“If you’re going through hell, keep going.”

Winston Churchill

Bethany did not know where she was headed. She had no plan. All she knew was she needed to get away from the park. She needed to get as far away as possible.

The city streets were a maze with no end and no beginning. Buildings flew past her, but she barely registered their passage. A mediteranian rain from the eastern ocean started to fall, large droplets splattering on her windshield. It was an unnatural rain that had no place on the prairies.

Her mind swirled as she replayed what had happened, over and over. The smell of wine filled the car and her vomit-stained shirt stuck to her skin. Her mouth throbbed where Becka had struck her, and the mixture of wine and tears caused the thorny cuts across her face to burn. A bump formed on the back on her head where she had struck concrete, and she struggled to maintain her focus on the road.

Without destination, she drove on, driven by a desperate need to be anywhere else.

Gunshots rang out in the distance to the west, so she turned east and kept driving.

She wound her way through endless residential neighborhoods, their window blinds pulled firmly shut as if it would protect them from the world outside their four walls. Silens blaring, police cars raced through the major arteries of the city in a vain attempt to maintain order in growing anarchy. She lost count of the number of accidents she passed, though she counted six cars engulfed in flames. She did not slow down to help.

Bethany tore her eyes off the road for a split second to stare up at the sky, towards the golden numbers projected above the city.

210,104

“Twenty thousand people,” Bethany whispered in utter shock. “Nearly a tenth of the city. Wiped out in half a day.”

Bethany suddenly felt very small and insignificant. She drove on.

There was a home burning at the end of a cul-de-sac, and their neighbors were desperately trying to keep the fire contained with garden hoses. It made little difference. Bethany watched in horror as a crystalline orb crashed through the front window of the burning home. The flames subsided and the neighbours gave a joyful cheer, but Bethany knew what came next. She could picture the orb inside the home, wrapping those flames around itself to create a body.

Bethany accelerated, and she caught the faintest glimpse of glowing eyes behind the shattered window before she was out of sight.

Bethany turned north and sped away, before the neighbor's screams reached her ears. She glanced to the sky, and saw their deaths reflected in the number.

210,099

There were monsters everywhere she looked. The orbs created carapaces from whatever material was around them. In a schoolyard, an orb had ripped apart a playground and fashioned itself into an eight-foot-tall orangutang, which now swung from the rooftops of the school. In a narrow alleyway, an orb had absorbed a lawnmower and created a shell with whirling metal blades. It now stalked the sidewalk in front of a hardware store, hunting for victims. Bethany counted another dozen such orb creatures, often surrounded by victims that had strayed too close.

“That could have been me,” Bethany whispered, her hands gripped tight on the steering wheel. “If the orb had been made of anything other than leaves and branches, would I have survived?”

The orbs were not the only monsters invading the city. Bats the size of men flew across a sky filled with the last rays of evening light. Four blue and red skinned women with curled horns knelt above a screaming man as they stripped away his skin. At the entrance of a rundown pub, a monster with the body of a scorpion and the face, chest, and arms of a man stood frozen in place, as if it were guarding the entrance.

Thousands upon thousands of winged eyes flew in flocks above the city to capture the action in the chaotic city below.

Bethany’ own winged eye still followed behind her, the relentless cameraman, broadcasting her fear-driven flight.

Bethany lost track of time. Night settled in, and the horrors were shaded from view. Still, Bethany drove on, without knowledge of what she was searching for.

She felt numb and unable to focus. She could not catch her breath. The horrors around her – the monsters and the human bodies – were everywhere she looked. She twitched at every movement outside the car, and her psyche was strained from constant vigilance.

She drove on. Night settled in, and a full moon bathed the city in an eerie grey light. She was in the north end of the city now. The tropical rain had stopped and the air felt cool and was filled with the scent of pine. She could see the great mountain peaks beyond the stone wall, and thought she spotted a fleck of snow.

Bethany licked her lips and realized it had been hours since she'd had a drink. Her mouth tasted of wine and vomit. Reaching into the back seat, she grabbed a bottle of water from her meager supplies. She spat her first sips out the window to wash the taste of the foul wine from her mouth. The sensation of that first swallow of water brought with it a sudden clarity that had been elusive since she had left the Arena of Dolos.

Bethany glanced at her Civic’s fuel gauge. "Less than a quarter tank left. Where do you even fill up a car during an apocalypse?"

