“You got what you needed?” I asked.

“Yep, let’s scram. Nice job, by the way.” She replied.

“I cheated for that first one, but yeah. Let’s get out of here.” We scurried back pretty quickly. Technically we might not have been in immediate danger, but there was still that thing flapping above us and whatever had spooked that pooka into such a hurry was still out there as well.

“So what was it that you needed from your car?” I asked, once we were safely indoors again.

“Tampons.” She said.

“Oh. Really?” It wasn’t that hard to tell when Madeline was on her cycle, and she certainly hadn’t seemed to be at the time.

“Yep. Wanted to get them before I needed ‘em. I also grabbed my other gun.” She pulled the firearm in question from her inventory. It was a long skinny thing, with a wooden stock and a blued barrel.

“It’s my twenty two plinker. Not the most lethal of calibers, but it should still help.” She explained.

“Cool. Why was it in your car?”

“Because possessing firearms is against the terms of the lease, and this thing is harder to smuggle in and out of the building than my other two guns.”

That checked. The revolver hung out in a pretty innocuous tackle box, and her beretta lived in her purse, so those could just come and go without comment. The lengthy rifle was not so easily disguised; thus why it lived in her car.

Though that did seem a little unsafe.

“How much ammo you got?” I asked, instead of questioning her on her choices regarding gun storage.

“About 150-something rounds.” She said, cheerfully.

“That seems like a lot.”

“It's a good day’s worth of shooting. I got two thirty round magazines for it, so it isn’t hard to burn through the ammo.” she said.

“Anyway,” Madeline continued, “trade me.”

“Uhh, sure.” I handed the revolver over, being careful not to point the business end in the wrong direction. I was mostly successful in that, though my hand shook more than I would’ve liked.

“You're shaking pretty bad, Leo. You ok?” Apparently she’d noticed my tremoring hands as well. I clenched my fist in an attempt to suppress the spasming, and only made it worse in doing so.

“I’m mostly fine. Just. . . still not used to this whole fighting for my life thing I guess.” I said, taking a long breath in and out.

“You did pretty well out there, I thought.”

“I did ok.” I agreed. “Still scares me.”

“Huh. You’ve done a pretty good job of hiding it then.” Madeline said, handing me the rifle and pulling a magazine to go with it from her inventory.

“Aside from this morning you mean?” I regretted that pretty much immediately after I said it.

Why am I such a dumbass?

“That-” Madeline stopped, taking a second to collect her words. “-was something else, yeah. I really think you’ve done a pretty good job otherwise, though. The possible end of the world ain’t an easy thing man.”

“Yeah. It really isn’t.” I sighed for the umpteenth time and put the gun she’d given me away before straightening up. We were back to relative safety, so I took deep breaths, trying to get myself to calm. Madeline looked at me with obvious concern, but didn’t press me. I was grateful for it. Showing weakness or vulnerability to other people wasn’t something I was used to.

But maybe I could start getting better at it.

“So about what happened this morning, I uh, take meds and see a therapist, because that wasn’t really anything new for me.” I said quickly, before I could change my mind.

“I’d been doing better for a while, I think, but then Jacob turned out to be an asshole and then everything else happened, and now I’m just not doing super great, if I’m honest.”

“Honestly, that’s perfectly understandable. All this,” Madeline said, as she twirled one arm in a wide circle around her, “fucking sucks. And losing access to your therapist can’t help.”

“It’s not great. Especially ‘cause I’m almost out of meds.” I hadn’t meant to say that last part out loud. Apparently I was rattled enough that my mouth was working without me.

“Shit man.” Madeline swore.

I only had about five days worth of medication left. It was an SSRI with a fairly long half life, meaning it would stay in my system for a while after I stopped taking it. But all that meant was that I had some extra time before things went south. Like, real south.

I’d been trying not to think about it. And frankly continuing to do so seemed like my best bet. There wasn’t anything I could do about now afterall.

Time to change the subject.

“Regardless, what do you wanna do next?” I prompted. Madeline gave me what I can only describe as a look, but I pushed forward undaunted. Moping wasn't gonna get us anywhere, and it was time to move on.

“As gross as it is to say this, neither of us have murdered enough things yet to make up for yesterday’s losses. Should we head back out, or take a break first?” I said.

Madeline let a breath out between her teeth and relaxed her posture, apparently giving up.

“I’m good for a break, even if we haven’t done much.”

“Let's do that then.” I checked the time on my phone. It was only half past ten in the morning.

“It’s a bit early for lunch, but I could use a snack. Wanna break into that vending machine and raid it for all its worth?” I suggested, pointing at the automated dispensary that usually hung out next to the elevators. Someone had pushed it over towards the front door in order to incorporate it into the barricade.

