Sponsored Apocalypse ch 10

“Alright, maybe this could work.  Yeah.  Maybe it’ll be fine,” said Aldina.  She looked at me in an appraising way, from my toes to the top of my head.  “You might be able to keep up.  Hmm.  So I figure you’ve already thought about places you could find items for your skill.  Junk yards, antique shops, antique furniture stores, swap meets, that sort of thing.”

She’d phrased it as a question, so I nodded and said, “Yup.”  Inside I was taking mental notes.  The only place I’d actually been thinking of so far was the antique shop in town.

“And the antique shop is near the pharmacy.”  She tapped her lips with a finger.  “I need to go to the pharmacy. Should still be untouched.  There is no way that enough survivors are thinking of the future right now to have cleaned it out yet.  Not now during the first night.  I was going to go there with Amanda, but she’s still pretty wiped out and she needs to rest.  It’s honestly probably better if I could go somewhere a little less dangerous with her first to level…”

She was obviously thinking out loud, so I looked around at what everyone else was doing for a second.  Tom and Matt were carefully watching something across the street.  Around the same time, I caught some movement, too.  Nothing approached, though.  The dead trolls in front of the store must have been giving some of the more intelligent monsters pause.

“Hey, excuse me.  I’m talking to you.”

I snapped my head back around with a sheepish expression.  “Sorry.  Didn’t seem you really needed my input there for a minute.”

“True.  Now I do, though.”  She met my eyes directly.  “Can I trust you Miles, Shrug, whatever you call yourself?”

I was taken aback.  What a strange question.  “Huh?”

“Can I trust you?  Are you the type to honor a promise, or are you a sonofabitch?  Are you a cheater?  Will you try to steal from me or rape me?  Do you help people or are you a selfish peson?”

My mouth moved up and down a few times.  Even in my long and storied history of being generally awkward around women, this was a new level of for me.  “Uh, I try to be a good person. I just…”

“You just what?”

A spark of irritation flared and I held onto it.  “I just want people to leave me the hell alone.  Always have.  It was touch and go before, but it doesn’t seem to be in the cards at all anymore, huh?  Like impossible.  I’m not gonna lay down or hide, so I need to be stronger.  If you’re asking me if I will stab you in the back, hell no.  All the stabbing in my life has always been behind me.  And if you treat me like a person and stop talking to me like a…employee that you are interviewing, and you’re actually nice, I’d have no reason but to treat you the exact same way.”

I glared.  Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Jeb and Sarah quietly watching us.

Aldina exchanged a glance with Amanda, who nodded.  When she turned back to me, she had a quirky smile.  “I think I was right.  We might be able to work together after all.  You up for a trip to the antique store in town?  I need to go to the pharmacy on the way back.”

“Isn’t that going to be dangerous as hell to go out now?”

“Yes.  I have my ways, though. I got Amanda here and she was injured.”

She had a point.  “Where did you come from?”

“Ocean street.”

That was a long way.  I winced.  “Okay, but shouldn’t we still stay here for the night?”

“No.  I was going to leave anyway, remember.  But…”  She turned to her friend again.  “You don’t mind staying here, do you Amanda?”

“No.  You can go with Miles, Dina.  I’m fine staying here.”

“Okay.  Miles, if you’re willing, we will go to the antique store to help you out and cancel my debt.  Like I said, I have some skills to help us get there and back in one piece.  It’ll likely still be dangerous, but not nearly as much as if you were to go alone.”

I thought about it.  “What about tomorrow?”

“Even tomorrow.”  she nodded.  “What I mean to say is, It’ll be less risky with me tonight than by yourself tomorrow.”

“Seriously?”

“Yes.  I swear it. Truth is, I could use someone to watch my back, too.  Realistically I can probably go solo and be fine, but you can never be too careful.”  She gave me an appraising look again.  “You can help me carry stuff back, too.”

Part of me wondered if I could trust her, but my instincts were telling me that I could believe her.  “Alright,” I said.  “When are we going?”

“Now.  No time to waste.”

I nodded and followed her to the front of the store.  To one side, I noticed Jeb and Sarah both giving me little smiles below worried eyes.  Sarah gave a small, encouraging gesture.  Maybe they were misunderstanding the situation at hand.  This was not a date.

Tom met us at the door.  “You leaving now, miss?”

“I need to go somewhere with Miles, here.”

Matt shook his head.  “It’s not safe.  You’re better off staying here.  We have food, some water, a bathroom, and a bunch of guns.”

