It took Alexander the better part of a week to come to terms with losing every single person he’d ever known and the two people he’d loved. He hadn’t been inside his old home since retrieving the guns and ammunition with which he’d purged the little monsters he thought of as goblins. The rage and grief that had driven him to massacre the creatures faded, now replaced by a dull listlessness, characterized by long hours spent staring at the water that ran from a large creek, through a nice little park with a rustic stone bridge in the middle of it.
He wondered the town, cataloging all the frozen humans he’d known. Most of the statues showed a people that were completely absent any indication that they’d realized what happened to them. Whatever petrified them had happened so quickly that they still wore expressions of prosaic small-town folk going about their lives in peace.
The schools, full of children, were the worst.
Classrooms full of kids petrified looking towards an adult in mid-explanation made for an intensely sad sight. When he got tired of torturing himself for surviving, he scavenged supplies, stocking the small house he’d selected as his dwelling before, sure as salmon returned to their home river to spawn, he was drawn back to the little creek, where he watched the running water burble along its path.
Slowly, the sharpest edges of the negative emotions were wore down, replaced by acceptance. Five days after returning to his home he’d, mostly, made peace with his being completely alone in a reality that probably wasn’t the one he’d known before his plane went down.
There was still some niggling feeling that he was insane. He still wasn’t totally convinced that any of this was real. A magical healing dawn on a seventy-two-hour timer was without any logic. The little monsters were another added wrinkle, they were flat out nothing that existed in anything but fantasy.
Or myth.
There were several bits of folklore that conjured murderous little beasties that had a penchant for murdering wayward travelers, children, and the like. Redcaps. Boggards. Goblins. Pucks. The unseelie. Tales that almost universally painted a rather grim picture of the nature of these critters.
Alexander was thinking that maybe the Brother’s Grimm were more prophets than story tellers.
The miniature shark-mouthed bastards hadn’t turned everyone to stone though, that had been something else. But what? He didn’t know. He was fairly certain he never would. Especially not if he died when the Maine winter settled over this tiny, remote, town.
The good news was, he was perfectly healthy in body, if not mind. The debilitating injuries to his arm, and likely more than that, were gone. The meat of his lower leg was perfectly hale. It made no sense.
Other things too, made no sense.
Whatever had occurred had completely fragged anything that had a diode, resister, or electrical gradient of any kind. Alexander had gotten a bright idea to make a battery bank using car batteries, only, when he went to test them by running a set of jumper cables between the terminals, they were all dead. Every single one. Which left him without a whole lot of options for electricity, even if anything had survived that could use it. The old incandescent light bulbs probably would still work, if you could find one that hadn’t been shattered. The LED ones that were sold these days were a no go.
So, no light that wasn’t the sun or moon or fire. At least he had a literal ton of candles.
Scavenging through supplies in various stores made him painfully aware of how dependent modern civilization was on computers and electronics. Almost nothing ran purely mechanically. He had hand tools, loads of them, half of which he had no idea how or why or when they were useful. That was just about it. Alexander’s schooling hadn’t included any “How do you live without electricity” lessons.
On that score though, there was one saving grace, call it a parting gift from his parents, born of their quirkiness.
Old Man Gerifalte had a hobby of collecting textbooks and instructional “How to” magazines. He called himself an “analogue archivist”. It wasn’t quite an obsession, but his father had a saying “Don’t trust computers to think for you.” A strange attitude for a man of his background, who used computers almost daily. His mother was complicit in this, telling a young Gerifalte “Nothing beats that smell of paper and ink, and it gives your dad something to keep his tinker spirit busy. Now get your ass to bed!” when he asked them why they spent the last hour they were awake reading old books.
Alexander read enough for his academics, he didn’t touch a book or tablet outside of that. Unless it was about planes, that was. His old man’s library had such an eclectic collection of books on everything from manual transmissions to crop rotation and irrigation techniques. Only problem was, most of those assumed you’d have things like motors to work with and that wasn’t looking like an option.
All the gas engines he’d tested hadn’t worked. Their spark plugs were all burned out and there weren’t any batteries. He’d have to figure out how to make a power source from scratch, one that was strong enough to generate the amps to spark a gas engine to life from a homemade spark plug.
Alexander wasn’t his father, he didn’t have that kind of knack, that kind of brilliance. He took after his mother, more interested in the direct, the tangible now. Not to mention, he didn’t have thirty years of casual reading about, if the library was any indication, absolutely everything engineering in the last ten centuries. Not yet, at least. It was looking like he’d have a lot of time on his hands to learn though. Not much to do when there was nobody to talk to, not much to do after increasingly early sun downs, no television, radio, or internet.
