ã€ŠClean Slateã€‹


 Prologue

    In a dimension both near and far to Earth in ways beyond human understanding, to powerful entities were deep in conversation. If they could be understood by a mortal, this is what it would have sounded like.

    ¡°Man I can¡¯t believe those flying giant anthropoid pigs didn¡¯t destroy those bipedal tadpole looking things¡± Eternal 1 relayed.

    ¡°They are called Ilitrilions and they were just too technologically advanced. That¡¯s the problem with the giant races. They look cool and all, but even a giant pig that can fly a starship cannot hope to outfight a tinier creature which has had to learn to survive against physically superior opponents. They just end up with better evolutions to compensate.¡± Eternal 2 replied.

    ¡°Yea, I know. That bet was more of a lark for me than anything; I would need to get more serious about the Game to get higher in the leader boards anyways. But come on, if the pigs won it would have been awesome.¡± Eternal 1 lamented. ¡°Hey, I think I¡¯m going to use in this version of Earth for the next one. I¡¯ve gotten bored with it. I originally filled it with giant reptiles that were pretty awesome, but there evolutions stopped prior to sentience so I stopped paying attention to them.

    ¡°I was thinking maybe we could pit them against you¡¯re left over Survival World??

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    ¡°That¡¯s not going to happen,¡± Eternal 2 returned. ¡°That Earth is a non-magic version right? There are already full-fledged dragons on that world, and they would not tolerate any other giant reptiles.¡±

    ¡°Bye bye giant lizards, you were loved. Hah, I even left the remains on the planet to be found. It really fucked primate variants as they became more technologically advanced. They are a human arch-type but without magic they went the technology route. Not too advanced but they have potential.¡±

    ¡°You know I know everything you know, except for your internal thoughts right?¡± Eternal 2 said. ¡°Sometimes I think that you¡¯re the only idiot to have ever been given near omnipotence.¡±

    ¡°Idiot like a fox!¡± Eternal 1 replied. ¡°You can¡¯t take this Game to serious. It¡¯s just a way to pass eternity.¡±

    ¡°Anyways, I was thinking an old fashioned magic hack and slash type of battle for our next merger. I have been burned out on energy weapons lately. I want this fight for survival to be about the individual creatures¡¯ drive for power, rather than which group has the smartest think tank and best economy.¡±

    ¡°Ok. But you know Earth has no magic.¡±

    ¡°It¡¯ll be rough on the planet, and will wipe out most of the species, but I can add it. I¡¯ll make some illogical changes to the local physics to limit technology as well. Give the humans some time and they should adapt. Hell we can make a lot of bets on this one. What faction will be dominant, how many will serve the mana injection? It has potential. I always loved splicing the leftovers in that survival style world. Its chaotic and a ton of fun to watch.¡±

    ¡°Ok, I¡¯m in. I¡¯ll play Moderator, if you don¡¯t mind. I like these local human¡¯s though. They got heart. I¡¯m going to give them a little bit of a warning, but not enough to get them to pull together. As individuals they should at least have a chance to prepare. Poor little souls, I¡¯ll have to be nicer to them in their next reincarnation.¡±

    ¡°Since they haven¡¯t had time to adapt to magic I¡¯ll have to give them some perks at the beginning. Something that they will understand, hmm. Ah, there is just the thing. Let¡¯s do this.¡±

 Chapter 1 - Bunker Down

    Chapter 1

    Now

    A bunker in Fairfax, Ohio

    Hidden deep within an underground bunker is where you be when world is coming to a violent end. No one would spend a long time in one otherwise, because without power or people to talk to it is only slightly less boring then watching the grass grow. Not right at first, obviously. At the beginning the apocalypse was full of interesting things. Violence and mayhem ran rampant through the streets and the human race was quickly dying off. Comfortably concealed in my bunker, I had court side seats to all of it while it played on the news

    But slowly, the anticipation of death wore off. Even the excitement, if it can be called that, of knowing that I¡¯ll likely die a grisly manner, drifted into the past. After so long, sitting in my own personal fortress of solitude, it was nothing boring.

    It was weird how you miss the feeling of hopeless rage if you are bored enough.

    A damp, dark bunker certainly lends itself to intense brooding. My most recent intellectual pastime has been judging my life¡¯s worth. Had I lived it to the best of my ability or had I just let life pass me by? It was easier to look back at my life and focus on the things that I have not done, rather than then seeing I have accomplished. For a time I felt that my life had been a waste. I had not really done anything of any merit. I have just gone with the flow, and now that the flow was gone I recognized that it had not been good enough.

    Life is an extremely individual and personal experience. Deep down I knew that as long as I had found some happiness and helped a few other people along the way, that my life has had some worth. My life had not been all that pathetic, ansd over time I began to convince myself of it.

    I used to have a few people in the bunker with me, but even then it was still a shitty time. When the power was still on there were some small forms of entertainment, like watching movies or playing video games. It wasn¡¯t that we no longer had fuel for the generator; it was some other weird magic shit that caused electricity to fail. We had known it was not going to last, but having it quit early still shocked us deeply.

    Now, when someone mentions a bunker most people would probably think of some rugged, dug in and fortified building. A structure that was built to endure and outlast any assault that may come its way. Mine, not so much. It is much more of a basement then a bunker really. But as this is possibly the humanities last stand, a bunker is what it will be called. Besides, no one is alive to tell me otherwise, well alive near me anyways.

    Something could be said for my half-assed preparations as they have kept me alive so far. That is even without a ton of effort and a startling lack of forethought. Others must have done far better. I am sure that there are more survivors out there, presumably a plethora of them. Everyone was given ample warning that something like this was going to happen. Individually people seem to be smart and decent human beings, but group us up and we can easily turn into a mob of morons playing follow the leader. So even with the warning, just like the near certainty of death by cancer from smoking cigarettes, the vast majority of the population ignored it.

    My basement, a former cellar, had a farmhouse on top of it which was built in the late 1800s. The whole thing started off as a two story building with an attached and covered wooden front porch that runs the length of the front. Later renovations expanded the cellar which was originally only accessible from outside the house into a roughed in basement, manly used for more dry storage. It is separated into three rooms. One used for storage, the other a bathroom, and the rest an open area with racks on the wall, a TV and a few chairs, my deep freezer, a small kitchenette and two beds.

    The ceiling was fairly high for a basement, being around eight foot tall. It would have been a fairly comfortable living space for a single person. There used to be city water in the basement, but the grounds had an old well which I was able to rig to the waterlines. It allowed still have water when the city services went offline.

    Walking to one of the windows, I took down the cardboard covering and attempted to look outside. I knew it would accomplish little and not much would be visible due to the deep recession of the window well. A sliver of the sky shown through and clouds still completely covered the heavens. Flashes of brilliant lightning cut through them, forking again and again. The constant dull roar of thunder throbbed throughout the basement like the soundtrack of a bad horror movie. I tried to ignore it but it weighed on me, leaving me in an unending state of anticipation.

    The clouds were dark and heavy but no rain would fall today. Rain is a sign of health and renewal. I understand the importance of rain. Water is essential to all life and I am almost out of it.

    Continuing to look upwards I again observe the unnatural ambient lighting. The horizon is filled with what I would call a light purple but an ex-girlfriend of mine, who thought herself an interior designer, might call periwinkle.

    Day and night the strange weather persisted. No hint of the sun can be seen and it is impossible to tell if it¡¯s even day or night. The air itself shimmers with color. The purple seemed to be carried with the light, but it crepts along like a slow moving plague. It slowly filled the empty spaces of the room. Kept uncovered the window leaked the miasma until it illuminated the basement almost as bright as good old fashioned sunlight used to. It was slightly dimmer though, like an overcast day. The strange color had a weight to it.Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.

    Taking a breath felt smoking a heavy cigar. The air burning in my lungs as it is pulled in. It may have been a trick of my eyes, but when I expelled it there was a fog coming from me, like breathing on a cold winter day. The small cloud that came out of me seemed lighter shade of purple then its surroundings, but only for a moment. It was quickly recharged by the surrounding light and caused me to doubt my own eyes.

    The miasma continued to creep into the bunker from the outside and seemed to weigh down everything it touched, pressing down on my shoulders, an unwanted burden, as I gazed uselessly out the window.

    If my friend Big Gay John was still alive, I bet him and his fellow members of the LGBT community would all be dancing and possibly having a parade to celebrate that the end of the world was covered in periwinkle.

    ¡°Dumbass¡± I whispered. Then I started laughing. It slowed to chuckle, but even that lasted for an unreasonably long time. ¡°Yup, I may be losing it.¡±

    My skin started to feel the burn of the periwinkle and the thought sent me into hysterics a second time. If possible my sanity seemed to slip even farther away each moment I was exposed to it. I placed the cover back over the window and watched the light take a slow moment to fade away. My arms glowed a soft purple as the poisonous light clung to them just a little longer than the rest of the room. Finally the last of the miasma faded away, and my heart was heavy as the dark fully encapsulated me once again.

    I shrugged my shoulders and rubbed my forearms as they tingled from the exposure to the filth. It left me feeling dirty and in desperate need of a shower. Just that short time touching it and I could feel it changing me. I did not know how or why, but it was having some an effect on my body. I was trying to limit my exposure to it because I have seen the changes the light has made. Both on the news and in person, and I sure as hell do not want anything like that to happen to me.

    A decision needed to be made soon. I had no watch and no way to tell night from day, but I was able to extrapolate sleeping a rough estimate time¡¯s passage. Around seven weeks have passed since this all began. At my current rate of consumption in two days the water will run out. That meant going outside enduring more exposure in an attempt to survive.

    I recalled watching documentaries on prison inmates who were placed in solitary confinement or the ¡®hole¡¯ as it was sometimes called. I always blew off how the bleeding hearts of the old world thought that it was cruel and usual punishment. I have dealt with some pretty awful people and I know how the world works. There are just some people who cannot interact with others and they must be segregated from normal human contact for the good of others. To me, it justified solitary confinement a necessity in certain cases.

    Advocates against it say that it further unbalances the human mind, as we are a social creature and cannot survive mentally without regular human interactions. I think that those people were right. I have a new appreciation of their views because I have not even made a week alone in the dark without becoming unhinged. I now truly believe that we are not meant to live alone, let alone confined and alone.

    Of course, even when there were three of us down here it had felt like solitary to me, so maybe I am just tired of the dark.

    I started exercising for entertainment of it. Like I have seen prisoners do on television. Without room or equipment the workouts consist of body weight motions like pushups, pull ups, burpees and the like. I do a little yoga as well for the peace of mind it brings me. The exercises feel more natural to me the more I do them. Even with rationing food and water I feel strong. It probably helps that my gut is shrinking. Pushups are easier the less you way after all.

    After a few short weeks of training like an inmate I think may be stronger then ever. I have worked out before and I could tell where my body should be after this amount of effort. Such huge gains in such a short period were nothing but unreal, magical even.

    I was procrastinating, like normal. It seems like even after the end of the world, I tended to put off what could be done today until tomorrow, or the next week. A decision must be made on what to do. Should I try another supply run? The last one ended in the death of my best friend. He had been killed by a creature out my nightmares. I lost track of time after that trip. I don¡¯t know how long I was unconscious from burn and blood loss after my return, but miraculously I lived through it.

    Oddly, my body actually felt stronger when I finished healing up. But that didn¡¯t make sense. Since when does injury make a body stronger rather than weaker? Nothing heals back perfectly. Our bodies remember injury and pain. Even all of my usual aches have faded into the background. Those old wounds and injuries that had stuck around for years, never truly healing no longer trouble me at all. My body used to be a roadmap of pain. I have taken so many impacts and broken multiple bones through the year that I could tell when it was going to rain just by the aches in my joints.

    Even the constant hurt of my lower back was no longer there. That sharp involuntary spasm of protesting muscles near my spine that protested whenever I moved my body in a motion it no longer wanted to was gone. None of those aches were disabling, but they were recognized as part of the aging process. Those types of pains are supposed to stay with you forever, until you finally give up to the pain and let yourself die. Now they have just faded into the background as if they never existed.

    I assume that the changes in my body have been caused by my exposure to the periwinkle light and whatever it contains that is causing the world to mutate. Hopefully all of these will be for the better, like my newly gained healing ability.

    I should be dead right now from the bite I sustained, but something kept alive instead. Something made me better. A chunk was missing from the meaty portion of my right forearm, a victim of the same creature that killed John. The wound was a mess and at the least I expected to have to amputate the forearm.

    I had no real expectation to survive more than a few days after receiving it. The lack of antibiotics and proper medical care should have been my my death. Judging from the horrid smell of the creature an infection should have overwhelmed me in no time. To my surprise the wound healed in just less than a week, fully. The bone could be seen in my arm and it healed with nary a scar in less than a week. Even the chunk of missing muscle in my forearm filled back in. Don¡¯t ask me where the extra mass originated. I assume it was from my tremendous belly.

    On a whole, other than my current loss of sanity, I feel fantastic.

    The series of decisions and phenomena that led up to the death of John, why I had to put a corpse in my non-functioning deep freezer, was currently locked in my basement, and was in the best shape of my life started about a little over a year ago when everyone on the planet earth heard the same Voice.

    It was not a voice like you would expect from a heavenly being, like God with a capitol G. No, that kind of voice would make you feel that hollowness in your chest, down deep into the pit of your stomach. That fear of death and of being completely insignificant in a universe that generally ignores your pathetic little existence. The force from that type of voice would likely have had the world down on the ground groveling for mercy and forgiveness.

    This Voice was not like that at all. It was a simple Voice and not even really that loud. The Voice¡¯s volume was soft, what a kindergarten teacher would refer to as an inside voice. Though soft, the Voice had strength. Whether they were in a crowded bar or all alone in the wilderness it had been extremely clear to everyone¡¯s ears. Although deep and masculine it was without inflection and feeling. It spoke to everyone in every language, but to no one did it sound like a native. The Voice was something you heard clearly, but did not believe it was directed at you. Nothing it said made anyone believe that it was human, but everyone instantly understood it.

    The Voice announced to all, ¡°You have been chosen to play the game. Prepare for change.¡±

    Back in my bunker, right after I saw red and committed my first murder, I heard the Voice again. It gave me an announcement.

    My name is Darren Desmond Slattery and I am level 2.

 Chapter 2 - Growing Up

    Chapter 2

    Slate

    Area of Fairfax, Ohio

    I wasn¡¯t always sitting atop the pinnacle of greatness, sometimes called level 2, like I am now. I started out a regular kid growing up with his grandparents. I was raised on their farm before they had to sell off most of the land to cover debts. They were able to keep the house, which I later inherited and live in today.

    I grew up in beautiful village of Fairfax, Ohio. Contrary to most of America¡¯s knowledge, there are still legitimate villages in the heartland. For some reason the great state of Ohio still uses the names from near the colonial age for their cities and towns and calls them, in order of size, townships, villages and cities. Fairfax barely meets the standard as far as villages go, being just above the required population of 1,600. It is a suburb of Cincinnati. I generally just tell everyone I am from Cinci¡¯ because only the locals know the village exists.

    This little village, like its name, was a throwback to an older era with an aging population. Most of the people in it were good. They were kind of folks that open doors for others and called their elder¡¯s sir. In Fairfax, if you drive up to a stop sign just a few moments after the person to the right of you stopped, expect them to wave you on through with a smile.

    I was always a big kid, a little taller and a little thicker than pretty much everyone my age. The farmers in my bloodline had passed down their heavy frames to me, leaving me with a thick barrel shaped torso, broad shoulders and big hands. My Grandma had some Native American Indian in her blood and luckily it over road the ginger in my almost pure Irish Grandfather. It left me with skin that would tan reasonably well in the summer and dark hair to go with my dark green eyes.

    My body has always been top heavy, with my legs just a bit shorter and skinnier than was proportionate. Most of my youth was spent in the gym doing squats to make up for it, as my upper body seemed to grow disproportionally stronger than my lower. Near continuous working out throughout my youth, into college and my short police career helped make me into the giant of a man I am today. Currently I am carrying around 300 pounds on my six foot seven inch frame. It used to be less, but beer is delicious.

    I would classify myself fairly intelligent but not overwhelmingly so. The problem was staying interested enough to learn. My remarkably short attention span causes my thought process jumped around a lot, making it hard for me to stay focused on the task at hand. It was enough smarts to breeze through high school with decent grades, but not enough to truly excel.

    I never really got into social relationships. It was awkward for me to talk to other people so I tended to avoid them altogether. I replaced childhood friendships with videogames, books, and comics. They sparked my imagination. I always liked the idea of being something more than human and they allowed me to live out my fantasies through escapism.

    By the time I got to high school I was well outside the social structure and my hobbies were not considered ¡°cool¡±. Out of some sort of misplaced angst I was afraid to share my interests and became a bit of a closet geek. I did my thing, but did not hang out with people like me. I just kept my head down, throughout high school and college. It was easy to avoid other people with my size. It¡¯s tough to start a conversation with a reclusive kid my size. It always kept people at a distance, like they were as uncomfortable around me as I was of them.

    At college I discovered the wonder that is beer. That delicious nectar of the gods and I became lifelong friends. Instead of keeping up on my studies I was generally drunk, playing video games, or both. I ended up taking three years to obtain an associate¡¯s degree in Criminal Justice and a hefty load of debt. I was ready for a change and was not looking forward to two more years of school, so I decided it was time to take a break from higher learning.

    When I started looking for jobs I learned that apparently the entire post-college world knows that getting a Criminal Justice Degree is a huge waste of time and money. What kind of bullshit is that? They advertise this program but there were no employers that would hire you for having it. I decided to try and become a police officer, thinking the CJ would help there at least. I found out quickly that most of the police agencies don¡¯t care what your degree is in. I actually seemed to get less credit for having a CJ. Without many other options, and wanting to have a job where I could help people, I became a cop anyways.Royal Road is the home of this novel. Visit there to read the original and support the author.

    Being a cop helped me come out of my shell and I became quite good at talking to people. I liked helping people, but I just didn¡¯t enjoy the headache that came with the position. A few years on the job was all it took to be able to write a book on what is wrong with America¡¯s justice system, the media and police in general. Like most young officers I become embittered and left the force within five years. The whole experience left me disgruntled with life in general and I turned to drinking to find some happiness.

    Honestly, I only lasted as long as I did on the job because of the plethora of tail it throws at you. Badge-bunnies were by far my favorite part of my work. Putting on the uniform was something else. A common saying amongst cops is that if you take off your police shirt, put it over a chair and leave it, sooner or later some girl is going to come along, rub on it, and try to fuck it.

    My grandparents had left me their house when they passed, so I owned a decent sized farmhouse, albeit without a farm. It was surrounded by other farms on the outskirts of Fairfax. After moving in I started binge drinking, fighting in bars and generally was a big fat lazy asshole for a while. I piled on the pounds, pushing 400 at one point, and played a lot of World of Warcraft.

    My neighbor, Horace Wilkerson, was the man to put me on what I thought would be the rest of my path through life. He hooked me up with a friend of his who worked construction and got me on his crew. I quickly adapted to the lifestyle and enjoyed the honest fulfillment of building things with my own hands. I don¡¯t know what it is, but something as simple as finishing out a bathroom really gave me a sense of completion. I found satisfaction with life that had been missing for some time. I was able to slow down on the binge drinking and eventually got invited back to some of the local pubs I had been kicked out of for being a jerk. The crew I worked with was great and one of them became the best friend I had ever had, Big Gay John.

    John Alders was one of the few people I had ever met that was bigger than me. Some had been taller and some were wider, but no one prior to John made me feel little. John was on another level entirely. The man was six foot ten inches tall and probably weighed 400 lbs. He reminded me a little of Andre the Giant except the man looked unreasonably good. He took a lot of pride in his appearance. Even before I knew he was gay I would describe him as having a cascading blond hair and blue eyes like the summer sky. John¡¯s good looks were something you would expect more on some famous celebrity seemed out of place on his gargantuan body.

    He was so big, that in some of the older houses we would remodel poor John would have to squat down and go sideways though the doors made for the smaller people of times past. It was neat watching the reactions of people when he passed them. The guy was lucky though, his looks stood out so much he did not get the normal questions that a tall guy like me got all the time. How tall are you? Do you play basketball?

    John and I hit it off right away and became great friends. Despite his size, and gayness, John was far more comfortable with himself than I will probably ever be. He had a presence, almost an aura of command, which made people look to him for guidance. Even with my newfound peace with my place in the world, I still talked a lot of issues out with John. These were not long conversations with both of us talking equally. They generally more one sided, where I would rant about perceived injustices and he would calm me down, give me some advice and call me an idiot. He was also a consistent drinking buddy and we would go out a few times a month. Of course, the excursions generally consist of me getting obnoxiously drunk while he watched, but they were fun.

    Big John eventually recommended yoga and simple meditation to help with my anger issues I had developed from being a cop. Surprisingly enough it seemed to work. I was not willing to subject any person to watching a 400 pound fat ass do yoga, so I learned it from videos and practiced at home. It was a surprisingly good workout and my extra pounds began to fade away.

    About 6 months after working on the crew I figured out John was gay when he introduced me to his boyfriend. I was a little shocked to say the least. I should have notice earlier, but I tend to miss a lot of obvious stuff. Probably because of the way my brain works, hopping from one subject to the next in no rational order keeps me distracted. It sometimes causes me to miss the obvious.

    Eric was averaged sized, maybe six foot even and 180 pounds. The man still looked tiny beside John. Eric was a lawyer who worked in Cincinnati and looked to be about the complete opposite of John. Eric had the delicate features that I tended to associate with effeminate gay males and was openly flamboyant. For a huge flamer, Eric was not that bad of a guy. He was honest to a fault, which was very refreshing. As for the whole gay thing, I figure to each their own. Not for me, but there is too much pain and suffering in this world to not attempt to find your own bliss.

    Thinking back, I never actually called him Big Gay John to his face, but I¡¯ll be dammed if I didn¡¯t think it every time I saw him.

    Life was good. I didn¡¯t make a ton of money working construction, but it was good honest work that left me feeling complete at the end of the day. I trimmed down my weight to a sleek, even three hundo and even though I was still rotund, I felt pretty good about it.

    John was with me when I met Jessica Bates. Hell, he was probably the only reason she initially gave me a chance. She was the longest relationship I ever had, which meant it lasted about a year officially. She finally got tired of my late night carousing in the bars and my unreasonable addiction to video games gave me an ultimatum telling me it was them or her. ¡°Bitch I told you to play the games with me.¡± Is apparently not the correct reply when a woman is screaming at you to choose her over a bunch of pixels? Who would have known.

    I really did love her though and she loved me from what I could tell. After our ¡°break up¡± We became more like friendly fuck-buddies and called each other when we wanted sex, or even just to hang out. It felt like she was waiting for me to finish growing up so she could settle down with me and start a family knew there was not room for another in my life right then.

 Chapter 3 - The Voice

    Chapter 3 ¨C

    Slate

    Fairfax, Ohio

    I was approaching 30 years old when the world first heard the Voice. John¡¯s big ass is not allowed on roofs so he was handing me shingles. Being abnormally tall, he didn¡¯t even need a ladder. Hell I probably should be up the roof either but we were short today and only had John, myself and Miguel, a small Mexican man who worked twice as hard as everyone else, were there. We were at the transition point of the handoff when it spoke.

    I could not tell where the Voice originated but it was amazingly clear. It said in a clear tone, ¡°You have been chosen to play a game. Prepare for change.¡±

    Apparently John had heard it to because we both jumped a little, causing us to lose control of the 80 pound bundle. It dropped, hitting the earth with a noisy boom. You would not thing that a person as large as John could move so fast, but he practically danced to avoid being struck.

    ¡°What the fuck,¡± John exclaimed. ¡°Did you hear that?¡±

    ¡°Yea,¡± I replied. ¡°Something about being chosen to play a game.¡±

    Miguel came to our side of the roof told us that he had heard the Voice too, but couldn¡¯t find who was speaking. The rancher style house was only one story tall, maybe 9 feet high at the gutters, but it was at least 90 feet long. Miquel shouldn¡¯t have heard the same Voice John and I had from 50 feet away and on the other side of the pitch. It had not been loud enough.

    ¡°Hey Miguel, what did you hear,¡± I asked.

    ¡°I was chosen to play a game. I was hammering and wasn¡¯t really paying attention. I am surprised I heard it at all, who said it?¡± He answered. ¡°I know you two gringos do not speak Spanish anyways.¡±

    ¡°What are you talking about? I heard it in good old fashioned American,¡± John replied with a grin. The two were always going back and forth in good natured ribbing about the differences in Hispanic and American culture.

    ¡°Like I have told you before you gigante,¡± Miguel shot back. ¡°No one speaks American around here, they speak English. Is anyone else around here?.¡±

    We looked around the house but didn¡¯t see anybody. . Oddly, my ears popped a little and a chilly breeze ran across the hot rooftop. The sky lit up and we briefly saw a second sun appear. It only lasted a few moments before fading away. I was starting to get a little afraid at this point and ignored Miquel and John¡¯s exclamations and following conversation as I pulled up the area news app. The app was not used often, because fuck the media, but I needed to know what was happening.

    The app already had a story about the Voice. It only had a couple lines, but it said that the entire world seems to have heard it. The phone locked up and had to be restarted. At the same time the air compressor for the nail gun turned off but started back up shortly later, as if the power had flickered in the area.Support the author by searching for the original publication of this novel.

    The customer was not home so we didn¡¯t knock on the door to see if there was anything more on the TV. After a brief discussion we decided to complete the job rather than drive back to town 20 minutes away. We were blue collar men who needed the money that would come from the project, so we continued to work until it was finished.

    The drive home through Fairfax it was unusually busy. The parking lot at the supermarket was full of people loading up their cars from full buggies. I passed one of my favorite bars and stopped in. Buffalo wings to help wash some beer seemed like a great idea, and it was all you can eat wing night. I like to keep the restaurant industry in check on their buffet style set ups by raising the bar and putting away 40 wings or so.

    The bar was almost entirely empty. Only one old drunk seated and he was hunched over, nursing a beer in the corner as sat down in front of the bartender. He was watching one of the many televisions on the walls and looked up as the padded stool groaned under my weight. I looked to see what was on and temporarily set aside my disdain for the media. All visible channels were talking about Voice and following phenomena. I found myself holding my breath as I gazed upon what had happened to the world.

    A video someone had taken from a cell phone of a second sun burning in the sky played in a loop upon most screens. The anchor¡¯s reported that every person all over the world had heard the voice, including people who were deaf. Various experts of every field, religion and belief gave theories on where it came from. Be it angel, demon, aliens or God, but it was all conjecture and no one had any idea what was going on.

    About half of the world had their electronics shut down momentarily. The same half that saw the second sun in the sky. It sparked theories that this event had started in outer space and only the side of earth facing the event were affected by it. Electronics had started back up normally and appeared to all be fine now but the effects were a lot more severe than resetting the clocks at the house. At any time in America it was estimated that 5000 planes were in the air at any one time. Like my phone from earlier, every one of those planes had lost power. Most of them had been able to restart and save their passengers, but many had not. The news was reporting that there have been around 500 crashes of commercial flights causing an unknown amount of death and injuries. There were also industrial accidents, car wrecks and other havoc caused by the temporary blackout. The death toll counter on the screens rose as the President declared a state of emergency for the nation.

    There had been several major plane crashes at airports and throughout the state of Ohio, including one Bowing 747 full of passengers that had been in the process of taking off at the Cincinnati / Northern Kentucky International Airport. There were no reported survivors of the crash and crews were still on scene cleaning up. All modes of public transportation had been suspended. Nothing was moving until it was certain that the passengers would be safe.

    Reporters began to state that the president would address the nation soon to speak of the event and its aftermath. The news switched to people making runs on supermarkets and gas stations. After we had a storm come through a few years back and everyone had done the same thing. I have kept the house stocked at all times with a week¡¯s worth non-perishable food ever since, so I was good for now. The news was also predicting looting and violence to begin as night fell across the nation as the less savory of our citizens began to realize police resources were strained to the max.

    The screens all cut out to an emergency announcement screen and then the presidential logo. A few minutes later the screens showed the presidential podium and the man himself, Barack Obama, walked up to it. He gave an inspiring speech about working together through crisis and finding out the nature of the Voice, but did not provide any new information.

    I got on my phone and tried to call John but all circuits were busy. It was the same when I tried to call Jessica a little while later. I texted them both asking if they were ok and got positive replies from both. I thought about trying to get to the grocery store to stock up on some extra food like the rest of the herd but realized that it was way too far behind in the game to do that. Thinking that this would get worse before it got better, I decided that fortifying my property would be good idea. I could always hunt some if I needed more food, Ohio has a lot of white tail deer, but I needed something quieter than a gun to poach them with. I decided to head to the store and buy a bow.

    I went to a local gun store and maxed out my credit cards buying both a crossbow and a compound bow. I also decided to pickup a new shot gun and an AR-15 as well. I would need a few long guns if this got worse. I also bought up all the beef jerky the store had in stock, and a few cases of water. I made a stop by Home Depot and picked up a load of lumber that I may need to secure my house before heading home. The rest of the evening was spent organizing my purchases and then waited to see what would happen next.

 Chapter 4 - Repercussions

    Chapter 4,

    Slate

    The world went crazy. In the following weeks and months religious and race wars tore across the Middle East and Africa. Well, more than normal anyways. India and China, the world¡¯s two most populous countries, finally went to war and an estimated 300 million people have been killed so far. The EU did ok for the most part, with only the occasional military coup taking place. Several South American governments were torn down and rebuilt, or just plain taken by cartels. Russia closed its borders and no one is really sure what is happening there. I am sure Putin was still riding grizzly bears shirtless while his photographer follows him around, but there was a media blackout from the country.

    America had its own problems. Riots and looters burned through almost every major city and a state of Martial Law was declared across the nation. With the amount of strife at home and abroad America ceased all overseas military activities and shipped all the troops back to protect the homeland from itself. After several months of strife and food shortages, people seemed to realize that the world was not actually ending. After about six months, America finally started returning to normal. The masses either forgot about or ignored the fact that the voice had ever spoke at all.

    Jessica moved in during the strife and we rode most of it out at my house. There were some hard times, but we didn¡¯t go hungry. I ended up poaching a couple of deer, enough that I got tired of hunting with a rifle and went out once with the crossbow. Walking home, I tripped and fell on the damn thing, breaking it. I thought about getting it replaced or fixed, but never got around to it. Practicing with the compound bow became a fun diversion. I became able to accurately hit a stationary target at up to 40-50 yards with some consistency. Jessica and I would have competitions on who could shoot the best, the loser having to pay out in various ways. That usually ended up being pretty fun for both of us.

