Amazon Apocalypse: Chapter 9 (Patreon)

Craig’s dramatic entrance, speech, and exit caught everyone’s eyes. Even those who had no interest in his offer were talking about him.

“Wasn’t that the building’s security guy?” A woman asked. “Didn’t he harass Jessica in the hallway last month? I was certain he’d be fired for that! Does he have blackmail on the building manager or something?”

“The dude just pointed at a bunch of chicks and told them to follow him, and some of them actually did. Holy shit, I can’t believe that worked,” a man said in awe, mentally jotting down a few notes for future reference.

“It looks like he’s building a more exclusive team of survivors than ours. He’s taking the best. And did you hear what they said? They’re actually going to brave the monsters outside to find food,” the woman said.

“I know. Benjamin and Margaret don’t have any supplies. Maybe that Craig guy knows something we don’t. We should have tried to get him to take us too...” the man muttered.

There were similar conversations going on all around us. Benjamin was hearing them as much as I was, and her face was drawn in a grim frown.

“We’re going to lose people,” Benjamin said. By his side, Margaret looked worried as well.

Sakura frowned. “I wish we could help.” She turned to me with a hopeful look in her eyes.

I considered things for a moment. We could help. Craig’s main draws right now were his gun and the fact that he was strong and looked confident. He leveraged that to assemble a team that would help him secure food and pretty women, both of which would draw more people to his side like flies to honey. That he rejected people would only make joining his club seem even more exclusive and appealing. Humans naturally valued things based on how hard it was to obtain them. That was part of the reason so many fraternities and sororities made it a pain in the ass to join them. It meant their people would cherish their membership more.

“We’ll just have to match whatever Craig has to offer,” I said.

Sakura folded her arms again. “You plan on collecting pretty women, too?”

I chuckled. "Not quite. For starts, I was planning on going to a food run to the local grocery store."

“You would do that?” Margaret’s brows rose in surprise. “But the monsters! The wildlife has turned terrifying. The cockroaches we’ve been fighting are just the beginning.”

“I know.” Margaret filled me in on a few tales that had been spreading around about a massive squirrel someone had spotted while looking out the window nearby. Apparently, that had scared enough people that they were disassembling the furniture to board up every window in sight and reinforce the doors. They were even building a second more defensible structure within the office itself for everybody to sleep, and I was pretty sure Benjamin was setting up a formal watch rotation. The law office was looking less like an office and more like a survival shelter with every passing hour.

Benjamin and Margaret were truly good at organizing people in that respect. The only thing I’d done was lead people into fights. Getting them to do anything else sounded like more trouble than it was worth. I didn't want to hold people's hands or find the best way they could contribute to the collective.

The two of them warned me once again about the dangers of facing the unknown, but I planned to leave the office soon anyway. I didn’t plan on staying here forever, after all.

“Good luck. I don’t know if we have any supplies you think will help you, but if you see anything you want, it’s yours.” Ben clapped me on the shoulder as he offered me his hand.

When we parted, I turned to my companions. “So, I don’t know if--“

“I’m coming,” Sakura declared. She hefted her new baseball bat over her shoulder and met my gaze with a stern and steady look of her own, as though daring me to tell her to stay.

“I... I’d like to come too, if you don’t mind?” Bridget asked hopefully. She twirled her blonde hair with one hand, which was in stark contrast to the tough face she’d worn just moments ago when getting rid of Craig.

“And you, Caleb?” I asked.

Caleb sighed. “I guess it beats moving furniture. Which is what I’d be doing if I stayed here.” He gestured to all the people in the law office, most of whom were hard at work, boarding up the windows and building barricades.

“Grab whatever you think you’ll need from the office, though remember, it’s only a trip down the block.”

***

That turned out to be entirely incorrect a moment later when we ventured outside. Crownhill had a modestly busy downtown area, and that’s where our office was. But something had changed with the integration. Now, there were endless blocks of urban sprawl. We’d never been a large city, but you’d never guess that now.

Next to our office was... our office. Both sides of our office had a building that was similar in appearance from the outside, though after we kicked down the door to one of them, we discovered the insides were completely empty. What’s more, most of the supporting structures were missing, so the building was collapsing in on itself after merely a few hours of existence.

“If nothing else, we have a massive supply of bricks.” Bridget poked a wall, and it fell over.

“We’ll explore the place fully later,” I said. “It looks like our trip to get food is going to be a longer journey than we thought.”

