Sponsored Apocalypse, ch 14

I jerked my improvised spear out of what felt like the hundredth goblin that night.  Finally, I saw what I’d been waiting for.

[Level up! Congratulations!]

I’d finally hit level 10.

New windows popped up and I sighed.  “I just hit level 10.  You were right.  I got a whole bunch of stuff.”

Behind me, Aldina didn’t reply, just kept watch.  After our last fight we’d taken shelter in the loading dock of a furniture store.  I figured she was letting me read my notifications and I decided to take the opportunity to do exactly that.  I looked at the first one.

[Level 10 Functionality: Unlocked]

I drilled into this and verified that everything Aldina had told me was true.  Now I could see monster names or types from this point forward.

Level 10 Functionality

[Bone Truth Eyes]

Concentrating on known enemies will result in being able to see a species name and relative danger level.  Named foes will not be revealed unless certain requirements are met.

[Basic Enchanted sleep]

Increased recovery time and automatic, pre-sleep auto wake up.

Once I’d actually seen the information, I could feel a new way to think of sleep.  Somehow… I knew that now I could go to sleep whenever I wanted, and actually decide to wake up whenever I wanted–at dawn, after a few hours, or even after a few minutes.  For something so unnatural, it felt completely normal.  Part of me was amused.  For people who’d struggled with sleep their entire lives, maybe this ability might help make the apocalypse less horrible for them.

“You were also right about the stuff about seeing monster names,” I said.

“No shit.”  Aldina started walking.  “Level ten. Good. That is probably a good place to stop for the day.  My hideout is a ways away and we should probably get there to rest.”

Hideout, I mouthed.  Rest?  Part of me wanted to obstinately reject the idea since I still felt like I had plenty of energy.  I was bone tired emotionally, though.  Aldina had promised me answers, too.  Now that I was level ten, I understood why we’d just found solo and duo monsters to kill for the last few hours.  But part of me wanted to keep killing, keep grinding.

Luckily, I could still think rationally. Continuing on would be dumb.  My second activation of [Stalwart Pan of the Lonely Mountain] was almost up.  I had a handy timer in my menus.  Around five minutes left.

“You’re gonna level with me after we get there?” I asked.

She gave me a considering look before nodding.  “Yes.”

“Okay, good enough.  Lead on.”

Even though it’d only been a single night, I could stay inside Aldina’s circle now almost as naturally as breathing.  It didn’t take a lot of brain power.  Monster activity around town had slowed down a lot, too.  A lot of them were full.  Besides, Aldina could spot them faster than me.  All of this meant I could check my other notifications.  The see-through function for my menus was super handy.

As we walked slowly, I pulled up another notification I’d gotten when I hit level ten.  It turned out I’d gotten another title.

First Five to Ten:  You are within the first 5% of your world to have reached level ten.

It didn’t confer a related power or skill. Instead, I got a “boon.”

Boon:  Skill Voucher  Free skill voucher at level 20.

I read more into the description and it seemed like another one like the free skill roll I got before.

Interesting, I thought.  I pulled up my character page.

Miles Lindstrom

Title(s):

First Ten to Five

First Five to Ten

Level 10

Class: none

Traits: none

Stats:
Str: 6

Dex: 4

End: 9

Int: 6

Will: 7

Luck: 6

Reflex: 7

Armor (nat): 0

Affiliations: Sponsored by *hidden*

Associated Sponsor Titles: *hidden*

Boons:

Free skill voucher at 20. (locked)

Prime Skills:

Tsukumogami Embrace

Spirits of the Past

Built Different

First to Five Eyes

Active Skills:

Saliva of Hared Ha

Bone Truth Eyes

Basic Enchanted Sleep

Equipment-related Skills:
Better Days Auto Whisk

Beaded Benediction of Delayed Solace

Stalwart Pan of the Lonely Mountain

Skills:

Dagger Combat

Hammer Combat

Club Combat

Spear Combat

Sword Combat

Scythe Combat

Ambush

Healing Salve Application

Firearms (pistols)

Combat Endurance

Available Advancement Points: 7

***

It was absolutely amazing that I hadn’t even been living in this newly messed up world for a full day. Probably equally amazing I was still alive.  There’d been a few close calls.

