“The monster’s next attack left your father mortally wounded, then the jabberwock chased me through the city.” I took a deep breath. “Eventually, I used the point your father broke in the monster’s armor to kill it. By the time I got back to him, his health was almost gone. With his last words, he asked me to make sure you were safe.”
Both teens had tears in their eyes as they held each other tightly.
“I’m sorry,” I said finally. “Your father was a hero, and he deserved better. You two were all he talked about. He was proud of both of you and wanted to be here for you more than anything.”
I stood, and a notification in the corner of my vision demanded my attention.
Quest Complete!
You have safely located the Thomas children.
1,000 XP Awarded
I closed the notification and left the kids alone to process their grief. That conversation was one of the hardest things I’d ever done.
The school official waited for me a respectful distance away as I moved away from the kids.
“Keep an eye on them,” I said. “At least they know what happened to their dad, but others here may never know.”
A sudden wave of exhaustion hit me as I wandered back to the entrance of the school building. On top of the emotionally draining conversation I’d just had, I had been up most of the previous night and then fighting or traveling for the entire day. My stomach growled, gnawing at my insides, but I felt too tired to even pull one of the ration bars from my Inventory.
I staggered to the side of the lobby and leaned against the wall before I sank down to sit with my back against a trophy display case. The afternoon sunshine that shone through the lobby windows warmed my skin pleasantly, and I relaxed as I listened to the firefighters and cops talk outside in the distance.
For the first time since the apocalypse began, I could do more than react to sudden changes in circumstance. I had finished Zeke’s Quest and now found myself free to explore the new realities of our world under the System. I could grow stronger as I earned more Levels and learned new superhuman abilities. Then maybe, someday, I would put paid to the accounts of those who had consigned so many people here to their deaths.
My daydreams of the future relaxed me further, and it didn’t take long before I nodded off completely.
A loud, heavy rumble deep in my chest that reverberated like the bass at a metal concert woke me, and I opened my eyes to find that it had grown dark outside the school lobby. I stood, still shaking off the abrupt transition from slumber to wakefulness, and stretched out the kinks in my back that were sore from my nap against the wall. As I twisted from side to side and looked for the source of the increasing vibration, an explosion detonated right in front of the building.
The shockwave shattered the window, covered me in razor cuts from broken glass, and popped my eardrums as I was picked up and flung through the air. The trophy case I had napped under was thrown after me by the force of the blast, and I hit the far wall just before it followed me.
When I hit the wall, my breath was driven from my lungs as several of my ribs snapped and several cement blocks crumbled under my impact as I was driven partially through the wall.
Then the trophy case hit and knocked me through the wall completely before it fell on top of me.
I gasped hoarsely as I tried to pull air into lungs, and my broken ribs screamed in agony. Distantly, I felt more explosions and debris falling on top of the trophy case above me, but I was too caught up in attempting to breathe to focus on what else might be going on.
Another explosion dislodged one of the heavy wooden shelves from the cabinet above me, and the shelf smashed down onto my forehead.
The world went dark.
Chapter 13
I woke in darkness, and I braced myself for the nightmares to begin once again.
Only the pains were different this time, and I wasn’t struggling just to breathe. Aches suffused my body, and I remembered being catapulted across the school lobby. The miraculous powers of the System may have begun to heal my damaged body while I was senseless, but my health had been nearly depleted from the many wounds, and every inch of my body protested my injuries.
Memory warred with the reality of being trapped in a collapsed building for the second time in my life. Repressed emotions broke free of my control and ravaged me until I lost consciousness again.
The next time I awoke, a sharp pain dug a line deeply across my forehead. The pressure and pain helped me to focus, which allowed me to regain control of myself as I reined in my rampant memories.
Whatever else may have happened, I was still alive. I could still grow stronger and do something about these attacks on my world.
Silence filled the space around me. I could hear nothing, and I opened my eyes to find that I couldn’t see anything either. I cautiously attempted to raise my hands to my face and sniffed, picking up the scents of smoke, blood, and dust.
Careful exploration by my hands revealed that a thick wooden shelf rested on my forehead and was angled above me to anchor somewhere above my lower half. When I lifted the wooden plank off my head, whatever held the other end gave way, and the full weight of the shelf slammed down onto my knees.
I groaned and cursed as I pushed the board off of me before I continued to feel my way around the dark space. It took a couple minutes to shift around in the tiny, rectangular space, but I eventually figured out that I was pinned underneath the sturdy wooden frame of the trophy shelf I had napped beneath for the afternoon.
The case angled upward toward my feet as that end of the case rested on the wall I had been thrown through by the explosion. From the rubble that littered the ground beneath me, I figured that the building had caved in on top of me.
That wall gave me an orientation of the direction I needed to go.
With a deep breath, I pulled one of my beam pistols from its holster and pointed it at a section of the wall that was not supporting the case. I didn’t want to get crushed if this didn’t work. I fired into the cement blocks that made up the wall and had to squeeze my eyes shut against the brilliance of the beam that lit up the darkened space. I blinked repeatedly in an attempt to clear the afterimage that had been seared into my eyes, then I reached out in the darkness to feel how effective the shot had been.
