Apocalypse Cultivation 2, ch 17

He knew the new people were coming long before the children saw them.  Eventually, the children also noticed the lights and finally heard the voices yelling their names.

Erica took off like a bat out of hell, crashing through the undergrowth and whimpering as she ran.  Once she got to the adults, she attached herself to one of them and didn’t let go.

The remaining three moved faster toward them.

“Holy shit!  What the fuck is that thing!”

A couple flashlights of different intensity lit up Jake and the remaining kids he was walking with.  They gasped and all three of them fell back.  One of the armed adults raised a rifle, but another shouted, “That thing is holding Jared!”  Don’t shoot!”

From Jake’s back, Jaren waved his hands frantically and said, “Don’t shoot Jake!  He saved us!  He’s a good monster!”

“Are you okay, Jared?”

“Yes!  Well, I’m hurt, so is Tom, but I think I’ll be okay.”

Kids grow up fast during times like these, thought Jake.  He felt a moment of sadness, thinking about all the little bodies his team had stumbled across in his past life.

“Can you get down, Jared?  You and Tom should come to us.  Leave that…whatever it is,” one of the men said nervously.

“I don’t think I can get down, Mr. Hensley.  And I don’t want you to start shooting,” said the boy.  To one side, the boy Tom stepped up. He didn’t get too much closer to Jake, but he also didn’t go to the townspeople.

“It’s night!  We can’t stay here!  Let’s just shoot this thing and take the kids,” said one of the men.

“Yeah, that would be a really bad idea for lots of reasons, genius.  How about we just have a chat,” said Jake.

The group of men all stopped moving entirely.  One said, “It spoke.”

“Yes, I spoke.  Now lower your fucking guns, please,”  said Jake.

“It spoke.”  One of them repeated.  This time Jake identified the speaker as a man with a big bushy beard and a head lamp.  There were three of them before him, and one woman behind them who was still comforting a non-speaking Erica.

The entire group seemed to still be in shock.  They’d come out in the dark expecting a horrible fight and probably death, so having the children returned and meeting a talking monster in the forest was obviously something they were still adjusting to.

Brave people, thought Jake.  He amended, Or desperate.  Either way, It took balls to go out at night, following some monsters that could single handedly tear through the walls of a house.  It was possible that one or more of these people had powers or magic, but Jake doubted it.

“Wait, holy shit!” said another man, this one short, holding a shotgun, and sporting a mustache.  “Dude, look at his eyes.  Blue eyes!  It’s the fucking Heavenly Grim!”

“You think so?” asked the bearded man.

“Why don’t you just ask me, guys?” asked Jake.  He wasn’t really too worried about these guys, but he needed information and being friendly with the first decent-seeming people he’d met would be an easy way to get some.

“Oh, uh…”  The third man, a tall, thin man with a ponytail lowered his rifle a bit and asked, “Are you the Heavenly Grim?”

Jake resisting rolling his eyes.  “That is the name some people call me, yes.”

The shorter man asked, “So you were in Macon a week ago and stopped all that stuff going on there?”

“Yes.  And I wrote the advice articles when Purple Rain happened.  When I killed some raiders I put a video out, too.  I kind of regret that a little now.  The video, not killing those guys.  How do you know about that, though?”

“Ham radio.”

Jake nodded. In some of the advice he’d written online before the web went down, he’d mentioned old school radios as a way for people to communicate.

“See, I told you he was a good monster,” said Jared proudly.

Jake said, “So not that I’m complaining that you’re here, the more the merrier, but how were you able to come after the kids?  You were being attacked.  When I was following Erica’s screams, it wasn’t looking great back in your neighborhood.  I was half expecting to find you all still fighting when we got back.”

The woman with Erica answered.  “A group of Paladins showed up and came to help.  They helped us push the monsters back, but they wouldn’t go out into the outside, in the dark.  Can’t blame them.  But Erica is my daughter and I couldn’t…”  She stopped talking.

“Got it.”  Jake absently tapped himself on the arm with one sharp pinky claw.  “What are Paladins?”

