Jacob breached the surface of the rubble with a frenzied gasp of air, a wraith risen from his grave. He dragged himself out and rolled onto his back, cradling his bloody hands to himself. They were worn down to splintered bone at the ends of his fingers, most of his nails peeled off or hanging loose. His clothes were torn to shreds, and he still had the cuffs around his wrists, ankles, and neck.
The sky above him was black smoke. The clouds burned, and the orange glow backlit the heavens with an almost biblical awesomeness.
Jacob laid there for a long time, just breathing. He gave a hoarse, wheezing laugh that ended in an agonized whimper. He curled over on his side, nursing a thousand bruises and scrapes and cuts and breaks. Whatever Cheat the Hangman did to numb his pain, it wasn’t enough. Not for this.
He took the privilege of feeling sorry for himself. Every single thing had gone to shit. His efforts had made no difference. It had all come apart in his hands.
Why am I being punished like this?
What the fuck did I do that was so wrong?
It didn’t matter. There was still work to be done.
Jacob rolled over and worked his limbs under him, supporting himself on his elbows rather than his battered hands. Slowly, and with inordinate effort, he got to his feet. He wobbled, betrayed by unsteady ground and even more unsteady legs, and fell back down. All the hurts flared anew.
He let out a long, breathless groan and started the process over again. It took a few minutes to reproduce his feat, but he managed to stay upright this time. A minor miracle.
He stood in a vast pit of rubble and earth intermingled, a bowl-shaped sinkhole resulting from the facility’s collapse. He started climbing, lost his footing and slid back down more than once. It was tricky without the use of his hands, but his persistence was rewarded when he finally crested the top and reached flat ground.
Rewarded with a good look at what had become of the world. Barren ground piled with drifting ash. Trees reduced to fragile black pillars, branches burnt off. There were thousands of them scattered across the flattish landscape, silent casualties of some nameless apocalypse. This area had likely been a forest. A cracked and warped road extended from the area around the facility and led off into the distance.
A partially collapsed bunker stood nearby past the edge of the sinkhole, a concrete octagon with a steel door that yawned open. Maybe the entrance to the facility.
He could make out parts of corpses sticking out of the rubble below. Seeing that lifted his spirits a little. He was only annoyed that they’d gotten more of a burial than they deserved.
The earth shuddered. The ruins of the facility shifted and sank a little deeper into itself. A husk of a tree fell over in the distance. The earthquake lasted about two minutes before it ebbed out.
A dark silhouette moved overhead. Looking up, he saw a multitude of mismatched limbs dip below the cloud cover, followed by the oily-green, bloated underbelly of some creature he could not begin to classify. It was big, though. The creature drifted aimlessly on the wind like an organic blimp, limbs trailing behind it. It crossed right over Jacob’s head, hundreds of meters up. He watched it go until it merged back with the smoggy clouds and vanished.
Monsters. Fun.
Jacob had a hard time reconciling the fact that this was Earth, and not some blasted hellscape in the realms of death.
Whatever did this, I have to assume it’s happened everywhere else, too.
It didn’t matter. Only one thing mattered.
I have to get to Arcadia.
He had decided that Becca was safe and refused to revise that premise. He just had to find her, wherever she had gone to avoid all this.
If he was lucky, the teleportation to the second Red Right Hand facility had not taken him much further from the city. But considering his legendary bad luck streak, he didn’t put much faith in that.
For now, he would follow the road until he found a settlement and get his bearings from there. He wasn’t sure how well his legs would carry him in this state, but there was no point delaying anything. He was skin and bones, completely emaciated. He’d need to find food and water somewhere, fast, or he was going to die of malnutrition. Considering that resurrection did nothing to alleviate this, it was possible he’d get caught in an endless loop of dying and coming back if his body became too weak to move.
He put that thought out of his head. Fretting over maybes wouldn’t do him any good.
Just as he was about to set off, another creature appeared, emerging from the open doorway of the bunker. A huge black wolf with a smoldering red eye. It moved laboriously out into the gray field, bits of ash getting caught in its fur where it drifted down. It limped heavily, and one of its eyes was scabbed over with blood and matted hair.
The wolf spotted him and headed straight for him in its slow, plodding way.
Jacob settled into a ready stance as well as he could, hands out before him in an open-handed guard. He couldn’t clench his fists if he wanted to. The beast was obviously in no state to fight, but neither was he. Avoiding it altogether would be preferable, but he wasn’t sure if he could limp away faster than the wolf.
“Please fuck off!” Jacob shouted in his most intimidating voice, which at the moment was not very, and ended up doubling over in a coughing fit. Gathering himself, he picked up a fist-sized stone between the palms of both hands before standing back up.
