Chapter 7.1: The Overpass

  Dave did the math.

  Six people. One gun that he could see, probably more he couldn't. Fifty yards of open road between here and there, no cover, no concealment. A sleeping baby on his back, an injured mechanic beside him, and a body that was, at the present moment, exactly as strong and fast as a thirty-four-year-old IT technician who'd skipped the gym for most of the last year.

  The math was bad.

  "We could go around," Ron said. He was leaning on the tire iron, breathing hard, one hand on his bandaged side. The gauze was holding, but the dark stain was spreading at the edges.

  Dave looked left. The residential neighborhood. Yards, fences, houses in varying states of impossible. Going around would add a mile, maybe more, through rough ground, and Ron was already moving at a pace that made turtles look ambitious.

  He looked right. The commercial strip continued, but it dead-ended at the highway embankment. No way through without climbing a concrete wall, and climbing with a baby carrier was not something Dave wanted to attempt without powers.

  The overpass was a bottleneck. Whoever had set up under it knew that. Single point of control, shade, defensible, with clear sightlines in both directions. This was tactical.

  "No," Dave said. "We go through."

  "Through the people with the gun."

  "Through the people with the gun."

  Ron looked at him with the expression of a man trying to determine whether the person next to him was very brave, very stupid, or just too tired to care. "Do you have a plan?"

  "I'm going to walk up and talk to them."

  "That's not a plan."

  "It's what I've got."

  Dave shifted the crowbar to his left hand. Visible but low. He kept the bags on his shoulders. He looked, he hoped, like what he was: a dad with supplies and a baby who wanted to get past without trouble. Just a man trying to get somewhere.

  He started walking. Ron followed, muttering something under his breath that might have been a prayer or a profanity or both. They crossed from the grass shoulder onto the asphalt, their footsteps echoing under the overpass's concrete canopy.

  They were spotted at thirty yards. Dave saw the shift. One silhouette turning, nudging another, the group reorganizing with practiced efficiency. The person with the rifle moved to the front.

  At twenty yards, a voice called out.

  "That's close enough."

  Dave stopped. Raised his empty right hand. "Not looking for trouble. Just need to pass through."

  A man stepped out of the shadow. Big. Bigger than Dave, which was unusual. Dave was six-two, two-twenty, and this man had at least an inch and thirty pounds on him. Flannel shirt, work boots, a face that had been unfriendly before the apocalypse and hadn't improved since. Thick arms, thick neck, the build of a man who lifted real things for a living, not gym things. The rifle was a hunting rifle, bolt action, scoped. Deer gun. He held it across his body, positioned so that aiming would take about half a second.

  "Nobody passes through without contributing," the man said. "Supplies, information, labor. Pick one."

  Dave looked past him. The pickup truck was loaded. Coolers, boxes, what looked like a generator still in its retail packaging. These people had been busy. They'd been gathering, organizing, establishing a position of control within the first two hours of whatever this was. The generator was from the hardware store half a mile back. The coolers were from the gas station. They'd looted, organized, fortified, and set up a toll system in a hundred and twenty minutes.

  Dave had spent that time walking across town with a baby. These people had spent it building a fiefdom.

  "I've got a baby," Dave said. "And an injured man. We just need to walk past. We'll be gone in two minutes."

  "Everybody's got something." Flannel Shirt looked at Dave's bags. "What's in the packs?"

  "Baby supplies. Formula. Diapers."

  "And the other bag?"

  "Groceries."

  "We'll take the groceries."

  Dave felt something old settle into his chest. The feeling he'd had in the nursery, when the beam was falling. When Todd came through the wall. Colder than anger. The narrowing. Everything nonessential falling away until there was only one fact left: that man was between Dave and his daughter's food.

  "No," he said.

  "Wasn't a question, buddy."

  "I know what it was. The answer's no. Those groceries have formula and baby food in them. I'm not giving away my daughter's food."

  Flannel Shirt studied him. Behind him, the others shifted. Dave counted them now that he was closer. Five more, three men and two women. One of the women had a baseball bat, Louisville Slugger, held with the easy grip of someone who'd swung one before. One of the men had a handgun holstered at his hip. The others were unarmed but stood watching, ready for this to go sideways.

