The trip started the next morning at five am. Fern and Will had woken everybody up and got them ready. There was no coffee.

They had looted a couple of bags of coffee beans from the last house they’d visited, one of the surviving children Mary Butts’ home. Both of her parents had died from the coyote pack. Her mom, Megan, had carried her out of the house while her dad, Jeffry fought and died trying to let them escape. A coyote followed and killed her mother right before Fern, Rex and Will came running down the street in answer to her cries for help.

But, of course, nobody had a manual grinder and there was only a single percolator pot. A small all-metal pot her family took with them when they went camping that couldn’t make enough for everyone, so no coffee.

They had some of the last melons and some more of the venison for breakfast. Then the whole group gathered outside for their last meeting before getting on the road.

Fern repeated the route that they were planning on using to get to Max’s once more to make sure everyone knew in case they got separated by a monster attack.

Fern told the group that she was going to send out four groups of three people. Two groups would be responsible for one side of the street, the other two groups for the other side. They would have a bunch of rocks with them. They were the white quartz stones people used to make ornamental walkways. Just like the ones on the path that Fern was standing on which was where they were going to get them.

Each group would spend no more than 10 minutes at a house. And once they left they put rocks on the side of the street. No rocks meant no one was home, three rocks meant they were ready to come and the main group would stop and gather them as they passed. Two rocks meant they were not ready, but wanted help to Max’s within the next week, one rock meant they didn’t want help. That was their time frame for joining the group, now or within a week. Nothing else was to be offered.

Then she appointed the groups: Hildi, Rex, and Bernie were left side one. Sammy and Dato (Jake’s sisters) and Cody Fisher were left side two. Hugh Falcon, Jackie Falcon, and Joseph Bumpers were right side one, and Garret Grissom, Jamie Conte, and Teresa Armstead were right side two.

She hadn’t wanted to put any of the new adults on the house teams because she wasn’t sure about them yet. About how they’d react to a monster. In a smaller group, it was critical everybody fight. Nobody could freeze or do nothing. Of course, Baxter was going to go with Hildi’s group, despite Hildi trying to get him to stay with her brother. That left her, Will, Diana Caldwell, old man Withers and his wife, Katherine, Janet Fisher, a very fat woman although as she liked to say, slenderizing nicely post-apocalypse, Georgia, Sara Kessler and the two Shocked as well as the other newcomers: three shocked, four elderly, 11 adults and 16 more kids.

There was some talk at first, but Fern ignored it and sent the teams out at a slow jog toward the base of the hill. Then she dealt with it.

“It’s done,” she said, turning back to face the remaining people in the group. “All four teams have ranged weapons and a machete or something equal. We are going to rescue everyone that we can. I can’t let folks die when we have a chance to save them.”

“But what about us?” said old man Withers. “I can see that they’re pretty well equipped, but how about us? What are we going to do if a monster comes? We’ve just got Will’s, yours and Diana’s bows and a bunch of bats and one or two machetes. What are we gonna do?”

Fern looked at Billy and nodded. Billy had been waiting for a moment like this. He and his new brothers and sisters had not been wasting their time down in the basement. Over the past eight days, they had been going through nonstop cycles of practice.

The basement wasn’t that big, but the kids have ad been able to figure out a few things. The first thing was that as spells leveled, they leveled too. They didn’t have to fight monsters to gain experience, they could practice and get stronger. The second thing they’d figured out was a Qi healing ability. And finally, they figured out that if eleven kids hit a monster at once with their highest powered bolt, they were going to kill it. After all, they were no longer the first level newbies that they started out being. They were now at least eighth level.

Billy had also figured out that if you gave kids whose families got slaughtered in front of them a chance to get back at the monsters that killed them, they didn’t mind practicing 10 hours a day. Although, they didn’t really get a chance to practice ten hours a day. Ms. Caldwell spent time with the group and then they had to do chores, but as long as the kids were quiet and seemed happy, the adults left them alone. The adults still needed time to figure out this new world too.

Their force bolts were all level seven which meant when they cast their highest powered version, they did three bolts that did 1-6 (+7) points of damage per bolt. He guessed that meant the System rolled a six-sided die and then added the extra damage to it. Which made no sense at all he thought, but welcome to the world. He hoped it was just the System dumbing it down for the mortals because the idea of Gods rolling dice caused his body to tremble.

Billy and the others had been practicing pretty much non-stop for the past eight days. When they had gone out yesterday to leave for Max’s they’d all been ready. But nothing happened so they walked along like everybody else.

The other thing that they’d been practicing was something called ‘volley fire’. According to William, their gamer, it was the best way to take down a boss monster. Done right, it was kind of a one-shot, one-kill kind of scenario. Everyone agreed that with Billy’s high intelligence and perception, he’d make the best shot caller.

So, Billy shouted, Attention, Force Bolt (5), Mailbox, ... Fire.

