I followed Byron, holding the packet of mochi gingerly with my fingertips, trying to keep my body heat from melting them… until I noticed the condensation beading on their surface. Probably all the frozen goods were kept together, cold enough to insulate each other. This little packet of treats had lost that insulation, exposed to the oppressively warm temperature of the warehouse at large. Even without my body heat, it wouldn't last long.

I tore the packet open and popped one in my mouth. The ice cream inside was delicious, but the rice coating was gummy and strange. I didn’t like the texture, but it was interesting and different. I’m glad I got a chance to try it. No one on Earth would be making mochi anymore.

The warehouse was bigger than I expected. By the time we were a third of the way through, we had already walked across a space as big as the entire ValuCo in Huntsville. Byron took a right and I caught the smell of cooked food and heard the uneven rumble of a crowd.

Hundreds of people had congregated in the same area. Several packages of clothing were torn open, and I saw some people napping on a “mattress” made of Halloween-themed sweatshirts. Many more were awake, gathered around a series of barbecue grills. I saw frozen burritos - just like the half-eaten one I was holding - being reheated on top of a layer of aluminum foil.

“ValuCo really is the perfect place to be," I muttered. "Food, fuel, appliances… what doesn’t it have?"

“Vince!” Byron was farther down the aisle, looking back at me with an exasperated expression. “You coming?”

“This isn’t what you wanted to show me?”

“Nah. I mean, this is what we expected, right? Or hoped for, anyway.”

I nodded, and moved away from the grills reluctantly. Someone found a pan and was using it to reheat packages of burnt brisket ends. Byron probably grabbed whatever was easiest to carry, but damn, that meat smelled delicious.

I’d have to come back for it.

Byron ducked between sets of industrial shelving. I followed him, eventually reaching what looked like a series of massive… cages? A woman lounging in an easy chair next to a door opened one eye as we approached, then jerked her head upward. “Read the sign.”

The sign in question is a torn chunk of cardboard secured to the cage’s door by several zip ties. “MONSTERS INSIDE. PROCEED AT OWN RISK.”

“Gotcha,” Byron said. He opened the door and ushered me through into an empty cage. Another door at the far end led into a line of three more identical cages, which terminated in an opening cut into a garage door. Inside each of the last three cages stood people with serious expressions, all of them holding long, thin, slicing knives and staring at a… construction… in the middle. It’s a long tunnel made of some kind of wire panels or shelves and held together with more zip ties than an entire IT department could go through in a year.

I heard a shout from near the garage door, then a flash of yellow streaked into the tunnel. A spacedog, I assume? With the wires in the way and the speed of its approach, I can’t really see.

A man at the end nearest to us dropped down, using all his weight to press a large cookie sheet against the opening. “Exit sealed!”

The yellow streak slowed and started to back up, the motion awkward and slow. Yes, definitely a spacedog. They must not reverse well, or maybe the monster wasn't sure about what to do. Another clang of metal made the monster stop cold. A second person shouted: “Entry sealed!”

The people surrounding the tunnel moved forward, using their thin knives to jab through the gaps in the sides of the central tunnel. The monster skittered forward and backward, taking shallow slices before it realized it had no escape route. It pressed its back against one side of the tunnel and struck out with its front paws, claws clattering through gaps in the wiring. Unluckily for it, the people surrounding it have traded power for safety: rather than putting their full strength behind any blow, each strike is carefully stopped with the hilt of the blade a few inches away from the cage. Everyone’s fingers are kept out of reach.

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The tight confines had already limited the spacedog’s motion; with four blades sticking out of its haunches and back, the monster is truly trapped. Its feet scrabbled at the floor uselessly, metal blades ringing against the metal bars of the cage as it thrashed.

Given a few seconds, it would succumb to these injuries, but it doesn’t get that time.

A woman lunged forward. She slammed her knife in up to its hilt, trusting the blades of others to keep the monster still.

The monster faded away into nothingness.

The woman who dealt the final blow straightened, pulling her knife away. She lifted her other hand to her mouth. “Reset!”

In the distance, another woman worked a cookie sheet out from between two sections of tunnel. “Entry reset!”

A few feet away, the man leaning on the cookie sheet sat back. “Exit reset!”

“What… what is all this?" I'm embarrassed about the question as soon as I asked it. What they're doing here is clear, if surprising. I hurried to clarify. "They’ve set up a… kill zone?”

The man with the cookie sheet nodded proudly. His eyes stayed fixed on the tunnel, but his voice is relaxed. “Yep. The monsters won’t run in if we don’t leave them a way to get to us, but we can stop it up after they’re inside. Close the way out and the way in, and they don’t know what to do. We fight about… one every ten minutes or so? Give or take.”

“And they haven’t had any injuries at all today!” Byron said.

“We had a few yesterday. Some mistakes right after we got it set up. But we have a system now, and we’re all practiced with it. We don’t even really need the kennels-” the man took a hand off his cookie sheet to gesture to the cages surrounding us. “-but we have ‘em and they help people sleep at night, so I don’t mind.”

“Everyone here has a second ability! And they earned it with no risk, no magic!” Byron said, clearly excited. “It lets anyone earn points.”

“Everyone in ValuCo?!”

The man laughed. “I wish! Nah, just those of us you see here and a few others. We’ve got a good system, but it’s still kind of… a lot. Makes people uncomfortable. There’s a reason we’ve got this set up far away from the cooking and sleeping area.”

“Well… We should definitely get John over here, if they’re willing to let him in on it.” I said.

“The more the merrier. We’ve got another group working on putting up some more kill zones in other parts of the warehouse, but I wasn’t sure if we’d have anyone willing to use them.”

Byron elbowed me. “I’m gonna make John come over after he finishes lunch, but that’s not the point. Your wife! She could figure out something like this too, yeah?”

I hesitated. “Well… she doesn’t have kennels and an ocean of zip ties and miles of… whatever this is. Wire shelving? Even if she did, that only helps her earn points. It’s not going to help her travel with the kids when she needs to find food.”

“So she gets dragon scales and super strength and goes out to get food and brings it back. Come on, man! This pessimism isn’t you.”

What Byron’s saying isn’t… wrong. I take a deep breath, trying to reorder my thoughts.

Meghan can’t fight the monsters like me, but that doesn’t mean she can’t fight. I can’t help her right now, but she’s not helpless. She’s not hopeless. If she manages this, it won’t be the first time she’s pulled off something I thought was impossible. All I can do is trust her to find a way and get back to her side as soon as I can.

That’s not going to be by walking.

Walking is trash. It’s taken us a day to move less than two miles across the most favorable terrain possible. Even if we could keep up this speed, it would still take us over a year to get back.

I’ve been looking at this all really wrong. Really narrowly. I’ve been thinking of this like a hack-and-slash videogame, but it’s not a game: it’s real life. No one’s forcing me to approach it in any particular way.

The warehouse workers saw the same things I did, but they realized that they didn’t have to play the obvious game. They played a different one, a crafting game, using their resources and ingenuity to turn dangerous fights into something predictable and trivial.

We had resources too. An entire warehouse full of everything ValuCo had for sale, a parking lot full of semi trucks and passenger cars, and, most importantly, five trained engineers.

“How, exactly, do you think the aliens stopped the cars from running?” I asked Byron.

He grinned at me.