With all the stresses and horrors of day to day life, I had almost forgotten about the wonders and pleasures of the new world. Or old world. I found a few people who were starting a table top game set in a post apocalyptic world. Rather on the nose, I know. But I decided to join in.

  Oh, boy things quickly got out of hand. We went from rolling for starting stats to brain storming the best ways to build a real world adventurer. This wasn’t anything I hadn’t done in Green River, but now I have research and government contribution points to spend. This is gonna be fun. I’m rubbing my hands together like an evil scientist if you can’t tell.

  Day 113, Owen Landers

  Silas took a shaky step backward. The two hundred gallon water tank was mostly empty, but even the little that remained made the whole thing absurdly heavy. Bella, of course, was on the other side, barely straining at all.

  She grinned across the tank. “The arm is holding up great. It feels good to have ten fingers again.”

  Silas didn’t have the breath to respond, but he managed a low, irritated grumble. It was ridiculous. His arms were easily twice the size of Bella’s, and yet she was the stronger one. How did that make sense? Just because she had a body stat of five? His stats were all higher around five, several nearing ten, except for body. The one necessary to move heavy things. His companion looked like she should be the weaker one, but no. It was infuriating.

  He braced the tank against the back of the bus where the two rear doors stood open. “All right, push it in,” he called.

  The moment he let go, he sagged in relief. He guessed the thing weighed seven or eight hundred pounds. Lifting that with two people was still impressive, but it looked pitiful when Bella casually shoved the entire tank into the aisle between the rows of seats as if it were a rolling suitcase. She gave it a final push, then wiped her hands on her the pants of her armor and flexed her biceps with a smile.

  “You know, it’s insane how much stronger I am now,” she said. “I think it’s more than just the stats. I’m getting a ton strength from my Sturdy Gather too.”

  Silas could only nod. Anything that explained her freakish strength made his bruised male ego feel slightly less injured.

  He leaned into the bus and mentally cataloged the supplies. “Do we have everything? Food’s here, water tank’s secured. Filter’s packed.”

  Bella glanced around, then shook her head, “I’m not seeing anything missing.”

  Silas turned to Aron, who had finally learned how to fly well enough not to crash land every ten minutes. “How many miles to the, uh, gallon? Hour? I don’t know how to categorize mileage for a solar-powered vehicle. How far can this thing go on one charge?”

  Aron folded his wings, “Anywhere from three hundred to six hundred miles on a full battery. Depends on AC use, terrain, it can vary dramatically. Also it takes a long time to recharge.”

  Silas raised an eyebrow. “How long is ‘a long time’?”

  “All day, if it’s sunny. If it’s cloudy a couple days.” Aron shrugged.

  Thankfully, it wasn’t monsoon season. Plenty of sun meant plenty of recharge. And with his portals, Silas could stretch the bus’s effective distance enormously, up to an extra one hundred twenty miles per hour, easily. He didn’t have exact estimates yet, but the distance to Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia was roughly three thousand miles by road, maybe two thousand if they cut straight over mountains. Normally that would take nearly a week of constant driving, but with portal boosts?

  Five days. Maybe a week counting recharge stops. That was taking the long route. With portals skipping hairpin curves and bypassing dead roads, it could be even shorter.

  “All right,” Silas said, rubbing his hands together. “Are we ready to go on our magic school bus?”

  Samantha gave him a deadpan look. “You aren’t Mrs. Frizzle.”

  “I could be Mr. Frizzle, he never shows up in the show,” Silas insisted solemnly. “And I’m taking you all to see biological horrors, uh, wonders, beyond mortal comprehension.”

  Samantha’s eyes went wide. Silas grinned. “There might even be a sigil or two we can steal from an Eldritch bug nest.”

  “Really?” she whispered.

  “It’s a possibility.”