  "Look," Flannel Shirt said, and his voice had the tone of a man being patient against his preference, the patience of someone who was used to getting what he wanted and viewed conversation as a formality, "I understand you've got a kid. But we've got twelve people to feed and protect. The world ended two hours ago. Resources matter. You can leave the food and pass, or you can turn around."

  "There's a third option," Dave said.

  "What's that?"

  "I walk through and you let me, because taking food from a baby is a line you don't want to cross on day one. Whatever this is, it's going to last a while. And the man who started by taking formula from an infant is going to have a very specific reputation, very quickly."

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  Calculation. Dave didn't think this man had much guilt in him, but he could calculate that power depended on legitimacy, legitimacy depended on narrative, and "I took food from a baby" was a narrative that would cost him.

  Then one of the women, the one without the bat, middle-aged, dark hair pulled back, wearing scrubs like she'd come from a shift, said, "Jesus, Kyle, he's got an infant."

  "I can see that, Denise."

  "Let him through."

  "We made a rule. Everyone contributes."

  "He's got a baby, Kyle. She's asleep. Look at her."

  Kyle, Flannel Shirt, looked at Denise. Looked at Dave. Looked at Emma, who was still asleep, her face soft and oblivious, Raf's sparkly head poking out of the carrier beside her cheek.

  Kyle's jaw tightened. Then released.

  "Fine," he said. "Go. But if you come back this way, you contribute. That's the deal."

  "Fair enough," Dave said. He didn't intend to come back this way. He had no intention of telling Kyle that.

  He started forward. Ron fell in beside him, tire iron clicking on the asphalt. They walked under the overpass, through the shadow, cool, mercifully cool, the first relief from the orange heat, past the pickup truck and the collected supplies and the six people who had decided, within the first hours of the end of the world, that the best use of their time was to set up a toll booth.

  Dave didn't look at them as he passed. He kept his eyes forward and his pace steady and his hand on the crowbar and his breathing even. He could feel their eyes. Six sets of them, tracking him, weighing him, doing the same math he'd done fifty yards back.

  They were almost through, almost past, almost out the other side into the orange light, when someone grabbed the grocery bag.

  One of the other men. Young, twenties, baseball cap backwards, quick hands, a man who'd made a calculation and decided the big guy with the baby wasn't going to do anything about it. Wasn't going to start a fight, not with a baby on his back. The calculation was: he can't afford to escalate, so I can take what I want.

  He was wrong.

  Dave turned. The man had the grocery bag in one hand and was already backpedaling, grinning like he'd found a loophole, and Dave felt the anger arrive. Like a door opening into a room that had always been there, that he'd always known about, that he'd spent his entire adult life keeping closed because he was a big man and big men learned early that their anger had consequences. He'd learned it in football, learned it at parties, learned it every time someone smaller than him did something that made his hands want to close into fists and a voice in his head said you could and another voice, older, wiser, said but you don't.

  That second voice was very quiet right now.

  His daughter's food. This man had taken his daughter's food.

  "Give it back," Dave said.

  The man kept grinning. Kept backing up. "Kyle said everyone contributes, man. Consider it a donation."

  "Give. It. Back."

  The words came out different.

  Dave didn't yell. He didn't shout. He spoke at a normal volume. The exact volume he used when Emma reached for an electrical outlet or pulled the cat's tail or leaned too far off the couch. The volume that wasn't loud because it didn't need to be loud. The voice that said stop what you are doing right now with every syllable carrying the weight of absolute, unconditional certainty.

  The man stopped.

  Stopped. Mid-step, mid-grin, frozen. The grocery bag dangled from his hand. His eyes went wide. His face went slack. The grin was replaced by something raw and involuntary. The expression of a child caught doing something wrong by a parent he didn't want to disappoint.

  Everyone went still. Kyle. Denise. The woman with the bat. The man with the holstered gun. Ron. All of them, stopped, held in place by whatever Dave had just put into the air. Dave hadn't been loud. This was something else. Something that traveled through the concrete and the asphalt and the warm, orange-tinted air and landed in the chest of every person within earshot and said listen.

  Emma stirred.

  Her eyes opened. She blinked. Looked around with the bleary, puckered confusion of a baby waking up in a place that wasn't her crib. Saw orange sky. Saw strangers. Saw her father standing rigid with his hand extended.

  "Bah," she said. And yawned.