Aldina’s plan to go to her hiding place was sounding better and better.  However, I’d almost missed the implications involved with the fact she had a hiding place in the first place.  Could it be? I thought.  A theory started growing, one that would help explain how she seemed to know so much about everything going on.

We didn’t talk much as we left town and headed down a road toward several residential areas.  My crappy house had been in the other direction.  This way was to some of the nicest houses that the handful of people with money in town owned.  We didn’t really encounter on the monsters on the way, which was understandable.  There were no houses or businesses on this road for a couple miles.  The sun was also going to rise soon and the monsters had been busy all night.

I eyed the makeshift spear in my hands, basically just a mop handle I’d whittled to a point.  The fact I was using a weapon similar to the psycho who’d chained a transient woman to a fence wasn’t lost on me.  I really needed something better.  The bayonet I’d found in the antique store had been handy, but I missed my Zombie Tools glaive already.  There was no way in hell I was gonna go back and look for it, though.

We neared a gated entryway to a housing development.  I thought we were going there but we walked right past it.  Instead, Aldina led me off the road, down a hill and under a bridge across a river that ran near town.

My skin tingled when we got under the bridge.  I frowned.  No messages or screens popped up, but I definitely could feel something supernatural going on.  When I looked at Aldina, she just gave me a rare smile.

Then I blinked in confusion when she went for a large tunnel set in the concrete, covered by a thick steel grate.  The steel bars were thicker than rebar.  “Drainage system,” she said.  “Runs through parts of town, some residential areas, and winds up here.  Runoff goes to the river.”

I nodded, but didn’t say anything, just watched.

She moved up to the grate and laid her hand to the side of it in a way that was vaguely familiar to me.  About ten seconds later, she grabbed the whole thing with her other hand and pulled the grate open with a squeak of unattended metal.

I followed her into the four foot tall concrete tunnel and examined the entrance.  Sure enough, she’d conjured ice to open the lock the same as how we’d broken into stores earlier.  I frowned, looking more closely.  Unless I was mistaken, there was no other way to open the grate.  No knob, no electronics, no switch or bar.  The grate actually looked like it’d been solid at some point in the past, but someone had rigged up a way for it to open, most of it cleverly hidden in little nooks that had been crudely drilled out of the surrounding concrete.

Bizarre.  None of it would have made sense to me if not for the theory I’d come up with after hitting level 10.  Now I was even more sure.  Aldina had to be like me.  She must have gotten a quest and knew that the end was coming.

The ice all fell out of the gaps where the spring-loaded bolts would go.  “Make sure you close the grate,” said Aldina.

I nodded, then realized she wouldn’t see unless she was looking back.  I grunted and closed the grate.

It was uncomfortable to stoop and walk through the tunnel, but at least it was high enough I could move relatively quickly.  When the tunnel curved, we rapidly lost any light to see by, but Aldina clicked on a flashlight before I could even take my pack off to locate one of my own.

From then on it was not much farther before the tunnel actually ended.  Up ahead, there were several other grated entrances to smaller tunnels that would feed into this one.  “We’re surprisingly deep right now,”  said Aldina conversationally.  “I guess when this town was established forty years ago, someone on the planning committee liked to use tractors and was from the north where things got really cold.  A lot of the drainage was done in a really overkill way, buried super deep.  Of course, it could have been a money laundering thing, too.  Who knows?  But this is one reason I moved here.”

She moved to one wall and opened a smaller grate that was about halfway up the wall, a two foot grate.  “You might not like this,” she said.  Then she took off her pack, pushed it into the tunnel, and climbed up after it.  Like before, the ice fell out of the lock mechanism.  “Go ahead and follow me in a minute and close the grate, please.”

By this point, I was equal parts shocked and impressed.  Everything I’d seen so far was some crazy do-it-yourself, secret squirrel shit.