“They’re basically vigilantes.  Most of them have magic or powers,” said the man with long hair.  His tone was almost conversational.  Jake was impressed that these people had already gotten used to talking to a monster at night in the forest.  He suspected that survivors in this new timeline were just tougher and more mentally flexible than during his first life.  One thing is for sure, if Jake had met a “Heavenly Grim,” at night during his first life, he would have not been handling it as well as these people were.

Jake frowned.  “They’re just roaming around?”

“Yeah, more or less.”

“If you know who I am, then you might know about the stuff I wrote on the internet when Purple Rain first started.  Maybe it’s talking about on the radio.”

“It is.”

“Alright,” continued Jake.  “Alright, well, I saw a group at a Golden Arches restaurant in Georgia–”  He did some quick math.  “--over a week ago.  When I saw that I thought people saw my suggestion about Adventurers that I wrote online.”

The three men looked at each other silently before turning to Jake again.  “Some real assholes have taken over the local Walmart.  The Walmart is really close to the McD–, I mean, the Golden Arches.  It’s not safe to go anywhere near there, now.  We’re actually too close, here.  It was just hard to give up our homes.  Like, those psychos have only left us alone because it wouldn’t be worth the bother.  But now?  With so many holes in our defenses and some of us dead?”  He let his voice trail off.

Jake mentally sighed.  He couldn’t save everyone, but if he had time for it, he’d help where he could.  First he needed information, though.  “Where exactly are we?”

“You don’t know where you are?”

No, I’m totally just fucking with you.”  Jake’s voice dripped sarcasm and he frowned.  When the three took a step back and one raised his gun again, he was reminded of what he looked like.  “Oh yeah, right.  Anyway, no, I don’t know where I am.  I was sent here by the divine.”

That statement was true, if maybe a little misleading.

“The divine?!?” asked the bearded man.

The shorter man said, “This is Locust Grove, Georgia.”

Jake thought for a moment.  “Isn’t that north of Macon, south of Atlanta?”

“Yeah.  Just further north than halfway.  But we’re honestly too close to Atlanta.  That place is a death trap”

The tall man shuddered.  “Some of the stuff they’re saying on the radio… Yesterday, one of the few poor bastards in the city with a radio went off the air.  Before that he said he heard something big coming.  Like, they say there are things bigger than houses in the city.” His voice was hushed.

“Yeah.  And the people running away south usually don’t stop here,” said the shorter man.  “Pretty sure those assholes at Walmart are preying on the refugees.  This area is not exactly safe, not that anywhere is safe.”  He gave a little laugh.  “But still, the only reason we’ve been able to justify staying as long as we have is because all the nastier stuff goes north to the city area.  But some of us area afraid that some of that shit will leave the city eventually.”

“Some will, some won’t,” Jake said.  He was only half paying attention to the conversation, now.  He thought he’d sensed something new in the forest.  A moment later, he’d confirmed his suspicions.  Sneaky bitches, he thought.  Good thing Lamia can’t speak English.  If I give some instructions now, she won’t understand even if she hears.

He made sure he was still speaking English when he said, “I need you all to act casually, don’t react to what I’m saying right now.  If you are scared or angry, direct it at me.  One of the lamia, the snake monsters, is approaching.  I need to set Jared down to deal with her or she is going to kill all of you.  You can’t see well enough and none of your weapons are powerful enough to put a lamia down fast enough to keep one from kill you, especially at night in the forest.  And I can’t protect all of you at once.”

Jake didn’t wait for them to acknowledge what he’d said.  He gently lowered Jared to the ground.  The boy grimaced but didn’t otherwise make a fuss.  Once Jared was sitting down, Jake immediately flash stepped twice in quick succession.  The first was upward at an angle to clear the undergrowth in the forest to one side and get line of sight to the sneaking lamie.  The second took him right at her.

His cut with his wooden sword neatly lopped off her arm.  With the other arm, she threw some sort of bladed weapon at him, but Jake performed a quick, clean, short distance flash step.  The creature screamed and whipped at Jake with her powerful tail.  He ducked and slashed but she managed to dodge most of it.  The cut still opened up a decent wound on her belly.  The lamia attacked again with her tail, the powerful, natural whip cut through a tree like balsa wood.  She shrieked and moved back into deeper cover, snake quick.

