Miss Kinsley, the board will not stand for this. The VP began. The board will stand exactly where I tell them to stand, Chia said, her voice dropping to that lethal, quiet pitch Abalardo remembered from his apartment. Abalardo, you have complete operational control. Don't let those supplies freeze.
Abalardo didn't waste time nodding. He turned and sprinted out of the room. He spent the next 48 hours living on black coffee and adrenaline. He left the glass tower and drove his sedan equipped with proper snow tires straight into the teeth of the blizzard. Making it to sector 4 just as the sun went down.
He turned the warehouse into a fortress. He commandeered the executive offices for sleeping quarters. He personally authorized the delivery of 500 pizzas from a local shop that was struggling to stay open. He got on the radio dispatch himself, talking the fleet drivers through the blinding snow, rerouting them down secondary roads, coordinating with local emergency services to clear paths for the medical supplies. He stripped off his suit jacket, rolled up his sleeves, and waited into the mud.
When a forklift died on the loading dock, blocking a crucial exit, Abalardo didn't call maintenance. He jumped down, grabbed a pry bar, and helped three floor workers manually force the frozen brake calipers open. By dawn, on the third day, the storm finally broke. The pale winter sun crept over the horizon, illuminating a city buried under a crushing weight of white. Abalardo was sitting on a stack of empty pallets near the loading bays.
He was covered in grease, his shirt was ruined, and he had slept a total of 4 hours in 2 days. He held a styrofoam cup of lukewarm coffee, watching the exhaust from a fleet truck dissipate in the freezing air. They had done it. Every single pallet of medical supplies had reached its destination. Sector 4 hadn't lost a single worker to the cold.
A heavy measured footstep crunched on the salt stained concrete. Abalardo didn't look up immediately. Greg, if that's you telling me the heater in bay 4 is busted again, I'm going to throw you in a snow bankank. Not Greg, a voice said. Abalardo looked up.
Chia was standing there. She wore a heavy dark wool coat, new, impeccably tailored, not a slash of mud on it, and thick boots. Her breath plumemed in the cold air. She looked around the warehouse. It was chaotic, loud, and messy, but it hummed with an undeniable energy.
The workers weren't shuffling with exhaustion. They were moving with purpose. "You left the tower," Abardo said, his voice raspy. "The tower was boring," Chia replied. She walked over and sat down next to him on the wooden pallets.
She didn't seem to care that the wood was dirty or that Abalardo smelled heavily of diesel and sweat. She looked out at the snowblinded city. "The board is furious. " "Let them be," Abalardo said. "We saved the inventory. We saved the contracts and we didn't abandon our people.