The truck-waggon was booking it along the flooded road, pulled by Diane’s large beetle, its rapid, wobbly walk still leaving Goodie feeling uneasy. He knew that they were trying to leave the area as fast as possible, but he still felt that all that movement was unnecessarily excessive. That speed and chaotic motion that it travelled with just seemed so…violent and seeing it always put him on edge. And he was always on edge nowadays.

Of course, when he remembered what they were running away from, he instead felt that the big bug could have stood to have been moving a mite bit faster.

He did not want to remember that thing.

Those hollow eye sockets.

Staring at him.

Goodie shook his head and turned his mind to the here and now.

The people that they had rescued from the zombie. He had not had the time to inspect before, when all of them had piled inside vehicle, eager to escape the pursuing dead.

Seventeen in total, three children clutching to the sides of whom he assumed were their parents, or elder siblings, while one woman held a baby. The rest were mostly young adults.

Each and every one of them was soaked to the bone, doing their best impressions of one of those eternally-shivering hairless dogs that celebrities liked to keep in their purses.

What drew his attention the most, however, was that look in their eyes.

These people were not grateful. Maybe they were grateful for being alive, but not for him or Diane, not for being saved by foreigners. What he saw in most their eyes when they looked at him was a feeling that he knew only too well. A look he had seen on the bullied and beaten back on earth, the complete lack of hope that left a dullness in a person’s gaze. The same look he had seen in the mirror each day since his parents died.

These people were bitter and angry.

Their lives destroyed and they knew they could do nothing to change anything.

Goodie did not spare an ounce of sympathy for them, sure, they may have lost loved ones, seen their world crumble around them with the meteor strikes, certainly, but they would have still have had those looks even if they had just come from a leisurely walk in the park on a sunny summer’s day.

And if the situation had been reversed, he knew, none of them would have lifted a finger to help him, Diane, or any other person from Earth. Ungrateful shits.

The few exceptions to this, being two men who seemed eager to talk to him and, of course, the baby.

Baby!

Out in that downpour for who knows how long, if it was not already dead, he realised, it soon would be. He needed to get one of the health potions from upstairs.

But if he got one, the others would want it. Fuck, he thought, not just want, they all looked like they needed it. It was not as if the entire potion needed to be drunk to feel its effects, but one would still not be enough to treat everyone. His face scowled over the thought of more money being pissed away, but he was not the type of arseshyte to let people die just to save a buck, so he made his way to the stairs.

The two men barred his way, or at least tried to, both were worn down, drained of whatever internal resources had kept these people going, one so much so that he was easily bypassed, the other, however…

“Go…good and no…nooble sir, our gratitude for your actions knows no bounds,” he stuttered out, though whether this was an effect of the man’s obviously low temperature, or just his eagerness to say what he had to as quickly as possible, Goodie could not say. The man continued, “we are sick, the childre…”

“Yes, I’m getting them,” Goodie interrupted, knowing full well what the man had been hoping for.

He pushed passed the man and headed up the stairs to the second floor, holding onto the railing for dear life, not that they were bouncing around that much. The waters obscured their vision of what lay ahead, but the beetle managed to keep them more or less on the road, that and with the vehicle’s large tires, ensured a relatively smooth journey.

No, Goodie held on because of Tom Godwin, a kid who had slipped in the shower and snapped his neck. He had been eating at the mall’s food court when he was eleven when he overheard the couple behind him mention the ‘unfortunate incident’ as they called it. It was what happened in life, but hearing that a kid with roughly the same name as his and had been roughly the same age as him at the time had died like that, had freaked him out. He had poor coordination, atypical for a geek like him, some would say, something he was fully aware of and something that had given him nightmares for a month. Since then he had tried to keep to the rule of always keeping one hand on the railing.

Admittedly, that rule came from a movie about sailing boats, but he thought it was still a good rule to stick to. That and always keep a mat in the shower.

Upon reaching the top, he had to do a quick search for the potions in question as he had separated the various magical items over the place. He knew that the field of mana each item generated could interfere with each other, but not the full consequences of what such an event would entail, the rarity of magical items making the knowledge on the subject more a matter of curiosity than necessity.

