Apocalypse Queen: My Space, My Rules Chapter 211: Meeting With Denton

Denton rubbed the back of his head, still grinning. "Don't mention it. You're with Ms. Townsend, so I treat you like I treat her. That's just how it works. And this one's the biggest I could find..."

Chandler cleared his throat with pointed force.

Denton caught himself, realized he'd said too much, and reined it in with an awkward laugh.

Mariella stepped in to smooth over the moment. "Denton, are you still taking cash?"

"Absolutely!" Denton was off again without missing a beat. "The government's commandeered a retail store and set up daily rationed sales. Anyone with valid ID can go purchase supplies. Ten pounds of grain runs five thousand, and each ID gets you ten pounds max.

"There's also diesel and cooking oil. Each person can buy two pounds of either one per day for three thousand. Everything else in the store is also available for cash. Other household goods haven't spiked as outrageously as the fuel and grain, at least."

The currency had devalued sharply, but four hundred thousand in cash could still convert into a meaningful quantity of grain and supplies.

Denton's crew all had families to support. Once he split the cash among them, their households could send someone with an ID to the store every day and keep supplies coming in.

Jewelry and gemstones were worthless now, anyway. Other than Chandler, nobody was spending money on things like that anymore.

Once Denton's men had finished unloading everything into the warehouse, Mariella had them load the traded goods onto the tractor's cargo bed.

She pulled out a portion of the motorboats, kayaks, and life jackets she'd seized from Black Bear across both raids and handed them over to Denton.

She'd kept more than enough watercraft for herself already. Between those, fifteen wooden boats, and a yacht, her fleet was essentially complete.

The equipment from Black Bear was all in middling condition anyway, and she had no interest in using secondhand gear when she didn't have to. Trading it for supplies was a far better use.

Denton tallied everything up: eight motorboats, twelve kayaks, and twenty life jackets. His eyes creased with undisguised delight.

Watercraft were among the most sought-after commodities right now, with prices climbing by the week. This trade was an absolute windfall.

What Mariella wanted in return was agricultural machinery. The equipment was enormous and heavy, but with all the farmland currently submerged, nobody else had any use for it.

Every piece of farming equipment in the region had essentially become scrap metal, and aside from Mariella, no one was in the market for any of it.

Denton had acquired the machinery at almost no cost, the main investment being the labor and time required to haul the heavy equipment onto boats and transport it over. The machines weighed a brutal amount.

He genuinely loved doing business with Mariella. She always wanted the things nobody else would touch, and she always gave back the things everyone was desperate to have.

"Thank you for your business, Ms. Townsend!" Denton struck his chest with conviction. "You ever need anything done, you just say the word. My crew will come through for you no matter what!"

Mariella smiled lightly and offered a word of caution. "Word from official channels suggests extreme cold could be hitting soon. Once the water surfaces freeze over, watercraft won't be worth much to anyone. Everyone's scrambling to stock up for the cold right now, so you'd want to move those boats as quickly as you can."

Denton felt the urgency land and nodded several times in quick succession. "Understood."

As a gesture of thanks, he presented her with a full-band radio at no charge. "TV signals are unreliable these days. This'll give you something useful to pass the time."

Mariella accepted it without hesitation. "This is perfect, actually. It wasn't something I'd stocked."

Beyond entertainment, the radio's real value was immediate access to any official announcements the government broadcast.

Then Denton remembered something and turned back to her. "Ms. Townsend, are you still in the market for gemstones?"

Mariella's attention sharpened immediately. "Didn't you say you got out of that business entirely?"

"I did, but I've got colleagues sitting on massive inventories they can't move. They're losing sleep over it. I figured I'd ask if you had any interest." Denton himself had only held a modest stockpile, and he'd already sold all of it to Mariella.

At the time, the currency hadn't devalued as severely yet, and he'd traded a full trailer's worth of gemstones for ten million in cash.

He'd converted that cash into supplies almost immediately afterward and recovered a good portion of what he'd lost.

His colleagues, though, were sitting on inventories ten, twenty, even thirty times the size of his.

After the disaster hit, gemstone prices had collapsed, and they'd refused to sell at a loss, leaving everything locked up in their warehouses.

They'd been counting on the disaster passing and prices recovering.

But the disaster hadn't passed. Four months had gone by, and the floodwaters still hadn't fully receded. And now rumors were circulating that far worse was still to come.