Aldina frowned.  “Like I said, you all should stop using guns unless you have to.  You’ll be way better off in the long run.  As for firepower…” She trailed off and gave the dead troll she’d killed a significant look.  Now that we were closer to the store again, I could actually smell the thing.

Tom coughed into his fist and said, “Tonight, with everything happening, I think we will stick to guns.  But…we have archery stuff in the shop.  Would a crossbow or compound work?  For more…uh…XP?”

Aldina nodded.  “Yes.  Archery is definitely a decent path to take, too.  Every community will need archers in a week.” She paused.  “At least that’s what I think. My opinion.”

“Does your skill tell you that?” asked Tom.

She smiled.  “Yes.”

While they were talking, I made sure that the pistol I’d taken was secure.  I only had one more mag for it, but like everyone else, I was taking Aldina very seriously.  Something about her just seemed legit.  She was sure of herself but also articulate, and just… there was something solid about her.  Real.  She was definitely mysterious, but I was willing to extend a bit more credibility to extraordinary things or people now that I might have a day ago.  I also hadn’t missed how much her friend Amanda trusted her.  In fact, nobody was treating Aldina like a crazy know it all.  If she’d been someone else, maybe we would have.

I held up a finger and ran to the back to grab my camping backpack and all the supplies I’d gathered.  Aldina nodded in approval when she saw what I was doing.  A few minutes later, I was outside the protection of the gun shop’s barred windows again.  I felt naked.

“Okay, hold on, Miles.”  She looked around first, then touched my forehead with a finger.  Immediately, I could see a faintly glowing green circle on the ground with Aldina in the middle.  It extended around her in about a four foot radius.  “Stay in the circle, and you will be much less likely to be noticed by monsters.”

I stared at the circle after gingerly stepping inside.  “Wow.  Was this your free skill?”

She didn’t turn as she answered, “Something like that.”

“Why didn’t you do this inside the store?  Like before we left?”

“Better to let you in when nobody else was inside the effect. Works better.”

I nodded.  “Does your stealth circle thing here work with sound, too?”

“Sure does.  But we should still keep as quiet as possible.  And remember, the circle doesn’t work on other humans.  Only monsters.  So keep an eye out for assholes.  Shouldn’t be a problem tonight, but it will be in a week for sure.”  She adjusted her clothing and the backpack she was wearing.  For the first time, I noticed the big knife that was hanging down her side, handle toward the ground.  It was mostly hidden and looked real handy to draw in a hurry.  She said, “So we’re a team now until this is done.  I’m fine sharing experience and any loot.  We good?  You all-in?”

“Yeah.”  I shrugged.

“Alright.  Let’s get going.  These first few days will be critical for XP and getting ahead.  We have a mission so let’s not go out of our way, but if we see any targets of opportunity, we should take them.”  She paused.  “Also, if people need help and we can do something, we should help.”

“Cool,” I said without conviction.  I wasn’t an evil bastard, but my track record with people just wasn’t great.  It was hard to really care that much about strangers when so many people I’d actually known over the years had betrayed me or just not given a fuck about what happend to me.

Neither of us talked for a while as we moved down the street.  I focused on staying inside the glowing circle.  There seemed to be fewer random acts of violence, at least that I could see.  I could still hear distant screaming, though.  A few glows in the distance signified fires.

Maybe the monsters have eaten their fill, I thought.  But then I remembered the goblins.  They seemed to kill for fun.

IAs we cut through an alley, Aldina slowed as we got close to some dumpsters.  She pointed to them and held a finger over her lips.  Then as we drew abreast, I was able to see a goblin holding a spear made of rebar between the two dumpsters.  Ironic, I thought.  I was just thinking about goblins.   A second after I saw it, an icicle shot from Aldina’s hand and punctured the creature in the chest.  Its eyes widened a faction of a second before the projectile had hit.

She kept walking, and I hurried to make sure I wouldn’t leave the circle.  “Aren’t you going to check the body or something?” I asked.

“No.  There was just one and it was old.  Probably got kicked out of another hunter band for being too slow or something.  Wouldn’t have anything useful.  Wasn’t even much XP.”

I nodded.  “It didn’t register that we were there until right before it died.”

“Yup.  This stealth ability is pretty decent for right now but it only works on low level monsters and stupid monsters.  It won’t work anymore if we attack, or stay in one place too long, get too close, that sort of thing.”  I frowned and she must have misunderstood.  She said, “Don’t worry, I won’t hog all the XP.  I’ll let you get the next target of opportunity.”