He hurled his projectile when the wolf got within four five meters. It was a bad throw on account of his ruined fingers, but to his surprise and satisfaction he actually hit the beast, right on the nose. It shrank back with a yelp and turned its side to him, hackles raised.
“Just leave me alone, yeah?” Jacob was too tired to put much emotion behind his request.
The wolf stayed where it was, staring at him with its one eye. Jacob picked up another stone and threw it. This landed over a meter off its mark, but the wolf got the message and circled back to a greater distance. There it stayed. Watching him.
“Whatever, good enough.”
He was lucky that the beast had been so easily dissuaded. Given its size, he wasn’t sure what he would do if it came for him seriously. Maybe the Death Glare would be enough, but if not… His fingers weren’t much good, so no gouging or punching. He didn’t have enough strength left in him for a lethal grappling move. He’d have to try and bite out its throat.
It was a slim line of defense. Hopefully it wouldn’t come to that.
Jacob started down the road. Maybe he should have looked inside the bunker for supplies, but the wolf was between him and it, and he desperately wanted to leave this place behind. He didn’t regret his choice.
The way he was shambling with his torn clothes and open wounds, he had to look exactly like an actual zombie to a bystander. That gave him a chuckle.
The wolf stalked him at a medium distance, stopping whenever he looked directly at it. Probably waiting for him to die so it would get an easy meal. He wished he could explain to it that there were plenty of perfectly edible corpses back where they came from. He caught it trying to sneak up to him once and got it to retreat by shouting and waving his hands.
Just what I needed. A proverbial vulture circling me.
At least it’s a nice motivator not to slow down.
It was difficult to tell the time through all that smoke in the sky, which cast everything in a perpetual half-murk, but he was fairly confident it was day. Sometimes, he could catch a small yellow haze through the clouds, standing out as a little spot of purity against the angry orange of the airborne hellfire that danced about up there.
Even in such dismal conditions, he was happy to see the Sun again. So happy that he wanted to stop and weep, but he had to keep moving. One foot, then the other, on and on. If he stopped, even for a few moments, he didn’t think his body would let him start back up again.
The darkness had begun to deepen and his legs were numb from the knee down by the time he saw his first house along the road. More accurately two walls and a sliver of ceiling. The rest had been blown away, scattered across a shallow hillside by… something.
Jacob turned his steps towards the house without any hesitation. He was about ready to keel over dead. He needed someplace to rest, and if that place had food too, he’d consider that a pleasant bonus.
The front door was completely gone, so he just stepped in through the empty gap where a wall should have been. The wolf laid down outside, watching him with that unnerving one-eyed stare from between its paws.
He encountered a corpse almost immediately, laying on the floor of what had once been a living room, judging by the shredded sofas and shattered, heat-warped TV. The corpse had had all its features burnt away, just a blackened, vaguely human shape, frozen in its last act of holding up its arms for mercy. He couldn’t even tell if it was male or female.
It smelled like cooked meat. Barbecue. He only felt a twinge of shame that the smell made him hungry. Maybe there would be a few slivers of usable meat if he dug through the black shell.
If I’d picked the Aspect of Devouring, it might actually do something for me.
But he wasn’t going to eat a human. As ravenous as he was, he wasn’t that desperate just yet. Still, he was happy to have a backup plan. In case he did get that desperate.
There were other corpses around the house. A few of them were huddled together in a bathroom. One of them was definitely a child, clutched protectively between two adults.
He didn’t want to see that. He turned away from the scene. Luckily, the bathroom still had a door, so he closed it.
You could be reading stolen content. Head to Royal Road for the genuine story.
Wherever the kitchen had been in the house, it must have been blown away, because Jacob didn’t find any trace of one. But he did come across some stairs leading into a basement.
He missed the second step and tumbled all the way to the bottom, rolling ass over teakettle until he landed on a cold concrete floor with a blow to the head that set everything spinning. He coughed his way through a long string of curses.
He tried to get up and didn’t make it far before his limbs went out from under him. He managed to crawl over to a nearby workbench and slung one arm over it, using that as a support to pull himself up.
The basement had been spared most of the devastation. Part of the ceiling had collapsed, leaving a gaping hole to the upstairs, but the rest was mostly in one piece, if a little tossed around. It was full of tools and cardboard boxes and old furniture the owners had evidently found too ugly to use but with too much sentimental value to throw away.
And there, tucked on the middle row of a rack of shelves, there were cans of tinned food.
Holy shit. I’m gonna cum.
Jacob shuffled over there as fast as his hobbled legs would carry him. He counted six cans, but there were several more that had fallen on the floor. Once he retrieved those, he was at 10. There were two cans of baked beans, three cans of spam, two cans of corn, one can of corned beef hash, one can of hot dogs, and one can of peaches.
All in all, not a bad haul.
There was only one problem.