A tiny hole punched completely through the concrete, not even big enough to fit my index finger through.
I sighed; this would take a while.
By the time I had completely drained both of my beam pistols of charges, I had only managed to burrow through the cement blocks and barely scratched the pile of debris I found on the far side of the wall.
I supposed I was fortunate that this building had never been purchased and included in the System. I could only imagine how resilient the walls would have been then. Though it might also have shrugged off whatever attack had wrecked the building to begin with.
Tired of waiting for the pistols to recharge, I decided to try something that was probably a bad idea. I rolled sideways and pressed myself against one side of the trophy cabinet to maximize the opening I had managed to clear. Into the space beside me, I summoned the hybrid rifle from my inventory.
Wrapped halfway around the bulky weapon, I carefully pulled my body away from the hole I’d dug so far, then I double-checked that my legs were out of the way as I held the rifle across my chest and aimed in the direction of the lobby.
I squeezed the trigger.
The whine of the weapon spooling up deafened me in the small space, and I felt my eardrums pop as the rifle discharged. A spray of dust and sand back blast stung my arms and exposed skin as the shot tunneled far beyond where I’d managed to dig so far.
I swallowed and winced as I touched one of my tender ears. My fingers came away wet and bloody. I shook my head and brushed off the pain. Nothing I could do unless I got out of here.
I gripped the rifle firmly and fired twice into the crater I was digging with my weapons fire. Not seeing immed
iate results, I shifted my aim slightly upward and then fired twice more.
At the end of the tunnel I had just blasted, it seemed somewhat less dark. I stored the weapon back in my inventory as I bent in half, then inched my way into the narrow passage that I’d cleared. Sharp stones and jagged debris cut into my hands as I crawled through the tunnel. It was so narrow at points that I ended up removing my belt and holstered pistols, storing them in my Inventory so that I could slither through a narrow gap.
When I reached the end of the rubble, I pushed out into the open and stood to find that most of the sky remained dark and filled with stars. The faintest lightening hint of purple at the edge of the horizon indicated that dawn would soon come.
The smell of smoke was more intense, and I looked around at the still-smoldering rubble that had once been school buildings. Some places still stood, but they were isolated islands in a sea of wreckage.
Beyond the temporary damage I had already healed, the collapse of the school building on top of me had managed to add a few more tears to my already worn adventurer’s jumpsuit. I dusted myself off and made a mental note to get higher quality gear when I could afford it. Or at least a few replacement sets.
All of the vehicles that had been parked outside, including the fire trucks, were also burned-out wrecks. I circled the area, searching for more information, and found several bodies had been laid out in a line in the grass away from the school.
On closer inspection, they were all of the adults who had defended the school building from the coyotes. They had all been put on their knees then shot repeatedly in the back. At the far end of the line, one of the figures lay on top of another, and I walked over for a closer look.
It was the younger state trooper who had been kind of a dick. At least trooper dick had somehow taken one of the attackers with him.
And the body under him wasn’t human.
The creature was humanoid in shape with two arms and two legs. However, the legs were canted backward and ended in cloven hooves instead of feet. The flesh of the creature’s sharply angled face was a dark red that shifted to purple-brown away from the center of its face. It had no hair on top of its head. Instead, two short, slightly curved horns jutted from the creature’s brow like the horns of a goat. A tiny pair of horns, no larger than the tip of my finger, protruded forward and down from either side of the alien’s chin. Its face was twisted in a rictus of pain and surprise that displayed sharp fangs within its mouth. The creature almost looked like a demon from any of a dozen different human mythologies. Even in death, the body had an unsettling aura.
Beyond where the bodies lay were several large rectangular impressions in the lawn surrounded by charred circles blasted into the grass. Something heavy had rested there, as if landing then taking off with rocket propulsion engines.
Spaceships.
I recalled the first of the welcome messages from the System, which had implied that aliens would be coming to Earth and that we humans should make friends. The evidence here showed that some of those Galactics had now arrived and didn’t have humanity's best interests in mind.
At one side of each of the rectangles, impressions in the damp grass showed where numerous feet had walked up to the craft. I followed the tracks backward and toward where they seemed to point across the asphalt. When I circled the ruined school building along the line left by the prints in the grass, I found a section still intact amongst the rubble. The exterior wall here stood undamaged with only a single hole blasted through it, large enough to pass through. I cautiously approached the hole and peeked inside.
On the ground in front of the hole lay another human corpse. The body wore khakis, a button-down shirt, and a charred lab coat, so I presumed the dead man had been one of the teachers. Besides the body, backpacks and other school supplies littered the classroom.
But still no kids, living or dead.
Something tickled in my thoughts at that, so I walked back outside and continued around the building.
