I didn’t wait any longer.

Taking abilities always made me feel weird, but this time I felt something extra near my face: intense pressure. It reminded me of a sinus headache, but fortunately only lasted a few seconds.

My new vision was strange, unlike anything I’d ever seen returned from an infrared camera. I still had my normal color vision, and I could still make out when things were white or gray or green or black, but I was getting more information, too. The best way I can describe it is someone holding a string of Christmas lights behind a stained-glass window. The picture on the window itself was visible, but you could tell where the lights were behind it.

The wavering intensity was disorienting, like looking at a screen of a 3D movie without 3D glasses on; two similar scenes floated on top of each other, not quite resolving.

Can I turn it off?

The moment the thought crossed my mind, I realized I could. A glance at my interface showed that I’d received more than 50% synergy with each of my other Biological Augments, putting my vision over 200% the moment I got it, so maybe the toggleable nature was my bonus. Or maybe this ability came that way, and there was no bonus. Who knew? Reinforced Skeleton was over 200% as well. Maybe I’d stop needing to bother the healers before I fell asleep for help with my aching bones!

I played with the ability, flicking it on and off as I looked around the room. Davi had been sitting in a square of light from a warehouse window, and her dark hair practically glowed in my infrared vision.

“Whoa, weird.” I couldn’t hold back the comment.

Davi raised an eyebrow. “You’re saying I look weird? That’s rich, Vince.”

I shook myself. “Do I look much different?”

“Your pupils are definitely much bigger. And… you’re just… off… somehow.”

Kurt and his crew picked that moment to come in. The truck had been filled completely, but they carried a few cans of extra gas. “Vince is always off somehow. What else is new? He- Oh. Shit. What did you do to your face, man?”

I felt at my nose and cheekbones. Were they different? “I just took an ability. It looks that weird?”

“Yeah,” Kurt said solemnly, just as Twinkles, a few steps behind him, said “No.”

Davi and Kurt both gave the eSports player looks of disbelief. Twinkles shrugged. “What? His pupils are bigger, but otherwise he looks about the same.”

I glared at my co-workers. “Are you screwing with me?”

“I’m not!” Davi said. “You really do look different. There are mirrors in the truck cab if you don’t believe me.”

“Fine.”

I might have moved a little too fast across the warehouse, judging by the shouts I startled out of the people who were still awake. I guess my friends’ reaction had gotten to me. What if Meghan thought I looked weird?

It was a possibility - a probability - I’d been actively trying to ignore, and I’m usually pretty damn good at ignoring things. I needed to get back to my wife and kids to protect them. If I had to become a monster to do that, I would… but the idea of getting back and having Meghan not recognize me… having my family scared of me?

It hurt.

Not as much as the possibility of getting back too late, of not being there when Meghan needed me… but it still hurt.

I pulled myself into the cab and flipped down the sun visor, then peered at myself in the mirror.

Instantly, everyone’s reactions made sense. I didn’t look monstrous or inhuman, but I also didn’t look quite like myself. I’d seen my face every day of my life, so, unlike Davi, it was easy for me to pick out the changes.

My eyes and eye sockets were bigger. My eyebrows rested a little too high on my forehead, and the bridge of my nose had changed shape slightly.

It’s not bad. I can wear sunglasses when I meet my family.

The thought made me laugh. Sure, sunglasses would hide this change, but I didn’t intend to stop here. I’d have a fifth ability soon enough, and probably a sixth and a seventh and so on.

Unauthorized duplication: this tale has been taken without consent. Report sightings.

I won’t be able to hide all the changes. It’s okay. I just need to get home.

Before I rested, we took some time to test out the changes wrought by taking a fourth ability. While we were all clearly stronger than we'd been a few weeks prior, it was hard to account for base differences in strength. Our best guess - helped along by a few frail elderly people who'd clawed their way to a second ability - was that the first ability gave you the ability to lift another 50 pounds or so. Far fewer people had a third ability, but that seemed to add another 50 pounds.

This morning, before I’d taken an ability, I’d been able to lift one of the 215-pound sacks of road salt with some effort. I was certain that wasn’t an accurate representation of my actual strength - the sacks weren’t optimized for gripping or lifting - but it gave us a reasonable baseline to compare against.

