When the dog locked eyes with me, it went ballistic. The Chihuahua yipped and spun in a circle before it lunged at the window, cracking the glass slightly and adding another bloody streak to it. Emboldened by the fracture, the dog rammed itself into the window again. This time, the glass shattered, and the huge dog leapt onto the porch.
The rain of broken glass still fell onto the patio as the dog charged me. As it grew closer, I saw exactly how mutated the dog had become. Instead of being about the size of a boot, the growling dog had a head nearly the size of a basketball and would have stood up almost to my waist.
As it closed, I hit it with Hinder and drew my combat knife with the desire to save my limited ammunition. I stepped toward the Chihuahua and stabbed up into the dog’s jaw. My knife sank deeply into the dog’s head, but the damage failed to kill the creature. It yipped annoyingly as I kept my grip on the knife and pulled it free.
The beast scrambled to turn toward me with its jaws snapping. With Hinder still active, I easily avoided its attacks and jabbed my knife horizontally into the dog’s ear. This time, the blade reached the creature’s brain, and it tripped over its own feet as it lost control of its limbs and tumbled to the ground.
The legs still twitched as I knelt beside the animal and wiped the blade clean on its fur before I returned the knife to its sheath. The dog’s blood flowed from its wounds to join the gore around its maw. If I had to guess from the available evidence, the creature had disposed of its former owner not long before it had attacked me.
I looted the not-so-little monster, receiving a small pelt and more hunks of meat. The inventory created a pile for each unique item, so even though I had both dog and bear meat, the multiple pieces of animal flesh only took up a single square in the five-by-five grid.
I contemplated the two stacks of meat in my Inventory. Some cultures consider dog a delicacy, but I would rather eat the bear meat if given a choice. While I’d eaten worse things on deployment, most of those had been on a dare. I felt the start of a grin as I recalled the hundred bucks I’d made from my squad mates for finishing a serving of khash. The disgusted expressions on their faces had been worth the nauseated roiling the cow hoof dish had left in my stomach.
As always, the thoughts of my time in the service and the recollection of my fireteam quickly dampened my mood. To banish the negative emotions, I pushed myself back to my feet and continued down the road.
Since vehicles were no longer working, I didn’t have to worry about being hit by a car, so I kept to the middle of the road in the hopes that I’d have more time to respond to a threat—like mutated dogs jumping through windows. Equipped with my guns, I hoped I would have the time to respond to any danger from range first.
The neighborhood was strangely quiet, and it felt a little unsettling. Despite the occasional crash or distant scream, I stuck to the road. I wasn’t going into any houses unless forced. Close-quarters battle against mutated monsters sounded like a good way to get dead fast. At only Level 2, I had no way of knowing how strong the creatures around here might end up.
The main road began curving back toward the park. Since I had no desire to repeat my close encounter of the bear-kind, I opted to cut over several smaller side streets instead. After a short stretch, the side street turned away from the park, and I followed the pavement around the corner. Along the edge of the road sat a number of wooden planters filled with early spring growth.
The plants looked odd from a distance, and my unease increased as I grew closer. They resembled tomato plants, especially the leaves, but tomato plants generally didn’t move. The waving tentacles that reached toward me as I approached were clearly something else. An empty shoe lay ominously next to one of the planters closest to the road.
Curious, I prodded the nearest plant with my shotgun. The tentacles shot upward and wrapped around the muzzle of the gun before they tried pulling me toward it. I yanked on the shotgun’s pistol grip as I stepped away and onto the street. The plant refused to release my weapon and kept a tentacle wrapped around the barrel of the gun.
Tension grew before the plant came uprooted and flew toward me in a cloud of earth. Since the plant still held onto the shotgun, I jammed the weapon forward and down, pressing the plant into the ground. The jagged end of the shotgun’s breaching barrel dug into the fibers of the plant’s small body and held it in place as I smashed my foot on it and ground the plant into the street. The plant fibers ripped apart and sap smeared the asphalt.