So, for the week after he regained his sanity, such as it was, the last Gerifalte spent his days combing the town for supplies, caching them, making an inventory on graph paper, like some kind of Byzantine clerk, and studying the art of gears, wheels, and chemistry.
Gears and wheels, because that’s how all mechanical apparatus derived their power, the capture of water’s fall to become rotational force, to become…whatever you needed it to be, so long as the river ran, and you had enough gears.
Chemistry because, what he was realizing upon doing his inventory was, everything was manufactured. The world he lived in was a construct, generated from the minds of chemists and materials scientists, like Prometheans handing fire to the apes to transform them. He would never achieve anything but a life of subsistence if he couldn’t figure out how to identify, isolate, extract, alter, and purify substances.
Electronics were gone, the delicate circuitry and silicone pockets of the semiconductors that had made them possible ruined by the Pulse, as he’d come to think of it.
An EMP, but with extra sauce.
In the absence of those little electron holding miracles, Alexander would be forced to learn, from the foundational theory to the manufacturing application, how to produce them. And it started with gears, wheels, and chemistry.
Maine was being nice to him. The weather was beautiful, unusually calm, clear, and absent the typical October rains that made this portion of the northeast a dreary affair most years. Sitting quietly in the candlelight, that odd, flickering source of orange luminescence so vital compared to the cold, constant illumination of an LED bulb, Alexander realized that he heard footsteps outside.
It was their rhythmic sound, breaking the near total silence he had grown accustomed to over the last seven days that pulled him from his research.
Quiet hope kindled in him, as he rushed up from the L shaped arrangement of desks, he’d hauled to become his workspace, littered by texts, manuals, and notebooks where he organized his education and brainstormed for the future.
By habit, he picked up the long gun and twitched aside a curtain to observe the exterior of the somewhat modern house he was calling home base. Not home, because that was gone, but home base. His laboratory he would call it, cackling madly, playing the part of a mad scientist in the lonesome isolation. Mostly playing.
While he looked out the window, hiding his frame, waiting to spy the source of the sounds that had disturbed him, Alexander Gerifalte lamented that he was a rules guy. He believed in following the rules. Rules were what bound a chaotic, aggressive, incredibly short sighted, and territorial animal like Homo Sapiens into relatively peaceful cooperation.
When everybody followed the rules, life was grand. When the rules fell apart, you got wonderful happenings like the butchery that had gone on in Darfur, or the purging of the Native Americans, or, worst of all, when the rules were warped to become a weapon to commit barbarisms like that maniac down in Cambodia, Pol Pot.
What stuck in his craw hard, the deaths of his parents and, so far as he could tell entire civilization, aside, was that the rules he’d known had been broken. His grasp of what was and should be were broken with it. Nothing was right when he didn’t know what the rules of reality were. How do you play a game if you don’t know what you’re allowed to do? His mother accused him, regularly, of Rules Lawyering, both over their weekend tabletop, and in their interpersonal relationships, but Alexander was a stickler. Sanity demanded rules.
There. More proof that the world was gone mad. The sounds outside were the slap of small bare feet on pavement. That slap was why the newly kindled hope had died in its crib: People didn’t walk bare foot in Maine’s Autumn.
From the sliver of outside he saw from behind his hiding place he saw more of the goblin creatures. These were more heavily armed than the ones he’d killed earlier. Those had crude spears, bone, and stone flint napped knives, and only wore rough loin cloths and wraps of badly processed hide. He saw metal weapons, roughly ground, badly forged, notched, and dull, but weapons, nevertheless. The creatures also wore thick boiled leather pieces of armor, strapped to their bodies. Nothing sophisticated, just pieces of hard-boiled leather covering parts of chests, shoulders and back, hanging by jute thongs or leather cords. But, sophistication aside, there were thirty of the creatures in loose double row formation led by another of the Hobgoblin couple he’d killed earlier. Different in feature, clearly not the same individuals, but the same idea.
This was a war party. But from where? How? Alexander had been all over this town. High and low he’d wandered it, for thirteen days since discovering the end of everything he’d known. Aside from the goblin scavengers he’d seen nothing to indicate that there was anybody around. So where had these little bastards come from? Speaking of which, where had the ones he’d killed earlier gone? His explorations of the town found none of the bodies one morning soon after his mental break and slaughter, a mystery then, on top of too many mysteries.
As the ugly hominids in their crude arms pattered by, grunting, hissing, and growling at each other as they went in some approximation of communication, Alexander stayed still and silent.
The goblins had to go. But he couldn’t just start shooting.
