I reached Jayden’s house in just a couple of minutes. Of course, he only lives a few houses away. He stood on the front porch as I breathlessly arrived. He crowed, “Holy shit, Cade! Have you ever seen anything like that?”
As I followed him into the house, I couldn’t help but notice he was almost a head taller than me. Of course, Jayden’s a year older, but that year hardly accounted for the difference in size. He was the only sophomore on the varsity football team, and a linebacker, too. For my age, I was fairly tall. Five-eight, but I still felt small when standing next to my best friend.
I pushed the thought aside, “No kidding. This is going to change everything. Ask your system about ‘help.’ It’ll explain more about what’ll happen in three days.”
Jayden’s eyes glazed over and his mouth went slack. Is that what I looked like when reading those blue floating boxes in front of my eyes? After a long moment, he said, “Whoa! A character sheet–with stats! It’s like a video game, man. We’re gonna rock and roll this, Cade.”
Then he found the attributes, “Strength and Con. Oh, this is only getting better and better.”
He paused, his eyes remained glazed over, “Um, Cade, what’s your strength on your character sheet?”
“Eight.”
He huffed, “What the hell? I could bench press you. But I’m also an eight.”
“I wonder,” I mused, “if there’s anything on the help screen about that.”
With nothing more than a thought, I had the help screen floating in my vision. I scanned the various options. “System, show me information about the countdown.”
There are 71 hours 21 minutes of earth standard time until your planet will convert to the UDS.
Time was a-wasting. “System, why do Jayden and I have the same attributes?”
As part of implementing the Universal Development System, all classable humans start with eight points in each attribute.
Each question just begged more questions, “What’s a classable human?”
All humans fourteen standard Earth years and older are classable humans.
My imagination was aflame, overwhelmed by all the possibilities the system would give us in less than three days. Jayden seemed to agree, “Dude, this is going to be amazing. Can you imagine the kind of warrior I’ll become?”
That’s when Hanna, Jayden’s sister, appeared in the living room, “You’re both fucking idiots.”
I stared at her, my mouth agape. Hanna had been an object of my affections as long as I could remember. At nineteen, she had just finished her first year at the local community college. Even if she wasn’t five years my senior, she’d be out of my league. Where Jayden was bulky, like a tank, Hanna was willowy with milky skin that would burn at the start of every summer. Definitely out of my league. But I could still dream, right? Still, her words confused me. I stammered, “What? Why?”
Hanna pointed at us, “You see some gaming stats and all you can think about is playing some damned role playing game. But what happens to everyone who can’t adapt? What about them? They’re going to die. Did you think about that?”
The truth was, all I’d thought about was the fun of playing a game in the real world. A glance at Jayden showed his thoughts had matched mine. He shot back, “How do you know? You probably haven’t seen anything beyond the system message.”
Hanna rolled her eyes, “I’ve been watching the two of you since Caden came in. I’ve been playing MMOs longer than either of you losers. I know a character sheet when I see one. How many people can handle the kind of change the System will bring?”
I hadn’t considered the potential downside to the System. But the conviction in Hanna’s voice shook me to my core. How many of the kids in my school wouldn’t be able to survive? What about my dad? Or Jayden and Hanna’s mom?
I collapsed on the sofa, the joy gone from my face, “What can we do?”
Jayden sat down, too. The conflict in his eyes was plain to see, “You’re such a bitch, Hanna.”
Hanna shrugged, “Maybe so, but you two need to get your heads on straight. Whatever’s coming won’t be a game.”
I leaned forward. My mind was jumbled with a million thoughts competing for the top spot. “You mean, like taking some kind of stat? Maybe dex or strength?”
She pinched her nose, shaking her head, “Dude, you’re still thinking of it like a game. Maybe we will gain stats, like in an MMO. I dunno. But do you really want to approach it like that? What if you’re wrong?”
Despite Hanna’s warning, my mind wanted to cling to the whole idea of just bumping stats while effortlessly leveling. Still, I wasn’t a kid anymore and her words made sense. When I pushed all my preconceived notions out, I had a sinking epiphany. “You think we should treat it like the apocalypse?”
Hanna leaned against the wall, “Better than treating it like a game.”
Jayden was restless and rose, pacing back and forth, “We need to talk to Mom when she gets home, Sis. Maybe we should hunker down and see what happens when the system comes.”
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His sister bit her lip, “We can talk to her, Jay, but I don’t think she’ll believe it until it happens. She only believes what she can see. But if we’re gonna hide until we see what the System will do, we should probably stock up on food and probably before everyone else has the same idea.”
She fished her keys from her pocket, “You losers wanna go to the grocery store? Mom left her credit card on the kitchen table. I’ll grab it.”
I didn’t need any groceries. Dad wasn’t only a game warden for the state, but he was also a survivalist. We had enough food to last for a while. Still, I joined Jayden as he followed his sister to her car. The Walmart supercenter was only a couple of miles away. Despite Hanna’s words of warning, Jayden and I spent the short drive speculating about how classes would work in the System.
For a Saturday, the parking lot wasn’t very crowded. After grabbing a cart, Hanna said, “Let’s start in the canned goods aisle.”
She grabbed soups, canned beans, just about anything you could imagine that was canned, went into the shopping cart. By the time we got to the end of the aisle, I glanced behind and saw several people roll their carts into the same aisle, swiping canned goods from their shelves. I nudged Hanna, “Looks like you’re not the only one with this idea.”
She swore under her breath, “Great. This place is gonna become a zoo; and soon.”