  Over the last few days he’d scouted the surrounding roads and was shocked to find they were mostly clear. There were still thousands of wrecked cars were present but they had been shoved to the sides by something with enough mass and force to carve lanes open. The cars were crushed, crumpled, tossed like soda cans, but the middle lanes were passable. Silas suspected that the governed the had used a tank to open up a pathway.

  He felt a little guilty for how surprised he’d been. Some part of him still held to the images of “India equaled ox carts.” The number of vehicles on the road alone shredded that assumption.

  He turned the key. The bus hummed to life with the soft whir of an electric engine. For a moment he thought something was wrong, there was no rumbling growl, no roar of a diesel engine, just a faint electronic whine. The rural Midwest had few electric vehicles.

  “All right, we’re—” Silas started.

  “I’m picking the music!” Samantha announced, already hopping into the shotgun seat.

  Bella opened her mouth, but Silas spoke first, “Actually, it’s good she’s up front. If anything jumps on the windshield, it’d be better to have someone who can shoot through the glass instead of getting out. She can fix the glass with her abilities as well.”

  Bella clicked her tongue but couldn’t argue with the logic. So she dropped into the seat behind Silas. The bus’s layout was strange, instead of rows facing forward, two long bench-like rows ran down each side, leaving a wide central aisle. Less efficient for seating, but perfect for storing a massive water tank and boxes of supplies.

  Silas wasn’t a big fan of Twinkies and dried fruits, but the others could use them to sustain themselves. With the water tank and a good filter, they could theoretically drive around the world without resupply. Not literally the whole world, but a chunk of it.

  He pulled through a portal onto the road. He could portal farther ahead, but preferred to keep a bit of spirit in reserve for emergencies, like a monster trying to bite the bus in half. Since he had most of their route memorized, he could portal quickly when needed without stopping to scout again. Perks of a high memory stat.

  They passed hundreds if not thousands of wrecked cars as they drove and the broken skyline of New Delhi stretched across the horizon. Nothing was spared. The devastation felt almost holy in its scale. India wasn’t a weak nation, far from it. Even with outdated stereotypes removed, they were one of the most powerful on Earth. If a nation like that could fall this completely what about the United States? His homeland was powerful, but not invulnerable.

  His chest tightened. He might already be too late to save Abby. When he got home, if he got home, would he find a grave? A shredded corpse picked over by beasts? Or worse a parasitic spirit wearing her body like a puppet? The thought clung to him like cobwebs he couldn’t brush off.

  Thankfully, Samantha was there to yank him out of his spiral, “How do I get this to work, Silas?”

  He glanced over and burst out laughing. Bella peeked over his shoulder, saw what Samantha was holding, and started laughing too. Samantha frowned in confusion, holding up a binder with the word MUSIC written across it in multiple languages. A famous musicians smiled from the covers of the CDs.

  “What? What is this? How do I use it?” Samantha whined, “It’s not funny.”

  Silas laughed far longer than the situation deserved. He needed it.

  “Dang, Samantha,” he wheezed, “You know how to make a guy feel old.”

  Bella leaned forward, “Sweetie, see that slot between the knobs? You slide the disc in there. The player reads it.”

  Samantha eyed the slot skeptically, “Are you sure? What if it doesn’t come back out?”

  “It will,” Bella said, amused.

  Samantha held the CD up to the slot and yelped when the mechanism sucked it in. A moment later, the speakers crackled and music started playing.

  Samantha stared at Silas, eyes wide. “That is, that’s insane. Why would you put music on a disc and then play it? That’s so complicated!”

  This time even Aron and Mandy laughed. Starting a road trip with laughter was always a good omen. Unfortunately, all good things eventually end especially the good ones.

  Fortunately, while things didn’t stay great, they didn’t turn terrible immediately. It didn’t take long for a monster to find them. This one was an angry goat, it bleated furiously as it lurched into the road, apparently convinced it could intimidate a full-sized armored bus moving at fifty miles per hour.

