Apocalypse online 2, p.23
APOCALYPSE ONLINE 2, page 23
Sam chuckled. “If it wasn’t for our little mad bomber here, I doubt we would have made it out of the water alive. There are some nasty fish in that lake.”
Louis stepped up with a warm smile. “I don’t suppose you have any more of those bombs to share, do you?”
“Of course I do.” Jo swung her bag around and popped it open. Her face fell immediately. “Oh no.”
Aron cocked his head to the side. “How many bombs do you have, Jo?”
Jo pouted with her big blue eyes on the verge of tears as she turned to Aron. “Not enough.” She held the bag open for everyone to see. There were just three pipe bombs left, a lighter, some equipment Sam had to guess was for making more bombs, and a small notebook covered in colorful, adorable bunny stickers.
Louis waved his hands placatingly. “No need to worry, Jo. We’ll just have to make do without them. Right, Wallace?”
Wallace opened his condescending mouth to speak before Louis elbowed him in the ribs. He winced and forced a smile. “Yes, we’ll be quite alright. The RV is fueled up and ready to go. You can keep what’s left in the tanker for yourselves.”
“I guess I could make some fire bombs with that.” Jo sounded so deflated.
Sam found Jo’s reaction both sad and adorable. That couldn’t be normal. Even with the apocalypse going down around them.
Aww you’re starting to like her, Olivia teased her.
Sam stared up and to the corner of her vision as if her muse was there. Shut your face, please and thank you.
Olivia simply laughed.
“Weren’t you going to wait for me to help you pick out an RV?” Chet asked, finally getting off the boat with all his guns. “I saw some really good ones out there.”
Wallace shook his head. “The sooner we get back to our city, the better. Really, the only reason we’re still here is because Louis wanted to make sure your group made it back from the water in one piece.”
“It would have been rude to leave without saying goodbye!” Louis insisted.
“Yes, yes, but unless you need anything else, we’re going to go ahead and leave.” Wallace turned toward the RV park.
Sam considered for a moment, then shrugged. “Unless any of you changed your mind about staying, I’ve got nothing.”
“Good.” Wallace walked off with a dismissive wave of his hand. “Best of luck on your recruitment drive. Enjoy the countryside and so on and so forth.”
The rest of his group took off with him, except for Louis, who hung back for a moment.
“Sorry about my brother. He’s…special.”
Aron commented, “Understatement of the year. No, the week. We’ll go with week.”
Louis rubbed at the back of his neck. “Anyway, thanks for your help finding that tanker truck and the offer to join up. I feel bad about turning you down, but we have family and friends back there we’re worried about.”
Sam nodded. “Don’t worry, we understand. Just be careful, alright? The cities have a lot more seeders than the countryside, and who knows what else is roaming around now.”
Louis nodded. “We will be. Take care.” He waved and sprinted off after his brother, then left in the RV with him.
“Well, he was nice,” Chet said as he dragged his crate to the middle of the pier and popped it open. “A little too pretty for the apocalypse, but very nice.”
“Too pretty?” Jo asked.
Chet nodded. “Yeah. I was expecting normies to be more… I don’t know, Mad Max-looking with the world ending. Hell, just look at Aron with all that metal on him.”
“I’m a little too covered up to look like anything out of Mad Max.” Aron chuckled.
Chet fished out more magazines for the P90 and passed them off to Aron. “True. But you don’t even need any spikey bits to scare the pants off someone with that armor of yours.”
Aron probably rolled his eyes behind his mask as he snatched the magazines.
Randy laughed. “He’s got you there, Aron.”
“So, what’s the haul, Chet?” Sam asked. Getting Chet’s stash was the whole point of their detour, so they may as well know what they’d gotten.
“Barrett fifty, bunch of AKs. The P90 Aron’s carrying around. A deagle because no good gun collection is complete without one.” Chet dug around the heavy case and exposed boxes of ammo. “And enough ammo to make a freshly minted warlord blush.” A proud grin spread across Chet’s face.
