As the strongest person who’d actually spoken to Ava besides the colonel, I was tasked with accompanying the driver to the hospital to look for recruits, under the cover story of investigating a broken Signal stick at the far edge of our neighborhood.

“It’d be faster if I went,” Dane said. “But I’m wearing too many hats at the moment.”

The innocuous statement meshed with our cover story, but also a bald statement of fact. This whole operation depended on his suite of abilities. He was contacting people in our neighborhood, which was still a necessity. Even if we crowded the truckbed like a clown car, I doubted we could fit more than ten or twelve people, which meant we needed more locals, and I was skeptical that we’d get volunteers as easily as he’d suggested.

Even once he found them, he’d be busy. Not only did he need to direct our “army” to meet up surreptitiously, he absolutely had to locate the Dragons’ base. If he couldn’t find their army, we didn’t want to send ours out.

I was a good choice of emissary for other reasons too. Although we’d traded in our original truck for one with a closed bed, it was still possible for badblankets to gum up the wheels. While just about any of us could jump out and handle a badblanket, my Life Sense meant it would be challenging for a bladetail or leafenrat to ambush me while I fought, even under cover of darkness. Rams, at least, weren’t an issue - they’d been cleared from this route earlier.

Once we got close to the hospital, we stopped encountering any monsters whatsoever. I saw people out on the road, even in the twilight. People had purchased alien light sources, and someone had managed to tie them to the top of the parking lot’s streetlamps, maybe by telekinesis. The people outside fighting recognized the truck, many of them pausing to wave and cheer.

We parked and I hurried inside. A tired-looking man in dirty nurse’s scrubs was sitting in the entryway behind a table filled with an array of bottles, cloths, and tubs. “Any wounds?”

“Uh… No. I’m looking to talk to…” I hesitated. The name Colonel Zwerinski had given me was odd. “The Living Legion, I think they're called?”

That got his attention, and I saw him actually look at me for the first time, his eyes dwelling on my bike-helmet-headgear and my book-and-ribbon vambraces. “You’re not from around here. Oh! The, um, Shop group? I didn’t think we were due for another shipment of goods until tomorrow. I can’t thank you enough for the water you brought earlier this evening. We were running very low.”

“You’re welcome?” I said, somewhat confused. I hadn’t heard anything about bringing them water, but I guess that was a thing. “Uh, no. We didn’t bring any goods with us. I really need to talk with the Living Legion as soon as possible.”

“They’re probably sleeping right now,” he said, skeptically. “I mean, they’re feeling much better now, but they’re mostly, you know, kind of older. Go-to-bed-early-wake-up-early people, by and large.”

“Well, it’s kind of an emergency. We need their help, and we need it tonight. It can’t wait until morning.”

“If you say so…”

The nurse seemed unconvinced, but he gave me directions. It wasn’t far, just over to lobby for the Emergency Room, but the darkness made it more difficult. There had been an alien lamp by the nurse’s table to match the ones above the parking lot, but most of the building was unlit. I stumbled through pitch-black hallways until I reached the dim illumination of the Emergency Room lobby, where moonlight streaming in through windows and glass doors softened the pitch black to hues of blue and gray.

I could make out a sea of hospital sheets and pillows strewn across the cold tile floor. It confused me, at first, before I realized that the hospital likely held far more people than it did beds. There might be beds for the patients, but the building was full of surgeons, doctors, nurses, people in waiting rooms, visitors, janitorial staff… When I thought of it like that, I was impressed that they’d scraped together enough pillows and sheets for everyone.

Life Sense offered me familiar feedback, letting me know that human beings were resting all around me. Well… almost all around me. Moving sheets to my right accompanied by two humans in close proximity gave me a hint that not everyone was overly bothered by the lack of privacy, even if they were keeping their intimate actions quiet. I veered left, not wanting to intrude, and caught a man returning to his sleeping spot from a nearby restroom.

“I’m looking for the… Living Legion? Are you part of that?”

“No! Great people, but I was just here for kidney stones. The Legion’s over there.” He pointed to the Emergency Room’s front door.

I thanked him and made my way over, not questioning his odd comment. Answers would come soon enough.

An older man was sitting and watching the doorway while the others slept, and he rose as I arrived. “Did you need something?”

It was odd watching him stand. In the pale moonlight, I could see the liver spots amid the wispy strands of his remaining hair, and his skin had the loose and papery appearance common among the extremely elderly. I expected him to move with the slow and careful caution I remembered from my grandfather’s last years, each motion carefully planned and tested before it was committed to, but instead he leapt up with all the confidence and carelessness of a teenager.

“I’m looking for the Living Legion?”

“You’ve found it. Name’s Joseph. What’s the sitrep?”

I quickly filled him in. His face initially bore an expression of polite, if tired, interest, but as I told him about the Dragons’ domination of their neighborhood, he started to look disgusted. By the time I explained about Ava and the hostage-enforced enslavement of the Dragons’ soldiers, he looked furious.

