Chapter 284: On Way to the Optical Center

“Do you guys ever plan on clearing the whole city?”

Cindy’s question rang out into the afternoon air without much preamble.

We were still moving through Atlantic City. Had been for the better part of half an hour now. Shawn set the pace, which was not a fast pace.

If I’d been alone I could have covered this distance in a fraction of the time. I wasn’t alone, so I walked at Shawn’s pace and told myself it didn’t matter.

Though I did want to try something tonight, which meant I had a mild preference for not spending the entire afternoon in transit.

“What exactly do you mean?” Maribel asked, turning her head toward Cindy without breaking stride.

“I mean, you’re here for the long run, right? This is where you’re building something. So at some point doesn’t it make sense to actually secure the whole city instead of just the parts you’re currently using?” Cindy said. “You’re leaving a lot of real estate unmanaged.”

“You’re not wrong,” Shawn said, which seemed to mildly surprise everyone including himself. “That was Marlon’s original thinking, secure as much ground as possible, push the perimeter out, work toward controlling the full area. But then Callighan showed up.” He shrugged one shoulder. “Smaller territory is easier to defend with the numbers we have. Spreading thin against a group like his is how you lose people.”

“Better to consolidate everything we have,” Maribel added, nodding. “Pool our resources, focus our energy, and deal with Callighan’s group first. Once that’s done the rest becomes a different conversation.” She paused. “He needs to be removed. Everything else comes after.”

She really hated Callighan and his group didn’t she?

I was thinking about it idly when she glanced back at us.

“What about your group?” She asked. “You’re part of this city now too, in a manner of speaking. You should have thoughts on it.”

“In the future, once Callaghan’s dealt with both communities working together to clear and manage the full city makes sense,” I said. “Pooled numbers, shared resources, divided zones. It’s more sustainable long-term than two separate groups doing parallel work.”

Maribel nodded, apparently satisfied with that. Then something in her expression shifted, a small pause, a slight narrowing, like she’d caught something in what I’d said and was holding it up to the light.

“You said both communities,” she said. “Why are you talking about it like you’re not included in that?”

I didn’t answer immediately.

Cindy picked it up. “It’s a little complicated. We didn’t come to Atlantic City as part of Margaret’s group originally. We crossed paths with them back in Jackson Township and things developed from there. But our group is separate, small. Ryan, me, Daisy, a few others.” She kept her voice easy, matter-of-fact. “We sort of ended up here together rather than choosing it as a permanent destination.”

Maribel looked between us, then at me directly. “Okay. But that doesn’t change the situation you’re in now, does it? You’re here. You’re invested. You’re building an alliance. That’s not the behaviour of people passing through.”

Cindy glanced at me sideways.

“We’re not planning to stay in the city,” she said. “Not permanently.”

Maribel stopped walking.

She looked at me with a confused expression, like something she thought she’d understood had just rearranged itself.

I didn’t contradict Cindy. There was nothing to contradict.

“Then what is all of this?” Maribel asked, something in her voice landing halfway between confused and something that might have been the early stages of offended. “The alliance. The planning. All the risk you’ve already taken, if you’re not planning to be here, what exactly are you doing?”

“They have Mei,” I said. “And Emily. And before any of that, Margaret’s community welcomed and helped us back in Jackson Township, when we had nothing and needed somewhere. They were generous when generosity wasn’t free.” I looked at her steadily. “The least I can do before we leave is make sure this city is actually safe for them to live in. I don’t want to walk away from people who did right by us and leave them sitting in the middle of a problem I could have helped with.”

Maribel was quiet for a moment, working through it.

“If the city is safe when you leave,” she said carefully, “that’s actually less reason to go. What’s pulling you away?”

I thought about how to answer that.

I am looking for Elena, one of my four girlfriends who had been stolen by her dangerous Russian father.

Of course that would be too much…

“W…We’re looking for our friends,” Daisy said while I was thinking.

“Elena,” Daisy continued, adjusting her cracked glasses with one finger. “And Alisha. We got separated from them. We’re going to find them.”

“Separated how?” Shawn asked, now also finding himself curious.

“It’s a longer story,” I said.

“Are you sure they’re even—” Maribel started, then stopped herself, choosing the words more carefully. “Do you know they’re alright?”

“They’re alive,” Cindy said, chuckling a bit. “Definitely.”

I let that sit without elaborating.

The full version of it was complicated in ways that required more time and trust than this conversation had so far earned. Elena and Alisha were with their father. Their father had resources, people, the kind of operational capability that kept his daughters safe regardless of what the world was doing outside his perimeter. They were physically fine. I was confident of that.

