Hildi was ready to go. It had been seven days. Actually seven and a half. Baxter had been asking her daily when the group was going to be ready. Starting last night, he’d begun asking about every three hours or so. He would stand, walk to the door of the house, look out, ask her, walk back, circle three times and lay down with a sigh. Even playing with the children didn’t keep him as occupied as it used to.

Frankly, she was sick and tired of hearing his, “When go?” question. But she wasn’t foolish enough to yell at a rhino-sized dog, so each time she would say, “Soon, buddy. Soon,” or something similar.

But at the same time, she knew that they had to let everybody have their chance to get their stuff. Each of them had a lifetime’s worth of memories they needed to somehow gather up and pack away. And judging by the way the houses were disappearing from the street, they would have no second chances.

But they were finally ready to go. And Fern called a meeting.

Everyone showed and looked antsy, everyone was ready to leave. Those that had gone to their homes earlier in the week were especially antsy, but Fern wanted to make sure everyone was on the same track.

Hildi’s family used to live on Skyline Circle in a white brick one-story house. It used to be about half a kilometer from the Silvestre’s house. That was before the Event. When she and Billy and Baxter had walked it, it felt more like four kilometers. It used to be flat until you reached Brittain Lane which was on a largish hill. Since then the hill has grown. It now was about 1.7 kilometers high. The road had also changed from a two-lane asphalt street to a single-lane dirt road. The spaces between the house had grown too. You could still see the house of your neighbor from your front porch, but there was a bigger gap between the houses and the gap had grown larger as the three of them had come closer and closer to the Silvestre’s. Lawns had pretty much vanished and were becoming part of the forest growing to surround all the houses. All that made Hildi understand why Fern called the meeting, but she didn’t like it. She wanted to move. If she had to listen to Baxter say, “When go?” one more time she was not sure she'd be responsible for her actions.

“Thanks, everyone!” Fern started off. “I wanted to thank you all for your patience. I know some of you have been waiting for almost a week. But before we take off, I’d like us to be clear on our route and, there’s something else I like us all to do as well. I’ll get to that in a minute.” She paused and looked around.

“As far as the route goes, we’ve all been talking it over so everyone should have a pretty good idea. Down the hill to North Moccasin, follow it down to Cobb, then take Cobb west to Route 66, follow it south ‘til we reach the Y by the dispensary and take North Frankhoma Road until we come to the Turner Turnpike, then we follow that until we reach 9th St. Then we move off the turnpike, up onto the overpass and we should be right by Max’s. Everybody follow that?”

She paused and looked around the room, making eye contact with everyone, including the kids. Especially the kids. She needed everyone to know where they were going and how just in case there was a monster attack and someone got separated.

“Good. And let me explain the reason that we chose this route. It avoids the bad element that’s started a camp at the old Kum & Go convenience store. A man named Wade, or maybe I should say cockroach named Wade, has gathered up a bunch of the former lowlifes, drug dealers, druggies and gang members and somehow united them and that’s where they are staying. Hopefully, this will be the safest route we can take.

“The reason that we aren’t trying to go under the turnpike on North Frankhoma and make the turn and come in the back way by Lampton Welding is that according to Hildi, the further away from a city you are, the greater the distance between things. Just as an example, she says the distance between her house and mine has grown from .3km to about four km. And we’ve all seen how ridiculously large the hill we live on has grown. I can’t even imagine what’s happened in Colorado or New Mexico. In other words, we expect the distances to grow the further from the town center we are.”

There were some sounds of surprise from the listeners, but everybody realized that the world had changed. This made the changes a little more defined.

“Every man and woman will be armed and, from the description of Hildi, we do not want to compromise with Wade’s folks. We need to be clear. If my husband tells you to fire, we need you to shoot your crossbow or bow. These men are no longer your neighbors. They have set aside civilization. We haven’t. Ultimately we will prevail, but right now things are still up to decision. And they are against our decision.”

She paused here again and made eye contact with everyone in her group. Especially the adults this time, trying to figure out the temper of her group. Would they stand? Or would they collapse?

Looking around she felt satisfied. Her neighbors had survived the Event. Not untouched, but they had survived. Everyone here had changed, grown stronger, a little bit harsher, but still possessed a sense of community, a sense of belonging. A feeling of tribe. She could trust these folks. And did. After battling all the monsters that had come to the house, these people would not fail to do what was necessary.

“Ok,” she said. “I can’t tell you how proud I am of you right now. Y'all are survivors! We are going to make it and I can promise you, life will be better! This is the first step on our road to survival. Believe it and we will make a better life together!”

There were a few half-hearted cheers then, so she smiled and waited. She wasn’t trying to psych up her neighbors, but if that was the result of her talking, she’d take it!