First of all, the scavengers had proven that these creatures were durable, for something so small. It took some doing, even for nine-millimeter hollow points to drop them. Good shot placement, and repeated hits to bring them down fast. The rifle was far, far better, but it was a bolt action. Reliable. Accurate. Hard hitting. But fast it was not, even for an experienced shooter.
If he started an engagement, he’d have to do it like a sniper. From cover, from range. Pick them off a few at a time and move, break sight. It was a high skill tactic that he was a novice, at best, in executing. You didn’t have to work so hard to sneak up on deer, so long as you were quiet when they were quiet, and the wind didn’t shift. They had a killer sense of smell, did deer.
Smell. Oh, gods above, below, and in between, thank you that I threw those wolf-hide wrapped clothes away, Alexander prayed. If he’d been wearing untanned hides he’d have stunk to high heaven. The goblins would have been able to see the stink on him.
What do I do? He asked himself, trying to stay as calm as he could, trying to avoid doing something stupid from fear and stress.
Take the high ground, Anakin, Alexander told himself.
The wisdom of Obi-wan wasn’t to be discarded so lightly. If he got up to a high vantage he could see these little monsters from a lot farther way, maybe far enough that they couldn’t see him. Those big, bulging, cat eyes said they were probably more nocturnal, but he wouldn’t trust them to not have excellent vision. Same for the big ears, hearing had to be impeccable. They were little predators, carnivores, and he had to assume they had the standard carnivore sensory package of eyesight, hearing, and smell.
He had a plan, now, and so he acted on it. Stepping carefully to avoid creak of wooden floors, Alexander exited the Laboratory from the back and stuck to the shadows of buildings. Hyper-alert, freezing at any sound, adrenaline on a steady drip, the young man hustled the opposite direction from the goblin troop.
He had a cache up on the hillside, in an old root cellar. Perishables like sugar and flour by the ten-pound bag, transferred into plastic totes he’d vacuum sealed by a bicycle pump and rubber gasket, because he wasn’t an idiot. Potatoes, carrots, squash, radishes, pumpkins, bags of brown rice, in abundance.
Trying to control his breathing, shooting looks behind him compulsively to try to peer through the gloom that promised an overcast sunset, the reason he’d been reading by candlelight this time of day in the first place, he made furtive way the half mile to the cellar.
It took a grunt of effort and more noise from the hinges than he ever wanted to hear to pull open the heavy doors and reveal his stash. He wasn’t a gardener or farmer, but he learned enough from the library to know which things you could plant and get to grow back. It wasn’t the season for seeds to be out, so getting a store of renewable produce was mission critical.
But he wasn’t here for the food.
Because losing everything you ever knew made you paranoid, he also had a stock of weapons and ammunition. In particular, he wanted the three hundred Winchester magnum stored here. He loved his steady three point zero eight. His good old pretty freaking NATO. The gun carried bittersweet memories, old faithful, but it wasn’t enough oomph for this.
Alexander was going to be shooting through thick leather and he needed something with the energy to put down a moose, from a good godsdamned long way away too. He’d scoped and zeroed this one at two hundred yards, and, after a couple hours fiddling with the bi-pod and figuring out the trigger, it made a single ragged hole through the pie pan target tacked to an old barn. Now it was going to make holes in fairy tale things.
Smiling more than a little cruelly, the young man wrapped the rifle case in a prone pad, both from the same hunting store he’d ransacked last week.
From the cellar, it was twenty minutes to make his cautious way to the water tower that sat on the middling ridge above town. He was shivering in the cool air, partly due to nerves, because he was wearing a sturdy set of hunting pants and jacket in that good old standby hick tie die, woodland camouflage.
The pad rolled out and Alexander opened the case with a muted *click* retrieving the heavy bolt gun with the twenty-six-inch barrel and long ass optic. It was good glass though, worth the weight. From his vantage, the onetime pilot wannabe spotted the goblinoids. They were circling through town, not pillaging, or looting or going through houses. They were looking for him, is what they were doing, Alexander realized suddenly.
When the raiders didn’t come back, somebody must have decided that they ran into trouble. These warrior caste critters were the answer to that trouble.
Alexander looked through the scope, illumination helping to get a decent sight picture as he used the minutes of angle reticle markings to get a range. He put the Hobgoblin with the big ass club in the center of the scope, counting the number of hashes and recalling that the other one he’d killed had been about six and a half feet tall. That gave him a decent range of about six hundred yards.
Sharp mechanical clicks from the turrets sounded as he dialed in the optic, adjusting less than normal thanks to the elevation difference. He was shooting a flat running bullet downhill, it would be a problem not to miss high, rather than to grab dirt too soon.
