We talked for a little bit and then just as we started to break, we heard voices coming from where the road met the parking lot. I could recognize them, even if I’d only worked with them for a month, I could tell it was MixerBeast and Dogleg

“What the hell are those cubes?” I heard Dogleg say. “What they made from? They look kinda like baked dirt.”

“I don’t know,” said MixerBeast, “but get ready. I don’t want to get jumped by a giant possum like we did before.”

We looked at each other and then shook our heads in disbelief. “Hey, you two!” I yelled out. “Come around front. The side facing Maxes’ entrance.”

“That you Monsoon?” said MixerBeast. “Good, you’re still here.”

“C’mon in,” I said. “Stay under the trees,” I added a second later. No sense giving that Vulture any ideas.

“Ain’t that something,” said Dogleg. “I cain’t believe that those trees grew that much in six days.”

They came around the entrance and into our compound. They really hadn’t changed, a lot dirtier, but they looked the same. Dogleg was 5’8” worth of skinny blond. He was all angles. Even his straight blond hair pointed downward. MixerBeast was 5’10” and had black hair that he wore short, messy, and spiked up. Unlike DogLeg he was a little bit hefty, not fat, just a boy that liked his food and beer. Especially the beer. Well, basically anything with alcohol in it. That’s how he got his nickname after all. He was always up for a party, a drink and liked making them too. Neither one of them had shaved, but you could only tell it on MixerBeast. Dogleg just looked the same as he always did, well, if you added a bunch of dirt to normal.

How do you greet someone in the apocalypse? Fortunately, Big Mike and Tanya were here as well.

“MixerBeast, Dogleg” Big Mike said. “I’m glad you made it.”

“Yes,” said Tanya. “It’s good to see you both. I’m glad you made it.”

“Hey, guys,” I said.

“I’m glad you’re still here, Monsoon. And Big Mike’s here too,” said Dogleg. “Ain’t this the shit? We got back to our trailer and hung out and then the apocalypse happened and our trailer vanished. It left us some funny money and instead of a car, we got these pull things.”

“Did everything vanish?” I asked.

“Pretty much,” said MixerBeast. “It left us some funky ass potions and a gold coin and three silver coins and a couple of pull-cabs like you see in movies, not as nice as the one you guys got, by the way, but something similar.”

We’d left the rickshaw outside when we came into our compound, so it wasn’t really a surprise that they’d seen it. I was a little surprised that they said theirs didn’t measure up. I guess They did me right in the exchange for the Caddie. I paused expecting a smart ass blue screen, but nothing happened.

**7/17

“Your trailer vanished?” I asked just to be clear.

“Yep,” MixerBeast said. “I was out on the front yard and it like glowed or something for a second or so and then just vanished into these sparkler-like sparks and when it was done there was nothing left. I mean nothing. Even the pad was gone. The driveway had changed into some rocks, kinda like those river rocks you see bagged up in Home Depot, but the whole trailer was gone.”

“Sure as shit freaked my ass out,” said DogLeg. “I mean one minute I was standing there on the front yard waiting for the apocalypse, and then, boom next thing I was in the woods. Well, not woods so much as a big-ass lawn. I looked around and all them other trailers was gone too.”

“So where have you been staying?” asked Big Mike.

“Well, you know that barn we put up to store our lawn equipment?”

We all nodded. This was their idea for getting ahead. MixerBeast was about half Osage and he was going to start a minority-owned business to get government contracts. He and Dogleg had talked about nothing else for the month I’d been at Maxes. They were saving up money to buy the trailer next, followed by the lawnmowers and hedge trimmers and weed eaters. All the stuff you needed for a lawn care business. It was actually not a bad plan, provided they followed through on it, which they were doing. In any case, the first thing they decided to do was to buy a metal frame building, once again, a Quonset hut. They’d thrown a party to get it erected and basically over the weekend, it had gone up. I’d gone out and helped because I had nothing better to do. They’d set the foundation the week before so all that needed to happen was to get the walls raised and the doors mounted which we did. MixerBeast’s family, a large clan, had come out and helped. Dogleg was an orphan, kind of an adopted child of MixerBeast’s family. They had known his folks and took him in when they died in a car wreck. It was a good time, lots of beer and music from his cousin’s band, a kind of Lynyrd Skynyrd cover band.

In any case, he continued on, “well, the Quonset hut was still there, so we moved in there too. All my neighbors did too. A whole bunch of old people and a couple of meth heads. The meth heads went into withdrawal the second day and took off to ‘see about getting some food’. They never came back. We stood it as long as we could, but then today we decided we’d had enough. ”

“There’s no plumbing in the barn. No running water, no way to wash up,” Dogleg said.

