We were no more than five feet away from the front door of the pizzeria when it swung open. Wood came staggering out, hefting what looked like a giant dead ferret over his shoulder. Teddy groaned beside me.

Ellie came out the door right behind Wood, and she had a laceration up by her temple, and blood trailing down her cheek and down her neck. Again.

Fuck…

Wood stopped in this tracks when he saw us. Ellie, looking a little dazed, ran into him—well, she ran face first into the giant ferret corpse. After she shook that off, she turned and looked at us.

“Where the hell have you guys been?” She sounded equal parts infuriated and shaken. That’s when her eyes focused on me. “And what the hell is all over you?”

“We were out grinding.” I stood there, and stood up at little straighter under her gaze. “And we both leveled up.”

She shook her head, looking really pissed off. “This isn’t really a game guys, this is actual reality, the end of the world, remember? And everything here is trying to kill us.” She came down the stairs, passing by Wood, and then glared at us both. “And you two think it’s a good idea to just go out and try and get killed, is that it?”

“That’s not what we were—”

I cut Teddy off mid-sentence. “That’s the point, Ellie. We can’t just sit around and wait for monsters to come and try to kill us.” I waved my arm over at Wood and the giant ferret corpse, and then pointed up at her bleeding head. “The game will send stronger and stronger things after us until they do kill us.”

She opened her mouth and started to take a breath, ready to argue with me. But then she didn’t. Ellie just stood there for a moment, staring at me.

I took her silence as a chance to say more. “So if we start playing the game these aliens want us to play, and we start leveling up, then it’ll be harder for these things to try to kill us. Harder to kill, equals living longer.”

Her eyebrows scrunched together. I knew that look. I was starting to get through to her.

When she spoke again, the harshness was drained out of her voice, and she sounded almost pleading. “But we could still get killed.” She looked into my eyes. “You could get killed… again.”

Teddy laughed. I gazed at him like he was crazy. This was not the time to start laughing like a madman. But then he started talking.

“Ellie, you should’ve seen him. This dude’s like impossible to destroy now. This huge ass monster smashed him into the ground with its foot, like twice! He didn’t even get a scratch.”

Ellie stared at him, her eyebrows knitting further together.

Warning! Warning!

We were starting to lose her.

But before I could stop him, he elaborated.

“Mort here climbed up on this monster thing, and bashed a hole in its skull—with a freaking frying pan—and then jumped inside and scrambled the fucker’s brains.” Teddy was definitely getting the hang of cursing. “It was amazing, and extremely disgusting.”

Her face started the drop, and then she turned and looked down at me. “You come back to life, and now you’re suddenly suicidal?”

Suicidal? Is that what I’ve been feeling?

No, I had felt desperate. I had felt desperate to stop the monster before he killed my friend.

“Not suicidal, Ellie. Desperate.”

She closed her eyes and shook her head, letting out a slow sigh. When she opened her eyes again, she rolled them up in her head. It was my turn to sigh. She understood now.

Yes!!!

“Well,” she said, “we’re not going out and trying to kill anything else tonight. And you need another shower.” And with that she turned around and walked away, towards her house behind the pizzeria.

***

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The next day we weaponed-up, met up in front of the pizzeria, stretched like we had to when we were in Mrs. Young’s GYM class, and headed out to find some monsters. Since this all was based on video game logic, technically these were going to be mobs. But I guess some of them could be NPCs. It was too early to tell.

I had my mom’s old frying pan back in my inventory and called up into my favorites list, so I was ready to swing on anything that came near me in a moment’s notice. Wood, being what they called a man-at-arms, could literally call upon any weapon within a mile of him. But he didn’t take any chances. He had knives, he had a crowbar, and he had a staff. Teddy had his bow, and some daggers on his belt. Ellie had her nasty razor wire covered baseball bat, and a single dagger in her belt.

As we left, Ellie pulled a strange looking stone bug the size of her palm out of her inventory, and then slapped it onto the façade of the pizza parlor. Not a heartbeat later it pulsed, turning from kind of like a marbleized white stone, into what look like a living, squirming insect.

“What is that thing?” I asked.

“It’s a domicile protection do-hickey,” Ellie said.

I gave her a hard stare, and blinked. “And you just thought to put that on the pizzeria?”

She shook her head as she was passing past me. “It doesn’t work if there’s anybody inside the structure. Believe me, we found that out the hard way.”