Deep breaths, he reminded himself, controlling the tension and anxiety. He’d take five shots, empty the magazine to clear the leaders and whatever else he could, then he was gone from here. If he could stay on target and kept his mechanics clean, they shouldn’t be able to figure out where they were getting hit from, the mountainside and valley geography would make the rifle report echo from damned near everywhere. The muzzle break wasn’t a flash suppressor, they’d see his general direction if he hung around too long. Better to take what he could get and hustle, rather than get pinned down.
“What are they gonna do about it, throw rocks?” A sarcastic part of him looked down on the primitive creatures.
“There are no rules, you don’t know what they’re gonna do about it, which is why you aren’t going to let them try.” The cautious part of him corrected.
No risks, he decided, jacking in a round from the sleeve on the rifle butt, which would give him six shots, instead of just the five from the magazine. Six gave him three sure things, two apiece. Two rounds from a . 300 Winchester magnum would down a moose, no problem. Leather armor or no, these goons wouldn’t take those hits and cause him trouble later.
He wasn’t going to be greedy and aim for head shots, this was big game hunting rules, you took the center mass shot for heart and lungs. Nothing fancy.
For a minute he watched, letting himself get settled behind the gun, letting the patterns of movement ingrain themselves on his senses. When they paused, when they started, it all mattered at this kind of range. There would be about a second and a half between the flash and the report of the rifle, the bullet would get there about three quarters of a second before they heard the crack. He’d get one freebie. The rest he’d have to work for.
Alexander found his moment, a pause, while the beasties looked at stakes that had once held their impaled brethren. Maybe it was them that had taken the bodies? Not important.
Hold. Release. Squeeze.
The rifle jumped backward into his shoulder, trigger breaking cleanly, crisply, and he worked the bolt, keeping his scope sight picture on the goblins. The Hobgoblin warrior and all the rest alerted, looked around rapidly, scanning, searching for the sound that had echoed through the valley, and Alexander was suddenly uncertain. Had he pulled it?
Uncertainty was replaced by excitement, the Hob dropped to the ground, legs boneless. One down. He clamped down on the emotion. Found the target, his scope trained on the female Hob, the one with the feathered staff. He put cross-hairs on the grotesque cleavage and fired again. Through the optic, Alexander watched as the creature raised the staff, its mouth working while it howled alien sounds.
This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.
He watched with satisfaction the vapor trail; it was money. Hit! Right up until the bullet disintegrated on a shimmering blue honeycomb of nested hexagons that appeared from nowhere.
“Oh godsdamn.” Alexander moaned as the barrier faded from sight, working the bolt to get another shot, rushing slightly, pushing the second attempt at the goblin co-leader high.
His hurried shot mattered little; the projectile hit that same invisible barrier. This time, though, the barrier didn’t disappear. This time, there were cracks across its spherical surface, the perfection of the hexagonal field damaged by absorbing two heavy hitting slugs.
There was a chance!
Steadying, ignoring the movements of the goblins circling their leader tightly to defend against the invisible attack, Alexander readied a third round and sent it, hoping that the visible chanting of the goblin mage didn’t mean the barrier was getting stronger.
A flare of blue light and the sound like a broken bell rang out alongside the boom of the gun, the Hobgoblin female squealed and fell, its staff falling to the ground as it clawed at the hole in its chest.
Pay-dirt! He grinned behind the scope and worked the fourth round, targeting a hatchet wielding goblin that had its eyes looking toward his position.
One second, repeating the shooter’s mantra, he put the little monster down, the bullet slightly low and through its middle. The way it folded, he’d broken its back for sure. Its comrades were now spreading out, were trying to find the enemy blooding them. None moved toward his position. None moved toward their fallen companion, even though the goblin was still clearly alive, thrashing its claws around, hacking up blood too dark a red to be human, almost rust brown.
Another bullet jacked in, another sent, this one at a goblin with a crude long bow. The monster howled and started running, making it ten steps before it fell and began to crawl. The rest broke, scattering.
Time to go.
Alexander wasn’t going to hang around, not with the creatures fleeing. Taking running shots on targets that small, from that distance was just wasting ammunition and risking giving away his position, even more than he already had. He was out of here.
It only took a minute to fold the bi-pod, roll the rifle into the shooter’s pad, and settle the instrument into its case. Then, the young man was climbing down the long ladder as fast as he dared in gloves.
A glimpse of hard rocky ground a long way down reminded him it was a damned good thing flying had taken most of the fear of heights from him. Most. Not all.