A moment later, an experience notification popped up to inform me of the death of a Young Carnivorous Killer Tomato.
I considered the green-smeared sap on the pavement for a moment before I looked back at the other plants. If the plant-thing had been a little stronger, or if I had been a little weaker, it might have pulled me down and wrapped me up within the tentacles. I wasn’t going to leave these other plants to get strong enough to take down someone else. Especially when they gave me experience in the process.
Decision made, I repeated the process with each of the dozen killer tomato plants that filled the wooden planters. Several sweaty minutes later, the street had become a goopy mess of plant sap and shredded plant fibers. A glance at my status showed that the experience gained had almost pushed me up to the next Level. Not bad for a few minutes of work.
I left the uprooted planters behind as I cut off-road between the garden and the house next to it. I dropped downhill slightly as I passed through another backyard. I soon rejoined the road at a point just east of where Beachwood came down the hill and curved to run alongside Forbes Avenue.
Here I saw the first signs of other people. Traffic was jammed up on Forbes, the main thoroughfare for the city district that headed toward downtown and the Cultural District in the distance. The cars here were unmoving and most had their doors left open while pedestrians ran in all directions. Several people shrieked as they passed me, clearly fleeing from something, with their eyes widened in panic.
I headed the way they had come and pulled the shotgun snugly up to my shoulder, keeping the muzzle angled down as I searched for the source of the terror affecting the people running away.
A series of cracks echoed nearby when I stepped onto Forbes and drew my attention to the nearby intersection. A Pittsburgh police officer stood on the hood of a police cruiser parked alongside the road and fired his weapon toward the ground. From my position, I couldn’t see the officer’s target, and I cautiously worked my way to the far side of the road as I approached.
Beyond the police cruiser, a pair of municipal maintenance trucks sat parked alongside the road. It looked like a typical spring pothole repair crew, except that the half dozen road crew members also stood on top of vehicles throughout the street as they swung shovels, rakes, and even sledgehammers down toward the ground. As I approached, I saw that the street seemed to writhe beneath the vehicles. The stench of sewage filled the air.
Then I realized that the gray tide wasn’t the street, and my skin crawled in revulsion.
Out of the storm drains along both sides of the road poured a flood of sewer rats the size of small dogs. The rats’ matted gray fur blended with the asphalt and the other rats as they swarmed, making it nearly impossible to pick out individual creatures.
At some of the vehicles, the rats climbed up over each other, creating a mounded pile in their attempt to reach the people who stood above them. I headed toward the closest mound that grew near the back of the police cruiser. At the front of the vehicle, the cop fired into the writhing mass. The officer’s shots were steady and disciplined, despite the rising tide of rats that climbed higher and higher toward him.
I pulled the trigger on the shotgun, and the rear pile of rats disintegrated in a splash of gore. I racked the shotgun to chamber a new round and strode toward the front of the vehicle. I stepped, then fired into the swarming rats again. The blast pushed back the advancing tide, and I pumped the slide again.
At the front of the cruiser, the tide crested over the hood an
d the officer kicked at the top of the pile that rushed toward him. His kick flung the first several rats airborne, but the rest swarmed up his legs, and he fell with a hideous scream as the rats flowed over him. His horrific screams continued even after he disappeared under the throng, and I leveled the shotgun at the swarm.
I fired, and the officer’s screams grew mercifully silent. I chambered another shell and fired again at the swarm. The flood of rats seemed to hesitate and recoiled from my continued fire, so I took advantage of the opportunity and thumbed several shells into the shotgun from the pouch on my belt before I continued.
In the middle of the road, a towering black man in a neon safety vest stood on an empty blue sedan and slammed a wide-headed steel shovel onto another pile of the rats. The forceful impact pulped the majority of the mound, and the man moved to counter another growing pile as the sedan sagged precipitously under the muscular man’s weight.
