Chedderfield

Chedderfield looked around.

“You okay?” Nguyen asked Lucy. “Not that I wouldn’t have had your back, but you went off on them there . . .”

“Loot ninjas deserve death. They’re all the same, and I don’t care what ‘turn the other cheek’ shit that white-collared bastard was saying, he didn’t say a damn word until after the crowbar had already finished breaking across Arc’s head,” Lucy replied. “That group was playing the good guy, but at the end of the day, even the fucking pastor was willing to watch someone die for a few cards.”

“People have to live, Lucy,” Nguyen replied, her eyes darting to Archimedes for a moment. “I’d kill someone for someone I cared about, like you, if it makes you feel any better.”

“Yeah, I’d definitely murder a few people for you too, Luce,” Archimedes said, rubbing Lucy’s hair as he joined their conversation.

Danielle sighed as she leaned against Chedderfield’s arm. “Please tell me you’re not going to be a part of that overplayed ‘I’d kill for you’ group.”

“I kind of already have. Do you realize how many living, sentient things I’ve probably bashed into oblivion for you?” Chedderfield asked. “I mean, come on. They could talk, they could think, they had their own agendas . . . I feel like I’ve already crossed the line into sentient-silencer for you.”

“Yeah . . . those aliens do have their own agenda, but they’re kinda bad guys, right? Like . . . we can call them that, can’t we?” Danielle questioned.

“If you ask me, I say yes,” Archimedes weighed in. “No matter how smart they are, the hell-cursed aren’t people to us. They’re like Nazis in a WW2 video game: clearly evil bad guys that unambiguously want to kill everyone, so it's okay to kill them first.”

“Yeah, but I’ve killed people too. Remember the police station where we found Silverman?” Chedderfield said. “That didn’t end in a ‘happily ever after’ for some people.”

Archimedes let out a dramatic but clearly forced sigh. “That whole experience with Frank shed some light on human nature in an apocalypse. Such an illuminating experience.”

“I thought I told you to stop making puns off that guy’s ability,” Lucy quickly reminded him.

“Yeah, and . . . you really shouldn’t joke about stuff like that around . . .” Danielle paused as she looked over at Emma.

“Huh? I don’t care. I didn’t know the guy. That was Silverman,” Emma said. “I’m just wondering if you guys are going to finish with the whole ‘Juliet, I love you so much I shall kill a thousand men for you’ bit already. I mean, can we just head back already and sleep? I’ve been up since 4:00 a.m.”

“5:00,” Lucy corrected.

“Wow, I didn’t know they still taught Shakespeare in high school.” Archimedes looked like he perked up at the mention. “I thought it was all the history of memes and influencer classes nowadays.”

Emma rolled her eyes at the comment but asked, “So, we gonna head back now? Can I finally freaking sleep?”

“No, wait . . . I thought we already talked about you not having a vote,” Archimedes said.

“Come on! Not all of us have a special Batman perk that lets us live on, like, four hours of sleep,” Emma said, a yawn punctuating the end of her sentence.

“Who wouldn’t choose to be Batman?” Chedderfield asked.

“Anyone who has even a basic understanding of how valuable crafting is,” Danielle answered. “Why wouldn’t you pick that perk over some silly ‘I don’t have to sleep as much’ perk? Sleep is so nice.”

“NOPE! We’re not having another bullshit discussion out in the open, surrounded by potential threats on all sides, while we waste time,” Emma objected. She turned to Archimedes. “If we’re not going home, where are we going? There a bar you don’t think has been ransacked or something? Come on, Lucy. You have to know a dozen.”

“I thought we covered the whole ‘you’re not old enough to drink’ thing already,” Lucy replied as she dismissed Emma.

Chedderfield ignored the byplay between the two and answered seriously. “I think we need to follow up on where these hell-cursed armies are heading. This makes the second one that we’ve come across that are moving somewhere. What if they’re gathering to take over the entire city or building another portal? I think it’s something we need to investigate.”

“Okay. Show of hands. Who wants to try to find where these hell-cursed are going?” Archimedes asked as he raised his hand.

Chedderfield raised his hand, along with Nguyen, even as Lucy scowled, and Danielle looked like she was just ‘done with it’ for the day.

“There we go. Three to two,” Chedderfield said with a smug look on his face.

“Wait! No! It’s a tie! I didn’t say I wanted to go,” Emma whined, frowning.

“What part of ‘you’re still a kid and don’t get a vote’ is so hard to grasp?” Chedderfield asked.

“Even you, cheeseman? Even you?” Emma looked like she had been struck in the gut as the whole group snickered at her shocked expression.

“Come on, kid,” Lucy said. “Just think of it like another adventure. We had fun on the last one, didn’t we?”

“We had hot, freshly made sandwiches and nice beds on the last one . . .” Emma sighed. “We better get sandwiches again.”

“So, while we’re walking, you three wanna show what unlocked classes you just got?” Archimedes asked.

“Yeah, being a gunsmith sounds really cool. What does that class do? How do you level it?” Chedderfield asked Danielle as he leaned over and looked at her class detail as she opened up the menu.