Back to ground level, Alexander ran all out, circling the town along the ridge, keeping his eyes on the streets below, looking for signs that the goblins were rallying to head in search for him. Luck. They were scrambling, terrorized from losing their leaders to an invisible thunder. He slowed, crouch walking, getting his breath back. He needed to be ready to set up quickly if he spotted a group of them hiding, keep picking them off. Keep them disoriented.
A low growl from his left was all the warning that kept him alive when a huge black panther leapt from a nearby tree to tackle him, one swipe of wicked re-curved claws ripping through his jacket and knocking the rifle case from his grasp when it sent him ass over elbows.
Stunned by the sudden assault, he had barely rolled over before a couple of hundred pounds of cat gathered itself and leapt. A lesson learned from the wolves, he had a chest holstered sidearm, safety off, bullet in the chamber out and cycling as the animal landed on him, white fangs flashing a vicious maw closing on him.
Rapid shots, cracks of sound, drowned out his frenzied cries somewhat, as well as the awful growl of the predator that took his warding left arm in crushing grip and savaged it. Alexander emptied the pistol into the animal’s body, not even knowing how many times he’d squeezed the trigger and come up empty. His arm was jerked with hideous pain, the punctures fire hot and he felt the bones of his forearm break in its grip.
The knife on his belt! His last chance, Alexander dropped the empty gun and desperately pulled the fixed blade and rammed the drop point between ribs, pulling free to do it again. Again.
Something important must have gotten stabbed, or the bullets finally worked, because the panther released him and jumped away, circling, growling.
Pain was there, hot as the blood he was losing, but he was too hopped up on fight juice to care, Alexander got to his feet, holding the injured arm close to his body. Despite the trembling, the knife wielding hand waved threateningly at the animal.
How the fuck hard was this thing to kill? He wondered panicked, fearful.
The panther’s fur was matted with its blood, steady drips ran down from its chest and stomach. But still it circled, ears low, with a threatening growl in its throat. It would jump him if he turned his back, he knew it.
Cold clarity reached through the terror, the sudden violence. He had to attack. He couldn’t let this thing go. Now was the only chance he’d ever get to see it coming again.
Screaming, goblins forgotten, Alexander charged the wounded panther with his five-inch drop point held in a hammer fist like a dagger. The animal hissed and turned to jump away, and then, its wounds showed effect, its back legs folded, and Alexander tackled the heavier animal ramming the knife into its neck, the hand of his broken arm clenched in fur. Pain was searing his mind blank while he stabbed relentlessly.
The animal had been dead a little while before he stopped killing it, and he shook like a leaf in the wind when he stood up over the steaming blood rising from the corpse.
Agony radiated from his arm again. Why was it always the arms? He wondered senselessly.
Worse, when he turned his head, teeth chattering from the shivering that refused to let him go, he saw tiny humanoids converging from the town, moving toward this side of the ridge. They’d found him, the sounds of his gun finally giving him away. That and all the yelling, probably.
Gladder about it than anything he’d ever known that his legs hadn’t been clawed up and chewed, Alexander hurriedly gathered up the firearms and worked back the way he’d come. These creatures didn’t know the terrain, but he did. These were his hills; it was his mountain. A creek made a rapid path for descent from the ridge, in a narrow fold that would hide the sight of him.
He only had to get to it.
Wild, inhuman cries dogged his unsteady steps as he ran, leaves crunching loudly without care. He thought about throwing away the big gun to save weight but couldn’t do it. He needed something heavy hitting if he was cornered. If any of the others could make one of those blue barriers the pistol wouldn’t cut it, it had taken three direct hits in a relatively small area to penetrate the shield. A nine-millimeter would barely scratch that whatever the fuck it was.
A spell. Magic. Insanity. What were the rules?
Compromise, he decided. Alexander removed the rifle from its protective case, discarding the bulky, hard plastic and the pad, hopeful that the jostling hadn’t broken the scope’s zero. He took off across the mountain, awkwardly holding his weapon with the one good arm and tried not to smack the mangled one on anything.
Scattered thoughts chased him as hard as the goblins as he ran, panting, legs burning.
There! Alexander spotted the nearly hidden creek, recognized the triad of maples around a red cedar that marked one of the only tells that the little fold in the landscape existed.
Gasping now from the fading of his endurance, he clambered down to the creek running fast from recent rain. Slick rocks challenged his weakened body, forced him to slow.
For the best.
He abruptly realized through the fear driving him that if he made too much noise on the rocks the monsters would be able to track him, even if they didn’t know exactly where he was.