    My job did not start up again until the unrest was over, but by then there were far more jobs out there than we could hope to complete. Jessica ended up moving back to her place after we started to have our regular fights and arguments. Funny how the fear of dying alone made us get along, but once it was gone the little shit that made up our daily lives pushed us back apart. Once she was gone, I needed a project to keep myself occupied and decided to turn my basement into a semi-fortified bunker in case the collapse happened again. Prepping had became a new fashion across the land, and I got caught up in it as well.

    To be honest, the worst thing that happened to me throughout the entire crisis was that I was forced to take a roommate at the end of it. I had really been hoping that the credit companies would crash and burn, but since they didn¡¯t I owed them big.

    My new roommate, Seth Brian Eggleton, moved in a month or so later. Seth¡¯s apartment had burned down during the upheaval and he had been forced to move in with his parents. Now that everything was settled down he was ready to get back out. Seth called himself a video blogger. I watched a few of his shows and thought he was more of a dick than anything else. He was the kind of guy you saw on YouTube treating others like crap and you immediately just hated. The general public seems to be a bunch of morons though, because Seth was insanely popular in some circles. The little bastard had about 200,000 subscribers watching his antics.If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.

    I was eventually the star of his most viewed video and his first viral. Just having woken up after working an 18 hour shift, I was mostly asleep as I walked into the kitchen to make my morning coffee. I was wearing only boxers and a wife beater at the time. Without warning, my bare feet flew out from under me and fell on the floor hard. Seth popped up with a camera laughing. He cackled about how he had buttered the floor and had ¡°got me good¡±. All I saw for the next few moments was red as I went after him.

    Later I saw the video, and this is what it showed. First there is my fat ass hitting the floor like a ton of bricks with some annoying little shit in the background laughing. Then, like a pig wallowing in mud I slip and slide around until I am able to get back on my feet. Face flushed, with proverbial steam coming from my ears, I charged at the cameraman as he starts to run away. The camera goes flying and hits the ground to catch me and Seth at an angle. I then grabbed Seth like a cartoon bouncer would throw someone from a club and launched him through the air about 10 feet out into the yard. He hit the ground hard due to the three foot drop at the end of the porch and lay there sputtering.

    I went back inside and Seth came in several minutes later. That asshole wasn¡¯t even mad, he had a big smile on his face. He was holding his wrist like he had sprained it, but ignored the pain while talked about it being his best video yet. He was right, it got around three million hits over the next month.

    With the extra money from Seth¡¯s rent and what I was making working long hours, I was able to purchase and install a few things in the bunker. Heavy duty metal frames and solid metal doors were placed on the exterior and interior access the bunker. Both had slats for two by fours to drop behind the doors to reinforce them further. A decent generator and battery set up that could run on natural gas was hooked up to the electrical system. I built a cinderblock shed covering it outside and ran the wires through the ground and into the house to keep it secure.

    Some cleaning and minor interior work was completed to rough out the living space. I hooked up an electric pump to run from an old ground well that was not used anymore and connected it to the downstairs plumbing. A small kitchenette with a medium sized faucet, a natural gas stove top, and a decent sized deep freezer rounded out the appliances in the basement. The rest of my money was spent on an old gun safe and a lot of ammunition for in .223, .40 and 12 guage. I kept up with the bow shooting because it was enjoyable, but didn¡¯t replace any of the shafts that broke while during training.

    I started loading up the basement with all the food I could afford. Most of it was dried long term food, or canned. I did not stock up on water because I figured that the well wouldn¡¯t run out of water. An antenna on the roof allowed for basic TV in the basement. After I dragged a chair and an old full size bed down there, and connected my Xbox and PS3, I thought myself fairly well prepared.

    Around the world there were a lot of groups preparing their own fortresses with provisions. Prepping had always been a thing, but it really took off among the rich and influential people now that they were shocked into believing that chaos could happen at any time. Entirecompounds popped up in a surprisingly short amount of time. Many were in places that people knew about, but some were hidden away underground or in the mountains. There were websites dedicated to tracking doomsday hideouts and where they were, as well as sites dedicated to the best set ups.

    I thought I was ready, as prepared as you could get without spending tons of money. I thought that the effort and planning put into my underground fortress would be enough. Sure there was more that could have been done, and if there had been more time many things would have been added to the basement, but the time ran out. When the event happened, I realized that I should have worked harder and prepared more. But no amount of preparation, physical or mental, can ever fully prepare you to watch the world burn.

 Chapter 5 - The beginning of the End

    Chapter 5,

    Slate

    Then the end of the world actually happened. It started just over a year from the first time the world heard the Voice. I had just finished a hard day at work and picked up a twelve pack, which I intended to drink most of, when the world started to change. The thing people noticed first was the purple tinge that pushed the blue out of the sky. It started out a dark violet and quickly spread across the horizon. It crept lower and became a lighter color, turning into my dreaded periwinkle as clouds took over the horizon. John and I were both at the same store, having stopped for the same reasons and noticed the change on our way out.

    ¡°John, I don¡¯t know what the hell is going on, but this is probably what that voice talked about a year ago.¡± I muttered.

    ¡°No shit,¡± He replied, looking a combination of scared and angry. ¡°Eric is in Pittsburgh, I won¡¯t be able to get to him.¡±

    ¡°I am sure he¡¯ll be ok and come back as soon as he can. I say we go back inside and buy all the beer in this fucking store. Then let¡¯s go to my place? You know I have set up my basement for something like this.¡±

    ¡°Slate you may be a dumbass, but I like your attitude. Let¡¯s buy everything we can though, food is important.¡± John replied.

    So we loaded up on chips, candy, junk food, beer, and even purchased the unreasonably expensive canned and dry foods that they had in stock. Our two trucks were loaded up with most stores stock as we pulled away. As we were headed to my place I tried to call Jessica. We had discussed plans for another major event like this and decided that she should come over like last time. We may not be able to live with each other when the world is normal, but when push came to shove, we wanted to be by each other¡¯s sides during catastrophe.

    We had not changed much, she was still ¡®shopping around¡¯ when it came to guys and I was still playing video games and cussing kids out online while in my underwear. But we both spent a few nights a week at my place or hers. To be honest, the relationship was working great. There was the small chance to lose her to a guy she decided to start dating which was slightly frustrating, but I loved the no expectations attitude way we treated each other. I would be nice to her just because I wanted to, buying presents on a holiday or birthday not because society said so, but because I honestly wanted to do something nice for her. It was peaceful not to do the traditional boyfriend-girlfriend dance, and we were able to avoid most of the preconceptions that went along with that.

    We unloaded our trucks into the house and went back out front. Standing on the front porch we watched silently as the freakish purple took over the world. With visual confirmation of a possible upcoming apocalypse, the world was surely going to freak out way worse than the last time when it had only heard the Voice. This was it, this was the end of modern society. I wondered how far humanity would regress, what it would take for people to recover. Looking back, even my doomsday thoughts were mild compared to what actually happened.

    I sat at the edge of the steps, opened a beer first for me and another for John. I handed him a cool refreshing can of Heinikan and said ¡°Beer at the end of the world John?¡±

    ¡°Don¡¯t mind if I do,¡± he replied, sitting next to me. ¡°So how is secure is basement?¡±

    ¡°It¡¯s a bunker John, not a basement. It¡¯s not too shabby. Food for six months on top of what we got today, well water, and a natural gas generator that should run for a while even if the power plants shut down. I have a ton of ammo to go with my guns if it gets bad enough to have to fight off looters.¡±If you come across this story on Amazon, it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.

    He looked over at me and nodded and we sat in silence some more.

    ¡°So Eric is still in Pittsburg?¡± I eventually asked.

    He looked sad when he replied ¡°Yes.¡±

    We both knew with what was coming, the four and a half hour drive to Pittsburgh may has well have been across the world. John had his cell phone out and was continually calling Eric¡¯s number like I was trying to reach Jess, but the circuits all stayed busy. He tried to send him a text, but either it did not go through or it wasn¡¯t working all together.

    ¡°Don¡¯t think we are going to hug or anything, but I am glad you are here,¡± I offered. ¡°I could use the company.¡±

    He thought about it for a long while before agreeing. ¡°Yea, no hugging. You generally smell like shit anyways¡±

    We stayed outside and finished another beer in companionable silence. I did not have any living family to worry about. There was just Jess, and was hoping that she would just show up soon. John on the other hand still had his parents down in Georgia and a sister in Tennessee. I knew he must be thinking about them as well as his boyfriend.

    ¡°If you¡¯re staying, we¡¯re going to need to move another bed into the basement. I am not sure if I trust you in mine,¡± I joked. ¡°End of the World, last guy on earth and all.¡±

    John gave a sad smile. He knew I was only trying to cheer him up a little and take his mind off his loved ones. In all reality, unless this change was short lived he would never see his loved ones again. We did not know at the time what the world would become, but we knew no one would be driving anywhere casually for a long time. I could not imagine how he must have felt.

    ¡°I assume this is part of that game the voice spoke of a while back. All though I¡¯ll be damned if I know what the hell we¡¯re playing,¡± Stating the obvious, I spent my last few moments on the porch wondering if I had done enough to get ready. Even while preparing, I always assumed it would only be for a short term event, such as we had gone through the year before. It was awful, but eventually society had reinstated itself and life went back to normal. I was not prepared for the long haul and hoped the minor preparations would keep us alive. I knew that he would eat half my food, but damn was I glad John was here. Surviving might not be worth it if I did it alone.

    We sat outside in silence until the purple touched us. We both started to notice the ill effects immediately. It felt like we had been dipped into dirty water and came out again, with the oily film that floated atop clinging to us.

    ¡°Can you feel that too John?¡±

    ¡°Yea.¡±

    ¡°Well, this shit can¡¯t be good for us, we outta get moving.¡±

    ¡°Yea.¡±

    I got up quickly and made my way inside. There were still a few things to move downstairs. The PlayStation and Xbox were already set up, priorities after all, so I snagged the laptop next. I brought down some more blankets, towels and toiletries. Plenty of toilet paper had been stashed, but I didn¡¯t think to get extra tooth paste or deodorant. I was starting to drag down the second bed when John came in and lifted the other half of it in with one his huge mitts. We got it downstairs and on its frame, and left the sheets on top of it for later. I grabbed a bunch of clothes, some of which John should fit into, and left them in boxes on the floor of the basement.

    John and I boarded up the house and left up some premade signs I had made. They read, in various ways, ¡°This house is trapped, proceed if you want to get shot¡±, ¡°Trespassers will be executed¡±. I was going for the gun nut hermit vibe to keep looters away. I only locked the back door and front door after boarding up the window panes on them. I wanted to be able to get out if some dumbass lit the house on fire. My bunker wasn¡¯t fire proof; after all it was really just a basement.

    After we had moved downstairs and locked up steel doors we noticed that the purple was starting to come through the glass well windows. It still burned after being filtered by the glass. When working midnight shifts on the police department that I learned to cut up cardboard and put aluminum foil on the outside and place them in the windows for covers. If you got a good seal it would cut off all light from the outside. I told John about this and we cut up some boxes and got to making seals on the windows. We did a good job with it, putting them in place with the universal sealant, duct tape. By the time we finished, our skin was red and irritated from the exposure. Finished for now, we pulled up chairs in front of the TV.

    The news showed the end of our world.

 Chapter 6 - The World Burns

    Chapter 6 ¨C

    Slate

    The chaos that occurred the first time was only a precursor to what was happening now. Newly rebuilt cities were already burning after a few hours and nothing was being done to contain the damage. Most civilian emergency service workers had quit to go home with their families rather than attempt to control the civil unrest. It is one thing to risk your neck for 20 bucks an hour to help others knowing your family was safe, but another all together to leave them alone to fend for themselves when you could be there to help. I couldn¡¯t blame them, I would have quit too.

    There was one shot of an idiot reporter who standing in the purple shit describing how his skin was burning off. We watched small circular wounds open on his body as though the light was eating through his skin, pulling it apart at the seams. For all my hate of the media, I did appreciate that some of them were staying to do their jobs now. They were more dedicated to their work than I was. For the rest of the night we stayed transfixed in front of the TV and continued to attempt to contact our loved ones to no avail.

    Big John was able make contact with Eric via email and they conversed in a chat room late in the evening. They had tried Skype but it was not functioning, the servers were all too busy. He told John that he had gone home with a partner of the firm he was working and would stay there for the duration. Eric told John not worry about him and to take care of himself. There was a sad look on John¡¯s face and he wiped away silent tears as he typed with Eric. I sent an email to Jessica as well, but had not received a response. John pecking away at the key board serenaded me into an uneasy sleep well after midnight.

    The second day while we were watching the news there was a banging on the steel door of the bunker that lead up into the house and we heard Seth yelling for me to let him in. Pissed off, because I was hoping the idiot had got himself stuck somewhere and was never coming back to my home again, I went to the door. I was not going to let him die upstairs even if he was a huge douche-noggle, so he was allowed in. He was wearing long sleeve clothing with a hat and sunglasses but had still sustained some raw and angry burns from the light.

    ¡°Oh my God!¡± He said. ¡°It is nuts out there.¡± Seth brought down a suitcase loaded with clothes, camera and laptop. ¡°This is going to be my big break. After the episodes I do surviving this I am going to be so famous!¡±

    I snorted. ¡°Seth you moron this is the end of the world. We are all probably going to die down here.¡± That idiot risked his life to get to us not because I had food, but because his equipment was here.

    ¡°Yea right,¡± He replied, his voice dripping with sarcasm. ¡°This will be just like last time, a couple of months and then everything will be back to normal. Well if me being famous is the new normal.¡±

    ¡°Whatever, well if your celebrity ass doesn¡¯t want to sleep on the floor you need to go upstairs and get something to make bed out of. My spare is already down here for John, and yours won¡¯t fit.¡± I motioned to the quite man hunched over the laptop, making it look like a child¡¯s toy as he typed away with his oversized hands.

    Seth dropped what he had and made a couple of quick runs upstairs to grab some cushions and bedding. I stood guard by the door while he went back and forth. He made a nest in the corner and began deliberately making it look messier than it needed to be. He jumped on the floor landing headfirst with his elbows out. I looked over wondering what the heck he was doing. He grinned as he stood up and showed me his bloody elbows and began to smear some of the blood around his head and neck.

    After setting up he began to stream about his situation, telling the camera that he was stuck in the basement of an abandoned house with two strangers. He went on to tell obviously an obviously made up horror story on his fight for survival thus far. I chuckled and told him that if he mentioned where he was, that he would not live to make it to the end of the story. Seth looked at me with angry eyes but nodded. Not sure if he believed me, and also not sure how far I was willing to go to keep my bunker a secret, but I put the threat out there anyways.

    The second day had far fewer reporters and they no longer cut to discussions with high paid consultants. A few stations mentioned that most of them were unavailable due to the chaos. The new info was that contact with the light might have a mutating side effect as well as the obvious one of burning your skin off. The news flashed around from city to city showing entire towns burning in the night as no fire departments even attempted to fight the blazes. Most local news stations were already down and reports were coming in that the military was falling apart. The president did a quick address in the afternoon, he re-enacted Marshall Law like the year before and made some stupid safety comments like, stay inside, don¡¯t stand in the burning light, etc.

    I ignored him because every idiot knows not to stand in fire, right?

    I received an email back from Jessica who said that she was at a friend¡¯s in her apartment complex. She wrote that she was going to wait out the initial craziness there and we could try to meet up in a few days. I wrote back that I would come and get her with John, but she told me to stay put and would not tell me what apartment she was in. Damn that stubborn woman. I wanted to keep her safe but she wouldn¡¯t let me. Scared that she would cut off contact with me, I gave her a whole list of do¡¯s and don¡¯ts. I told her to not open her door to strangers, cover the windows, be quiet, fill up the bathtub with water, and whole lot of other advice that may or may not have been useless. I am sure she ignored most of it, but it made me feel like I could help her.

    The news was sparse the third day and many stations went off the air.The emergency broad cast system message played across the empty screens. Occasionally a message would scroll across the screen, advising to stay inside, don¡¯t touch the light, and beware of animals. The caution to beware of animals was new and since the internet was still working we scoured it for updates. Bloggers and some web news sites that were still functioning so we stayed connected to the outside world a while longer.

    The videos we started to watch looked like they were horror movies. Animals and people looked to have gone insane from the exposure to the periwinkle. Animals, even herbivores, began attacking people. I saw a video of a buck who¡¯s skin was sloughing off charge down a man and stab him clear through with his eight point rack of antlers. Although it should not have been possible, the deer picked the man up and ran with him on his rack for quite some ways before dumping him on the ground. The deer proceeded to kick and stomp on the corpse for several minutes before it bent down low over him. The video was shot from a cell phone pretty far away, but I think it was eating him.

    The human aspect was a lot worse. There were videos with masses of people fighting in the streets. They were literally tearing each other apart with their bare hands. Some grouped up on single opponents, quickly killing them and then moving on like a pack of predators. They were also feeding on the victims. There were still people who looked mostly normal others were changing in frightful ways. For the most part the particulars of their mutations seemed random. Some had mild to severe changes in skin color across the spectrum. Some had giant tumor like growths on part of their bodies or a disproportionally large limb. Some resembled ghouls, with claw like protrusions at the ends of their fingers and moving about more on four limbs than two.

    One guy I saw leading a pack of the feral humans had light green skin and his head was mutated to where it was unusually large for his body. He looked like some comic book villain with an enlarged brain. When feral met feral in the open battles fight was always to the death. There were still cases where normal looking people without defects were seen running away from the packs. Most of those targeted by an organized pack died, but some who were singled out by solo monsters actually looked like they got away.

    I looked over at John where he was seated next to me. Both of us were hunched over trying watch the screen on the same laptop. I imagined we looked like two movie goons watching the hero take out our fellow bad guys on a security video the while making his way to us.

    Even though I was scared to death, I did not have the ability to shut up.

    ¡°See? Zombie apocalypse bro,¡± I taunted John. ¡°What have I been saying was going to happen since this whole thing started? Now remember, rule number one is cardio. Gotta get you into shape big guy.¡±

    John did not deign to reply as he glanced over at me shortly and let his eyes return to the computer screen. Ok, maybe that was a little inappropriate.The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.

    ¡°I am sure he will be all right¡± I said in a half-hearted attempt to cheer him up. John was not speaking much over the past few days, but he was not overly talkative to begin with. He usually took a while to warm up to someone, but when he did he would usually add to any intelligent conversation. Of course I tend to run off at the mouth sometimes. I refer to my condition diarrhea of the mouth, so I didn¡¯t expect any response.

    I grabbed one of my last remaining Heinekens and began to drink it warm. I had not dragged the refrigerator downstairs because I thought it would be too much of a drain on our energy supply. There wasn¡¯t much in the way of perishable food anyways. It was going to be sad when we ran out of good beer. Luckily we had stocked up so we still beer, but running out was going to suck.

    The lights flickered for a moment and I heard the generator kicking on. That meant the city power grid just went down. I did not have everything in the basement powered by the generator and I tested my theory by flipping one of the out of network light switches. It failed to turn on. While preparing my bunker I had purchased some large batteries and rigged them into a power bank based on information I had found online. The idea was that you could save your generator and extend your fuel by running it enough to fill up the storage and then just filling it up again when it got low. It was working well and I wondered how long it would last.

    The news over the web was reporting massive power outages everywhere and I doubted we would see the power back on anytime soon if ever. That¡¯s why I had decided on hooking the generator up to natural gas rather than fuel. The gas lines ran on pressure, and I was hoping that the air compressors that moved the air were fed by the same gas that they moved. I tried to google it but never found it out. I could not have afforded to store the amount of fuel needed to keep the lights on otherwise, even with the extra money I was getting from Seth.

    Financially I was kind of lucky that the world was ending. Most of the money spent I did not have, and I was floating around the debt on credit cards at the moment. If the world had not ended in the next year or so I probably would have went into collections on a lot of them. That¡¯s right ¡°Fuck you student loans¡± I muttered. John and even Seth glance over at me like I was a nutball. Oh well. I never was the most mentally stable of guys and the periwinkle apocalypse was not helping.

    I don¡¯t know why or how, but for some reason the internet stayed up longer than the power. We routinely checked the FEMA website which had minor daily updates. They still recommended everyone to stay inside, stay away from other people and animals, to stay out of the light and basic stuff any idiot should realize instantly. They had mentioned that they were organizing for rescue squads to deploy after the violence was contained. I did not believe that because videos were starting to pop up of fights on military bases with mutated soldiers attacking each other. Luckily the mutated ones attacked themselves as well and did not seem to single out normal humans.

    Hopefully they would eventually kill themselves off if we could just keep isolated from them long enough. The military mutants were smart enough to use firearms, but were too aggressive to be very tactical. The normal military survivors were able to take advantage of cover and basic maneuvering to over whelm their opposition in most cases. Unfortunately there seemed to be a lot more mutated soldiers than not so no one was sure who would win the war of attrition.

    Seth thought that day 5 would be a good day to play a joke on John. I thought he had learned his lesson when pranked me and got tossed, but apparently he thought it would be a good idea to bother someone a third again my size. Without being able to set up something elaborate, Seth had simply sat a bowl of water on John¡¯s bed and placed one of his hands in it. The enormous paw would not even fit entirely in the bowl. John moved in his sleep and spilled the water, waking himself up. I had been playing on the laptop and did not notice it when it happened.

    I guess John must have seen him with that stupid ass camera. I heard John roar and stand up and saw him grab Seth by the neck. John¡¯s hands are so big, that the finger tips actually overlapped with his thumb, a real life Homer and Bart Simpson moment. I started laughing but noticed that Seth was sputtering and turning blue. I went and grabbed John¡¯s arm trying to get him to calm down. I hung on it trying to pull it down but don¡¯t think John even noticed I was there for a few seconds. He eventually did though and sat Seth down in a daze.

    Seth collapsed to the floor gasping for breath like a fish out of water. He coughed a few times while the blood came back to his face. For a moment Seth looked enraged by John¡¯s response. He opened his mouth in preparation to what I guessed would be calling John derogatory names and possibly insulting his ancestry. Not about to save Seth a second time and I settled down to watch the show. Seth looked like a light bulb clicked on and calmed down while mutting, ¡°This is going to be even better than last time!¡±

    Seth ran to his computer and huddled in front of it. I got John settled down and he fell heavily back onto his bed. I handed him the laptop and he got busy typing to Eric. Eric was still alive but there had been some issues in the neighborhood he was staying in. The colleague he was staying with had prepared a little by stockpiling some food, and had a generator, but there were not any guns in the house and no way to secure many of the entrances. Afraid of being attacked, they had been keeping the lights off upstairs and staying in the basement.

    I went over to Seth and got his attention.

    ¡°You know we are going to be stuck in this basement with John for quite some time and he is worried about his friends and family. We are all under a lot of stress as a matter of fact. No more playing pranks Seth. I am letting you in here and feeding you my food but I have no obligation to do so other than basic human decency. This is my home, and I expect you to respect it and me by behaving like an adult.¡±

    ¡°Whatever,¡± Seth shot back. ¡°You can¡¯t kick me out of here any ways. I would just tell everyone where we are.¡± Seth had a smug look on his face when he turned around to his computer and began typing on it again.

    Just like that I was infuriated. I let that ingrate son of a bitch into my bunker, fed him and kept him safe. He would most likely otherwise be dead and this is how he wants to treat me? I knew I was on the edge of doing something drastic and walked over and sat on my bed thinking about my options. This was the first time I ever seriously contemplated murder, but I knew enough not to do it on impulse.

    I understand that I tend to brood over subjects. Over-thinking things to the point where I focus so much on certain details that I forget ignore common sense. Right now, I was weighing the potential risks killing Seth, be it kicking him out of the bunker or outright murder, verses the gains of having him gone. Having him gone would keep the stress down a lot, that¡¯s for sure. It would also be less of a strain on my limited amount of food, and more importantly the beer. John and I on limited rations could probably make six months of food for one person last about four for the both of us. During that time, if we could handle it, we could safely stay in the basement waiting on the shit-storm upstairs to end.

    Exiling Seth would just be too much of a risk. He could do something stupid like set my house on fire and put the video on YouTube. With the poisonous atmosphere outside we wouldn¡¯t be able to watch for his return. If he able to stay alive long enough to find another group of survivors, he would tell them about our place. I am sure that in a few weeks the world would be out of easily accessible food and everyone would be struggling to survive. People would be searching for resources and would quickly come our way.

    There was also the long shot that society was restored. In that case if I straight up murdered him I could spend the rest of my life in prison.

    We needed to bunker down and wait until the worst was over. The weak and unprepared would die off or be killed by other survivors and we would only come out when most of the mayhem was over. Yea yea, I don¡¯t want people to die, but what could I do to prevent it? With people turning into insane cannibals we did not want to go out until they had slaughtered off most of their kind.

    But I also needed to go out. I had not been able to get in contact with Jessica and although it tore me apart inside, I had not after her. The chance of surviving to save her with 2.1 million people turned monster in the city was like a snowballs chance in Hell. John also would not let me go alone, and I could not risk his life without even knowing what apartment she was in.

    The world was fucked and murder was on my mind, but instead of killing anyone I just sat on my bed brooding and thinking deep and ominous thoughts.

    Unable to sit there any longer, I got up and started pacing. John and Seth glanced at me but went back to their screens after a few moments. Deciding to burn some of the angry energy and I began to do a body weight workout. After 45 minutes I was pleasantly exhausted and I drank some water and sat down in the corner for some light stretching. After cooling down I gathered myself into the lotus pose and attempted to meditate. I couldn¡¯t reach Zen that day because I just couldn¡¯t focus out the typing on the computers, let alone the occasional grunt of the generator kicking on and the snorts of derision coming from Seth¡¯s corner. Oh well, I tried, time for some more beer.

    The internet shut down on day eight. We were all in a shell shocked state after our last line of communication with the outside world as cut. It didn¡¯t help that we had most of a conveyance store¡¯s worth of beer and had spent most of the week drunk. I talked with John about what we could do, but the big fellow had fallen into a depressed state and wouldn¡¯t reply. We both knew that we were stuck here until the purple lifted or we ran out of food. I continued with my workouts and meditation, getting stronger even with the alcohol in my system.

    Until day 44 we did not have it that bad. Seth, who had taken the fall of the internet harsher than the rest of us, had opened up and become a fairly decent sort to live with. I never forgot his threats, and still thought about killing him occasionally, but most of the rage faded with time. We played video games, a lot, and ended up running out of beer. I mostly had single player games so we would have to rotate, but with no other entertainment available it becomes pretty fun to watch someone else save the universe in Mass Effect 2. I continued to work out and meditate, and got better at focusing out the others in the room. I was starting to get in really good shape and was trimming up a little. The only thing memorable that happened during that time was that the earth had become completely covered in clouds. They spat lighting back and forth and we could no longer tell day from night without the clocks.

    On day 45 the generator stopped kicking on. The problem was that without the generator we would run out of water fairly quick. I cursed myself for not buying a hand pump for the well to put in the basement and spoke briefly with John. John and I were fairly handy guys when we were building a house. I had no problem with basic installation of plumbing, electrical wiring, or pretty much anything to do with residential building. I had learned some about battery banks by building one but did not know much about fixing small engines. Between the two of us, we thought we would be able to fix the generator and prepared to head outside.

    We bundled up to try to limit our skin exposure and headed out with Seth holding down the fort. It did not take long to figure out what was wrong with the generator, it was out of fuel. We walked back inside and told Seth what the problem was. Seth laughed at us. He held up his phone and told us that it didn¡¯t work. He told us that his laptop didn¡¯t work, and ours didn¡¯t either. He said that he had been saving the charge on his camera and laptop in case we lost power and they both should be fully able to turn on but wouldn¡¯t. He said it happened sometime while we were outside. We all thought back to the brief loss of electrical power that happened the first time the voice spoke. Our best guess for the situation was that electricity no longer works.

    I did not have many candles so on day 46 we were sitting in the dark talking about our options. We decided that we had to go out for supplies, mainly water. Only had a few gallon jugs of water were left since I relied upon the well and had not stored much more. We also needed some information on the outside world and were going stir crazy from just sitting around. After a short discussion, John and I decided to both go out again and left Seth in the bunker. I grabbed my Glock and asked John if he wanted a gun. John shook his head and we headed out.

 Chapter 7 - First Fight, First Death

    Chapter 6

    Desmond Slattery

    The bunker stunk. It was not a musty stink from the small water leaks that tend to get into basements, but the stink of humans. Specifically it was the three of us. If someone decided to teach a class on what to pack in a post-apocalyptic bunker, they should focus on packing health care products like soap, toilet paper and deodorant. Three dudes in a basement with little ventilation during a hot summer, wiping their asses with their hands, was fucking gross. We had no soap hands or bodies, and although we showered daily while we had power, it was like a pebble trying to hold back a mudslide when it came to the stink. At least we still had toothpaste. If I had to put up with Seth¡¯s nasty ass having dragon breath on top of everything else, I might have decided to end it right there.

    The smell was not a deciding factor, but it was in the back of my mind when we decided to go out looking for supplies. That and the lack of information on what was happening in the world made us subconsciously repress the fact that we could just go get water from the well outside. It was just miserable sitting in that basement smelling like butt. The atmosphere surely played a part in deciding if a trip outside was worth the risking our lives. At the time we left it we thought the trip would be worth it.

    The abnormal canopy of clouds had kept down the heat and the humidity somewhat, so if we had been wearing short sleeves it would have been fairly pleasant outside. Unfortunately we were wearing long sleeves, jeans and ball caps in hopes that we would not be mutated. John was wearing one of my 3x shirts and the extra long sleeves stopped just past his elbows. It left his forearms and down open to the air, so we had to cut off up some socks to cover the rest of him. Prior to leaving the house we had looked out of the ground floor windows and we did not see any indication an incursion to the yard by animals or mutants. Nothing was moving outside. The oily film from the light seeping through the windows already had me feeling dirty. Fully exiting the house had me feeling like we were walking through warm bathwater.

    Covering up defiantly helped, but eventually my skin gradually heated up. The miasma permeated down into my muscles they began writhing under my skin like nest of snakes. I guess this is what was happening to everyone, the change that was turning normal people into mutated killers. I looked at my hands expecting to see my something undulating under my skin, but they were normal. I could swear the feeling was sinking into my bones. It was an odd sensation, causing the bones throb with every step. Each step sent a pulse that traveling from my feet up my legs and it dispersed into my torso.

    I thought about asking John to pick up the pace, but even with the craziness happening under my skin I was honestly enjoying the walk. We were moving at a good pace, our long strides crunching on the gravel of the driveway. I was worried, but not overly so, and enjoyed the change in scenery and smells.

    Thinking back, we should have been more tactical and taken the whole end of the world thing a little more serious. Walking up the drive to the street, it just did not seem like that big a deal. I had also not brought up the correlation between all things periwinkle and the gayness that was Big John directly to him. John was not a flashy homo by any means. He was just like any normal guy. We were basically the same person, minus the fact that he loves the cock. We dressed alike, spoke using similar patterns and had backgrounds that were much the same.