[Gunsmith] – Reduces resource requirement costs when creating weapons by 25%.

“Oh that’s cool,” Lucy said as she looked over at the class description too. “This is mine.”

[Berserker] – Increases damage proportional to mood instability by 50%.

“What about yours, Nguyen?” Lucy asked after showing hers.

“Read it and weep,” Nguyen laughed as she showed her class.

[Operator] – Increases critical damage from exploiting weak points by 50%.

“Do you level that one up by picking out plastic hearts from a cardboard patient or something?” Danielle asked as she read the notification.

Stolen from its rightful author, this tale is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“No, I just need to treat my rifle like a switchboard and help connect people with their maker,” Nguyen answered, her eyebrow arching as she finished her response.

“That sounded a lot cooler in your head than when you actually said it, didn’t it?” Lucy snickered.

“So you guys wanna start training those skills while we keep heading north? We could trade some punches and heals, start leveling up those skills on the move,” Archimedes suggested. “Maybe get some parts for our new gunsmith too?”

This caused everyone, including Chedderfield, to shoot a disgruntled look over at Archimedes.

“Can we just do the whole ‘walk in silence’ thing instead? How about that one? How about we just say and do nothing until I get a damn nap or until this apocalypse gets staffed coffee shops again?” Emma grumbled.

“So we just need to raid a coffee shop and get some beans?” Archimedes noted aloud as he scratched his chin.

“No. No class training till nap time. We’ve been doing too damn much today as is . . . so for once, I’m taking the kid’s side,” Chedderfield said, stopping his friend from taking things too far.

As if agreeing with both Chedderfield and Emma, the rest of the group didn’t even respond to Archimedes’ request as they silently trudged northward.

———

It wasn’t hard for the group to pick which direction to head as the army they had just defeated had left a very clear path through the city. Paved roads and sidewalks were left cracked, buildings knocked over like spilled legos, trees and greenery smashed or uprooted, and all other obstacles demolished as the army marched through.

The tension from being constantly watchful for monsters and the sight of the ruin was causing Chedderfield to get mentally worn out. He wanted one of those naps or breaks Emma kept nagging about as they walked, completely exposed in all directions, through the rubble and carnage. It felt like, at any moment, they would have some creature or monster jump out at them.

“What are you looking at?” Nguyen’s question for Archimedes snapped Chedderfield out of his thoughts of a nice lounge chair and some sleep.

“The defense requests on the quest page,” Archimedes replied. “Look at the map and tell me if you don’t see a pattern.”

“Yeah . . . that’s a pattern alright,” Nguyen replied as Chedderfield leaned over to see what was going on too. There, he could see at least a dozen ‘help me’ requests spread out north of them. Some were near each other and some far apart, but all were in the same direction.

“So, now we know where they’re headed,” Chedderfield noted as he read the map.

“That’s way too big of a spread to know exactly where they are,” Emma remarked.

“No, Chedderfield is right. Just look at this line here. Draw it out in a straight line, and you know that wherever they’re headed has to be somewhere on this line . . . and then if we look at the clustering of places getting hit by this giant hell-cursed army, this is probably the rough location,” Nguyen said, pointing to a spot on the map that Chedderfield recognized.

“That’s . . . That’s the new nuclear plant!” Chedderfield blurted out as he realized where they were indicating. “They’re heading to the nuclear plant. I remember people bitching and getting all upset when they first switched it on a few years back . . . all that ‘not in my backyard’ and ‘oh no, what if it explodes’ crap.”

“Well, frell,” Danielle said, her jaw hanging open for a moment before she closed her map and nodded. “Are they, are they trying to nuke humanity with our own power plant?”

“I don’t see what else it could be,” Nguyen mumbled as she stroked her chin like it had a beard.

“Of course, they’d fucking nuke us. This is some Fallout shit,” Lucy cursed. “They’re going to make us all some radioactive zombies. And not the pretty ones like them either, but the ugly-ass, hair-loss, skin-falling-off, ‘walking around with clothes from two hundred years ago that somehow didn’t get shredded by wear and tear or nuclear moths’ shit.”

“Wow . . . you think they’re doing this to every nuclear power plant across the country? Like what if there is some plant north of us that’ll go off and kill us even if we defend this one?” Emma mouthed. “Like, holy crap. That’s gonna keep me awake at night.”

“Don’t worry, kid,” Archimedes said as he put a hand on her shoulder, “You’ll do just fine as a radioactive zombie.”

Emma gave Archimedes a little glare. “Ha. Ha.”

“She’s right though. We can defend this one, but who knows how many are being attacked?” Danielle said, souring the group’s mood a little.

“We just have to deal with the one we can protect then. The rest of the world will have to take care of itself,” Chedderfield said with a shrug. He’d learned a hard lesson growing up that you could only take care of your little place in the world.

“Hey! Speaking of which, there’s the plant! I can see the boobs!” Lucy yelled. “Our journey to Mount Doom is finally almost over! SLEEP AHEAD!”