Which meant it was now unplugged and functionally useless. I figured that smashing the glass and pilfering the snacks within would serve to elevate our moods significantly.

Madeline looked at me incredulously for a second before bursting out in laughter. I giggled too. I should say that neither of us were usually the ‘smash and grab’ type, Madeline being far too upper class and myself too perpetually ridden with guilt and shame to ever even think about it.

The end of the world just seemed like the perfect time to change that.

We stalked towards the vending machine like middle schoolers about to sneak a whoopee cushion onto the teacher’s chair, trying not to laugh the whole while.

Though once we found ourselves before the vending machine, we were at a bit of a loss as to how to effectively pilfer it.

I briefly attempted to use telekinesis on the items inside the machine, but I couldn’t seem to do anything but fruitlessly push on the outside of it.

I then gave it a kick. A bag of chips shook tauntingly from its hook.

Well if that was how it was going to play, then the kid gloves were coming off!

I nodded to Madeline once, and stepped back to let the professional handle it. She made a show of spitting into her palms, rubbing her hands, and winding up for a punch.

Madeline rotated her chair with a quick swipe of her wheels using one hand, and let loose a fist with the other. The machine crashed against the barricade behind it, the safety glass window on the front of the machine gaining an impressive number of cracks, but not breaking.

“Fuck, owwww. . ." Madeline whispered, shaking her hand out. She was visibly bleeding on a couple of her knuckles.

“You ok?” I asked rhetorically, wincing.

“Yeah. It’s not as bad as it looks.” She said, ever the tough cookie.

“Well, should we call it there and head back?” I suggested. Theoretically we could get the machine open by shooting the glass or using a beam weapon, but that’d be a bit of a waste. Plus, we couldn’t afford to make that much noise. That one blow from Madeline had already been pretty loud.

“No way in hell!” She cried, “At this point it's personal.”

“Well ok then.” Despite my earlier thoughts on the subject, I readily pulled Madeline’s rifle out of my inventory and inserted the magazine. I searched for the slide and was about to pull it back when Madeline stopped me.

“Wait wait wait!” She waved her hands hurriedly. “Don’t fire that thing in here you idiot!”

“Ok but. . . How else are we gonna get through the safety glass?” A plasma beam was hardly a smarter solution.

“I was just gonna slice it open.” She said.

“Oh. Right.” I put the gun away and stepped to the side once again.

Madeline reached for the sword strapped to the back of her chair, and then seemed to think better of it.

Instead, with little to no preamble, she brought her left hand down in a chopping motion.

There was a flash and brief shower of sparks.

I saw that she’d scored a clean line down the front of the machine. She pushed on the safety glass experimentally and it bowed along the line. She’d apparently cut straight through the glass and metal with her bare hand.

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Though not effortlessly. After pulling her hand back frem where she’d been pressing, a bloody handprint was left on the transparent surface.

Madeline looked down at her hand and cringed. The tips of her fingers were torn up bad enough that I could see glistening white beneath the red. To this, Madeline only made one utterance:

“Ouch.”

“What the fuck Maddy.” I said flatly.

“I’m pretty sure I threatened to deck you the last time you called me that.” Madeline grumbled sourly.

“Good luck accomplishing that when you’ve ruined your good hand.” I shot back. Her left hand was absolutely ruined.

“I have a sword, you know.”

“Yep. Just try grabbing it with your right,” I said, knowing she couldn’t reach behind her head. “I’ll wait.”

“Fuck you too.” She snarled.

I might have gone a bit far with that one. I was a bit bunched up to begin with, and seeing Madeline injured was reminding me uncomfortably of the last time that happened.

“I’m sorry.” I apologized, mostly as a preface. “Now do you wanna use a healing item or are you gonna keep procrastinating?”

“But those things fucking hurt.” She whined.

She wasn’t wrong, was the thing. The healing always hurt worse than the initial injury, but she was bleeding all over the place at this point.

“You know you're getting blood all over your nice sneakers, right?” I pointed out.

“I just cleaned those things too.” She shifted her bleeding hand forward slightly to redirect the dripping blood and grimaced, presumably feeling a fresh jolt of pain.

“God, fine.”

Madeline opened her display, swiping once and taking a deep breath before tapping the screen. I heard her hiss loudly, and tears sprung in her eyes as her fingers swarmed with little black spots.

She then slammed her right arm on her armrests and proceeded to swear profusely for the entire duration of the healing process.

“Why does that hurt so much worse?” Madeline grumbled finally, once it was all over.

“Dunno. I’d appreciate it if you could stop injuring yourself though.”

