Four. John had gotten four more points.

“I guess you haven’t been here too long…” I said slowly.

One of the ValuCo workers laughed. “He’s been doing alright. Each monster’s only worth 12 points, so we only get… 60, 70 points each hour. Shared out over all of us here.”

“Each monster is worth 12 points?” Byron asked. “Are you sure?”

There was a chorus of agreement from the ValuCo workers.

“Yep!”

“100%.”

“Every time.”

The woman who’d spoken first grinned at us. “We get a lot of downtime to check. If one person gets a lucky hit, they get 12 points. If two people hit the monster, six each, and so on. We even tried not to kill a monster long enough to let 15 of us hit it, to see if we could get more points that way. Didn’t work: 12 of us got a point each, and the other three got diddly squat.”

“Twelve points per monster. Kill twelve monsters, earn 144 points. Just enough to earn a second ability,” I said. I glanced at Byron. “You think?”

“Clearly a base-12 number system,” he confirmed. “I was actually going to say something before, when we were talking about the ability percentages. I don’t know what they mean yet, but every number we’ve heard about would be a round number if you divided 100% into twelfths.”

“Does that help us figure out when we might get a third ability?” Davi asked.

“No,” said Byron. “We still only have two data points, so it’s impossible to predict the pattern. Hopefully 432, but… could be a lot more. The first was at 144, so I was hoping we’d get the second at twice that: 288. Vince is past that point, though, so it could be 288 additional points, which would leave us at 432. If it’s not, it could really be just about anything. 144 is twelve squared, so it could be 12 cubed. That’s, uh, 1,728.”

“Does it help at all?” Davi asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “If they think in base-12, things will tend to happen in ways that match up with that. Like, instead of having a set of five monsters attack us, it’s more likely that they send three, four, or six: factors of 12.”

“You think they’ll send out packs of six monsters at once?” Davi yelped.

“We don’t know what they’ll do!” Byron said. “That’s why we want to get a truck working. Kurtis said you might be able to help with that, John?”

“A truck? Like a semi truck?” John asked. “I… I’m not sure. I know the aliens stopped all the planes and cars. They said something in their announcement about combustibles, but I have to admit I don’t rightly remember what, exactly.”

Byron adopted a prim voice. “‘In order to level the playing field, electronic wiring has been ruined and most combustible materials have been neutralized.’ Pretty sure that’s what they said, anyway. Been going over it in my head.”

“Hunh.” John’s voice was thoughtful, speculative. “Most combustibles neutralized. That’s some weasel words right there. Honestly, you can get anything to combust if you try hard enough. I’m guessing they mean explosives and gasoline, but we’re gonna be shit outta luck if they mean oil too. Also, what does ‘neutralized’ even mean?”

“I’m not sure,” I said.

“I think cooking oil is fine,” Kurtis offered. “I saw a jug of canola oil next to the woman reheating mini-quiches.”

“Ooh, the bacon and broccoli ones? I could go for that.” I said.

“Really? You just ate three yogurt pops, a bowl of brisket, a burrito, and a packet of mochi,” Byron said.

“Don’t judge me. It’s been a busy day!”

“I just don’t want you getting sick to your stomach if we’re about to go fight monsters.”

“Fine,” I grumbled. “I guess I can wait until after.”

John shook his head. “Go to get your snack, son. Charging outside right now isn’t gonna do us a lick of good.”

“Why’s that?” Kurt asked.

The narrative has been taken without permission. Report any sightings.

John sighed. “You kids never got a chance to work on your own cars, did you? It’s all automatic doors and keyless ignitions and backup cameras these days. Your average car has thousands of feet of wiring in it. Some have over a mile!”

“It’s absolutely fine if we don’t get the automatic doors working,” I said.

John snorted. “Yeah, but those are just the things you see. Maverick - that’s my Chevy - was made in 1967. Getting him running now, I’d need… gasoline, find a way to repair the brake lines, and figure out a workaround for the ignition. That’s about it, and we’d be on the road. It’s a lot harder these days. They put tiny computers everywhere. Started with little sensors for the anti-lock brakes, then they went hog-wild. Processing units everywhere. It improves performance, but all of a sudden all these rugged cars that could stay working for decades became prissy lil’ fussbudgets that break down because you look at them funny. An old diesel motor can run off cooking oil no problem. A new one?” He grimaced. “I dunno. It’ll be rough. And that’s if whatever they did to the gasoline ain’t wrecked the things.”