Now, I lifted that same sack easily. Davi set an empty bag on the top and Byron poured bucketfuls of salt in until I thought the effort of holding it up was comparable to that morning.

Byron frowned at the bag. “Nearly half-full. A little under a hundred pounds more. Did we ever decide if you were scaling up the same as the rest of us, with your muscle augment?”

“We didn’t take a baseline before I got my first or second abilities, sadly. Based on the before/after on my third ability… it looked like it might be helping my strength a little, but it wasn’t 100% certain.”

“Huh. Well, we’ll have to compare when someone else gets a fourth, because right now the strength increase isn’t following any kind of pattern.”

We didn’t bother trying to test my speed, not while we were stuck in the tiny warehouse. The speedometer on Frank was mechanical and still functional, so it was easier to just see if I could keep pace with the truck at various speeds.

My endurance wasn’t amazing, which made sense - the augment had been called “Sprinter” not “Distance Runner,” - but if I got out ahead of the truck to let it get up to speed, I could keep pace with it at 25 miles per hour for about a thousand feet before I got tired. Thirty miles, and Frank had been able to outpace me. I looked forward to seeing if that had changed, but for now it was time to rest.

We left when darkness fell, a little lighter on supplies than we’d intended. A few locals had come by later in the afternoon, hungry enough to risk interacting with a large, organized group. With over a month’s worth of food in the trailer, we’d decided to share some.

“We’ll be heading out into the country,” Davi had argued. “If we need more, we can probably get it from, like… a farm, right?”

“Farms will probably be having trouble too,” Byron said. “How are they going to water their crops and feed their animals?”

It was an uncomfortable question.

“I have to imagine the farms will still be better off than the cities,” I said. “And it’s not like we don’t still have weeks worth of food left.”

“For now,” Byron said. “Are we going to turn down the next person who asks? And the one after that?”

We all knew the answer was no.

“Let’s just try to get away from the cities,” I said.

Getting back on the highway took far less time than getting off of it. We’d cleared the roads of automobiles the previous day, so we only had to contend with monsters and the difficulties of navigating the truck through tight gaps and around sharp corners. While we were still in town, on the roads we cleared earlier, we ran a test: I had gotten slightly faster. At 30 miles per hour, I could keep pace with Frank for a good while.

Kurt paused at the top of the ramp to let JoeyT run back to warn our hitchhikers. All our original crew was riding in the cab for now, but our passengers had used our day of rest to tie down the goods we still carried and bolt handholds to the truck wall. We’d keep the back door of the truck closed, but traveling at night would keep the enclosed area from getting too hot.

JoeyT was back in a flash. “They’re ready.”

“Moment of truth,” Kurt said, and hit the gas.

The truck accelerated steadily and I slid into the seat beside him, enabling my new infrared vision to help warn him about distant obstacles outside the range of our alien Small Light Sources.

“Truck on the right!”

“Car on the left.”

“Something weird dead ahead. Oh, I bet that’s a pavemimic!”

Even with my help, Kurt didn’t feel comfortable moving the truck at top speeds in the darkness, but he was moving much faster than earlier in the day: 25 or 30 miles per hour as opposed to two to five.

We’d only been traveling for a little over a minute before I called out a new obstruction. “Ram! On the right.”

This time, Kurt changed lanes toward the obstacle, rather than away from it. We’d adjusted the snowplow before we’d left: it sat a foot off the ground, sloping to our right at the maximum possible angle, 45-degrees.

The ram accepted our challenge, charging toward us without a hint of fear.

We braced ourselves.

The impact was loud, and the truck shook slightly, but the ram’s helmeted head skidded along the plow with a screeching noise before the animal vanished.

“I think… I think that worked!” Davi said. “The impact wasn’t nearly as big as yesterday’s.”

A brief pause and check to the snowplow confirmed her analysis: the monster’s head had left a scrape in the painted coating, but no visible dent in the thick, heavy metal of the plow.

“We can do this all night!” Kurt crowed.

“That’s what she said,” JoeyT said, absently. John glared at him and the younger man shrugged, grinning.

“Are our passengers okay?” asked Avalanche.

A quick check confirmed that they were.

I grinned, stretching. “We’ll still have to kill monstrosities from time to time, but we’ve got Byron’s device for that, and a whole lotta help. Let’s see how far we can get before dawn!