighbors.

Harper became a heartless, efficient receiving machine. A driver would hand over heavy plastic bags of hot, fragrant food. The moment their taillights faded down the driveway, she continuously transferred the meals directly into her storage space. The frozen time inside meant the food would stay piping hot until she was ready to eat it. Another driver arrived. Bag taken. Bag stored. Over and over again.

She felt zero fear of being tracked through the delivery apps. Ashbourne was a sprawling metropolis of ten million people. Vanishing into a city this massive when the world ended would be effortless. Finding her would be like looking for a ghost in a hurricane.

With deep, heavy dark circles under her bloodshot eyes, Harper stubbornly stayed awake. Midnight rolled into the early morning hours. By six o'clock, the breakfast stalls opened. She began collecting massive, continuous breakfast orders: stacked boxes of pancakes, breakfast burritos, hash browns, and sizzling sausage biscuits.

She stood in the chilly garage until eight in the morning, receiving the very last order of fresh coffee and pastries.

She rubbed her stinging eyes. She was just about to finally head upstairs to sleep when a blaring loudspeaker echoed from a nearby commercial street.

"Don't miss this sale! Liquidation clearance! Everything is ninety percent off! The owner's wife left him and he can't pay his employees! Everything must go today!"

Knowing perfectly well that a luxury designer handbag wouldn't even be worth a single moldy loaf of bread in the impending apocalypse, Harper's hoarding instincts took over anyway. Freezing temperatures, monstrous mutated creatures, and starvation were coming. But right now? Ninety percent off was a siren song she couldn't ignore.

She sprang toward the sound, her exhaustion masked by the thrill of unstoppable hoarding.

She found a massive three-story shopping center with huge red banners plastered across the windows. The doors were propped open. Inside, it was a chaotic mess of discounted inventory.

Harper grabbed a massive rolling cart and went to work. She frantically grabbed seven or eight of every single thing in sight. Premium bedding sets, heavy canvas work clothes, steel-toed boots, hand tools, camping gear, and random housewares. She threw it all into the cart without a second glance at the price tags or brand names.

She dragged three overflowing carts to the front, piling her chaotic finds into a towering mountain at the register.

The young cashier stared at the sheer volume of goods, her jaw hanging slack.

"Uh, how would you like to pay for all of this?" The overwhelmed cashier asked nervously, her hands hovering over the barcode scanner.

"Cash." Harper shifted the straps of her canvas backpack.

Pretending to reach deeply into the bag, she accessed her storage dimension. Her fingers wrapped around a thick, heavy stack of crisp hundred-dollar bills she had secured from the pawn shops. She pulled the massive brick of physical cash out and dropped it onto the counter with a satisfying, heavy thud.

"I was planning to deposit this at the bank today, but I guess I don't need to anymore. Here you go."