When we got back to the pizzeria, Ellie and Oz were in the kitchen, talking.

“I'm just saying,” Oz said, “don't you get tired of pizza after a while?”

“We have a ton of it,” Ellie said, “and I know how to make it. Plus, we have the facilities to make it.”

“Yeah, but after a while don't you…”

“I'm pretty much used to pizza. And so is everybody else. We practically grew up eating here.”

“But there are so many other foods out there. I mean we’ve got an oven here, and a stove top.”

Ellie shook her head. “Fine. We have spaghetti and a ton of Ragu meat sauce. Do you want me to make spaghetti?”

“No!” Teddy cried out.

I turned to look at Teddy. He looked white, like 2% milk white. He also looked like he was going to throw up.

Wood smiled, and then chuckled. “If you make spaghetti, we'll have to make my brother something else to eat. He can't eat spaghetti.”

I started the smile in spite of myself. I knew the story. But it was still pretty funny.

“What do you mean?” Ellie asked, feigning ignorance.

Oh, it was going to be like that today.

I looked back at Teddy, his eyebrows knitting together.

“What?” Ellie asked, “Don’t you like spaghetti?” Her face was overtaken by a faux shocked expression.

“Very funny,” Teddy said, his sickly white complexion starting to warm up with a ruddy pink. He was getting pissed off.

I smiled even wider.

“You try to eat spaghetti after you've seen your brother puke it up through his nose!” Teddy spat. “At the freaking kitchen table!”

“We were nine,” Wood said, blinking. “I would think you’d be over that by now?”

“So how is it that you can eat it?” Teddy’s words exploded from him. “You're the one that puked it up!”

Wood shrugged. “I guess I'm tougher than you.”

Teddy stood there for a moment, the pink that had dappled his cheeks was turning red, and was creeping down his neck, and down into his shirt. I’d seen him shirtless at the pool, and when he got like this his entire chest area would turn bright red.

This was going to be good.

“You…” Teddy growled, and then he launched himself at his brother. The fell in a heap to the floor. Teddy landed a couple punches to Wood’s stomach, but Wood used some ninja grappling moves to get himself positioned behind Teddy, grabbed hold of his brother’s neck, and putting him in a choke hold.

I looked up to Ellie and Oz, smiling broadly.

“I could go for some spaghetti,” Oz said. “No one's ever puked it up in front of me. But what else do you have for Mr. Queasy Stomach over there?”

“I'll take care of you, vampire boy,” Teddy ground out, trying to free his neck from his brother’s vice-like grip. “Right after I'm done with this troglodyte!”

“Ooo… slam me with those big three-dollar words, little-brother.” Wood chided.

I saw Ellie's eyes flash white as she mentally flipped through her inventory.

Well, I've got some leftover pizza rolls, pizza bites, a Frozen spinach pizza (Teddy and Wood both groaned), some pierogis I could boil?

Everyone's heads snapped towards Ellie, chiming, “Pierogis!”

“Okay…” she said. “I think we have enough for everybody. And I have some butter.”

I really wished I could eat. I loved pierogis.

And that’s when Ellie’s eyes narrowed and she looked us all up and down. “You’re all covered in blood. What did you kill?”

I tore my eyes from the wrestling brothers and looked to Ellie. Beside her, Oz stood, looking suddenly queasy.

“We didn’t kill anything.” I started telling her about running into Jesse Jackass (Jesse Jackman, actually), and how the two Gilmore Girls trolls had dropped a huge-assed refrigerator on top of him, pretty much smushing him into a gore stew that splattered all of us.

If you spot this narrative on Amazon, know that it has been stolen. Report the violation.

Ellie and Oz just stared at us.

“Oh,” I continued, “and his two friends, slash henchmen, were with him… and like twenty other kids. He had like a mini-army. They all started fighting the two trolls, and we—already knowing how over powered they are—decided to live to fight another day. They were like level 98 and 165, respectively.”

“Yeah,” Teddy coughed out after Wood released him from the choke hold. “No wonder my arrows barely annoyed them.”

“So,” I said, looking down at the dried blood and gore covering me, “the last we saw them, they were getting their heads, arms and legs torn off for their trouble.”

“I’d be surprised if a quarter of them survived,” Wood said, looking happy and triumphant as pushed his brother away and then rolled gracefully to his feet again.

Ellie just shook her head. “That’s a hell of a way to go. But that guy was pretty irritating.”

I nodded, since I could nod now.

“Tell me about it.”

“I didn’t have a problem with him,” Wood said, picking what looked like a sliver of bone from his shoulder, and then dropping it into the trashcan by where the cash register used to be. “Except for him calling us the Lost Cause Boys. That was pretty much a dick move.”

We all nodded in agreement.

Ellie gave us all another long up and down look. “Well, you guys go clean up, and I’ll start the pierogis.”

Teddy and Wood turned and trekked back out the front door. I followed. We walked back to Ellie’s house and then up to the second story. I guess we were going to use her shower.

