“Five minutes, then we head out!” The voice belonged to Sarah, the woman who’d been in charge of organizing the defenses the night before. She was leaving with us, a fact that made me more convinced than ever that we were making the right choice.

Not everyone would be leaving the barricades. Too many people hadn’t fully accepted the situation, and others seemed to be waiting to see what happened to our group. Sarah had a new clipboard now, having handed off the old one to an older man who’d be taking charge here after our departure. She’d taken a headcount of everyone who intended to try leaving and roughly organized us into groups. We’d have nearly 300 people with us, and our group had been assigned to help kill monsters along the group’s left flank. None of my friends had an ability to help find monsters or prevent ambushes, so we’d be supporting one of the people who did. To my surprise and Davi’s delight, she and I had been assigned right next to Team Always Forward - uh, TAF. Our position put us right behind the vanguard, which I had mixed feelings about. Those in the front might be in more danger, but… I trusted myself a lot more than I trusted most of these people. At least I’d be able to see what was going on.

Byron would be slightly behind us, with Kurt, while John would be in the center of the formation, walking beside the baggage carts we planned to claim. He’d be ready to offer healing, and if needed, we could carry his exhausted body on the carts. Initially they’d be empty, other than three people with scouting abilities who would ride to allow them to focus on their remote senses.

We weren’t charging out into the unknown, not totally. Davi and Kurt, who’d been awake for much longer than the rest of us, had been listening in on discussions between locals and airport employees. No one had a map of the area, but there’d been widespread agreement about the existence of one particular shining beacon of hope:

“A ValuCo warehouse!” Kurtis said. “Think what we could find there! 64-packs of granola bars! No… we could find that at a regular ValuCo. This is a distribution center. Truckloads of granola!”

“Gallon-size containers of ketchup,” Byron laughed. “Enough to swim in. Don’t know who needs those in usual circumstances, but I bet people will be grateful today.”

“Even if their water is out, I’m sure they’ll have giant flats of sports drinks!” Davi said. “That’ll probably be even better for us than water, because of the, uh, electrolytes and stuff.”

“I’d take that,” I said. “Dehydration would be a bad way to go.”

The trouble was that the distribution center was only relatively close. The airport was located far from Denver proper, miles out into the fields surrounding the city. The distribution center was in the island of buildings “close” to the airport, but it was still probably a two mile walk, “or thereabouts.”

So we weren’t heading directly south toward the ValuCo building. Instead we planned to head southeast, toward a maintenance building. It would be a long and dangerous walk - especially since we planned to avoid the darkened parking garages: about half a mile, maybe a little farther. Even after we made it to the building, it likely wouldn’t have much to offer us, aside from better weapon options.

If we got there, though, there’d be plenty of buildings we could use for rest and shelter. With Kurtis’s ability to open any door, we could make most of the rest of our journey to the ValuCo center in shorter bursts, a few hundred feet at a time.

There were a lot of unknowns. We couldn’t be sure the buildings would be safe and monster-free. Even getting inside the buildings could be a problem. Kurtis’s ability had defeated every lock he’d tested it on so far, but I couldn’t rule out people inside any of the buildings banding together to keep strangers out.. We couldn’t even be sure that our trip was possible; if we got exhausted in the middle of the parking lot, that would be it. There wasn’t really any shelter other than the cars themselves, dangerously hot in the summer sun.

Leaving would be risky, but the empty water jugs rolling around the upstairs hallways spoke eloquently about the risks of sitting still. I was sure we wouldn’t be the only group leaving, just the first one.

When the time came to head out, two smaller groups hopped the barricade. One carried a large piece of drywall to block the broken doorway, while the other group fought off oncoming spacedogs long enough for the drywall to be set in place.

The drywall was flimsy, but it held long enough for the rest of us to make it down the stilled escalators and assemble in the airport foyer, grabbing baggage trolleys and getting into formation. It took a few minutes to get everyone in place - a surprising number of people mixed up right and left - but we got it sorted out.

“Right, then,” Sarah said. “Here goes nothing.”

Someone else pulled aside the drywall, and I rushed forward, part of a wall of people who would secure a spot outside for people to get back into formation. Monsters rushed toward us immediately after we exited, but… fewer than I’d expected. Maybe ten? With the unending stream we’d fought off inside, I’d expected going outside would mean wading through a sea of the things. I could see more down the road, but they seemed to be ignoring us for now.

I swept my staff downward, activating Powerful Blow. I heard a snapping noise as the metal pole hit the creature’s back. It didn’t die, but it flopped to the ground, unable to stand. It continued to swipe its claws at me, undeterred by immobility that made it nearly impossible for it to reach anything.

I used my pole to shove it a little farther away, then checked on those next to me. Surprisingly, they didn’t need my help. We’d been attacked by several monsters, but even with more than half the crowd still indoors, we vastly outnumbered them. When the monsters couldn’t ambush us, if they didn’t use their ridiculous jump strength, they weren’t too different from very angry small dogs.

This book was originally published on Royal Road. Check it out there for the real experience.

