Tim was up on his feet, kind of crouched down with his spear up and pointed forward like he’d watched one too many Tony Ja movies. I bent down and picked mine up too, looking around to see what he’d spotted.

“What did you see, Tim?”

“Did you not get the text message o’ doom, Jack? Monsters are about to spawn. We’re way away from everyone else with these shitty wooden spears. This was supposed to be for rabbits, or maybe the wolf thing in the loading part. What do you think they mean by monster?”

“Keep the pointy end towards the monster and we’ll be fine. Whatever it is, just attack. We’ll both pile on, two versus one. Overwhelming aggression is the right answer 99% of the time.”

“Uh-huh, so if it’s a rabid grizzly?”

“That’d be the 1%. On that thought, let’s start heading back towards everybody else.”

He agreed and we started back the way we’d come. We were both walking quite a bit slower now, trying to spot any potential ambushes. Tim had better hearing than me, because he stopped and put up a hand. He looked over his shoulder and whispered to me.

“You hear that clicking noise?”

I answered in a low voice.

“Whispering carries further, just talk quietly. And no, I don’t.”

He gave me a dirty look, but before he could continue I nodded my head.

“I hear it now, think it’s coming from over there. Let’s check it out.”

He looked hesitant, but when I started that direction fell in behind me. I tried to walk quietly and crept up close to a nice solid tree so I’d have something at my back if things went sideways. When I saw what was making the noise I couldn’t stop a short grunt of laughter. The thing looked kind of like an armadillo, rodent head, articulated plate body, but it had crab claws on its forelegs and every couple steps it would scissor them making that click sound.

“What the fuck is that?”

Tim came up beside me to look and shook his head.

“I’m going to call it a crabadillo. I guess the monster’s weren’t nearly as scary as I thought.”

He stuck out his spear and kind of poked at the thing. It immediately swiped that lobster claw out and lopped off the end of the branch like a pair of geared pruning shears.

“Holy shit.”

The crabadillo knew we were here now and it charged. With the way it had trimmed his branch I had no doubt that thing could lop off your foot at the ankle. It ran at us, not quite house cat fast, but way faster than its stubby little legs should have made possible. Tim and I both backpedalled. It chased Tim, and I immediately switched gears to come up behind it and thrust with my spear. I could feel the flex of my still green branch when I made solid contact, but it didn’t penetrate the shell. The thing made a grunting noise and turned around grabbing for my spear with its claws. I jerked the end out of the way and it missed. I turned the motion into my backswing and swung my now shorter spear like a golf club into the thing’s side as it charged at me. It knocked it a few feet away, and the thing made that grunting noise again but otherwise my strike didn’t seem to affect it much. Tim on the other hand screamed like a maniac and ran in. At first I thought he missed with his spear, but then it became apparent it had been intentional. He dug his point into the dirt beside the thing and kept shoving forward while he brought it up. The crabadillo flipped over onto its back and he pinned it down in the center of its body. The thing tried to roll into a ball like a real armadillo and its clawed arms reached for the stick, but the placement was just right that it was unable to do either.

“I’ve got it pinned. Kill it.”

I had my knife out before he’d even finished. I dropped down into a squat, much closer to those claws than I really wanted and stabbed a half dozen times into its throat and chest. The crabadillo finally quit thrashing around and Tim straightened up from where he’d been leaning his body weight on his spear.

“Man, that was intense.”

“I’m impressed. I don’t know that I would have thought to flip it over and try the armor on the underside. I was just gonna beat on the thing until it gave up or the armor broke.”

“Uh, yeah.”

He looked uncomfortable so I shrugged and dropped down to process the body. He watched, a little pale in the face and asked me questions while I worked.

“You’ve done that kind of thing before?”

“Butchered a crabadillo? Fuck no, but wild game is wild game. You cut up here and try not to puncture the gut. Then reach up in there as high as you can get and cut that,then right on the other side of the pelvis you cut this lose here and you can basically hollow out the whole thing.”

I finished field dressing as I explained and dumped the insides out onto the ground.

“Probably want to save all that stuff if we were starving, make sausage and whatnot, but don’t really have a grinder and I doubt anybody’ll be hungry enough yet to eat it while it’s still recognizable. I’ll skin out the carcass when we get back to camp. Probably share the meat with everybody and you get the hide. Sound fair?”

“Sure. How do you know all this stuff? What do you do for a living, butcher or something?”

“Shit no, I’m in the army, but I grew up in the country. Guessing you’re a city boy.”

“Well, suburbs actually. I teach at the neighborhood high school, never really spend much time in the city.”

I dropped the carcass in my messenger bag and we started back towards the others. We stayed cautious but the easy win against the crabadillo had taken a little of the edge off, and we were confident enough to hold a conversation while we walked. Tim seemed like a pretty nice guy. He was in his 30s, lived alone, taught high school science, watched a ton of movies, played a ton of video games. He also talked way too much. I mostly grunted in reply and he filled the silence with his life story and I was glad when we got close enough to see other people. A blond wearing nothing but a green t-shirt ran up and greeted us.

“Tim, you’re back. Did you guys get that crazy message too?”

“Hey, Angie. Jack, this is the girl I was telling you about I gave my shirt to. Angie, this is Jack. We killed a crabadillo.”

“What’s a crabadillo?”

I grinned at her.

“Dinner if we can get a fire started.”

