Epilogue

Day 5

Plano, Texas

Raymond “Pops” Sullivan opened his eyes and let out a gasp. He heard a voice, but it faded away with his dreams. He shuddered for a moment, trying to chase the voice, but it was gone now. A memory.

A concerned face appeared above him. Meredith, his wife. She looked both relieved and exhausted, an emotional combination that were at odds with one another. No one had been relieved about anything in the last…

“How long?” Ray asked.

“You’ve been out for nearly a day,” Meredith replied. She smiled slightly. “We almost lost you.”

“You can’t get rid of me that easy, dear.”

Ray tried to get up, but pain flashed down his left side. He grunted and looked down at his naked torso. Thick bandages wrapped his chest and left arm. The off white cloth was soaked with old dark blood and something purple.

“Stay in bed,” another voice ordered.

The elderly face of Mina Byrd appeared beside his wife. Ray was still taken aback by the change he saw in the woman. Old Lady Byrd; she had been pushing ninety a few days back, but now she was straight backed and had lost at least three decades.

It was an ability, Ray knew, Revitalization. Somehow the old woman had survived the first day of horror and had raised her level to nearly four by the time Ray and his family had found her. She had been a nurse before retiring. It was one of the reasons Ray had always tried to help her out when he could, now she was helping him out.

“That armadillo or whatever was a walking sack of disease and poison,” the old woman stated. She waved her hands above him, a slight glow that seemed to emanate from her bones. “You’re gonna pull through, but your arm’s gonna need therapy and a lot of prayer to get back to normal. It don’t matter how much you put into your physical traits, that poison had a lot of mana in it, did some pretty nasty things to your channels.”

Ray looked down at his bandaged arm. They had been ambushed by a swarm of what he could only describe as long legged armadillos. They had spiked tails and spat venom, the tails contained a type of poison that had nearly been the end of him.

The last few days had been a brutal education in the System and how to survive it. Mana channels, mana renders, mana mutations; mana, mana, mana. Ray hated the fucking word, but it was the way of the world now. Mana channels made him stronger, faster, and all of that made him fight harder.

“How’s Malcolm?” he asked. His youngest son had been with him, scouting the path ahead of the main group. He had fought well, he remembered, but the boy wasn’t a fighter. He was their mage, with the power to sense enemies before they were seen. A Skill that had saved their group more than once in the last few days, but it lacked much defensive abilities.

“He’s fine. Shaken up, like everyone else, but fine.”

Ray pulled himself into a sitting position. Byrd tsked and returned to her other patients. There were only two in the small tent, a woman named Sarah they had found in the outskirts of Dallas and a man named Jose who had been sliced up pretty good by a giant preying mantis. Both were in a healing coma of sorts, a reddish light enveloped them, healing their wounds far faster than they would normally heal.

“Take it easy,”Meredith said.

“I’m fine. I’m fine.” Ray grunted and pulled a loose shirt over his bare chest. He hissed for a moment and then had Meredith help pull him to his feet. The world swayed a bit, but he was fine.

“People need to see I’m still alive,” Ray said.

Meredith snorted, but didn’t say anything. He had already explained to her the need for morale. He hadn’t been officially nominated as the leader of the Dallas Survivors, but he was unofficially the leader of the group.

He left the tent, walking on his own.

The noise of two hundred men, women, and children working greeted him. He moved around stiffly, but even Meredith saw the relief in their faces as the people saw him up and about.

“Pops!” Malcolm called out and rushed toward him. At the words, more heads rose up and a general cry of greeting filled the air. People walked up to him and shook his hand, at Meredith’s warning, they refrained from their usual backslaps and shoulder punching.

Ray smiled and talked with the people, still taken aback by the adoration in their eyes. It was something he hadn’t experienced in his life; the look of people who were thankful he was there for them. He had done his best to help his neighbors over the years, but none of them had given him the look that these survivors gave him.

It was wonderful and terrifying. They relied on him too much. They were placing all their hopes of survival in his hands, hoping that he would take them to the promised land.

There was one face out of the gathered people that wasn’t sharing the same thankful smile many wore. Instead, the man who strode up to Ray looked like he would never smile again.

“Sir.” Bobby Neville gave him a nod.

Ray had always bristled at the term ‘sir’ from his years in the military, but Neville meant it in the formal sort of way. He was polite like that. His parents had been good people. It was a terrible shame what happened to them.

The somber faced young man before him also gave Ray a lot of conflicting emotions. He had been the last person to see his daughter alive. He had been working at his summer job when Maya had gassed up the food truck there. That had been minutes before Integration occurred.

Ray knew the story by heart now. He had asked Neville to tell him time and time again. Integration had begun and mere moments after, there had been Dimensional Instabilities. Ray hadn’t seen these instabilities, but he had heard stories from others. Black lighting that struck down from a cracked sky, everything it touched vanished from existence.

Neville told him Maya had driven off with the food truck, speeding down the road and away from the gas station. Neville himself had barely escaped with his life, running from the store and back home, just as the whole area had vanished into a ball of black light and all that remained was a crater that spewed out horrors.