The convenience store next door that Craig was taking his people to was just barely in sight. But I didn’t want to run into him or his new gang of thugs on the streets, so we would head for the grocery store in the opposite direction. It was further, but there would probably be a greater selection of food. Plus, they would have shopping carts we could take, which would make hauling enough stuff to make the trip worthwhile far easier.

We saw more oddities as we walked down the street. The sidewalks still worked fine, but there was no confusing this with a stroll before the System, though. The sidewalk was cracked and misshapen in the regions between the duplicate buildings, and after studying the sidewalk a little closer, I realized what was going on. It was like someone had copied the broad strokes of the nearby areas and copied them repeatedly, like a poorly stretched image. They copied each chunk of land repeatedly, and some buildings had even been cut right in half. There were three halves of a coffee shop, one after another, and only one whole one.

"How did we miss this happening?" Sakura asked.

"We weren't exactly looking out the windows when we were fighting monsters." Bridget shrugged.

"I didn't sense a thing." I shook my head, just as startled as everyone else. The System could simply cut and paste land without issue. I knew it had god-like power, but to see that power written so plainly across the land was something else.

I was a little concerned though. This modification would have been much more seemless if it had been nothing more than adding sprawling plains or a patch of ground with a few trees on it, or the side of a mountain. But here? In the middle of a busy downtown street? The changes were obvious at a glance. Clearly, the whatever the System was doing here hadn't been designed with cities in mind. How much more chaotic real cities like New York or Tokyo be?

"There were a bunch of weird glowing lights. It was pretty cool," Caleb said.

Sakura turned to look at him. "You saw and didn't mention anything?"

"I hadn't finished my coffee yet. I thought I dreamed it."

As we neared the grocery store, I heard a sound behind me that almost made me jump. It was the distinctive clacking of claws against the pavement, and I turned quickly to find a hedgehog-like monster walking toward us from the other side of the street. Its fur was dark and better suited to the wilderness than a city block, though its head was covered in thick red fuzz that didn’t match the rest of its body at all. The fur almost resembled flames wrapping around the creature’s head. It was cute in a pudgy, colorful way.

“Carter...” Sakura began.

“I see it.”

By now, all of us were looking at the thing monster across from us. It reminded me of the Rat Matriarch, and I had the sense that it was roughly that powerful. But I’d beaten the Rat Matriarch, and I’d gained several levels since then. In theory, a rematch between me and her would be completely one-sided.

I took aim and launched a Mana Bolt at the ground near the creature. It was in our way, and I certainly would not approach a creature as fearsome looking as this one willingly. The best thing would be for it to wander off on its own, and I planned to scare it a little to get it moving. My Mana Bolt struck the ground and tore a chunk out of the sidewalk, but the hedgehog didn’t run.

Instead, the creature turned towards me with a snarl on its face. It wasn’t charging forward. Instead, it raised its open maw to point at me and unleashed a stream of fireballs at me.

“Split up!” I shouted.

Sakura followed me to the right. Bridget and Caleb went to the left. The monster kept me in its sights, and it was clear I was the one it was targeting with its fireballs.

When crossing paths with a monster, I had expected to face teeth and claws. Maybe another attack like the toxic bite ability the Rat Matriarch had if I was truly unlucky. I hadn’t planned for fire-breathing hedgehogs.

My heart pounded as I dodged each successive ball of fire. They were slow, but the sheer number of these things flying toward me meant it was only a matter of time before I slipped up. One hit me square in the chest and knocked me backward, but I recovered immediately.

It turned out the fireballs weren’t all that powerful. I should have guessed as much from how many the hedgehog was shooting and the level of power I sensed from it, but the individual fireballs were even weaker than my Mana Bolts. They briefly singed my clothes and gave me a burn about equal to if I’d run my hand over a candle. My skin was probably red, but not much worse than a sunburn. That meant we could simply ignore them and charge.

Checking my health points, I was only down around five percent.

“Carter!” Sakura screamed in fear and terror that soon turned to relief and confusion. “You’re... completely fine?”

I laughed. “Guess so! Now, let’s see if this thing is worth a level or two.”

Once we realized the fireballs were cosmetic, we rushed the beast down and clubbed it into the pavement.