  Silas glanced at the bumper, just to make sure the critter hitter wasn’t going to throw the goat into the windshield. Satisfied, he sped up. The goat tried to bite the bumper. The bumper won. Spectacularly.

  Presumably, every bone in its body broke, but the sound insulation inside the bus was excellent. Silas didn’t hear a thing, he only saw the creature bounce off the wedge in his side mirror and roll into the line of cars behind them. It slumped to the pavement, dead. At least for the next ten minutes.

  Monster appearances came with startling regularity. Silas portaled past the more dangerous ones whenever he could and simply ran over the lesser ones. A massive spider, something straight out of nightmares, had draped a web across the road, its strands heavy with alarmingly human-shaped bundles.

  He was tempted to kill it to avenge the dead. Also to see what kind of boots the spider would be able to make with its sigil, but it wasn’t worth the time or the energy. Instead, he opened a portal and skipped a mile ahead down the highway.

  Thankfully, the monsters big enough to pick up a bus and tear it apart were rare. Well “rare” was generous. There were plenty of them, but they didn’t show up every thirty seconds, which gave Silas enough time to get away before things turned dire.

  He had no real intention of stopping to fight anything. Still, there were a few exceptions, opportunities he wouldn’t pass up if they presented themselves. Any dragonkin would be perfect prey, they needed four of them to update the twins’ sigils. German raptors and beholders were also high priority. And, of course, he’d slam the brakes for any sigils of extreme importance, werewolves, the shield ticks, anything with a healing trait, or any monster with an unusual ability he thought he could identify before they passed it.

  It was strange how easy the trip was. Monsters, strange events, random disasters, none of it was technically their responsibility for once, and that alone made the trip feel oddly refreshing. What wasn’t refreshing was the emptiness that trapped him in his own mind.

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  Despite driving through a city that should’ve held millions, they hadn’t seen a single person the entire time. Aron kept an eye on the leaderboard, watching for fluctuations. New names trickled in and out at the bottom ranks, but the top of the board never budged.

  Without a satellite uplink the biotech network had a range of about three miles it could extend further if people managed to daisy-chain the signal. It was how Silas had found Bella before, she had to be within that narrow radius. It was strange due to the fact that they had driven almost sixty miles, and the names hadn’t changed. That meant they had passed within a few miles of dozens of people and seen not a single one.

  How many were holed up in basements, shelters, or buried somewhere the monsters couldn’t find? More than a few, yet far, far fewer than there should have been.

  Silas’s thoughts drifted, inevitably, back to Abby. Back to the horrors she might be facing. He liked to believe she was strong. That his father and her father would protect her. But he had seen what lived out there. His dad was tough and stubborn and would do anything for his family but Silas couldn’t picture the man taking down a dragon the size of a football stadium. Silas couldn’t picture him standing toe-to-toe with a god.

  His grip tightened on the steering wheel. He tried to focus on the road instead of the ache swelling in his chest. What was that old Alcoholics Anonymous prayer? Something about accepting the things you can’t control. It sounded wise right now it felt impossible. Just a week ago he had felt so close to home, now, after driving for only an hour, it felt so far away.

  He was sliding too deep into that spiral when Aron suddenly called out, “Hey, look out the side window is that a drone?”

  Silas looked out the passenger side window. How could drones work? They needed a signal. His eyes widened when he saw trail of a combustion propelled projectile. There was a flash half a mile away. He saw the fireball before the sound reached them. A bloom of flame rose, throwing chunks of stone and dust into the air, then the delayed crack that rocked the bus a second later.

  He raised an eyebrow at the distant destruction,“What was that?”

  For a moment he thought it might be a new type of monster, but if one of those could create an explosion like that, it would be far beyond anything he could deal with. It looked more like a shoulder mounted projectile, so Silas assumed that humans were nearby. Then came the sharp ratatat of automatic weapons.

  Silas lifted his foot off the gas. Those shots were close. Gunfire was always loud, but he already knew how good his vehicle’s soundproofing was. If he could hear it this clearly whatever was happening wasn’t far away at all.