  The warmth flooded back. All of it, all at once, like a furnace igniting. Dave felt his muscles tighten, his senses sharpen, the world snap into focus. Colors brighter, sounds clearer, the concrete grain under his boots suddenly tactile. The system text blazed back to life in his vision, bright and golden.

  ~*~

  Good morning!

  Oh! New ability!

  ~*~

  The man with the grocery bag dropped it. He took three steps backward, fast, and his eyes weren't on Dave anymore.

  They were on Emma.

  Everyone's eyes were on Emma.

  Dave didn't know what they saw. He didn't know if the golden warmth he felt was visible from the outside, or if Emma was glowing, or if the air around them had changed in some way that he couldn't perceive from the inside. But every person under the overpass was staring at his daughter with an expression he recognized, because he'd felt it himself in the nursery when she'd put her hand on his chest and the world turned gold.

  Awe. The helpless, stunned, breathless kind of awe that arrives when you're in the presence of something so much larger than you that your brain can't process it and your body fills the gap with stillness.

  Dave picked up the grocery bag. He slung it over his shoulder. He looked at Kyle, who was standing very still, the rifle lowered, his face a complicated map of things he was recalculating.

  "Thanks," Dave said.

  He walked. Out of the shadow, into the orange light, past the overpass, back onto Route 9. Ron followed, faster now, adrenaline overriding the wound, the tire iron clicking rapid-fire on the road.

  Nobody followed them. Nobody said a word.

  When they were a hundred yards past the overpass, out of earshot, Ron spoke.

  "What the hell was that?"

  "I don't know."

  "Your voice did something. I felt it in my chest, Dave. Like a bass speaker. Like my body wanted to sit down and apologize."

  "Yeah."

  "And the baby?"

  "Yeah."

  Ron was quiet for a while. His breathing was ragged but his steps were steadier than they'd been since the tire shop, as if the shock of what he'd witnessed had temporarily overridden his wound. Then: "I'm going to stop asking questions."

  "Probably smart."

  They walked. The system, fully awake now and apparently delighted about it, was busy.

  ~*~

  ABILITY UNLOCKED: Dad Voice

  When you say no, you mean NO.

  Warning: Does not work on babies.

  They never listen.

  ~*~

  Dave read it. Read it again. The "does not work on babies" line was so specifically, absurdly accurate. He thought about every time he'd told Emma no and she'd looked at him and done the thing anyway with the serene confidence of a creature that had never once considered the possibility that his authority applied to her, that he almost smiled.

  Almost.

  Another notification, quieter:

  ~*~

  ABILITY UNLOCKED: Boo-Boo Fixer

  Kiss it better. Really.

  ~*~

  ~*~

  LEVEL UP

  Level 3 → Level 4

  ~*~

  And then, a few minutes later, as they crested a small hill and the strip mall came into view ahead:

  ~*~

  LEVEL UP

  Level 4 → Level 5

  ~*~

  Dave hadn't done anything special. He was walking. But the system was counting something. The frog-things from before, the overpass confrontation, the accumulated experience of simply surviving the first two hours with his daughter on his back. In his game, XP came from combat and quests. In this, whatever this was, it seemed to come from endurance.

  That tracked. Dave had never been the flashy one. He was the guy who showed up. The guy who kept showing up. If the system was rewarding consistency, he had a feeling it would serve him well.

  Emma was awake and chatty. She babbled at the orange sky, at the warped buildings, at the back of Dave's head. She grabbed at his hair. She kicked her feet. She was rested and fed and happy, and the warmth in Dave's chest was a steady flame, and his legs didn't hurt and his back didn't ache and the twenty pounds of baby and thirty pounds of supplies felt like nothing.

  The strip mall was half a mile ahead. A Walgreens, a Chinese restaurant, a laundromat, a sporting goods store. Some of them were standing. Some weren't. The Walgreens sign was still lit, which shouldn't have been possible with the power out, except the letters were glowing from the inside, a soft amber that pulsed with a rhythm that looked almost biological.

  "I need to stop there," Dave said. "Feed Emma. Regroup. Grab supplies."

  "Works for me," Ron said. "I need to sit down before my body files a formal complaint."

  They walked toward the strip mall. Emma babbled. Ron leaned on his tire iron. The orange sky burned overhead.