Hearing someone speaking behind me, I whirled around before recognizing Luke's voice. "Jesus Christ, Luke!" I swore, my hand going to my throat. "Don't sneak up on a guy in his own Shadow."

"Hmm," Luke said, keeping a wary distance between us. "You sound like you know me. Blame it on the apocalypse, but I don't recognize you. I'm looking for a big werewolf named Oberon. Have you seen him?"

I considered introducing myself as Sam for a moment. Having a secret identity might have been fun—might have made it easier to be Oberon when the tough calls came. Unfortunately, however certain I was that I had a right to both identities, four of Luke's customers already knew I had this human form. It would be just my luck that my secret identity would be one of the few things this group actually remembered.

"Right, you haven't seen me like this. These days, I can only be human in dreams and places like this that don't follow the same rules as the rest of the world, but it's still me, Oberon." I spread my arms out as though inviting him to inspect me, not that there was any hint of my wolf.

"You're Oberon?" Luke asked skeptically. "Do you have any way to prove that? You'll forgive me, but there's not a lot of certainty left in this world."

"uh, proof. Hmm." I hadn't had to prove who I was before; then again, the exit was right there, and that would be the quickest way, assuming there weren't monsters out there.

"Sure, my body will revert back to the blue werewolf form when I leave here. I'm injured, though, so I'll need help bandaging my face." I said, holding up the gauze.

I'd taken the Morphine already, but if I stayed here, it would take another 20-30 minutes before it kicked in, and my human body didn't need it. One of the strange quirks of coming and going from the Shadow changed that, though. I'd discovered, accidentally, that my stomach contents got digested instantly as I moved between realms—Not that I had any idea why; I didn't seem to be losing any actual time, at least. That had been my biggest concern when I first discovered the strange feature.

There weren't many uses I'd discovered for it, and it was a bit inconvenient since I usually started feeling hungry shortly after using it, no matter how recently I'd eaten.

"Before that, though," I said, eyeing the Portal leading back to the garage pit, "Weren't you leading away monsters? Heroically, I might add."

Luke gave me a searching look before shrugging off his own concern as unimportant. "I drew away what I could, but I saw two stay on your tail. I took out two of the monsters following me with my last bullets. The sound drew more monsters, but the death throws of the monsters I shot attracted their attention. I managed to slip away as the remaining monsters fought over the dying ones.

"I decided to circle back and see if I could help with the remaining two, and I happened to see the flash of a monster—you, I guess—hurrying into the mechanic's garage. I saw the Shadow door and decided to check it out. Where's everyone else?"

I didn't know Luke well, but he seemed like a reasonably solid dude, so I decided to trust him when he said he got away from his pursuers. At the least, I didn't think he'd lie about it, which wasn't the same as being correct.

"Wow, well, well done." I congratulated him. "Alejandra, Trevor, Satoshi, and Craig are further in. I'll bring you to them."

"That's okay. You were about to go back out there? I'll go with you." Luke said. I expected I might hear suspicion in his words, but if he was doubting my identity, he was concealing it well.

I raised an eyebrow, "Are you sure? I'm not going back to the bar, I need to go get a doctor friend of mine to stitch up a wound I took."

Luke looked me up and down, "You don't look injured, but you also don't look like a monster. I'm assuming it's part of the same power that lets you look human?"

"Well," I said, feeling a little irritated, "I am human. Or at least I was. Or at least all my memories before the apocalypse are of being human," I clarified, thinking about a dolphin's claim that I wasn't actually Sam. "Either way, yes, the change in appearance and masking of injuries is all part of the Shadow's power. Not that I completely understand how any of that works yet. Anyway, my doctor friend is at the hospital on the edge of town. It'll be a bit of a walk and potentially dangerous. We'll have to keep quiet if we want to avoid fighting more monsters. I know a safe-ish route, but there are no guarantees. It'd be safer for you to stay with the rest of the group."

You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.