    I had even seen Eric wear a similar purple in the past and overheard John complimenting him on the outfit. I felt it was time to address the elephant in the room, the periwinkle factor. There hasn¡¯t yet been occasion for me to give him a hard time about much recently. It didn¡¯t feel right to breach the subject while stuck in a basement and dealing with the fact that everyone he knew and loved, present company excluded, was most likely dead.

    As I am a thoughtful and considerate person, my general rule of thumb was to wait at least a day before talking about a potentially touchy subject. I had waited more than a month at this point and it was time to start the friendly ribbing up again.

    ¡°Man this is so weird. I can feel it getting under my skin. Do you feel it too? I imagine this is what it feels like to be exposed to radiation, not that I know anything about that kind of stuff.¡± I blathered to John.

    ¡°Yea, my skin is burning,¡± he replied, still a little grumpily. He was not the type to make me go looking for supplies by myself, but he was not happy about being out here. Even knowing that it was needed, the supply run was mostly my idea.

    ¡°Hey, so¡­what color would you call this world ending atmosphere?¡± I asked. ¡°Seems to be some shade of purple, but I don¡¯t think I would call it quite that.¡±

    ¡°Purple works for me,¡± The big man seemed distracted as he replied to me, his eyes and head were swiveling as he warily watching the surroundings. That actually seemed a good idea so I started doing the same.

    ¡°Hmm, It¡¯s not really a true violet, or and too light to be a grape, or an eggplant,¡± I grinned, looking at him from the corner of my eyes. ¡°More of a periwinkle don¡¯t you think?¡±

    ¡°You¡¯re an asshole, Slate¡± A phrase that has been said to me many times from many people came out of John¡¯s mouth. He looked over at me, but I could tell he was grinning with his eyes.

    ¡°Aw, come on man, the fucking end of the world is in periwinkle and you got nothing?¡± I exclaimed. I had expected more of a reaction from him and stewed on it a bit. I was getting tired of his sulking and wanted my friend back. Just because everyone being eaten by their previous neighbors who had been transformed into mutated cannibals didn¡¯t mean you got to be a baby about it. He had retreated into his own world for too long and I was going to jolt him out of it.

    ¡°I would think that your people would have known that this one was coming,¡± I muttered that comment under my breath, but made sure it was loud enough for him to hear.

    His breathing had picked up a little and I could see his shoulders shaking a little from the heaving. His face got a little flushed and I finally pushed him over the edge. The damn giant was going to snap me in half. I scooted sideways from him as he paused his walking, being sure to be out of his extended grabbing range.

    He stopped and I could see the anger in his eyes as he looked over at me. He then shook his head, with its long hair greasy from lack of shampoo. The simple movement seemed shrug away his serious mood and I saw him smile. It was his first since this all started.

    ¡°Ok, Ok. You¡¯ve figured it out. If someone as simple-minded as you could put it together, then you deserve the truth. The periwinkle was a little obvious after all. You are correct, my people have taken over the world. You will now all serve us as we bounce around on our rainbow eating unicorns.¡±

    I start walking again, quickening my pace to just to be safe before glancing backwards. More stupid comments were tossed over my shoulder at him and he started to reply like old times. I know that some people would hate me for the way I talk to him, but fuck them. He is my best friend and our relationship will be defined by us and not by their prejudices or preconceived notions of how we should act.Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

    Today, well pre-apocolypse, people were still victims of hate-crimes, where people are singled out and made victims for reasons of skin color, sexual orientation or whatever. It wasn¡¯t as extreme as years ago, but there are always going to be assholes in the world that will use any excuse to be a jerk. I will never down play a person¡¯s individual struggle but life is tough and everyone is trying to live their own version of it.

    I just never felt that anyone else¡¯s problems were bigger than mine. Everyone lives their own individual life and people handle pressure and adversity in a lot of different ways. Our relationship was just fine and we are happy with it. I just have no fucks to give for anyone who judges it. If John, my best friend in the world, had a problem with it, he would not be my friend.

    To me, it is hypocrisy to claim that just because you¡¯re gay, black, from Toledo (those dudes are weird), or whatever, to think that others are obligated to defer to you and your judgments on the way they should act in relationships that are not involved in. For example, I sympathize with those who are confused/comfortable or whatever with their gender orientation and consider themselves ¡°transgender¡±. I wish them well in their search for personal happiness. But if others are uncomfortable because a chick with a dick decides to piss in the girls room beside their 4 year old, than it is their right be so. Their discomfort should not be ignored just because you feel it shouldn¡¯t exist. Treat people as you want to be treated, don¡¯t ignore others just to ease your own pain.

    I don¡¯t know what the answer is in a lot of those situations, I just feel like peoples personal views shouldn¡¯t be forced on others. It¡¯s easy to make rules when it physically hurts someone, it¡¯s a lot tougher when its¡¯ their feelings that are injured. I don¡¯t know why I was thinking of it, that stuff probably doesn¡¯t matter anymore. Morals in the new world will most likely be decided those in power and not the consensus of the people.

    ¡°Hey John, if I gender identify as a chocolate chip cookie, can I join you¡¯re post-apocalyptic unicorn club?¡±

    It was starting to feel halfway normal until we heard a rustle out in the fields. We knew it was not the wind, but John looked at me like he had been telling me to shut up the whole time. Nothing jumped out as us as we continued on but I drew out my Glock and kept it in my right hand for the rest of the walk.

    My house set back from a rural two lane road about fifty yards. The walk to the neighbor¡¯s driveway was about quarter mile down the road and then thirty or so yards down his driveway to his House. Even taking our time, the whole trip took less than ten minutes.

    Built in the late 1990¡¯s the one story brick rancher had lost a lot of curb appeal compared to my prior visits. No one had been mowing the lawn and the house had the looked to be sitting empty. Normally even a few weeks of neglect would see a couple feet of growth in a yard with the fertile Ohio soil; plant growth had been slowed down, probably due to a lack of sunlight. The grass was maybe eight inches or so tall right now, just enough to be uncomfortable walking through, but not high enough to stop you. In the dim light, it felt like we were watching the beginning of a scary movie. The type where you scream at the dumbass characters to stay outside.

    The house was owned by Katy and Jud Carter. They worked in the city and had bought the house to because they did not want to live down town or in suburbia, but wanted to live close to where they worked. They had a cute little daughter, Misty, who was five years old. I have not had a lot of experience around normal healthy children but I dealt with many abused ones in my previous line of work. Hanging around Misty had been so different compared the broken ones I met in the past. She was a little ball of energy and laughs. She would run around from one thing to the next, playing pretend or just exploring. She almost always had a smile on her face and was so happy with the simplest things. I dreaded the thought of them being home, but changed. I always hated the zombie movies with infected children. They take something so innocent and precious and turn them into tiny walking horrors. If they freaked me out on the television, it would be a hundred times worse in real life.

    Until we had walked up to the front door I still had the expectation that it would not be a huge deal to get some supplies from the neighbors. That we could just stop by, ask them to burrow a cup of sugar and what not, and then have a nice walk home. At the front door I noticed for the first time the unnatural quiet. There was no noise other than the soft rumbling of the clouds. The lack of cars running up and down the highway made my breathing sound abnormally loud, like a bellows pumping continuously to fan a fire. It seemed wrong to disturb the quiet, and looking at John it seemed like he felt the same way. Knocking on the front door right now seemed like another of my stupid ideas.

    ¡°Think we should just knock?¡± I asked John. I asked him the obvious question hoping he would have some better solution.

    ¡°I don¡¯t really want to be shot for breaking into the house if they are inside,¡± replied John.

    I agreed with him wholeheartedly and gave the front door a couple easy taps. Waiting a bit, I gave it a couple of louder knocks and then a couple good thumps that could probably be heard back at my house. No one answered. I tried oddly placed center door knob and found it to be locked. I told John that I did not want it visible from the front that we had broken into the house and started around back. We found some sliding glass back doors that were conveniently unlocked.

    I pulled the door open and the air rushed out, carrying with it the pungent odor of death. I had run enough calls back with CPD to recognize the smell of rotting corpses. This time it was far stronger than I was used to. Usually people found a dead body within the first few days of the person passing so the stench was usually manageable.

    People generally had a decent support system in place to check on them if they were ill, so a friend or family member will find them within a day or two, or sometimes a neighbor will call. In an apartment complex people can usually smell their former roommates within about four days of their passing and so we also got calls that way. It was rare to come across a body as decomposed at this house smelled like, and I had only seen a couple. When they are this bad, you usually send for the fire department and put on self-contained breathing apparatus before entering. We were both gagging and unable to proceed. I pulled the door open all the way and motioned John to step away with me.

    We needed the supplies and every house we went to was going just going to increase our risk of encounter, so after a talk we decided to go in anyways. I had a handkerchief in my pocket which I handed to John. I pulled my shirt up over my nose as he held it over his nose. It was just chance that had John was standing closer to the door, so he entered first. Thinking back that was another stupid ass decision. I was the one that was armed and trained to make house entries, but I had let him lead. I had always deferred to him though. With his size and looks most people did. It was just natural to follow him as he ducked down a little to get under a door frame and went inside.

    It happened fast. As soon as I got inside I heard was the clacking of claws against the imitation Pergo wooden flooring. A beast jumped into John, knocking the big man onto his back and latched onto his throat before either of us could react. The skin covering his neck ripped as it was torn away and it made odd wet sound I had never heard before. The creature shook its head back and forth before pulling back with a disgustingly large piece of bloody flesh hanging from its mouth.

    I knew instantly that John would not survive having the front half of his throat removed even though he was looking at me eyes that were pleading for help. The brutality of what just happened stunned me, locking me in place while the creature stared at me and chewed.

    It looked to be my next door neighbor¡¯s mutated golden retriever. The animal was no longer a seventy pound loveable ball of fur that would let Misty crawl all over it. Whatever had changed everything else had made it something else, something evil. The animal had somehow grown to around three and a half feet tall and looked to have put on another forty pounds of muscle that was spread across its figure in bulbous shapes that seemed to writhe in the dim light. I noticed as it stood there chewing that the front shoulders and head were a lot higher than its back half, giving it a lopsided appearance.

    I was enraged, but it just ignored me as it calmly ate a piece of my friend. Forgetting about the gun, I stepped forward and kicked hard at its ribs. It tried to pull back but the tip of my work boot connected with a solid crunch that propelled it across the room. After scrambled to its feet, and instead of retreating like a normal canine would, it came charged at me. It lunged at my throat but I was able to bring my right forearm up in time to protect it. Instead of killing me, it latched onto the meaty part and hung on while I started throwing weak left handed punches into its ribs. Its oversized front paws were clawing and ripping at my shirt, leaving thin bloody trails behind with every swipe. Unable to support its weight I fell to my knees. My vision was tunneling and the only thing I could focus on was its teeth and the pain. In a brief moment of clarity, I remembered that I was wearing a Glock model 22. I pulled it from right him with my weak hand and pushed it into the creature¡¯s side. Screaming and pulling the trigger I heard an impotent click.

    I dropped the useless hunk of metal and pulled a small Strider tactical fixed blade knife from my belt. I shoved the knife into the freakish muscle on the animal¡¯s side over and over until it let go. It fell to the ground and flopped around trying to stand up but its tiny back legs kept giving out. Refusing to quit the thing tried to pull itself away with its long forelimbs. The claws clattered against the floor again as it tried to scramble away but it couldn¡¯t gain traction on the blood soaked floor. I glanced at John who was lying on his back no longer moving and then back at the thing that had killed him. Cradling my wounded arm to my chest I tried to stomp its head but it turned around and snapped causing me to miss. I gathered myself again and stomped halfway down its back, breaking bones repeatedly until it collapsed. Working my way up its body I continued to stomp the animal and its head finally crunched open. Still too worked up to stop, I kept abusing it until all that was left was a bloody piece of mashed meat with little pieces of white bone sticking out.

 Chapter 8 - Leveling Up

    Chapter8

    Slate

    When my brain finally signaled that the monster was dead, I rushed over and knelt by John. His face was pale and he was not breathing due to obvious lack of the necessary piping. His hands were clasp over his neck in an instinctual attempt at self-preservation, and there was a sucking sound as I pulled them away to see the wound. He never had any chance of survival. The front third or so of his throat was missing, probably in the hound¡¯s belly. I don¡¯t know why I looked because the sight was something from my nightmares. It was something I wished I could un-see.

    My right hand was not really working and the pain was picking up. A fun fact about the body is that traumatic injuries often take a while to hurt fully, and the true agony of mine was finally making itself known. Thick rivers of blood pumped from my arm to a tune that matched my heartbeat. My fate would soon be the same as my friend¡¯s if it was left untreated, so I pulled off my shirt and wrapped it tightly. The cloth was fully soaked after moments of exposure, but the bleeding seemed to slow.

    Oddly enough, now that my entire torso was exposed to the light it was starting to feel better. The lizard part of my brain seemed to think it was what I needed all along. The burning sensation had receded and it felt way more natural. Well, either that or I was focused on the pain receptors that were firing in my arm. Either way it seemed like the light was providing the energy to keep me going.

    The hound had dug long furrows into the front of my body with its claws, but they were not deep. The amount of blood they leaked seemed negligible, but I am sure it added up quickly. My chest itself was a mess and looked like a bloody road map had been carved into my flesh. With these wounds I needed to get back to the basement before passing out from blood loss. I glanced again at John. I did not want to leave him, but there was nothing else I could do. I left, and headed back home.

    Rather than taking the longer route down the road, I cut through the knee high cornfield and went directly towards my house, not quite running, but moving as fast as I was able with my injuries. Hopefully nothing would come looking for me by following the bloody trail that lead back to the bunker. After pounding on the door, Seth let me back inside. He was momentarily speechless at the sight of me, which was probably a first for him. He looked past me, looking around for John, and then back to me questioningly.

    ¡°Close the door, he¡¯s dead.¡± I told him, voice harsh from the pain and loss.

    I fumbled my way through the dark to my bed and was almost there when Seth lit up a lighter. I looked over at him, surprised that he still had one, since we had not had light in the basement for some time. There were a few more lighters stashed upstairs in the house, but I had not bothered bringing them down because we had not been cooking and no longer had any candles. I thanked him and he followed me as I stumbled across the basement.

    ¡°What happened,¡± He demanded, the small light flickering and showing his angry face. ¡°Where is John? Did you get any water?¡±

    That little shit had no right to pester me now of all times, but oddly all I felt was calm. It was like I was standing outside my body and was watching everything happen. My moment of frustration passed to quickly and I thought it was probably shock setting in.

    Instead of snapping, my voice was monotone as I replied, ¡°I said he is dead. Give me a minute to bandage this before I bleed out.¡±

    Seth started pacing back and forth, muttering over and over ¡°We¡¯re going to die,¡± along with some other unintelligible words.

    I dumped most of a bottle of peroxide over my arm and I lost a few minutes as fresh agony overwhelmed me. Woozy and weak, it took a lot of fumbling to finally wrap a fresh towel around my arm. It was secured in place with some duct tape and I began cleaning up my chest. Another towel later and most of the blood and gunk had been wiped off of my body. I tried to dab the furrows on my torso clean with peroxide, but I was beginning to fade. The feeling of floating got stronger, and my body went on auto pilot as my brain function slowed down.

    Yea, this was definitely shock. I hoped it was an emotional reaction rather than the medical one which generally preceded death. The reality of my best friend¡¯s death was sinking in, and his mutilated corpse was lying on my neighbor¡¯s cold floor. Like I usually do after making a mistake, I started thinking about all the bad choices I made leading up to it. I was working myself up to a solid bout of anger and self-loathing when Seth spoke up again.Reading on this site? This novel is published elsewhere. Support the author by seeking out the original.

    ¡°What are we going to do now Darren? We are going to die without water. You and John were supposed to bring some back.¡±

    ¡°John is dead and if I don¡¯t bleed to death I am going die of infection in a few days anyways.¡± I paused. Sometimes I speak before I think, and it hit me. Holy shit, I was going to die. There was no way to survive bite caused by that nasty ass creature without antibiotics. Hell, President Calvin Coolidge¡¯s son died while he was in office from an infected blister on his foot because there weren¡¯t antibiotics yet, and he was the freaking President. This was way worse than a measly blister.

    Rationally I knew that someday I was going to die, but I never actually believed it would happen. It was one of those uncomfortable situations that I liked to ignore, hoping it would go away. Most of the time, I was not even willing to consider my own mortality. Even after watching millions die after the Voice¡¯s first warning and then watching the world end from a cramped basement, I never doubted my own survival. I was always going to be that guy who miraculously lived when everyone else was dead. Bad shit is supposed to happen to other people, not to me.

    I gathered myself before continuing, ¡°We were attacked by one of those creatures we saw on the news. It ripped out John¡¯s throat and took this chunk out of my arm.¡±

    I ignored his insistent questioning for the next few minutes and thought about what would happen over the next few days, which was all the time I had left in this life. There had been bits of rotting flesh in the hell hound¡¯s teeth. That purification had to have gotten into my wound and no little bottle of peroxide would ever clean that out. This was actually happening. I was dying.

    Taking a couple of sips from one of the remaining jugs of water I lay on the bed and closed my eyes. I wanted to think of what I would do in my final days but my thoughts were clouded. The fear and adrenaline dump that had kept me moving earlier was quickly fading and I was crashing hard. I fell asleep in moments.

    I don¡¯t know how much time passed as I entered a haze of fever induced hallucinations and pain. I could have been moments, days or even a week. I just remember the fiery torment in my arm. It had worked itself up to my shoulder and now was radiating throughout my entire body. I started experiencing extreme temperature changes. One moment I would be shivering under all the blankets that could be found, thinking I would never be warm again. The next I would be stripped to my boxers, sweating and feeling like I was taking a bath in a lake of fire.

    Seth was constantly approaching and trying to talk to me, but the words did not reach me. I could hear them. The sounds he was making should have meant something to me, but I was unable to determine what they were. I only knew that I desperately wanted the irritating noises to stop. The noises had a physical presence which weighed down on my shoulders and was slowly crushing me. It had to stop. I needed it to stop.

    In one of my hot periods I was laying naked on the concrete floor of the basement in a desperate attempt to cool down. Seth was standing over me, yelling down at me in a rage. I told him to fuck off, maybe not using words as couldn¡¯t speak, but my body language was screaming it. Seth did not leave though, and he continued yelling at me. He started kicking my legs to get my attention. Hell, they may have been gentle nudges, I don¡¯t know. My memory is not to clear on what actually happened, but the pain that filled my entire body made them feel like they were asteroids pummeling me from space. They were leaving craters in my body that may not have been visible to the naked eye, but they left pits of anguish in my flesh.

    I bellowed, roaring at him and tried to get him to stop. Maybe anyways, I don¡¯t know what happened. I could have been making whimpering cries or whistling Dixie, but he just would not stop. He would circle off only return and continue with the annoying little kicks. I was furious at him for bothering me, but something was pressing me to the floor and I could not escape him.

    On next pass the babble coming from Seth¡¯s mouth rearranged to form words that I could finally understand. He muttering something that sounded like ¡°Fucking fag deserves to die like his fucking faggot friend.¡±

    His face was angry when he said it, taking on a red glow in my sight. It was soon the only thing I could focus on, and it was the cause of everything that had every gone wrong in my life. He was the reason I was in pain. He was the reason John died. He was the reason why the world ended. He had to be stopped, and I was the one to do it.

    Going into a rage only heard about in stories the weight that had been holding me down snapped with an audible sound. It sounded like your ears popping when you change elevation to fast, or the loudest bubble to have ever been popped in the universe. I flew from the floor and went charging at him. How dare Seth insult my friend? He had just sacrificed his life on a trip that the worm was to cowardly to make. I tackling Seth to the ground and put him in a full mount while pinning his arms down. I began to howl at him and grabbed his shoulders, shaking them up and down with all my strength so he would my point.

    In my head I was telling him to treat my friend with respect and to be worth the sacrifice he made for us, but all that came out of my mouth was inarticulate wailing. Spittle covered his face as I howled at him and continued to bash him against the ground. His head began to flop back and forth, making wet thuds as back of it struck time and time again. When I felt like he understood my point, I got up and stumbled over to my bed. As I collapsed, I watched him roll around on the ground groaning. He slowly worked his way into sitting position and put his back to the wall, facing me. My last memory before passing out was of his face. It was no longer angry, but full of fear. He looked like he gotten too close to a dangerous animal. Now he was waiting, hoping really, that the animal would lose interest and he would be safe once again.

    The haze passed, the world came back into focus as finally I woke up. Sitting up was so pain free that it took seeing the bloody bandages and sheets to remember what had happened. I unwrapped the crusty, dark red cloth from my arm and winced as the duct tape pulled several hairs off my arm. Underneath was something completely unexpected. What had previously been a lethal wound was in the process of healing. Instead of an angry wound full of puss, it looked healthy. Even indentions from missing flesh were filling back in and it was scabbing over. It looked like it had been healing for weeks.

    I then realized that the room was still completely dark but yet I could see. I glanced over and saw Seth¡¯s corpse was slumped against the wall, and then I heard the voice for the second time.

    Holy shit, I just leveled up.

 Chapter 9 - Attributes

    Chapter9

    Slate

    The third time hearing the Voice was like the others in that it sounded exactly the way it had before, but this time it seemed more integrated with the world. The words went off inside my head rather than be carried through my ears like normal sounds. The Voice actually seemed as if it was a part of me. It was something extremely personal, something only I could hear.

    Instead of doubt and confusion, the Voice instilled upon me absolute confidence. The reptile portion of my brain recognized that it spoke nothing but absolute truth. When I tried to doubt this, it seemed to chase the conscious portion of my brain into hiding. Frightening, the Voice seemed to demand obedience. It was in control. If it ordered something done, it felt like I would be compelled to do it. I began to hate this new Voice all together, until I heard the words it said.

    ¡°You are now level 2,¡± The Voice announced. ¡°You may choose to advance one of the following attributes: Mind, Body, Soul, Magic or Ki. Choose with care¡±

    What the hell was this? Part of the game it mentioned? Am I stuck in an RPG? My closet geek has read several books and web novels with a premise of being stuck in a game world or being transported to one. That combined with my extensive MMORPG background made me believe that this was a way to build up my character, or in this case me.

    Selecting skills or assigning points to certain stats was always my favorite part games so I did get a little excited when I heard the Voice announce that I had levels. It also meant that I could get strong enough to survive in this new world. The DING was a powerful thing and I used to grind for long hours, staying up way past when I should be asleep, in order to hear that wonderful chime. Planning ahead, researching builds and seeing which class was the best were all things that I enjoyed immensely. Oh, yea! I¡¯m going to be fucking OP.

    With this knowledge jumping through my brain, combined with my past reading web novels and a watching a little bit of anime here and there, I knew exactly what to do in this situation.

    Channeling Kirito I raised my right fist in the air and yelled ¡°Status Screen.¡±

    ¡­

    Where the hell is the infamous blue screen?

    I tried all the prompts I could think of, yelling out ¡°Status¡±, ¡°Character¡±, ¡°Character Sheet¡±, ¡°Information¡± and ¡°Help¡±.

    Feeling like an idiot, my hand slowly slid back down and I spent a few minutes thinking. I continued for some time attempting to find the magical words by speaking them, thinking them, and attempting motions that would allow me access to my personal stats but nothing happened.

    I was having a hard time believing that didn¡¯t work. In every one of the stories I read having a status screen was vital. It allowed you to see your progress and told you what your strengths and weaknesses were. The screen should also provide more information on this game and what was happening to the world. How could you know which way to build up a toon if you didn¡¯t know where he was currently? This was bullshit.

    As a matter of fact, aren¡¯t I supposed to talk to a god who should be giving me an overpowered skill right about now? Some sort of old man to mentor me in the ways of the magic and martial arts?

    ¡°Fuck this shit,¡± I muttered. ¡°What¡¯s the fun of living in a game without a screen?¡±

    There was no status screen. No god coming to bless me as his champion. No righteous cause to fall behind and fight for. It was just me in a smelly basement sitting alone in a basement with no fucking internet. Oh yea, and there was a stinking corpse in the corner.

    I guess this is the real world still. A world that was without the almighty identification skill. I sure as hell know there is no coming back to life in this game. Seeing a friend die showed me that there were no extra lives. Seth sure has hell hasn¡¯t stood back up either. He just sat there looking like the same annoying fuck he used to, only deader.

    I sat there for a while and decided to go through my routine to clear my head. I used to separate my work out days in to upper body, lower body and full body. Like most normal humans I needed time for muscle recovery. Exercise tears tiny little holes in your muscles, and they heal back stronger. If you did too much, you would never heal and it was counterproductive. No longer is that the case with my body. Even before discovering that I could regenerate it had been recovering within hours. I pushed it today, going through the full spectrum and working until complete muscle failure.

    Lying on the ground in pain filled euphoria, I thought about stupid mistakes made recently and the one made just now. Dehydrating my body while I was on limited resources and a cloud of purple death hanging around outside was an idiot move. The workouts were about the only thing keeping me sane at this point, so I wasn¡¯t to upset about it. It was still a stupid move though.

    Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

    I decided to ignore my totally unexplainable ability to see in the dark and do something about Seth. That ass hole was probably trying to rot in the corner as a final revenge. I wasn¡¯t having it though. If I dragged him outside he may attract scavenger creatures to my yard, and that was unacceptable. Glancing around I noticed the deep freezer. Perfect, who hasn¡¯t wanted to shove a body in one of those? That shit was on TV all the time.

    A couple of grunts and groans later the only thing visibly left of Seth was a dark stain on the concrete. Surprisingly I was not upset at all at having accidently kill him. You would think taking my first human life would be more traumatizing, but it wasn¡¯t. I just accepted it as part of the new world. Of course it probably helped that I had already considered killing him anyways.

    I glanced around looking at the other furnishings and tried to figure out my new night vision. My range seemed to be about 25 feet and past that faded out into the darkness. It was like someone had put a night light above where I was now sitting and anything in range became visible in something similar to grayscale.

    I got up and checked the seals on the windows. They were all good. There was none of that damned purple glow anywhere in the basement and no other sources of light. The brief search for a light source eliminated all other possibilities. I could see in the dark. Gaining this ability would not have made much sense prior to hearing the level up message. In games it was common to acquire skills and talents. I guess so far I had two: Regeneration and nightvision.

    Shit was getting weird. If there was someone else alive in the basement I could talk this out with maybe we could figure it out together. My personal thought process was so jumpy that bouncing ideas off others really helped me stay focused. It would have also have been nice to test their healing and recovery rates as compared to mine. Was it a perk specific to me, or something that changed with the world becoming a game? Seth had screwed me one last time by dying. If he was alive, I could have used him as a test dummy.

    Regeneration of HP was a common concept in a game, so I assumed everyone would have it. The nightvision was something else. Comparing my vision to Seth¡¯s could tell us if it was a universal ability everyone gained, or if I had hit some sort of hidden requirements needed to get it. Maybe I got it from spending too much time in the dark. Hell maybe I got it because of murdering someone in the dark. I don¡¯t know. He could have had perks that I did not, but maybe they could be obtained by repeating the actions he had. At the very least we could have compared notes.

    Well shit, I guess I did feel a little bad about killing him after all.

    Sitting down to meditate I tried to work on my questions without outside help. Meditation is a wonderfully simple and yet entirely complex process. The general concept is to empty your mind, but it is deceptively difficult. You usually start by focusing on breathing and slowly phasing out all other sensory input, but it is far easier said than done. There are a few other methods and views on meditation, but that one seems to work best for me.

    Ever since Big John had talked me into yoga and meditation I had made a small study of it. I found that even doing it correctly for 20 to 30 minutes left me refreshed and energized. Beginning to learn how to meditate it is very easy to find yourself distracted. Instead of emptying the mind, my attention had been all over the place. There was the mild pain in my hips from sitting cross legged, the feel my clothing on my skin, all kinds of stuff. I thought of anything and everything else really except for the nothing I was going for. Prior to the deaths of my roommates, I had been meditating more for an escape. With all the recent practice slipping into a clear minded state now came quite easily.

    What was new about my meditation was that I felt a tiny ball of energy deep inside my core. It was centered slightly above the belly button, but deep in the center of my being. Over the weeks I noticed that it had grown slowly with each session, but had finally stopped when it reached the size of a large blueberry. The energy did not do anything but sit there but it could possibly be the source of my healing.

    Today I tried something new and meditated on the choices given by the Voice. It seems simplistic when you say it but to get to this point, where I could stay clear minded and think about specific issues, had taken a lot of effort. Thinking of the advantages of each attribute the Voice mentioned I scrutinized the choices. It was assumed that the gains would be similar to those received from leveling up in a game, and certain attributes would make certain types of players. Before choosing I thought of what the attributes could mean by comparing the games played in my past.

    Mind ¨C It seemed a combination of Intelligence and Wisdom. These stats were for magic users or priests and generally effected how well they used their spells. As the voice had listed Magic, and called this a game, I assumed that there would be some sort mana resource like in normal RPGs. Having more Mind should improve my use of the mana, and the mana pool. Or maybe it just made you smarter and better able to learn new skills. Hell I don¡¯t know, Mind could do all of this or none.

    Body ¨C Games tended to break down the category of body into several different attributes, like agility, dexterity, strength and constitution. This is probably some kind of combination. Physical classes were generally the easiest to play in the beginning, so points in this would be something worth investing in immediatly.

    Soul ¨C I was not even sure I had a soul until this option was listed. This is good news. I have always believed that God existed. There are little signs everywhere that point to an intelligent creator if you are willing have a little faith, and little is what I had. It was enough to believe, but not enough to be sure. I have no idea what this attribute would do but am glad that the game thinks I have a soul. I just hope we all start with a soul and I don¡¯t need to use a point to obtain one. Obviously that would suck. Note to self: put a point into Soul before dying.

    Magic ¨C I usually played a caster in most games, so I thought heavily about gaining magic. Being able to deal fiery death to foes from afar seems like a better way to play then spending all your time in close combat. Especially since this was a game without respawns. The problem was how does magic work? Is there a starter fireball spell or are you expected to teach yourself? With the lack of information the voice tended to give, it makes sense to expect the latter. Learning magic, like any other skill, is generally very time intensive, and probably requires knowledge that I do not have. Although I was not eliminating it as a choice to put points into later, I needed something that will help me survive right now.

    Ki ¨C Like Soul, Ki is a vague concept. Many cultures have their version of Ki, or Chi, or Qi, which is believed to be an internal energy that can be harnessed in various ways. I assume Ki would be something like that, but was scared it would be completely different. I was excited as couple of different ideas came to mind. In a favorite I see the DragonballZ characters yelling, ¡°It¡¯s over 9000!¡± as they throw power around. I would love to have that kind of ability, but the show always had huge training montages, so KI would probably not be immediately useful. Ki is probably like magic; hugely difficult to train enough to be of use but powerful if you can master its secrets.