Randy whistled. “And then we can just print more ammo back at the Gaming Center?”
Chet nodded. “It's worked with all the other guns so far, so why not?”
Jo gave a disappointed hum. “But no boomy guns. That’s not very fun at all.”
Chet laughed. “Those were a little harder to get my hands on before the aliens came, but”—he shrugged—“we might just get lucky and find one in our adventures.”
Jo gasped with excitement. “Yeah! Or we can make some. You can teach me how the pew-pews work so I can make some boomy guns, right?”
“Uh, sure?” Chet had never sounded more uncertain about anything in the time Sam had known him, but she wasn’t going to bother him about it.
“That’s great and all, but we still have a job to do,” Sam said. “Aron, get the guns loaded up on the truck. Chet, get us an RV, a big one, and fill it up. We might need it if we find survivors in the next town over. Jo, Randy, help Chet out.”
Aron nodded and took the gun case from Chet. Even he, with all of his fighter strength bonuses, struggled to lift it off the pier, but he had a much easier time than Chet.
Chet stood up, dusting off his knees. “Speaking of fuel, we could probably hitch that little fuel tanker to the RV. Might be useful for something.”
Sam pursed her lips. She doubted they would need that much extra fuel for the RV to make it back to the Gaming Center, but they had a lot more places to hit up when they finished with this first trip. They might even find more survivors than the RV could carry and need to fuel up other vehicles. “Why not? We’ll probably need it anyway. Good thinking, Chet.”
Chet grinned. “Come on you two, we have a lot of work to do real fast.”
They took off sprinting to get to work. While they busied themselves with their tasks, Sam went about exploring the Cedar Springs Resort for anything useful. Unfortunately, Wallace and his people had loaded up just about everything but a few snacks and drinks. Still, the resort itself was a solid structure, fenced off and out of the way of just about everything. She marked the place out on her map as a potential outpost. If her recruiting drive was successful, it was only a matter of time before they had to expand beyond the Scotch Creek Gaming Center.
By the time they were ready to go, it was already getting dark. The lights of their cars would attract the attention of humans and seeders alike, but there wasn’t much they could do about it. They needed to see where they were going, after all.
Aron and Jo climbed in the truck while the rest of the party climbed in the RV with Chet.
The road was surprisingly devoid of life, but Sam wasn’t going to complain. After their close call with the fire pig and whatever those lightning-wolf things were, Sam didn’t want to risk the RV getting damaged by them. Especially not with a fuel tanker hitched to the back.
They drove past small communities and abandoned homes. Some were broken into by seeders. The smashed windows and trails of orange blood showed as much. There were even signs of successful hunts by the aliens, as some homes were covered in the green fertilizer the monsters created. Other homes were eerily intact. There were no signs of break-in or struggle around them, not even a hint of fortification.
“Why are there so many intact houses?” Sam asked.
Randy leaned forward on his seat. “A lot of this area is lived in by tourists. People renting out houses, or making them their vacation homes. My hunch is the seeders’ senses are sharp enough to know if someone’s in a home or not and they don’t bother with empty houses.”
Chet glanced over his shoulder. “But we saw seeders flatten plenty of towns on the way to Scotch Creek. Wouldn’t they do the same here?”
Randy pursed his lips for a moment. “Maybe. Think it’s because they didn’t have any of the big ones? I don’t think the regular seeders can really do much to a house on their own.”
Sam nodded. “They can smash windows and break doors, but they don’t seem smart enough to start fires or anything.”
The party came to a stop at Magna Bay Resort for a quick inspection. It was another place they could turn into an outpost, but again it was deserted. This time, though, it looked like the tourists had scrambled to pack their things and leave.
Among the shredded ruins of a room, Sam found clothes plastered in green and red. On the floor beside them was a folded-up note. She unfolded it and took a look. It said there was a group of survivors banding together and heading to the Anglemont Marina.
The marina might turn out to be another bloody mess like the school they’d found earlier, but it was a starting point for their continued search. Sam joined the others back in the trucks and they moved on to Anglemont.