“No, that’s not what I meant.  I’m just wondering why you’d kill that one goblin back there if it wasn’t much XP for you and could have maybe alerted others or something.”

She made a face.  “They’re monsters.  We kill them.  And goblins suck.  Fuck goblins in particular.”

“Fair enough,” I murmured.  There wasn’t much reason to pursue that conversation even if we weren’t currently walking through a monster-infested town at night.

Traveling through town with Aldina was a vastly different experience than I’d had before.  We were still in danger, but monsters had a hard time seeing us.  It also helped to be with another person, especially when that other person seemed to be able to throw ice magic like she was born to do it.

True to her word, she pointed out and let me kill a few goblins.  How she could always figure out where they were, I had no idea.  Most were by themselves, like the goblin that had cut me before I’d reached the gun shop.  I actually leveled up at least once, and might have again.  The windows could be distracting and block my vision so I’d quickly gotten into a habit of instantly closing any windows or notifications that came up.  Now was not the time to be messing with my stat sheet.

As a small southern town, this one wasn’t odd for having brand new shops standing next to old brick buildings that were over 100 years old.

More of the buildings in town looked like they’d been broken into, now.  What used to be a general store was even starting to burn as we walked past.   But I was actually surprised that so many buildings still looked mostly whole.  There were notable exceptions, of  course.  An entire block of businesses windows had  been busted out.  Most looked like they’d been done by monsters, but I did see a brick, and a few drops of red blood in front of an electronics store.

I wondered what the story behind that was.  Maybe someone had tried to grab a new TV and been surprised by a monster instead.

Aldina led and I followed.  We avoided bigger monsters, at least, I assumed we did.  I didn’t see any.  Either they were all otherwise occupied, or Aldina had some way of sensing them.  I didn’t ask.  Even though it seemed okay to talk in low voices or whispers, I was just way too tense to be engaging in small talk.

Right after we left Main street, we actually snuck up behind a group of four goblins.  Adlina pointed to the ones on the right, then at me, the two on the left, and herself.  I nodded.

The moment she let loose a magic attack, I sprinted forward.  The first goblin on the right reacted quickly.  With a snarl, the creature stabbed at me with an ugly spear made of bone.  After having killed a couple more goblins before this, I was able to handle myself better than my first couple fights after the giant merced my house.

I gritted my teeth and parried the spear with the blade of my glaive.  Then, using a technique I’d picked up while learning the longsword a year before, I took another step forward, leading with my blade.

The short, simple strike still had all my weight behind it. My momentum had continued, too.  The smaller, lighter goblin didn’t have a chance.  I yanked my weapon out of the monster’s ruined face and spun to deal with my second enemy.

Bits of blood and brains scattered in a wave as I parried the second goblin’s shovel.  The shovel had a yellow handle.  I distantly noticed that the makeshift weapon still had a big sales sticker on it.  This goblin and some of his buddies had obviously broken into the nearby hardware store and helped themselves.

The goblin hissed and jerked back, trying to trap my blade.  I dipped down the tip of my glaive, avoiding the bind, then lunged forward, using almost exactly the same attack I’d used executed.  Once again, my weapon slammed into a goblin head, crumpling its skull and destroying the creature’s brain.

I kicked the little monster off of my glaive and turned in case the other goblins were still alive.  They weren’t.  I wasn’t surprised.  Aldina killed with efficient, methodical precision.  Both of her targets had probably already been down by the time I’d killed my first.

Her eyes landed on the shovel of the goblin I’d killed, then on a pick, and a machete that her targets had been carrying.  The machete had dried blood on it and that goblin’s stomach seemed full, too.

Gross.

“I really hate these things,” I said.

She nodded.  “A lot of people will look down on these fuckers in a few weeks, get complacent.  Just because they’re small and not very strong doesn’t mean they’re not dangerous.  Especially if there are a lot of them.”

I nodded, but inside I was wondering again just who the hell this woman was.  The way she spoke about all of this was so matter-of-fact and calm, I’d have to just not be paying attention to avoid having questions about it.  Then there was her knowledge about what was going on.  She could be lying out her ass, but I really believed her.

Some theories ran around my mind, each more outlandish than the next.  I dismissed them all.  Right now, all that mattered was getting to the antique store and back before some goblins burned it down or something.  Being with Aldina made traveling in town slightly less terrifying, but I still wished I was back behind the metal bars of the gun shop.

Then again… I closed another level up window.  There were definitely benefits from killing monsters.  The monsters I personally killed gave me more experience than the ones Aldina did, but I seemed to get at least some from them, too.  Must be some sort of hidden, automatic party system, I thought.