  He was torn. His instinct said run. Gunfire around a kid was a terrible idea, but Samantha, despite being twelve, wasn’t a normal child anymore. If she fought any pre-apocalypse human, Silas would bet on her every time, even against an MMA fighter or a linebacker. Guns would still be dangerous, but how could it be worse than dragonkin.

  However the other issue weighed heavier, he had no idea how these people would react to him and Bella. They’d be fools not to know their names from the leaderboard, but knowledge didn’t guarantee friendliness. Would they shoot? Would they try to recruit them? Would they panic? Silas hated the uncertainty.

  Fortunately, the source of the gunfire wasn’t difficult to locate. They rounded a bend where buildings, billboards, and abandoned delivery vans had been blocking the view. Beyond them was a bridge atop which a group of men with automatic rifles of clearly foreign make were defending a truck that had a rocket launcher bolted to a tripod and welded directly into the bed.

  Silas frowned at the setup. You really weren’t supposed to fire a launcher like that. He wasn’t trained in heavy weapons, but even he knew the backblast could shatter the rear windows, or roast half the men standing behind it.

  The men themselves were a strange sight with mismatched armor plates strapped over linen shirts, bits of camouflage mixed with brightly colored civilian clothing. Silas wasn’t sure what he expected maybe something more uniform, more equipped. With billions dead, there should’ve been abandoned gear and supplies everywhere. Yet here they were, wearing patchwork gear.

  As for what they were fighting. The creatures resembled the same Dr. Seuss like monsters Silas had seen before with bendy arms and fingers and a fuzzy, unsettlingly human adjacent faces. These ones were slightly different because carried weapons that looked like long metal claws. They also wore armor that looked like dryer-vent tubing wrapped around their arms and torsos. It would’ve been comical if they weren’t absolutely tearing the soldiers apart.

  Whatever the armor was made of, it deflected bullets with obscene efficiency. A magazine’s worth of shots would dent a plate, deform it, and punch through on the final few shots. If the hit wasn’t in a lethal spot, the creature just kept going. Even if it was lethal, a comrade grabbed the body by the ankle and flung it off the bridge. Ten minutes later the thing would be back in the fight.

  A vicious cycle. They couldn’t be worn down. The humans could.

  Samantha tugged on Silas’s sleeve and looked up at him, “We should help them, right?”

  Silas slowed the vehicle further and glanced at Bella, “What do you think? Humans should help humans. But they’re not our responsibility.”

  Bella frowned, “Normally I would say no, but what if they have access to a plane?”

  That thought hit Silas harder than he liked. He tried to dismiss it, airports should’ve been destroyed but what if a few planes had survived? What if these soldiers had a functioning craft. There were other things like an updated map, knowledge of major events, or safe zones? All of that would matter on their trip.

  If Silas was being honest, he didn’t want to abandon them. The same instinct that had pushed him to save Bella and Samantha was pushing again. What would Abby think if he showed up after a journey paved with innocent and more importantly, preventable deaths? What would he think of himself? When framed that way, the choice felt simple.

  “All right then,” he said, gripping the wheel. “Let’s go kill some cartoon nightmares.”

  He stomped on the accelerator.

  Because of the silent engine the soldiers noticed them first from their position on their truck bed. Their eyes widened as the armored bus roared straight toward the melee. A heartbeat later, the first Dr. Seuss creature turned, just in time to catch the tip of Silas’s bumper square in the chest. Unlike the bullets, its vent-armor didn’t stand a chance against a dozen tons of steel moving at highway speeds.

  At sixty miles an hour, the bus crushed through three more creatures. One even slipped under the wheels and was spat out the back in a spray of flattened fur. Silas slammed the brakes. Tires screamed. The bus skidded so long that they nearly went over the bridge’s edge, only hitting an abandoned car absorbed enough momentum to stop them. Not that a fall would’ve killed them. He would have just portaled them back to the road.