How am I going to get these open without my fingers?
He ended up putting a screwdriver—clutched between his palms—to a can of beans, and managed to pry open the pull tab. From there, he used his teeth to rip the lid off. He drank the beans straight up, barely bothering to chew. He’d never been much of a beans guy, but after everything he’d gone through, this was divine. It overwhelmed his taste buds so much it almost hurt.
Despite his body screaming otherwise, Jacob forced himself not to have too much at once. The last thing he needed was to shock his system after starving for so long and dying from that. That would be ironic in the extreme.
He wasn’t sure how much was an appropriate amount to start with, so he ate half the can’s contents and left the rest for later. Not enough to feel full or even satisfied, but at least it took the edge off his self-preservation panic.
With his most immediate concern solved, Jacob felt all the weight of his accumulated fatigue crash down on him. He barely managed to drag himself into a dusty, flower-patterned recliner before his body went completely limp on him and he passed out.
*****
Jacob woke up stiff, cold, and groggy. Sitting was uncomfortable—he’d gotten so thin his bones were poking against the recliner and each other. Even with that, he still didn’t want to get up.
But he had to. He forced his eyes open with a rattling sigh.
A fuzzy black head looked up at him from between his legs. One red eye took him in.
The wolf shuddered when their gazes met and gave a soft whine, but did not try to flee. He shoved the creature away and nearly fell backwards over the recliner, but managed to stay on.
“Away!” he shouted. “Away with you!”
The wolf circled away but didn’t leave the room. It sat down on its haunches with a determined huff. It watched him, always watched him. Like it was waiting for something.
But it hadn’t killed him in his sleep, so that was something. It didn’t even seem particularly hostile. How could that be? It was a monster, wasn’t it? Jacob had assumed it was a minion of whatever malevolent force had skull-fucked the Earth to death.
Shouldn’t it be a little more… murdery?
It had come out of that bunker, so maybe it had been kept in the facility just like him. Quite the survivor, in that case, to have made it out of the collapse.
The open can of baked beans he’d left for later lay on its side on the floor, licked clean.
“Hey! Those were my beans!”
The wolf did not make any sign that it had heard him.
Jacob rose from the recliner. He found that his fingers had been wrapped in new flesh, although his nails still hadn’t grown back, leaving them looking quite unsightly. Most of his superficial injuries were gone, but from the mute jolts of pain in his ribs and legs he surmised that he was still stuck with a few fractures. Still, it was a wonderful improvement.
The wolf licked at its left front paw, which was clearly causing it pain.
“Hurts, huh? Yeah, you and me both.”
Jacob chose to ignore the wolf and fetch himself some food. He chose canned corn since it would have plenty of water in it. He opened the can a crack and drank the water out first. Not nearly enough, but at least it eased his sandpaper throat.
The wolf watched intently while he ate the corn, following his hand every time he put the can to his mouth.
“You’re not getting any, thief,” Jacob spat.
It whined.
“I mean it.”
Almost like it understood him, the wolf gave a sullen growl and stalked up the stairs, tail between its legs.
Finally, Jesus.
Once Jacob had eaten, he felt almost ready to tackle the day. He decided it was best to keep the basement as a headquarters for a few days until he’d recovered some of his strength. That didn’t mean he could afford to do nothing with his time.
Water, need more of that. And clothes. And something to carry supplies in, a backpack ideally. More food couldn’t hurt. A gun would be good to have while I’m this weak, but that might be too much to hope for.
He went over the basement more thoroughly, including the boxes. Several of them were stuffed with clothes. They smelled funky from being stored away, presumably for a long time, but they were an astronomical improvement over the torn, blood-stained rags he had on. They stank of old piss from when he’d been forced to soil himself in the cell. The fact that he hadn’t even noticed yesterday was a testament to how bad off he’d been.
While he got undressed he discovered something odd. A black handprint on his chest, right over his hard. Five sharp fingers sprawled out. Seeing it put a chill in him.
I am watching. Those three words echoed through him.
Jacob would have liked to wash before changing into clean clothes, but with no water there wasn’t much he could do. He did find a few bottles of soap, so he rubbed himself down with that and scraped off the thin lather afterwards. It would have to be good enough for now. He’d tried to clean off the handprint, but it wouldn’t come off. It was like a scar or a burn, the skin all rough and indented at that area, but it didn’t hurt.
That means the realms of death can affect the living one.
He wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a bad thing. He wasn’t sure if the handprint was something to worry about. He wasn’t sure about anything.
I’ll have to figure it out later. Maybe the snake would know something, if I can make sense of his riddles.
He got dressed in new underwear, a gray sweater, and a pair of sweatpants. Everything was much too large for him given his pathetically emaciated condition, but at least the sweatpants had a drawstring he could tighten to keep them from falling down. He lamented the fact that there were no shoes, but it couldn’t be helped.
