Sponsored Apocalypse, Ch 7

This chapter took me a really long time.

Every story I've written has had one chapter that is kind of pivotal, a chapter that communicates what readers can expect for the rest of the book, or at least a glimmer of it.

With Delvers LLC, it was the chapter where Henry and Jason fought the goblins in the cave with nothing but sharp sticks.  In Apocalypse Cultivation, it was the chapter where Jake becomes a zombie.

In this book, I think this chapter is really the do or die for whether a lot of readers will continue.

As such, I needed to really do my best to (in shorthand) explain in a non heavy-handed way why a reader might want to continue reading.

At this point, I'm pretty happy with the result. :)

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My friend Tom hurriedly unlocked and opened the door for me.  “Oh wow!  Surprised but definitely glad to see you.  Hurry!  Get in here, Shrug!”

I scurried inside and scanned the inside of the store. It was dark inside, but a small red light in one corner offered enough light to see by.

In addition to Tom, it looked like his store, Tom’s Guns, had three other people hunkered down inside.  I recognized the middle aged couple, Tom’s cousin Cam and his wife, Sarah.  They were nice people every time I’d met them before.  Both of them looked like they might have been athletic in their prime, but time and maybe too much cake had softened their edges.  

The other man wasn’t familiar.  He looked like he was in his 30’s, had a short beard and was wearing a pair of overalls.

Tom nervously locked the door to the front of the store again.  Half the windows had been shot out at this point, but the iron bars were obviously serving as excellent protection for the defenders.

I nodded to everyone in the store and they nervously nodded back.

Cam gestured me over.  His normal pleasant grin was nowhere to be seen under his usual Crimson Tide ball cap.  His overalls straining over an ample gut were covered in a bandoleer of loaded magazines and he had a silenced Ruger PC carbine in one hand.  “You’re hurt, Shrug!”

I glanced down at my bloody arm and shrugged.  “Shit happens.”

“Why are you calling him Shrug?” asked Sarah.  “Isn’t his name Miles?”

“It’s a nickname,” I sighed.  “Not sure how everyone always finds out. Had it since high school.”  I joined the little group behind their makeshift barricades fashioned from overturned tables.  Now that I was closer, I realized that everyone in the store was using silenced weapons.  Based on the pile of various monsters outside the store, they’d been effective.

Tom followed me.  “Shrug, you already know Cam and Sarah.  This is Matt.  He works at the hardware store down the street.”

The man nodded.  “When everything…started happening, I was just leaving work.  I got out a few minutes early.  I parked down this way so I was almost right outside when– So I ran in here when a family in front of me got attacked by some… wolf things.”

The entire group, including me, was facing the front of the store, just like the others had been when I’d arrived.  Matt glanced at a phone set on a nearby counter and Tom asked, “Still no word from Stacy?”

Matt shook his head.

“Who is Stacy? I asked.

Matt made a helpless look.  “My wife.  Phones are dead and I haven’t been able to get ahold of her.  She was out of town.  All I can do is hope she can hide and make her way here.”

I nodded and made a mental note not to bring it up again.  The man had to be frantic inside.  This was one of the many reasons I hadn’t dated in what felt like forever.  It would be hard to take the risk when I could imagine myself in a situation like Tom was in.

“Beebee is at the college,” said Sarah.  I turned to see her stricken look and registered she was talking about her daughter, Beatrice.  “Out of state.”

“Nothing we can do right now but survive,” said Cam.  His eyes were slightly wet.  “It won’t help Beebee any if we charge out there and get eaten.  Gotta figure things out in the morning.”

“Gotta reach morning,” said Matt.  We all nodded.

Suddenly, something outside darted by fast and low to the ground.  Everyone in the store immediately went quiet for a few minutes, just watching the front of the store.  Tom had his big pistol aimed where we’d seen the movement.

The moment passed and we all breathed a sigh of relief.  Tom looked at me out the corner of his eye.  “Shrug, that big axe thing. Is that all you got for a weapon?"