“Yep,” said MixerBeast, “And well, also we ran out of potions this morning. They only gave us a couple of week’s worth and when you have to share them with old folks, they go pretty quick. So we decided to come to Maxes and see if there was any food leftover here. Hey, we’ve even got money to spend,” he said, holding up the silver pieces that he’d got for his stuff.

I wondered about the currency they’d been given. I mean an auric and three agnis for all their stuff didn’t seem like a lot, but then again, they didn’t own much. Even their cars were mostly financed. Almost everything of value they had in the trailer was rented and so was the trailer. But if you figure a cupro was worth about a dollar, they’d got maybe $10,300. I wanted to argue that they deserved more, but I’d been in their trailer, $10 grand seemed pretty reasonable. Plus they got a couple of rickshaws and were able to keep their Quonset hut.

“How the hell are you living then?” asked Tanya. “I mean how many old folks do you have?”

“Well,” said MixerBeast, “it was just a small trailer park, it only had about 12 trailers. One of them contained the meth heads, four of them were empty at the time, the people that lived there had gone to be with other family members, so that left only about 10 people sides us in the park. It was kind of a retirement community. We probably shouldn’t have been living there, but one of my cousins was the manager and let us in. He got onto us about the noise at the barn raising, evidently, some of them old folks weren’t Skynyrd fans. The meth heads weren’t his fault. They got let in by the previous manager.”

Jackie spoke up then, “uh, who is?” meaning a fan of Skynyrd.

MixerBeast just laughed, “you’re obviously not from Oklahoma, are you?”

“Well,” I said, “we’ve got a lot of explaining to do, it sounds like,” trying to cut off a Lynyrd Skynyrd argument before it had a chance to get started.

“Did you select a class?” I asked.

“Not yet,” they both responded.

“I just got offered some basic classes and wanted something more, stuff like Merchant, Fighter,” said Dogleg.

“Yeah, same here,” said MixerBeast.

“I figured that you might have a handle of it better than us, so I was going to wait and ask if you were still here,” said MixerBeast. “I want some magic.”

“Same here,” said Dogleg. “If you can’t have magic after an apocalypse, what’s the damn point of surviving?”

“OK,” I said. “Let’s figure out what needs to happen and then make a plan and get ‘er done.”

“First off, we need to figure out what to do with the old folks,” said Janet.

“Good,” I said. “That’s probably the top of the list. Have they been fed today? Did your potion supply last?”

“Yes,” said MixerBeast. “We used our last potions this morning. We’re good through tomorrow. Nothing that’s been sniffing around the outside has a chance to get in.”

“Something’s been sniffing around the outside?” I asked.

“Yep,” they answered.

“Just this morning we heard something pawing at the door, but it couldn’t get in. That damn door is strong. It’s even stronger after the apocalypse than it was this morning. Whatever it was, couldn’t even dent the metal.”

“Your talking about the rollup door? A garage door, basically?” I asked.

“Yeah,” MixerBeast said. “It’s sturdy as fuck anymore. Ain’t nothing going to get through that.”

“MixerBeast,” said Big Mike motioning to the little girls.

“Oops! Sorry about that, excuse my language,” MixerBeast said. “I’m wired and need to tone it down some. On the way here we passed a cow-sized Possum. It wasn’t pretty. Fortunately, it was still da...rn slow. We left it in the dust.”

“Yeah,” said Dogleg. “It was a whole lot of ugly. Still slow though.”

“How far away from Maxes are you guys now? The reason I’m asking is because there seems to be a lot more distance between most places,” I asked.

“We just lived down the street,” MixerBeast said. “That was one of the reasons we begged my cousin to let us stay in the park, you know? I used to could walk it in about 10 minutes. I’m a pretty fast walker too. Remember last October when my car died?” he asked. “Well, I still made it to work fine the week while my brother’s shop was working on it.” His brother used to be a mechanic.

“Now it took us most of the morning to get here,” he continued.

“So, when you say all morning, what time did you leave?” I asked.

“How the hell would I know that?” he asked. “My cell phone turned into a block of black rock and I never wear a watch, but it was right after the animal left which was probably about 30 minutes or so after we got up. We tend to go to bed early and rise pretty early these days. Not much to do at night and there ain’t no lights in the barn.”

“So, about 5:30 to 10:00, about four and a half hours, I’d say,” I said.

“Well, if it’s 10 o’clock now,” he answered.