Mana Renders had opened up across Dallas, monsters from other worlds had begun invading. Massive creatures of death and destruction that couldn’t be stopped by the scattered survivors of the city.

Even now, Ray could still see the smoke rising from the burning city. Strange arcane lights occasionally erupted spawning monsters and shooting brilliant colored lightning into the sky. Downtown Dallas was a death zone. The suburbs just slightly better.

They had survived it, though. Two hundred people out of nearly five hundred that had left. A mob of scared, bloody people who fled the city on the second day. Rumors had it that the military was setting up in Plano, but that rumor was dead. Plano was dead. There was nowhere safe anymore.

“How’s it looking, Neville?” Ray asked, walking along side the young man.

Neville didn’t say anything at first, seeming to chew on Ray’s words. Finally he spoke. “Good.”

That was it.

Ray didn’t look at the man as they walked through the camp, Neville kept stride with him, along with Malcolm. Meredith headed off to do something else, she was the organizer and the accountant of the group. Even in the apocalypse there was need for accountants. She nodded at Neville and walked off with some others. The young man never left his side when they were out and about. He was his shadow, something that his own boy Malcolm seemed to resent.

It was regret, Ray figured. He didn’t know what Neville and his daughter had, but it seemed the man regretted running. He regretted abandoning Maya to her fate. Ray thought it was bullshit and had stated so many times when Neville had apologized to him. It wasn’t his fault. Shit happened.

“Alpha group brought in some meat,” Neville said. “Two hundred pounds of some kind of deer. Old Lady Byrd said it was good to eat. Bravo group found some old guns and tools in a couple of houses, not much ammo. We’ve got the water distiller set up.”

“I could go along with Alpha if we’re staying here tonight,” Malcom said. “They need people to spot the game and I’m the best at it.”

“No,” Ray said. “We need you on guard duty. You saved our asses last night when we were attacked. We need to protect the group.”

“But we need food more.”

“We can go without food if we have to. We can’t let any more people die.”

Malcolm frowned at his words, but didn’t say anything anymore.

Ray sighed inwardly. He’d seen so many young people in his years and immediately knew where his son fell on the spectrum. He was too eager and he was too ready to throw himself into a fight, but he wasn’t a fighter. That was something Ray was good at judging. His temperament wasn’t right. It was sad to say, but Malcolm would be more of a danger than a help in most situations.

The boy was smart, like his mother, and he didn’t like taking orders. He also knew he was smart and that made him a danger. He thought he knew better; he thought his ideas were better than anyone else’s and he didn’t have enough experience to know when he was being damned stupid.

Maybe in time he could change. Maybe after there was enough blood on his hands from his failures he would learn or he’d break. Ray had seen plenty of smart recruits lose it when they were responsible for another person’s death. Death was a stone, either you carried it or it pulled you under.

Death was something Ray was getting used to again. He looked out on the land before him. The camp they had set up was on a rise, a cluster of buildings and a small shopping center they had occupied; with some defenses to their flanks and a good open field that would expose anything trying to sneak up on them.

The place was a mess. The stores had been ransacked, some had caught fire, and there had been more than a few bodies laying in the open, festering and feeding the mutant animals stalking the land. There had been a nest of rabbits that shot lightning from their eyes. That had been a crazy thing to see, one that had given them a quest to clear the grocery store of the rabbits. Experience and useless universal credits.

The same scene was replicated over and over across the land. Ray had seen war and this wasn’t war; this was an apocalypse. This was death on a scale so large it dwarfed anything he had witnessed before. Even the worst humanitarian crisis was a picnic compared to Integration.

“The animals are even giving out credits,” Malcolm said as he watched a herd of twisted cattle walk a mile from where they stood. They had antlers, not horns, and their tails were thick and tipped with a barb like a scorpion’s. “If there’s credits, that means there’s something to buy with it, right?”

Ray sighed inwardly again.

“This is like a game, y’know. So it goes to figure that if there’s credits, there’s something to buy with it. From the System maybe or some kind of trader.”

“This ain’t no game,” Ray stated.

Malcolm frowned. “I know, dad.”

Dad, there he goes. Ray thought. He only uses it when he’s pissed. But he’ll never say that out loud. Not like Maya who would get in your face when she was pissed. That girl was straight up brutal to people that wronged her.

Malcolm wasn’t Maya, dearest Meredith had stated that too many times. He wasn’t Marcus either, the other child he tried not to think of. He was their only kid left. The only one who hadn’t been overseas or killed by some fucking dimensional instability. There was still hope for Marcus though, that he had been with his unit in Germany, that he had survived all of this. But even if he leveled up to the world’s strongest man, he’d never see his son again.

Traveling twenty miles was murder, traveling across the world…. Madness.

Maya, though, she was gone forever. Ripped apart or killed by that black lightning Neville had talked about.

If he hadn’t made her work that day. If he hadn’t made her gas the truck up. If he hadn’t…

Ray stopped his train of thoughts. He looked out on the burning world.

Either you carried it or it pulled you under.