Luke shrugged. "Safer for me, maybe. In my experience, people are plenty dangerous enough, especially of things that scare them. If I'm with you, I imagine you'll be safer, or at least less threatening to the average person, and therefore less likely to get shot by the first survivor you come across."

He had a point. In the worst-case scenario, I could probably open the Shadow Alcove long enough for him to slip inside.

That said, I was more hesitant to use it that way after hearing what the experience had been like for Luke's customers. "Alright. Well, we'll step out, do a quick monster check, and then wrap my wound. It'll be easiest to just wrap the gauze around my whole muzzle to secure my flap of skin."

Luke offered to go first and make sure the garage was clear, and given that my injury might be distracting, I agreed. He popped out and back in the space of a few seconds, just long enough to poke his head out and look around. "Alright, we're clear out there. Do you have something to wash the wound before we bandage it?"

I shook my head. "It might get infected, but that'll only last till the end of the loop at best, so it shouldn't matter too much."

I followed Luke back out of the Shadow, and the ache of my wounded cheek immediately returned, but thankfully without some of the sharper pain. The Morphine kicked in before the pain could take back much ground, but I still felt the cold air on my teeth and blood trickling between the furry fingers I was using to hold a gauze pad against my cheek. With Luke's help, we bandaged the pad tightly in place.

"How's that?" Luke asked, inspecting our handiwork? "Jesus, it's already bleeding through."

I could feel blood pooling in my mouth as well, and I spat it out as best as I could with a bandaged-shut mouth. I couldn't speak, a distressingly familiar situation for me. Thankfully, unlike my experience at the start of all this, I could at least communicate in other ways, and I gave Luke a thumbs up. It was as good as it was going to get.

Luke had used the last of the bullets for his gun when he'd drawn away and killed some of our pursuing monsters, so he carried my bat. I left the crowbar in the Shadow Alcove and brought the spear. The crowbar would do more damage, but the spear would do a better job keeping any monsters at bay. Or so I reasoned. I had more monster-fighting experience than most, but I hadn't exactly been a warrior before the world ended.

Since defeating the Bogey monster that Nia's mom, Kay, had become—and receiving the deadline to evacuate Forest Lake—I'd made the trip to and from the hospital several times. The hospital was toward the edge of town, and—while there were businesses and even plenty of housing in that direction—it was less populated than inner parts like where the Kaiju appeared. That was my best guess for why there weren't as many monsters. 'Not as many' wasn't to say none, but Luke and I managed to avoid them.

As we got closer to the hospital, I caught sight of a pair of crows flying near the hospital, and I wondered if they were connected to Crowseph. I hadn't seen any sure sign of the crow monster since they'd abandoned their roost in the hospital ER. They were a threat I had a bad feeling I'd have to deal with eventually, but until and unless I found their swarm, there wasn't much I could do.

Luke pointed to something off in the distance, but the fog that most people seemed oblivious to obscured my vision, and I shrugged at him and raised an eyebrow in a question.

"That giant rabbit is over there. Could be a look-alike, I suppose."

I pulled out the pocket notebook and pen from a spot in my vest. "Alone?"

Luke shook his head. "There are a few creatures with it,"

"Allies, probably, watch them pls." I wrote.

When we got closer, I could see the silhouettes of Mother and Father, waddling around the rabbit and ducking underneath its bulk without any apparent concern. Then again, they could grow to more than twice my size in the span of breaths, so they didn't have much reason to be afraid.

"Why aren't we going in the front?" Luke asked as we climbed the steep drive to the back of the building.

We weren't going in the front because I wasn't really interested in running into any of Kay's group, who were holed up right in the chapel next to the main entrance. Fear and trauma had led them down some dark roads, but they hadn't resisted those paths as hard as I thought they should, and I wasn't willing to extend them much trust. Most people who weren't monsters wouldn't have much to worry about, assuming Pastor Kay hasn't been corrupted by her trauma monster again.

I just shrugged and pointed at my injury as we approached the entrance for outpatient surgeries. It wasn't worth explaining all that quite yet.

Besides, there was something nostalgic about returning to where it all began.