Trying to make an opening, huh? Thought Jake.  He watched with narrow eyes, making sure she wasn’t trying to move toward the humans.  She wasn’t.  The lamia darted into a deep patch of darkness.  Jake rolled his eyes.  He could still see her plainly, so when she lunged out at him, the monster didn’t come anywhere close to actually getting ahold of him.

Jake used his inhuman speed to move around behind her and attacked diagonally with his  carved sword.  The powerful, overhand chop cut the monster all the way through the torso.

The entire fight had taken seconds.

Jake cleaned his sword off on some leaves before putting it away.  The lamia’s death throes were taking it farther away from the humans, which was a lucky break, but the corpse was still making a lot of nose as it tore up an entire patch of yearling trees.

He began moving back to the group of armed people.  Flashlights shone on him again.  Now the woman and Erica were with the rest of the group.

The bearded man quietly asked, “If we’d run into one of those things out here in the dark without a wall or houses to hind behind, we would have died, wouldn’t we?”

Jake thought about it for a second.  “Probably, yeah.  If all of you had shot a lamia, she probably still would have killed you but the monster would eventually die, too.  Unless you met a mage.”  

A group of Lamia was too challenging of a target for Jake’s old group, but the Grasshopper Mice had participated in larger raids to destroy nests of the things.

The children were terrified.  Erica clung more tightly to her mother.  “Shhh, it’s okay, baby,” she said.

“Is it back there still?  The body?  It’s dead, right?” asked the bearded man.  He gestured with his light.

“Yes,” said Jake.

“I need to see it.”  The heavyset man began walking back where Jake had ended his brief struggle with the lamia.

“No, don’t go, Cam!” said the woman.

He shook his head.  “I need to.  Those things killed–”  He paused and swallowed.  “They killed Jessica.  I…I don’t know why, but I want to see this one dead.  Killed in the dark, away from its buddies.  Maybe…I need to know that this one is also really dead, just like the ones outside the fence back home.”

“Don’t go,” repeated the woman.

“I have to.” With that, the man moved into the forest.  His light was an easy way to tell where he was, even for the humans.  Jake could just sense where he was if he wanted.  He was confident that if any more monsters got close enough, he’d notice, too.

The tall man turned to the woman and gestured at her daughter with his chin.  “Is Erica going to be okay for us to move?  We need to go as soon as Cam gets back.”

“I think so.  She’s still stiff as a board, now, though.  As soon as she hugged me she hasn’t moved or said anything.”  The woman looked worriedly at Jake, and just as quickly flinched away when her eyes actually landed on him.  “Are there any more of those things out there, uh, Heavenly Grim?”

“You can just all me Jake.  I don’t think there are any more around us, but that fight made a lot of noise, and I made even more noise earlier when I blew one of them up.”

“We heard that before, I think,” said the short man.  He crouched down next.  “Erica, we’re going to go in a minute, okay.  Do you think you can keep being brave and walk with us?  We have the Grim here to protect us.  He’s the hero of Macon.  It’s all over the radios.”

Suddenly, the girl finally spoke.  “No.  Grim is scary.”

There was an awkward silence.  Her mother coughed and said, “I’m sorry, uh, Mister Grim.  Erica is usually really outgoing, even after, you know, everything that’s been happening.”

“It’s fine,” said Jake.

The terrified little girl spoke again.  “His voice scares me.  I hate it.”

Jake grimaced.  Even though he’d had a decade now to adjust to his inhuman vocal cords, he could still definitely understand Erica’s sentiment.

The pool of light around the group grew brighter as Cam returned.  His eyes were huge.  “Grim diced that thing up like sushi.  The fucking corpse is still destroying trees.  That’s what you’re hearing right now, the crashing.  The thing’s body flipping around like a dead snake and tearing things up.  Dude, Mister Grim, why the hell do you even carry a gun?” He pointed to Jake’s AK pistol.

Jake thought about it for a while.  The man had a point.  Finally he said, “Habit, I guess.  So are we heading back now?  I want to talk to these Paladins.

The adults shared a look.  “Sure.  Yeah.”

Jared beamed.  “I told you that he’s a good monster!  I told you!  See?”