    Frustration entered my contemplative state and caused me to fall out of it. Sitting here thinking the issues out was useful, but the lack of information on this alleged game is stifling. Even with the peace meditation brings, I am just an angry man in a basement. Bunker dammit, call it a bunker. I will probably end up acting on my assumptions, but everyone knows what they say about assumptions.

    My steps were heavy as I paced and quietly raged at the destruction of a world so that there could be some stupid game. My best friend is gone, civilization has been destroyed, an untold amount of people are dead and I haven¡¯t even seen a girl in near two months. This isn¡¯t a game, those are supposed to be fun. They were for entertainment. This is a horror movie. It was orchestrated genocide, an extinction level event that will be the downfall of humanity. My emotions built up until I could not keep them in any longer.

    ¡°And just what the hell is Ki anyways¡± I screamed at the heavens.

    ¡°You have Chosen Ki. Your current attributes are as follows:

    Body ¨C 2

    Ki ¨C 2¡±

    Motherfucker.

    What?

 Chapter 10 - Exploring Ki and Testing Physics

    Chapter 10

    Slate

    There was no damn blue screen. The Voice simply intoned, or maybe it implanted, the words into my head telling me about preexisting points in both Body and Ki. I must have gained attribute point in Ki from yelling the word but I do not know where the others came from. I did note that the asshole Voice took the first word muttered on the list as my choice. That is something that must avoided in the future. I would need to carefully plan out my path to power in advance, prepare myself for each level up and be ready to spit out the attribute quickly to avoid another accident. Let me just check the wiki¡­..

    Fucking internet was still down. No internet really sucks balls. First off there was no porn. That shit is almost as bad as the world ending. Secondly, there was no convenient group of people out there to compare knowledge with about what is happening. I would have a hard time planning my way without outside help. I guess I was stuck playing blind for a while, until I can meet some other survivors.

    The stats did let me extrapolate a few things though. Since I have a 0 in Mind, and my mind still works, these stats are not a baseline number. They must be a bonus to natural bodies. That should mean that the stronger I get my original self, the greater the buff from the Body stat becomes. My ability to see in the darkness may be a result of the points in Body or Ki, or it could still be something else, hell it could even be a mutation like comic book heroes. Maybe there was a chance for the purple goop to change people beneficially. If it was a skill I had gained then I gained it without putting a point into it. That means I might be able to improve my special abilities. Of course if being able to see 25 feet with this nightvision skill took a week of sitting in a pitch black room, than I can assume it will be just as insanely hard to gain other skills.

    I also apparently have the ability to heal major wounds. I am not sure how long it took to do so, but it seemed like only a few days. Being able to regenerate over time was a key factor in RPGS. It would be tough to level a toon if you spent weeks online waiting for him to heal after every fight. Some table top and the occasional harder video game would even require you to recover your hit points over a full night¡¯s sleep, but that was not the case here. It caused me to wonder about death mechanics and if they had changed.

    This game seems too grounded in reality to be based on hit points. I saw Big John die shortly after having his throat ripped out. If this was a game with HPs his character should have started with a huge amount of due to his size and strength. If there were HP¡¯s then the damage would also be number based. That meant he shouldn¡¯t have died to just one critical hit. So I am ruling out a HP based system and will continue to act like people and creatures will still die if critical body systems were interrupted.

    Sitting down again to meditate again, I thought that the new energy ball must be my Ki. I was able to slip into the trance easier than ever. The ball in my core had grown by about 50%, and was now comparable to a small grape. The noticeable difference in my meditation and increase of the little ball were obviously linked to my Ki attribute.

    Feeling something new, I went with it. My consciousness separated from my body in such a way that I became aware of my surroundings while my mind was a peace. My introspection become clearer and I could see into different parts of my body. It was hazy and vague, but I could see what was happening in it. The muscle groups that I had pushed in my previous work out almost glowed where a small amount of energy circulated. Testing a theory, I followed the Ki back to where it originated in my core. Concentrating, I attempted to draw the energy out. Like popping a cherry, I had to force a hole into its warm, tight cocoon. Once I could pull it out through the gap I found I could move it around, and send it flowing through me.

    If a guy in a disembodied Zen like trance could say ¡°Holy shit¡±, I would have.

    My closet nerdism had also led to me to read some Chinese light novels, mostly Wuxia and Xainxi, so I had an idea about how the people in those stories cultivated. Most of them pulled the energy of the world into their, cores or dantians, and then circulated it to make the body stronger. Since I already had the energy, I simply pushed it out began to move it through my body.

    It was tricky to move and took a lot of concentration. It naturally wanted to follow certain directions but I could not understand way. It was as if there were preexisting pathways that were like one way streets. If focused hard along those lines it would move faster than its natural pace. As I kept at it and it became slightly easier to move. It was as if the lines it traveled were growing infinitesimally wider and letting more energy move through. I began panting and sweating from the excursion. Moving the Ki faster than it wanted to flow was taking a tremendous toll on my body. The small gain seemed to be my limit for now so I relaxed and let it circulate slowly.

    Once the energy was out of my core and moving through my muscles it never returned to its starting point. My tiny grape had withered and only a little flicker of power remained in it. I tried to grow it again following the same principles of cultivation from Wuxia. Focusing, I attempted to find the latent energy of the world. A huge ocean of it existed all around me but it seemed like only tiny flakes of it were compatible with my core. Reaching out I pulled the matching specs of energy towards me and watched as they slowly moved towards my center. When the specs touched the energy inside of me they melded seamlessly and little balloon of energy enlarged just a tiny little bit. My chest was heaving again from the effort and I knew I was putting too much strain on my body. So again I relaxed.This book''s true home is on another platform. Check it out there for the real experience.

    Not focusing on anything for the moment I stayed in my trance as my breathing came back to normal. I noticed a few other things about Ki during my explorations. First was that when I had been letting the Ki circulate it seemed to pool in the area of my wounded arm and my regeneration seemed to increase its pace. I have been in this new trance for a few hours now, and it seemed like it had almost finished its healing. Another thing I noticed was that the tiny specs of matching Ki floated towards me their own, albeit much slower than when I reached for them. It seems as though my Ki well will refill naturally if given enough time, or I can speed up the process by working at it.

    Coming out meditation I stood up and decided to test my physical limits. First things first, I started to punch, kick and dance like a moron on YouTube. My coordination was higher, and my center of balance seemed more stable but I had no basis of comparison. I did not know how drastic the improvements were. I did know some basic fighting mechanics but after several minutes I could not feel any improvement in my shadowboxing. Sadly, becoming an instant ninja did not seem to be in the cards.

    If someone were to have seen me punching the air they would be generous to call my form mediocre. My law enforcement training consisted of only a few courses for gaining physical control of a suspect. One was called defensive tactics (DT), and the other was called pressure point control techniques (PPCT). DT was nothing more than a short class on how to escort people out of agitated situations and a few arm lock take downs. PPCT was similar. It was an over view of the bodies pressure points to manipulate and control people using pain compliance. Both classes were very informative but very short.

    I never gained the instinctual muscle memory needed to execute precision control techniques after just a week or two of classes. To master a physical talent, like martial arts, you have to dedicate a lot of effort to learning its ways. With my natural size I had not had many violent confrontations with suspects. It made me lazy and I never put the effort into truly learning the techniques, or learning to fight in general.

    If I had to classify myself with words, I would call myself an instinctual fighter. A brawler that uses pure physical strength and size to absorb and shrug off blows a trained warrior would deflect or avoid. My size is a huge advantage in a fist fight. You lose power punching upwards, and my wide shoulders tended to absorb most strikes aimed at my head. My flat face and square jaw would keep most from ever calling me handsome, but they were built to take an impact.

    People always say it¡¯s the size of the fight in the dog, not the size of the dog in the fight. It¡¯s true to a point, but it is mostly some bullshit that little people say. There is a reason welterweights don¡¯t fight heavyweights after all. A superiorly trained small guy might take me down, but the people who put that kind of effort into taking care of and educating their body were few. They also generally don¡¯t fight outside the ring and didn¡¯t fight the police either.

    Although confident in my size and ability to fight due to my successes against drunks, training was still needed. But how do I to start? In books most protagonists would go find some old wandering warrior master and then impress him in some random way. The master would teach his student an obscure path to martial greatness and asses would be kicked. Acting like the idiot I was, I glanced around looking for one. No such luck. It looks like I¡¯ll just have to wing it like normal. Besides, I wouldn¡¯t be only fighting people but monsters. How the hell was I supposed to train for that?

    Continuing my shadowboxing I knew that to survive I needed to get some weapons. When I fortified my basement, making it worthy of the name of bunker, I had stocked it with the best weapons I knew of: guns. Unfortunately on the run I tried to shoot the monster that killed John but my gun didn¡¯t work. My Glock 22, used by most of the police officers in America and known for its reliability, failed to fire. The ammo in it, Winchester Rangers, were top of the line. I had not picked up the gun since my return so I did not know which part of the weapon failed. There had been no reason to check before learning I could see in the dark but there was now.

    I got the weapon out and ejected the round. Looking closely in the dim light there was a little indention where the firing pin hit the primer. It meant that the bullet had failed. After chambering another round I contemplated the benefits of test firing it in the basement. With what happened to electronics I decided finding out if my guns would fire was worth the risk of something hearing a shot. Besides, if the gun would shoot it could be used to defend me anyways. Snagging a set of ear plugs, I went into the bathroom dumped a bunch of blankets in a corner to create a not so safe backstop. I pointed the .40 caliber at it, hoped for the best and pulled the trigger. The machine that had never failed me before the change made the same impotent click again. After trying a dozen rounds I never heard an earth shattering kaboom, and every one of them had the distinct impression of pin denting the primer.

    For some reason, guns no longer worked.

    In most end of the world scenarios, I thought that the more guns you had, the better off you would be. The Remington 870 12g Shotgun and Colt AR-15 I tested next both failed to fire as well. Whatever changed world did not want electronics or firearms to work. Without a background in physics I had no way to figure out why none of it was working. I still needed a weapon though, and my 3 ? holdout knife was not going to cut it.

    Muhaha, look at me making horrible puns in the dark.

    After seeing all the movies on living in and going through an apocalypse, I always thought it would be zombies that destroyed society. Well maybe not walking dead zombies, but something more like infected living people that were like the ones in 28 Days Later. The fast as hell scary type zombies. During my bunker preparation I took into account the following things one must know for the zombie apocalypse.

    <ol>

    <li>Own lots of guns. It seems that with lots of guns, you can always get the other resources you need, if you¡¯re willing to bend your morals. Well bend them to the point of murder anyways.</li>

    <li>Bunker down and survive the initial changes and only than attempt to move around to secure more resources.</li>

    <li>Know your enemy and prepare to hide, flee or fight them. Killing the walking dead type zombies would be much easier than the freaky fast Jimmy John¡¯s type zombies.</li>

    <li>Don¡¯t trust the government, police or big corporations. In every post-apocalyptic story they are almost always the bad guy.</li>

    </ol>

    I had been relying on guns as my weapons, but the other three rules still applied. It¡¯s seemed like primeval weapons were what I needed. I needed something pointy and sharp, and I needed it now.

 Chapter 11 - First Quest

    Chapter 11

    Slate

    The workout and experimentation had been exhausting and I lay on my bed, relaxing and contemplating the future. An awful case of cottonmouth and a headache forming right behind my eyes were reminding me about my water situation. If nothing changed the signs of dehydration were only get worse in the days to come. Without roommates I could hold out a few more days in this dank basement, but I was tired of inaction. I was tired of things happening to me, of things being out of my control. There was still no sign that the purple covering the world would ever clear up and I would not be able to hide from it forever. It was time to be more proactive.

    According to one of my favorite books water is best stored in the body. Following such sagely advice, I picked up a clear plastic jug of spring water, popped the top, and drank about three quarters of it in one go. That jug had purchased for 97 cents before the world had turned to shit. It was funny how an item bought for less than a dollar could be so important to right now.

    A combination of dirt, blood, sweat and a tiny bit of homicide had combined into a film that coated my body. The odor was tempting me to dump the remaining water over my head in attempt to wash off the filth, but I held back. After all, I was just most of a dumbass and not a complete one. I could put up with my stinking ass for a while longer.

    I stood up with a sigh. Guns were worthless. I opened up the 400 lb Hayman safe stashed in the corner of the basement and started dumping guns out. All of the precision-made machines of death stacked in my gun safe were now worthless pieces of scrap. The pile of wasted recourses growing on the floor was sickening. I could have spent that money elsewhere. I tried to positive and be glad the safe relied on a mechanical combination instead of an electrical key pad. There was still one item inside that could help.

    The compound bow inside was not the best model out there, like most of my purchases, but it was a good bow. The six arrows that had survived my training sessions all fit inside the mounted quiver. They are modern arrows made from carbon fiber with plastic fletching. They had been touted to be long lasting, but I knew from practice that they would only last a couple months if fired with any regularity.

    I gazed longingly at the busted crossbow inside the safe before I tossed it into the pile of junk. Modern crossbows like it fire remarkably similar to firearms. As long as you are within 60-80 yards of your target, you simply sight on target and pull the trigger. The kinetic force behind the bolt will take care of the rest. But it was useless. I had slung the thing over my shoulder while dragging a deer out of the fields during the last crisis and slipped while crossing a ditch. It had not survived the fatass landing on it and had broken it into pieces.

    An actual bow took an entirely different level of skill to use. From practice, I considered myself accurate at still targets up to about 40 yards away. It takes me a little time to line up the shot but I fancied myself a somewhat competent archer. The process of readying an arrow after I had loosed the first was a little slow and I would not have much of a fire rate, but with only six arrows that shouldn¡¯t matter. I had only really ever thought of the bow as a weapon for silently poaching deer and shooting passive animals. Shooting at a moving target would be much more difficult.

    I needed something for close range fighting other than my holdout knife. I had some kitchen knives upstairs and a small Gerber folding knife in my pocket, but they were not made for stabbing things.

    I grabbed a piece of one and a half inch steel pipe from an old plumbing job. At about three foot in length, it had a solid weight to it. It was just a little bit too unwieldy to be comfortable in one hand, but it felt ok in both. I just could not figure out how to carry it with my bow. So it was dropped in favor of a claw hammer shoved into my belt. I gave up striking power and reach for convenience and accessibility. Growing tired I decided to sleep a little before going back out.

    Deep thoughts encroached upon my consciousness as I lay down. Like how the closet nerd in me always wanted a big ass sword to hang on my wall, preferably in a place of honor over the fireplace. Not one of those cheap ones either. I wanted to the $1000 dollar functional replica katana made of high carbon steel with a good Rockwell rating. But I was afraid to publicize my fascination with all things fantastical and unwilling to expose myself to make the purchase. I should have rocked out with my cock out, but now that sweet sword would forever be an object of my fantasies. Instead the challenges of this new Middle Earth will be met with a freaking claw hammer. That won¡¯t be very heroic.

    Ok, they never mentioned mutants in Tolkien, so what fantasy world or game would this be? There were no guns, but it had mutants and the remains of an old world, so maybe a hardcore version of Fallout? That didn¡¯t fit. Hmm. No AI guiding me against an alien invasion. No dragons taking over the earth, well that I know of anyways. Maybe it was more of a comic book crossover game, with people given power ups instead of pure superpowers. I just hoped it wasn¡¯t a game like Resident Evil, all scary and no hope. Thoughts of conquering the world filled my head as I drifted off to sleep.

    The next day or the next whatever, I have no way of telling time, I woke up and felt great. My remaining non-perishable food had been stashed in the safe and nothing else really had any value. My arm seemed fully healed and the last bit of scabbing was flaking off. I finished off the mostly empty gallon of water, grabbed my bow and hammer then went upstairs. I dug around a closet until I located my old faded black Jan-Sport backpack with leather covered nylon straps. I also grabbed a Rothco Metal 2-quart camping canteen that my grandma had bought me back when she was trying to get me interested in rejoining the Boy Scouts.

    A better way to store and carry stuff would be nice. ¡°Open Inventory,¡± The level two me cried.

    Of course nothing happened so I had to use the straps to put on the backpack. Ok, game plan time. My priorities in order of importance were to find a weapon, find water, find food and find other survivors. While at it I needed to limit my exposure to the purple death mist. Once I found enough for another week I would high tail it back to my place and repeat as necessary.

    I realized my diminutive high school backpack would not be able to transport a lot of water. Rather than being slowed down by taking the wheelbarrow and containers right off, I decided to locate a source first before carting it home.

    ¡°Stop stalling and go,¡± I mumbled. Looking down at myself, I was wearing a pair of my work jeans, my brown leather work boots that I had broken in during the spring, and a black long sleeved t-shirt. Not the best set of starting armor I had ever had on a character but also not the worst.

    A barn caught my wandering eye when I was peeping out my windows looking for monsters. The thought popped in my head that I may be able to snag a pitchfork from it. That would be a way better weapon than my little claw hammer. I had a lot more confidence stabbing some demented canine with a metal capped, pointed stick than trying to hit a moving target with an arrow. The barn was only about two hundred yards from the bunker, a relatively safe distance. Three quarters of that was covered in wilting waist high corn and the rest was lawn.

    I was shocked to see a hazy outline of the sun floating in the cloudy sky. The sun seemed to be waging a war against the miasmic periwinkle and was its life giving rays were burning off the gloom. Hope welled up in my heart for the first time in months at the thought of humanity recovering from this crisis. The cycle of night and day returning hopefully meant that the plants in the fields would finish growing in time for the harvest. If collected humanity could potentially store enough food to survive the coming winter. After that it would be more difficult, as we would likely be planting by hand, working together we could rise again. Hell, if we could raise walls to keep the mutants out, some semblance of society might return within a generation or two.

    The itching of my skin was fading as the periwinkle continued to burn away like an ill remembered dream. Changing focus to the present, I glanced at the sky. It was just past mid-morning and I got underway. An arrow nocked I ventured out again on my first solo quest.

    The barn had seen a lot of rough use through the years. It was a sturdy structure made out of corrugated steel and had large openings that allowed for a breeze to blow through in the summer. The rounded metal top had rusted leaving it a shade of burnt red. The faded gray of the ribbed siding stood out in sharp contrast and gave it a deceptively dilapidated look. It was big, but not overly so. The front opening was wide enough for the harvesters and there was plenty of room to store the rest of the machinery inside. But it was only a barn for a small farming family, and not the huge structure that would be needed for a larger plot of land. An attached silo, built to match, watched the nearby fields and was just a few feet taller than the barn itself.You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

    I moved quickly toward the barn while paying attention to my footing. Anyone who has ever walked across a cornfield knows that it is surprisingly easy to sprain an ankle if you don¡¯t pay enough attention. There was a marked difference in my gait and it was smoother and more coordinated than ever before. My body quickly covered the uneven terrain and I was at the building sooner than I expected. The barn was strictly equipment storage so I was not worried about mutant cows, but who knew what might have taken up residence inside. I paused at the entrance, straining to hear or see anything moving inside, for several minutes before I felt safe enough to proceed.

    Out of the direct violet light the burning persisted but the effect lessened as the day progressed. Even the milder effects still caused exposed skin to itch, like a developing rash. The periwinkle seemed to be too weak now to spread illumination into the interior but my nightvision allowed me to see in the darkness. The tools would be attached on a peg board near the far wall so I traveled in that direction. I¡¯ve always heard that while sneaking you should move slowly and when stepping try to roll your feet in a heel to toe motion if on solid ground, and vice versa if not. It was awkward at first but seemed to work. I continued to take my time and worked on leveling up my stealth on the way. Big guys can be sneaky bastards too if they try hard enough.

    I passed a couple of tractors, a harvester and a Terrax as I made my way across the floor. The thought of what could be out of my sight was terrifying, so I focused on the machines as I passed. There were a couple options when I arrived at the tool board for medieval combat. The two that most interested me a wood splitting axe and a pitchfork. The axe looked to be one of the 6 pounders, a chunk of not so sharp metal on the end of a plastic handle. It was dull from splitting wood and would wield like the sledgehammer at my house. I have already decided that something sharp in between me and charging animals was the goal, so I left it there after making a mental note. The four tined hay pitch fork seemed to glow in my vision, like an upgrade on my interface. Placing my bow to the side, I picked it up with both hands.

    I had a brief mental image of running through some fancy spear kata and looking like Chris Farley from Beverly Hills Ninja by the end of it. But before I could live out my fantasy the audible scuffling of a tiny fast moving feet cut into the silence. Sharp teeth dug into my in my right calf before I even caught sight of the animal. There was no way I just screamed no matter how it sounded. What happened was I yelled out as my legs back peddled. There was a weight swinging from one leg and I looked to see a giant rat attached to it. It was worrying at the calf muscle like a dog would shake around a chew toy. Each twist of its head making an audible sound as it ripped skin and meat apart.

    The rat was the size of a pit bull in the fifty pound range. The ugly little fucker looked like a blind barber had shaved its hair at random and left unhealthy, pink strips of skin amongst greasy, uneven hair. Its tail was a diseased shade of black and its eyes shown red in the dim lighting. Corded muscles rippled underneath its skin as it attempted to pull me to the ground.

    The tines on the pitchfork were facing up so I was forced to start jabbing the rat in its head with the rounded wooden end. The rat ignored the weak strikes and continued to gnaw. If anything, it only looked annoyed at my attempt to dislodge it. Kicking my leg and trying to shake the thing off was another bad idea and only caused more damage. The motion caused a small chunk of flesh to be torn loose and the rat flew away with squelch. It landed awkwardly about 10 feet away but rapidly scrambled back to its feet. With a tilt of its head the rodent swallowed the piece of me before it charged again.

    What¡¯s up with all these fucking mutants and their mid-battle snacks? The bastards could at least wait until the fight was over before eating people. That shit was poor manners. Frustrated and getting my ass kicked, I lined up the pitchfork so that the pointy end was facing the rat this time. I adjusted my aim as it leapt towards me and caught it through the hindquarters with the tines. It squealed as I pinned it to the ground and started my battle tested stomping routine. It took some adjustments to land a square hit because as it was squirming around, but soon one good boot led to another. The follow up stomps rewarded me with the sweet sound of crunching bones and splattering meat. I missed the exact instant the rat died, but to play it safe I didn¡¯t stop until it was mush.

    ¡°You¡¯re not eating me motherfucker,¡± I cursed at the corpse. That wasn¡¯t quite on point, and I vowed to work on better one liners for future battles.

    Hmm. Killing rats in a barn to get a starting weapon. I¡¯ve done this before, but it¡¯s not as intense when you are sitting playing in front of a computer in your underwear. It was not a victory to brag about, but every last bit of EXP will help in the end.

    Lightheaded and a little smug I was catching my breath when a group of five more monsters sauntered out of the shadows. I could swear the cocky things wanted me to see them because they could have easily caught me by surprise and finished me quickly. Maybe they didn¡¯t like my shitty taunt from earlier and were doing their own form of intimidation. Four mutant rats came scrambling at me while a giant one stayed back to watch. The rat in the back was almost twice as big as the rest of the bunch and had an intelligent gleam in its eyes.

    ¡°Oh, shit!¡±

    So I screamed a little that time as I ran away and tried to think up an exit strategy more effective than running like a bitch. There was loft nearby that was about twelve feet off the ground. Its access ladder was on the other side of the barn and would be impossible to get to. Badass pitchfork or not, if I got surrounded by these things I would be quickly overwhelmed, so jumped for it.

    I had played a little bit of basketball during my younger days. Being so tall, and relatively in good shape I never had any issue dunking on the standard 10 foot rim. At my best I could touch the top of the white box which was about 18 inches above the rim. Sprinting towards the loft I would have to make the biggest jump of my life to have any hope of surviving. I dropped the extra weight of the pitchfork and launched myself upward with all my strength. In my desperation, I had not noticed the Ki leaking into my legs during my sprint. Almost like a coiling a spring, it had condensed and propelled me upwards with amazing force.

    ¡°Ooof,¡± I gasped as the ledge struck my chest.

    ¡°What the crap,¡± I groaned as I fumbled over the ledge and flopped over to my back. I rolled over to my belly and looked over the edge at them the rats. They squeaked up their extreme displeasure as they saw my shit eating grin.

    ¡°What now ya evil Micky Mouse looking furballs! Whatcha gonna do!¡± I taunted the creatures.

    A loud chirp caused the rodents to stop and look over at the giant rat. It was standing at the base of the ladder that led up to the loft. I have no idea how the rat was smart enough to immediately go to the only access point to the upstairs, but the other mutants quickly caught on and ran over. You could almost more accurately call the ladder a steep set of steps. The rungs were flattened on the stepping side and it was only about a 55 degree incline. It was mounted with one side connected to the wall, and a railing for safety. If you were agile enough you could easily walk up without it. The rodents were not meant to climb ladders, but I soon saw they were surprisingly adept with their clawed feet.

    I pulled out my claw hammer and ran the distance to the top of the ladder, my injured limb screaming in agony with every limping step. I arrived just in time to kick a field goal with the first rat. Ok, note to self: don¡¯t kick anything with part of your calf muscle missing on your planting leg, because that shit hurts. The leg gave out and I slammed down against floor. Bright lights danced at the edge of my vision as the back of my head left a dent in the wood. I was somewhat mollified by the satisfying thud when the rat hit the ground below, but didn¡¯t plan on repeating the attack. I accrued several splinters from the rough lumber while scrambling back to my feet and again faced the ladder.

    ¡°King of the hill, bitches.¡± I challenged.

    Rat number two was reaching the top of the stairs by then. Attempting to hit a dog sized rat with a claw hammer is amazingly awkward when you are freakishly tall. The only reason I was able to connect is because they insisted on jumping at me, and presenting a good target. The hammer ripped through the air and struck rat two on the back and knocked it to the floor of the loft. Its ribs crackled as they broke allowing for an easy follow up stomp. It should have been a death blow to the creature, well as long mutants needed their internal organs, and I pushed it off the side. There was another dull thud as it hit dirt.

    It looked down for the count and the first rat was slowly limping its way back to the ladder. The third and fourth rats seemed to have noticed the ease at which I handled their predecessors and paused a few feet short of the top. Any hope of them giving up and running away was crushed when an angry chirp from the giant rat got them moving again. The two looked at each other and then came charging up the ladder side by side. The first one got another kick and went flying like the others. I had toned it down to stay on my feet but the force was enough to knock him to the ground as well. Rat four skittered past instead of attacking right away. Turning, my back was to edge the loft. Any attempt to circle around to safer footing was blocked by the rats continuous short lunges. Damn these things were smart. The animals¡¯ coordination and planning had me believing that either their instincts were amazing or these were thinking creatures.

    Unable to reach its short form with my hammer I tried for another kick. My leg gave out again as I missed and my butt hit the floor. Capitalizing, the mutant made its signature leap. My right arm placed in its way saved my throat, but it seemed content to chew on it instead. Locking its large jaw over my forearm it started shaking vigorously back and forth, causing the hammer to fall from my grasp. I already knew what to do in this situation. The knife from my belt was quickly out and stabbing into it, over and over. Ending the fight, I gave it a few stomps as it tried to crawl away, turning it into another pile of rat goop.

    I made back to the ladder in time to see the giant rat halfway up. It looked at me and turned to jump six feet to the ground, landing smoothly. It turned around and hissed at me like a possum. The boss rat was obviously a lot craftier than its friends. It looked me in the eyes and we had a brief stare down. I am not saying it punked me out or anything, but I did break away first. Aching all over and with two heavily bleeding wounds I unhooked the clips holding the steps to edge of the loft. My eyes caught the rats again as I shoved it to the ground. It continued stare for a few more moments before shuffling out of sight.

    Temporarily safe, I took a look at my wounds. My right arm seems to be taking the most punishment nowadays. You would think a righty would learn to use offhand for absorbing damage, but not me. That would be to simple. The hand would no longer close all the way, and only two of the fingers still moved on demand. I sat down on a nearby bale of hay and pulled my shirt over my head. The blood covered hold out knife was dropped and I fished my folding knife out of my pocket. With the knife, teeth and some finagling, my shirt was chopped up into uneven bandages. Half of them were tied over my left calf where the first rat had taken the first pound of flesh. The outline was uneven do to the missing meat and looked awkward under the makeshift bandage. My arm was tougher to wrap, but I managed to at least apply on a basic pressure bandage and the blood flow slowed down.

    So far all of my half assed planning has left me wanting in critical situations. The lack of a hand crank on my well water had caused my best friend to die because we had to go searching for supplies. Right now I could really use some bandages, but I had never even considered purchasing some for my bunker. Right now I was thinking about how putting some water in my canteen would be a really nice after fighting a pack of RoUS¡¯s. Heck, it would help with my blood loss too. I hear that shit is dehydrating.

    If I wanted to continue to survive, at some point I would needed to stop being a complete idiot.

 Chapter 12 - Boss Fight

    Chapter 12

    Darren Slattery

    I began to meditate after the bleeding stopped. Sitting is my usually my go to position, but with chunks missing out of my body lying flat was far easier. Like some mystic guru on a mountain precipice, I was contemplating and attempting to understand the world by understanding myself. Failing to plan was planning to fail. I was still not taking the game serious enough and my old complacent lifestyle was still affecting my actions. Drifting through life without putting much effort into anything was ok if you did not have to fight for survival every single day. In this new world, my own paradigm would have to completely change. I needed to be better. If I was going to become strong enough to destroy these monsters that were taking over my world, I would have to put forth the effort.

    Changing focus back to the present, I began visualizing different plans. My only advantage right now was time and there was no need to rush the confrontation with the boss rat. With my absurdly fast regeneration, time was also healing my wounds. I felt for my center and found my energy tank about three quarters full. Instead of circulating, I pushed the energy towards my wounds. It moved easily as it seemed to be naturally attracted to damaged areas. It formed small pools around the injuries and seemed to feed whatever force fueled my regeneration.

    My body mended slowly. New skin formed and the muscles slowly grew back from the inside out. The sky outside became dark as the cycle of day and night finally returned. The periwinkle was fading and my skin was no longer tinged pink under its poisonous touch. Due to the nature of my nightvision, I was unable to tell if the purple was completely gone yet. When light was absent and my special sight activated, colors became muted and I saw tones similar to a black and white movie. If there was any left in the air, it was a much smaller amount.

    I peeled the soggy bandages off after I ran out of Ki. The wounds looked weeks old after only a couple of hours of meditation. They were far from completely healed though. The flesh had not filled back in and the muscles were weak because of it. The wounds ached like old injuries now, but the pain was no longer sharp enough to disable me. I took a couple of test swings with the hammer and found my grip to be weak, but manageable. It would not hold up if the hammer struck something at full power but at least it worked again. I wiggled my fingers and was glad for magical healing. Who knows if I would have ever regained use of them otherwise?