He went upstairs to throw the old clothes away out behind the house. A few of the corpses had been chewed on, but there was no sign of the wolf, which was a relief. Hostile or not, he didn’t trust it. And the Death Glare hadn’t worked on it, either, which was disconcerting. Maybe its monstrous nature offered some level of immunity?
Jacob decided that today’s endeavors would consist of continuing down the road with the hope of finding more houses and maybe a way to figure out where in the world he was located, exactly. He had no idea how that Red Right Hand teleporter worked, or what its range was, but it was best to assume worldwide to keep expectations at the floor.
He brought a can of spam with him and set out. The sky was just as dark and dreary as yesterday. He was fairly certain it was morning, but it felt almost like nighttime. He spotted a pack of something monstrous and many-legged running through a low valley on his left, below the road, but they did not see him and disappeared over a ridge.
Several types of creatures so far, definitely monsters. Demonic, I guess? Moraine talked about the urgeks performing a huge sacrificial ritual on one of their slave worlds, so maybe they summoned a whole demon invasion force here.
Do urgeks even have the concept of demons, culturally? Man, I should have studied more. Never thought I’d need to know all this stuff.
The landscape was the same everywhere. Black trees, ground covered in ash like a nuclear winter, no life. In some places, the ash piled knee-high. At least it wasn’t heavy to wade through.
Jacob was forced to stop often to catch his breath and quell bouts of light-headedness. He tried to pick spots that were at least moderately out of view to sit down, behind a fallen log or a rock or a ridge of earth that had shifted from the quakes.
All of a sudden, he started getting flashes in his head.
[REBOOTING…]
[TAMPER ALERT]
[ATTEMPTING TO REPAIR DAMAGE…]
…
…
…
[REPAIR COMPLETE]
…
…
…
[BOOT SEQUENCE COMPLETE]
[DO NOT TAMPER WITH ADVANCED INTERFACE!]
Great. You sure picked a good time to come back.
[WARNING! UNABLE TO ESTABLISH SYSTEM CONNECTION]
[ERROR CODE: DÖD DRAKE]
Scratch that.
He checked his regular interface, which flickered to life soon after, but found the same error message. The System never lost coverage—you could be a thousand meters below the earth and it would still work—which meant that the System itself was down, which meant that KATLA’s mainframes on both Earth and the Moon had likely been destroyed. Not good.
I must have gained at least a level or two while I was imprisoned. I could really use the rewards right now, but I guess that’s not happening anytime soon.
He estimated it was mid-morning when he came across a group of houses clustered around the road. A small village. None of the homes were intact, and three of them had completely burnt down to their foundations. There were cars in driveways, but none of them looked to be in usable condition.
Jacob kept a light step as he went from house to house. Plenty of hiding places for unsavory types to lurk behind.
But to his great relief, he encountered no resistance as he rooted through the village. He was forced to abandon many items that were not recoverable due to being burnt or warped or battered.
Despite that, he came out of his little scrounge well ahead. He found a backpack—admittedly a pink children’s backpack, full of school books that he promptly dumped out. Not exactly the hiking pack of his dreams, but the straps were adjustable, so it would do for now. He also found a pair of proper leather boots, but they were too big for him, so he put on two pairs of scavenged socks to fill them out. It was bulky having to fit the boots over the ankle cuffs, but he managed. Then there was a hunting knife complete with a sheath. The blade was dull—well-loved but not well-maintained—but it was better than nothing. Two chocolate bars. And, last but not least, a six-pack of beer. One of the cans had ruptured, but the rest were still good.
To celebrate his victory, he drank a beer and ate one of the chocolate bars. It was fucking delicious. The only good thing about starving was that it had seemingly cured the way Cheat the Hangman ruined food for him, at least for the time being.
He didn’t want to push his luck too much, and he was starting to get tired, so he decided to head back up the road. But just before he turned to leave, he spotted a fallen road sign just outside town. He hurried over and lifted it up. It read:
‘E6
OSLO
32 KM’
Oslo. That meant he was in former Norway, now part of the NE-HZ region Northland.
It could have been better, but it could have been a lot worse. At least he was on the right continent. He could travel south by foot—or car if he was lucky—down through Northland, into former Denmark, and to Arcadia from there. But that assumed the bridge between the landmasses was still intact, which he didn’t like to bet on.
The other option was to head into Oslo proper, find a boat, and take that to the north coast of Germania, from which he could walk to Arcadia.
He liked the second idea better. Faster by far, assuming he could find a working boat. He had never operated one before, but it couldn’t be that hard. He’d manage.
All right. Oslo it is.
But first he needed to rest up. He wasn’t going to get far in his current state, especially if he bumped into trouble along the way.