My excitement gave Davi the push she needed to select Biological Augment: Rapid Regeneration. She gritted her teeth as the same itchy feeling came over her body, then pulled herself to sitting and started unwrapping her ankle.
As soon as she had it uncovered, she stared at it intently.
No visible change took place.
She groaned. “Damnit! There goes my hopes this would turn me into Wolverine.”
“Do you have a pen?” I asked. “We could mark the edges and see how fast it heals.”
“You have a clock?”
“Well… no. But we could get a rough idea.”
Davi flopped back down. “I don’t have a pen, anyway. Kurtis probably does. Hopefully he and Byron get back here with a cart. I can ride on top like a pageant queen and wave elegantly at the monsters. That’s about all I’m good for, apparently.”
“Your shields will still be useful,” I said.
“I guess.”
Her voice was bitter, but underneath that I could hear an edge of anxiety. Even though Davi hadn’t been with the company very long, I knew her reasonably well. When I’d been hired, one of the senior engineers had invited me over to his home for dinner and board games. I'd tried to continue the tradition, even if it sent Meghan - my wife - into a tizzy as she frantically tried to hide the mess in our house. Davi had been over a few times. She’d been quiet and shy at first, but had seemed delighted when Cassie - my littlest girl - came to sit in her lap and help her roll dice. The timidity had been very out of character for Davi, I now knew, but she’d been nervous about her new job. The second time she’d come over, she’d been confident enough to bring lok lak, a type of fucking delicious Cambodian lettuce wrap. When we’d complimented her, she’d beamed like the sun and we started to get to know the real Davi, a boisterous and high-energy woman with a “no prisoners” approach to life.
Davi had been approaching this disaster kind of breezily, fangirling over the TAF players, joking about X-Men and Star Wars. I could tell that a lot of that was an affectation.
She was falling to pieces and doing her best to keep it together.
“Hey,” I told her. “It’ll be okay. We’ll get through this.”
“Sure!” she said, her tone dismissive, almost laughing. “Of course we will.”
“I’m serious.”
She looked at me searchingly, as if trying to see if I was just trying to make her feel better.
“There’s going to be a way to survive, and we’re going to find it. You and I are engineers and serious gamers, and Byron’s a mathematician and a gamer. John’s old, but he’s got an engineering background and over 50 years of life experience to share. Even Kurtis started out as an engineer before he moved to the management track.”
Davi tilted her head thoughtfully. “I guess his people skills are useful too. Don’t tell him I said that.”
“Of course,” I said.
“Still… I don’t know. It’s just… a really bad situation. I can’t walk normally! I should go to the doctor, or at least rest on a couch until I feel better. Instead, I’m seriously considering letting you guys load me onto a cart and roll me through a field filled with monsters. We’ve got these superpowers, but if we use them too much we fall asleep and become monster chow! How do we problem-solve our way out of that?!”
I shook my head. “Step one is to get more space. The monsters are scary, but we can fight them. We can’t punch hunger or fireball thirst. Once we have a little breathing room, maybe we can get a car working or something. Then we can travel without fighting every step of the way.”
Davi frowned. “I don’t know. My bestie in college was a mechanical engineer, and she said cars these days are a lot more electrical than I would have thought. Miles of wiring.”
I waved a hand at this. “So maybe we don’t do that. Maybe we do something else. Go old-school. Find some horses and make a chariot. Hell, maybe hook some monsters up! We’ll figure it out.”
Davi still looked skeptical, but she didn’t argue, turning away from me to look down a long walkway between sets of tall shelving. “Is that Kurt and Byron? I think they got one of the flat carts. Wait… is that TAF with them?”
My friend's hand went up to smooth her hair, although I don't think she realized she was doing it.
She’d slept on an airport floor and fought monsters in an open field; a little smoothing didn't keep it from looking like a rat's nest.
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I didn’t tell her, instead pushing myself to my feet and jogging over. As I got close, I noticed Kurt’s cart already carried two people: a sleeping guy and a woman sitting holding her knees. Bloodstains along the side of her jersey suggested she had reasons for not walking. The cart also held a selection of construction equipment.
I lifted my hand in greeting. “Hey! Glad you’re back. What’s the word?
“Found us some partners!” Kurtis said. “And a little bit of gear. I thought rebar might be better than your broom?”