What I was less confident about what I thought about more than I admitted was whether fine and safe were the same thing as where they needed to be.

I knew what Elena wanted. She had told me many times and I would never forget the last look she gave me from that helicopter…

And Alisha, who was the more careful and pragmatic of the two, had chosen to be with their father, safer despite she was also feeling clearly more at ease and better with us.

These three months she had been with us in that house, she couldn’t just tell me it was nothing for her.

That was why I believed they belonged with us.

That wasn’t arrogance. It wasn’t possessiveness. It was the plain recognition that we were better together than apart all of us and that whatever their father offered, it wasn’t the same thing as being with people who chose each other without conditions attached.

I felt my hands tighten slightly at my sides.

When I went to find them, and I was going, the timeline was just a question I’d have to be ready for the father. Ready to stand in front of someone who had decided his daughters’ safety was a matter he controlled, and make a convincing argument that I was someone worth trusting with them. Not just me personally. Us, as a group. As something functional and real and capable of protecting people who mattered.

I’d have to earn it.

And right now I wasn’t sure I had everything I needed to do that. But I was getting closer. Every day out here, every fight, every decision made under pressure, it was all going toward something.

It had to go somewhere.

“Quite the loyal group,” Shawn said, laughing. “I’ll give you that.”

“Clara isn’t part of it, by the way,” Cindy added, turning to look at him with a raised eyebrow and a teasing smile. “She’ll be staying right here in Atlantic City. All yours, whenever you decide to stop being theoretical about it.”

“I said I was interested,” Shawn said. “I did not say I was going to actively pursue anyone. There’s a meaningful difference.”

“Sure,” Cindy said pleasantly.

“I cannot picture it either way…” I said, mostly to myself.

“What was that?” Shawn’s eyes cut sideways to me with surgical precision.

“Was just wondering how much further it was,” I said, immediately.

Shawn held the look for one more beat, then turned back to face forward. “We’re close. Right turn at the next corner and we’re on the street.”

We followed him around the corner and the street opened up in front of us.

It was a quieter stretch than the main roads, narrower, more residential in character, the kind of block that existed in the middle distance between commercial and lived-in. The buildings were lower here, two and three storeys, with shopfronts occupying the ground floors. Most of them had been picked over to varying degrees, doors standing open, windows dark, shelves visible through the glass that ranged from completely stripped to partially ransacked depending on how obvious the contents had been to someone moving fast and grabbing what they could.

Not all of them, though.

Shawn stopped in front of a building roughly two-thirds of the way down the block. The signage above the door had faded but was still readable, a small pharmaceutical supply outlet, the kind that sat between a full pharmacy and a medical wholesaler, stocking things that the average person didn’t know to look for and therefore hadn’t thought to take. The door was intact. The lock had been broken at some point and roughly barricaded from the inside, which told you someone had been here and had made a decision to preserve rather than strip it.

“This is yours?” Maribel asked.

“Ours,” Shawn said, producing a key from his jacket pocket and working it into the padlock that had been added to the outside of the door’s improvised seal. “We secured it in the first month. Rationed what’s inside, only pull from it when necessary. Most people don’t know what half the supplies in there are used for so it hasn’t attracted attention from outside.” He pushed the door open. “I need to restock the clinic.”

He stepped inside without further ceremony.

Well seeing how much materials he had used to clean Clara’s and my wound, I didn’t want to imagine how difficult it had been for him for the past three months constantly attacked by Callighan’s men onto of the Infected threat.

Maribel followed him in and I hung back with Cindy and Daisy at the threshold, doing the automatic environmental check, street behind us, clear; opposite building, windows dark and still; nothing moving in the middle distance that wasn’t wind.

“We’ll wait here?” Cindy asked me.

“Well, do want to pick something there? What about you Daisy?” I asked her as well.

“Hum, we should look around just in case shouldn’t we?” She said.

“Yeah,” I nodded briefly but looked at Shawn first.

“Shawn,” I called in through the door.

“What,” he gave a distracted reply from somewhere among the shelves while Maribel checked around making sure no Infected was around.

“The optical center where exactly?” I asked.

There was a pause and the sound of something being moved, a box dragged along a shelf. Then Shawn’s voice came back out, slightly muffled. “Next corner from here, the other direction. Back out and turn left instead. You’ll see it, it’s got the blue signage still up, half of it peeled but readable. It was a proper practice, had a qualified optometrist running out of the front, examination room in the back. They partnered with a central supply lab, so patients would come in, get their prescription assessed and certified, and the order would go off to the lab. Two weeks later the glasses came back to the center ready for collection.”