I moved toward the bulky road worker and fired each time I saw a large cluster of rats. Only a few of the rats darted toward me individually, and I easily smashed or kicked the lone rodents that reached me.
I attempted to slow some of the nearer rats and found that Hinder only worked on individual monsters, making the Class Skill almost completely ineffective against a larger group. The fragile creatures died easily on their own, but their danger lay in their large numbers.
A few more blasts from my shotgun cleared the area around the sedan, and the big man jumped down beside me. Up close, he looked like a middle-aged bodybuilder. He loomed over me, taller by several inches. I didn't take much more time than that quick appraisal before I got back to rodent killing. The two of us worked our way up the street, my shotgun clearing the largest congregations of rodents as the man’s steel shovel took care of any smaller groups that tried to get around us.
Several more of the maintenance workers were swarmed by rats before we could reach them, but as soon as we cleared the massed rats away from the few surviving members of the road crew, the tide of rodents ebbed away into the storm drains alongside the road. Whether the creatures had retreated temporarily or just gone in search of easier prey, it was impossible to tell.
Left in the street, between and around stopped cars, piles of bloody meat and gore-stained clothing marked the spots where the people had been too slow to flee or fight back.
My belt pouch of shotgun shells was nearly empty by the time I finished reloading the weapon, then it took several minutes to loot the area. I tried looting from what was left of the other fallen people, but no loot window popped up in response to my attempts. Maybe only the killer could obtain the loot, which meant that only things physically on their person would be left behind and anything in their Inventory would be lost.
My Inventory accumulated a number of greasy rat pelts and a small number of Credits. That last item came from the slain officer, as I had been responsible for the man’s death. A sickened feeling twisted my stomach before my brain justified the killing with the rationale that the man would have died anyways under the swarm of rats.
When I brought up my Inventory window for a closer look, I found that the Galactic Credits appeared in a tracker attached to the bottom of the window. From the format of the counter, it looked more like currency than anything, though without any idea of what Credits might be used for, I just felt fortunate that they didn’t take up any of my precious few Inventory slots.
I pushed the doubts from my mind as I walked up to where the surviving road crew had gathered by their trucks. The muscular man I’d fought beside drank water from an orange cooler jug mounted on the back of the truck, and a shaky younger guy puked onto the curb behind him. A stocky brunette was the only other survivor, and her curly hair peeked out from under her white hardhat as she chatted with the bodybuilder. The broad-shouldered man pulled off his hardhat and wiped the sweat from his brow, revealing a smoothly shaved pate.
As I reached them, the two halted their conversation and looked at me.
I nodded in greeting. “You should loot anything you can.”
“Loot?” the woman questioned.
“Yes,” I replied. “Life is like a video game now. Touch something that you’ve killed and think about looting it. You should be able to put whatever you get in your Inventory.”
The big man frowned for a moment without saying anything, then he moved over to a pulped pile of rats and knelt. He looked surprised a moment later.
“It worked!” The man’s gravelly exclamation rumbled with the intensity I expected from someone that intimidating in size. He wiped his hand off on asphalt-stained jeans as he stood and walked back over to where I waited. Then he offered me his hand. “I go by Zeke. The lady is Paula, and the kid is Adam.”
“Hal,” I replied as I gave his hand a firm shake and looked over the three.
Zeke seemed like the steadiest of them. Paula’s eyes darted all around as her head twitched from side to side at the slightest sound. Adam had finished throwing up and returned to join us at the back of the truck, but his gaze remained distant and unfocused.
I’d seen that thousand-yard stare before and, combined with his pale skin and rapid breathing, mentally diagnosed him with shock. Not much we could do for him now though. Until we found someplace safe, the only hope was that he would snap out of it.
“You seem pretty geared up for this,” commented Zeke.
I shrugged. “I was trying to bring in a wanted bail jumper when this all started. I’ve been lucky so far.”