“The Colonel thought that you all might help?” I finished. Actually, he’d been extremely confident that these people would help, a confidence that seemed a little crazy given how difficult it had been to get people from our own neighborhood on board.

Joseph pounded a fist into his palm decisively, though, not showing any of the reluctance I'd expected. “Damn straight. Clarice! Sueann! Matthew! Wake up! We’ve got a mission. Captive innocents used as hostages. Limited window of opportunity for rescue. We need to move!”

In minutes, the whole crowd around me had been shaken awake and were shrugging on gear and picking up weapons. Joseph turned to me. “We could pull in our auxiliaries from Myrtle Gardens, but you said we had transport limitations?”

“Yeah,” I said, a little shocked by how quickly the group had transitioned from quiet slumber to war footing. “I’m actually not sure if we can fit all of you. How… how many abilities do you each have?”

“George! Find something we can Improvise to the roof to make handholds! Some of us might be riding up top,” Joseph called. He turned back to me. “Most have four or five abilities, but a few - like Clarice and I - have more ‘cause we used the Points Siphon. Let’s move, people!”

His voice had gotten loud, and some the non-Legionaries sleeping around us grumbled or pulled sheets over their heads, but no one actually said anything to him.

Joseph was a force, and I felt myself being pulled along in his wake as he snapped orders. I bounced along unresistingly as he modified the truck and boosted several other people to the roof, then climbed up after them. I found myself being prodded into the passenger seat of the cab along with an tiny older woman wearing a leaded apron - the kind they used to shield the body during X-rays - tied around her torso as armor.

“Come on, sweetie! I’m afraid we’ll have to cuddle, but I rarely bite! You’re not my type, I’m afraid.” A salacious wink accompanied her words, her energy and attitude at odds with her wizened appearance.

“My name is Meghan,” I said numbly, letting myself be pulled inside.

“I’m Sueann! Nice to meet you.”

I sat down and pulled the door shut behind me. Sueann perched on the center console, resting her feet on my lap and wrapping her arms around both headrests for balance.

I glanced over my shoulder into the bed of the truck, which was jam-packed with senior citizens.

“You all were asleep fifteen minutes ago,” I said.

“That we were! But we can sleep more when we’re dead. What you said about Cotton Acres… it’s awful. Someone needs to do something. That’s us!”

I looked at her, confused. “Not that I’m not grateful for your help but… I didn’t really expect anyone to leap into action like this.”

She smiled at me, exuberant bubbliness mellowing slightly. “Listen, sweetheart… I bet this has all been just awful for you. You’re young, probably had a real nice life going before all this started.”

She was right. I’d had a wonderful husband, a beautiful family, a nice house, enough to eat, and a little money left over for fun and relaxation. It had been a paradise I had only sometimes fully appreciated. I nodded, trying not to let the reminder get me down.

“I can’t tell you what I was doing before this started,” she said, her voice matter-of-fact.

“You… were in a coma?”

“Lord, no. I had just been brought into the hospital because I’d gotten a big gash in my arm doing some fool thing. My daughter brought me in to have it treated, and I was giving her shit because I didn’t remember who she was.”

“Alzheimers? But… you don’t have it anymore?”

Sueann nodded. “Cure Disease was a miracle for me. It’s the same story for the rest. Oh, not all of us had Alzheimers, but all of us had something: dementia, cancer. I think Clarice had some real bad osteo-something, so she was pretty well always dealing with some broken bone or another. We got our lives back.”

I frowned. “It’s a long way from being cured to becoming a pack of badass monster hunters. What…?”

Sueann laughed. “You’re not wrong! Gotta thank Clarice for that one. A door to the lobby got wedged open, and some monsters got in. She shamed us into fighting, and the nurses and doctors mostly kept us alive.”

“Mostly?” I couldn’t help but ask.

“We… we lost some. All in that first day, while we were still weak. You know the waterfall in the entryway? Well, there’s no water anymore, so we carved their names in, made it a memorial.”

I hadn’t noticed, in the darkness.

Sueann’s voice had turned somber told me about the dead, but having finished, she shook herself. She didn’t seem to be a woman who let things get her down long. “It was worth it. I know I shouldn’t say that when it was other people who paid the price, but any of us would have done the same. Better us old fossils than young folks like you or my daughter. Anyway, after we cleared out the lobby, we noticed there were some people out trapped in their cars, and by the time we’d taken care of that, Joseph had gotten a second ability and it made him feel young again. That got the rest of us motivated, and we kept going, even when the people still in trouble weren’t right in front of us. We keep the area around the hospital safe now, and we’ve helped others earn more abilities too.”

“So… You’re the Living Legion because you feel alive again?”

“Partly.” Sueann smiled. “Partly as a reminder to ourselves, partly a promise to y’all. Partly to irritate that loudmouth Joseph, who insists we ain’t a legion without thousands of people.” Sueann smiled. “The point is, though, that these lives were given to us. This curse for y’all… it’s been a blessing for us. This health, this strength… it’s more’n I would have ever thought possible. You’ve paid the price for our blessing. We can’t pay you back, but we’re going to try.”