It took a force of will to ignore the animal urge to flee at top speed, but Alexander set himself a methodical pace, recovering his wind, taking meticulous care to make as little noise on the stony banks of the creek as he could. He was using the rifle as a walking stick now, after setting the hard safety because there was a last bullet in the magazine, even though he didn’t remember jacking it in. No chances, he was too shaken to risk something like a reflex causing him to shoot himself in the face.
His foot slipped, mossy betrayal taking his leg from under him. Instinct made him reach out with the broken arm to grab a nearby sapling and he choked back a howl of pain, sobbing quietly, unable to stop the flood of tears as abused bones pulsed agony and he lost his grip. A wet sprawl and painful scrapes across Main’s ever-present rock were his reward for a minor misplacement of a single boot.
Slowly, the young man managed to lever himself up, avoiding using the injured limb. He was gritting his teeth against the urge to make sound. Vertigo made the dim hillside wobble. It was all he could do to stay on his feet now and Alexander realized he had a flaw in his plan.
He couldn’t make it back to his shelter. He was too tired now, too hurt. The panther’s mauling and the goblin’s chase were finding him at the end of the day with the sun already behind the hills. The dim twilight would be true dark long before he ever got to safety.
The realization shifted priorities and he almost felt his brain click when he started looking for a hollow or cave to huddle in.
“Thanks be to all the gods, above, below, and in between.” Alexander whispered, recognizing this particular bend in the creek, the set of the banks, and the contour of the hill.
There was a cave, just a quarter mile down the way. It was small, but under an overhang that stayed almost dry. It was barely enough to stuff himself into, but that was better than sitting huddled under a tree with things that saw better at night than him all around. There was another saving grace: there was no moon tonight, and no light pollution. Dark tonight would be as dark as dark got.
Quiet desperation guiding his steps, he made the cave just about the time his eyes became useless. Silently as his booted, tired feet could manage, he climbed mid-way up the bank and stuffed himself into the outcrop, curled up protectively around the battered limb. Without light, he clumsily ransacked the first aid kit on his belt, whimpering when the alcohol pads went over the punctures. Cat bites. Filthy things, he’d always heard. Infection was the actual last thing he needed so he ruthlessly cleaned the wounds and bandaged them, giving in to another round of the shakes when the ordeal was past.
Laying there, hoping that nocturnal predators wouldn’t be able to follow a trail of blood to his hole, hoping they wouldn’t drag him out into the night to murder him, chill from exerted sweat, late October autumn night, and anxiety, Alexander experienced another bit of the impossible: he fell asleep.
Predawn light awakened the young man and put him into a fierce shiver with its cold. Autumn had come a little early and a lot cooler than the last couple of years, and he saw hints of frost in the shaded grasses and undergrowth. The heavy jacket and pants had saved him from freezing to death over night while he hid.
Before he left the relative safety of the outcrop, Alexander uncovered the hastily cleaned and bandaged wound from the night and was shocked at the extent of the damage, having been unable to see it clearly in the fading light and shadow of the nook.
His left hand was useless, muscles and tendons shredded. The bones of his forearm were broken cleanly, he could see them where one of the long canines of the panther had penetrated almost completely through the limb. That he’d ever managed to grab anything, the panther’s fur or the tree to catch himself was absurd, witnessing the ruin of his arm. Seeing the wounds almost sent him into shock, bile rising into his throat, but he closed his eyes and willed it down, concentrating on the immediate surroundings, and his next steps as intensely as he could.
Wrap mangled arm. Sneak down the mountainside. Get inside. Do nothing until the third sunrise. Heal. Kill everything.
It was a plan and Alexander grimly set to executing it, starting with the awfulness that was going to be an alcohol wipe.
Five minutes later, cold sweat beaded, and limp from another session of taking care of a mangled body part, Alexander was ready to travel. This was becoming too familiar a pattern.
Slowly, slowly, the camouflage clad seventeen-year-old worked his way down the narrow creek, having taken the time to reload his rifle and sidearm, but knowing that if it came to using either he was probably beyond help. He was thankful for the camo, thankful that the leaves still on the trees, in their wild arrays of golds, yellows, browns, and greens rendered him almost invisible against the forest backdrop.
Birds called joyfully. Singing counterpoint to the terror that permeated him. A single misstep. A broken branch. A fall. Anything could create a sound that would carry in the cold Maine air, echo down into the valley and alert the monsters to his presence. The monsters wearing cloth, and, now, he was intimately aware, the monsters bearing fur of their own growth.
Maine wasn’t cougar country. It certainly didn’t have lion sized bastards like the one that had jumped him.