Wood pulled his blood and gore covered shirt off over his head and then smacked Teddy in the chest with it. “Light on the starch this time.”

I blinked. “You do his laundry?”

Around the blood splatter on his face, Teddy started to blush.

“My brother does everyone’s laundry,” Wood cooed.

I looked back to Teddy with disbelief.

“I have a… a laundry upgrade in my stats,” he said.

I felt my brows bunch. “A laundry upgrade?”

Wood unbuttoned his jeans and pulled them off. “The AI likes the way our Teddy cleans out monsters, so it rewarded him with a laundry upgrade. He cleans, he fluffs and he folds.” Wood plopped the blood stained clothes into his brother’s arms. “He’s our little laundry wench.”

I had to smile as Wood turned and sauntered into the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.

Teddy rolled his eyes.

A couple beats later Wood opened the bathroom door a few inches and flung his underwear at Teddy. The underwear landed on the top of the pile of laundry, and the bathroom door shut again.

I looked to Teddy. One second the blood and gore covered clothing was there, the next it was gone. I guess Teddy had pulled it into his inventory, and into his laundry upgrade.

Teddy shook his head warily. “The AI has a perverse sense of humor.”

Tell me about it.

***

I helped wash dishes. Even though I didn’t eat, I wanted to help. And I fit near perfect on the counter where the Dirty dishes were stacked. I’d gotten pretty good at using the sprayer attachment when I’d use this area as a shower, and I sprayed and scraped the pizza pans, the cutter, and the plates. Then I would hand them over to Ellie so she could scrub them in the sink area. It felt a little weird to be washing them by hand when there was a perfectly good industrial grade dishwasher just to our right.

But, without any electricity, that machine—like so many others—was useless. Ellie had emptied out the thing a couple days into this mess. She’d said the last thing we needed was for some disease to breed in the stagnant water.

Ellie’s grandma had died a few years ago from one such disease: Legionnaires disease. She was fine, seemed to have the flu. Bu the next morning they’d found her unconscious in her bed, her lips blue.

I remembered how sad Ellie had been, and how angry. It had been before we’d started dating, so I’d never pushed her to talk about it. But later, when we had been going out, she’d talked about it a couple times.

Ellie’s grandmother had been her whole world. It had been heartbreaking.

She had the same far off look on her face as she had when she’d shared what had happened to her mother. We definitely were not dating now. But I would stay here and wait for her to decide whether or not she would talk to me about… well, about whatever was bothering her.

I handed her the first of the pizza pans, and she held it in her hands, as if she were frozen for a few beats.

“I saw my mom a couple weeks before… before all of this happened,” she said, her voice flat.

Jesus.

After a few beats of silence, I finally said, “Oh?”

She kept staring straight ahead, as if the gray, pizza sauce stained wall were a window into her memories. “Oz took me to a Fourth of July fireworks… you know, the one in Clinton.”

I let my jealousy flare for a beat before I smothered it like the potential dumpster fire it was. I simply stood there, the oversized dish scrubby in my puny little hand.

She smiled wanly. “Oz had that hand-me-down Honda of his dad’s.” She closed her eyes and chuckled quietly. “Not only did the aliens destroy all the gas stations first thing, but a flaming pit opened up and swallowed Oz’s car right off.”

It was my turn to chuckle. Silently I mourned the Honda. All of us had been shuttled all over Pennsylvania by that little car.

“So,” Ellie continued, “We’re in this huge field at the Clinton fair grounds, and the fireworks start.” She stopped, staring off with that vacant expression again. That look on her face was making my chest hurt.

Again, I don’t have a heart or anything else in there, so how it was hurting me I’ll never know.

“That’s when I saw her—my mom—sitting on a blanket not twenty feet away.”

Mother fucking shitballs…

“There was a man sitting on the blanket with her… and a toddler playing on the blanket between them.” She suddenly realized she had a pizza pan in her hand and dunked it into the sink of soapy water. She started to scrub. I didn’t think she would say anything else… but then she did.

“She saw me. The fireworks were illuminating her face, and the booms were deafening. But she saw me.” Ellie turned and looked me straight in the eye. “And she shook her head, letting me know I wasn’t welcome.”

That cold-hearted bitch!

Ellie started staring straight ahead again.

“I asked Oz to take me home, and he did. No questions.”

“That’s Oz for you,” I said. If you asked him for something, or for him to do something for you, he just did it.

“I didn’t tell him. Not even after.” She shook her head. “I don’t know why.” She bit her lip. “And now I don’t want to dump my load on him. He has enough on his plate.”

I was getting a lot better at pushing my jealousy back. I only did a five second mental jig that she’d told me and not Oz.

But then I said, “That he does. Just consider me your gnome Snapchat sounding board. Whatever you tell me erases five seconds after you send it.”

Ellie grinned and closed her eyes. “I only set my Snapchat to five seconds to keep you on your toes,” she said, and then looked to me, her eyes shiny. “It’s usually 24 hours.”

I smiled back. “I know.”