After I left the deli, I found I didn't have all of the leaf-hounds to myself anymore. Big guys laying into them with baseball bats or pipes was becoming a more and more common sight already. I saluted them and moved on.
But the person that got my attention was a panicky-looking woman clinging to a shovel for dear life and bolting from one doorway to the next like a scared rabbit. Mid-twenties, probably, she had red hair in a messy bun, glasses that she somehow hadn't lost yet, and a floral-print dress that completed a very teacher-y aesthetic.
I raised my free hand in the universal gesture for 'don't shovel me, I'm friendly,' and then approached, nice and slow.
“You alright?” I asked, grateful for the way the helmet distorted my voice; yet another way for people to not think of me as just some kid.
“NO!” she yelped, “I am very not alright.”
“Then... what are you doing out here?”
She was still shooting glances left and right, in no shape to talk, so I got a little closer and turned my side to her, making sure my shield was between her and the street.
Having a bit of shelter seemed to help her find her voice. “I'm... trying to get to my job.”
“Your... job?” I tried not to scoff too hard, but it sure seemed like a silly thing to be doing in the apocalypse.
“I work at the daycare center down on 36,” she said. Like most of us in New Jersey she didn't bother with the 'State Route' part; highways were just numbers here. “I'm... I was more worried about the kids than I was about me! Or so I thought. Now... I don't know what I'm doing anymore.”
I sighed. Power and responsibility, right? “Alright. Well, come on. You tell me where we're going, and I'll walk you.”
“Really?”
“You would not believe the day I'm having right now. Doing something for you might... ugh... might help me feel less awful about everything else. So. Yeah. Let's go.”
She looked around, then nodded. I could practically see her trying to gather her nerve, and she still clung to her shovel like a lifeline, but she was able to give me directions and watch my back.
I kept looking around everywhere – especially looking up – while we got started.
“So... what's your name?” I asked, looking over my shoulder to make sure she was close enough to hear me without having to yell.
“Renee,” she said, “It's weird, though. I'm so used to the kids calling me “miss Renee” that sometimes I forget I'm not supposed to introduce myself that way to everybody. I think that happens to all of us, but nobody talks about it.” She was babbling a little, but I wasn't about to hold that against her.
“Wouldn't surprise me,” I deflected, not wanting to be drawn into my thoughts on the very idea of teachers. “Anyway, I'm Emma. No 'miss' or 'sir' or whatever, just Emma.”
“You sure look like a 'Dame Emma' to me.”
“The armor's borrowed. I helped make the shield, though.”
“Really?”
“I'm handy with an angle grinder. Or, used to be, y'know?”
We continued on like that. In deference to Renee's knee-shaking terror, I didn't go rushing into every fight. We took it slow, pacing ourselves and sticking to the shade, not interfering when other points-hunters wanted to take a fight off our hands.
It was an easy, if slow, walk, all the way to Stone Road, where the simple trick of looking up allowed me to snipe a leaf-hound off the top of some gas station fuel pumps where it had been lying in ambush. The gas station itself had already been broken into and looted, but there was – thankfully – no fire. Or bodies... I clanked a bolt against my helmet to bring myself back into focus.
“You should try to get some kills, too, y'know,” I said after finishing off the wannabe ambusher.
“You mean fight these things on purpose? Why would I ever? I'm not exactly the 'knight in shining armor' type.”
“Because you get to pick a second ability after you get 144 points. That's twelve solo wins. I'm guessing probably twice that with help. If you wanna be safer later, you gotta take a few risks now. And these guys are pointy but they really aren't that tough.”
“I'll... I'll think about it.”
The next time we came upon a leaf-hound – and it seemed like the average of two or three per block was holding out because it didn't take long, pretty much as soon as we set foot on Rt. 36 – I let it start its frenzied leap, then stepped forward and punched with my shield. I felt a tremendous whump from the weight of the thing impacting aluminum, but then... nothing. I stumbled forward, through the cloud of smoke that was all that was left.
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“Huh. That's new.”
“What?”
“I hit one of these things with my shield earlier, and it was still kicking afterwards. Either this one was already hurt before it decided I looked tasty, or I'm a lot stronger than I was an hour or two ago. UGH!” I scuffed my foot against the ground and rolled my eyes.
“How is this is a bad thing?”
“I was trying to save that one for you.”
That, of all things, got Renee to laugh. She looked more relaxed afterward, too, or at least she didn't cling to her shovel quite as hard.
I tried to same strategy with the next one, but this time once it was in the air I bubbled myself in a Force Shield right in front of it instead of testing whatever was going on with my strength. Already moving full-speed and with no feet on the ground, it didn't have a hope in hell of being able to avoid it, and my Force Shield made a comical GONG sound before it popped. The leaf-hound fell backwards, sitting on its backside the way bears sometimes do, rocking side to side. I could imagine leafy little birdies flying around its head.