“So we need to find materials for a siphon,” I said. “Try to get a sample of whatever’s in the fuel tanks now and find a way to analyze it.”

“Well, maybe,” he said. “I think you’re gonna want to disconnect the fuel line to get the gasoline out. Too many anti-siphoning measures these days: you can’t just stick a hose through the filler neck. But even if we get some good fuel, we’re gonna need to find a real old truck. Maverick’s fuel pump will stay running as long as his engine does, but that ain’t true for modern cars. The fuel pumps they have these days… I don’t know the details, but I know they’re computerized too. No belts. If we can’t find an old one, we’re going to have to try to take one of the new ones apart and see if we can rebuild it to run off the engine’s power.”

“So, we try to find the oldest-looking heap of junk out there?” I asked.

“Yep,” he confirmed. “I don’t know how we get permission to take it. I’ve been making a list of everything we’re eating so we can reimburse ValuCo later, but semi trucks are awfully expensive, even old ones.”

There was an uncomfortable silence as the rest of us looked at each other in disbelief.

Kurt jumped in, clapping John on the shoulder. “Ah, I wouldn’t worry about it. We don’t need to keep the semi, just use it for a while. Like a rental! And we’ll be repairing it first. Vehicle repairs always cost a ton. I’m sure it’ll even out.”

John’s face was doubtful, but Kurt’s confident ebullience had him nodding slowly.

- - -

The warehouse was already kind of dim: the skylights had been meant to supplement electric lighting, not replace it. As we searched for supplies it plunged into full darkness, with only the occasional island of light. The fires from the grills provided some illumination, and a few people had purchased one of the blueprints available through the Interface for a small light source.

Davi and John had acquired that blueprint as well, but only Davi had enough “money” to purchase it. When she did so, a small device, about as big around as a Frisbee but twice as thick, appeared on the ground in front of her. Its appearance wasn’t quite instantaneous: it reminded me of watching a time-lapse video of 3D printing, except there was no machine. It began working even before it had finished appearing, illuminating about twenty feet around us brightly, and casting dim light over a much wider radius.

Davi picked it up, turning it over in her hands. “No buttons. No way to turn it off. I guess we could cover it if we need to?”

“At least it’ll give us light to explore,” I said.

It took us a while to decide on a plan, but what we settled on in the end was surprisingly simple.

It was Davi who pointed out that screws were technically simple machines. She asked Kurt to test his “Animate Machine” ability on some bolts holding together an empty shelf.

When it worked, she crowed proudly. “That’s going to make taking apart a fuel line much easier! That’s why they pay me the big bucks. Oh wait, that’s you guys.”

“Ahhh, we’re just farther away from our college physics courses,” Kurt said.

“If you say so, grandpa!”

Kurt scowled, but he’d set himself up for that one.

The success got John interested. “Say… can you work just a part of a machine? Not the whole thing?”

“Maybe,” said Kurt. “Why?”

“Well, some cars have a pump inside the tank. If we find one of those, and you can work it, we don’t have to MacGuyver one ourselves.”

It’s a good suggestion, and tests with a robot vacuum make it clear that he could make it roll around without working the beater bar, or vice versa.

Davi’s little light was sufficient to let us explore the safe warehouse interior, but we elected not to head outside with only a glorified camping lantern.

“That sounds like a great way to get ambushed,” I said.

No one disagreed.

It couldn’t be that late - maybe nine in the evening? - but the long and dangerous day left all of us tired.

There was plenty of space to sleep. The workers had torn open several more packages of clothing and blankets, making room for the steady stream of people who’ve followed us from the airport. Apparently, we'd only been the first of many groups to leave; in the scant hours before full dark, the population of the ValuCo ballooned from the few hundred present when we arrived to over a thousand people.

I picked up a bedtime snack: something called spanakopita, a Greek food I’d never tried. It was decent, though would have been better with some meat in it. Maybe lamb? Yeah, some gyro meat would be perfect.

Even though I was more comfortable - or maybe because of it - it was harder to fall asleep. I had a blanket, a pillow, and a pile of soft things pretending to be a mattress. Put together, it did a good enough job pretending to be a bed that it felt wrong not to have Meghan next to me. I always missed her on business trips, but usually I could tell myself that I’d see her in a few days.

Now, her absence ached.

Four, five times, I dozed off… but as I reached out to curl around her, I remembered she wasn’t safe. My kids weren’t safe.

They weren’t restful thoughts.