As if to emphasize this, she got a notification:

Keep them alive! A leader needs a group and a group needs a leader. In growth, ascendance.

Skill Gained

Oration

Elemental Sphere: All

Rank: Bronze

Level: 1

Range: Within limits of voice

Damage: na

Cool Down: na

Duration: Permanent

SP: 25 per 10 minutes.

10% bonus to Health, Qi, Mana, and Stamina for (3*Rank) of skill hours.

Everyone in the room jumped a little then and old Wither’s said, “10%?”

She smiled and said, “I just got a skill! Oration.”

“These are truly the end times,” Withers said. “Could you imagine Trump with that ability?”

“No,” said Cody Fisher, a former flight instructor who used to live down the street from Fern and Will. “He’d ramble on complaining about the Democrats or the Fake News so long the damn buff would wear off before you could use it!” Everybody laughed. Somethings are universal. Even in Oklahoma.

“Ok,” Fern said. “Everybody’s on board with the plan, you all know where we are going and how we are planning on getting there, right?” She paused and made sure everyone was nodding.

“Here’s the part that I haven’t discussed with you all, except with my husband,” she continued. “We’ve figured out that if a house still exists, it means that somebody is alive and still considers it their home, right?”

She looked around and got nods.

“Remember how the well, Bobs or the System or whatever you want to call it said we needed to do better on saving people?”

She paused and could see that everybody remembered their day two notification when the System had scolded humanity for dying too fast.

“I’d like to use this trip to gather up as many people as we can. Too many folks are dying. We need to do better. That said, I’d like to propose that as we travel we stop at every existing house and check for survivors. We’ll have the main group, and then the two groups of searchers will fan out and check houses? Is everybody clear? Have questions? Think it’s a bad idea?”

She paused and waited, letting her plan settle in.

Old man Withers spoke first, “You know it’s not safe splitting the group?”

“I know,” she said. “But the System is right. We need to do better. When we get to Jake’s I was going to suggest this anyway. Forming teams and searching for survivors. But while we are traveling there, it seems like the perfect time to gather up folks. I don’t know if those houses have shocked or kids or even old folks still living in them, but if we don’t do something, they won’t be living long!”

Withers spoke again, “Do we need more shocked? It sounds harsh, but, well, do we?”

Fern spoke again, “They are part of us. A broken part true, but a part of us none-the-less. We need to gather them up and somehow heal them and bring them back to us. I don’t know what this new world holds, but with magic and Qi, there must be some way of healing the kind of wounds that broke them.”

Georgia spoke up then, “They ain’t trouble. They do what they're told, but they just lost their spark. If we can re-spark them, they’d be good as new. But one thing I do know is whatever we’re gonna do, we’d better do fast because they ain’t gonna last long on their lonesome.”

There was some conversation then, mainly other people trying to make sure that they had their say, but the consensus boiled down to ‘let’s try it and see’. After all the System had told them to. Not quite what the gamers in the group called ‘a quest’ but a pretty clear directive.

They started out then.

Brittain Lane continued up the hill where it met and merged with Kingsway Street. The main body of the group and one of the explorer teams started down the hill toward North Mocassin The other team started to the hill’s crown, checking houses along the way.

The temperature was midway between what you’d expect in an Oklahoma summer and an Oklahoma winter, about 19 degrees. At least Hildi thought so, then she wondered how she knew that and said ‘temperature’ and a menu appeared:

Good job! Always fun to discover new functionality!

19°

‘That answered that,’ she thought. Then wondered if she could get the information from the menus without all the menus appearing. ‘It’d be nice,’ she thought, ‘if every time I wished to know the time, the temperature, the date, what a person’s name was, the information appeared in my mind. I'd rather have that happen than it appearing in some block of text that I have to read to understand. She made a mental note to talk to Baxter and Jake about it, well, Jake really. But in any case, she shared her discovery with Fern and Will and the others in the group.

The hill was steep and the distance between houses seemed to be growing rapidly for the uphill group. It was as if the world were formerly a ball of compressed paper and pieces of the paper had been pulled out by an origami master. Somehow the Event had taken into account the presence of humans and made large numbers of them act as another ball in the huge sheet of paper that was our world. A town, a small ball, a neighborhood, a smaller one, a city, a large ball and the closer you were to one of those balls of humanity, the less the geography of the world seemed to change. The less the paper was pulled.

Of the 27 houses that made up Fern’s neighborhood, running around the big loop on the top of the hill, everyone she and Will had invited to their yearly picnics, 14 of them were gone. The whole southside of Kingsway Street was gone. It backed up onto a wilderness zone, overlooking Polecat Creek, and something or several somethings like the coyote pack had cleared them out.

The explorer teams developed a similar strategy. They pounded on the front door, listened for a response, and if they received one, they tried to convince the people inside to come with them. They were always successful.