    I took a powernap and awoke refreshed. It was still dark outside and I was starting to become quite thirsty. Too much of my body¡¯s water had been expended during the fight and my cottonmouth was back. Soon it would no longer be to an advantage to wait. My health would only deteriorate with no water available. I looked over the edge and tallied up the dead rats. Three corpses were visible below, with a blood trail leading off from the fourth. The trail was wide enough to lead me to believe that the fourth one was no longer much of a threat, but I would still be cautions because sometimes wounded animals are the most dangerous.

    The big rat was still out there and was probably smart enough to set up an ambush, but staying focused while waiting on your prey to appear was draining. Hopefully it was growing tired of waiting while I napped. I recovered and cleaned up my knives before I slunk back out of sight of the ledge. Moving with as much stealth as possible, I manage moved to the far edge of the loft without seeming to notify the monsters. My plan was to grab the pitchfork and fight the last two rats on the ground. Not only was it a far better weapon in this fight then a hammer, but with two hands on the shaft I could compensate for my weakened grip. I strapped my pack on and shoved the hammer back into my belt. Low crawling to the edge I hung over and let my feet dangle before dropping. A few quick steps and a snatch and grab later the weapon was in my hands. I put my back to the nearest wall and waited for the attack that never came.

    It was a lot darker in the barn than earlier and full night had fully fallen. There was no way I would have been able to see anything if not for my nightvision. Maybe I could use that. How smart exactly was this big rat? Testing a theory, I decided to try and sucker it in. Moving erratically, hands forward to feel my way, I fumbled around in the darkness. With a hand on the wall, I took hesitant, shuffling steps and pretended to use it as a guide. After every few steps, I paused to listen intently. All a humans normal weaknesses were played up as part of my act as I tried to draw the rat in. After faking a stubbed toe, the rats finally crept slowly into sight. The smaller rat was heavily damaged and its pain evident in every limping step. Giving no indication to being aware of their presence, I continued stumbling forward.Stolen from Royal Road, this story should be reported if encountered on Amazon.

    The bloody rat crept forward alone while the big one stayed back like usual. I could easily kill it now, but I did not want to play cat and mouse with the boss rat if it decided to retreat. Hell, it would most likely be the cat in that scenario anyways. I needed to end this fight so I quickly made adjusted to draw in the smart rat. It was a bit of gamble and would require some more blood and sacrifice from my abused body, but hopefully this would be over soon.

    When the small one leapt for my poor left leg again, I let it latch on. It bit my leg from the front this time, its huge mouth griping over my shinbone. Fuck that hurt, it seemed worse since it was intentional. I kept my head and played it up, screaming and flailing away in the darkness. A couple of pokes with my pitchfork going intentionally wide solidified the act. For around a minute we stumbled around bumping into wall and several machines. Just as I was getting ready to give in and stab the damn thing, the big rat made its move. It scurried towards me and looked prepared to make the rodent¡¯s standard attack. It leapt for my throat, but the tines of the pitchfork were planted in its path and it impaled itself. The weight of the impact, combined with the fifty pound beast on my leg, knocked me to the ground. I shoved the pitchfork and pushed the big rat back before letting go of it. I pulled my holdout knife again and went to stab-town on the stupid rat that just would not let go of my leg. After killing it I heard the wooden pitchfork dragging as the smart rat tried to flee with a foot of metal stuck in its lungs. Since the tines were curved slightly down, I stepped on the shaft with my foot and pressed it into place. The rat was still struggling itself away when hammer hit its head. After a few glancing blows with my left hand, I was able to strike its skull clearly. The cracking noise was followed by a collapsing rat, but I still gave it a few more whacks for being such pain in the ass.

    Even after winning I was very weak and had another major injury, my third of the day. If there had been another rat my strategy would have gotten me killed. It was a good plan for the situation, but I was still getting lucky. I couldn¡¯t even bandage my leg because I was out of shirt to make them. Breathing deeply I sat down and rested my tired back against the cool corrugated steel. That was when I heard it again.

    ¡°You are now level 3,¡± The Voice announced. ¡°You may choose to advance one of the following attributes: Mind, Body, Soul, Magic or Ki. Choose with care¡±

    Fuck me sideways. A ding and I was too tired to woot woot! Closing my eyes for a moment as my head rested against the wall I thought about the options. I had been leading towards taking another point in Body, but now I wasn¡¯t so sure. It was too dangerous to get distracted about it right now though.

    ¡°Get up Slate, get to safety¡± I told myself. ¡°You don¡¯t want to be caught bleeding when the next mob paths through.¡±

    I needed to perform some basic first aid and give my leg a chance to clot. I pulled off my boots, unbuckled my pants and sat there in my blood stained boxers. The tattered remains of my jeans were cut into denim band-aids and I did my best to wrap my abused leg. I put the hammer into my backpack and pulled the pitchfork out of the big rat. Leaning on it, I used it like a walking stick.

    It sucked that these mobs don¡¯t drop any loot. I could use me a magic sword or some armor. This smart rat fit the role of a named or maybe an elite mob, that shit should drop something right? Taking a minute to examine the corpse did not enlighten me of anything other than it was a dead big ass rat. It was disgusting like they tend to be, and it smelled of old carrion. In a RPG my toon would be skinning this sucker and taking the tail and teeth to sell to the nearest merchant. Real me looked at the disgusting carcass and decided to leave its skin alone, because fuck that nasty shit. There was no practical use I could think of for its body parts and its corpse was left undefiled. Just before standing up I thought about some rat steaks, but that just made me start dry heaving.

    I stumbled back over to where my bow was still sitting on the shelf and picked it up. With no way to secure it, I carried one weapon in each hand and limped to the front of the barn. I was headed home in my underwear after an ass kicking when I noticed the empty 5 gallon bucket. It was the same type of 5 gallon bucket I had half a dozen of sitting at my house. It was a cartoon like moment where the enormous light bulb appears over someone¡¯s head. I started talking to myself again, which seemed to happening often enough to be called a habit.

    ¡°You big dumb son of a bitch, you have a well, a bucket, and a bunch of rope at the house.¡±

    The trek back home was a special kind of misery. Each step was full of torment and self-loathing, every movement agony to body and mind. The pain was something that I deserved, and wished there was more of it. It is the body¡¯s way of telling us to not do something, and I wanted to remember to think before acting. I needed to get smarter about how I played this game.

    I spoke to the heavens, ¡°I choose Mind.¡±

    ¡°You have chosen Mind, Your current attributes are as follows:

    Mind - 1

    Body ¨C 2

    Ki ¨C 2¡±

 Chapter 13 - Suns Out, Guns Out

    Chapter 13

    Slate

    I limped my way back home without any further incident. Going over to the shed and dropping my gear, I went inside. I took one of my 5 gallon buckets, tied it to some rope and went over to the well. It was the work of a few minutes to get the cover off and then to lower the bucket down. A few moments after hearing the splash I slowly pulled it back up. Viola, Water. It was odd that something so obvious had slipped our minds. Granted water was not the only reason for the first exploratory trip to the neighbors, but it had been significant factor.

    The first bucket quenched my thirst and a second was drawn to clean up with. I took off my work boots and discarded my dirty bloody boxers before giving myself a good scrubbing. Without soap or deodorant, my pits still stank, but it felt good to be clean. I did keep both eyes open for anything approaching across the lawn, but the open area around me felt relatively safe. My nightvision was working a lot better in the little natural light of the full moon then it had in the periwinkle. I could see clearly to the edge of the fields, and even past a bit in the grayscale. I kept my head on a swivel while finishing up and pulled up another bucket to take with me inside. Exhausted, I went down stairs headed for bed.

    The point spent in Mind must be paying off because prior to lying down I went back up and snagged my gear from outside. I also prepared for the unexpected by loading up my pack with a full canteen of water and a couple of days¡¯ worth of food. Even with the locked and barred doors, the weapons stayed nearby as I slept.

    I woke up tired and took care of my morning ablutions. Grabbing a snack, I went upstairs wearing gym shorts and sneakers while carrying my pitchfork. Bright streams of sunlight pushing through cracks in the boarded up windows illuminated the house. Excited, I ran outside to see a sky so big it might as well be in Montana. It was bright blue and there were no clouds in sight. That damned periwinkle was finally gone. If not for the unusual quiet that seemed to be the natural state of the world without the noises of civilization, I might have thought the last two months were only a nightmare. My favorite rocking chair was dragged off the porch and into the sunlight. Pushing back and forth, I luxuriated and simply enjoyed the morning.

    I would have liked to close my eyes and taken a nap in the sunshine, but fucking mutant rats could be anywhere. There was still a peace to be found, a balance, between vigilance and relaxation in the yard. Sitting there thinking, I could notice the small changes to my mind. I entered a light trance and continued to heal my injuries using Ki while I did a mental tally of my resources. The bunker was livable as long as the food lasted now that there was such a blatantly obvious source of potable water.

    Today was set aside for fun though. I was just going to relax and put the scavenging on hold. It would be a couple weeks before I started feeling the pressure of an emptying supply room anyways. I only lasted an hour before getting bored and deciding that instead of having a lazy day, I was going to figure out how to jump eight feet into the air again. The Ki had gathered in my legs and propelled me to superhuman heights. I needed to learn to do that intentionally and on demand. It could be the key to defeating my foes or to running away from them.

    Feeling my injuries healing well from the morning of meditation, it was time to try to utilize the energy intentionally for something else. I snagged my fork and took off running around the yard. Yup, cool kids call pitchforks forks when they want to save a syllable. Alternating jogging with sprinting, I tried to force the power to activate with the occasional leap. If I could get badass with a spear and improve my jumping maybe there was some sort of Dragoon class to unlock, if this game had classes anyways. Probably not, classes would require the game to give me information, and that didn¡¯t seem to be happening. Hell I don¡¯t even know if I have the ability to gain more skills.

    I came out of my distracting thoughts to notice that my pace was incredibly fast. I must have been doing around 25 mph. The energy could be felt seeping into my legs, making them push harder and thus moving me faster. Like catching something out of the corner of your eye, as soon as I paid attention the feeling vanished and the jog resumed a more normal pace. Well normal for a big guy in absolutely amazing shape. Hell, I was not even breathing that hard. It was as if my body was far more efficient and could go harder than it should be able to. If I could run that fast consistently it would be a huge advantage. More importantly it would allow me to run away from monsters too strong to fight.

    I stopped running after thirty more minutes and still felt good. I never recaptured the speed or feeling of Ki moving into my legs, but my mind recognized that it was only a matter of practice makes perfect. I decided to try combining my meditation with some yoga to find an alert state where I could access my energy from. The combination of meditating while exercising could teach me how to access the power. Going through the poses in the front yard, I made an effort to pay attention to my surroundings while focusing on my breathing. I continued for about an hour, never quite accessing my core, but I felt it moving with me, like it was slightly expanding and retracting with each breath.

    I went down stairs, made lunch and went back to the rocking chair. After a short mental debate about setting up a target and working on my archery, I decided it wasn¡¯t worth the risk that I might damage any of my few shafts. For all intents and purposes, I needed better and more durable weapons. A better way to carry them would be nice as well. Changing weapons and storing them was never an issue in video games. You simply clicked a button. In the real world, to transition from my bow to my fork I would have to drop the bow and risk damaging it or lose precious seconds setting it down. Then I would have to pick up the dropped fork, or pull it out of whatever kind of sheath I manage to build for it, slowing me down even more. Just dropping the one I was not going to use was not a viable long term solution. If either was to break I would be unable to replace it.

    Keeping an enemy out of biting range was a huge advantage, so my plan for exploring was to walk around with the bow out and an arrow knocked at all times. The problem was that with an effective range of 30-50 yards I would only get one shot off. If the arrow missed, any reasonable quick opponent would be on me in seconds. It would probably take me the same few moments to drop the bow and start to transition to another weapon. I doubt I could do it in time to have the second weapon ready prior to the monster, or any attacker really, arriving to chew me up.

    Following the same concept, a sword of some sort with the respective sheath would make the weapon swap easier. I could probably drop the bow and pull it in time to face a charge. Of course a sword had a whole slew of other issues. With the pitchfork I had been able to just hold it steady and allow the beasts to impale themselves. With a sword I would be swinging something unfamiliar at a moving target, a far more difficult task.

    Still feeling energetic after the yoga session, I went through my prison style workout, throwing in some pull ups from one of tree limbs nearby. Even after all the physical activity earlier, I was able to push myself for another hour before feeling exhausted. Though I had only been on lock down for short time in the basement, I doubt any inmate had been this fit. The two points in Body were making all the difference.

    Thinking of it, I wondered how I got my bonus points. I was not a genius, but still maintained a 3.5 GPA in high school without even trying. I have never taken an IQ test so did not know where on the bell curve I fell, I always assumed it would be the very top half of normal. Comparatively, I had always been strong prior to the change, but in recent years I had gone soft. Mostly just hard at work, letting the labors of my construction job keep me in decent shape. So If the game gave points based on your starting talents, then Mind should have had at least as many starting points in Body. The point in Ki was the only one that made any sense. Although I was not an expert, I was far above a beginner and I had been using it a lot recently.Enjoying the story? Show your support by reading it on the official site.

    I am not sure if I¡¯ll ever find out what the starting points meant.

    I had recovered a little and decided to finish my work out with a set of jump squats. The energy wanted to be used, I just could not figure out how to do it. Shortly later my jump squats went from twelve inches to four feet off the ground. After noticing, I was able to repeat the enhanced jumps a few more before losing the feeling.

    The key seems to be focusing on it without intensity. It did not make sense and I would not understand it myself if I did not have the Ki to guide me along. It was like being fully aware of something, without concentrating on it. Like focusing on something in the corner of your eye but never directly looking at it. It was something that I couldn¡¯t quite put into words, but was learning how to do anyways.

    My injuries constantly complained while I exercised, but did not cause significant distress. I couldn¡¯t completely ignore them either. My grip failed while doing pull ups and there was a noticeable limp to my stride, but I persevered through the pain. I thought of it as an attempt at mental conditioning. I was hardening myself to the pain, because there were more battle wounds in my future.

    I took a break by walking laps around the edge of the yard and looking for any signs of life. The fork was a reassuring weight in my hand and I decided to practice using it. I did not expect myself to be able to wield a pitchfork like a martial artist would a spear, but thought I should be able to at least stab something and keep my balance while doing so. Setting my feet in a bladed stance like taught in the police academy, I tried a few stabs, imaginary blocks. Even with no one watching, my closet nerd cringed at me dancing around with a pretend spear like I was giving a demonstration at a LARP festival. To counter this I started goofing around yelling ¡°Keeyaa!¡± and the like every once in a while to lighten my mood.

    The fooling around was productive though. I figured out that the bladed stance may be good for reacting to close aggression and even maybe some boxing, but it did not fit stabbing with a spear. I ended up standing with my feet even to my shoulders and my body sideways at my target area. Lunging from this position felt far more natural and a twisted of the torso seemed to add more power to the thrust. It seemed to also allow me to retreat and approach targets in relative balance. I had so much fun with it that I ended up spending most of the afternoon playing with my shaft.

    Speaking of shafts, I had been a long time in male company and with no privacy for most of it. So don¡¯t judge me for being so happy with the world going back to almost normal that I got a little happy with myself later that night. I really hoped some women survived the change. It would be my luck that the only ones that did were mutated into those nasty looking zombies. Of course, that would make it easy to get my dick into their mouths, but getting it back would be a whole another issue.

    ****

    The next day I started out with strict meditation in the sunlit bunker, followed by some peaceful yoga on the lawn. Even though I spent about half of my Ki healing my injured muscles, they looked like they would need another day or two to fully re-grow. Still I felt great. The sun shining above did wonders for my mood. It was another no shirt day. Sun¡¯s out, guns out after all and I was still wearing the shorts and sneakers from yesterday. I checked myself out in a mirror this morning and changes since the game started are tremendous. My barrel shaped torso never tended to have sculpted abs even when I was young and skinny, and my pot belly at the beginning of this had been impressive.

    Right now, I was freaking jacked. If I could find a spandex unitard, I could do a fair impression of a comic book superhero. Leaning out had caused the spare tire around my waist to disappear. Curious as to how many pounds had been lost on the apocalypse diet; I walked inside and stood on the scale. Well that doesn¡¯t look right. It said I was still weighing 270 lbs. With the amount of mass lost I should be weighing far less, probably around 240 or so. I knew that fat had five times the volume of muscle, but that was absurd.

    After eating some breakfast I decided to spend the next week hanging around the yard. I was due for a nice training montage anyways. I needed to get a handle on Ki and test the limits of my improved Body, so I developed a routine similar to the exercise the day before. I also trained with a sledge hammer and a large pipe, simulating using them as weapons. I did not intend to bring them with me, but a club would be easy to find anywhere. It would also get me used to swinging an object like a sword. I wanted to be prepared in case I did eventually find one. Mostly though, the work was for the balance, foot work and exercise anyways.

    I began working on a tentative plan for the future as well. For my peace of mind, I needed to go to Jessica¡¯s apartment complex to find out if she still alive. I do not think she could have survived in the middle of a population center, like where she lived in Cincinnati, but I had to know for sure. She deserved to be buried at the very least. There were also some possible upgrades for my weapons on the way there. The specialty sword store near the Riverside Center Antique Mall was only a small detour out of the way.

    I had passed it by a few times but never actually gone inside. Hopefully it had some of the functional replica weapons inside because some of those stores just sold display stuff that wouldn¡¯t last in real combat. It was my best bet for obtaining medieval style weapons for this new world though, unless I wanted to try for another crossbow. Thinking of it, it wasn¡¯t a bad idea grab one of those too from a sporting goods store. Maybe restock my arrows as well. Upgrading my melee weapon would be first up though, because I had no confidence in my ability to be a ranged character.

    *****

    The following week was nothing but more sunshine and clear skies. I even got a bit of a tan. Working out and playing with my Ki was so much fun that time flew by. It was still a bit lonely though. I probably could have gone an entire month without feeling the urge to speak with another human being if the world was still normal. Now that the option was gone, I missed it. Weird right? The week had been productive though. I still haven¡¯t figured out how to get my Ki to work in my arms yet, but I was getting pretty good at using the energy for running and jumping.

    The Ki could be drawn at will now. It was still working like a resource in a RPG, but I seem to be increasing the rate at which it refills with practice. I only have a few tricks with it so far. The first is reinforcing my legs to run faster. A slow steady Ki burn allowed me run at extreme speeds for 5 minutes or so. The second trick is I could do some serious powered jumping. I could leap 8-10 feet in the air about two dozen times or so before running out of gas. Although there were not many obstacles to hop over around the yard, I had a feeling I would be a pretty big badass at parkour with a little time and practice in the city. My sense of balance has vastly improved over the week and I have no problems landing from one of my leaps. Both tricks should enable me to escape from most situations and greatly enhanced my survivability.

    I had one final trick, a powered lunge. Just like it sounds, I can power my legs to lunge a dozen feet in an instant while jabbing with my spear. This one does not take much energy at all but would be of limited use. My pitchfork was just not sturdy enough to handle me stabbing too many things at that speed. As long as they were small enough, like the rats I should be fine. But I don¡¯t know if the wooden shaft could handle me impacting something much larger.

    Refilling the Ki was still a slow process, and it seems to refill itself naturally over the course of about twelve hours. I am getting better at speeding up the refueling process, but forcing it is as much effort as running a marathon. Well, it¡¯s like running a marathon used to be. As I am now, cranking one out should be fairly easy. Sucking in energy from the world completely exhausted me after only an hour or two, but an hour after that my body has recovered from the effort. If I force it, I could recover my Ki over the course of 6 hours and would take two exhausting cycles.

    All the practice has widened the pathways in my body as well. The wider the pathways get, the faster I can pull in energy. But widening them is so infinitesimally slow that progress in it seems to be a distant dream.

    The training had leaned me down to 260 pounds and I felt powerful. Even on my limited rations my personal energy level is through the roof. It¡¯s going to be tough in the future just lying around, because I now feel like always moving, training, or being physically active. It was also feeling like it was time to move on, to keep advancing and taking small steps towards my goals.

    The point in Mind made a difference in my week of training as well. My thought processing speed has sped up and memories seem clearer. My ability to learn, even if it is only learning balance or stabbing with a pitchfork, seems to have improved. The point seemed to have also had an effect on my mental health. I looked back at some of my past mistakes with positive criticism rather throwing the normal pity party. My slightly improved mind did not fix my all mental issues though. My thoughts seemed as all over the place as normal, but it did focus me, like an ADHD kid on Ritalin.

    It was time to go back, find John and bury him like he deserves. Hopefully he was not on his own too long and wild animals had gotten to his body, but after near two weeks the corpse has to be in pretty bad shape. Tomorrow morning, I¡¯ll take care of it. While out I would also try to secure some supplies for my base and maybe scavenge a few useful items.

    Who knows, maybe I¡¯ll get lucky and find some old school porn magazines stashed under someone¡¯s bed. I may be a bit of a dreamer, but hey, it could happen.

 Chapter 14, Burying John

    Chapter 14

    Darren Slattery

    The weather was still fantastic the day I decided to head back to the Carter¡¯s. The sky was clear, the humidity low and the morning bright. It was one of those perfect days where you wanted to be by a pool with your kids, or sitting on a deck and drinking beer with old friends. It was the type of day that you only get the opportunity to enjoy every so often. Personally, my choice would have been more training, but I was starting to run low on food.

    It was time to move on, to go exploring and find out what was happening in Cincinnati. The world was changing into something unrecognizable, but if other people were out there then we could help each other through these tumultuous times. Before any of that happened, I needed show my friend his last respects and put him in the ground.

    Wearing my high school backpack, I pushed a wheelbarrow containing a large tarp and my pitchfork towards the Carters¡¯. The pack is a new constant feature of my wardrobe, and contained basic survival supplies, like food, water and bandages that will with me everywhere. It is one of my attempts to be better prepared going forward. With the pack I can always run in a different direction from the house and still live for a few days on what¡¯s inside. While not quite as prepared as an average boy scout, I was getting closer.

    Protective gear is what I really needed, especially arm and leg guards. My poor extremities were getting mutilated and devoured way too much. Rather than trying to rig up some ghetto armor with cardboard or scrap metal last week, I decided the time would be better spent on training. That left me leaving the house in my standard defensive outfit consisting of jeans, a t-shirt and work boots. I kept my hammer and two knives on me as well, but left the bow at home for this trip.

    I went the same route as the first time. Moving up to the street and then down to their driveway, I jogged along as fast as the wheelbarrow could be kept under control. Less exposure meant more safety and I wanted to get back to my yard as soon as possible. Knowing the Carters¡¯ house would still have an overwhelming smell of death and decay, I decided to moderate the odor by booting in the locked front door after arriving. Hopefully it would create a cross wind and draw some of the stench out. The heavy oak exterior door had been a very solid piece of construction but I barely noticed the impact when my work boot shattered it open. I took hesitant sniff at the air and gagged anew at the smell wafting out before heading around back.

    With some apprehension I pushed the wheelbarrow to the rear. I had left the doors open last time, but the smell was still far worse than before. The still outline of John¡¯s corpse in the dimly lit room brought tears to my eyes. I am not a big crier, but I recognize that there is a time and place for it. Now I am not saying I am a stoic by any means, but repressing feelings until they explode in anger and rage is kind of my thing. It just seemed to work better for me rather than having a nice healthy cathartic sob on occasion.

    There was no way avoid it this time though. I tried to push it down like normal, but the loss of my friend hit me harder than I could cope. Stumbling back to middle of the yard, I fell to the ground and started crying so hard my shoulders shook. Calling it a nice cry did not do it justice. It was uncontrollable. Snot leaked and tears fell as I screamed out in pain from a fetal position. After a while it simmered down to a whimpering shudder, which was followed by some sniffling before I finally sat up and began wiping the fluids from my face. As my nose cleared the smell of death made itself known again, and I was reminded of the work ahead of me. My emotions were back to a controllable level now and I was finally able to push the remainder back down, repressing them again like they were supposed to be. Steeling myself for the grisly work ahead, I stood back up and got to it.

    There is nothing graceful about moving a corpse. Even when they are ridged with rigor mortis, they are still ungainly and heavy sacks of meat. It makes it hard to show the respect the dead deserve when their body just flops around all over. For that reason, well that and to try and contain the leaking bodily fluids, someone invented the body bag. A dead person compressed into a thick plastic bag and then strapped to a backboard makes them a lot easier to carry with some dignity. Regrettably, the needed equipment was not on hand nor was a helper available, so I was unable to treat John like he should have been.

    In bad shape like expected, the corpse was still in the bloat stage of decomposition. He was still in one piece, and it did not appear that scavengers had gotten to him. His killer was still lying in the floor nearby with fangs exposed in a permanent snarl. Loathing being in the same room with the creature that had taken so much from me, I still could not bring myself to move it. In my weakness I settled to covering the abomination with a towel acquired from the bathroom before moving on to my friend.

    Moving John was a careful process. I laid down the blue tarp and started pulling John onto it by his legs. The skin from his legs sloughed as I dragged the body into position. I managed to not puke directly on him when it happened, but it was a near thing and my breakfast soon decorated the floor beside us. After the retching subsided and I could handle it, he was rolled up in the tarp.

    A six foot, ten inch, 400 pound dead body does not fit easily into a wheelbarrow, but it was a far better option than dragging him back to my house. To be honest, without my recently improved strength, the task would have been beyond me. As I am now though, muscling him onto the cart was only a few moments of moderate effort. The corpse did not quite explode from the process, but burst a little and started leaking fluids heavily. The smell caused me to need another short break and I took it. Physically I was not tired at all, but mentally it had been one of the most taxing endeavors of my life. The emotions dripped out again in the form of quiet tears as I rolled him back to my yard. Not quite ready to put him in the ground, I left him in the wheelbarrow and took off running with my fork back to the Carters¡¯.

    There was no food to be found in the residence and I had searched extensively. A few week¡¯s worth of stacked garbage bags in the utility room suggesting that the Carters¡¯ had survived for a time. I went looking for signs of what happened and found it in the master bedroom. It contained what was left of two adults and one small child in the form of corpses lying mostly on the bed. The hound had eaten most of them and bones were scattered across the room and into the hallway like as many discarded chew toys. It was a gory scene that belonged in a B rated horror flick, not at my neighbors. They couldn¡¯t have all died of natural causes and have ended up on the bed together. From the bloody knife beside the largest skeleton, it looked like they had decided to leave this world together. Never being married and without child, I was unable to fully grasp the ultimate terror and grim resolution the Carters must have experienced in order to go through with such a tragedy. Feeling sick, I moved on and tried not to think about it anymore.Love this novel? Read it on Royal Road to ensure the author gets credit.

    One of the items I did end up taking was a carpenter¡¯s half-hatchet from the garage. The half-hatchet is exactly what it sounds like, the front half a hammer and the back half a hatchet. The hatchet side blade was about four inches wide and it weighed close to three pounds. I shoved it into my belt to replace the hammer and it fit comfortably. I also snagged a spud bar which I liked the look of. It was a fourteen pound piece of metal shaped like a staff about sixty inches long. It had a dull point on one end and I liked feel of it. If I had any talent in wielding a staff this would be a great combination of weight and length to go with my newfound strength. I took it to play around with during my next training session.

    My new toys in hand, I carried a can of gas out into the yard to test its flammability. There had been no cars driving by and my truck had not started, but that could be attributed to all the newer models relying on electronics. If it was just an electrical issue, then maybe older machines might still work. I poured a little onto the driveway and lit it with a match from the house. It caught on fire, but was lacked the explosiveness of old. Instead of a small fireball of exploding fumes, the flame slowly marched across the pool until it was fully lit. The small puddle of gas took a long time to burn out, like oil in a lamp, and it finally consumed itself over the course of 15 minutes. As interesting as it all was, I had no idea what that meant for the world or physics. When I got done playing with the fire I jogged home, leaving the useless gas where it lay.

    I started digging John¡¯s grave after arriving home and it should have been backbreaking work. Being in manual labor and construction, I have had the occasion to dig many a hole with by hand. Unless you were a Winchester and on the set of Supernatural, it used to be impossible to dig a grave without totally exhausting yourself over the course of 3-4 hours. This one only took me about an hour. I felt a little tired afterwards but even that seemed to be mostly mental. It had just been a long day so far.

    Being in superhuman condition was still astonishing even after a week of testing my limits. Finding out what I could do from body weight exercises and jumping around was all well and good, but what I really wanted was access to a gym. A nice set of weights would enable me to more accurately gauge my new strength and allow me to quantify it. I made a mental note to attempt to do so during my wanderings.

    My errant thoughts drifted as I finished up the pit. It was a little longer wider than my friend. It was silly and irrational, but I wanted him to have some room to stretch out. I did not want him to be cramped for space like he was most of his life. I lowered John into it as gracefully as I was able, and straightened him out. He had to stay wrapped up in the tarp because I had no access to a coffin. I thought about taking another look at the man who had helped me through a difficult part of my life, but I knew from the horrid smell and viscous fluids coming out of the tarp that there was nothing of him but meat rotting in the sun.

    I climbed out of the pit and stood over it for several long minutes before filling it back in. I debated giving an audible eulogy but decided against it. His hopes, dreams and aspirations were gone, and I had to focus on my own. If there was anything left of John other than the corpse he left behind, hopefully he would know how I felt.

    After my friend was finally in the ground and covered with his dirt blanket, I thought about doing the same for my roommate. Even if he was an asshole he deserved a proper burial as well. Unfortunately for him, I was all out of tarps and didn¡¯t want to make a mess dragging his gooey ass up the stairs. The whole deep freezer was not coming out of the basement in one piece either, so Seth would just have to stay on metaphorical ice for a little longer. I don¡¯t know what it was that made me think of John as still a person and Seth as rotting meat, but it spoke to my personality that I disassociated myself with my murder victim and still thought myself a good person for taking care of a friend.

    The burial had been enough exercise for the day and after cleaning up I spent the rest of the afternoon debating traveling gear. A backpack made for schoolbooks was not enough for a man to live out of, but beggars can¡¯t be choosers. I went downstairs and loaded mine up to its limit. Two lighters were added, as well more food. I was able to loop the canteen to the outside and fit in a couple of full plastic water bottles. A small cooking pot would have been nice to bring, but there was no room left and everything else was more important than cooking utensils. As I picked up the pack I noticed that it rattled annoyingly from the cans of food inside. Following the Hitchiker¡¯s Guide, I wrapped everything up in a good old fashioned towel to keep it from making noise. I thought about rigging my yoga mat to strap to the top for sleeping comfort, but decided against it. I could likely secure myself inside a building somewhere if when I intended to sleep and hopefully find a bed. As a last minute thought, I tied some empty pillow cases on the straps for extra carrying capacity if needed.