  Before the monsters could regroup and target the new arrivals, Silas kicked open the door and rolled out, drawing his sword. Immediately, he scrambled to his feet. Silas spun, ready to fight to the death.

  But nothing came.

  The entire battle had stalled. Humans stared at him in shock, mouths hanging open. The monsters stared at the bus with wide disturbingly human eyes, glancing between Silas, the vehicle, and the smeared remains of their comrade on the pavement.

  Silas knew that thing would be back, after all, the werewolf in Berlin had resurrected itself, but some morbid part of him wanted to watch this one reform. Would the scattered chunks pull together into a whole creature? Would five new ones spawn out of the pieces? Or would one chunk start healing and just be missing bits? Gross, but interesting. He wondered vaguely if they could use that to farm meat from these creatures.

  While Silas contemplated solving world hunger with alien anatomy, the others piled out of the bus. Aron and Mandy climbed onto the roof and drew their weapons. Silas had built Aaron a crossbow and Mandy a composite bow. Flesh Lord eventually would give her the strength for a heavier draw, but for now she was relegated to a forty pound bow. Samantha didn’t get out, she simply rolled down the window and leaned out, aiming a shimmering cone of death at the monsters.

  Bella stepped up beside Silas. She cracked her neck and tightened her grip on the war club he’d made her. Eventually, he’d rebuild her chain sword, but for now the Aztec-style weapon would have to do.

  He surveyed his opponents, looking over the furry creatures, “Keep them away from the bus. Stay out of the line of fire.”

  Silas hadn’t known what to expect from the monsters flexible dryer-vent armor. It had deflected bullets, but it still looked flimsy with all the bends and ridges. He stepped in with a quick chop and his blade bounced off leaving behind little more than a scratch.

  Growling in frustration, he stepped back to avoid the claw swipe aimed at his face. He glanced over to see how Bella was doing. She swung her weapon down on a monster’s helmeted head, and the metal plating buckled.

  Silas grumbled. Of course she could break it. The monster swung to backhand him, and Silas rolled clear.

  This was too frustrating. If he couldn’t fight like a superhero, then he’d fight like a normal medieval warrior. He would aim for the gaps between the plates, which on second thought was quite obvious. While his low body stat reduced the raw kinetic force he could create, his control stat was incredible.

  He dodged a swipe of the metal claws, angled his blade, and thrust straight into the narrow gap between upper and lower chest plates. Silas almost staggered at the lack of resistance. A smile grew on his face, targeting the gap had been easy, working around the armor would not be an issue.

  The creature spasmed violently. Silas jerked the sword free and staggered back to avoid getting clawed. His evasive maneuver failed anyway, as another monster raked its claws across his back. He braced for pain, but got the sound of a knife scraping hardwood instead.

  His armor held. Right. These things didn’t have powerful bodies. That’s why they wore armor. They weren’t bullet sponges like werewolves or dragonkin. They were Dr. Seuss noodles in tin cans.

  Silas spun, smashing the pommel of his sword into the creature’s face. The skull-cap helmet absorbed most of it, but not all. He kicked the creature in the chest, then drove his blade down through the open faceplate. Silas shuddered as made the mistake of looking the creature in the eye as it died. Its to large human eyes.

  By now the Indian soldiers had recovered from their surprise and started firing again. Caught between Silas’s group and the humans, the remaining monsters hesitated. There were about fifteen of them versus five soldiers, typically those were good odds, but Silas had already temporarily killed four with the bus, a few had been dead before, and he and Bella instantly dropped four more seconds after their arrival.

  They weren’t the only ones fighting either. Aron and Mandy weren’t doing much damage, but they distracted the abominations quite well. Samantha, on the other hand, whenever she saw an opening, she took it, and her projectiles were nearly unstoppable. She left behind circular holes in whatever she aimed at.