“There. Go get it. I'll have your back.”
Renee gulped, nodded, and stalked forward, raising her shovel before she even took her first step toward the still-stunned hound. When she looked back over her shoulder, I held up a bolt to show her I was serious about backing her up. She got closer and brought the shovel down entirely with her arms. It wasn't enough to kill the hound, but the next two swings she delivered with the force of pure panic behind them were.
I checked my Status and, like I kind of expected, we each got six points for that one. My novelty was also slowly going up, but I had no idea why or what that meant.
“Okay, look... Firstly, we need to find you a real weapon. That shovel isn't gonna cut it for long. And second, you gotta learn how to swing it...”
We had a little reprieve since the leaf-hound was dead, so I showed her how to stand, how to keep her center of gravity low, and how to swing from her feet instead of from her elbows.
“This is, like, SCA body mechanics 101. Here, watch the difference...”
I had her put her hands up while I took the shovel and gently pushed against her forearm from the elbow.
“See? I have a bunch of leverage from this end of the shovel but you can still push back; I'm not that much stronger. Now...”
I did the same thing, but this time I slowly pushed from my feet, rolled my hips into it, and so on; a proper calibrated blow, delivered in slow motion and with no actual swing first. Her eyes widened – in understanding or surprised, I couldn't tell – as I pushed her halfhearted guard aside like it was nothing and tapped her on the shoulder.
“When you're fighting for real, the difference is even bigger. Always remember, whether it's your fist or a shovel or whatever you've got, a proper strike starts at the bottoms of your feet and ends at the back of the other guy's head.”
“The back?”
I nodded, handing the shovel back as we started walking again. “Really more like 'the other side' from where you are, but yeah. The point is, you're not hitting the surface of their head, you're swinging through the space their head just so happens to be in. It's important so that you don't hesitate, or flinch, or just plain slow down right at the last second and rob yourself of all your power.”
“How do you know all this?”
“My m... my mother does martial arts, and she taught me enough to protect myself. This is pretty basic stuff, too, kinda... knowing how your own body works. If you wanted to really learn how to fight with a sword or something it gets ... involved... and I'm only just learning myself so me teaching you would probably be pretty bad. She could teach you, but... she's at work too.”
I shot another leaf-hound in the leg and motioned Renee forward to finish it off. Her stance was still all over the place, but her swing was better, and it only took her two hits instead of three to kill it. I gave her a thumbs-up. She wasn't laughing anymore, but she was starting to look a little bit less like a scared rabbit, so, progress, hopefully.
Walking down the highway was less of an ordeal than I had expected. It seemed like most of the cars had broken down all at the same time when all this began, and most of the drivers had had the same thought: pull off to the side of the road. Hours into the apocalypse, with the road crawling with leaf-hounds and the sun glaring down at us like it held a grudge, nobody was still waiting for the roadside assistance that clearly wasn't coming. It gave us a clear strip of blacktop to walk along. Plenty of places for leaf-hounds to leap out from, but I was getting used to picking out the scraping sounds their claws made when they got running.
“What did you take for your ability, anyway?” I asked her as we regrouped.
“Healing Touch. I figured... for the kids. And for me, if I got hurt getting there.”
“You can heal yourself with it?”
She nodded.
“That's handy. I'm almost surprised it lets you.”
“Why wouldn't it?”
I shrugged. “Weird game logic? I don't know; some games the rules are like that, where being able to heal yourself is harder or more expensive or just plain not the same spell or something.”
“This is definitely not a damn game...”
“I know! But... doesn't it sound like it also kind of is? The announcements called us “contestants” and talked about winning prizes. It's not even just a game, it's like some kind of alien game show. Except, y'know, Drew Carey never killed anybody...”
“You think... people are actually dying?”
I debated telling her. The fires at the grocery store. The bodies. Torn between telling the truth and, y'know, not kicking the puppy, I shook my head. “Later. I'll... talk about that once we're safe inside somewhere. It's not much farther, right?” When did I start thinking of a woman twice my age as a puppy? Maybe when she started hiding behind me like one...
“No. This is the turn-off for it here.”
“Good. I'm not sure I have many more shots in me right now, so, let's get there quick.”
We made good time, though we ended up having to pause behind the neighboring event-planning business to put down one especially aggressive leaf-hound that wouldn't take no for an answer. I didn't want to risk exhaustion, so I put myself in its way and let Renee beat on it from behind my shield until it dissolved into smoke. By the time she finished it off, she had figured out how to stab with her shovel like a spear. The ancient Greeks would be proud.
When we got to the daycare center, one of Renee's coworkers let us in. I couldn't help but think that the cheerful red doors and rainbow fences looked somehow out of place in the end-times.