At first, that possibility eemed like something sort of dumb for a worldwide system to include.  But then I thought about how in the future, low levels would be able to just last kill monsters with an experienced party and the auto grouping made more sense.

I remembered what Aldina had said back at the gun store about people who get a head start on leveling. In this new world, the division between the weak and the strong would be more and more obvious. There didn't seem to be any shortcuts, either.  Even though I was still freaked out about how the apocalypse had actually happened, I was actually glad to be out with Aldina for the first time.  I was getting stronger, fast, and she was making it a lot safer for me to do so.

Our progress was slow but steady.  At one point, I thought I saw movement down at the end of a side street, something big, but we just kept going.  The experience made me wonder if we’d really actually just gotten lucky so far, avoiding the bigger or faster monsters.  There was a possibility that the route Aldina was leading us on might have been picked on purpose for safety.  I didn’t ask.  Even with her magic stealth field, I was trying not to make unnecessary noise.  It didn’t seem appropriate–or smart–to be chatting in the middle of a monster infestation.

Over half of the way to the drug store, I thought I heard…laughing.  Before this, I’d heard plenty of screams and yelling in the distance, but this was the first time I’d heard a cackle.  The sound caught my attention like a steak in a Vegan restaurant.

And we were heading in that direction.

I looked a question at Adlina, but she seemed as perplexed as I was.  When we rounded a corner and actually saw what was happening, her eyes got hard, flinty.

Near a busted up liquor store, an unkempt man was behind a chain link fence.  He had a makeshift spear in his hands, just a sharpened rake handle.  An empty cop car, engine still running, was on the corner.  The car’s lights were on.

A dirty and terrified looking woman was handcuffed to the front of the fence.  She was choking, in obvious distress, but she couldn’t talk very loud and kept stuttering.  Based on her speech, clothing, and a tic where she flailed her free arm, I figured she was one of the handful of methheads in town.  The man behind the fence probably was, too.

There were two dead goblins on the ground in front of the fence by the woman.  It looked like a couple of dead people were there too.  They had wounds in their heads.

This was a lot to take in all at once.  My jaw dropped.  The man and the woman seemed to spot us both around the time.  He fist pumped and showed a mouth with maybe two good teeth.  “Levels!” he crowed.  “Getting stronger!  Oh, pretty lady!  Should join.  I got bee-eer.”  The last word was extended in a creepy sing song.

The woman saw us and reached out a hand.  She was obviously trying to get our attention.  I noticed that one of her shoes had come off at some point.  Where she sat, what I’d thought was just shadow before, now I could see was blood.  She’d been injured.

Monster noises in the distance made me tense.  Aldina definitely noticed too, she turned her head in that direction.  But then I heard her mutter, “Now that I’ve seen it, I have to deal with it.”  She walked toward the man.

I followed and wondered what had happened to the police officer that had left the car.  Maybe the cop had come here before everything blew up because of the handcuffed woman.  I could only speculate.  A lot of what I was seeing just wasn’t making sense to me.  The surrounding noises, echoing sounds of monsters and violence and pain all set me on edge.

We got closer and the man behind the fence started to say something.  I was half paying attention.  A lot of my focus was still on our surroundings, wondering how long we could afford to stay in this one location.  Aldina’s stealth was pretty good, but definitely not foolproof.  And there were still things out there that were bigger, and much more dangerous than goblins.

But when she was almost to the fence, Aldina raised her hand and suddenly delivered an ice spike directly into the unkempt man’s throat.  My head snapped around and I stared in horror as a torrent of blood sprayed out of the man’s wound.  He reeled back, choking, his mouth open to display what was left of his teeth.  Then his eyes changed from pure shock to a bit of malice mixed in.  He reached into his pocket and drew what had to be the ugliest pistol I’d ever seen.  The weapon was rusted, blocky…some sort of ancient-looking revolver.

Another ice spike slammed into the man’s hand, making the revolver skitter away over asphalt.  The man fell to the ground, futilely holding a hand over his ruined throat.  He tried to speak, tried to breath.  The entire time Aldina watched him die, her expression didn’t even flicker.

My blood ran cold.  I’d never seen anything like this before.  My hands on my weapon tightened as I tried to wrap my mind around what I was seeing.  Killing monsters was one thing, but I’d just witnessed Aldina murdering someone with magic.  With that thought, I glanced at the running cop car, wondering if law even existed anymore.

And if not, what about me?  Should I just witness something like this and do nothing?  My hands tightened further on my glaive and I managed to ask, “What are you doing!? Why did you do that!?”