“Say ‘time’,” I said, “and think that you want to know the time also.”

“Time,” he responded and then immediately went, “Wow! Cool. There’s a”

“clock in your head, right?” said Janet. “Pretty cool!”

I looked over and I could see that Dogleg was trying it out too.

“So what was the road like? I mean if it took you 4 and a half hours that means either the road got a lot longer or you just were a heck of a lot slower? Did you get lost? What happened?”

“No,” MixerBeast said. “We didn’t get lost and I swear we were traveling as fast as I normally did. But the damn woods stretched on forever. The road just stretched out with woods on both sides. Kind of like you got here. Maxes didn’t used to have all these trees around it. It’s like we got more land or something. But whatever. Anyways, it was like the same streets existed, but they were way further apart.”

“Did you ever feel like you were lost?” I said. “I mean come on, you walked for 4 and a half hours on a trip that should have taken you 10 to 15 minutes tops.”

“Nope,” he said. “It’s weird, but nope.”

“I know,” said Dogleg. “It should of been weird, we should have felt lost or been panicking or something, but we just kept on.”

“That’s really fucking odd,” said Janet. “I mean, did you have a sense that you were on the right path or something? Because if I go for more than five minutes without a clear direction, I am lost and starting to panic.”

“Nope,” said MixerBeast. “I just, we just kept on. It was like we knew things were different now and didn’t care. Maybe we should get an Explorer class or something?”

“Anyhow, back to the road, what was it like?” I asked.

“Well, it wasn’t that great to begin with, well after all this, it just turned into a stone street,” he said. “It just stretched off through the woods and we followed it. It was still heading in the same direction anyway. The woods were different. I mean the trees were different, there wasn’t any undergrowth really, just these big tall trees. And I didn’t recognize about half of them. I used to be in the woods all the time. Deer hunting, quail hunting, turkey hunting. You name it, I was out there hunting it.” He paused for a moment thinking about the woods, I guessed.

“They’re different now. Hell, you can see it outside the parking lot, just like that,” he said, pointing to the trees that surrounded our little square area of what used to be a parking lot. “Well, and I mean there’s woods there now. That’s the main difference. Fucking trees everywhere. It used to be a city street.”

“So it really took you four hours and a half hours to get here?” I asked again, trying to keep the conversation under control.

“Yep,” said MixerBeast.

“Ok,” I said. “That’s different. So if you were walking at a 15-minute mile pace that means your barn was moved about 18 miles away.”

“Wow,” he said. “No wonder I’m tired. Those potions rock though. I’m still not hungry.”

“If that’s the case, then, well crap, instead of a 19-mile, 30-minute drive, it looks like about a 340-mile walk to get to where my mother’s house is.”

“That don’t sound that bad,” said Dogleg. “You could do that in about a day if you kept after it.”

“What?” said eGirl. “In what universe is walking 340 miles in a day not that bad? Not mine, that for damn sure.”

“I’m just saying you could cover it in about twenty-four hours if you needed too,” Dogleg defended himself.

“It’s may not be that bad timewise, but monsterwise I’m thinking it’s a bit different,” I said. “We’ve fought ten giant rats, four giant squirrels, one acid slime, two giant lizards. And that’s with us staying right here. I’m sure if we started moving, we’d have a lot more encounters. All while hauling along a bunch of old folks in a paddle of rickshaws.”

“You forgot the Giant Vulture,” Tanya said.

“And a Giant Vulture,” I added. “Although to be fair, it did just leave. With our squirrels.”

“Only three of them,” said Janet. We all looked at her like really, That’s what’s important?

“Well,” she said. “You were being precise too. Is that what a group of rickshaws is called, a paddle?”

“Yeah, OK, it left with three of our squirrels. It left the other baby squirrel behind. Hmm, maybe that’s why it’s flying by so much. Maybe it wants the other squirrel,” I said. “I have no idea what a group of rickshaws is named,” I continued. “Probably not that, but I just thought it needed a cool name, so I called them a paddle. Cool huh? Anyway, back to what we were talking about before, I’d say our first priority is to get the old folks back here? Everyone agree?”

“Or maybe we could move to them?” said Big Mike. “They are eighteen miles closer to where we want to go, there isn’t anything to keep us here, is there? That road leads straight to Sand Springs. Why don’t we just move there? All our plans were to move that way anyway, why don’t we just do it? Pack up our stuff and move out. Not to mention, I’m thinking we might be wanting to move away from Maxes anyway. People are starting to get hungry, looking for food, I’m thinking that they might be coming here.”