“You’re a cop?” Paula questioned, hope in her voice.
I shook my head. “Bounty hunter.”
“Oh.” Disappointment filled her single syllable response.
I understood the dismay. It was only natural that in times of chaos, people craved order. I wasn’t one of them. Instead, I was becoming someone who reveled in the chaos.
I couldn’t help but smile to myself as I saw my latest notifications.
Level Up!
You have reached Level 3 as a Relentless Huntsman. Stat Points automatically distributed. You have 2 free attributes to distribute.
Class Skills Locked.
“What Class did you all get?” I asked as I closed the notification.
“Demolitionist,” replied Zeke. “It’s a hybrid Class that has combat and non-combat Class Skills from a race called the Gimsar, and it specializes on attacks to armor or structures. Right now, I’ve got a Shatter ability that can permanently damage a target’s armor to expose them to follow-on attacks.”
“That sounds useful,” I said.
Paula sighed. “More useful than my Class.”
“What makes you say that?” I asked.
“Surveyor is a non-combat class,” the woman replied. “So unless you care about the distances between designated points or laying out a city grid, I’m not much use.”
“Oh, that could be useful if we survive this,” I said. I hoped we survived to the point where civilians would be able to use a Class that wasn’t focused on killing anything that moved.
Paula rolled her eyes and gestured to the carnage around us, the corpses proving her point.
“What about Adam?” I asked.
Upon hearing his name, the young man blinked and seemed to notice me for the first time. His expression remained blank, and I shared a look with Zeke, who only shrugged.
“What is your Class?” I asked him.
“Class?” Adam asked. “Uh, Operator?”
“What exactly does that do?” Zeke asked.
Adam’s gaze grew distant as if looking at something we couldn’t see, likely his status menus. “I can run equipment, and it uses less Mana.”
I looked at the cars that filled the streets in either direction. “Vehicles?”
“Maybe?” Adam said, being less than helpful. “My current skill only allows for passive efficiency for Mana batteries. So, I guess if a vehicle has a Mana battery?”
I doubted we would find a working vehicle if all electronics were fried, like my
phone. Or my own car. This whole video game thing felt like it was rigged.
“My kids,” Zeke cried out. His sudden, wide-eyed realization grabbed my attention as he unconsciously twisted a gold band on his ring finger. “I’ve got to get to my kids.”
“Where are your kids again?” Paula asked.
“Montour High School,” replied Zeke. “Over in McKees Rocks, just this side of Robinson.”
I had a pretty good understanding of the local geography from the bounty hunting I’d done through the area. The suburb Zeke had named was located outside the west of the city limits, completely the opposite side of Pittsburgh from where we were. However, with no immediate family of my own, I wasn’t driven toward anything besides surviving, and I had the sense that staying put was a bad idea. Still, I was reluctant to volunteer. I wasn’t the hero type.
“My Jake can take care of himself,” said Paula with a firm nod. “I’ll come along.”
Her statement was the first bit of confidence I’d seen from her.
“Adam?” Zeke questioned.
The young man blinked and seemed to come to himself again. “Uh, yeah?”
From the way he looked around as if seeing his surroundings for the first time, I sensed that Adam had no clue what he’d just agreed to help with. Zeke must have seen the look too.
“We’re going west, Adam,” the big man said before he took another drink from the truck’s water jug.
Then Zeke looked at me, and I raised an eyebrow.
“Look, man,” said Zeke, “I don’t have much, but if you’ll help out, then you can keep whatever I can scrounge up on the way. Money, loot, you name it.”
I considered the offer. It wasn’t like I had anywhere else to be, and I liked my odds of surviving with a group better than being on my own. One of the many lessons of the Rockpile was that everyone needed someone to watch their back.
“Okay,” I finally said. “I’ll take the loot.”
Fist Full of Credits: A New Apocalyptic LitRPG Series (System Apocalypse - Relentless Book 1) Page 4