Oh…

Ellie caught up with Wood, and they led the way. Wood looked back at me with a disdainful glare. I still didn’t know why he was being like this. It was as if he really hated me now.

I just had to believe it was because he didn’t trust me yet. That, yes, I could be part of the game, a mob, or an NPC.

Or one of the aliens playing secret agent.

I walked towards the back of our group with Teddy, as we all made our way through and out of our neighborhood. We needed practice, we needed to start killing these monsters. And there was no better way to do that than to go out on a fieldtrip of sorts to intentionally provoke them into attacking us.

That had been the idea. But after an hour of traipsing across town to nearly the city limits, we hadn't been bothered by anything. Hell, we hadn’t seen hide nor hair of one single monster. It was as if they were all at home in their dingy, dark little layers, taking a siesta.

Did monsters nap?

Once we got to the city limits, we decided not to head out what was left of the service road leading out of town, and out into the forest itself. Because, yeah, there’s a lot of wooded area in upper Pennsylvania. And if towns were full of monsters, Then the forests around them were probably teaming with them, too.

So, instead of going back the way we came, we decided to trek around the perimeter of the city, staying close to houses and other buildings. Well, what was left of them. I still couldn’t wrap my head around how much of my hometown was just no more than a pile of rubble, some of it still smoking.

A small pack of wild dogs, which were obviously not mobs, or NPCs, skittered away from us as we came closer to the police station. For some reason, it hadn’t been built near the City Hall, which would’ve made more sense. But instead, it was one of the first things you came across when you drove into town from Pittsburgh. Maybe that was intentional. Maybe they wanted it as a warning: slow down, don’t do anything bad in this town, or the long arm of law will come crashing down on you.

Some shit like that.

Most of the building was intact. But, the front of it was no more than a gaping hole, blackened from an apparent explosion. There were a couple of cop cars still parked out front. But one of them had blown up as well, leaving only a burnt husk behind. The other had been smashed down to the ground, not unlike my mom’s car.

I stopped and stared at the smashed car, trying not to relive touching my mom’s dead hand.

“What did that mean?” Teddy said, talking low. “Polka will never die?”

Even though I could still feel my heart tearing a little more, just thinking about it—thinking about that damn bumper sticker made a smile twitch at my lips. I started walking to catch up with Ellie and Wood, and Teddy came up beside me again.

“You remember how my mom and dad were really into fantasy stuff, right?”

Teddy nodded. “Yeah, Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, The Witcher, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and The Vampire Diaries were always on at your house.”

“Well, it wasn’t just TV and movies. My parents really loved reading books, too. Urban fantasy was my mom’s favorite genre, and her favorite author was this guy named Jim Butcher. He wrote about a wizard PI in Chicago, and one of his friends in the series is a medical examiner named Butters.”

“Like on South Park?” Teddy asked.

“No. This guy… he was just a nerdy medical examiner who helped the wizard out from time to time. He also loved polka music.”

“Really?” Teddy chuckled.

“Yep. Weird Al Yankovic was the guy’s hero. So at a dire point in one of the books, he’s freaking out, and Harry has to try and calm him down and give him a reason to keep it together and keep fighting.”

Teddy looks over at me. “Polka will never die?”

“Polka will never die,” I repeat.

We laughed for a couple seconds, but then we fell silent again. I really love my parents—loved… I really loved my parents. I hoped one day I would be able to think about them and not feel pain.

About twenty minutes later, we rounded the corner headed towards the library. The only thing that was left of the library, quite literally, was the cement handicap ramp and stairs leading up to the front door. But there was no front door now. There was no library now. At least it wasn’t smoking.

I looked over and saw that Teddy was very tense. His eyes riveted on what was left of the building.

Oh, shit…

“I’m sorry” I said, “I know how much that place meant to you.”

He gulped, shook his head and looked away. “It was more than a building with books. Everyone inside just… understood me.”

Teddy had been a volunteer there, re-shelving books, moving boxes for the librarians, reading to little kids at story hour on weekends. He was really good with doing funny voices to make the kids laugh.

“We understand you,” I said, waving my wee little arm towards Ellie and Wood up ahead. “We always have.”

Teddy nodded.

Something flew up out of the blackened pit that used to be the library, and landed right in front of us, rolling around for a second before coming to rest, literally face up. It was a mangled skull, with some of the meat still on it.