    I worked out my traveling strategy next. Although confident in my ability to run the distance to the mall and back, there was no reason to pull every mob in the area by sprinting around like a madman. It would do me no good to arrive quickly but with a horde of monsters on my tail when I stopped to look for weapons. Heading towards the city instead of away from it meant that I was guaranteed a few fights along the way, but there would also be an increased chance of encounters with other survivors. Which would be more dangerous was open for debate. Mutated humans and monsters should be instinctual hunters, acting on impulse without much planning. A retreat or tactical fall back to a more defensible position should allow me to overcome most of those encounters.

    Conversely, the potential to meet other survivors filled me with both hope and fear. Living through the change would be a lot easier if I could group up with some good people, but people are people, both good and bad. The humans still alive would be one of three types. They would be lucky, extremely tough or they had been protected by someone else. Although I have had my share of good luck, I did not fear those who have been surviving by relying on pure chance. I also did not have to worry about the protected members of the herd, the weak and infirm. What concerned me most were the tough bastards who have fought for their survival every day for the last few months. Those guys would have had to been ruthless to survive out in the world without prior preparation. That surely would be far beyond me in both combat experience and levels.

    Humans had ruled the world for a reason, and it was not our physical prowess. Our minds had made us the apex predators on this planet. We took advantage of our surroundings and used them to our advantage. It was that knowledge in particular that led me to fear an ambush. What you don¡¯t see coming can kill you. It was still a little early for that yet though. Hopefully people had not yet reached the point where they were killing each other for their experience and levels, but it was possible and something I wanted to avoid being the victim of.

    The need to my long term survival weighed on me as well, but my mind kept jumping. There were just too many unknowns right now to know where to begin. Winter would be coming in a few months and without the convenience of food supplied by grocery stores, I am not sure how to get enough food to last through the cold season. It could even be best to start traveling south to avoid the worst of the weather. That may still be an option, but I still had business to take care of in Cincinnati.

    The present was already overwhelmingly difficult enough. I decided to make it to the mall first, and try to scrounge up some decent gear from the specialty sword store there. Once better equipped for medieval style combat, with actual weapons instead of farm equipment, I would try and find Jessica. The next step would depend on her still being alive and any encounters I had with other survivors along the way. With the decision made, I decided to forgo further training and head towards the city.

    The next morning I left the house decked out in my newbie gear. I had my Secondary School Pack of Lesser Carrying, the Carter¡¯s Homestead Half-Hatchet with plus two damage vs nails and my Pitchfork of Rat-slaying. Deciding to keep the pitchfork in my hands, I ended up tying my Compound Bow of Inconvenient Use to the pack in case I ever a chance use it. I had also equipped my Jeans of Greater Paint Stains, my Bud Light T-shirt of Minor Alcoholism, and of course my Work Boots of Mutant Hound Stomping.

    The tutorial was complete and I had slain the necessary number of rats in the barn. Thus armed and armored I set out on my nooby quest to upgrade my starter gear and left the house at an easy jog. I decided travel down US- 50 to Cinci. Hopefully people would be avoiding the major roads and I could use it to my advantage.

 Chapter 15 - Heading to Town

    Chapter 15

    Slate

    The outskirts of Fairfax were one of a few low population areas left near Cincinnati. There were only a few houses in the area, and they were surrounded by several square miles of farmland. It was perfect for someone who wanted to have all the benefits of living near a big city and still wanted to live in the country. Inside the village itself, there was enough land that the houses were not all cramped together. Small and rural enough to give off that Mayberry like feel, the town was just a touch more modern. As you head towards The Nati, the land became covered with clustered suburbs, housing developments and apartment complexes. So while there were only a few thousand people who used to live near my present position, I would have to pass through an area where close to a hundred thousand souls had lived in order to reach the store.

    Following the highway seemed best, since it bypassed some of the more dense population areas. The rest of the way would require more stealth as I neared the city proper. It was idiotic to be looking for more conflict, but I was hoping for some easy monsters to kill along the road in order to grind some levels. The need to get stronger is almost palpable. I was far better prepared for combat this time around and ready to use my fork of doom on any deviant domestic animals or giant field mice. I was prepared survive in this world, and leveling up would help me secure my place in it.

    I quickly found my pace. Walking seemed too slow and I was unable to focus on the surroundings at a run, but a slow jog seemed just right. The five or so miles to the store would quickly pass within the hour at the 6 mile per hour slow jog. Wisps of hazy smoke trailed into the sky from the direction of Fairfax. They were just the right size to have belonged to a cooking fire, but I ignored the possible sign of human life because it was in the wrong direction. I would return to the village at some point, but I wanted better gear first. Traveling the side roads to the main highway passed without hardship. Broken down vehicles littered the road, abandoned with doors and trucks ajar by their owners. Glancing into these as I passed revealed nothing except the occasional blood stain. Pieces of dropped luggage that left a trail the west and a drunk Indian could follow. Everything spoke of people fleeing the city for their lives, whether from the mutant humans, monsters or out of just plain fear I did not know.

    The wreckage became far more frequent as I reached the main road. In most movies with world ending events, be it an earthquake or an alien invasion, there are usually scenes of vehicles left stranded on the road. Cars and trucks would be wrecked or abandoned just like this because of people trying to flee said danger. The movie scripts had been right about that part of an apocalypse. They were everywhere. Far more were in the eastbound lanes headed away from the city than on the west side. There were also dead people, and lots of them. They seemed to be everywhere I looked, but in reality there was really only one every couple of cars. Some corpses were just sitting behind the wheel, but most were crumpled in the road or off to the side in the grass. Most appeared to have been partially devoured, but remaining rotting flesh did not speak of anything recent.

    I had mentally prepared myself for all the dead people and knew that seeing them would not stop any time soon, but the smell, it was just awful. The rotting corpses had not moved me at all, but the stench had me retching again. Fuck man, I think my senses must have been dialed up when my Body attribute leveled. I had to stop to tie a rag around my face. The weak attempt at keeping the putrid reek away worked somewhat, but it seemed more mental than physical. There was nothing to do but continue on, and hope I got used to it.

    A half mile later there was motion in the back of an old four door Ford Taurus. The vehicle was in the slow lane and looked to have a flat tire, but was in good condition otherwise. The rear doors were open and someone was bent over digging around in the backseat. Due to its small stature my first thought was that it was a child. I was approaching to see if I could help when it backed out of the car. It stood up facing away from me and was noticeably not human. Spindly arms and knobby legs that seemed far too long its body jutted from an tiny emaciated torso. If it had been human, I would have told that fucker to eat some cheeseburgers or something, but since it wasn¡¯t I only stared in stunned silence.

    A crusty loincloth was its only piece of attire. Small flakes of brown stained nastiness flaked off of the poorly tanned leather as it hopped around and fiddled with something in its hands. Its stringy black hair went halfway down its back, but what stood out most was the unhealthy dark green color of its skin. Bits of bone tied into its hair as decorations rattled as it twitched back and forth and the noise snapped me out of my stupor. Even though this thing was pretty disgusting, I did not want to kill a possibly sentient creature without cause. I needed to stay relatively safe though, so I snuck closer before attempting to communicate with it. The smell of unwashed ass temporarily overwhelmed the constant odor of rot in the air as I closed within twenty feet. My olfactory senses decided that was plenty close and I debated on how to get its attention.

    I went with my standard and said ¡°Howdy.¡±

    Don¡¯t get me wrong, hello is fine for a salutation, but it just seems over used. Sayings like ¡°What¡¯s up?¡± or ¡°How are you?¡± were never my bag of tea. I just did not want to feel obligated to actually listen if someone answered the question with sincerity. Hell, I have a problem with small talk in general, the uselessness of it offends me for some reason, but I did not want one of my many personal issues to fuck up my first meeting with another species.

    I smiled a little bit when the startled little thing jumped about two feet in the air at the noise. It quickly turned to face me. A children¡¯s lunch box fell from its shriveled hands, and it bent to snatch up a three foot stick off the ground. The slightly bent wood had a pointed rock tied to one end and looked to be some sort of primitive spear. It froze briefly in shock, looking at the pitiful spear and then back to me as if wondering how effective the weapon would be against my massive frame. Its large eyes twitched over a beak like noise and tube like ears that seemed to stick straight out of its head. It pulled thin, slightly blackened lips back to bare tiny shark like teeth at me in what looked to be a snarl. It froze like that, so I went on to state the obvious.

    ¡°Holy Jebus, you¡¯re a mother-trucking goblin aren¡¯t you?¡± It would be rude to curse someone you just met, but I just could not help a modified explicative of some sort.

    My words must have been taken the wrong way because it screamed, more of a squawk really, and threw its spear at me before darting away. The pitchfork had been held loosely in my hand at the time. I thought the distance was far enough that there was plenty of time to stop a charge if needed, but I had been caught flat footed when it launched a projectile. I tried to dodge but the shoddy spear still hit my right shoulder and sunk in about two inches before falling out.

    Due to its scrawny little body I had not given this encounter as much respect as it deserved. Even being angry at the little wound rather than dying with a spear in my throat did not leave me any happier with the encounter. It left me feeling enraged. What the fuck was that little thing thinking attacking me? Did it not know who I was? I guess the legend of my rat killing prowess had not made it this far yet.

    Besides in most RPGs goblins were an integral part of the leveling process. They were generally low level monsters who were only dangerous if too many of them swarmed you at once. This thing had to know it was just gratuitous experience for any adventurer, like me, who walked by. I even gave it a chance to live by talking to it. Of course, fleeing mobs that were not caught before they got to their friends would almost always would cause a party to wipe. Without even the luxury of a group to back me up, I knew he had to be caught and dealt with immediately.

    The short decision making process had only taken a moment and I snatched the rickety spear off the ground. Roaring, I took a crow hop and chucked it at the goblin who was now about 50 feet away. The throw was significantly harder and faster than my opponent¡¯s had been, but the shitty little spear was not aerodynamic and it was my first time throwing one. It twisted in the air and whacked the little greenie in the back with the length of its shaft. It caused a small stumble, but he just looked over his shoulder and sped up. He soon drove off the road and into a wooded area separating the highway from a street of middle income houses.

    I started sprinting after him and was gaining on him until he hit the brush line. Where the goblin slithered through the thorns and brambles like a snake, I stumbled through like a bull in a china shop. The sharp points caught my skin and clothing causing numerous small cuts and rips. He broke free of the foliage first and headed towards one of the houses screaming the whole time. It slipped and fell to the ground as it tried to hop a chain length fence surrounding the backyard of a two story split level. I focused some Ki into my legs and made a lunge, covering the 15 foot gap between us in an instant. The tines of the fork skewered him through the torso and exited out the front of its boney little chest. Its cry turned into a gurgle as I pinned him to the ground. A stomp on the back of his neck followed by a sharp crunch ended the disgusting thing¡¯s existence.

    Breathing a sigh of relief at catching him, I looked at his corpse for anything of value. Yup, still a dirty, stinking, dead green thing in its poo stained underwear. It had a greasy pouch tied to its waist that I cut open after debating if it was worth touching. It had what looked like some flint, a few pieces of string and a brightly colored rock inside. The japtem wasn¡¯t even worth picking up. Disgusted with the whole thing I stood up from a squat and checked my shoulder. The wound was bleeding down my shirt and reached the top of my jeans. The red coloring matched the multitude of bloody scratches I had received after running full blast through the briars. The smaller cuts were already sealing but my shoulder continued to leak steadily. If you encounter this story on Amazon, note that it''s taken without permission from the author. Report it.

    Cursing my inability to avoid damage, I took my backpack off to get some of my makeshift bandages out. Before I could open the bag, the back door of the house smashed open. Several sets of red beady eyes peered out of the darkness seconds before a deluge of goblins poured into the yard.

    The little green creatures did not have much variety in clothing or general hygiene. They were sticking to the whole smell like butthole while wearing a loincloth theme, but did at least have a wider variety of weapons. One held a large kitchen knife, a few held clubs made from tree limbs, two had the primitive spears and one held a wooden baseball bat. The one with the kitchen cutlery must have been the prima donna of the group because he was wearing a sleeveless shirt to complete his outfit. It looked to be made of leather as well, but it was so blood stained and greasy that I just couldn¡¯t tell. There was a primitive headdress tied around its forehead, but instead of going up, the feathers were hanging downwards.

    Like the rat boss, the headdress gobby led from the back and was a bit bigger than the rest. If all the others were between four and four and a half feet tall, this boss seemed to be around five. A large pot belly underneath sagging tits pulled the greasy shirt tighter than anyone would want to see and I think he was exited, because I saw some ridged titty action going on. Pointing the knife at me it squawked something at the others and they charged forward while the leader watched. There was no way for me to escape. They would easily catch me if I tried to run through the thicket, so I chose to meet them at the 4 foot high chain length fence that enclosed the yard.

    RPG experience has taught me that goblins are only slightly smarter than animals, but there was more to learn by looking at them. They obviously could make and use primitive weapons, and also apparently recognized the need for clothing to protect their precious bits. They had a social hierarchy and the ability to communicate, but they did not realize attacking a very tall man over a fence they were barely taller than was a bad idea.

    A goblin wielding a club was the first to reach the fence. It kept its weapon in one hand and used the other to vault the fence. A two handed jab of the pitchfork pierced all four tines through his chest and I tossed him over my shoulder like a load of hay. The next was coming over the fence before I could get the pointy end of the fork facing the right way, so I shouldered charged it, knocking the goblin to the ground and bending the top rail. Gaining some room, I swung the fork in a wide arc causing them to all step back or duck and returned to my original stance. Again I was prepared to stab the next green-skin stupid enough to come over the fence. The goblins fell back realizing their tactics were not working and spread out before resuming their assault.

    Well that sucks. I was not yet handy enough with a pitchfork to take on six goblins if they surrounded me. Deciding to become more aggressive, I took a quick side step and took one through the throat with the fork. Like some movie with gory special effects, I watched the blood fly through the air, following the tines to splatter on the fence as I reset again. Some of my opponents had made it over the fence by then so I sprinted next door. I easily hopped over its matching chain link fence without touching the top and turned to meet their next advance.

    This was actually going pretty well so far. These creatures, that would slaughter me on open ground, were quite manageable with the careful use barriers. If my life wasn¡¯t on the line, I wouldn¡¯t even be breathing heavy. While I waited, the creatures reorganized and prepared a two pronged attack, from outside the yard and from the original house. The leader still had not moved, and was stroking its knife like a cheesy cartoon villain while it watched. The next goblin to take a shot at the title was holding a wooden Louisville Slugger. I gave him the pitching hay treatment and soon chucked him over my shoulder like the first. Easy EXP, I thought. I sidestepped and caught another through the stomach. Lifting him in what was now becoming my signature move; I heard a heart wrenching crack and felt the wooden pitchfork shaft break. Gobby number four looked down surprised at the metal sticking out of its stomach and then to me before collapsing to the ground. The shock of losing my weapon stupefied me. I was fumbling around attempting to pull out my hatchet when I got stabbed for the second of the day.

    I did a fair imitation of the goblin earlier as I fell to my knees and looked at the goblin pulling the spear out of my back. It was grinning as it thrust at me again. Twisting I was able to shove the spear out of the way with my hand and grab onto the shaft. A sharp pull brought him close enough and I grabbed him by the throat in my left hand. His bloodshot eyes flew wide open as the life was choked out of him. A club hitting across my shoulder blades caused me drop him before he was finished. Another swing caught my hip as I stumbled back to my feet and turned to run away. The wiry little things could hit harder than they looked and the impact sites flooded my mind with new agony. I swung my fist wildly at the club wielder causing him to dodge and gained the separation necessary to run stumbling to the stairs of an elevated wooden deck connected to the house.

    The spear toting goblin had recovered and was right behind club wielder who was chasing me. I managed to stay ahead of them and finally pulled the half-hatchet from my belt. After climbing the first few steps I quickly turned and faced them. Club goblin was not prepared and stumbled as he attempted to stop. With no room to swing the club in between the stair¡¯s handrails he jabbed at my shins. I ignored the weak blow and chopped down, lodging the hatchet into base of his neck. The hatchet was a little dull, but it still ripped several inches into his flesh. Before I could rip the hatchet loose he dropped like a sack of rocks. My body was bent forward, so that I could land the strike on its diminutive form. The hand axe refused to come loose as the corpse fell and it pulled me forward. Losing my balance I tripped over the dead goblin and fell down the bottom few steps. The spear goblin was unable to get his weapon lined up in time to skewer me when I struck him and we tumbled tail over teakettle down onto the grass.

    The spear wielder ended up on top of me with both of our backs to the ground. I latched onto the back of its scrawny neck in a headlock and rolled until he was on the bottom. Although effective, the overwhelming smell of unwashed monster had me regretting wrestling around with the creature. Grinding his face into the dirt I pinned him down into a rear mount. Under a frenzy of punches his skull cracked like a rotten egg, grey brain matter soon stained my hands and leaked onto the lawn. Taking a life with my bare hands felt very primal and I instinctively roared, announcing my victory to the world. Unfortunately, the goblin leader was not impressed with my savagery and took the opportunity to attack.

    Without any warning it stabbed me in the back with the kitchen knife, directly between my right shoulder blade and spine. I jerked away from the pain and flopped to the ground. The knife handle sticking was jarred in the impact and I temporarily lost my sight to the white hot pain. Lightheaded and dizzy from injuries and blood loss, I swiped out without direction. I flailed about like a dying bear, surrounded by a pack of hounds after a long hunt. The goblin stayed out of reach and was shouting in a grating language, sharp words full of hate. Lunging and swinging once again I felt more than saw my right hand catch one of the leader¡¯s legs. Little fucker should have finished me off instead of talking shit. The weaponless goblin began clawing at my arm as I pulled him to the ground and reeled him in. His dirty, jagged nails were digging deep furrows into arms but they were ignored. When he was close enough my hands went around his neck, first one and then the other. Looking at his eyes, I slowly choked the life from him. He grasped at my wrists as he continued to squirm in a futile attempt to escape. After what seemed like forever, his body a final shudder and his muscles relaxed. Just in case he was faking it, I drew a knife and drug it deeply across his throat before letting him go.

    Totally exhausted I wanted to collapse, but was afraid to fall down due to the knife lodged in my back. My injuries were too severe to continue on my journey, and I desperately needed a secure place to lick my wounds. Knowing that knives were supposed to stay in before going to an ER for treatment, as they tended to block severed veins and arteries and caused much more bleeding when they were pulled out, I let it be for now. Standing, I recovered the hatchet and returned it to my belt. Ignoring everything else, I worked my way the fences¡¯ gate and exited the yard before grabbing my pack. I was forced to use my left hand as the other arm was refused to work now that my adrenaline had worn off. The broken pieces of the pitchfork were left lying on the killing ground, no longer useful and now only trash. The lack of a primary weapon had me yearning to grab the bat as it lay there, but there was no way to carry anything else. Unsure if I had cleared all the mobs in the area, the option of hiding in the house was quickly thrown out. I slowly worked my way back to the road, avoiding most of the thorns from before, and went back to the blacktop of the highway.

    The two miles back to my house were too far, so I looked around for other options. A white cargo van in parked on the shoulder seemed like the best choice. A creeper style van, the GMC had no windows in the back and had a solid metal cage wall separating the cargo area from the front cab. Thankfully the doors were unlocked and opened easily. The van looked to have belonged to a plumbing contractor, and there were racks and bins with various items like PVC, copper pipe and the like stored within them, but the main floor space was empty.

    I got inside and shut the door behind me, willingly enclosing myself with the hot air the sweltering sun had created inside. It was a fair exchange for the relative safety provided. Relying on my night vision in the dim light, I made an attempt to bandage my wounds. The compression would hopefully slow the flow of blood enough for me to live through my latest adventure. Ignoring the scrapes on my arms, I used some duct tape found in the van to secure a bandage in place over the spear wound to my lower back. My shoulder had stopped leaking already and was left alone. My wounds took all the energy out of me, leaving me bone-tired and unable keep my eyes open. Forcing down a bottle of water to replace lost fluids, I lay down on my side. The knife was still sticking out of my back when I lost consciousness.

    When I next awoke there was no longer light seeping through the cracks in the doors and the van was a lot cooler, indicating it was well past nightfall. Still exhausted and in pain, waking up because of having to pee would have been fantastic compared to what was happening. The whole fucking van was shaking. Something was sniffing at the doors and the shocks squealed in terror as the van was knocked violently back and forth. Ground shaking footsteps caused the concrete to crunch as something circled my hiding place. Not daring to make the slightest movement that could give away my presence, I held my breath and prayed. A square cut out allowed me to see out of the front windshield, and several stars twinkled in night. Their ever burning fires were briefly quenched when something with dull gray scales and yellow eyes passed by. The van came up on two wheels as the monster knocked into it again, causing pipes to fall and clang on the inside as it righted itself. I had a feeling that the beast was going to treat the van like glittery wrapping paper, and unwrap it like a present before eating me for Christmas dinner. A loud cry came from the west followed by church bells ringing. The beast gave snort and crunched swiftly away. It sounded like it was following the roadway to Cincinnati as well and the noises of cars being knocked aside followed it into the distance. I spat out the breath I was holding and began sucking in much needed air. My heart raced as my chest heaved and I proceeded to have a moderate freak out.

    Was that thing a fucking dragon? Were there dragons in this world? I hoped it was full grown, because if they came any bigger there was no way to get strong enough to take them out. Holy shit how many times and I going to almost die today? I checked on my wounds while trying to settle down and saw that they were closing up nicely. The furrows on my arms were done bleeding and were scabbing over. The spear wounds still ached, but they had at least stopped bleeding. I could feel the knife still sticking out of my back and my chest ached sharply with my every breath. Now would be as good a time as any to pull it out, so holding a wad of mostly clean towel strips in one hand, I reached over my shoulder and ripped it out. The skin had healed around it, holding the blade in place tightly. The new opening oozed a tiny waterfall of blood as I struggled to stop it. I left the remains of my t-shirt on, wedged the bandage underneath it, and leaned against the side of the van to apply pressure.

    Lightheaded, my world started to spin. My vision slowly tunneled and I eventually fell over to my side when my muscles failed to hold me up any longer. The screeching sound of claws rubbing against metal sounded from the van¡¯s door. Death knocks again I thought, as I faded back into unconsciousness.

 Chapter 16 - Encounter on the Road

    Chapter 15

    US-50, Ohio

    On the Road

    Waking up in a sweltering van in a drying pool of your vomit and blood was pretty awful, but it was better than the alternative of not waking up at all. The noxious mixture acted as an adhesive when I pulled my face off the hot van¡¯s floorboard like a fat, sweaty shirtless man would peel away from his leather recliner. I was not prepared for the pungent smell of the toxic marinade and started dry heaving. Being glad there was nothing left in my stomach to come out, I opened the back doors of the van and drug myself outside. I reached back in for my backpack and got some water out, rinsing out my mouth and spitting before using more in an attempt to clean up. There was nothing to do about the smell as it hung around like a crazy ex-girlfriend, so I drank some water and prepared for the day.

    Weather wise, the previous day was one to remember, being just the right mix of temperature, direct sunlight, breeze and humidity. Today was the more standard day in southern Ohio. I was already sweating from the van, and the salty excretion clung to me as the air around me was far to saturated with water for my body¡¯s natural cooling system to work like it should. A groaned as I saw my backpack was not immune to the vomit soup either. Luckily the side the bow was taped too was down, and most of the grossness was stuck on it and not the fabric. Some water, another rag, and a little elbow grease had the bow looking clean even if it smelled awful. I peeled the sticky shirt from my back and tossed it like the trash it was. My T-shirt collection has been taking a lot of causalities in my quest to stay alive and having not yet learned to pack extra clothes, I was shirtless once again.

    I am not sure that there was much to be learned fight the day before except to stay aware of my surroundings and do not become over confident when fighting a weaker foe. Their teamwork and numbers had more than made up for my advantage in size and strength, but I felt that if I had a stronger weapon, like the giant-ass sword Cloud wielded in Final Fantasy 7, that I would have been able to go right through them like a frog through a blender. Wearing a set of basic armor, or even a heavy leather jacket would have protected me from most of the wounds I received and the lack of wounds would have allowed me to continue on my journey instead of almost a day recovering. So nothing new knowledge was acquired from the battle. I already knew that I needed better gear.

    As my stomach settled, I fished a can of beans from my backpack, opened and then drank them out of the aluminum as I took stock of my situation. My freakish healing was putting me to rights, but I was still hurting bad. My right arm was working, but every movement caused significant pain and the stab wounds were too much to be ignored. I was covered in blood and gunk from sleeping on the floor of the van, was naked from the waist up. My pants were shredded and my primary weapon had been broken. A few hours of meditation and cycling Ki should heal me up, but would leave me vulnerable during the process. I couldn¡¯t keep running home every time I got my ass kicked, so I decided to try and put myself back together as soon as I found a safe place.

    I found a nice shaded spot between the tractor and the trailer on a Paschall Truck Lines 18-wheeler and sank into a trance. I kept myself aware of my surroundings and attempted to cycle the Ki while focusing on healing. From my rate of progress I could tell that the point placed in Mind was paying off strong dividends. Since advancing my Mind it seemed like I caught onto things faster, be it my amateur pitchfork kung-fu or trying to learn how to manipulate Ki, everything was easier to understand. I even seemed to have faster reaction times. My body had sped up significantly from the two points in Body, but the one point in mind allowed me to direct it better in response to outside stimulus. I would probably not be able to enter this open minded trance that seemed to let me find enlightenment while keeping an eye out for danger if not for the added point. It was well worth the point.

    Around midmorning my body was whole once more and Ki was circling through my body at a slow and steady rate. What I really liked about Ki right now, other than it healing the shit out of me, was that with hard work you can receive noticeable gains. Compared to my first attempt at cycling, my current rate was at least 30% faster from my practice sessions. If I ever had a safe place and the time to devote to it, I could probably double my original rate over the course of a week. It has also helped me learn to manipulate the Ki to reinforce my limbs. Although I currently only know how to do the Ki assisted sprinting and jumps, I was hoping to reinforce my whole body with Ki eventually. It would stack with my Body attribute and allow me strength only previously seen in comic books.

    Feeling mostly whole, I shoved everything back into the backpack and shouldered it. The hatchet went back into my belt and the bow into my hands. I knocked an arrow and set off walking. The jog I had tried the day before, while not taxing in the least, did not seem like the optimal pace in this environment. Keeping alert, I went stealth mode, Solid-Snake style. I set a mental warning for any out of place noises and quickly crouched behind the nearest cover whenever I heard them while searching for its source. Most of the time I did not find anything to be wary of, but occasionally I could hear something moving through the brush off the side of the road. The sounds were not loud, something a chipmunk or squirrel would make while bouncing around on the carpet of dead leaves that lined the ground, but it was far better safe than sorry at this point. At a slow and steady pace, I continued along the highway to Cincinnati.

    After an hour of cautious travel I caught the smell of smoke drifting past me on an eastward wind. I paused and crouched behind the nearest vehicle, this time a Maroon Honda CRV that looked to be in bad shape even before it was left on the road for two months. There were some small wisps of white smoke coming from near box truck which was parked off the shoulder. It smelled of burning wood and roasting meat, bringing memories of past holidays and barbeques in the sun. I crept forwards until reaching the back of the trailer taking small steps, rolling heal to toe to try and lessen the sound while channeling my inner ninja. Squatting down, I snuck a glimpse down the outer edge.

    I saw the side profile of a man squatting by a small fire. In his grasp was a sharpened stick piercing meat he was roasting on the flames. A green military style duffle bag about half full lay nearby in the dirt. The clothing he was wearing were too thick to be called comfortable on a hot morning such as this. Anyone can wear jeans any day of the year and pull it off, but the thick hoodie and black beanie under it were too much. A pair of black knuckle gloves covered his hands and dirty, old Jordan¡¯s were on his feet. His face looked heavily scarred from burns and his nose was a flap flesh with holes in it instead of a protrusion of skin covered cartilage. His ears were the same, depressions in the wrinkles on the side of his head. I honestly could not tell if he was a normal person with severe scars or if he had been changed like those I saw on the news, a monster in modern day apparel.

    A few near death encounters with random dogs, rats, and skinny green skinned scavengers had left me extremely apprehensive of even talking this guy before killing him. Action is almost always better than reaction. Say what you want but even if you call it a sucker punch, the guy who hits first, hardest and doesn¡¯t quit almost always wins a street fight. With practiced controlled breaths, I drew back on the compound bow and edged around the corner placing my arrow in the middle of his chest. There would be no arc in the shaft¡¯s flight this close to the target. If this thing was indeed a man, this would be the first premeditated murder I had ever committed and the thought of doing so disgusted me. I wanted to be better than this. Maybe if I had still been severely injured and in dire need to avoid a confrontation there I would have been able to take his life in cold blood. But right then, I just couldn¡¯t shoot. Easing my bow down, but still keeping it ready, I made ready to say hello.

    ¡°What¡¯s cooking?¡± I asked. My usual ¡°Howdy¡± had failed me with the goblin and it was time to try something new. If I had set a lighter tone at the beginning maybe the greenie wouldn¡¯t have tried to kill me. I also thought the metaphor was applicable, with the added benefit of also being a mighty fine pun.

    The encounter was not off to a good start as the man jumped up in surprise, turning while doing so to face me and pointed the browning shish kabob in my direction. He looked a little mad around the eyes and seemed to be debating poking me with the pointy end of his meat stick. Only a few moments into my attempt at being kind, I decided that was enough with this nice bullshit. Too many people take kindness for weakness.

    ¡°Settle down motherfucker, or I am putting this arrow through you. Sit on the ground and do it now!¡± I shouted at him. His entire demeanor changed as he cowered and flopped onto the ground like a puppet with its strings cut. He glanced around looking half afraid that I would kill him, and half afraid the shout would be bringing us company.

    ¡°Take it easy man,¡± The guy implored with a voice that reminded me of a stoner speaking to a neighbor who had just knocked on his door and asked him to turn town his Pink Floyd. ¡°Don¡¯t shoot, I won¡¯t do anything.¡±

    ¡°What are you doing?¡± I regretted the stupid question as soon as it left my mouth, but couldn¡¯t change it as I was not going to show weakness or indecision.

    ¡°Umm¡­, cooking dinner?¡± Simple answer to a basic question, but why did he look so guilty about it. Everyone eats dinner. I assumed he had something to hide as he scooched over towards his bag. I drew back my arrow lining it up with him again and he stopped moving. A motion with the arrow shooed him the other way and I circled around to look at the duffle.

    For being confronted by a bloody shirtless guy and held at arrow point, this guy seemed to be handling this well. Of course if he was not able adapt to this new crazy world, he most likely would already have been dead.Unauthorized duplication: this narrative has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

    ¡°It¡¯s not what it looks like man.¡±

    On the other side of the bag, out of view of my original approach was a human¡¯s calf and foot, cut off below the knee with a piece missing that looked like it fit on the end of his stick. Motherfucking cannibal. I drew again intending to end this abomination when he started to cry and talk. It was so sad and pathetic that I ended up listening instead of killing him.