  Silas stabbed upward into another monster’s armor gap, sliding the blade up under the gap between the hips and upper chest plate. It was at about that time that the first resurrected creatures began climbing back over the bridge edge. Their eyes stared at the humans and Silas’s group in pure surprise.

  “Purify the ones we already put down!” Silas shouted.

  He stepped on the one he’d just killed and confirmed a prompt. It was surrounded in putrid black smoke that faded to purple. That pushed the remaining monsters into a frenzy. Silas didn’t know what they thought he was doing, however he imagined it was equivalent to how he would feel if they desecrated a fallen soldier from his unit.

  Silas didn’t care. They were desecrating his planet. If they didn’t like it, they could leave.

  He kicked another corpse and purified it as well. Then he raised his sword at the abominations and yelled, “You killed billions of us and you complain when we kill, what, eight of you?!”

  Humanizing things came naturally to people. It was typically irrational, but here, Silas thought it was justified. They were intelligent. They crafted intricate overlapping armor that flexed with their bodies. They didn’t just survive, they engineered. He felt it was reasonable to hold them to a higher moral standard.

  He purified a third corpse before the monsters reached him again. One charged, and he shoulder-checked it aside before stabbing his blade between its teeth. They clearly weren’t used to anyone challenging them physically. Probably apex predators on their own world, just like humans were here.

  The third monster tackled him to the ground. Fortunately it wasn’t as strong as a dragonkin, so wrestling wasn’t impossible. Unfortunately, its weapons were on its fingertips, long serrated claws attached to super-flexible fingers. They wormed into armor gaps easily.

  Unfortunately for them, Silas had another layer beneath his armor, a diving-suit-like underlayer made of the same bone material. It could stop a knife with finger-strength behind it, maybe not an ax, but definitely claws.

  The creature snarled in frustration as its first attempt failed. Silas didn’t let it try again. He pulled the bone knife from his belt and shoved it through the creature’s neck. It gurgled as the blade pierced its esophagus and scraped its spine. He used that leverage to roll on top, drew the blade out, and plunged it down again, this time through the eye.

  It went still. He purified it, endured the disgusting puff of smoke, and turned to help the others with the final group. Bella had one lifted by the neck in her prosthetic arm.

  She looked terrifying, her strength enhanced by sigils, and the new arm far stronger than her old one. She squeezed until the monster choked out its last breath, then crunched her claws through its throat. Bella purified it as she dropped it to the road.

  She turned and smiled. “That was kind of fun. We should do this more often.”

  Silas frowned. It shouldn’t have been fun. He thought about how he’d felt while cutting the creatures apart and reluctantly admitted, yeah, it had been exciting. Was he turning into a monster himself? Violence wasn’t supposed to be enjoyable.

  He glanced at the Indian military. Saving people was fun. That should be fine. However, he noted the feeling. He didn’t want to slide into monstrosity. He wanted to be recognizable when he got home.

  Silas purified the run-over monsters as well. He picked up quite a few sigils, though the one had been scattered across the pavement gave him nothing. That concerned him. Heavy weapons might not yield sigils if they splattered a monster to badly. That meant humanity’s most powerful weapons wouldn’t produce resources. It would let humans win against lesser threats, but leave them weak when only bigger monsters remained.

  He pushed that grim thought aside. When he turned toward the soldiers, all the rifles that had been aimed at the monsters were now pointed at him and Bella. They shouted to each other in Hindi. Silas raised an eyebrow.

  “Aron,” he said. “What’re they saying?”

  Aron shrugged. “I know Mongolian and English. Not Hindi.” He listened harder. “Uh… something dangerous something something alive something food? I’m catching like one out of five words.”

  Mandy’s soft voice spoke, “They’re debating whether you’re a threat and whether they should finish fighting you.”

  Silas blinked, “Mandy, you speak Hindi?”

  She nodded.

  “Would you translate for us?” Silas asked, unsure if she got the implied request.

  She hesitated for a long moment, then nodded again.