I gave it about twenty seconds before following her up into the smaller hole.  Part of me was scared.  Going head first into a dark, unknown tunnel was not quite nightmare fuel for me, but it was close.  But Aldina had gone first, and even though she was smaller than me, it looked like she put all this together and I doubted she would have planned to be crawling around a claustrophobic passage for too long.

The entrance of the tunnel caught my attention as I climbed up.  The concrete didn’t quite match the rest of the larger tunnel.  About two feet in, the concrete itself changed, becoming rougher.  I could definitely tell now that this had not been part of the original system.

It took me some shimmying around to close the grate, but I managed it with my foot.  Then I continued onward.

The rough tunnel sloped gently upwards.  I moved forward for about ten feet, curving the entire way.  Finally around my pack I was pushing, I saw a glow ahead of me.  My little tunnel opened into a room.

I gratefully climbed out of the tunnel I’d been in, using some bars attached in stategic places to help myself out.

Aldina was waiting for me.  There was enough room for both of us to stand.  She nodded at me in the light of her flashlight.  Move back against the wall.  I could see why when I spotted the door, a thick, seriously-looking metal one.  She turned and laid her hand next to it.  Then she pulled it open, revealing a short stretch of hallway and another door.

She repeated the process with this second, even heavier door, then we were through.  Both doors were securely closed behind us.

"Glad all that worked," she said.  "It's been a while."

"What?"

She just smiled, then she hit a hidden switch. Lights came on.  Now I could see the tunnel around me much better.  I'd expected something like an old mineshaft–something made of dirt, really rough looking.  Instead, the tunnel looked more like pictures I’d seen of escape tunnels dug by drug cartel leaders out of Mexican prisons.

It was rough, but professional looking.

Some tracks had been laid on the ground, explaining how all the dirt for this project had been moved.  The walls looked similar to the walls of the side tunnel I’d already been through, just bigger.  This tunnel was still too small for me to stand in, but much less claustrophobic than the others so far.  Light came from white LEDs along one corner of the ceiling.

“I made this.”  Aldina was quietly proud.  “Took me a few years.  Did it for an hour or two a day as my workout.  Sometimes more.  The steel fab places I went to probably thought I was fucking nuts, asking for so many five and a half feet by three foot rebar squares.  I ran plastic behind them, attached chicken wire after the braces were up, then plastered it all with some sealant to help keep moisture out.  The old escape tunnel I built off of, one from the days of the Underground Railroad, meant a lot of the work was already done, though.  This is just the last quarter.  Maybe third.”

“Wow.”  I was seriously impressed.  Now I was even more sure about my theory.  “You had to know that all of this was going to happen.  There is no other way to explain this.”

She eyed me and made a complicated expression.  “Question and answer time can come after eating and maybe resting.  Don’t worry, I’m not gonna run away and leave you in my badass, sickass hideout that I spent years of my life preparing.”

I just grunted and followed her down the tunnel.  Sure enough, before too long, we came upon a smaller, older tunnel.  Instead of being braced with steel and concrete or plaster, this one had some super ancient looking wood beams.  Sketchy looking, I thought.  This older tunnel had another route that actually curved to one side, out of sight.  Duck walking and stooping the rest of the way was not fun.  Aldina was shorter than me and looked far less uncomfortable.  “Sorry,” she said.  “I actually used to use the car to get back and forth before.  Makes it easier when you can Superman your way down.”

“Yeah, I’ll bet,” I muttered.  “What did you do with all the dirt?”

“The way we just passed leads to a mine entrance on my property.  There are a bunch of chasms that way.  I used to get a few carts full of dirt and wheel them that way to dump.  Helped when I got an electric motor to make it easier.  Before that…yeah.  Not good times.”

Eventually, we came upon a steel grate that Aldina opened the same way as the ones before.  Then she opened a solid wooden door the same way.  Finally, we emerged from the tunnel into a modern-looking room where I could actually stand.

I couldn’t help but groan in pleasure when I actually got to stand up.  The room had a set of stairs leading upwards to a metal cellar door.  “Lots of doors,” I said.

