Everyone stayed in the pizza parlor the rest of the day. I kept on pulling up my stats box, and then looking at my friend’s stats boxes. Well, except for Wood’s. Every time I looked at Wood too long he would get angry and tell me to… well, Wood would tell me to Fuck off! I still had no idea what I’d done to piss him off. Maybe this was just the way he dealt with shit. But he had always been pretty even-keeled.

Well, he fought a lot, especially in middle school and our Freshman year. But then he’d started taking karate lessons. Which, didn’t seem too logical at the time. Sending a kid that’s fighting all the time to learn how to fight better and more efficiently doesn’t seem like the best idea. But Mr. Baker at Mars Shotokan Karate seemed to have a calming influence on him. Though, Wood stopped fighting at school, he was kicking ass three nights a week at the dojo.

Ellie and Wood didn’t talk to me much. I kept on catching them staring at me, and not looking pleased. I really couldn’t blame them. But they were two of my best friends, and they were acting like I was some kind of monster. Okay, honestly, I guess I was. I was trapped in the terra-cotta body of the thing that literally killed me. So, yeah, I guess to them I was a monster.

The sun went down, and my friends automatically started boarding up the two main doors. The windows were already boarded up tight. After that, everyone went to different parts of the pizza parlor to go to sleep. Teddy scrounged me up a dog bed of all things. I didn’t see any dog hair on it or odd stains, and since I couldn’t smell anything, I decided it was pretty clean. I lay down on it. I’m sure it was soft, but, I really couldn’t feel it that much. The longer I lay there, the more acutely I was aware I wasn’t sleepy, I wasn’t tired, and though I could close my eyes and make everything dark, I wasn’t going to sleep. Not anytime soon.

So I got up, and trudged over to where Teddy was sitting on the floor, right beside the boarded up front door. “Can’t sleep?” I asked.

It was really dark with the windows boarded up, but I made out him shaking his head. “It’s my night to stay up and keep watch.” He nodded to a gap in the boards.

I guessed they had a rotation. If I wasn’t going to sleep, I guess I could start doing this for them. That is, if they ever trusted me enough.

I sat on the ground next to Teddy. We both sighed, and for the first time since I woke up in this nightmare, I felt calm. Safe. Normal.

“So,” he said, “what do you remember?”

I blinked, and tried to remember. I wasn’t tired, but things felt really fuzzy.

“I remember… mom calling.” I wanted to bite my lip, but my mouth wasn’t that flexible. Or, maybe I really just didn’t have a mouth, not one that had actual teeth. All that really made my head hurt. “She said that she loved me, and then there were all these explosions. Then the phone went out, and suddenly…” I remembered… “Mrs. Hendershot porch exploded. Next thing I knew, her gnome flew across the street and… that’s all there was.”

Teddy nodded. And then he gulped. “We found you not long after that. Ellie and Oz came and got me. Then we headed over to the garage, looking for Wood.”

We sat there in silence for a little while. I was pretty sure he wasn’t going to say much more, but then he said, “I’m sorry we didn’t bury you. None of us wanted to go back there and see you like that.” He scratched the back of his neck, and looked really uncomfortable.

“You don’t have to talk about it,” I said, but then I added, “But you were there today.”

“I was.” He said.

We fell silent. That silence seemed to stretch on and on. But since neither one of us was going to be sleeping, I decided to change the subject. Kind of.

“So, you’ve leveled up far above everybody else?”

Teddy’s expression changed, his brows knitting together. “Yeah, I guess I have.”

“Why is that? And what’s up with you picking coins and stuff off the ground… is it like drop loot when an NPC or player dies?”

He took a deep breath and sighed. “Yes, on the drop loot. Ellie and Wood don’t trust the game. And that’s what this is. We don’t know anything about the aliens, but it’s literally a game. Our reality has been taken over by it. We have levels, we have an inventory… hell, we have health bars and Mana bars and everything.”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

He bit his lip. “But those two will not play. They say this isn’t a game, this is the end of the world.”

“They’re right,” I said. “If this isn’t the end of the world, what the hell is?”

Teddy laughed. “We’re both right. It’s the end of the world, and it’s all a game. What else do you remember?”

“I think, before I woke up… like this, I think I heard a couple people talking. Maybe it was the aliens. They were talking about me, how pathetic I was for the way I died, and that one of them thought I deserved a second chance to fight. To play the game.”