Night had already fallen when they entered Anglemont. They followed the southern road along the coast. It was a narrow path without much in the way of options if they ran into trouble. Their options were: drive off into the lake or try to smash through any of the nearby homes or forests.
Of course, their path could also come to an abrupt end.
Piles of cars blocked the road ahead of their tiny convoy far before they could reach the marina. But this wasn’t the site of a slaughter caused by seeders. The cars were deliberately placed there.
“Guess we’re walking from here on out, huh?” Aron suggested through party chat.
“Guess so.”
The party disembarked and moved over the barricade of cars. They made it all of five steps before the sounds of cocking guns and bright lights greeted them.
“Hold it right there,” a sniveling man called out in a tone resembling a pissed-off chihuahua. But those dogs had more hair on their entire bodies than this man had on his wispy head. “Who the hell are you people?”
Sam raised her hands. “I’m Sam, and these are my friends.” She tried to make sense of the scene beyond the blinding lights, but there wasn’t much she could make out. There were at least ten lights, though.
“Yeah? And what the hell do you want?”
“Ideally?” Sam said. “To find survivors we can link up with. Friendly ones. Preferably the kind that don’t shoot us on sight.”
Chet chuckled nervously. “Yeah, shooting someone in the face is not the best way to say hello.”
The wispy haired man looked over his shoulder to another. “Think Karen will want to see them?”
“Probably will, Steve. I’ll call it in,” answered a voice behind the lights.
Steve turned his attention back to Sam and the party. “You lot sure you aren’t thieves or killers?” he asked, waving his shotgun at Aron.
“Woah now,” Randy said. “Just because Aron is a man with a peculiar aesthetic doesn’t make us bandits.”
Aron chuckled. “Can’t scare seeders off looking like a Care Bear, Steve.”
Steve winced at Aron’s gaze. “N-no, I suppose not.” He lowered his gun for a second, then snapped it back up. “Wait, those things aren’t afraid of anything.”
Sam had a feeling Aron was grinning from ear to ear behind his mask. “They should be.”
Steve took a step back. “Roger! A little help here.”
“Don’t be a little bitch, Steve. We have them at gunpoint.”
Sam sighed. She hoped they hadn’t just driven into the middle of the second coming of Colton’s crazies.
A few seconds passed before Roger spoke again. “Karen wants to see them. Let them keep their weapons, as a token of goodwill.”
“Wow. How unlike a Karen of her,” Chet commented in a near whisper.
Aron elbowed Chet.
Steve’s shoulders drooped as he shook his head. “I don’t got a good feeling about this, but whatever Karen says goes, I guess.” He waved Sam and her party over. “Come on, follow me.”
The lights around them lowered, and as Sam’s eyes adjusted she could make out ten other survivors beside Steve. Most of them looked like tourists who got stuck out in the wilderness, with only a couple of them actually carrying guns. They carried mostly pistols, outside of Steve’s shotgun.
“Why’s she wanna talk to them, anyway?” Steve asked a scraggly-bearded man beside him—Sam assumed he was Roger.
Both men had weak jaws and weaker, softer bodies. How they had survived the apocalypse without succumbing to aether poisoning was nothing short of a miracle as far as Sam was concerned.
Roger slapped Steve upside the head. “Karen gets what she wants. Now stop asking stupid questions.”
Chet leaned over to Sam with a whisper. “They seem nice.”
She replied in party chat. “You know we can communicate without making it so obvious?”
Chet followed her lead. “Yeah, but this is way less fun.”
Sam rolled her eyes as they followed Steve and Roger to the marina. There were more survivors gathered there. The bulk of them were tourists, with a handful of locals. Sam assumed they were locals, as they looked more like the folks of Scotch Creek than anything else.
They were led into one of the larger buildings and up into an office. Sam assumed it was for whoever used to run the marina. But since a woman with platinum-blond hair who didn’t look like she had ever worked a hard day in her life sat in the chair, Sam had a feeling the owners were out of town or no longer among the living.