"Yeah. Lost my house, lost everything."

"How?"

"A giant,” I said.  Cam and his wife gasped.

"Seriously?"  Tom shook his head.  "Figures.  If there are literal monsters running around downtown and we are all seeing floating screens, there definitely could be giants, too. Why not?”  He chuckled without humor  “Bad luck for you."

"Yeah.  But worse luck for my neighbors. I think they're all dead."

“Lord have Mercy,” said Sarah.  She crossed herself.

Tom sighed.  “So anyway Shrug, since all you have is the pig sticker, you can grab a gun or two in the store.  There are a few red lights on the counter.  We’re not using regular white flashlights so we don’t lose night vision.  I just keep telling myself we’re deer hunting.”  He pointed at the merchandise behind the counter in the back of the store.  “Just make sure to get something in a pistol caliber and something that will fit one of the silencers we have in stock.  We’re all using silencers so we won’t ruin our hearing.  In fact, you can grab a bigger rifle or something after that.”

“Gotcha.  Thanks.  Mind if I also grab some camping gear and stuff?”

“Of course. Go ahead.”

I awkwardly scratched my head.  “I don’t have any cash right now, so uh…”

“Don’t worry about it.    I figure this is the end.  End of everything.”  He laughed.  “Inventory ain’t gonna do me much good anymore.  Can’t even trade if nobody is alive to trade with.”

“Shit hit the fan times a hundred,” said Matt.  “End of days.  Red Dawn from hell.”

Sarah moaned and Caleb gave her a one armed hug for support.

“No more of that talk.  One day at a time right now, everyone.”  Tom glared at Matt then turned back to me.  “I’m not too worried about things, material stuff, right now, Shrug.  It’s more important to make sure we all pull through this.  The community, I mean.  If anyone comes by the store right now that I know, I will help them out.”

I nodded, feeling humbled, and went to check out the available guns.  Luckily, Tom had a decent number of silencers left and even some pistons for the different brands and sizes.  I eventually decided on a threaded H&K USP .45ACP.  It went into a crappy, generic holster that would fit it.  Tom’s holster selection wasn’t great, but I was definitely not going to complain.  It’d do the job.

That done, I eyed the rifles and shotguns for a second before moving to the camping gear.  It didn’t take me too long to get a bare bones camping kit unpackaged from boxes and blister packs and into the hiking pack I’d chosen.  I also threw in some emergency food and a couple water filters.

“Oh yeah, hey Shrug!” Called Tom.  I turned, and he continued, “All of this, it’s, uh, it’s weird, but we should use it I think.  Have you pressed the button yet?  The skill button on the screen?”

“Huh?”

Tom scratched his cheek.  “I know how you are sometimes, like, not great at making decisions.  So, uh, I was just thinking if you haven’t yet, you should probably hit the button.”

“Huh?” I repeated.

Matt helped translate.  “I think he’s talking about the free skill that the system offers.  We all, like, all of us here, got a different skill.  Mine is the ability to drink dirty water safely.”

“Yeah,” said Tom.  “That.”

I was taken aback for a minute, because I really had been waiting to use my free skill button.  Then the rest of what Tom had said registered, and instead of just waving him off, I actually gave myself a second to think.  A lot had just happened.  What’s more, what Tom just said uncomfortably reminded me of how much I had to push myself before spending all my skill points before the cyclops tore my house apart.  Sure, the skills I’d gotten had been weird, but it’d absolutely been the right decision.

So while I still thought the reason for why I was saving the free skill made sense, so did Tom’s logic, and by extension, my own logic when I’d used my quest reward skill points.

Fuck it, I thought.  It’s the end of the world.  Maybe I can be a new, less cautious Miles.  YOLO.

“Oh yeah,” I said out loud.  “I’ll do that.”  Then I opened my menu and did so.

[You are eligible for one free skill.  Do you wish to use your one free skill voucher?]