“Is that a bad thing?” I asked. “My mom said we should be gathering up people, helping them survive.”

“It all depends,” Big Mike said. “She said we were all survivors. That can be a good thing. But it can also be a bad thing, you know? Depends on what you’re willing, wanting, or able to do to survive.”

There was a pause then while we all considered what Big Mike had said and what it meant for our plans.

Consuelo said then, “Well, what about our plans for here? We were going to go back into Maxes and kill the rats and we were going to practice our spells to get stronger. Are we just going to give up on our plans?”

“No mamma,” Big Mike started to say when he got interrupted by Dogleg.

“You guys have spells? Really? That is so cool! I want them. Tell me how to get them,” he said.

“Alright,” I said. “Teach Dogleg and MixerBeast how to use magic goes into our task list. But hold on, let’s finish making plans first. It seems like we have two options, option one - return and get the old folks and bring them back here or option two - pack up and move to where the old folks are now.”

“The first plan means that somebody’s got to haul some rickshaws along and cover 36 miles. So, probably whoever goes won’t be back until tomorrow. I’m not hauling people through the woods at night and I’d recommend that nobody else do it either. Once we have them back here, we can move them into their own houses and teach them magic too. So somebody could be making houses for them to stay in while we are traveling to get them back.” I looked around and everybody was still listening.

“The second plan means that we’ve got to pack up and get out of here, probably in an hour or less, because, once again, I don’t want to be traveling through the woods at night, you know. Fortunately, we’ve got inventories and not much stuff, so we could probably do it. But the faster the better, because I’ve been in the barn, it will be crowded with all of us in there. I’d like to have my own house in a compound set up tonight. But that takes about 30 minutes each to set up. I can probably set up my own though.” Again, I paused and looked around. Everyone was still looking at me, waiting for me to finish.

“The first plan means we’re going to have to split the party. The second plan means we’re going to have to abandon our current plans and move through the woods with us being a little less prepared than I’d like. But regardless, we’ve got to do something, because I’m not comfortable leaving a bunch of old folks alone in the woods with no food. We need to be there tonight regardless of whatever plan we decide.” I stopped then and looked around. Everybody looked like they were considering the two plans.

“OK, MixerBeast,” I said. “When you left what time did you tell them that you’d be back?”

“Well,” he said. “I didn’t know things had changed so much. I told them that I’d be back probably this afternoon.”

“Well, that puts a hard stop on it, whatever we’re going to do, we need to get done by this evening or else who knows what they’ll get up to.”

“You’re talking about them like they’re kids. They’ve got a lot of experience,” MixerBeast said.

“I know and I respect that, but their experience hasn’t been in this new-Earth. It’s been in a highly populated, urban environment where they don’t have to worry about large predators. Just over there,” and here I gestured toward the woods, “I was about killed by a Giant Lizard. I stepped into its territory and it attacked. If I’d been alone or with two weaker people than those two,” I gestured at Big Mike and Consuelo, “I have no doubt I’d be dead now. I thought I was watching, I thought I was ready and still, I almost died. What do you think the odds are on your older folks making it in a situation like that? We get them trained up and they can sit in their seats in the rickshaws and take care of practically anything. Old Folks artillery brigade, till then, they could die stepping out the door of that barn.”

“Well,” said Big Mike. “How are we going to do this? We gonna vote?”

“We started that way,” said eGirl. “I think we should continue that way.”

“Why don’t we?” I said. “We can worry about how we want to go forward later. We’re on a time limit now.”

“OK,” said eGirl, “I vote we stay here and send people to get them.”

“I’m with eGirl,” Miranda said. “Always! But, now that I know what’s out there, I want to be stronger before facing it. I think we got lucky when we made it here.”

“Consuelo, Big Mike?” I asked.

“I say we go. We don’t need the rats,” said Big Mike.

“I go with you,” said Consuelo. “I followed you all over this country. I’m not stopping now.”

“I say we go,” said Baila. We all looked at her, especially MixerBeast and Dogleg.

“What?” she said, looking at them. “I’ve got a Force Bolt. I’ve got a vote.”

Amada looked at her sister for a second, smiled and then said, “I vote we go too.”

It’s strange how customs could be started from seemingly small beginnings.

I looked at Tanya and Jackie and then at Jake.

Tanya asked, “What about you? What do you want to do?”

“Yeah, let’s have it, Monsoon. What do you want to do?” asked Jackie.