It was rather odd how quickly four office workers turned into cavemen. The fire-breathing hedgehog should have cut its losses and run the moment it realized its fireballs were of no effect on us. Maybe it had been frying bugs up until now and hadn’t realized how ineffective its attacks would be, but it kept trying to kill us with those splashes of flame.

Caleb gained a level for the fight, so that at least made it worthwhile. It should have been worth a lot of experience points, but those points had been split four ways, so nobody else received enough to gain a level.

The more interesting thing happened after the fight. The world sharpened by just a little. My limbs felt stronger, my body tougher, and my mana pool grew.

At first, I thought I had leveled, but then I saw the others had gone through the same experience. Sakura and Bridget both looked different, and after a moment of study told me each of them was a notch prettier than before, as well as considerably more athletic. Sakura’s figure, in particular, was looking less like an office worker and more like a career athlete. I poked myself in the gut and was surprised when my finger found something hard and toned just beneath the surface. I didn’t have a six-pack or anything, but a few more stat points, and that might not be an impossibility.

Caleb squirmed a bit when he felt something strange, grabbed the lip of his pants, and took a peek downstairs. What he saw was apparently to his approval. “Nice.”

I was tempted to check myself, but Sakura was watching me a little too closely for me to be comfortable with that. She was studying my face as though she intended to inscribe my current appearance into her memories, so I hesitated.

So instead, I checked my stats and found that every single one of them had increased by one. It didn’t take long for me to remember that title of mine, Blessed of the System. Every four hours, we’d get another point in every stat. Perhaps this was the System’s way of making sure everyone had a decent start. Those back in the office working on building defenses could get stronger just by surviving, even if they weren’t yet willing to risk their lives for levels.

They’d still be behind, but I was pretty certain superhuman strength, speed, and attractiveness would go a long way to bolstering everyone’s confidence. The System’s arrival would have been a joyous occasion if this had been everything, though losing most of the planet’s population and the destruction of our way of life certainly put a damper on things.

Still, it seemed like there were some positives hidden within the tragedy. And I hoped if people survived, these changes would continue to improve our odds of survival.

“Alright, since nobody here knows how to skin a giant hedgehog monster, it looks like we’re going to continue on to the grocery store,” I said.

Caleb gave the dead monster a kick. I’d recovered my knife from my broken makeshift spear and was using it as a regular knife again. Caleb tried to use it to gut the giant hedgehog but gave up when he realized he’d have to stick his arms wrist-deep in the guts. “Never thought I’d say this, but I’d rather have cans of tuna fish.”

And so our trip continued. We came across more than a few human bodies, too, one small group of whom looked like the office workers we’d left behind.

“These might be the people Benjamin and Margaret said they sent out.” I bent over to examine the bodies while the others stood back. There was a lot of blood, but each of them only had one major wound right in the neck. Strange. The cuts on their necks were small and clean, with no other wounds on their bodies. I would have expected a monster to be a little messier taking them down.

“Try their wallets,” Sakura suggested. “If they have IDs, we can take them back to Margaret and Benjamin and ask them to confirm if they’re the people that tried to leave.”

That was a good idea, so I checked their pockets. It didn’t look like anybody else was willing to, so I was stuck doing the dirty work. Unless I went for the pockets, there was nothing there.

“They don’t have wallets.”

They’d decided that carrying a wallet was pointless after the apocalypse, but these guys had left hours ago when the apocalypse had just started. I was pretty sure old habits died hard enough that they wouldn’t forget something they usually carried with them everywhere.

I still carried not just my wallet but my cell phone as well, and that was little more than a brick right now.

I checked for phones, too, and found nothing. And now that I was looking for stolen stuff, I realized none of them had watches or coats, and one was missing both pairs of boots. There was only one kind of monster that could so cleanly dispatch someone and would then steal their stuff afterward.

“We need to be careful. There might be looters about,” I warned everyone. “I’m pretty sure these guys were stabbed in the neck. Stick together. I want eyes in every direction.”

Caleb agreed to watch our rear, and the girls took up either side. We had a few scares, but each time they turned out to be nothing more than leaves on a tree or a gust of wind. We didn’t even encounter another monster between the grocery store and us.

When we finally got to the grocery store, though, I soon realized we weren’t the first people to loot it. Now that I was thinking about it, the grocery store would have been open when the apocalypse began, which meant there had to be a significant human population within it.

I tried the door, but someone thought to lock it. In fact, there was something propped up against the inner door jamming the thing shut, so even if we had the key we wouldn't be able to open the door.