There was hollering from the large mass of people over by the door and we stopped our conversation to check it out. Ken, the guy in the coveralls was shouting something, but you couldn’t hear him over everyone else. Then the asian chick whose name I couldn’t remember let out a whistle. It was shrill enough everybody stopped to look at her and in the silence Ken’s voice carried.

“Everybody come over here, we’re having a meeting.”

It was nice to see organization starting but since this was from the gather rocks guy I wasn’t sure how much good it was going to do. I followed everybody else over. It was a pretty odd group that formed a circle around Ken. Everybody was around my age, it looked evenly split between men and women. Nobody looked to have much clothing and at least a third of the people seemed to be wearing some kind of bark and leaf loincloth thing. I spotted one guy with a sword and a chick with a machete but most folks were empty handed. I was busy checking folks out and missed the first part of Ken’s speech but I tuned in and caught the tail end of it.

“.. so we have to work together. I think some of us should work on building a shelter for everybody, while other people go out and explore. The worse thing we can do is everybody run off on their own direction so we can’t help each other.”

There was some murmuring in the crowd but it mostly seemed positive. Even I had to admit he had a point. Then the asian girl in the sundress spoke up.

“My name is Li. We should all work together but we need somebody to be in charge. I think it should be Ken. Is everybody else okay with that?”

“Hold up.”

I spoke before I even had a chance to think about it, and when everybody turned to look at me I didn’t say, they’re obviously in it together you bunch of morons, like my immediate reaction told me to. They’d been chatting with these people, getting to know every new comer through the gate, and all I’d done was piss off Tiny. Instead I tried misdirection.

“I think Tim should be in charge.”

Tim shot me a look of pure panic and I grinned at him, while somebody else in the crowd called out “Who’s Tim?” Tim raised his hand in a hesitant wave at the mass of people staring at him and someone I couldn’t see called out. “Let’s vote. Raise your hand for Tim.”

I raised my hand, and so did Angie. After a couple of awkward seconds so did Tim. When a few minutes went by and nobody else anted up the same voice called, “Raise your hand for Ken.” At least a dozen hands went up, if it wasn’t unanimous, it was at least a clear win and Ken took charge.

“Okay, thanks for the vote of confidence. So Jeff raise your hand.” A bald black guy with just a hint of a spare tire over a pair of navy blue BDU pants raised his hand. “Jeff is a police officer and he’ll lead the exploring team. He’ll meet people over there when we dismiss. Is anybody here an architect or in construction?”

I was a combat engineer and probably more qualified than anyone else for what I was pretty sure he was looking for, but I wanted on the exploration team so I kept my mouth shut. Two other guys raised their hands and gave their names and a quick resume, one carpenter and one plumber. The carpenter, Joe, was wearing one of the bark loincloths but he had a truly epic mustache. Ken nodded and thanked them both before continuing his address to the crowd.

“Joe will be in charge of the folks building our shelter then. Tim, if you and Li will join me for a quick discussion let’s all get to work.”

Co-Opting Tim into the power group was pretty clever, but I didn’t really care enough to try and warn him to play it cool. Instead I just clapped him on the shoulder and wished him luck before I headed over to Jeff the cop to join the explorers. He’d walked a little away from the main group and he waved one arm around in the air and called huddle up. About a dozen people gathered round and stared at him expectantly.

“Okay, we’re looking for food, water, or anything useful. Everybody got at least a pointy stick or a rock to defend themself with?” When nobody responded he kind of sighed and started again. “It’s the buddy system. I’m gonna split you up in pairs and send each group in a different directions. Head out, travel till you find something we’re looking for or till it seems like about two hours have passed, then come back and report on what you’ve seen. Go out with a buddy, come back with a buddy. Don’t leave anybody out there, don’t get lost. Anybody got any questions?”

Still nothing but silence responded to him so he started pairing folks off. “You two go that way. You two the opposite. You two over here.” and so on. I had been in the back of the gaggle around him, and there was only one person left to pair me with. It was the woman with the compound bow and the amazing ta-tas. I couldn’t help but notice she had definitely failed at weaving enough plant life for modesty, but had managed a fairly straight stick as an arrow for her bow. Apparently I failed to make eye contact again because she muttered.

“Him, seriously? My face is up here, jackass.”

I looked up and flushed.

“It’s just, Jack, actually. Hold on a second.”

Instead of immediately heading out in our direction to explore I jogged over to the door. Ken called out to me but I ignored him and opened the door and got that same green loading screen. I almost fell over as my messenger bag twisted around in front of me and the XP tokens I had from last time went flying out of it. They flew up to the number displayed in front of me and it rolled forward to 37,240. Apparently it kept a running total, and this was my leftover plus whatever I’d gotten from the crabadillo. This time the character tab was grayed out, apparently I didn’t have enough XP to level up and spend stat points, but it still let me choose items.

The giant wall of text came up and I asked for the search bar and started shopping. A pair of cotton socks were 500XP, I wasn’t willing to spring for wool. Six thousand bought a XL sports bra, I had to guess at the size but I’d stared long enough I was fairly confident. I was guessing it was the elastic that made it so much more expensive, because when I went looking for gym shorts the ones with a drawstring were only a thousand. I bought a splitting maul because it was cheaper than a traditional axe and I could get one with a nice fiberglass handle for 15,000 and three wooden broadhead arrows at a 1000 points apiece. Even though I had a couple points left I switched them back to tokens again. I stuck all my purchases into the magic messenger bag except for my socks. Those I sat down and put on before I headed back to the door.