Huge Wolves. Massive Panthers. Aggressive Elk. Raiding goblins. None of these were from this land he called home and all of them had been incredibly, wildly, hostile. If he ever found out who sent them, he was going to tell them what a knob they were. Right before he zero’d them.
But, first, he had to get home and wait out this whole grievous injury thing again.
Anger was a fine way to distract himself from residual fear, and Alexander kept a finely simmering rage while he picked his way down the mountain. The heartbeat metronome of hurt coming from the bandaged limb helped with that as well. Half an hour of intense concentration, meticulous steps, frozen pauses, and deliberate surveys of the creek bed below and the narrow ravine above, saw the young man finally reach level ground, just past where the road would bend to enter town.
One thing he’d noticed about the goblins was how loud they were. Boisterous, vocalizing loudly, frequently in seeming argument with each other, with exception of their more imposing leaders. Alexander didn’t hear any of that as he crept closer to the once humbly busy streets, the bustle of people getting ready to ride out winter, the motorized scramble of men and boys scouting for the upcoming gun season gone. All was quiet, except for the birds.
A fox crossed the street ahead, darting fervently between houses, before crossing the street, about fifty yards ahead of where Alexander crouched, his breath fogging in the sharp morning air.
That was a good sign, if the fox felt safe enough to pass through the open, there wasn’t likely to be anything threatening around.
Fortified by that observation, he hustled, moving at a fast half duck-walk sort of stride to stay low. It made his thighs burn from exertion, quickly. Stop and go, he would flit from the shadow of an empty house to the corner of a street-side business, furtive eyes checking the sight-lines before he made his next move.
Creeping was exhausting. Daylight had risen in full, finding the last Gerifalte slipping into the back door of his Laboratory, tired, hurt, and tired of being afraid and hurt.
He leaned back against the door and sighed, an almost silent, shuddering exhalation.
There he stayed for a minute, pausing to marinade in how close the shave had been.
His damaged body forced him to move, he was hungry, thirsty, and needed to use the lavatory. The water tower’s reservoir wasn’t infinite, so Alexander was going with the chamber pot method of dealing with bodily waste. That did very little for his attitudes on the overall situation these days. Going to get a bucket of cold creek water every other morning, throwing your shit and piss into a pile because you had vague notions of creating a nitrifying compost bed for saltpeter was getting old.
Where had the goblins gone? He mused over a cold meal of crackers, peaches ripe headed toward rotten, and scoops of peanut butter. Where had they come from?
And another mystery to add to the pile that wouldn’t stop haunting Alexander while he lay on a soft mattress, waiting for the dawn that would bring healing to his battered form.
In his roamings around the humble little pass through that had been home his entire life, Alexander had conducted something of a census. He didn’t know everybody, by any stretch of the imagination, especially the younger children. But he knew that, essentially, all of the pre-adolescent children in the school were accounted for, petrified. Most of the adults too. However, names he knew, faces that were familiar to him were missing. When he applied some napkin math to the problem, he roughed out that about one in three adult or nearly adult humans were missing from the rural parish. There should have been survivors of the Pulse.
Where were the missing folk?
The first answer that came to mind was the obvious: goblins. The thirty or so scavengers he’d come across might have gotten them. If those little monsters had come, with the squad of soldiers he’d, as far as he could determine, driven off, they would have stood a good chance of overwhelming the few disoriented remnants humanity here. Alexander had only been armed because he’d gotten a taste of what was out there before ever returning to city limits.
However, that led him full circle to where he started, where had the goblins gone, and where had they come from?
Round and round it went.
Eventually, to keep from driving himself completely nuts, the youngest Gerifalte fled his contemplations by opening the tomes of his father, annotating his growing collection of documents detailing how he might engineer some semblance of modernity. The key was to scavenge the finely machined pieces from the remains of the old technology.
Without electricity or skill to operate a forge or machining tooling, Alexander could never hope to reproduce the complex shapes and subtle design specifications of complex metallic components. His notes included lists of where he might find the pieces he’d need, predominantly from manufacturing sites and hardware stores.
The other facet of his research was in learning the basics of organic and inorganic chemistry. Primarily, he was focused on how to create the reagents that seemed ubiquitous in the reaction processes about which his texts were full.
Namely, Alexander got himself a set of procedures for the synthesis of the key acids, nitric, sulfuric, and hydrochloric, all at the ninety nine percent purity range, along with an ozone bubbling apparatus that would help to further dehydrate and destroy contaminants in them, if necessary, and thus protect that purity. In addition to the acids, he assembled the procedures for generation of the alkaline side of that spectrum, the sodium hydroxide, the ammonia, the ammonium salts.