By the time we reached the aisle with boxed meals, people crowded the aisle, grabbing food right and left. A middle-aged man with an unshaven face and a beer-belly poking out below a stained t-shirt pushed past us, knocking me into a shelf of ramen noodles as he grabbed a handful of spaghetti boxes, “Move it, kid.”
Jayden, all six plus feet of him, stepped forward, thrusting his chest out, “What’s your problem, man? Watch where you’re going!”
Jayden may not have outweighed that tub-of-lard, but he easily topped him by half a foot. The pasta-thief looked my friend up and down and rubbed his graying stubble a second before he muttered under his breath and walked away.
Jayden scowled, “What’s his problem? Next guy who tries that, I’ll bust his ass.”
I rubbed my arm where it had hit the shelf. It was more from the surprise than from any pain. “I guess people are figuring out something big is coming in a few days.”
Hanna grabbed several jars of spaghetti sauce, “It’s only going to get worse until the System kicks in. And then, it’s probably gonna make this look like a walk in the park.”
By the time we reached the bottled water, half the shelves were empty. She pointed at a shelf, “You two, load up on bottled water.”
By the time we finished with that, the cart overflowed with canned food, boxed meals, just about anything that didn’t require refrigeration. Even flour, coffee, and sugar.
We must have beaten most of the shoppers to the registers. We only had to wait for one person to get through the line before we shoveled everything from the cart to the conveyor. An older woman with a raspy smoker’s voice scanned items as she said, “you kids planning a party?”
Hanna tapped her foot impatiently, “Yeah, somethin’ like that.”
Maybe not everyone had paid attention to the System’s first alert. By the time everything was bagged and the cashier tallied the price, my jaw practically hit the floor when I saw the bill. We had managed to load over four hundred dollars in groceries.
We were halfway to Hanna’s car when sirens pierced the air. White police cruisers, with deep blue stripes down the sides, sped through the rapidly filling parking lot. They screeched to a stop in front of the Walmart. More than a dozen cops spilled from the vehicles. Trunks popped open, and the cops pulled orange pylons and barriers from storage. Moments later, the barricades ringed the entrances to the store.
A cop stood next to his cruiser, holding a microphone. His voice was tinny, but carried across the lot, “A state of emergency has been declared, folks. All stores are closed until further notice.”
Thankfully, they didn’t try to stop anyone who had left the store. By the time we loaded the groceries into Hanna’s car and were driving away, I turned and looked at the store. People were flowing out of the store, empty-handed. We’d barely managed to get in before things took a turn for the worse.
We had just finished putting the groceries away when Hanna’s butt vibrated. Actually, it was her phone, which she kept in her back pocket. But to my teenaged hormonal brain, I liked to think of her butt vibrating. She fished it out and collapsed into a chair at the bar that separated the kitchen from the small dining room.
She swiped the phone and answered, “Hey mom.”
I couldn’t hear the other side of the conversation. Just Hanna. “Yeah. He’s here. So is Caden Taylor.”
A moment later, she pulled the phone from her ear, “Hey, Cade, is your dad at work?”
When I nodded, she went back to her conversation, “Yeah.” A moment later, she added, “So, when will you be home?”
Hanna’s eyes narrowed before she let out an unhappy sigh, “Fine. We’ll be okay. We got some groceries before the state of emergency was called.”
I traded looks with Jayden, who just shrugged as he turned his attention back to his sister.
Before killing the call, Hanna said, “Yeah, love you, too. See you tomorrow.”
When she returned the phone to her back pocket, she said, “Mom has to pull a double shift at the hospital, Jay. They’re making all the nurses pull an extra shift. They’re worried. She said the governor has declared martial law for the entire state.”
Then, she turned to me, “Mom said you can stay until your dad gets home. She wants him to call her when he does.”
A bit later, while the three of us sat in the living room with plates piled high with spaghetti, Jayden flipped the channel from one cable news network to another, “Nothing about the system at all. Just a bunch of old people talkin’ about how the president has declared a state of emergency.”
I used my fork to twirl a bit of spaghetti onto the tongs as I balanced a tray on my knees, “Mostly. But did you catch the story about animals attacking campers at Yellowstone? I wonder if that’s what has kept Dad busy this evening.”
Jayden tried to speak through a mouthful of food, but Hanna wasn’t having any of that, “Dude, that’s gross. Close your face, moron.” She used her fork as a pointer, angling it at me, “I told you, the system hasn’t even arrived yet, and people are already dying. Still wanna be some hot shit warrior?”
I’d be lying if I hadn’t been thinking about what kind of class I’d want to play. But after watching the chaos at the Walmart and now the animal attacks on the news, what would the world look like when the system takes over? Would some sword-swinging warrior be the best class to survive?
When I voiced my fears, Jayden swallowed a mouthful of spaghetti before trying to talk, “You’re all skin and bone, Cade. Get yourself a good bow and sit back and do some DPS while I tank whatever the System throws at us.”
I shot my best friend a dirty look. He was way over two hundred pounds and had earned his place as a linebacker on the Varity football team. Thinking of him as a tank came easy; he was built like one. Of course, whenever we played MMOs, true to form, he loved melee tanking. I enjoyed playing hunter types; Especially if I could kill mobs at range.
Still, Hanna made a lot of sense, “I think I’ll wait to see what the system allows, Jay.” I shifted my attention to his sister, who sopped spaghetti sauce with some bread, and asked, “What about you, Hanna?”
Hanna finished her plate and set it aside, “I just want us to survive whatever this System throws at us. Whatever class lets me do that is what I’ll take.”