In several more places, I found classrooms that seemed to have survived the destruction of the school, but they were all empty, with the exception of bodies that looked like teachers or school administrators.
Despite a thorough search, I found no other survivors. Everything I could find indicated that the attackers had wanted the kids and had taken them all.
Back at the front of the school, I looked over the line of bodies once again. The clothing on their backs was scorched from repeated beam weapons fire, but the only one who had done something about it was the one trooper. From the looks of things, he had rushed at one of the executioners and beaten the alien to death with an extendable baton before the others had shot him enough times to finally bring him down.
I had rolled the trooper’s corpse off the alien earlier, but now that I really looked at the man, I found that his sightless eyes were staring straight ahead, frozen in an expression of mindless fury.
The trooper, like the other bodies, carried nothing of value. The alien, on the other hand, still held an energy pistol that looked similar to mine. I knelt beside the alien and pried the weapon from the dead alien’s grip before I added it to my Inventory.
The alien also had a ring on one of its fingers, and I worked the silvery band free with a few twists. I continued searching the corpse and added a few more interesting trinkets in the process.
A casting of Cleanse was needed to remove all the clotted purple blood from a necklace after I slipped it off over the sticky mess of the alien’s ruined head. I also found a couple items that looked like grenades hooked to the alien’s belt and a pouch that contained a Mana battery. I slipped everything into my Inventory so I could figure out how to get the items identified the next time I visited a Shop.
I couldn’t wait until I finally unlocked my Class Skills. I was really looking forward to the Greater Observation ability in the second tier of the Pursuit tree.
Finished with the bodies, I stood and took another look over at the depressions where the spaceships had rested. Nothing new caught my attention as I roamed through the grassy impressions, and the early morning dew clung to my boots.
A few skill notifications demanded my attention, and I found that the System had credited me with having learned both forensics and tracking skills from my efforts in investigating the now-destroyed school.
A separate tab in my Status page listed all of the other skills I had accumulated so far, but they were just numbers, static measurements that rated various proficiencies. As far as I could tell, there were no actual bonuses attached to the numbers, so I didn’t give much attention to the tab besides noting that my highest ratings seemed to be for energy pistols and knife proficiency.
A new Quest waited for my attention when I reached the bottom of my notifications.
Quest Received—Find the children.
The human remnants of the attack on Montour High School have been abducted by parties unknown. Locate the survivors.
Reward: Variable XP and Credits
I sighed as I read the vaguely worded Quest update. Of course, it gave me no hint of how to proceed.
I closed the windows and regarded the wreckage of the school around me. I should have felt angry. I had let down my guard, and now missing children were paying the price. Innocents, like the Thomas kids, who had just lost their father.
Everything that had happened over the past several days only strengthened my desire to get even stronger.
Sixty percent of humanity was dead, and all I could do was keep killing things in order to level up to get to the point where I could do something about it.
That goal lay years in the future. If I lived that long.
“You’re a piece of work, Hal,” I muttered.
I closed my eyes for a moment and leaned my head back.
There was nothing left for me here. I would need to find a new lead or catch a lucky break to find the school’s killers.
I opened my eyes and stared at the stars of the Milky Way galaxy
, bright in the night sky overhead. Up in the heavens, one star glowed far too brightly to be natural. I watched as it moved closer and dropped lower in the sky. At first, it almost looked as if the falling star was heading right toward me, but I soon realized that the descending object was tracking slightly to the west.
I thought about what was to the west and grinned as I pulled my bike from my Inventory and mounted it. Maybe it was more of the aliens, I thought as the Mana engine purred, and I throttled up.
Since my Class Skill, Keen Senses, boosted my night vision in all but complete darkness, the pre-dawn light provided more than enough illumination for me to clearly see the road ahead. Before long, I steered back onto the shoulder of the on-ramp for I-376 West once again. Staying on the shoulder allowed me to avoid most of the abandoned vehicles that still clogged the highway.
Above me, the falling star blazed even brighter. Soon it was nearly overhead. The light from it was bright enough that it could almost have passed for daylight. The object still moved west, but it steadily slowed to the point that my bike’s acceleration soon matched its land speed.
I veered off the highway onto Exit 53, barely slowing as my bike climbed the hill. I grinned as I blew past the posted speed limit sign. Normally, before all this apocalypse stuff happened, there would have been a police officer hiding alongside the road, just waiting to give out a speeding ticket to drivers who went over the posted limit on the airport access road.
My expression sobered a moment later as I braked sharply to avoid a smoldering pile of wreckage that was strewn completely across all lanes of traffic and for over a hundred feet on either side of the road. When I noticed the tail fin that stuck up sharply from one end of the debris, my breath caught in my throat. I imagined what it must have been like for all the people in flight as the electronics failed. Most would never have had a chance.
Ahead of me, the falling star slowed then gently descended to land on one of the airport runways. The brilliant light source cut out immediately after it touched down.
Fist Full of Credits: A New Apocalyptic LitRPG Series (System Apocalypse - Relentless Book 1) Page 14
