While reducing my suddenly-voracious appetite might not have been the bonus I’d chosen, it wasn’t unwelcome. There was plenty of food available now, but who knew what the future held? Even if we managed to steal an entire semi-trailer, we might not be able travel with it indefinitely.
Avalanche woke me up a little before dawn and we went out to snag Zephyr some more points. We had to stay out a few minutes past Twinkles’ call for us to head in, but we managed to get her the rest of the points she needed.
TAF was excited to hear that my appetite had gone down when my Biological Augment reached 200% synergy, but Zephyr was resolute about picking Temperature Tolerance. “It’s a guarantee. The other idea?” She shrugged, conveying her uncertainty eloquently without struggling through too many words.
Avalanche backed her up. “Even if we knew it would work for sure, we don’t know how to get you enough synergy in a single choice.”
There were a few others in the warehouse who’d taken Armored Skin, but everyone else had taken it as their first ability. After bad experiences outdoors, the others were content to use the safe killzones, slowly accumulating enough points for another selection.
I didn’t argue against it. Abilities were helpful, but - for now at least - the monsters were something a lot of people could handle even without them. What Zephyr needed more than anything was freedom. She was, in many ways, a prisoner in her own body.
Getting her third ability had been time-consuming. A fourth would take over a thousand points total: fairly out-of-reach if she could only scrape together a few dozen points at a time.
None of our group was close to getting one. At Zephyr’s current speed, it would take her almost another week of carefully-guarded group expeditions designed entirely to feed her points. Everyone else had more flexibility, but it still took 48 solo kills to get from the third ability to the fourth, and that wasn’t trivial.
As people had flooded into the warehouse, monsters had started appearing more quickly, but only to an extent: the killzones were seeing about twice as many as before. It was a noticeable difference, but nothing like the instant repops near the airport.
“Maybe we should head back over,” I said. “We could get dozens of kills per minute instead of a handful per hour.”
“I don’t think we could get anyone else to come with us,” Byron said. “If we made a mistake, we’d never make it out again.”
Kurt snorted. “The mistake would be going at all.”
I raised an eyebrow.
He shrugged. “Think about it. There hasn’t been water there in about two full days, almost three full days by this evening… and it would take us until this afternoon to get over there, and then we’d need to spend the night before we walked back. Half the new arrivals have the ability Create Water, and they're still dehydrated. Any survivors near the airport would kill us in our sleep to take the water we brought with, assuming we could get the people here to let us take any. If they won’t, we’d be fighting constant monster spawns while dehydrated.”
I frowned. “The monster spawns probably wouldn’t be constant anymore, anyway. We’ve seen them get more frequent here as we got more people. A lot of people have left the airport now, one way or another.”
My grim observation brought the discussion to a halt, but the problem of getting more points remained.
We were tethered to the warehouse, just like everyone else. We had few alternatives for the shelter it offered, which made extended hunting expeditions tough.
If we headed to the west, there were two other large buildings we could huddle in for a quick breather, but there was nothing to the east or south. Any distance we traveled in those directions, we’d have to retrace in the event of exhaustion or injury. Caution limited our range, and we had to share the space near the warehouse with others.
The areas near the killzones had to be left alone, or people got upset as we “stole” their points. The other two-thirds of the warehouse parking lot usually had at least a few groups outside, fighting. While the majority of people were content to huddle in safety or, at best, gather points slowly from the killzones, a small minority were - like us - trying to get stronger more quickly.
Of our group, I was closest to a fourth ability, but “close” still meant I was more than 400 points away. More than 30 kills. Even when we went out as a big group, we usually only killed half that many, and the points were shared amongst all of us. Progress was slow. I got more than my fair share of points… but even if I earned double what the rest of my group earned, it was still only thirty-odd points per long trip, and a fraction of that if we stuck to the parking lot.
It chafed. I could have had so many more points if I hadn’t been holding back, trying to let others play catch-up… but I didn’t want to head out alone. Not only did it sound miserable and needlessly risky, I was sure it would be slower in the long run.
Even as I fought alongside TAF, my co-workers were jury-rigging a pump. Kurtis was exhausting himself trying to clean out the engine. JoeyT had taken the ability to re-make the wires, and TAF had been great about guarding our backs while we worked. A cohesive group could accomplish a lot of things that weren’t possible for someone flying solo.
I took a nap after my morning outing and awoke to Byron shaking me awake in what felt like far too little time. “Whassamatter?”
“Kurt’s awake. I want to get him out for another session on the engine.”
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“Alright.” I shook my head, trying to clear the sleepiness from my vision.
“Go get some breakfast. I’ll be back in a few. I’m gonna wake TAF up.”
I rolled my eyes. “We don’t need everyone to walk Kurtis across the parking lot.”
“I hope that’s true. No one’s come through from the airport recently.”
“No one this morning?”
“A few hundred, about an hour after dawn. Another smaller group an hour or so after them.”
