CHAPTER 18 - OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE

It turned out Bradley of all people had grilling skills. I can’t say I was shocked. He looked the type: sort of had that somewhat overweight, straight from the back woods vibe. I didn’t like him, didn’t trust him, and didn’t want to hang around him.

But he knew how to cook snake, so he was everyone’s hero of the day. Turns out garter snake did indeed taste like chicken, and a ten foot long version had a lot of meat on those bones. We grabbed junk wood from pallets next to the building and broke them up while Bradley rigged some grills and set about cooking the thing. He skinned it, too. Was saying something about curing the skin to make stuff with it.

Far as I was concerned he was welcome to the skin. I just wanted some of the meat. It smelled delicious.

I worried a little that the smell could draw monsters to our spot, but it didn’t, at least at first. Instead it drew more people. The first ones showed up half an hour after we got the fires started. They’d seen the smoke.

“Got movement down by the rugby pitch!” George called out. He was on lookout duty, perched atop the police station where he could see things coming from a ways off. “Looks like people!”

The pitch was south of us, down past the rescue building and a helipad. I squinted and thought I could see people coming out of the wood line. It seemed like a whole bunch of them, which I wasn’t certain was good or not. We already had a bunch of people packed into a relatively small building. There was Lords and his three fellow police; myself, Alfred, and Kat; Henry and two EMTs who worked with him at the rescue center; and a dozen other students who’d been in the area when everything went to shit. That was twenty-two people, which we were already going to struggle to feed and house, especially if the bulk of them didn’t start contributing soon.

As the people headed our way came closer, I got a rough head-count. It looked like about two dozen more people, and they were a big mix. Bunch of older adults, even a few young kids among them. Clearly not part of UVM, so maybe they were from one of the hotels up the street, or from the mall half a mile down the road?

I shuddered at the thought of the mall. University Mall was Vermont’s biggest; not a huge claim to fame, but with the power off and monsters appearing, that place had to have become an instant nightmare. If anyone had survived to escape it, they were lucky and tough.

Lords stepped away from our group, grabbing Samson to join him. Samson was a big black man who didn’t talk much, so I hadn’t had any real interactions with him yet, but he looked competent enough. I figured the two of them would likely be enough to handle any major issues, but I went up to Lords anyway.

“Want company? If there’s any trouble, my new Entangle spell is pretty good at being a non-lethal cooldown,” I said.

He hesitated, and I could tell he hated the idea of bringing a civilian with him into an unknown situation, but then he nodded. “All right. But you take orders from me, and you listen, deal? And the zombies stay here. No sense freaking these folks out.”

I snapped him a nod. “You got it.”

“Hmph. We’ll see,” he told me. Then we set off together.

I had the only real weapon out of the three of us, which bugged me, too. Both of them carried lengths of rebar that worked pretty well as spears, but they didn’t have much of a point and were heavy as hell. For people with strength stones, that maybe wasn’t as big a deal, but if I remembered right Samson only had a stamina stone. He looked pretty strong to begin with, which was probably the only reason he was able to use a weapon that heavy at all.

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“Lords, it looks like families,” Samson said.

Lords nodded. “It does. There’s a hotel just past that clump of trees. Betting they saw the smoke and headed our way looking for help.”

Privately, I wondered if the hotel might not have been the more secure base of operations, but it was tough to say. The biggest problem we were going to have in the short term was water. With the power out, getting fresh water supplies wasn’t going to be simple or easy.

Back home, it would be.

That thought brought pain, because it made me worry about my family for the first time since all this started. I’d been able to keep them out of my head for the most part, focused on surviving one thing after another. I knew mom and dad would be doing the same thing, and they had better odds than I did, if I was being honest. Sure, the gun cabinet was full of useless chunks of metal now, but the well in the backyard that supplied water for our house was still a well. The pump was dead, but they’d rig up something to draw water out of it in no time, and mom’s garden was over an acre. They’d be okay, at least for the short term.

People in the Northeast Kingdom—man, that sounds corny with a magipocalypse going on, but it’s what we called northeastern Vermont—were survivors. I’d grown up there, and I was used to tough winters, making do, and figuring shit out as I went along. Sure, I’d had the easy life for a few years in Burlington, at college. But I remembered my roots well enough.

It’s not like my family were preppers, not really. But everyone out where we lived was into making sure they had what they needed for emergencies.

We followed a path from the rescue building down to the helipad. As we went, I eyed the woods to the east of us. There was a brook out there somewhere; I could hear water gurgling over stones. That might help solve our water issues. But I could have sworn I saw something moving in there, too.

“Lords, don’t pay too much attention, but I think we have company in the woods to our left,” I said softly.

He almost looked, in spite of me telling him not to. “You sure?”

“Nope. Just thought I saw some movement. Might have been the wind,” I replied.

“Or it might not,” Samson added, gripping his weapon tighter.

“Exactly,” I said. “We need to get those people out of the open fast. If something comes at us…”

“If it does, have your Entangle ready,” Lords told me.

“That’s the plan,” I replied.

But nothing jumped out at us as we approached the band of people. The nearer we got, the more it was clear these were scared refugees, not something more sinister. There was an older couple helping each other along, a family of five, a young couple, and a trio of guys in business suits.

Lords held up a hand when we were about ten feet away from them. “Okay, folks, hold up right there. How can we help you?”

One of the business suits stepped up. “We saw the smoke. Didn’t look like a structural fire, so we figured there had to be people there. We need help. You’re police, right? You have to help us! There’s no power, and there are these things running around. They killed Joe.”

Behind him, several of the people walking with him were nodding in agreement. They all looked exhausted and terrified.

I yanked at Lords’ sleeve. “We need to get them back to our base. Let’s get them fed and figure things out from there. I don’t like being out in the open like this for too long.”

He glanced around seeming to realize that we were standing in the middle of a very large field with lots of hiding places around the outskirts. He nodded back to me. “Okay, we’ve got some food and a relatively safe place to rest for a bit. Come with us and we’ll get you fed.”

“What’s going on?” the guy in the suit demanded. “We want to know what’s happening, and what’s being done about it! My car won’t start, my phone is dead, and then there’s…creatures…running around.”

I stepped up. “My phone’s dead too. Didn’t have a car, but I had to fight my way through a ton of weird shit to find these guys. Don’t worry; they’re actual police, the campus police for UVM. The food is a little weird, but it’s real too. Let’s get all of you back to our camp where it’s a little safer, and we can talk more there.”

“No, I want answers now!” the man sputtered. “What is all this?”

Lords shook his head. “Back at camp. We’ll tell you everything we know, which isn’t much more than what you already do. But we’ll share info, supplies, and make plans for what to do next. But we need to move now.”

“I—“

Mister Business Suit didn’t get more than that one word out before an arrow went through his neck, and he went down, gurgling.

Arrows? I ducked out of instinct, turning to my left, in the direction it had come from. The woods were no longer placid: a small horde of goblins rushed from the wood line, running at us with weapons in hand. The weapons were crappy; it looked like a mix of knives and crude spears, for the most part. But at least one of them had a bow, and that was major trouble.