“Look man, How was I supposed to know that was gonna happen?” She said, reaching for her sword.

“I don’t know. What the hell were you even trying to accomplish?” I asked.

“Well,” Madeline said, hoisting the blade from its sheath, “Remember when I punched that big guy and it basically didn’t do anything?”

“With an unfortunate amount of clarity, yes.” I responded. That particular series of events probably wouldn't leave me until the day I died.

Madeline breathed out and cleaved downwards with a blade covered in rapidly swirling black. The stubborn box of comestibles gained another long gash in its frame.

“That time I used my ability when I punched, but it only did the flashy part, not the black cloudy thing.” She waved her arm at me to step back a bit more before continuing.

“And that got me thinking. Maybe the glowy part of my Strike ability isn’t the important part.” She punctuated that statement with a grunt, swinging horizontally this time.

“Maybe it was the dark swirly stuff that was actually doing all the cutting. So I tested that out on that bear thing and those guys in the hallway.” Miss Madeline sheathed her shortsword again and shoved her hand against the one of the seams she’d just made, worming her fingers in the gap.

Once she’d succeeded, she started peeling back the sheet metal and the plastic.

“I found out that I could basically make that knife longer than it was, and I figured if I could make that happen out of my hands it’d be neat.”

“And that led to you losing your fingertips, how?” I understood her thought process, but I didn’t get how we ended up with self harm as an end result.

Madeline managed to pull a substantial amount of the front cover off from the machine before she took a break to catch her breath.

“That’s the thing, I don’t know! I was just figuring I’d try to karate chop through it and either it would work or it wouldn’t-” Madeline gave the wrecked vendor a frustrated slap, “-Not that it would work and my fucking hand would explode!”

“That sucked.” I said, not having a better response.

“That it did. But,” Madeline paused to wrench aside the last bits of aluminum standing between her and our prize, “I won in the end! Take that ya piece of scrap!”

“Yes,” I said while grabbing a bag of plain salted potato chips, “but at what cost?”

“A healing item and a reminder that the tips of your fingers have a lot of nerve endings.”

“That and the blood you’ve gotten all over the place. I mean look at that, someone’s gonna think somebody died here.” I commented, munching on a small handful of chips.

“Little late for that. Our other bloodstains are all over the stairwell.” Madeline pointed out, reaching for a pack of everything bagel flavored cashews.

She opened the packet and poured the entire thing directly into her mouth, her cheeks bulging like a squirrel’s.

That caused me to sharply inhale, and sent me coughing as I choked on my chips.

Madeline huffed through her nose, trying to suppress another giggling fit and not spill any of the nuts in her mouth as she chewed.

I grabbed a seltzer from my inventory and chugged it in order to clear my airways. The carbonation burned my throat a bit as it went down, and I Iet out a loud belch shortly after downing the entire can.

That was enough to send Madeline over the edge. Unable to contain her laughter she ended up spewing half chewed nuts across the room.

“God, why are we so fucking dumb?” I asked.

“Because life is hard, and unkind to the overly intelligent.” Madeline responded.

“So the apocalypse has made us dumber, you think?”

“One hundred percent. My brain cells decay every day I go without the internet.” She asserted.

***

“Hey, I know I said we should pilfer this thing for everything it was worth, but do you think we should leave some for anybody else?” I asked.

“. . .?” Madeline briefly paused shoveling everything she could get her hands on into her inventory in order to turn her head towards me. Looking at her face I could tell that the thought hadn’t even occurred to her. In fact it seemed like she thought I was vaguely insane for even suggesting that we might not take everything.

“I just brought it up because there might be other people in the building hungrier than us, is all.” I said, raising my hands to defend myself from Madeline’s intense gaze.

“I mean we could. . . but there’s no guarantee the person who really needed it would be the one to get it. Everything else could just as well be taken by the next guy, and that might as well be Jacob, or someone else like him.”

She wasn’t wrong. Especially about the possibility that however indirectly, I might end up helping fucking Jacob, of all people.

He was probably still alive after all. People that awful tended to live forever.

I still felt a bit guilty taking more than I needed though, so I started thinking about ways to compromise with my overly sensitive conscience.

“Is there anybody else in the building you give a shit about?” I asked. If we could just share some of the haul around then that would make me feel a lot better.

“Not really, no. One of the guys who plays on my team lives on the fifth floor, but he had class on the day everything went down so. . .”

“Oh, you mean Nick?”

“You know him?” She asked, slightly surprised.

“We chatted a couple times. He seemed like a nice guy.” I didn’t know the man super well; I only really knew him at all because of a mutual connection to Madeline.