“Every story that I’ve read said, ‘Don’t split the party’. But, of course, then they all split the party. I think I’d worry about you all if I left you behind and I have no idea what we’d be facing out there. I’d want you all there to back us up if we get into a scuffle and you know we are. Going to scuffle, I mean. So, right now, I’m thinking, let’s say goodbye to Maxes and rescue some old folks.”

“OK,” said Tanya. “That works for me, let’s go.”

“I’m there,” said Janet. “Let’s do this.”

“Jake, what’s the word?” I asked.

“It doesn’t matter, but I say go,” he said.

I looked at eGirl and Miranda to check and see if they were OK with the vote. eGirl just smiled and waved it off. She was fine with the way that the vote turned out. “Ok,” I said. “Everybody gathers what you need and we’re out of here. I’ve got something in Maxes I need. Big Mike, can you give me a hand?”

“You mean the GB?” Tanya asked.

“The God Box does what the God Box does. I wish I didn’t have anything to do with that thing. But I do and I will probably forever. Nope, I’m taking the stove. I was thinking that if we have to cook, why not use a stove?”

“Ok, not what I was expecting, but I guess it will come in handy,” said Janet.

“I know,” said Tanya. “He’s surprising.”

“C’mon Big Mike. Let’s look it over and see if we can acquire it for our trip.”

Big Mike and I made our way into Maxes probably for the last time. It was funny, but I was going to miss this place. Miss the time when I was just me and the girls. Miss, even more, the times from before the Apocalypse. It was my first real job. Probably not much of one and it was just a stopgap, but still I’d met some interesting people. Had some fun times at the place. And the rats. Let’s not forget the rats.

We both moved along in the perpetual gloom that shrouded the place. Staying along the front wall, next to the windows, well away from the nest. Even here we could hear the sounds of bodies shifting, the scratch of claws. We got up to the remains of the pizza place and soda fountain and the stoves were still there. We walked over and examined the stoves a little more closely then we did before, both of us keeping an eye on the rat’s nest just in case.

It looked like the big block of whitish stone with the handprints on it was attached to the metal top which was covered in the masonry bricks. It looked like it could slide in and out though, maybe for ease of cleaning. Don’t know, just knew that I wanted it.

“Damn,” said Big Mike. “They replaced the ovens. I wonder if They had a magical engineering crew that designed this or what? Did They just wave their hands and change it?”

“I’d guess the latter,” I said. “I think they’ve done this before maybe or well They had to come from someplace, you know? Maybe they had ovens there?”

“Why did you want this?” he asked.

“Well, like you said, magical engineering. They took away all of the gas, plastics, electricity, this oven might give us a way to figure out how to design replacements using magic,” I said. “At the very least it shows us what’s possible. I think that as bad as things are now, maybe they aren’t totally screwed up. If we can survive these first days and months, we can start rebuilding. We’re an inventive species. Clever little monkeys. The biggest hurdle I think to progress is figuring out what’s possible. With this and the knowledge that we had of stoves, fans, heaters, air conditioners, all the crap that made modern life better than it was in the old days, can be reinvented. If Consuelo wants an icebox, we’ll figure out how to make it. And maybe this stove might show us the way forward.”

“Good idea,” he said. “It kind of makes sense. Still, that pizza oven cost around $12,000 grand. It’s a shame to see it replaced by what looks like some bricks with a kid’s handprints on it.”

“Well, let’s tear it out and we can figure it out later,” I said. And we did. The rats left us alone and we gathered it up and put it and the other oven in Big Mike’s inventory. It was a stretch, he said he could feel them in there, but not too bad. I took a couple of the bar trestle tables and four of the benches that were there as well. I tied the benches together using some of the camping rope I had into stacks of two and did the same with the tables and they stacked that way in my inventory.

We came outside and the little ones and Roxie were already in the rickshaw waiting on us. The huts in the compound hadn’t collapsed but looked a little shaky. It turns out that Jake had re-acquired the wooden beams that supported the roofs and had them stored in people’s inventories. A great idea. It should make setting up the compound much faster, plus we won’t have to go into the woods to gather more. Woods, night, bad. At least, until we figured out how to see at night. I added that to my list of spells to figure out.

I turned around and looked back at Maxes, wondering if it was a dungeon or just a nest? I would have liked to have found out, but well, ‘needs must as the devil drives’ as my mom used to say. Tanya and Janet came over and stood by me. First Janet and then Tanya reached out and we stood there, hugging and just sharing the moment. We’d done a lot of surviving, a lot of growing, here at Maxes. The hug ended and I looked at them and we smiled and then turned and I picked up the arms of the rickshaw, fastened the dragon catch on the harness and we started on the next stage of our journey.