At an intersection of two major streets with gas stations on either side showing how much traffic used to come through this part of the state, Chedderfield looked down the sloping road and saw the outline of the nuclear power plant’s iconic cooling tower and pair of rounded containment buildings that housed the reactor. Some part of his juvenile mind had never grown up, and he saw exactly what Lucy meant.

“I hope you don’t mean the permanent sleep,” Nguyen grumbled as she pointed ahead, toward the end of the deforested and recently flattened track where the giant hell-cursed armies were organizing on the near side of the two-hundred-foot-wide river separating the horde from the plant. “Because there is also a giant group of the hell-cursed waiting for us too. They would be more than happy to help you close your eyes for good.”

“No, they wouldn’t,” Danielle corrected. “They’d have her walking around, being like, ‘Gimme your brains,’ like she was one of the earlier zombies from back when they could still talk and form complete sentences.”

“Yeah, that was cool then. Now we just have these super-fast horde types that want to rip your face off. How could Hollywood have gotten it so wrong?” Lucy scoffed.

“I mean, if things were as easy as the movies made them seem, we could solve this whole problem by growing some of our own mutated plants to protect our trailer parks or develop our own zombie camouflage by giving ourselves deadly diseases,” Chedderfield said.

“So how are we handling this situation then? ‘Cause I’m way too tired to go through that fucking mob of undead morons,” Lucy complained, and Chedderfield had to agree. From the hill they stood on, he could see the closest bridge that crossed the river had been destroyed, and the rubble he could see was still smoking from whatever explosive or incendiary had been used to decimate it. The only other bridge nearby was the major interstate one, but it would take hours to get there on foot. Which meant the closest way to the nuclear plant was straight through the hell-cursed army, and even with the system's stamina boost, the idea of another fight and a swim across the massive river before he got some rest was a nightmare. He could already feel his focus starting to drop a little, and his senses were definitely not as sharp as they usually were.

Well,” Danielle began, only to pause. “There’s, uhhh . . .” Her finger began to outline different spots ahead of them, dragging over the army for a moment, pausing and hovering over the dozens of skeletal catapults in the back of the army being tended to by the hundreds of zombies and brutes in square formations. A makeshift cavalry of undead deer, emus, and other mutated animals with zombie riders continued to patrol back and forth around the units.

It felt like, to Chedderfield at least, a proper army, given the way things were organized. It wasn’t just the size of the hell-cursed force either, which was far greater than he had ever seen before, but it was the way they moved, almost like a roman legion as they stood in lines and rows, their weapons in hand and their backs straight and heads up like they were on military parade.

“I don’t want to tangle with those guys if I don’t have to. Our goal is to get to the power plant and help whoever is in there defend it,” Archimedes said.

“What do you mean? How do you know someone is there?” Emma asked.

“It doesn’t take a genius. If it was undefended, then that army would have already destroyed it. Plus, don’t you see that?” Lucy said, pointing over to the now unfamiliar feeling of light against the darkening sky.

Emma squinted, and even though the sun was setting, Chedderfield could see her eyes widen as she pointed. “There are lights on! They have electricity. That means I can charge my phone finally and check my FaceTik!”

“That’s what you want to do? Check in on social media?” Lucy asked, her eyes rolling in annoyance.

“Well, yes. I mean, I’m totally going to try to see if any of my family or friends are okay, but how could I not see if the Internet is still a thing or what influencers are apocaposting, or whatever they’re going to call it?” She smiled, and seeing the glares from the rest of the group, she quickly added, “It's also, uhhh, an important potential source of news and information about what's happening in the rest of the country . . . and stuff.”

Nguyen shook her head and ignored the teen’s enthusiasm for her phone. “If we can’t cross the river here, we can follow it north and try to steal a boat. I remember there’s a place that stores boats and other stuff along the river. The motor should work too if it's old enough and doesn’t have any integrated circuits. Even if the motor doesn’t work though, the river will take us south back toward the plant and we just have to paddle across faster than the current drags us south.”

“And avoid the water monsters,” Archimedes said.

“What water monsters?!” Lucy asked in a panic. “Why would there be water monsters?! Are you jinxing us? Is this jinxing? I do not want to fight in fucking water! Water levels are the GODDAMN WORST PART OF EVERY FUCKING VIDEO GAME THAT HAS THEM!! There hasn’t been a single good water stage in any game I’ve ever seen. There is a reason only people who want to see a hunk in a bathing suit go to Aquaman movies! Their action scenes sure as fuck aren’t drawing a crowd. No, no, no. Don’t do this to me! I do not want to fucking drown. I might be able to swim, but I ain’t no fucking Michael Phelps!”

“Yeah . . . she doesn’t have the requirements for a good breast stro— OWE!”

Emma had started to mock Lucy only to be struck on the back of the head before she could finish her sentence.

“Trust me. I’ve seen how these planets they destroy work,” Archimedes said. “There is no niche that life won’t occupy—or, in this case . . . unlife? There will be monsters there. Best get comfortable with the idea.”