“If that’s true,” he said, “then that lends credence to the idea this is a game.”

“A game,” I said. “What kind of fucked up Assholes would come up with a game like this?”

Teddy took another deep breath, let it out in almost a laugh. “Well, obviously they’re from the education sector.”

I chuckled, and thought of some of the over-the-top crazy ass teachers we had over the years. “Mr. Phantome and Mr. Brach would be my top suspects.”

Teddy bumped me with his elbow, making me teeter a little bit before righting myself again. “Mrs. Galozeski would be my choice.”

“Mrs. G?” I said, incredulous. “Are you kidding?”

“She had the best cover.” Teddy said. “No one would consider her, since everyone loved her.”

I stopped smiling. “She’s dead, too, isn’t she?”

“Her house was hit even harder than yours. Totally flattened.”

Goddamn it… this was bullshit. But bullshit or not, this was where we were stuck.

“We need to get everyone playing the game.” I said. “If it’s like any other game, then we need to start grinding just to get everybody leveled up.”

“Grinding? You mean you want us to go out and kill people?”

I really wished I could move my head and give him a really hard glare. “No, not people. The monsters.”

Teddy chuckled. “Yeah, you’re right. Every time I kill one of them I level up in some way. I think it’s just experience points.”

That made me think. “Have you gotten any rewards?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, like, do you get any prize boxes? If this is a video game, then you might get rewards, prize boxes. Loot.”

“I don’t know,” Teddy cracked his neck. “I’ve never looked that far into my stats box. Give me a minute”

Teddy closed his eyes, and I could swear that his eyeballs started to glow some from beneath his lowered lids. I almost fell over, trying to see it.

“Well shit,” he said, which was weird, because Teddy doesn’t curse. “You’re right. I’ve got a list of prize boxes a mile long.”

I dug the heel of my foot into the tile floor of the pizzeria.

“What are you waiting for?” I asked. “Open those bad boys up.”

In the dim light, I could see his mouth tug up in a grin. “I’m glad you’re back, dude.”

Something in my head felt like my brain was scratching against something. I couldn’t say that I was happy. I was back as a freaking Terracotta gnome. But yeah, I was glad to be back. To be alive again. I bumped Teddy’s arm with my shoulder. “Me too, man. Me too.”

I didn't say anything to Teddy, but a little while later music started to play. I was pretty sure only I could hear. Down by the River. My ringtone. The music that played right before my mom died.

Fucking assholes…

***

“So where is Oz?”

We were on the other side of town, walking down the street where the high school used to be. Now there was just a crater. No walls, no visible proof that there was ever anything there, except, of course, the big, still smoking crater.

“He’s…” I noticed that Teddy’s shoulders stiffen, and his stride halted a bit as he said that. That meant he wasn’t telling me everything. I’ve known Teddy for years now, and he’s one of my best friends in the world. I know his tells. He wasn’t outright lying. But he wasn’t telling me everything he knew.

That meant there was stuff I didn’t know, and that stuff was important.

But I also knew if I pressed Teddy for more information, he would clam up. Plus, there was the whole I just came back from the dead and was a walking gnome. That would make anyone be a little standoffish. Especially if it was about something important.

I stopped for a second and looked over the expansive, gaping crater of nostalgia and regret. Again, if I had a stomach, I probably would’ve puked by now.

“They really tried to destroy everything, didn’t they?”

Teddy looked back at me. He didn’t say anything, he just lowered his head.

Good God, I wished I had my body back. I missed being able to shake my head, turn my head, eat, smell, taste… breathe.

I pushed my concerns aside. I needed to help my friends. I got this second chance for a reason. And it certainly couldn’t just be because those alien assholes wanted me to have a second chance to fight for my life—to play their fucking game. No, I was back because my friends needed me. And I needed them.

Nothing proved that more than to see them almost be wiped out by a couple monsters in the pizzeria. They’d killed them, but they were vulnerable.

And that meant they all needed to level up. So we needed to grind. If you’re playing a video game, and you want to level up, you go out and you start killing things. That shit will level you right up.

“Do you think it’ll be hard to find a monster today?”

Teddy shrugged.

And then the ground started to shake.

Right in front of us, a huge assed monster lumbered out of the crater that used to be the school. I saw a bunch of long, shiny black legs, a giant pincher for a face, and before I could take a breath to scream, one of those legs smooshed down on me, its foot, or hand, or whatever, smashing me into the ground.