Aldina glanced back, eyes flat.  I carefully watched her hands, ready to do something drastic if she held a palm out at me, but she didn’t.  She pointed at the man and the still-handcuffed woman.  “That piece of shit was using the woman as bait for monsters.”

I blinked slowly.  “What?”

“He was luring monsters here on the other side of the fence with bait, the woman, and then killing them through the fence with that wack-ass spear.  The dumb, junkie fuck got lucky up to now.  Nothing big came and no big groups of goblins.  Just single monsters and maybe a couple zombies at a time.”

“But the people on the ground…”

Aldina walked forward and using a foot, like she was kicking over a sack of rice, she rolled over one of the corpses on the ground.  I stared.  Sure enough, the person, or what had once been a person, had several holes from the crude spear on the other side of the fence.  However, the corpse  also had other, older, wounds.  Now that I could see the man clearly, I could tell he’d been dead for a while.  Zombie for sure.

The double-dead zombie was also wearing weird clothing.  Sure enough, the other corpses on the ground were dressed similarly.  They were very possibly not even from this world.

The horror of what I was truly setting began to settle in.

Aldina moved closer to the handcuffed woman but didn’t get close enough to touch.  Her expression still stony, she said, “This woman has been bitten.  She’s going to turn.  Even if she was in good health she’d still die and reanimate eventually, but she was likely in rough shape even before.”

“We gotta do something,” I said.  “Maybe I can spit on the wounds…”

Aldina hesitated and her expression flickered.  “Okay.  Go ahead and try.”

I carefully moved closer.  Now I could see several bite marks below the hem of the woman’s dirty shorts.  At least two of them were bleeding.  I could see the lines of dark corruption spreading from the bite.  The woman had such a bad fever I could practically feel the heat from where I was standing.  Aldina was right.  She was dying.

With a little preparation, I got a mouth full of saliva and spit on the victim’s leg.  “Yes,” I softly whispered to myself.  My aim had been good.  The healing spittle had landed squarely on a bite.

But as I watched, disappointment grew.  Then despair.  Nothing had changed.

Aldina nodded slowly, eyes sad.  “I was afraid of that.  Your ability has limits.  Maybe you can level it up or evolve it later, but right now, there isn’t anything we can do for her.  And even if we could, she was already in a bad way to begin with.”

I shook my head.  “There has to be something we can do.  You have magic! I have healing spit.  There had to be something.  This is so wrong…”

“We have two choices.  Kill her cleanly so she doesn’t turn, let her turn and then kill her for XP, or kill her through the heart or lungs so she comes back faster as a zombie so  we can kill her for XP.  There are likely monsters coming now so just waiting for her to turn is not an option, even if I would allow that.  And I won’t.  She is in pain and this is totally fucked.”

“I don’t care about the XP!”  At the last minute I turned my words into a loud whisper and not a shout.  “But…”

The words died in my mouth as Aldina raised a hand again and without hesitation, delivered an ice spike through the woman’s skull.  Like a puppet with its strings cut, the unfortunate, would-be bait settled back against the chain link fence.  Only the handcuffed wrist kept the body up.

It was one of the saddest, most disturbing things I’d ever seen in my life.

Without another glance, Aldina turned and began to walk away.  My brain stuttered and it took a second before I remembered to catch up and get inside the glowing circle.

A lot was on my mind.  Part of me wanted to be angry at Aldina, maybe even attack her, but I calmed myself down.  My rational mind had not completely left me and I had to admit that Aldina had likely done the only thing one could have done.  Maybe should have done.  And there was no way I could have done something like that, at least not yet.

That was when I realized I’d learned something about Aldina.  She’d immediately gone to help people when she’d seen someone in trouble, but she was also possibly the most ruthless person I’d ever met in my life.

I wasn’t sure if that realization made me feel better or worse about surviving the next few hours.  We continued on down the street, neither of us talking.  No more targets of opportunity presented themselves, but I was fine with that.

Images of blood and worse were starting to invade my thoughts.  I was glad for the break from violence and…horrible things.

Even though I wasn’t usually squeamish, I’d been through a lot in a very short amount of time.  Some time to process was a welcome change.  The magic circle of Aldina’s stealth field was even more reassuring than before.

But then I thought about the possibility of people out there being as hardcore and powerful as Aldina.  Maybe they might be more like the junkie that had been using another human as bait, not someone who at least tried to help people.  Or even was sane.

I got a chill that continued for a few minutes as we kept moving forward.