The items he was searching for, were a collection of glass vials, barely thicker than a black marker. Each with a label on it with the letters ‘HP’ written vertically down the side. Their contents were a translucent liquid, not red or blue as he had been taught to expect. Were it not for the labels, he would have had no clue as to their effects.

He had found them in the second cupboard closest to the back, on the right side, a pack of ten from which he removed three, then thinking for a moment, he took an additional one, upping the tally to four.

He moved back downstairs and gave them to the man that had waylaid him before.

“Baby, then children, then women,” he told the man.

Not a single thank you from anyone he noted as the man turned to distribute the magical liquid.

There was little else he could do, so he turned to head to the front to see how Diane was faring when he was again stopped. The younger man, boy really, as he was barely older than Goodie, had somehow found the energy to get back up from where the group of people had dumped themselves.

Something sparked his memory, the younger man looked familiar. Where had he seen him from? The dum-dum brigade!

Goodie’s memory was far from perfect, especially with only 5 points in intelligence, but he never forgot an idiot. He took a moment to grimace as a small voice in the back of his head wondered if that made him immune to amnesia.

“Mana; I haven’t been able to sleep, I’m nearly empty,” he forced the words out as if his life depended on it.

He pointed a thumb over his shoulder at the people behind him, “I can help,” he continued, “I just need a mana potion.”

Goodie breathed in, then out.

“Fine.”

He repeated his trip upwards, though this time to retrieve two vials with the word Mana written on the sides.

After handing them over…and being thanked…the man-child did just gulp them down, instead taking tentative sips, each time stopping to look to his left, at his [MENU] screen Goodie assumed. A moment later, the boy cast a spell, an orange glow cascading over his body, covering him in a glowing field that filled the compartment with warmth.

The boy then turned and walked over to the woman holding the baby; a moment and two spells later, a ball of water was dumped out the window. The boy had used magic to pull the water from their clothing, leaving them dry if not warm. Once finished, he had turned his attention to the other children.

Goodie looked around as this was happening.

The people were not pleased. Their faces and body language indicating their desire to speak out, including some of the mothers whose children were being spared from the cold, but with their choices being to keep silent or freeze to death, the kept their gobs shut.

Goodie decided to postpone his check on Diane and got to work. He was not trying to compete with the, now obvious, elementalist, he just knew that he could do something and did it.

The one good thing Goodie had learnt after having pissed himself in terror, was how to dry clothing. From his hand, he sent a small shower of shadow stuff onto the ground, the only indication of what he had done being a small dimming of light in the space between his hand and the floor. With it, he formed a small container of rubbery like material.

Many had chosen to discard their wet clothing, modesty taking a back seat to survival. Grabbing a…coat of some sort, made of a combination of wool and leather, he flooded the discarded item with a semi-liquid form of shadow stuff, darkening the colours as it did so, the barely perceptible substance filling the spaces between and within the material of the garment, pushing the water out and into the container below. Once done, he had the semi-liquid change into a gas, freeing the coat from its influence. It would not leave it bone dry, but it would be dry enough to allow for the owner to wear it again.

After handing it over, he and the elementalist went to work, stopping only to dispose of the water. It had left them both drained of mana and tired as hell. The affair made even harder by Goodie’s unwillingness to imbibe any potion, his fear of the alchemist’s products and their possible mutative properties still strong.

It pissed him off to do so, but he also handed out some of his dwindling food supply. Still no thanks from any except from the Earther amongst them.

He was about to head over and talk to that elder man, the local that could speak English, to explain that they would have to go on rationing. He was not being petty, his supplies were limited, and with this many people on board, they would be starving within days if they did not. He had no clue how long they would be out here by themselves and needed to make things last as long as possible.

His action, however, was interrupted.

“Goodie,” Diane called out, her voice sounding urgent.

He felt his skin tighten as a cold acidic sensation filled his veins as he imagined what could have happened. It was that thing. He knew it was. Or zombies, a hoard of the undead. Why was it always undead?

It was not the undead.

It was a man.

Riding a thing.

Goodie did not have the words to describe what he saw, the creature that the man rode upon was vaguely horse-shaped, but no horse had that many eyes…or tentacles.

It was a scout from the waggon train. Looking for survivors or loot, he did not know. Either way, they had been found.