I looked at Daisy.

“Which means there are pre-made glasses sitting in there right now,” Cindy said, working through it with immediate interest. “Orders that came in, got fulfilled, and never got collected because the world stopped cooperating.”

“That’s the idea,” Shawn called back. “Whether any of them match close enough for her prescription is the question, but there’ll be a significant volume of stock in there. More than enough to give you real options. The certificates are filed with the glasses, name of the patient, examining doctor’s credentials, full prescription details. Read the details carefully, compare them, don’t just grab the closest and assume.”

“Are there any risks going in there?” Maribel asked, having emerged from between two shelves with a clipboard she was apparently using to cross-reference something on the wall.

“Cleared it about six weeks ago with the group I came with back then,” Shawn said. “Nothing living inside as of then. But six weeks is six weeks, check before you commit.”

“Alright, I’ll take a quick look first and make sure everything’s safe,” I said, turning to Cindy and Daisy with a reassuring glance. “If you two need anything, just check here—”

But before I could finish, Cindy suddenly let out a sharp, pained gasp, her hands flying to her temples as if something had struck her from within.

“Hey—are you okay?!” I lunged forward, steadying her by the shoulders, my voice worried but she frowned further..

“Y—yeah, I’m fine…” she managed, though her face twisted in discomfort, her breath coming in shallow bursts.

I frowned. Right, her Symbiote ability. It had only just awakened, and if the grimace on her face was any indication, the process wasn’t exactly painless. I wondered if Rachel, Elena, and Sydney had gone through the same agony when their abilities first surfaced. Had they suffered in silence? I didn’t know, they just showed me out of nowhere their abilities after all.

“Cindy, are you sure you’re alright?” Daisy pressed, her brow furrowed with concern as she stepped closer.

I gave Daisy a small, reassuring nod. “I’ve got this. You go ahead inside—I’ll figure out what’s happening with her.”

The truth was, I needed a moment alone with Cindy, away from prying eyes. Whatever was happening to her, it was tied to Dullahan, and I wanted to understand it first.

Maybe if she understood it, she may have a better control with it.

Daisy hesitated for a second, her gaze flickering between us, but eventually, she relented. With a final worried glance, she turned and disappeared inside, joining Maribel and Shawn.

“Maribel!” I called after her. “Keep an eye on Daisy too, alright?”

From inside, Maribel gave a curt nod, her expression serious.

Satisfied, I guided Cindy toward the path Shawn had mentioned earlier.

“I—I’m fine, Ryan,” Cindy insisted, rubbing her temple with a wince. “Really.”

I wasn’t convinced. “You don’t look fine.”

“Ugh—” She grunted again, her shoulders hunching as if bracing against an invisible force.

“What is it? What’s happening?” I asked.

“C…can you…” She swallowed hard, her eyes squeezing shut. “Can you not talk so loudly?”

I blinked. “What? I’m not even—”

“Uhn!” She flinched, her fingers pressing harder against her temples.

“Alright, alright,” I whispered.

What in the world was going on?

For the rest of the walk, I kept my silence, my mind racing with questions. Whatever this was, it wasn’t just pain, it was something deeper, something tied to the Symbiotic ability.

The path Shawn had described wasn’t hard to find.

The blue signage Shawn had mentioned was still there, most of it, the letters faded and one corner of the board hanging loose where the mounting had given way. Atlantic Vision Care. Underneath, smaller: Certified Optical Practice — Prescription Eyewear — Contact Lenses — Eye Health.

The front window was intact, which was a good sign. The interior was dark but not in the way that suggested occupation, more the settled, undisturbed dark of a room that had simply been closed for a long time.

I checked the door. Unlocked or had been at some point, the mechanism worn past the point of catching. I pushed it open slowly, and we listened for a moment.

“There’s nothing in there…” Cindy said besides me.

“Hm?” I looked at her.

She just gave me an awkward look.

“I…I think there’s nothing there…we heard it nothing,” she said.

Yeah, I mean from here at least?

I followed in with Cindy.

The interior had the preserved, slightly airless quality of a room nobody had moved through in weeks. The display cases along the walls still held their frames, rows of them, glasses arranged by category, price-point markers still attached, completely untouched. A small waiting area with three chairs.

A frosted glass door at the back marked Examination Room.

But before I could move, Cindy’s discomfort spiked again. I guided her to a sofa at the back, sitting beside her.

“Tell me what’s happening,” I whispered.

Source: Webnovel.com, updated by NovelKeep