    ¡°I didn¡¯t wanna be like this, bro. Fucking shit tastes nasty, but it¡¯s the only way for me to level up. I didn¡¯t kill her but there was no point in letting it waste. I don¡¯t want to die, man. I just want to live.¡± He had dropped his evil meal and was crouching down, debasing himself in an attempt to look less threatening.

    ¡°What the fuck to you mean? You don¡¯t level up from eating people.¡±

    ¡°You don¡¯t man, but I do. I¡¯m a fucking cannibal. I didn¡¯t ask to be one but I don¡¯t know anyone who did.¡±

    I lowered my bow, took a few paces back and crouched down while keeping it ready. ¡°Explain.¡± I told him.

    ¡°I just did, explain what? You heard me, I¡¯m a cannibal like some of the others. We all level from eating human flesh. We don¡¯t have to kill them to get stronger, I haven¡¯t killed anyone, I just eat.¡± The guy, dude really, trailed off while talking lost in his own little world.

    ¡°Ok, I think I might be starting to understand. My name is Darren but everyone calls me Slate. I level from killing monsters and shit. Are you saying that some people like you level from eating humans?¡±

    ¡°Lucky guy. Yea some people level like that too. You don¡¯t even look fucked up like most people. Must be nice to not look like a monster. I hate this shit man, if I had the nerve I¡¯d just kill myself, but I¡¯m too afraid of dying.¡± The man was a wreck and sobbed as he lay there. I actually felt bad for him. Poor sucker did look like a rotten avocado. He just sounded like some random guy who was afflicted by the change in an awful way. I needed information though, so I kept my pity locked up and gave him a grim look.

    ¡°Explain better. Explain what happened to you, how you level, and what you know of others leveling.¡± I put force into my voice, letting him know that there was no other option. I would have to hear his story anyways. If he did not give me some good fucking reason, he was dead. I may not be able to commit cold blooded murder, but the cannibalism had gotten me seeing red.

    ¡°The world went to shit man, and people changed. Well you don¡¯t look like you changed, but almost everyone else I have met has something wrong with them. I¡¯m pretty fucked up looking, but others only have little changes. My nose and ears fell off, my face looks like runny diarrhea, my whole body looks like a burn victim¡¯s. I kind of am though. When that light hit us it burned us, inside and out. Some people went crazy, could no longer think, and started killing and eating shit. We call those the lost. They just lost everything. The ability to think, to plan ahead, to be human. There are some that have kept their wits but became truly evil. Those are the ones that can still think and plan, but have no morals and will do whatever it takes to get stronger. A couple of them have big packs around here.¡±

    ¡°Packs?¡± I asked.

    ¡°Yea man, some of those lost that can still think have packs of the mindless ones behind them. They somehow manage to order them around and they hunt in large groups, killing and eating people where they can but smart enough to avoid tough fights. They don¡¯t just eat people man, they are like, fucking rape monsters, bro. If they take people alive, well they¡¯ll screw the dead too, but if they take you alive they¡¯ll fuck you to death eventually. And when you die they eat you. They are like all base instincts and shit man.¡±

    ¡°So you have talked to other people? Is everyone else cannibals too?¡± Man I hoped not. Shit is bad enough with poorly thought out hentai style rape monsters running around.

    ¡°Can I sit up?¡± I motioned he could. ¡°There are some groups out there, but they are not all Canni¡¯s like me. Some of us are, but most Canni¡¯s like me leading or with the groups of lost. I am one of the few that can think and feel bad about eating people. I don¡¯t want to eat people, man. But I have get stronger somehow or I¡¯ll die.¡±

    ¡°What level are you? What are your points in.¡± I asked.

    ¡°That¡¯s some personal shit man, you¡¯re not supposed to ask it. I guess I don¡¯t have a choice though. I am level 8 but close to level 9. I got four in Canni, with 2 in Strength and 2 in Vitality.¡± He replied.

    This guy had different stats than I did and more than twice my level. In most games, you don¡¯t attack things double your level and expect to live through it. I would need to keep acting with confidence and make him think that I could tear him apart at will.

    ¡°You¡¯re stats are different that mine.¡± I told him.

    ¡°Yea man. Have you not talked to anyone? Most people got people got different stats, although there are some types, like Canni¡¯s, that you can tell are the same. Canni¡¯s mostly get three stats to pick from, Cannibalism, Strength and Vitality. We start with 1 in Cannibalism, get to choose our next one, but every other level a point is placed into Canni for us. So I have only gotten to choose four points, and I split them up. Points in C allow me to level faster when we eat people. It stacks up pretty quick, and some of the lost packs are pretty strong. Strength is obvious, vitality makes you harder to hurt and you heal faster.¡±

    ¡°How strong are you? How fast do you heal?¡± This was good info, I needed more. This is the kind of intel that would keep me alive.

    ¡°Personal shit man, how would you like it if I asked this shit about you?¡± He was getting agitated the longer I questioned him. I pulled the string on the bow back a little and he paused. ¡°I ain¡¯t worried about that bow man. If you weren¡¯t so strong I¡¯d have made an attempt on you by now. Fucking annoying ass questions. Where you been living? Under a rock?¡±

    ¡°House actually, I holed up in a bunker until the sun came back up. For the past week I have been leveling, training and preparing to come into town. I need to find my girl if she is still alive, and put her in the ground if she isn¡¯t. If I find someone¡¯s been eating on her, I¡¯ll kill that whole fucking pack, and everyone else that¡¯s got a connection to them.¡± I let a little of my anger seep out, and he settled down again. He looked petulant. Originally I thought he was some nice little burnout, but now he seemed the kind of guy who was never satisfied with what he had. Like a worker at the Department of Motor Vehicles, he was miserable and wanted to bring everyone down with him.

    ¡°Lucky guy man. Only been out a week? How¡¯d you level so high? You feel like you¡¯re twice as strong as I am. If I ate a fucker like you I¡¯d be level 10 in no time.¡±

    ¡°You can feel how strong I am? And you never answered the question about how strong you were physically¡± I returned the question in kind.

    ¡°Shit bro, you don¡¯t know nothing. Yea man. Some guy figured the system out by putting points in strength. It¡¯s one of the few things people could test easily. This guy was in a gym working out during the change, and knew what his max bench, squat and all that stuff was. After he got a point in strength he went back to see the difference. The best he could tell was that he was about 25% stronger across the board. Everyone thinks it¡¯s around 25% for all upgrades, not sure if it stacks or not. As for knowing how strong you are, take a moment and look at me. It takes a bit of effort but if you focus on me you¡¯ll just feel it. It¡¯s something everyone gets. Some survival trick or something. You just can tell if whoever or whatever you¡¯re facing is stronger or weaker than you are. If you¡¯re the same, you can tell that too.¡±

    ¡°Go ahead man, try it out. Hell you already asked all those questions might as well try it. Go ahead. I don¡¯t mind anymore, bro.¡± The guy muttered that last statement pretty fast. He must be more unstable than I thought and he seemed to be barely keeping it together. Crouching now and fidgeting back and forth, he picked up the chunk of human and started inspecting it. Checking if it was still edible maybe? Who gives a shit if it¡¯s dirty? Does matter if your piece of roasted people had a little dirt on it before you ate it?

    ¡°Some people find it helps to close your eyes, man. It might take some time though you¡¯re first try. It took me a bit to figure it out myself. I¡¯ll just be cooking over here, you take your time.¡±

    He really wanted me to do this and obviously thought he was being sneaky about it. I guess he thought he could somehow overpower me while if I was distracted. Occasionally crazy people are like that. Some feel like they are inherently smarter than others and that they can trick people into getting what they want. Well, this guy seemed to have been a moron even before he became unhinged, and I was already on DefCon4 so his juvenile attempt at subterfuge was immediately apparent. My body was still aching from the previous day¡¯s struggles and the continuous discomfort was leaving cranky. Even though I should have continued to pump this guy for information about Cinci, I was too tired mentally and physically to care. I was out of fucks to give about this guy. His ctions would decide his fate.

    I used the movement of placing my bow on the ground to conceal palming my holdout knife and positioning the blade to be hidden behind my forearm. I closed my eyelids most of the way, allowing for just a sliver of my surroundings to be visible through my eyelashes. A little Ki flowing through my legs and I was ready to try and feel his power level. Well, that was easy. It was the work of a thought to reach out judge his strength and it was an interesting sensation. Like the way the Voice just instilled me with knowledge, something about him provoked my inner fight and flight instinct. It was telling me to fight, and slaughter this weakling. It still cautioned me though, warning that my prey was not completely defenseless, but according to this sense he was not a threat to me. All and all it made sense. Even a junkie with a cheap Hi-Point 9mm can take the life of a veteran officer if the cards fell his way, but the odds were heavily stacked against him.

    I stayed squatting, still pretending to be oblivious, and noticed him glancing in my direction with what he must have assumed was the upmost subtlety. He slowly repositioned his body while pretending to cook and then without warning charged with his meat stick. Everything about this guy seemed hyper exaggerated, and his forward rush as threatening as a child¡¯s. When he was close enough, I reached under his arm to force the ridged stick of jiggling flesh up and out of the way. After redirecting his momentum I tackling him with my shoulder under his armpit. His impact with the ground while bearing the weight my body knocked the air from his lungs. Rolling him over, I quickly forced him into a rear mount and placed my knife on his throat.

    ¡°Dumbass, now tell me why¡­..?¡± I attempted to say. The crazy son of a bitch interrupted me by turning his head to bite atme. The motion, combined with the force of the knife against his neck, cut his throat for me. It was a bleeding wound andnot deep, but the wet gurgling noises thatwere being made meant thathe was probably dying. With everyone healing from shit now a days it was better to be sure about things. I readjusted and carefully rammed the knife through the base of his spine and up into his skull. My hand, slick with blood, slipped down the blade as it stopped, causing me to cut my thumb as it slid forward.

    Staring down at my thumb as it leaked blood onto the growing puddle on the ground, I decided to work on my people skills. After all, I had just murdered the last three people that I had talked to.

 Chapter 17 - Cannibal

    Chapter 17

    Tony DeFloure

    Avondale, Cincinnati, Ohio

    Even though my entire life has been one horrible experience after another, at the time it happened I still didn¡¯t want the world to end. People thought their life was rough because they were bored. Hah. Suck a few dicks for crack and then see if being bored is that bad of a thing. Those people were idiots and I hope they are all fucking dead. Fat asses that don¡¯t exercise and live on Mountain Dew Code Red were not meant to survive in post-apocalyptic America, but then hell I wasn¡¯t either. As a heroin addict I never expected to make it much longer anyways. I caught HIV a few years ago from a dirty needle and without the money for treatment it quickly turned into full blown AIDS. My only goal was to live out my last few years in a drug induced haze when everything changed.

    Dumb fucking luck is the reason I am still alive, but I was still pissed at those lazy entitled fucks who fantasized about world ending. To be completely honest, I was pissed at everyone else too, so I guess it was wrong to single them out. Still, if I found anyone that liked those world ending comic books and stories, I killed them. And then ate them. Being an equal opportunity cannibal, I decided to murder everyone else as well.

    *****

    It all started when I woke after on the dirty floor of a living room after shooting up some black tar heroin. That purple shit came down from the sky and everyone was freaking out. The guy who lived there, an asshole named Joel, kicked me awake to see it. I am sure he probably thought he was doing the right thing by getting me up to see the start of the apocalypse, but it just made me mad. I had to wipe my bloodstained eyes to get the crud that had accumulated out of my vision as we both looked out of his apartment window. My mouth tasted like a cat had shit in it while I was out, and I was getting a headache from staring at the weird light that seemed to be lowering over the world like a closing curtain. Joel was flat freaking out, but I was tired of this shitty life anyways so I just wanted to get stoned.

    My whole life at this point was focused on staying right. I had made stupid decision a few years ago to switch to the harder drugs my so called friends were using, and it had devastated what remained of my miserable existence. Having tried everything, from crack to pills, my drug of choice was currently heroin. My body was dependent on it from my constant use and if it did not get a fix each day it would betray me. The get clean programs tell you to just say no to drugs. All you have to do is stop using. It¡¯s sooooo easy, just have some will power. I tried that, didn¡¯t take. After about 12 hours the shakes would start. At 18 hours I began enduring body cramps, switching extremes of chills and sweats before it really got bad. When I started throwing up and shitting on myself I gave up. When you¡¯re going to die soon anyways, it¡¯s tough to stay motivated.

    Death, the great nothingness, would could not be that bad. I would really prefer to stay alive. Even a being as pathetic as me strove to stay above ground. It just sometimes seemed like it was not worth the effort.

    From what I can remember my father started abusing me when I was around five or six. Most of the memories are not to clear, but the worst bits tended to stay with me. It started with some excessive washing. Even though I told him that I was big enough to take my own baths, he insisted on watching, and helping me wash. He would rub me excessively, and then ask if it felt good. I don¡¯t remember if it did or not, but the pressure he put on me to say yes made me tend to do so. Children want to please their parents and I was no different. It advanced from me ¡°washing¡± him, to him forcing me to rub on his hard cock until he finished during our ¡°showers¡± together. The abuse eventually escalated to oral and then anal sex. The blood on my underwear was finally noticed by one of the teachers at school when I was ten, and after a meeting with the school councilor the cops were called.

    I knew something was wrong when it was happening but was just too frightened to tell anyone. When I mentioned to my mom that dad was hurting me, she would just yelled at me. She seemed to yell at me a lot, for pretty much anything. When I was older people would describe her as being extremely bi-polar. From what I have read, she should have occasionally had good days. I never saw them though, she was just full of anger all the time.

    She got worse after the cops came and took my father away in handcuffs. Mom did not work and had relied upon dad to feed her various drug addictions. She started physically abusing me shortly after he left, blaming me for him leaving. What kind of fucked up shit is that, my mom was mad at me for being molested. Fucking cunt. She told me that everything was my fault, and she was my mom so I believed her.

    Mom ended up overdosing when I was around 13 and with no family around they put me in the system. I went through a few different homes, some of them having up to eight other foster kids living there, before I started running away. I was a messed up kid, and had a hard time adjusting anyways. Besides, I tended to get kicked around in the system a lot because of my fucked up sexual tendencies. Hey assholes, my daddy taught me that playing with a dick was showing love, and no one told me it was wrong until too late. Dealing with other system kids who were just as fucked up as me didn¡¯t help me along, as most of them played the same way I did.

    After the 8<sup>th</sup> grade I ended up on the street. As bad as it was, it just seemed better then dealing with the system. I ate food from dumpsters, ran drugs for local dealers, and occasionally exchanged sex for a roof over my head when I had to. I started to mature a little and decided that this shit was only temporary. These actions were necessary to survival, and I when I got older, it would all get better. I would change and be successful. I would be the person I was meant to be.

    Only it never changed. Malnourished I never grew and was continuously weak and abused. I had any true companions, as addicts don¡¯t have friends. They only have their circle. The people they knew and conspire with to feed their needs. So at 19 years old, skinny as a rail, having just been fucked by some creepy forty year old white guy named Joel in his apartment for a shot of heroin, I was kicked awake too look at some purple shit that I didn¡¯t care about. Fuck my life.This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

    Joel was normally just my fence and dealer. I didn¡¯t like doing it with dudes, so my preferred method of payment for the drugs was stolen property. Joel had been repeatedly lowering the prices on me for the stuff I had been bringing by recently. Joel had been taking advantage of addicts like me for years and must have recognized I was more desperate that normal. He had offered me a quarter of what he normally gave for a Playstation 2 and told me to fuck off when I asked for more. I did not have time make another arrangement and reluctantly agreed to his second more lurid offer.

    I got the fucker back though, he didn¡¯t wear a rubber.

    Special occasion and all, I asked Joel for another fix but he ignored me. Turning on the TV, I started flipping through the channels until he came over and snatched the remote away. The news showed madness and mayhem all over the world. The light through the open window started to burn our skin and he lowered the blinds. I didn¡¯t like that though, the burn just felt right to me. It felt cleansing, like it was purifying my body, the proverbial washing away of my sins. Feeling the need for space, I went to the bathroom and stood in front of the window soaking the light in. My headache started to go away and I felt good. I wanted to fight, fuck, get stoned, whatever. The need do something, anything, was just overwhelming.

    I rarely looked into mirrors due to what they showed. The reflection in the bathroom showed only my shoulders and up due to my diminutive height. At 5¡±3¡¯, my frame was a result abuse and lack of proper food. On the disturbing side of skinny, my emaciated frame only weighed in at 95 pounds soaking wet. My face was pock marked and scarred from childhood acne and fighting with other bums over the right to sleep over a warm vent. Sighing as I turned away, I left and returned to the living room with an idea.

    Seeing Joel still on the couch I approached him and sat on his lap like a good little bitch. I didn¡¯t enjoy it, but I knew how to play the game. I was into girls. They were all soft, squishy and smelled delicious. But a junkie as far gone as me had little to offer the fairer sex. Screwing a guy just was not very fun. They were rough, stinky and crude. Plus taking it up the butthole at my size was just painful, although I did not mind it when the other guy was on the receiving end. A warm hole was a warm hole after all. It also gave me a since of power when I fucked someone else. It was the only time I felt in control of my life. Those situations were few and far between though. There were plenty pitch to a pathetic wretch like me, but not many welling to catch.

    ¡°Hey baby, do you mind giving me some more. I¡¯ll work it off.¡± I told him.

    ¡°The world is ending Tony. Shut the fuck up, I am watching this.¡± He didn¡¯t kick me off his lap though, so maybe there was still an opportunity to score a fix.

    Preparing for more drastic measures, I got down on my knees in front of him and began rubbing at his crotch for a while. He started to get hard so I went to unzip his pants and he backhanded me for my efforts. He yelled at me as sat back and wiped the blood from my mouth.

    ¡°Faggot piece of shit.¡± His face was red with anger as he cursed. He stood and kicked me in the ribs as I lay there, knocking the air from my lungs. Gasping like a fish, I was unable to move while he continued to berate me. A detached part of my mind knew the beating was coming when he started to call me a fag. My shitty path through life has put me in this situation before. Sometimes it¡¯s not that bad. This time it was.

    I could not tell how much time had passed when I finally woke up completely naked. It was long enough that some of the minor cuts had died up, but a large one on my forehead was still seeping. One of my eyes was swollen shut and the open one was blurry. I apparently got fucked while unconscious and my asshole was on fire. My body was starting to shake a bit from lack of dope, and the pain was coming if I did not get some in me soon. It was a testament to my fucked up life that I was more worried with scoring dope than being beaten unconscious and raped.

    Fuck my life.

    It felt like I was breathing fire, and I was sure some of my ribs were busted. It would take me months to recover from this, if ever. No ambulance would be coming for a homeless junkie with everything happening right now. Joel had fucked me in more than the carnal sense. These injuries would be my death. I lived on the streets. There was no way I was going to live through the chaos happening now with these serious injuries. Screw it, the world could burn if only I could get fantastically high. I was going to steal the rest of his stash and shoot it all in me. It was time to put an end to this joke that people called life.

    I crawled over to where Joel was passed out on the couch with a needle in his arm. I tried to get the rest the white stuff from his pocket but he woke up and pushed my hand away. I got mad. The least that motherfucker could do right now is let me get right. The news played in the background and I watched people killing each other in the streets. In front of the TV on a ratty coffee table sat a dirty plate with the remains of Joel¡¯s dinner. The steak knife on it almost glowed in my vision. I looked over and saw Joel¡¯s eyes were closed again when the homicidal urge hit me.

    The need kill gave me the motivation needed to struggle my crippled body into position. Taking the knife, I held his head in place and then pushed the blade into his throat. Blood gushed all over us both as I sawed my out of his neck. His eyes opened and there was a moment of resistance as he struggled for life. Watching the light fade in them was one of the best moments of my life. This was the first time destroyed the hope of someone else, and I found that I liked it. It was a shame that I was only learning about this feeling now, at the end.

    I dug the bag out of his pocket and looked at it. He only looked to have three grams left and I hoped it would be enough. Licking my lips in anticipation I began the process of liquefying the heroin on a dirty spoon. I had not noticed that some of Joel¡¯s blood had sprayed onto my lips until my tongue ran across them, but the effect was immediate. It tasted delicious. The salty flavor of it was better than anything I had ever tasted before. It was so good that my blood covered hands involuntarily came to my mouth and I started licking them. Oh my god was it good. A new need surfaced in me. Far stronger than my need for heroin, as the bag lay forgotten on the floor. There was not enough on my hands to satisfy me, needing more of it I leaned down to get at the source.

    I should have been disgusted by the way his neck was falling back and exposing the inner workings of his throat, but it did not bother me in the least. Any resemblance of control was lost as I started drinking dripping blood and then to my surprise, biting off pieces of flesh from the edges and swallowing them. Sweet, shivering fuck, the meat was even better than the blood. My attempts at vampirism were forgotten as I gorged myself on Joel¡¯s flesh. The blood had only been an appetizer, complementing my grisly repast like a pungent cheese with fine wine.

    I lost a little bit of time while I ravaged the corpse. My stomach seemed to have become a bottomless pit and I was able to eat far more than should have been possible. Joel was not a small guy, but by the time I was able to control myself I had consumed about a quarter of his 200 pound frame. As I sat back, feeling only a little full, I began picking at a piece of fat hanging loose between his skin and muscle underneath.

    The Voice sounded in my head again.

    ¡°You are now level 2,¡± The Voice announced. ¡°You may choose to advance one of the following attributes: Cannablism, Strength, Vitality or Pack Leader. Choose with care¡±

    This must be the game the voice spoke of. There was not much opportunity to play video games while living on the streets but I had occasion to hang around people who did.

    Tired of being weak, I said ¡°Strength.¡±

    ¡°You have chosen Strength, Your current attributes are as follows:

    Cannibalism - 1

    Strength ¨C 1

    The effect was instantaneous. My wounds were healing and I felt stronger.

    ¡°I¡¯m a fucking Cannibal.¡± I spoke aloud.

    I also had a raging hard on, so I must like it.

    Well, that must have been why Joel tasted so good. There was still some room left in my stomach and the meat was still looking deliciously fresh and appealing. For the first time in years I did not want any heroin. I was not sure if my addiction was cured, or if it had just changed into something else. Fuck it, it didn¡¯t matter. I decided to have me some desert.

 Chapter 18 - Gearing Up

    Chapter 18

    Slate

    ¡°Ding bitches,¡± I whispered when the voice announced my level up. It was about freaking time. Even though the leveling seemed slow to me, it really wasn¡¯t all that bad. It was just frustrating not having an EXP bar. Without it, there was no easy way to gage how many more monsters I needed to murder until I leveled again. I had leveled the first time after killing person and a dog, the second after a pack of rats, and the third a goblin tribe plus a random cannibal. When you look at it like that, the pace was actually a lot faster than most games I have played. It was not knowing when I would level that bothered me though. The Canni had casually mentioned the ability to know when he was close to leveling, but I had not asked how. It was yet another thing to work on when if I found the time and had a safe place to do so.

    Oh well, ¡°Level 4 mofo¡¯s, here I come.¡±

    I received my usual announcement of stats, and opportunity to add to one. I was half tempted to take another point in mind, but paused to contemplate all the options and think through the information given. The Canni¡¯s seemed to have their physical stats broken up, unlike my seemingly totally encapsulating Body attribute. So assuming that 25% is across the board, I was currently 50% better with every aspect of my body, 25% smarter and 50% better at using Ki. This implied a couple of things. First that my unseen vitality stat was also only 50% higher than it used to be. That was the recovery attribute according to Hannibal Lector over there.

    My body was healing a lot faster than a simple 50% booster would explain. Wounds that used to take a month to recover from were healing in less than a week, even less if cycled Ki. I could not tell it was a passive benefit of the Ki, but so far everything I have done with Ki has needed conscious direction. So it must be an ability I acquired, or a mutation, like my nightvision.

    This meant I might be overpowered after all, if I could live long enough to get there anyways. Of course, the Canni packs have been out there leveling for two months, and they don¡¯t even need to kill things to get stronger. It explained who had been eating all the bodies lying around, and it seemed like a pretty OP way to level to me. I guess it would still depend on how fast they leveled up. In the short term with the masses of people dying it seemed like a stupidly strong class. In the long term, with the loss of half of their attribute points and lack of easy EXP, it would nerf the class tremendously. If everyone else has split physical attributes then the Body stat would put me leagues beyond them, even if we were at the same level numerically. I should have questioned that freak longer before killing him. There were so many questions that needed answered, like what other stats and classes that were out there. He still needed to die of course, but I shouldn¡¯t have allowed him to rush his death along like I did.

    ¡°I choose Body,¡± I announced, and immediately grew stronger. Body seemed to be my cheat stat at the moment, and I would probably stick to it until gaining more knowledge about the new world.

    Speaking of gear, I patted down the man-eater. I discarded a blood stained Swiss-Army knife and dumped out the duffle bag onto the ground. It was mostly clothing, pictures and keep sakes that where were completely useless. The crazy fucker apparently only had that pocket knife on him for a weapon. Wow. Grab a stick bro, or something amazing, like a pitchfork. A picture of what must have been his wife or girlfriend brought me low for a brief moment. It humanized him, and made his death seem more real. It was short lived though, since it was lying beside the bloody leg that was left of his dinner.

    Again, I was strangely numb to after killing another human being. I don¡¯t know if it was the circumstances or what, but it wasn¡¯t really affecting me. In my head, I had some idea in my head that killing another human being should matter on some deep emotional level. Currently I was zero for two on that account, and I was starting to worry that I was turning into a sociopath. Calling what I did murder was a strong word for putting down what was essentially a rabid animal, but still, he was people. I¡¯ll have to pay close attention to my feelings in the future. I don¡¯t want to transform into a monster myself.

    The military green duffle bag had more of a carrying capacity than my high school backpack and was fairly clean, so it was kept as an upgrade. It was wadded up and tied it to the back of my Jan-Sport for now as the backpack was more still convenient to carry.

    The duffle would be used for clothing, extra food and other convenient but none vital items. Something I could drop and leave behind if necessary. All and all it was not the best piece of loot, but it was at least japtem worth picking up. There were no shirts that would come close to fitting me in his belongings so I moved on, leaving the leg and the corpse for the worms.

    I was about three miles into my approximately six mile journey to the mall so far and it had taken more than a day and a half to get here. That pace was too slow. Even without sustaining an injury, my encounter with the winner of a Freddy Kruger lookalike contest slowed me down another hour or so. It was frustrating to be able to run the distance in 35 minutes but being forced move at a crawl in order to travel safely. Still, it was just not worth the risk to move faster. I decided to maintain stealth-mode and attached a conflict avoidance modifier to it.

    It was time to hide from everything, people, monsters, puppies, whatever. Well, not puppies, I mean who doesn¡¯t want to have a dog to follow them around in a wasteland. Mad Max had a dog after all, and he was a total badass. But everything else would be avoided, dungeons ignored, and Rapunzel left in her tower until I had better gear. From the sun, it was now late afternoon. With a little bit of help from a long lost acquaintance, Lady Luck, I could still make it there today.

    Slow is smooth, smooth is fast. The next mile went like that for me. The highway turned into a city street and was now passing through urban development instead of being hidden by trees. I spotted my first pack of lost, a group of 8 of them playing follow the leader, but was able to hide and avoid them. They did not notice me and seemed still reliant upon sight to hunt, like normal humans. At the very least they did not have enhanced smell, because I smelled like straight up butthole from my nasty night in the van. They got within 50 feet of me and would have gotten a whiff of my from-unda cheese if they had any kind enhanced nostrils.

    It was tough to be sneaky when you¡¯re as big as I am, but when your body control is 75% better than normal you become a quick study. It was about patience, lines of sight, and waiting for the right time to move. Finding one hiding spot, waiting and observing and then quickly moving to the next seemed to be the key. Back in my fatass days, a whole 2 months ago, my excessive weight combined with my weakening chicken legs caused me to clomp around noisily in my size fifteen boots. Now I felt strong and light. I was able to focus on my foot placement, and it was like my improved stats were making me instinctually move on the balls of my feet. I was just always in balance.

    Even though I felt like a ghost, I was not invisible. A pair of mutated canines got the jump on me in an alleyway despite my best efforts. The two were bedded down as I was sneaking through, and they came after me like a free lunch once they noticed me. Hyperaware, with bow in hand and an arrow strung, I was ready. A quick lucky shot landed in the first ones torso, knocking it down and stopping its momentum. There was no time for another arrow so I was forced to drop the bow roughly to the cement, cringing at the crunching sound it made as it the ground. I sidestepped the second¡¯s hounds lunging attack and drew my half-hatchet as we turned on each other. It was more cautious and began lunging at my ankles. I took some quick hops back before I figured out the timing, but I caught it in the ribs with my hatchet soon enough.

    Neither of the blows killed the creatures in one shot, and it took a little time to finish them off safely. The whole encounter left me feeling stupidly proud of myself for avoiding damage. I seemed to finally be learning how to fight.

    ¡°It has been around 12 hours since the last workplace injury,¡± I giggled after killing them. Something, maybe the unquantifiable gain of experience, got to me. There must be something to this world that made killing things feel good. I felt high on life, strong, and powerful.

    The addition to my strength, dexterity and every other unnamed body attribute was again noticeable during the fight. The animals seemed slower, like they were moving through a film of wax. My mind raced to tell the body how to react, and it did so well enough that I easily took care of two of the monsters that nearly destroyed me at level 1. I was capable of more though. It seemed as if my mind was lagging behind my body again. My brain just functioning fast enough that it realized that I could not fully utilize my advancing body. Maybe keeping the stats even might be the way to go. Where were all the smart kids with their DPS spreadsheets when I needed them? Like almost everything else in this changed world, I would just have to figure it out as I stumbled along.

    The packs of lost grew more frequent as I worked my way to the mall, and they seemed to be the only predators out in the open. Some packs moved with purpose, while some walked around as if strolling through the park on a sunny day. They tended to avoid each other for the most part, but I did witness two of the leaders approach and speak to each other while their packs remained a respectful distance away.

    I cannot imagine what the two freaks would be talking about, but it sure wasn¡¯t the weather. Staring at the groups and wanting their experience, I had to stifle a sudden urge to kill them. In my mind¡¯s eye, I could flow through the packs leaving destruction and death in my wake if I only had training and a weapon. It was all just a dream though, my ability to do so in reality was practically non-existent. I felt for their strength and found the peons to be about the same as mine, if maybe a little lower. The leaders were the problem, they were as far above me as the heavens are over the earth. Creepy ass rape monsters better hope I don¡¯t get me a giant sword after a few more levels. I¡¯d chop them all up. For now though, I¡¯ll continue to hide.