The question entered her mind unbidden, and its absurdity made her laugh. It was an uncontrollable laugh laced with fear and pain, sorrow and shock, and denial and rage. Angry tears streamed down her face as Bethany struck the steering wheel with her palm, again and again, until her palm was red from the impact. It felt better to be angry, and in her anger she felt her bravery return. The bravery that had helped her run from her father and towards a new life.

Bethany turned the car sharply and careened into an empty parking lot. She stripped off her vomit-stained clothes and threw them to the ground in anger. She grabbed two more bottles of water and poured them over her head to wash herself, then dried herself with her worn towel. The winged eye observed it all, but she no longer cared what lay behind its sight.

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She reached into her grandmother’s suitcase and put on a raggedy pair of blue jeans and a red and grey plaid shirt. She grabbed the silver coin and gold disc from her dirty clothes and stuffed them into the pocket of her jeans. Standing there in the cool mountain air, Bethany felt cleansed, and her mind returned to her.

“You survived, Bethany,” she told herself, taking a deep breath. “That is what matters. Now, find somewhere safe.”

Bethany looked out across the city at the glow of thousands of lights shining in the darkness. “Not how I imagined my new life,” she whispered to herself. Her eyes fell on a supermarket two blocks away. Its parking lot was nearly empty, and it has a gas bar. “I won't get far without getting gas. Should be simple enough.”

Bethany climbed into her car and drove away, leaving her vomit-covered clothes, and the helplessness they represented, behind her.

* * *

Bethany entered the parking lot of the North End Savers Supermarket a few minutes later. She pulled in at the North End Savers Gas Bar and switched off the engine, letting the silence of the night settle in. Letting her eyes adjust to the glow of the supermarket's lights, she searched the parking lot for any creatures that might be lurking in the shadows. Satisfied there were none, she grabbed her hammer and stepped outside.

The only movement was from her winged eye, which still floated a respectful distance away. After everything that'd happened today, its presence was almost a comfort.

“This must be what it feels like to have a pet,” Bethany said, studying the eye. Her father hadn't allowed Bethany to have a pet. He'd said it was an unnecessary expense, though he was usually clutching a new bottle of whisky when he said it. The closest Bethany had come to a pet was a friendly squirrel that would climb onto her windowsill. Bethany would leave him peanuts and he would collect them one-by-one, always keeping a skeptical eye on Bethany. She had named him Jitters because he would dart away at her slightest movement. Bethany had been inconsolable after her grandmother accidentally ran him over with the car.

“I’m going to name you Jitters,” she told the winged eye. “You okay with that?”

The winged eye bobbed in place, which Bethany took for agreement.

“Well, Jitters. I don’t know what this God Contest is, but I do know I’m not getting far without gas,” Bethany said.

Her eyes fell on the fuel pump. Its tiny LED screen was cycling through advertisements.

“It still has power,” Bethany observed, curiously. “No one turned it off. No sense spending the time to close up shop when the world is collapsing around you, I suppose.”

She did not have a credit card, and even if she did, she doubted it would work, so she entered the tiny kiosk to enable the ‘pay inside’ option on the pump. She had covered a few shifts at the local gas station when she was seventeen - with pay under the table, of course - so she knew what to look for.

She left the kiosk cradling two gas station sandwiches, three bottles of water to replace the three she had used, and a bag of ketchup chips. She left the last of her cash on the counter as payment, and was half-way through her second sandwich before she reached her car.

Her hunger sated, she filled her Civic with gas. She winced at the slam of the nozzle when her tank was full. The sound carried into the night and bounced off the nearby buildings. Bethany’s eyes darted side to side, hoping the sound did not attract a monster.

She was about to enter her Civic and drive away when a pick-up truck pulled into the supermarket’s parking lot. Its beams cast a bright light across the darkness. Ignoring the parking stalls, the driver backed up to the main entrance of the supermarket so that its empty flatbed lay flush with the double-wide automatic doors. Bethany hid behind her car and watched.

The man that exited the truck was short and fat. He had a bald head and was wearing black jeans and a brown t-shirt drenched in sweat. He must have been over four hundred pounds. He swiped his chubby palm half-heartedly at the winged eye that orbited around him like a moon. He carried a red and yellow fireman’s axe awkwardly over one shoulder. It was the type that would be found inside a case labelled ‘in case of emergency, break glass’.