I rapped on the glass. It was tough stuff and even with my enhanced strength I couldn't punch through it.

“Let me.” Sakura volunteered. She hefted her baseball bat and slammed it into the window, shattering it in one blow. Those extra points in strength were doing wonders for her.

Sakura strode over the broken glass with confidence, and Bridget followed her. Caleb came next and gave me a pat on the shoulder. “Good luck keeping her happy, mate.”

“Maybe I should put some points into strength...” I muttered to myself. It would interfere with my build, which was mostly focused on Mana Bolt. I might be forced to put a few points into it, though.

I followed Caleb in to find everyone standing just inside the entrance and staring further into the store.

There were signs of other people here recently. The shelves were a mess. Several of them had been dragged across the floor toward one corner of the grocery store to form a makeshift barricade. But I wasn’t sure if any of the people who had made that barricade were still around.

I filled the air with the smell of blood, and it wasn’t coming from the meat aisle. There were five human corpses in sight, and I was certain there were more further in. The people in the store had piled debris to block the door and stop things from getting in, but when monsters came for them from within, they weren’t able to break the windows to get out.

“The carts are over here. Grab them and take everything a group of survivors should need. Some carbohydrates, basic protein, and water. Just grab ready-to-eat stuff for now. I don’t think the office is outfitted for cooking yet.”

Everyone grabbed a cart. Four carts full of food wouldn’t last more than a hundred people long. Maybe we could tie a dozen of them together and make a train. With Sakura’s strength stat, she could probably pull it without a problem.

“This place is so much creepier with the lights off,” Bridget shivered.

“Just bear with it,” I said.

“It really is, though. I swear one of those bodies on the ground moved since the last time we saw it,” Sakura said.

I looked behind us. There was a body laying in the middle of the aisle. I remembered moving the cart around it, but as it was now, it was blocking the path we’d come through completely. To get through, we would have needed to move the body.

I approached cautiously, and Caleb followed close behind me, holding his nose the whole time. Bridget and Sakura kept loading up the carts with water. Both women had started with two points less in strength than us and two more points more in charisma, but sometime over the last few levels, they’d put more points into the stat and surpassed us. Caleb was trying to get the Examine skill at ten perceptions, and I had been working on Intelligence and Vitality, so it was only natural that we left the ladies to do the physical labor.

“It looks like a body,” Caleb said, still holding his nose. “Probably smells like one, too.”

“It isn’t that bad. This guy had to have died recently.” The body we were standing over was tall, probably well over six feet standing. He had a beer gut big enough to keep the body from lying flat, face down, and blood dripping down from a bite mark in his neck showed what had killed him. The bite was roughly about the same size as a human mouth, which meant it couldn’t have been anything too large. Maybe something like those rats we fought had killed him.

I had expected more giant cockroaches, but perhaps I’d underestimated how clean the grocery store kept its operation. There wasn’t a bug in sight despite all the food.

“So what killed you...” I leaned over the body. Now that I was looking closely, the blood from his neck trailed along the ground behind it, almost as though it had been dragged by its outstretched arms across the floor.

I looked at the hands. They were bloody, and the nails were ground down to broken stubs as if...

I hurried to take a step away, but the body moved faster than I had expected. The cold, clammy arm wrapped around my ankle. Its jaws lunged for me, but I pointed my finger at its head and used Mana Bolt. The head exploded in a fountain of gore.

I wasn’t sure if blowing up the head was required to take out this kind of zombie, nor did I know if their bites were infectious. But I wasn’t taking any chances.

“Everyone, back away from the bodies!” I shouted.

The body that had been trying to kill me turned to look at the rest of the group. The dead man’s eyes were still open and staring, but there was no recognition in them. It was like a wild animal seeing its prey.

“Fuck!” Caleb shouted as he jumped back. Bridget shrieked, and Sakura picked up her bat. Oddly enough, now that the corpses had turned into enemies, her fear of them had been completely replaced by anger, and she charged toward my side with a wordless battle cry.

I pointed my hand at another zombie that was coming to life as well and blew its head off, just like the first. “Looks like we’ve got a zombie problem.”

<Note>

Carter Smith (Human, Level 6. Rank F)

Strength: 7

Agility: 5

Perception: 7

Vitality: 12

Intelligence: 16

Willpower: 7

Charisma: 7 (+4)

Luck: 0