I pressed, [Yes]

[Congratulations!  You have been awarded a new skill!]

I blinked as I read the result.  Matt just said he got a skill for drinking contaminated water, which sounded super useful and also, really…normal.  Well, normal as the apocalypse could be.

“Why are all my skills so weird?” I muttered.

Saliva of Hared Ha

Unlocked abilities:

Stat increases:

Endurance

New skills:

Just Spit on It: Your saliva now holds healing properties.  This ability’s power can be raised.

I made a face. The skill had a weird name, and was also kind of strange in itself, but anyone would be able to figure out how useful it was.

“What stats did your skills raise?” I ask.

Tom looked confused.  “My skill is to see in the dark.  I didn’t get any stats or anything like that.”

“Me neither,” said Matt.  Cam and Sarah both shook their heads.

“Oh, I said.”  Then something caught my eye in the system menu.  Some fine print read:

[Full menu and character unlocked at level 10.  Skill ranks will be displayed, and rank ups will be possible after level 10.]

Once I read it, I immediately understood.  “Holy crap. This is a tutorial,” I said out loud.

“What?” Asked Matt.

I gestured at my screen that the others couldn’t see.  “This system is familiarizing everyone with how it works, increasing what we can see bit by bit.  And it limits how people can spend their points at first, probably to stop people from spending points in ways that are more likely to get them killed.”  It was just a guess, but my gaming experience and the quest I’d been living with for years made me pretty sure I was right.

“What did you get, Shrug?” asked Cam.

“A healing skill,” I said.  “And I don’t mind Shrug, but Miles is good, too.”

Then I tuned everyone out as I peeled back the sticky, mostly dried portion of my shirt away.  I figured that weird skill or not, I should spit on the wound I’d gotten.  My eyes widened in surprise.  I’d been expecting that my wound would have been ugly and seeping blood.

Instead, it was an open cut…that wasn’t bleeding at all.

I remembered the status messages I’d gotten when the goblin cut me and I pulled them up now to review.

[Debuff:  Bleeding]

But then a second later, I’d received several other system messages I hadn’t read at the time.  One was:

[<Built Different> has activated.  Debuff: Bleeding canceled.]

“What the–” I breathed.  The skill made me just stop bleeding?  Both the system message and the evidence right in front of me definitely suggested so.  I absently spit on my wound and noticed that the pain I was feeling dwindled to almost nothing in seconds.  The cut started to heal before my eyes.

This is huge, I thought.  When I’d first gotten [Built Different,] I hadn’t really understood its power.  But now that I knew bleeding was considered a debuff by this new system…

I reviewed the actual wording of the skill.

Built Different: You are immune to negative status effects while in combat.

When I’d first seen it, I’d been underwhelmed.  But now I blinked as I pondered the implications.  If bleeding was a negative status effect, what else was?  Poison?  Disease?  When I had time, I definitely needed to explore the possibilities.

In fact, when people died in violent fights, wasn’t blood loss the main reason they went down?

My mind was still in a daze when I remembered that I still needed to choose another gun.  I turned and started heading back to the rifles again when suddenly Sarah shouted.  The sound of suppressed gunfire made me dive to the floor.  A loud boom shook the room as I turned my head.  In real life, silencers just make guns quieter.  They don’t convert them to make little whisper noise like in the movies.

At least one of the store’s defenders was using supersonic rounds in their guns, because the sharp crack of sonic booms bounced around in a deafening way.  It definitely would have been worse without the silencer.

Outside the front of the store, something big battered against the front of the store.  Then another one joined it.  The windows that hadn’t already been broken by earlier defensive fire all shattered.

“Focus fire!” shouted Tom. “The one on the left!”

The bars across the windows shivered and pieces of the ceiling fell down.  The bolts strained.   With a curse, I raised my USP and fired at the creature on the left.  Muzzle flashes from my pistol shined off of a pair of malevolent, slitted eyes glaring death at me.