“Well, I guess this situation counts as an emergency,” Bethany whispered. The man did not appear threatening. He looked like a giant teddy bear that had just been handed a weapon.

The man knocked twice on the window of the truck. The woman that emerged was the polar opposite of the man. She was just over six feet tall with long black hair flowing down her back. She was dressed in rugged overalls and steel-toed work boots and carried a three-foot long metal pipe in her muscular arms.

“We need to be quick, Rocky. Get in, get out. Fill the truck, but grab only what we need,” said the woman, sounding uneasy.

“It might be our only chance, Emily,” answered Rocky. “It doesn’t look like anyone has looted the supermarket yet. Everyone’s too scared to leave their homes, but they will start to run out of food soon. When they do, these places will get picked clean. We need to grab what we can before a quarter million people decide to do that same.

“It’s not a quarter million people anymore,” Emily countered, glancing up at the player number projected in the sky. As she watched, the count decreased by two.

“And I don’t want us to join them,” Rocky answered. “We know what is out there, Emily. We watched from the tower all day as monsters dropped from the sky."

Rocky took another half-hearted swipe at the winged eye as it dove in for a close-up of Rocky’s face. “We need to look out for ourselves first, Emily.”

“I know. I’m not arguing. I just…are you sure we should be staying at the refinery? Everyone else fled back to their homes. We could do the same.”

“What, and wait out the apocolypse in our crappy one-bedroom apartments? Trust me Emily,” Rocky answered, sounding confident. “I’ve thought a lot about this. The refinery complex is surrounded by a chain link fence, with controlled entrances in and out. The towers give us visibility over the whole city. The main office has the lunchroom, with plenty of fridge space and an industrial-sized kitchen. It’s got two floors of offices that can be used as bedrooms, and a gym and showers in the basement. Plus, we’ll never run out of gas!”

“How’d you come up with all that?” Emily said, sounding impressed. Bethany silently agreed with her as she listened.

Rocky pulled a small notebook from his back pocket. “I sit in the security office every day. It was an easy job, but it’s not like I could pull out my phone and start playing games. So I started imagining different doomsday scenarios and writing down plans for surving them in my notebook.”

He tossed the notebook to Emily, which she easily caught. “Nobody questions the attentiveness of a security guard writing in a notebook,” Rocky said smugly.

Emily cracked open the notebook. “Meteors, war with America, surviving a global pandemic… wait, did you write that last one before COVID? Is that why you told me to buy all that toilet paper?”

Rocky chuckled. “I’m a large man. Toilet paper makes its way to the top of the list in every scenario. Why do you think I grabbed the biggest truck at the refinery? You want to turn to page forty-two. Zombie apocalypse. It’s the closest thing to our situation.”

“Good lord, Rocky. Zombie traps, improvised weaponry. Is this the list of rules from Zombieland? You have ten pages that cover supplies required to survive, prioritized by the length of time of the zombie apocalypse. How much time did you have on your hands?” Emily handed the notebook back to him, impressed.

“It’s just a hobby,” Rocky said, sounding embarrassed.

“Well, I would have teased you relentlessly about your hobby yesterday, but today you are the most amazing man in my life. So, what do we do first?”

Rocky pointed towards the supermarket doors. “We go shopping.”

Bethany watched the pair from the shadows until the doors closed behind them. She should get in her Civic and drive away. She should do that. Strangers were dangerous. Becka and Daniel had tried to kill her. These ones had weapons, and they were both bigger and stronger than she was. She should leave this place as fast as she could.

“Remember your plan, Bethany” she whispered to herself. “Step three. Find friends.”

She was not ready to trust anyone – not by a long shot – but what choice did she have? Underneath her fear and her doubt, she was still a pragmatist. She knew she could not survive on her own. Not here. Not in the God Contest.

She would not let what happened with Daniel and Becka be the beginning of the end for her.

At least these two seemed to know what they were doing.

Bethany snuck forward, ball-peen hammer in hand as she moved from shadow to shadow, until she stood in front of the supermarket doors. Her heart raced and she took a deep breath to calm herself.

“Be strong, Bethany. Just take this step, and then take another.”

She pushed away her fears and walked through the supermarket doors, wondering what she would find on the other side.