Inside the blue-box store, things were both more and less chaotic than I had expected. There was no fighting – small mercy, maybe, but after yesterday I would take it – but the shelves were a mess. People must've had at everything in arm's reach as soon as the lights went out.

There were a handful of people furtively sneaking around between the isles, but nobody picked a fight straight off. Considering I was still in full armor and we had Nicole's Summon out, it made sense if they couldn't tell just how powerful we were.

I directed our group forward, towards the building materials.

“I can't believe people haven't made off with all of these yet,” I said upon spotting a pile of distinctive blue buckets, “Everybody with a free hand, grab one.” I did my part, grabbing one. I could always drop it if I had to fight. Todd had the same idea, hanging one over his baseball bat, but Renee kept both hands on her shovel. The girls took two each since neither of them actually needed hands for fighting most of the time.

A few minutes later, I was filling those buckets with stuff. Screwdrivers, a hammer, and so on. Todd ended up with a bucket of hand-saws and plain leather toolbelts. People were really sleeping on this place for there to be any left. Not that I was complaining.

We didn't see any pitchforks – that would've been nice – but we did find a smallish sledgehammer that Todd could use one-handed, allowing him to pass the baseball bat to Chloe, and Nicole found a pair of little hand-axes – really more like camping hatchets, but I wasn't going to discourage her – that she decided to try to dual-wield. It was more cute than threatening.

I even managed to score a few of those extra-comfy red tool handles. Not many, but shields made with those would be a nice gift for kids who stepped up as leaders. The plain black tool handles went in as well, with the leftover tool bits mostly discarded back into their display bins. Despite the weight, I also grabbed a gallon jug of wood glue.

Everybody did a good job sticking together, mostly. At one point, while I was gathering the nuts and bolts we would need for shield-building, Nicole ran off down an aisle, though she did stay where we could still see her. When she returned a minute later carrying a big box of lag bolts for me, I couldn't not pat her head. I realized I was praising her like a little kid only after I'd done it, but thankfully she took it as I meant it and grinned. I dumped as much as I could of the box of bolts into my belt can, then distributed the rest between the twins for them to use to get contribution.

Then it was time for the big score: the lumber department. A lot of wood was already gone. People knew what a 2x4 was, so of course those got cleaned out early. People could only carry so much plywood, though, so what we actually needed was still available.

Transporting it was threatening to become a bigger issue, but Renee had the winning idea there: she and Todd went out to the garden center and snagged a couple of replacement wheelbarrow wheels while the twins and I worked through the remaining sheets of half-inch plywood. There were no whole wheelbarrows left, but nobody had bothered to steal boxes of random wheels!

With those in hand, along with the tools we had already scavenged, we were able to cobble together a flatbed hauler for Nicole's Laborer to pull. Between the plywood it was made of the plywood it was filled with we would have enough for probably a dozen shields.

By that point it had been out for nearly an hour, but not doing any actual labor, and Nicole didn't seem any the worse off for keeping it up. We loaded the hauler with plywood and topped it off with a few more blue plastic buckets, these filled with nylon cargo webbing, another thing people were seriously underestimating if they were leaving it for us, and then had the Laborer pull it.

Nicole's eyes widened. “Oh... I feel it now! When he's just walkin' around I don't. But when he's doin' stuff... yeah I'm gonna get tired. We should get going.”

The rest of us exchanged looks and nods. It was getting on towards noon by now anyway and none of us were looking forward to walking the highways in the hottest part of the afternoon.

Nicole turned with a dramatic flourish and pointed towards the doors, “Away, Ridley!” The way she said it sounded like she was quoting – or misquoting – something she only half remembered hearing.

“Ridley?” Chloe asked.

Enjoying this book? Seek out the original to ensure the author gets credit.

“His name's Ridley now.”

“Why?”

“Cuz.”

“That's silly.”

“PFFT!”

Nicole got the last word as she stomped off to follow her Laborer, who was pulling our makeshift hauler with his lower two arms. As she caught up to him, she handed him her buckets, which he held with both handles in one upper hand. By the time we got out the door, she was whistling cheerfully, basking in being the only one with nothing but her weapons to carry since her Summon did it all for her.