    The rest of the trip ended up being extremely tedious. The cycle of wait, watch, move and hide continued. I got stuck in the hide phase at one point for over an hour, while a group of wild dogs ate what looked to be a mutated deer. I cheered on the normal looking canines in silence, but was not willing to risk being the next target of their hunt. Soon enough they finished their meal, I was able to move on. Eventually, I made it to the mall just as it was getting dark.

    It was an older set buildings, more of a collection of shops then a mall. They had been remodeled to fit the needs of the various stores that had come and gone through the years. The whole plot was a rectangle, with a communal parking lot and the stores lined up facing it in an L shape. The Riverside Antique Mall was only antique in its name, the rest had stayed fairly modern.

    There were only 5 shops in the mall. The mainstay and longest part of the L was a Food Lion grocery store. A Subway and the connecting sword store, which was appropriately named Joe¡¯s Sweet Sword Shop, comprised the crook of the L. An off brand clothing shop called the Thomas Collection and a flower shop with a busted sign filled up the rest of the complex. The parking lot was mostly empty, like almost all of the lots I had found. It was a polar opposite of the roads. People had either made it home when the light fell, or had gotten stuck on the roads in their attempting to evacuate the dangerous monsters of the city.

    I decided to avoid all the large windowed fronts, knowing there would be far less exposure if I approached from the back. As I worked my way around from the flower shop side, I had to stop behind their company van and hide from another small pack of lost. They were only four in the group with no apparent leader. It was the first time I had seen a group without one. They exited out of the front of the Food Lion and circled west before going behind the buildings. Luckily, they were noisy and I was able to hear them before I could see them, giving me plenty of time to hide behind a van. They looped around to the front of the buildings before re-entering the Food Lion.

    The lost were a very twitchy group of former people. They practically pranced from one foot to the next, twisting and jerking like they had severe Tourette¡¯s as they jogged. It seemed like they were trying to look everywhere at once and their heads were constantly moving. For all their apparent efforts, they did not seem to notice much and were more focused their route than anything else.

    That had looked a lot like a base patrol. The monsters must be living inside that grocery store. It was actually a pretty good place for hideout. There would be plenty of food inside, well if their diet did not force them to eat people all the time, and the location was fairly central. It allowed good access to other populated areas of the city for potential raiding. That was assuming the surrounding areas still had people holed up in their houses and apartment complexes. There had to be some normal people left, I couldn¡¯t have been the only idiot to survive.The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

    Not wanting to get caught red handed while breaking into the back of the sword shop, I held my position and waited to see if it was a patrol. Sure enough after about thirty minutes the same group made another lap.

    It was time for a little experiment to see how much they could observe and remember. If I kicked in the back door of the shop, it would be bloody obvious to anyone who looked at it. I needed to find out if they would recognize it and act on what they saw. The van I was still behind was unlocked and the keys were in the cup holder. I forced the thing into neutral and pushed it as hard as I could towards side of the flower shop. It was little downhill, so once rolling the vehicle started picking up momentum. It hit the building with a resounding crash as I was scampering farther away to a new observation point across the street.

    The patrol came out immediately, responding to the noise. From where they exited the building it was obvious that they could see the van, but they went west again. Like a train stuck on its tracks and unable to avoid a collision that it could already see, they were stuck in on a predetermined path and unable to deviate. They circled the building and passed the wreck without pause before going back inside. Yea, they were not so bright, but that was a good thing.

    The route must have been taught to them by one of those leaders, the smart cannibals. Extrapolating from my observations, it meant they were smart enough to follow simple instructions but not intelligent enough to notice changes in the surrounding environment. I stretched out with the new sense and felt that individually they were weaker than me, but not by much.

    As neat as my little science project was, I was still needed better gear. With about thirty minutes before they patrolled again, I ran to the rear of Joe¡¯s. Breaking down the metal security door was going to make a ton of noise, so I tried alternative means. After a failed attempt to jimmy it open with my pocket knife, I ran back to the Van and tried the keys. No luck there either, so I resorted back to force. The door opened inward, and was on a metal frame. It was similar to a door on a drug dealers house that I had to kick open back in my policing days. It had taken me about 10 minutes of effort to finally break the thing down. I didn¡¯t have the luxury making that type of continuous racket now though, this was going to have to be done fast. I set down my bow, took a few steps back and reinforced my legs with Ki. A long hopping power step into a thundering front kick smashed into the door with a resounding boom. The impact cracked the deadbolt and bent the frame. A second kick deformed it enough I could lever it inwards and slip past. After grabbing my bow, I went shopping.

    There were some crates in the back which were labeled as containing packaged weapons, but I wanted to check out the display models first. Thinking about the development of my stats on the way in, I had already made some choices about the kind of weapon to use. With my overpowered body stat, and if I could ever get my fucking Ki to work with my arms, a two handed weapon should make me nearly unstoppable. The extra reach combined with the ability to hit things hard and fast should make up for my severe lack of skill. Hopefully that would keep me alive long enough to figure it out how to fight properly.

    I snuck through to the front expecting to hide from the patrol while looking at the weapons. I was anxious to find a giant flamberge, a zweihander, or even the Japanese style nodachi. So equipped I would go and clear out Jessica¡¯s apartment complex, rescue her and then ride away into the sunset.

    But that didn¡¯t happen. The shop had already been raided, apparently several times over. The only things left were broken weapons and junk. I shifted through the remaining gear, hoping for some decent sloppy seconds, and found a couple swords that looked decent laying on the ground. Upon picking them up I could tell they were for display only. The swords rattled loose from hilts that were not connected to the blades correctly. I would be afraid to stab a barn cat with any one of them. After finding nothing in the front of the store, I collapsed against a glass display counter and started cussing under my breath. I was preparing to stand up and go look the boxes in the back when I saw humongous a mace and shield that had been dumped unceremoniously to the floor behind the counter.

    Afraid to hope, I approached them slowly. They had been mounted on the wall above the cashier¡¯s register before being pulled to the ground, possibly as a representation of the store¡¯s machismo or general awesomeness. They were big enough for it, and quite shiny as well. They looked to be both be made out of matching stainless steel. Picking them up I knew instantly why no one had looted them. They more than twice as heavy as their average equivalent, and it would take something more than human to wield properly. Holding them both, I knew that with my strength they would be barely useable for now, but I would grow into them in time.

    The shield was a Viking style round shield. Instead of being made of wood it was stainless steel, and painted black and red for a stunning visual effect. With the flashy looks came a price. From prior googling in between my gaming sessions, I knew that most shields worn by foot soldiers only weighed in at 6-10 pounds. Anyone who thinks that those shields would be light and easy to use has never tried to hold one for an extended period of time. At around 35 pounds this gaudy shield was a monstrosity. No normal human would have been able to lift it for long, and it had obviously only ever been intended to be displayed on a wall. Oddly for such an unpractical armor, it came equipped with a rugged leather carrying sling, for over the shoulder carry when not in use.

    The mace was a monster as well. It was a 36 inch rod of steel and weighed around twenty-five pounds. It had a flanged head on one end and a hand and a half sharkskin grip on the other. There was no guard above the handle, but there was a handy dandy wrist strap, the kind you would see on Bobby¡¯s batons in London. There was also a thick leather belt against the wall that matched the mace, and had a metal ring attached so it could be shoved through. Excited that my trip was going to be successful after all, I picked up both and took them to the back and out of sight of the front glass windows.

    Setting them aside for now, I rummaged through every box found in the storage area, as well as every office, locker and storage unit I could find. Mostly all I found were junk items, like non-functional cosplay armor made from painted styrophom and cardboard, or weapons made so poorly or so impractically that they would not survive the first contact with an enemy. Finally what seemed like forever, I found something of else of worth. Inside the employee break area were a few lockers. One still had a lock on it, but someone had attempted to pry it open at some point. The bottom half was bent and there were two broken short swords on the ground nearby that looked to have been used as levers. Hoping nothing would notice the noise, I used the hammer portion of my half hatchet to break the lock off.

    The locker contained most of a Roman Centurion¡¯s outfit. It had a heavy metal studded leather skirt made of thick straps that hung down to a few inches above the knee on an average sized person. Possibly the best find yet were the thick bronze forearm and shin guards. They were leather backed and covered with a strip of bronze painted steel, and only covered the front part of the intended body part. I pulled them out and almost started dancing with happiness when their adjustable straps fit on my forearms and calves. I attempted to put the skirt on as well, but the belt just was not big enough for my waist. I left it be and picked up what had been hidden behind it. Seeing the functional gladius in its sheath, I realized I had finally found my man sized knife.

    The 18 inch long, two sided weapon was used heavily by the Roman Legions and was often underestimated due to its short length. The Romans did not conquer 21 % of the world¡¯s population because they were bigger and stronger than others, but because they were smarter and better prepared. They built roads for troop and troop support, and they were also able to field better trained and equipped soldiers. Full time soldiers that were trained to fight as a group was something few populatoins could afford to do at that time. There used to be almost no full time soldiers in the olden days. Mostly they were farmers who had be conscripted or chose to fight to defendant their homes. Farmers could not afford to take weeks off, leaving their fields to be overgrown, while they trained with their neighbors. On the battlefield they would just clump up and charge in mass and attempt to overwhelm the enemy.

    These tactics did not work against the Romans, and caused the majority of armies to be slaughtered. The massed hordes broke against a Roman shield-walls. The deceptively short gladius would flicker between the shields to slaughter the poor conscripts who were stuck in the front, having been pushed into the wall by their neighbors behind them. Thus the gladius ended up being one of the finest swords to have ever been designed. But people were smaller in those days as well. The average height of a Roman citizen was only 5 foot 6 inches. In my huge hands it was more of a knife instead of a sword, but it fit my needs well.

    Wearing my new armor, I affixed my gladius to the mace¡¯s leather belt and put it all on. It was a little uncomfortable and fit snugly over my jeans, but it felt like something you would get used to wearing, like my old duty belt. The man-knife was placed on my weak side, as it felt easier to cross draw it with my main hand. I picked up the mace and shield and practiced as much as I could in the cramped space. The shield was just too much for me right now, but I could probably use it for a short time if needed. The mace was surprisingly well balanced for such a monstrous thing but I was tiring quickly attempting to keep them both under control. Placing the shield down, I continued practicing with the mace in both one hand and later two. Swinging the heavy weapon made me gave me a feeling of power that I never felt with my little pitchfork.

    I fought imaginary foes in the room, moving the large piece of metal around while raining crushing damage on invisible foes. After a time I stopped, out of breath and sweating. The mace was a monster and put a heavy strain on my body, but with time I felt we could become one.

    When I was finished playing make-believe, having already conquering a small town in my mind, there were several screams out in front of the shop. I crept towards the front of the shop and looked towards the Food Lion. A group of ten lost were playing follow the leader with their boss, and four of them were carrying people like they were human happy meals. I could not tell from the distance which was which, but there were both female and male screams in the air. I sympathized, and sure as hell would be screaming too if I had been captured alive by cannibal rape monsters.

    Just like most stories of intense depravity, it was one thing to hear about and another to see it happening. I wanted to stop it but I also did not want to spend my life in a wasted effort. There was just no chance of surviving a fight with such a large pack in anything resembling a fair fight. It figures that the first time I see normal looking people, there would be no way for me to meet them. I thought briefly about a rescue mission, but quickly discarded it hopeless. There were at least fourteen regular mobs in the form of lost, and one boss creature that was so far out of my weight class that I would be one shot did not make the decision that though.

    !!!QUEST ALERT!!!

    Greetings Desmond Slattery and congratulations! You have been selected to complete an order from the gods! The four humans that you have observed in the custody of the cannibals need to be saved. You are the hero who has been selected to rescue them, and for your efforts you will be rewarded!

    Rewards: Variable, depends on how well you complete the quest.

    Penalties for failure: Variable; you must make an honest attempt at saving the hostages, or you will be punished.

    Like the Voice, this so called Quest Alert boomed across my consciousness in a way that is difficult to describe. I could hear it, see it and understand it, yet there was nothing audible or visible about it. It had that familiar sense of frightening power and I could feel myself yearning to complete the task, but it was nothing that I couldn¡¯t ignore.

    Fuck that shit. Even without all the adds, the leader alone would kill me in an instant. As long as he is inside there was no chance of my rescuing anyone. Better to take the punishment and hope it¡¯s not too harsh, then to commit suicide by accepting the quest.

    Feeling silly, I looked up and talked to the ceiling of the store, ¡°Um, hello¡­..so yea, I am not anywhere near strong enough to take those guys on, and I don¡¯t wanna be raped and eaten, so¡­.no thanks on the whole quest thing. I¡¯m going to pass.¡±

    A bright flash of light and pain overwhelmed all of my senses, and I felt my body collapsing upon itself. The next forever was horrible agony. The torment was greater than anything I had felt in my life, far surpassing my many previous near-death injuries. At least when I was dying, I usually fell unconscious and missed the worst of the pain. Not this time though, instead I spent an indeterminate amount of time feeling different horrible ways to die. I burned from the inside, was frozen and shattered, experienced death from a thousand cuts and was drawn and quartered. Many other of the deaths were so extravagant that I could not even recognize how I being tortured.

    It seemed like it continued for an eternity, but when it stopped I knew no time had passed at all.

    !!!QUEST ALERT!!!

    Punishment issued: Pain, perminant loss of growth amplifier Soul.

    Hey dumbass, you must attempt this quest or you will continue to be punished. You will most likely die when during the rescue attempt it, but that¡¯s what I¡¯ve got my money on anyways. If you do not attempt it you will continued to be punished until we decide to kill you anyways.

    ¡°Arghhhh, you motherfuckers!¡± Shouting I circled the room, destroying everything I could reach. ¡°Not only did you murder almost everyone, but you can¡¯t even at least give me a fucking chance to live? Fucking assholes!¡±

    An invisible force picked me up and threw me across the room into a cinderblock wall. I hit hard enough to crack the cement blocks, but strangely other than the pain from the impact I was uninjured.

    !!!Quest Alert!!!

    Punishment issued: Ki pathways damaged

    The reason why you got good amplifiers is because we thought you could be interesting. Now attempt the quest before I decide to torture you for eternity. You¡¯re only getting weaker every time you piss me off.

    ¡°Fuck you!¡± I screamed again. These ¡°Gods¡± or whatever they are must be able to read my mind, because even though I was still cussing them, I fully intended to attempt the quest. What other choice did I have?

    I sat down for a minute to think. Pulling myself into a sitting lotus pose, I attempted to meditate. It took me a long time to find my center, but eventually I was able to fall into my usual trance. I cycled some Ki while considering what had just happened. I immediately knew something was different, broken even, when the Ki cycled. It seemed like the pathways in my upper body had been warped or destroyed. I could not tell what exactly was wrong, only that something was not right. Losing my Soul attribute, what they called an amplifier, was frustrating, but not an immediate issue. I didn¡¯t know what it did anyways. I had been relying on my Ki though, so the damage to it could be the end of me. I got up and focused the tiniest amount into my legs in order to see if my few trained abilities still worked. Thankfully they did. I could still reinforce myself to run faster, jump, lunge and kick. I sighed audibly with relief when I found out my limited bag of tricks was still in play. I decided to put off finding out what had been done to my ¡°pathways¡± until later. It wouldn¡¯t matter anyways if I didn¡¯t survive the upcoming rescue attempt.

    Calling the attributes amplifiers made a lot of sense. I still thought of them as attributes, but according to what I had learned from the interrogation of the cannibal, the body did get stronger by a certain percentage. The question was whether or not things like Ki, Soul and Magic were useable without the modifiers. I could use my Body and Mind, so it would make sense that I would be able to use the others as well. They just wouldn¡¯t be amplified.

    I moved to the front of the store and watched the four canni patrol exit to take a lap while trying to think of a way to rescue their victims without becoming one myself. As the sun finally went down and night took over the world, I began to formulate a plan. Hello Darkness, my old friend, I thought. With no lights I would have a huge advantage when facing other humans, or semi-human cannibals. My nightvision, although limited in distance, would be the key to victory. I would need to keep them confused and distracted so I could fight them as individuals instead of a group, but this could be doable.

    Well, as long as I could avoid fighting the leader. Or maybe take him out in some sort of sneak attack. Maybe I could just take one hostage and run for it? I wondered if that would be acceptable.

    Fucking ¡°Gods¡±. Forcing me to risk my ass for their entertainment. Even though my heart had been wanting me to save those unfortunate captured souls, I resented being forced into it. If I was strong enough, I wouldn¡¯t have needed the push. Those people would have already been rescued. I just needed to level up some first. It wouldn¡¯t do anyone any good if I died fighting for a hopeless cause. You would think that I would no longer fear death, but this hopeless mission had me fearing the great unknown again. Unable to fully deal with my feelings I did what any real man would do; I pushed them down deep into my stomach and ignored them. The rescue mission was a go.

 Chapter 19 - Eating the Neighbors

    Chapter 19

    Tony DeFloure

    I hit level 4 after finishing off the last bit of meat on Joel¡¯s bones. Having been weak all of my life, I had been planning on putting another point into strength with every new level. Instead the Voice gave me an announcement of my stats with a point already added to Cannibalism at level 3. I have no idea what it does but it obviously has something to do with me gaining levels from eating people. Probably makes me better at it, like strength makes me stronger. It was probably a good thing that it was automatically applied if it was essential becoming more powerful, because I would have kept putting points into strength otherwise.

    Another point went into Strength at level 4, and again I felt that surge of power. My muscles were not growing bigger or anything, but instantly I was stronger. Going into Joel¡¯s bedroom, I picked up his wooden dresser and threw it against the wall. Like most severe heroin addicts my muscles had rotted away to the point where I had problems doing anything physical. The feeling of power trashing the dresser gave me was intoxicating, so I destroyed a wooden chair next. Eventually the entire room was demolished. There were soon holes in the walls, broken glass littering the floor and anything that could be picked up had been thrown somewhere.

    Winded from my exertions, I finished up at the Joel buffet and went back to watching the news. They were starting to show groups of people running around eating others and that seemed like a damned fine idea. Originally I had been worried being arrested for murdering Joel, but watching the TV it truly seemed as if the world was ending. I decided, fuck the police. If I can gain enough levels, they won¡¯t be able to do shit and neither would anyone else. I needed to get stronger now, and the world would be mine for the taking. I looked around the residence until I found the largest knife in the kitchen and then went to the door preparing to go meet the neighbors. I caught a glance at myself in hallway mirror on the way out and stopped midstride. I was a mess. There was dried blood covering my naked body, and bits and pieces of Joel stuck to me as well. No one was answering the door for that guy.

    I took a quick shower and dug out some clothes out of my backpack. When you¡¯re homeless, you generally tend to keep everything you own on you at all times, so I changed into one of my few spare sets of clothing. I still looked like a crack-head, but at least I was a clean one. Luckily this was government housing, so I would fit right in.

    Not having an extra pair of shoes, I had to watch where I stepped because the hallway was littered with trash. I held the knife behind my back and knocked and went to the apartment next door. An elderly black woman in her nightgown opened the door and peered out at me under the door chain.

    Looking at me with clear disgust she asked, ¡°What do you want?¡±

    ¡°Hi, I¡¯m staying with Joel next door and he wanted to know if he could borrow a couple of eggs for a cake he is making.¡± I lied to her.

    ¡°Fuck off doper.¡± The lady told me as she attempted to shut the door.

    Cantankerous old lady. I hated bitches like that. I was dressed in my best outfit and she had still instantly judged me. I did note to myself though that if little old ladies opened the door for me in the future, I probably would need to not stare at them like they were going to be dinner. The hands held behind my back obviously hiding something did not help either. I jabbed a foot forward, stubbing my toes but stopping the door from closing. I leaned against it with my shoulder.

    ¡°Please, he gets mean if I can¡¯t get what he wants.¡± I stuck with my lost cause of a story.

    ¡°Leave before I call the cops, asshole.¡± The old bat told me.

    Since I was planning on eating this woman anyways there was no reason to continue with the act. I started slamming against the door as she fought against my entry. I was having problems opening a door which was only being held back by someone¡¯s great grandmother, fucking pathetic. After a few minutes I finally knocked her down and ripped chain off the wall in the process. Grunting I kept ramming the door into her body as she scrambled away until I could fit through the small opening. Squeezing through I looked down at her as I shut the door behind me.

    A grin crept across my face as I brandished the knife and locked the deadbolt. Getting through that doorway was the turning point in my life. I had fought for something, and won. Having never really succeeded in anything it was quite a rush. The power of it, the control, I could feel it in my loins. I wanted this and I was going to take it no matter what. In a rush, I dove at the old lady who was going to be one of my first stepping stones to greatness.

    Grandma was a fighter, I¡¯ll give her that. She kicked at me, bruising my shins and knocking me down before I could reach her. I had to roll on top of her legs and pull my way up her body before I could land any solid stabs. During the process I cut myself with knife several times. After a half-dozen stabs she finally stopped moving, and I stood up over her panting for breath. Stupid cunt. I had been so proud of my strength and granny almost kicked my ass. It was disappointing, but it would be ok, I would stronger. Just need to eat the blue-hair here and gain a few more levels. I did not want the blood to seep under the doorway so drug her to the kitchen and dug in.

    It was amazing how I could eat a corpse in a few hours and kept a boner the whole time. The rush from the kill had been great, but this took it to the next level. It was like taking a bunch of Viagra. I was so fucking horny that I could hardly think. Every thought I had while devouring a raw human corpse was about sex. I was fucked up, but this was something else. Strangely enough, I was ok with it, and as I finished eating it started to fade but stayed in the background, aching like a tooth and waiting to be dealt with.

    Where the fuck was all that meat going anyways? Some sort of magic shit because my stomach never felt full. My cuts also healed as I ate. The corpse only gave me two levels and put the point into strength before taking another shower. Maybe because she was weaker that Joel? She did have a lot less meat on her bones. I went back to Joel¡¯s for more clothes and went to another door. Over the few days I worked my way through the apartment complex, sneaking down hallways and knocking on doors until a suitable victim was found. Looking through the windows of my food¡¯s apartments, I watched the city burn. I bathed cleansing purple light that came in through the windows, allowing it to wash over me. The longer the light hit me, the stronger I felt. I loved it.Unauthorized use of content: if you find this story on Amazon, report the violation.

    Night and day began to blur together while I focused on gaining more power. Taking the lives of people that had always looked down on me was such a rush that I just couldn¡¯t stop. I wanted more. I gained level 20 after four days of feasting. The power was out now, and I occasionally had from groups roaming the hallways. People no longer answered their doors, but I was strong enough now to break down doors. Occasionally I would get chased off, forced to flee back into the hallways. I even had to dodge a few bullets, but my new strength had made me fast and I was able to get away every time.

    If I had any morals to begin with, they were all now truly gone. I was a true epitome of evil, and I loved it. As soon as I had the strength to control my victims, I dealt with the continuous hard-on. I used the flesh of my food to sate the needs of my body. At first, I stuck to women, but soon I did not care. I was beyond human, and felt nothing for people that fed my needs. They were just meat-suits for me to use and then consume. I had become something better, stronger, a new species that had no relation to the prior me.

    At the end of the first week while enjoying some nice relaxing, nonconsensual sex a hot Latino woman, I heard some voices outside of the apartment that I was currently using as my base. The door flew inward with a crash, and a group of wild looking men came rushing in. They all paused at the sight of the woman¡¯s half eaten son lying on the floor near, and stared at me as I thrust into her as she was bent over the couch. We started at each other, me in shock and them with hunger.

    They were in varying stages of undress. All of them wore the same coat blood and of gory bits that clothed my own naked form. My mind had become quite feral when I was screwing or eating, and although I recognized their danger to me, I could not stop. Hell I couldn¡¯t even pull out of the woman to attack or run away. Once I got started, I had the overwhelming need to finish.

    They ignored me and began eating what was left of the boy. I went into an inarticulate rage and began frothing at them, yelling ¡°Mine, mine, mine!¡± while I continued to fuck the woman. They ignored me and simply ate the free meal in front of them. I finished quickly and tossed the woman aside. I was pushing level 30, and a little power drunk, so I decided to see what they were made of. Picking up my trusty butcher knife, I charged at them.

    ¡°Stop.¡± A voice said, and I did. The ones eating had stopped as well, standing up and backing towards the walls.

    An older man approached. He had gray hair on his unshaven face, and a generous potbelly protruded out of the unbuttoned front of his janitorial coveralls. The hair on his head was greasy and slicked back over his skull. He looked like a child molester who had gotten a job as a grade school custodian, but his presence was overwhelming. I couldn¡¯t help but do what he said.

    I growled ¡°Mine¡± again. Unable to articulate anything else I spat the word out in my feral rage.

    The man said ¡°You¡¯re going to have to learn to share,¡± as he walked past me to leer at the woman on the floor. The man, with the name Joe on his outfit, acted like he was mostly talking to himself when he said, ¡°This one is quite pretty and only slightly used. I¡¯ll be enjoying her in the bedroom.¡±

    He picked up the whimpering woman in princess carry, walked into the bedroom and dumped her unceremoniously on the bed. He paused prior to shutting the door and ordered ¡°Stay. Quiet.¡±

    I went to follow the man but couldn¡¯t move. Taking just a few steps in any direction caused me collapse the ground, overcome by an unexplainable fear. Eventually, I was able to crawl back to my starting point and stand up again. The second time I tried to move from the spot, I ended up pissing myself after collapsing. Seeing as how I was covered in gore it shouldn¡¯t have mattered, but crawling through a puddle of my own piss was pretty fucking degrading. Soon, I was frothing in anger and planning my revenge upon this ¡°Joe¡±.

    The woman started wailing again, and I heard rhythmic slapping of flesh as the man stole my pussy. Thinking of my food, I turned to yell at the others to get them away from my dinner but my voice came out as a whisper. Somehow the his orders of ¡°Stay¡± and ¡°Quiet¡± could not be ignored. He had some power over me.

    ¡°Stop eating my food you bastards.¡±

    The group looked at me and one said ¡°Share.¡± Another of them ripped loose a few handfuls of flesh and threw them at me. I asked them in whispers ¡°What are you guys doing and how come I can¡¯t move?¡±

    The group looked at me but did answer. I continued bombarded them with questions, asking their names and if they were cannibals as well. A young black man wearing bright red jean shorts, high top sneakers and a red bandana was the only one to be able to articulate his name and said, ¡°Twan.¡± The rest just shook their heads as if they didn¡¯t know and continued to chew on the apartment¡¯s former resident. They were feral, and seemed a bit retarded. None were unable to speak except for an occasional simple word or two. Soon I was bored, and being not being too proud to eat a snack, I devoured their gift and sat down to wait for Joe to finish.

    The woman quit screaming long before the sounds of slapping flesh stopped. After some time, I heard the shower turn on. The rest of group had curled up where they were and started napping. When Joe finally came out of the room, he was still wearing his blue onesie but he was clean. The partially eaten corpse of the woman was still on the bed, and she was missing all the meat on her right arm

    Like a pack of well-trained hounds the group sat up and looked at their alpha for direction. He looked over at the group and motioned.

    ¡°Alright boys, all done. Go get it.¡± The others rushed into the other room, but I stayed put. ¡°Almost forgot about you,¡± He said. ¡°And what¡¯s your name?¡±

    He asked the question as if he was not expecting an answer so I stayed quiet.

    ¡°It¡¯s alright buddy,¡± He cooed as he ruffled my hair, like one might a toddler. ¡°We¡¯ll find a name for you and get you settled in right. Hmm. I wanted to name the next one Rambo, after my second favorite dog, but you just don¡¯t look like a Rambo. What do you got there?¡± He brushed his hand across the baseball sized birthmark I had on my right shoulder. ¡°Hah, you¡¯ll be Spot. How do you like that name Spot?¡±

    Again I stayed quiet.

    ¡°You¡¯ll be just fine Spot, just fine.¡± He sat on the couch and tapped his foot on the floor nearby. ¡°Come over here,¡± He emphasized the words, giving them a power which forced me to comply. All of my attempts at resistance amounted to nothing as I sat at his feet, my straining face shining red with anger.

    I heard meaty thwack before I felt the blow, and my body flew across the room from the force of the backhand. When my senses came back, I could do nothing but cower in the corner where I had landed.

    ¡°Now none of that. Can¡¯t have the dog biting the master, now can we? I know how to train a hound and I¡¯ll show you how to obey just like the others. Now get over here.¡±

    There was no compulsion in his voice this time, but with years of abuse as practice, I was a quick learner. I scrambled over and sat as his feet, imitating the others and looking to him for direction.

    ¡°Go in there and get ya some dinner. Have some play time if you want. We¡¯re gonna move on in a bit so make it quick.¡± A nudge of his foot sent me running towards the bedroom where the others were abusing the corpse. A big guy had fought off the rest for the right to go first and was fucking the corpse as it lay on its back. The body¡¯s single skeletal, lacking the weight of the other, flopped loosely on the bed with every thrust.

    I know I¡¯m fucked up. There is no redemption for the things I¡¯ve done over the past few days, and sadly enough I enjoyed almost every minute of it, but there was no way I¡¯m fucking a half-eaten corpse. With nothing to do do and so I waited for the others to finish with their necrophilia and then joined in when they started dinner. Needless to say I didn¡¯t eat anything from the bottom half.

 Not a chapter - Just thinking aloud

    Originally I wrote Slate trying to rescue the hostages because he was a good guy, and there was no "quest" involved. I don''t know why, but I decided to add it in the last minute, and looking at it now, I agree it doesn''t quite fit the theme.

    On that note, the reason why I changed it was because this little story of mine is obviously lacking. I needed to make something more interesting about my MC, or have some sort of goal for him to accomplish earlier in the story, but I couldn''t think of any way to work something else in. Obviously this is off the wall fiction that I''ve decided to write after becoming addicted to reading the LITRPG stories on this site, but I wanted it to seem a little more "real". I wanted my MC to have to struggle, without gaining any outright overpowered skills in the beginning, but along the way I failed to make him stand out.

    I¡¯ve recognized that for a while now, and I''ve been struggling with the direction I should go with it. My attempt to make things immediately more interesting failed quite spectacularly from the comments.Thanks for your all guy¡¯s opinions, it¡¯s helping me see where I should improve.If you stumble upon this narrative on Amazon, it''s taken without the author''s consent. Report it.

    So, I¡¯m going to edit out his quest, and make him storm the fortress because he¡¯s a good guy. I¡¯ll repost it in a few days and return to future content. The change won¡¯t be significant enough for a re-read, but if you want to feel free to comment on if you like the changes.

    I¡¯ve still got a few more chapters written, but they are unedited. Proof-reading is a bitch, and is the slowest part of writing to me. Anyways, Thanks for sticking with me, and as always let me know if you have any ideas or comments on how to improve.