Lastly, he had himself a shortlist of metallics he would most frequently need, mostly the key alkali and alkali earth metals, sodium, calcium, magnesium, and potassium, a few particularly useful transition metals like aluminum, silver, copper, platinum, each both electrically and chemically active, and some of the more esoteric, like lead, cobalt, calcium, and nickel.
Unfortunately, many of these compounds were toxic, reactive, and corrosive. Which meant they had limited shelf lives, if he could even find them, and he would, likely as not, be forced to synthesize them as he needed them, and store them safely, which meant that trying to solo jump-start civilization would take years, just due to the time sink necessary to create the materials he’d need.
He sat back, having just completed reading about the process for manufacturing clear glass, to store the aforementioned reagents and to blow glassware he might need for more complex apparatus required by those processes in his notes. For now, he could scavenge. But what if he couldn’t find what he needed? What if where they had been stored was destroyed by one of the cars that had veered into the joint, when its pilot had suddenly petrified? The only answer was that he would have to make what he needed, which meant knowing how.
To make clear glass he needed a furnace that got to right at seventeen hundred Celsius. That was, in his way of thinking, really fucking hot. Getting a furnace to that kind of temperature meant fuel that would burn with sufficient heat. The only thing he knew of that would cut it was propane or coal, and he’d have to find a way to create manual blowers to cycle the heated air into the forge or it would melt its housing.
On and on, it went like that, every solution had its own set of problems. Solving those problems dug up more problems. Civilization was a web of chemical engineering and metallurgy that was far, far beyond his capability and had, as its underlying requirement, the assumption that electricity was, essentially, infinitely available.
Alexander’s two days of research, coupled to those of his previous efforts were leading him to the conclusion that it was a lost cause. One person couldn’t do all of this, there wasn’t time. There wasn’t talent.
He’d just wanted to fly planes that soared like super eagles, to feel the pressure of acceleration, the freedom of breaking into the realm of supersonic, the mastery of engines delivering thousands of pounds of thrust while operating instruments that dissected the world.
All hope of that future was gone.
“Fuck this.” Alexander decided, raising himself up slowly from where he’d sat, reading and writing until he’d grown stiff.
Today was the third day. He was awake before sunrise, doing his endless dance between reading texts for theory, and manuals for engineering, and recording the applications processes he needed to lift himself out of savagery, because that was what awaited. The food would run out. The water tower dry. He was living on borrowed time.
Slightly hunched over the injured limb, he walked softly through the borrowed house, avoiding making noise, like a burglar even in this supposed place of safety. The goblins hadn’t come back, but he didn’t know that they wouldn’t. On the contrary. Alexander was certain they would return. And Alexander would be waiting for them.
Grim ideation occupied him while he ate bacon, sliced apples, and a large salad of spinach, carrots, lettuce turning brown, and olives. Heavy on the ranch and shredded cheese, he might as well enjoy himself before he died.
The problem with his previous tactic was that he’d left himself in a position that demanded he move quickly. Moving quickly was dangerous, as the panther had proven, because it decreased your ability to scout, to be methodical in your travel. What Alexander needed was a way to deal with large numbers of the monsters at the same time. Namely, he needed to devise a trap.
Currently, he was thinking something along the lines of poison gas. There were some easily manufactured gas bombs, the old bleach and ammonia would work. To get coverage in the open though was too hard, required a literal ton of material, a complex way to get adequate mixing of such large volumes of liquids, so that he could guarantee lethal dosing, unless he could lure the beasties into a room and barricade them in.
Rather than go that route, he was settling more along the lines of pour diesel fuel across the road between the brick bank branch and the cinder block elementary school in two places, trap the critters with fire, then throw Molotovs down on top of them from the bank roof. It beat using himself as bait for a noxious gas, now that he thought of it.
That bait route was risky, he wasn’t about that kind of hazard, not when he wasn’t crazy, like he’d been when he’d slaughtered the scavengers.
He still didn’t know how he’d gotten away with that and chalked it up to the wolverine effect.
How does the smaller animal terrorize the larger one? Insane, belligerent, aggression. Absence of any regard for well-being or survival. Well, Alexander was getting there, but he currently still wanted to live. He had a score to settle with whatever had caused the Pulse.
Dawn broke over the mountain and Alexander felt the cleansing wash of healing light. The arm, healing more rapidly than it should have in the first place, yet another mystery for which he had no explanations, showed no scarring, and gripped with full strength. Miraculous.
What other physics breaking rules were there to this unreality in which he found himself?