I shrugged. “I don’t see the problem. People have been coming in big groups, mostly. Gaps happen.”
“They didn’t yesterday.”
“So? Randomness is random. You can’t expect a real-world situation like this to follow a perfectly regular pattern. Come on, you’re the biggest statistics junkie in the office. You know this.”
He frowned. “I’d agree with you, but I can’t stop thinking about that base-12 number system. There are a few people here with mechanical watches that are still working. We passed the three-day mark about a half-hour ago, and I haven’t seen anyone since then.”
“Has anyone else headed out to hunt?”
“I don’t know. It’s not like there’s a sign-out sheet. Look, you’re right. I don’t have proof… but you’re the one who said you didn’t think it’d be spacedogs forever,” Byron said.
I nodded. “Better to be careful.”
- - -
Everything seemed normal when we ventured outside: we were immediately jumped by a handful of oversized alien rodents, just like we’d expected. After I took down one of the critters, I kept a lookout while the rest of my party finished the other three off.
Nothing else came at us.
“Sorry if I woke y’all up for nothing,” Byron said.
“Eh, better safe than sorry,” I said. “This won’t take long, and then we can go back to napping. How much progress have you made on the engine, Kurt?”
“Not a ton. This will put me a quarter of the way there, I think? I heard you guys went out after dark last night. Next time, wake me up too. If I keep this going around the clock, it’ll be done faster.”
“Okay,” I said, leading the way forward.
“We’ve got a pump almost ready,” Byron said. “Joey made some wires for us. Gonna grab another truck battery while we’re out this time.”
“Will you be able to get the pump past the, uh, anti-stealing stuff John mentioned?”
“Think so,” John said. “Kurt should be able to suppress the mechanisms.”
“That’s good,” I said. Even as I spoke, I kept my eyes on the dark shadows beneath the nearby row of vehicles, vigilant against more attacks. “If we-”
I only had the barest twinge of suspicion that anything was wrong before the pavement reached up and swallowed me.
I moved my staff instinctively, trying to bring it into a guard position, but I’d barely started before I found myself restrained, pressured in all directions. My arms, held apart from my body, were crushed back against my chest. I felt myself lose my grip on my staff as force from both sides squeezed my elbows out of ready position and into a mummy-like posture.
The sunlight vanished.
I could hear muffled shouts and screams. I would have shouted back, whatever happened had knocked the air from my lungs, and the seal around me was complete. There wasn’t much in here to breathe, and I couldn’t seem to push back against the wall surrounding me. I could move it a little when I pressed with all my strength, but it just pressed in on another place the moment I did. I realized I was starting to feel sleepy.
Oh fuck. It’s choking me out.
My fingers twitched as I tried to tap, but whatever the hell this thing is clearly didn’t recognize basic mat courtesy: the pressure didn’t let up.
The next thing I knew, my face was pressed into the gritty surface of the parking lot.
“Is he alive?! Holy shit, Vince!”
“We took too long getting him out… we shouldn’t have been so careful. We should have been faster.”
“Now, don’t y’all panic. He’s alive. Needs a bit more healing as all, but he’s taking heals. If’n I can heal him, he’s alive.”
I groaned, forcing my eyes open, trying to take stock of my situation. I was momentarily confused about where my attacker had gone, but realized I must have blacked out. I’d only lost consciousness once before, when one of the lower belts had suddenly gone from doing a choke really poorly to doing it absolutely perfectly. I’d been too happy for them to tap quickly, and when I had, their focus on what they were doing made them hold on for a second or two too long, not noticing my body starting to go slack. The sensation of losing consciousness and the subsequently-missing time were memorable. This felt… just like that, except for the soreness through my body.
“What in the hell happened?” I moaned.
“The ground fucking ate you!” Davi shouted.
“It wasn’t the ground, Davi,” Twinkles said. “It gave us points. It was a monster.”
I pushed myself up to a sitting position. “I didn’t see anything. The ground felt a little weird when I stepped down, but that was the only thing I noticed. Did any of you…?”
Everyone glanced at each other, then Byron spoke for the group. “Not a thing. I think we figured out why the groups from the airport stopped coming through. Probably turned around when they started getting attacked out of nowhere by these… pavemimics or whatever.”
“I fucked up,” Bolero said. “Byron was worried about a new monster; I should have had my scout critters out. I’m sorry, Vince.”
I rubbed my eyes. My face felt bruised. Bolero tapped my hand and the feeling receded slightly.
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Any of us could have suggested it. I’m… okay, or I will be. Thanks for getting me out of there.”
“We should head back in,” said John. “We need to warn people.
“We need to come right back out afterward,” I said.
“You don’t want to rest?” Davi asked.
I shook my head. “I’m sore, but I can rest while Kurtis rests. I want to get on the road as soon as possible. Tension’s been rising by the hour in that warehouse, and I don’t think the new monster is going to improve matters. Let’s get out of here before something snaps.”