A scream from behind me was proof that we weren’t having it all our own way, but when I turned, the monster in question had already been knocked to the ground. A woman’s bleeding cheekbone was evidence it had gotten through… but not for long. The woman herself stomped fiercely on the downed enemy, crushing it repeatedly until it disappeared.

A replacement fuzzed into being a few yards away almost instantaneously.

Things were tilting in our favor as more and more people poured out the front doors of the terminal, even if killing them seemed useless.

The moment the thought crossed my mind, I swung my staff to knock aside a baseball bat swung by a stranger next to me.

“What the hell, man?”

“Don’t kill them!” I shouted. “They come back when you kill them. If they’re hurt, just leave them on the ground.”

Incapacitating the monsters was easier said than done. Most of the crowd didn’t have any fighting experience. I’d been doing aikido for close to two decades, and I was still struggling. Aikido wasn’t too focused on striking, but our dojo dipped into karate and judo to “Give y’all a few more tools in your toolbox” as Sensei Hank put it. That had always been something I appreciated, because it made me feel prepared for any situation.

I was rapidly reassessing that sentiment.

It’s true that I wasn’t panicking, like a lot of people. I knew how to stand in a balanced stance and put the full strength of my body into a swing. But damn, was it irritating that the vast majority of what I’d practiced couldn’t be used directly on these enemies. We didn’t practice kicking puppies, we practiced high kicks at opponents’ guts! What good was being able to do the Heian Shodan kata in my sleep if every single strike it taught me went between two and four feet over these things’ heads? Forget joint locks; I didn’t even know where these things’ joints were, and I had zero desire to put my hands near their claws. My broom-handle staff was useful, and I’d practiced some strikes and blocks for knees and ankles before… but these things didn’t even come up to my knees, and they were far faster and more mobile than a human being.

I missed almost as often as I hit, and the crowd around me made footwork difficult. Without Davi’s Force Shields, the monsters would have gotten my ankles more than once.

It was frustrating.

Stressful.

Even scary.

Still, we outnumbered our attackers heavily, and numbers count for a lot. There were a few hundred of us. Even with embarrassingly terrible aim, someone was going to hit: usually several someones. A number of the monsters died even after the call went out to leave them alive, victims of our lack of coordination and inexperience. Enough little strikes or one strong strike in the right place would take a spacedog from “murderous” to “dusted.”

Luck and patience won out eventually. After an extremely tense five minutes of fighting, we stood in an oasis of stillness. Not calm - the crippled spacedogs were letting out shrill, headache-inducing screeches - but still. No new monsters were spawning, and the ones I could see in the distance were still ignoring us, even with the cacophony of their counterparts’ cries, just as the far-away monsters had in the hangar the day before.

The morning sun was barely over the horizon, and the morning was cool, but my buttondown was already drenched in sweat. I took my hands off my staff one at a time to shake them out, trying to relax my fingers and keep them from cramping up.

To my side, Twinkles gave a shaky laugh. “Okay… we cleared these creeps. Let’s get some vision out ahead. Bolero?”

A shorter guy in a matching orange-and-white jersey nodded. “Got it.” He lifted a hand, and a tiny mouselike critter that looked a lot like the ones from Legend Scramble appeared in the middle of the road and scurried under a row of parked cars.

It was a measure of how tired and stressed Davi was that she didn’t even smile.

The mouse-thing emerged and the other TAF member - Bolero? - glanced back over his shoulder. “I can’t see what it sees, but nothing bothered it. I don’t think there’s anything under the cars nearby.”

“Central scouts don’t think so either. We can probably move up slowly,” Sarah called. She was standing on top of one of the carts in the middle, clipboard still in hand. “We need to be careful, though! We took a lot of injuries getting outside, here. Our healers are standing for now, but I’d like to keep it that way.”

Twinkles nodded at her.

We began inching forward.

The first time another spacedog charged at us, the response was utterly ridiculous, a hail of missiles so dense that it almost looked like a wall. The monster was pulverized so badly that the smoke of its disappearance was spread out over a six-foot area.

It reappeared immediately and headed for us again. It wasn’t destroyed quite so quickly or completely, but it still suffered an unsurvivable amount of firepower.

At its third appearance, there was an effort to coordinate, with some people calling out that they had it, but it was still heavily overkilled.

It wasn’t until it ran at us for the sixth time that we managed to meet it with a reasonable amount of firepower.

“Use the letters!” Davi suggested. “Tell us what letter groups should attack the next monster.”

It was a good suggestion that met with easy agreement. Things started to go more smoothly. There was one moment of alarm when a monster charged us from behind - I think one of the ones we’d maimed before succumbed to its wounds - but the unexpected angle of its attack wasn’t enough to get it past our ranged damage-dealers.

We crept our way safely along the road in front of the terminal. Our scouts pored over the terrain around us, carefully locating and calling out any hidden monsters before they could attack. We couldn’t simply cross the road and leave, because the road we were on was elevated, at the same level as the shaded roofs of the five-story parking garage. The roof billowed slightly in the wind, made out of some kind of sheeting. The monsters were apparently lightweight enough to stand on it, and good enough jumpers to make the leap from the roof to the road… but I was positive it wouldn’t support a human, even if we could have crossed the gap.

The only real way out was to walk along the road itself.