Maria’s Point of View

  *Bang* *Bang* *Bang* *Bang* *Bang*. This gun had too much kickback compared to the one I used at the shooting range. It felt like someone modified it. Even still, I kept my barrel focused center mass and blew away the st speedy zombie. It hadn’t even been five minutes since the man left. Every single person he killed resurrected from the dead and fought us.

  Most were dumber, slower zombies. They weren’t worth worrying about; a normal person with a hammer or bat could take them down. The speedy fuckers who dodged around and tried to escape were a completely different case. Everyone was still shaken up by the near-death experience, which left killing them to the person with the automatic weapon, which was me.

  I moved instinctively after I killed it, pulling out my pocket knife, and I tried to dig through its head. My father shouted behind me. “What the fuck are you doing?” It was too hard for me to break through quickly. So I took a step back before aiming my gun and blowing its brain out. I watched the core roll on the ground as I smirked. It didn’t even cross my mind that I had been shaking and scared earlier as I watched the people being killed.

  It just felt more up my alley, it felt like a game. I couldn’t deal with killing people, fragging zombies was something I was far more comfortable with. They were already dead, killing them again was good for humanity, if they escaped they’d cause far more damage than if I killed them. So what was this core thingy he was talking about? I walked over to mimic what he did, I was going to pick it up and wipe it off on the dead man's clothes.

  The moment I touched the core, I felt a sudden surge. My body tensed up at the sudden influx of energy, and I fell over after seizing. I could still think, no, even now, I could feel my senses expanding. I could think faster, almost as if everything seemed in slow motion, but I was just processing everything faster. On top of that, my brain was making connections I never thought of. I knew I was smarter, and my senses were improved. It was hard to gauge how much they improved, but it was by a significant amount. Well, it was over three times, but once again, it was hard to tell.

  A prisoner, noticing my predicament, lunged toward me to take me hostage or grab my gun. I panicked, the gun dropped out of my hands when I began to have a seizure, so I just moved my hands up instinctively. I felt an energy being pulled out of me and into my hands as it exited. A moment ter, that man was unched backwards like he was struck with a cannonball.

  His shirt was scorched, and I could see fsh burn marks on him as he flew backwards. Standing up, I felt a sudden weakness from the ck of that energy in my body. My quickened senses began to slow as the energy equalized in my body. I let out a giddy ugh at my own power. I was megaman! Well, megawoman. Strengthened intellect and senses while I had energy inside my body, but I could fire it out in bsts to deal with people at range.

  I think I could do this five times before I needed to rest. With that big smile still on my face, I asked. “So… We know what those cores are for now.”

  …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

  I was tired. Getting the boat was the easy part; looting the stores and fitting all the food that would have gone bad underwater was the much harder/tedious part. Thankfully, I didn’t have to touch items to store them anymore. My aura was ultra helpful; the biggest problem I had with it was that I kept forgetting I could store items at a range.

  The mental pull wasn’t that much more. I had never had a problem with it before, but I could tell if I tried to pull something near the aura’s limit, it would be more mentally taxing. The boat was smaller than the first one I stole. I didn’t need to do this, but every bit of food that went unspoiled would help ter. Most of the canned food would be ruined as the saltwater quickly rusted the cans.

  Most were fine; it just meant that the expiration date that could have sted years would now only st months. It was far different from the first time. I pnned on using every spare moment I could to rescue supplies and possibly look for people to help. That was much further down unless they happened to have power. Something else stood out to me: the percentage of prisoners who had the power inside them.

  The number wasn’t nearly as high as the ICU, but it was about twenty percent of the people had powers. It was significantly higher than the people in my previous lifetime. I would put it much, much lower, maybe ten percent of people at best, but anywhere from ten to one percent. They were that rare, I still couldn’t correte the differences between people who gained powers and those who didn’t.

  Either way, I was beat down and tired from working all day. I just wanted to crawl into bed and perhaps into a beautiful woman sandwich. Opening the door, I heard Vicky talking to someone in the kitchen. I moved, hoping someone had made something, and the maid was warned and headed home to be with her family. That meant only the girls cooked now, two of the meals were by Melissa’s mom, Akiko, but I wasn’t just going to assume she would take over cooking duty for every single meal unless it happened a few more times.

  Moving in, I stopped at the doorway as I spotted someone I didn’t know sitting with Melissa, Vicky, and Akiko. I sat down at the table, completely soaked, but noticed the tray of cookies in the middle. “These for everyone?” My eyes scanned the new girl's face before I did a double-take. “Uhh, what? No, how? I thought you were dead.” You wouldn’t assume that the two people sitting across from each other were the same person with just ten years of difference.

  It wasn’t like a before-and-after picture; one was older and more beautiful. It wasn’t really fair to compare, but one of the well-known things about the powers is that they boosted people's appearance and made them look better. Even malnourished, the decade-older Melissa looked like the other Melissa, except she had been run through a beautifying filter a few times.

  Vicky chimed in. “We were all curious because she doesn’t remember who she is, but now I’m curious. Who is she?” I smiled as I began to expin. “She’s Melissa from the other timeline. I stored her body before I was killed myself… I guess she lived somehow, but that doesn’t expin the white hair.” For the next hour, we went over everything that happened.

  Melissa must have had a regenerating power and would have fully recovered… If I didn’t dig out the core in her brain. All the excess healing power she had left in her body was spent recovering from her burned skin and head wound. It obviously wasn’t perfect; her hair turned white, and she forgot most of her memories involving her previous life. She functioned like a normal person, there were no rge gaps in her knowledge of basic ideas. Her thoughts on how to survive were far more different than how a normal person would think, though.

  “I would kill the man and look through his backpack for food.” The other three girls winced back as I expined. “No, it’s still not the apocalypse yet, you've got to wait another year or two before things get that bad again.” She looked at me, confused, before shrugging it off. “I’ll leave it for the rest of you to deal with as long as you keep me fed. If you need someone killed or fucked, point me in their direction.” Yea… The two Melissas might look simir, but their personalities are completely different now.

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