You see, I liked to bake on occasion, but almost anything worth baking ended up making more leftovers than would be healthy to eat on my own. So I’d foist off the spares on anyone I had access to.

Madeline’s team happened to use one of the gymnasiums on our campus for practice, and I knew when they held it because of Madeline. Thus, they all got cookies on a couple occasions.

Nick had introduced himself to me during one of these deliveries. He’d always been one of the folks there who seemed the happiest about the free sweets, so I remembered him.

“Do you wanna check to see if he’s in his room by any chance? I know he’s got a sweet tooth so we could leave some candy by his door even if he doesn’t respond.”

Madeline seemed a little stunned by the suggestion. I didn’t think I’d said anything all that wild, but I waited for her to pick her jaw up off the floor regardless.

“I just sort of assumed he was dead.” Madeline admitted.

“. . .”

“Why are you like this?” I sighed.

“It’s a defense mechanism.” She said, looking down at the drying clots of blood on the ground. “If I expect the worst, then the world can’t hurt me.”

“Really?

“Yep.”

“Huh. Does that work?” I asked doubtfully.

“No, but having hope requires more bravery than I got access to right now. Let’s finish looting this thing and get up to the fifth floor.” She said flatly.

***

So that’s what we did. I grabbed most of the sweet things, and Madeline took everything salty. Except for the pretzels, which she apparently hated.

So I got five packs of stale pretzels to pawn off on the first sucker I could find.

Hard pretzels suck.

Going up past the second floor, we naturally stumbled onto all the dried blood and gore from the other day. The monsters didn’t seem to ever leave any blood behind, but we’d both lost buckets of the stuff.

Which really should have come with long term consequences, come to think of it. Neither of us had ended up feeling all that anemic or anything.

I decided to chalk that up to another win for the healing potions.

Still, the stairs on the fourth floor were pretty nasty. Dried blood completely covered the landing next to the exit as well as the landing below it. Scorch marks covered the walls, and I suspect the only reason I hadn’t burned the whole place down was because the walls were concrete. Looking closer, I saw that one fire-bleached wall actually had newly formed cracks in it, presumably from heat stress.

It stunk too. A metallic, sickly sweet smell. If all the insects hadn’t already started their hibernation for the winter, I imagine there would have been a lot of flies.

We hustled to get through it and proceeded to our destination.

Nick apparently lived in room 511, left from the stairs and at the end of the hall.

Nobody answered when we knocked, which was just as well given that at least neither of us got shot. As planned we left a small pile of candy. Mostly all the nougat filled candy bars that I wasn’t fond of.

Madeline cried a bit.

I didn’t bother asking her why, and just gave her the time she needed.

***

After that we trekked back until we ran into somebody on the second floor. They were an older lady, maybe in their forties or so? Regardless, they were pretty wary of us. I said hi, Madeline elbowed me in the stomach for opening my mouth, and they went back into their apartment without a word.

It was nice to see someone else around, even if they hadn’t been eager to see us. The rest of our short trip back was uneventful.

Once we were back in homebase Madeline exhaled a loud sigh.

“Nice job scaring the crap out of that poor woman, Jackass.”

“What did I do!?” I cried, indignant. I didn’t recall doing anything all that threatening, after all.

“Dude! You’ve got freaky purple eyes and a floating robot with some haunted fucking kitchen knives following you!” She exclaimed.

“Oh. I forgot about those.” That lady’s reaction made a whole lot more sense in that context. I’d probably worry about seeing someone like me in the hall too.

“Jesus christ, man.” Her face palm was audible and her disappointment in me was profound.

“Look, I wasn’t trying to be a menace! I just forgot!” I tried defending myself.

“And that honestly just makes it worse.” She sighed, and grabbed another packet of nuts from her inventory.

“Anyway, I vote we rest for an hour and then head back out.” Madeline said, between a small handful of almonds.

“Allright. Do we know where we’re going next?” I asked.

“Not really. Any Ideas?”

“Well, if we’re open to the Idea of more looting there’s this awful convenience store nearby that I used to work at.” I suggested.

“Really?” Madeline raised an eyebrow.

“I mean, not if you don’t want to.” I wasn’t going to make her do anything.

“No, I'm fine with it. I just had the impression that you were less. . . Morally flexible than that.” She replied.

“You’re not wrong. The only reason I’m ok with it really is because I used to work there.” I explained.

“And that makes it better because why?”

“Madeline, I got held at gunpoint twice at that job. And both times I was told to work late by my manager afterwards.”

“Oh, fuck that guy, then. I say we rob him blind!” Madeline cheered.

“Yeah!” raised a fist in the air, more than a little excited by the idea of getting revenge on a former employer.