At the word fire, all the kids from the basement said the word “Zap” and the mailbox pretty much disintegrated. The bolts were a light blue, barely visible in the dawn’s light. But eleven of them combined together had made an almost laser pointer type of beam toward the now disintegrated mailbox.

Fern looked at the kids and then smiled. Then she looked at old man Withers and smiled again. There was a difference between the two smiles. A bit more teeth were showing in the second one.

She had talked to Billy last night. Well, actually, Billy had talked to her. He had approached her at dinner and said he wanted to talk to her. They had stepped outside and he’d explained what the kids had been doing.

She didn’t know what to think. A ten-year-old saying that he’d been training other kids how to cast spells and do Qi. She didn’t even know what to do with her mana yet. Or her Qi. Yet here was a ten-year-old kid telling her that he’d trained a bunch of other kids to fight monsters.

He said that they could cast spells and do Qi healing. He said they’d focused on practicing one spell and one ability. Force Bolt and a Qi healing ability called, “Jade Lotus Touch” which they’d all discovered when they started investigating how to use their Qi. He told her that their Force Bolt spell was up to level seven and their Jade Lotus Touch ability was up to level eight. Most of the group could only do that one spell and ability. He suspected that in the same way that Force Bolt was given to new mages, Jade Lotus Touch was granted to Qi cultivators.

“He suspected?” she thought. “For god’s sake, this kid is ten!” If Hildi had been present she would have sympathized with her.

He started to go on, but Fern held up her hand to stop him. She called up her on Force Bolt spell and saw that it cost 20 points and could do 1-6(+1) in her case. She thought about her arrows and then she thought of the range that the spell gave, 10 meters plus three meters per level. At level seven that would mean they could hit a monster at 31 meters. That was a pretty good distance especially since the spell had no real cool down.

Fern had started to get upset but then thought better of it. What’s done is done and anything that could get them safely to Max’s was a gift from God as she saw it. She knew she was going to catch hell tomorrow when she sent off the rescue teams, but now she had a backup.

Later that night in the room they shared, she told her family what the kids had been up too. They were all equally as stunned as she had been. She also made some changes to the teams she was planning on sending out to check the houses. She made them larger and gave them more of their stronger fighters. She was sure that her main group could survive, now she worried about the away teams.

The house teams had disappeared down the hill and around the corner by this time. All the members of the teams had leveled and put at least a point or two into agility and vitality. Fern said load up and they did, everyone getting in their rickshaws if they were a passenger or walking beside them if they weren’t.

They had ten rickshaws from before and then they acquired a few more. The front yard looked like there was a rickshaw driver’s convention in town. Fern was pulling one, her husband another, Diana Caldwell a third. Fern was pulling old man Withers and his wife along with the two-year-old orphan girl, Dorothy Fuller. Diana wound up with Sara and Georgia, each holding a one-year-old orphan, and Will wound up pulling the two shocked and another one-year-old and Dobbie. Fortunately, they were all heading downhill. The kids divided themselves into three groups, one front, one in the middle and one bringing up the rear. Billy’s team took the rear.

Fern let the newcomers sort themselves out. It was going to be a long day’s walk and they needed to make it without too many problems.

Five of the adult men took up rickshaws and seated the shocked, the elderly and the smallest children inside. That left 6 other adults to herd the remaining kids along.

The remaining kids wanted to talk to Billy’s group but Fern didn’t allow it. They were on duty and shouldn’t be disturbed. The kid’s eyes were hungry as they thought of the way that Billy’s group had cast the spell. Spells. Magic.

It took them about twenty minutes to get down the hill. It turned out that if they lifted the handles up sharply a friction brake would engage and slow down the rickshaws. Before that was discovered, the new rickshaw drivers had a couple of tense minutes when the rickshaw’s had started picking up speed. At one point, an elderly couple had been climbing over the back trying to escape and the driver’s eyes were huge as his feet only touched down every five meters or so. The whole group had been running along behind, screaming advice, “stop, pull up, jam the poles in the ground, don’t jump, jump.” But it was this moment that had led to the discovery of the braking mechanism, so ‘all’s well that ends well’ seemed to be the general consensus. The group took a ten-minute pause then to regain their breath, calm down some, and let the rickshaw drivers cool off.

They made it down the hill fine after that with the rickshaw drivers riding the brakes. They started down Moccasin Road picking up the folks that the advanced teams had prepared for them. There were only 21 houses left between the end of Brittain Road and the start of the turnpike section of their journey. They could see house roofs further up the streets they passed, but Fern had been clear. They could only worry about the houses on their path, they couldn’t afford the time to expand their search. Not if they were going to make it to Max’s before dark.

They wound up with a lot of people, but few of the people were capable of being helpful. There were only fourteen adults capable of pulling a rickshaw. Fortunately, almost every house remaining had a rickshaw out so they didn’t need to worry about acquiring more.

There were a lot of Shocked, ranging from a 25-year-old man to a man who looked to be in his 90’s. A total of thirteen almost catatonic bodies. As the day passed and they kept finding more and more of them, the group became quieter and more despondent.