They learned not to tell them about the dungeon, instead just telling them they had a place with food and shelter. The people inside the houses were generally hungry if not starving. Some of the time they had a Shocked person there too. The Shocked were all adults, none of them were below twenty-five. It appeared the younger you were the more resilient to change you were. And an apocalypse was a pretty major event. Several times, they found families with a parent being cared for by their kids, their very hungry kids.

If they didn’t receive an answer, they broke in and looked for a survivor. Most of the time, it was a Shocked, but kids surviving on their own were a regular occurrence too. The youngest sole-survivor was a two-year-old child. Fern quietly added it to the other three that she had already claimed as her own. Sometimes the house was empty, the survivor out somewhere else. They left notes telling them to go to Max’s in that case.

They also gave each family an introduction to their inventories if they hadn’t yet discovered them. Then told them what to take, weapons, photographs, journals, high school and wedding albums, and any food they had. Also, seeds if they were a gardener. They didn’t give them a lot of time, but they tried to make sure everyone got at least something from their past.

Even giving the people only thirty minutes to gather up their stuff, it took the teams over four hours to gather the survivors up. It was past four in the afternoon and it was starting to get dark.

The downward exploration team had fewer houses to check, so they left the main group behind and started walking up the hill and checking houses. After they reached the second house, they met up with the topside team and headed back to where they’d left the others at the base of Brittain Road. They had another meeting.

Nobody wanted to make a night journey to Max’s. Plus they needed to step up their speed if they were going to make it regardless. Someone pointed out that there used to be about 38 houses along North Mocassin. Even if half of them were gone, that left 19 houses to check. At the rate they were going, that would be eight and a half hours to just get the first part of the journey done. Something had to change.

Fern, of course, said that they had to help those people and that started a huge row. Everybody chimed in with their opinions and they were all over the place. But the main consensus was that nobody wanted to be on the road either tonight or tomorrow night. Nobody wanted to have kids out there in the dark with giant snakes and whatnot out searching for food.

Hildi kept busy translating all this to Baxter. Baxter said that he could kill anything that came out after them. Hildi argued back that he couldn’t do it while keeping everyone else alive. What if it was a pack of coyotes instead of a single snake? While their little internal argument raged, the external argument resolved.

The whole group went back to Fern’s house, the original twenty-two adults plus the 15 kids and all the new survivors that they’d rescued: three shocked, four elderly, 11 adults and 16 more kids.

They had venison and vegetable stew. The venison was from a giant buck that had tried to impale Will just yesterday. It had charged up out of the woods from where the houses across the street had been before they were ‘cleaned’ away. He’d shot it in the head with his crossbow and it had folded down soon after. It was a brilliant, but lucky shot. It had made it to within about two meters of him before it went down. Somehow when it did, its antlers caught on the ground and the entire deer pinwheeled and slammed into the ground, a hind leg’s hoof whipping centimeters past his groin. The other hunters razzed him about that. When the skinners came to haul it back to the area they used to skin and dress the meat, they had to pull six crossbow bolts out of it. People were getting fierce.

The new folks were definitely happy to get fed. A common story was that they had run out of food sometime not long before, usually the day before. When Hildi thought about it, she figured that was about right. People generally grocery shopped once a week, sometimes once every two weeks. That meant their groceries or the potions they got left with in place of the food were running out. They couldn’t hunker down and survive in their houses any longer, they needed to get out and scavenge food.

Only one house had any shocked survivors where they were the only people in the house. In that house, the room they were in had a giant water feature. It was a big fountain. It didn’t run anymore lacking electricity, but there was still water in the base. The team that found them suspected that they drank the water from the fountain when their thirst grew too bad but had no way of proving that. Or perhaps they’d had a daughter or son caretaker that had left to get food and had never made it back.

After the meal, the group organized their sleeping arrangements. It basically meant old people and kids got beds, everybody else slept on the floor in the hallways, or wherever they could make space for them. Fern and Will’s family along with Rex, Bernie, and Dobbie all planned to sleep together in the master bedroom. Hildi and Billy were together in the basement back in a little alcove formed by the stairs and some boxes. Baxter planned on sleeping on the porch. He was still a little upset about Hildi’s pointing out that he couldn’t keep everybody safe. He planned on hunting tonight.

But before they fell asleep, Fern and Will and Hildi and the adults who were part of the original group held another meeting to determine how they were going to progress to Max’s. The other adults gathered around, but for the most part remained quiet, not feeling that they had the right to speak.

Everybody agreed that the way they were going about it was not going to work. Not if they wanted to make it to Max’s before tomorrow night. And everybody did. Nobody wanted to leave other survivors out in the cold, but the timing wouldn’t work. They couldn’t spend thirty minutes to rescue every person they came across. They finally tabled it and decided to talk about it in the morning before they took off.