The rest of us filed out, forming up around Ridley and the girls. I took the lead with my shield out front, Renee to my left, Chloe on my right with the baseball bat, and Todd bringing up the rear. I had to admit hammer-and-shotgun wasn't a fighting style I ever imagined I'd see in real life. Nicole stayed in the middle, this time, working to figure out her hand-axes but mainly staying ready to drop a Seeker on anything that needed chomping.

We made our way out of the parking lot, and just like inside a handful of people watched us go by but nobody looked interested in picking a fight. With even the two little girls in the group armed for bear, who would?

Well, the leaf-hounds still did.

As we put down another one, my bolt embedded in its forehead and Chloe's bat driving it in to finish it, I scuffed my foot in the spot where it dissipated. “These things might only be the size of a fat cat but it's like they're made of pure spite.”

“They are monsters,” Renee said, shrugging.

“I guess, but still, y'know?”

“Fifty pounds of angry in a twenty pound bag?”

“Exactly.”

We had to rearrange our marching order a bit when we got to the highway. We had expected that maneuvering between the abandoned cars was going to be a problem, and the hauler had extra – smaller – grips behind the wheels for this. Todd put his hammer on the hauler and took up one of the handles, Renee taking the other, while the girls and I fanned out around them. That way, the three biggest people in our group could move the hauler while the rest of us kept watch.

As we moved along the highway, I started getting in the habit of guiding our group away from anywhere I saw flocks of crows gathering. I had realized we would need to do that the first time I saw them converging behind one of the empty cars. Crows went where there was food, after all, and monsters didn't leave bodies, which meant the only thing they could possibly be snacking on would be things the twins didn't need to see. Not that I did, either, if I was being honest with myself. With that concern in mind – in addition to the abandoned and derelict vehicles themselves – it was slow enough going that we ended up witnessing several more respawns before we got back to our exit.

I thought about it while the others hauled. “Percy... I know nobody actually asked you to, but have you been keeping any tabs on how long it takes those things to respawn?”

“I haven't,” he said, “But let me review.” It took him longer to clear his throat than it actually took him to review his memories, I thought. “The timing is not consistent, but the window of variation is small, between eighteen and twenty-four minutes. Why do you ask, Sir Emma?”

“Just thinking. How long it takes them to respawn is how fast we have to be moving not to have to fight the same ones over and over again. It's also how easily we could spawn-camp them if we really wanted to.”

Soon, we came to the stretch of this trip I was – so far – the most nervous about: crossing back past the cemetery.

The leaf-hounds weren't as spread out as they were before. The heat of the early afternoon sun had, I guess, driven them to cluster in the shade of every tree they could find. If you didn't know what was out there, it almost – almost – could fool a person into thinking the grassy parts were safe. But a closer look showed that every tree had at least half a dozen of those awful pointy-toothed things hiding in it, and three or four more lounging or prowling in the grass underneath.

I knew they could climb, I even knew they liked to strike from ambush, but seeing them clustering in the trees like that was creepy and weird on a whole new level. Like all of a sudden I couldn't trust anything not to have one dangling from it. Or like I should've been hound-checking every overhead structure all along. It sent a shiver down my spine to think about how many billboards and exit signs we had walked past, dismissed as part of the New Jersey background noise.

Like before, we stuck to the far side of the street, keeping the hedges and parked cars between us and the open field. We crept slowly, sneaking for our lives. Even Ridley must have picked up on it, whether from the rest of us or because Nicole herself was sneaking, because he moved the hauler slower and more carefully, too. In whispers, Renee and I arranged that we should stay in highway formation, leaving herself and Todd helping with the hauler in case we needed to move in a hurry. In hindsight, I'm still not sure whether or not it was the right call.

Halfway past the cemetery, a leaf-hound did something we hadn't seen them do before. Instead of striking from behind or on top of a vehicle, one of them scrambled out from under one and hurled itself into the air, straight at Nicole. Who screamed and froze. Her axes came up to guard her face more because her hands did than anything, and she didn't pop a Seeker either.

The report of Todd's shotgun-arm sounded like the hammer of an angry god, and most of the leaf-hound's body disintegrated into green-black pulp before dissolving into blue smoke. But with the flat brick wall of the church behind us and nothing across from us but empty space, the sound must have carried for miles.

Every buggy-looking leaf-hound eye was turned toward us. And the answering chorus of shrill leaf-hound shrieks came back just as loud.

Pointing at the nearest church door, I gave the only order I could: “Run!”