“So these are my new, delightful guests!” Karen said with a forced cheeriness that grated on Sam. Karen steepled her fingers with long, colorful nails on them. “My name’s Karen. And who might you all be?”
How this woman had survived was even more of a mystery than Roger, Steve, or the bulk of the tourists. Sam decided it wasn’t worth the trouble to bring that up.
“My name’s Sam,” she said. “This is Aron, Chet, Randy, and Jo.”
Karen casually filed at her nails while Sam spoke. “Uh-huh, uh-huh. And what brings you to our little home away from home?”
“We’re searching for survivors,” Sam said. “People to bring back home to Scotch Creek where we’re setting up a community where humans can be safe from the seeders and grow stronger.”
That got her attention. She set the file down, tilting her head to the side. “That so? Are there any cops or military with you over there? Because we’ve been held up here for a while now, and you’re the first souls we’ve seen since this whole mess started.”
Sam pointed back at Aron and Chet. “These two are the closest we’ve got to police or military.”
“Eh, we’re more of an army of two,” Chet said. “Aron’s the muscle, and I’m the wise ass with an itchy trigger finger.”
Aron hooked an arm around Chet’s shoulders and pulled him in close. “Not the time, man.”
Karen looked at the two with a bemused look of concern on her face.
Sam cleared her throat. “The cops we’ve run into so far have all been dead, and we haven’t heard anything from the military. Other than Jo and Randy, we’re all from Kelowna, and we didn’t see any troops there, either.”
“Kelowna? That sounds far. Steve, dear, is Kelowna far?” Karen asked in a disgustingly sweet tone.
Steve looked to Roger, and the two went back and forth amongst themselves before answering in unison.
“Yes?”
“Yes.”
“Very far.”
“Super far.”
Sam rolled her eyes at the two.
“I take it things didn’t go too well in Kelowna?” Karen asked.
Sam nodded. “The seeder numbers were getting out of hand in the city, and the local crazies didn’t help, either. We came to Scotch Creek to start over, and so far we’ve been very successful. We have supplies, a safe haven, and the means to fight back against the seeders.”
Hushed whispers went back and forth between Steve and Roger before Karen held up a hand to silence them.
“Well, Sammy girl, under normal circumstances I would turn down your kind offer to join up, seeing as this all sounds too good to be true.” Karen trailed her finger along the rim of a cup filled with alcohol of some kind. “But truth be told our supplies here are rather strained, and I’d rather die on the road than die of starvation.”
Sam raised a brow. “Just like that?”
Karen took a sip of her drink. “Just like that, dear. You saw my people. If the seeders came at us in force, we’d be lucky to come out alive. But you five? Well, you look like you could tangle with a small army of those grey nightmares. Especially the big one. Aron, was it?” She took that sickeningly sweet tone again when using Aron’s name. She even batted her eyes at him.
Aron stared down his mask at her. “Yeah.”
“That one looks like he could wrestle down one of the big ones by himself.” Karen let out a quiet chortle. “With safety like that, I could sleep a lot better at night.”
Chet raised a hand. “What if I told you that you could gain the power to fight back like us?”
Karen waved him off like she didn’t have the time of day for Chet. “I’d tell you you’re full of it and have Roger and Steve here throw you out in the lake.” Her attention turned to Sam. “But I’m assuming he isn’t full of hot air, is he, dear?”
The more Karen spoke the less Sam liked her, but they needed more people if they were going to survive. Maybe a change of scenery and a chance to fight back would change her tune. “No, he’s not. All of us here have nano-tech inside us that enhances our ability to survive encounters with the seeders and fight them.”
“It sort of turns things into a video game,” Randy explained.
Karen perked up at that. “Oh? Like Candy Crush?”
Sam’s brow furrowed so tight with disbelief her face might have disappeared into itself if she pressed any harder. “No. Like Apocalypse Online, or Warcraft.”
Karen sighed and sank into her chair. “Ugh. Awful. It’s a good thing my late husband isn’t here or he’d never let me hear the end of it.”