“If monsters could get past the wards under the bridge, and one in the tunnel, I wanted to make it a little harder for them to rush me in here.”

“Ah.”

We climbed the stairs, Aldina leading the way and unlocking the door above.  Then we  entered what looked like a house, except there were no windows and the furniture was covered in plastic.  Aldina took the plastic covering off of a couple couches.

“What’s that for?” I asked.

“Kept the dust off after I closed the place up.”

“Huh?”

She sat down and leaned back, rubbing the bridge of her nose.  “Okay.  I’ll try to keep this shit short because I really want to get some rest before spilling my guts for the second time of my life. This life.  Fuck.”

“Huh?”

“Okay, so we are in what used to be a big, hangar-style workshop that is on the property of my vacation home.  A long time ago it was a barn, hence the secret tunnel.  I remodeled it into a proper, bitchin’ doomsday bunker.  Turns out it’s actually a hell of a lot easier to make a bunker out of something above ground than to put something below ground.  Then I covered it all up with lots of concrete and dirt.  Looks like a big ass hill now, but I just butts up to the hill that was behind the shop anyway.  Looks mostly natural.

“Electric system is all batteries and solar.  There’s enough food and water for a few months.  Air intakes are filtered.  Can’t live here indefinitely, but it’s a bad ass safehouse.”

I frowned.  “If this is on your property, why didn’t we just come straight here instead of taking tunnels and stuff?”

Aldina pointed at me.  “Great question.  Simple answer.  Some monsters have incredible fucking smell.  Going through the house would eventually clue them in where we were, and I really don’t want some of the more inventive fuckers deciding to tackle the peroblem of how to get in.  It’s a hell of a lot easier to ward, hide, and protect the tunnels than the house.

“This way, there’s also always a back door escape route that hopefully none of the bastards know about.”

“Alright.  Why didn’t you take Amanda here before?” I asked.  As soon as the words left my mouth, I wondered if I’d gone too far.

Aldina shook her head.  “I would have eventually, but she was wounded and smelled like blood.  She never would have even made it to the bridge.”  After a pause, she said, “She was also probably too fat to get here through the tunnels yet.  Maybe I would have brought her through the house though.  Dunno.”  Her mouth firmed and her shoulders visibly drooped.  “Maybe I should have taken the risk and just got into her fucking car and come here.”

I thought about the flying monster I’d seen attacking a car in  town.  “Maybe that wouldn’t have been such a great idea.”

“Yeah.”  She blew out her cheeks.  “Anyway, you can have that room there.”  She pointed behind me.  “You should find everything you need.  Food and water are in the kitchen, which is the door next to it.  There are some battles of water in the rooms already, probably covered in dust, though.  Now I’m gonna go pass the fuck out.  After that we can talk deep, dark secrets, leveling up, all that good shit.  I’ll be back out here in about eight hours.  No use skimping on sleep right now.  Go-time is already over.”

I sighed, exasperated.  “What the hell are you talking about?”

She waved at me over her retreating back.  “I’ll fill you in on everything after sleep.”  Then she turned with a flat expression.  “I’m locking my door.  If you try to get in, I’ll kill you.”

“...noted,” I said.  I would have been more amused if I hadn’t sensed she was completely serious.  Then I sat on the unfamiliar couch for a few minutes, thinking about everything that had just happened to me, all the horrible things I’d seen, and the uncertainty of my situation.  To my surprise, tears had begun to run down my cheeks.

I absentmindedly rubbed my face, which made me realize I had blood on my face.  Figures, I thought.  If I had more mental energy, the realization might have made me start sobbing, but instead I stood like a zombie, numb emotionally.  Then I shuffled into my guest room.

Thank god there’s a shower, I thought.  But I went to sit on the plastic-covered bed first.  Even though my body felt full of energy, my brain just wanted to check out.  I decided to listen to my brain.  With a grunt I laid back on top of the plastic, all my clothes still on.

Seconds later, I was asleep.  I’d only barely had the presence of mind to set my new biological clock to wake me up in seven hours.