I picked up a piece off the cart and twirled it experimentally. “Huh. Lighter than I expected it would be.” I thought about it. “It’ll be nice to have as a backup, but I’ll keep my pole for now. I’ve been practicing with it and the lengths aren’t exactly the same.”
“Aw. Oh well.” He lowered his voice. “Got the real prizes under that pile of tarps there. An axe and three sledgehammers.”
“And we’re not using them now because…?”
Kurt shrugged. “People are already starting to argue over the water that’s left. I’d rather not make it obvious that we’re leaving with things people want, so we’ll keep them hidden under the tarp until right before we're about to head out the door. Uh… well, when I say we…”
“The sledgehammers are ours,” cut in a tall woman in a TAF jersey. “But you guys have claim on the axe.”
“So you’re coming with us?” I asked, offering her a hand. “Vince, Vince Moretti.”
She took it. “TAF Avalanche.”
“That’s what you want us to call you?”
“Gone by the name for years. Plus… Avalanche fights monsters every day. She’s an expert. Ashley Givens? Not so much.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “Avalanche it is. And… the rest of your team? We met Twinkles earlier, and I know I’ve heard your names, but I don’t really have time to follow eSports anymore…”
Davi broke in. “The woman on the cart is Zephyr, and the sleeping guy is Bolero. The guy walking with Twinkles is JoeyT. Uh, unless they want to go by their real names. Then I don’t know. Oh, except JoeyT? I’m assuming?”
Twinkles laughed. “Player names are fine. My real name’s actually Joe as well, so it’s less confusing if I go by Twinkles.”
“How’d Kurtis convince you to come, anyway?”
The three upright members of TAF shifted uncomfortably. “We were already talking about leaving,” Twinkles said. There was something almost belligerent about his tone. “Better not to go alone, right? We’d already fought next to you and, uh, her, and you did a good job.”
“That’s Davi,” I said. “The sleeping guy is John. I’m guessing Byron and Kurt already introduced themselves.”
“Yeah. Davi. Davi. Okay. I’ll try to remember.”
I nodded. “So, what’s the plan here? Wait for our sleeping beauties to awaken and head out?”
“You can wait if you want,” Avalanche said. “But if you’re doing that, we’re getting another cart and leaving now.”
That surprised me. “Leaving with our healers still asleep - I assume Bolero heals? - seems risky. Especially with two of us still injured. I’m not saying I won’t come, but… why the rush?”
Kurt sighed. “You know how I thought we’d run out of water today?”
“Yeah…”
“Well, I’m glad we traded for water when we did, because there’s none to be had now.”
“It’s all gone?”
“Kind of?” Kurtis pointed at the bottles next to me. “We have a little bit, but if someone came up offering to trade you a… a sword for a bottle of water, would you say yes?”
“If the sword was real and not a costume piece? Probably.”
“Right, but you’d have to think about it. One bottle, for a fuckin’ sword. A half-hour ago, I got four water bottles for five cups of caramel syrup. And there’s no swords around.”
“So no one’s willing to trade,” I realized. “I wish we hadn’t handed out what we had in the luggage this morning.”
“Sorry,” Davi said. “But I didn’t think people would have been okay with us eating and not sharing. It’s not like we had privacy.”
Maybe we could have gotten some, I thought, but aloud I said only, “We’ll need to be more careful with anything we find to eat or drink from here on out.”
Kurt nodded grimly, and Avalanche chimed in. “We’ve got a little water, you’ve got a little water… but not everyone does. But everyone wants it. Killing monsters is, well, scary, but I don’t know if I could sleep at night if I had to kill a person.”
“There’s another factor, too,” Byron said. “We won’t be the only ones leaving today; I’d rather be ahead of the pack than trailing behind. It’s only about 200 feet to the next building - you can see it through the windows on the south doors. There’s a fence in the way, true, but there might be people who haven’t taken abilities. If we can find someone willing to take Healing Touch, it might be the quickest way to get Davi and Zephyr back on their feet.”
“Do we have a plan for the fence?” I asked.
Kurtis nodded. “JoeyT took an ability he thinks will break it down. If that doesn’t work, we’ve got bolt cutters as backup.”
“You guys in?” Byron asked.
“I am,” I said. “Hell, I think I was the first one to say we should get out of here. You with us, Davi?”
Davi’s hands clenched anxiously, but she snuck a glance at TAF and forced a bright smile on her face. “Of course I am!”