Fern just said, “Bring them. Maybe Jake can do something with them.”

Then there were a bunch of elderly folks too, ranging in age from 65 to 77. The 65-year-olds could walk, but needed to take breaks occasionally. The rest were just packed into a rickshaw and pulled along with the group. There were 10 of them.

Then there were the kids, lots and lots of kids. The youngest sole-survivor was a 10-year-old boy. They found him hiding in his mom’s closet. The biggest group of kids was in a house at the Moccasin Road right before they turned onto Cobb. A nineteen-year-old man named Cody Tash had gathered up 13 kids from the neighboring houses which later disappeared. Another man and woman had gathered up seven kids. The biggest surprise was the shocked man being taken care of by eight kids, the oldest kids were twin ten-year-old boys. Anyway, they wound up with 52 kids. The youngest they’d found today was a year old. Yesterday, they’d actually found a two-month-old, but she was with her mother.

They reached the turnpike by 11:15 that morning. They’d been lucky. No monsters or giant animals had come after them. Will suspected that it had was because of their numbers and the fact that they had the rickshaws with them. He figured that the body of the rickshaw looked large enough that it discouraged the smaller predators and they’d be fortunate to not run into any of the larger ones.

But, after they made it onto the turnpike, their luck ran out. They were passing through a treeless section surrounding the highway. It wasn’t the same turnpike that had existed before the Event. It had shrunk down to a two-lane road, from its former six lanes. For some reason, the trees that had spread everywhere else had drawn back from the road and the group was now following the road through a meadow about 3 kilometers in all directions. The grass was somewhere between two and three feet high. The soil looked sandy.

The grass of the meadow was pretty much all native. Will and Rex were able to identify it as a mixture of Big Bluestem, Little Bluestem, Indian Grass (the Oklahoma state grass), Switch Grass, and Prairie Cordgrass. They had been hunting for years and had recently made a trip to the Tallgrass Prairie preserve. There were also bits of Alfalfa, Rye, Fescue, and Bermuda mixed in as well. The meadow had only been growing for a couple of weeks, so it was already a miracle that the grass was as high as it was. Also, the season was wrong for the grass to be growing. According to the calendar, it should have been like January. In the northern hemisphere that usually meant cold weather, not 21 degrees.

Suddenly, from the land around the turnpike, a head rose up, not very high, only about a meter high before it began squeaking. Now that they were aware of it, the group noticed several dozen waist-high piles of dirt. Soon other heads appeared at the top of the simple piles of dirt and joined in on the whistling, squeaking noise.

The heads were grayish-brown with light spots on top. Underneath their jaws, their throats were a grayish-white.

The rodent-like creatures stood up on their hind legs and all faced the road and the caravan on it. All making a shrill noise while staring at the travelers. As they stood on their burrow’s entrances, they were visible. They had small ears and large eyes ringed in lighter fur. Their bodies were slender. Their tails had a black tip and were golden underneath. There were a lot of them, the travelers could easily see twenty or more of them, all standing on their mounds watching the group.

There were a lot of people by then. Besides the original three rickshaws, there were now fourteen more. All packed with the Shocked, old folks and children. Each of the rickshaws was surrounded by older children and adults that were capable of walking. The strongest adults were pulling the rickshaws.

Fen looked at Will and said, “What do we do? And what are they?”

Will looked at them for a moment and then said, “I’ve never seen them around here before, but I think they are Spotted Ground Squirrels. I saw them down in New Mexico and Arizona. But don’t quote me on that. For one thing, these fuckers are huge. So they could just be monsters. They kind of look like what I remember a spotted ground squirrel looking like. They are on both sides of us, but we’ve gotta get through, so I say we march past. Get the bows and mages ready and hope for the best.”

The first of the mounds was about 25 meters from the road.

Hildi looked at Baxter and nodded her head at the giant squirrels. “What do we do?” she communicated to the dog using their channel.

“Big rats. I kill,” he said. “No problem.”

“There’s like twenty of them,” she said. “And that’s only the ones we can see. Remember what we talked about with the coyotes?”

“Not same,” he said. “Coyotes kill. Eats grass.” Hildi took that to mean that they were not predators like coyotes were, but herbivores.

Baxter walked toward the whistling, squeaking squirrels and barked once. It was a powerful bark, sounding like a cannon going off. Everyone in the caravan jumped when they heard it. Then he proceeded to pee all over the ground in front of the squirrels. He did this in about four spots on both sides of the road. Everyone was watching the little dog’s antics by now; especially the squirrels. Then he turned his back on the squirrels and began kicking a cloud of dirt and weeds toward them.

The ground squirrels looked at him for a while and then somehow maybe by a breeze or something, picked up on the fact that this was not a fight they could win and disappeared back into their burrows.

After he was done, he trotted his little dachshund body back to Hildi and circled her feet. “Home soon?” he asked Hildi again.

“You bet, buddy,” she said. “We’ll be there tonight.”