We briefly discussed tactics as we walked down the stairs past the tier I had cleared early and down to the one below it. We had agreed that mechanically, it seemed the lower we went, the stronger the mobs were and clearing the town in order would give us time to learn how to fight together. We were also both gamers enough that we did want to explore this whole town and strip it for loot. Sam had indicated that beyond about ten feet, he had no confidence in his ability to hit with the pistols. In combat, then, we decided he would engage in short to close range, and I would harass from distance. Which was pretty much the tactics we had fallen into while fighting up the stairs.
The first building on the second tier down turned out to be a block of flats. Three stories of near-identical homes. The larger size of the buildings on this tier and the way they seemed to be cut into the hill gave, to my eye at least, the same amount of floor space as the home on the tier above, just flattened to a single level. The next building was similar, but broken down into five bedsit apartments on each of the three floors.
In the next building, we found our first fight. The ground floor was an express supermarket: six rows of empty racks, one of which had freezers on one side, fridges on the other. Inactive self-service checkouts had become the home to boar. The tusked creature pawed the ground when we came around the corner, clearly having heard us long before we heard it. Our carefully planned battle order went straight out the window at the sight of it charging towards us. Sam, the target of the charge, wisely dropped his original intention of tanking and side-stepped it, raking his rapier down its flank. I was the target of its next charge, and I hit it with a
“That stun effect makes it almost too easy…” he muttered as he drew his knife to start butchering.
I watched him for a moment before a thought came into my head. “Where did you get the meat for the kebabs?” I asked.
“You told me to use anything I thought would help…” he replied, distracted by his task.
The floor above had once been a gym. Time hadn’t been kind to the equipment, and much of it was not in a state to be used. The top floor contained more of the cubicles, implying it was once an office space, a faded wall mounting declaring it to be the Department of Oceanography. In one of the back rooms, we found some very detailed sea charts for several sections of coastline that, while faded, were still legible. Sam took them to add to the ones he had found aboard the Curiosity.
The next building over was a restaurant; the ground floor had a kitchen open to view from the restaurant. A series of islands where hot and cold food could be placed. The sort of layout you would expect to see at an all-you-can-eat buffet. There was additional seating on the first floor, and the top floor was clearly a staff break room, changing area and a couple of office spaces. A few spiders had made their home on the top floor, but their house-cat-sized bodies just made them easier for Sam and me to hit.
The next building proudly displayed the name Hopper Hall, which was room after room of computer terminals. The ground floor was a large open plan, with the terminals islanding around pillars. The first and second floors looked more like the classrooms I was used to teaching in. In one of the offices below a cork noticeboard, I found a key.
The faded red cross identified the next building as a hospital. The glass door had been broken at some point, and someone had cleared it up by sweeping it into a pile in the corner. We cautiously made our way through the building, checking out what we could, expecting something to jump out at us. The ground floor was intake and diagnosis. A quarter of the space was a waiting room, the rest a maze of diagnosis machines, the only one of which I recognised was an MRI.
The first floor consisted largely of wards, and the second floor had 3 operating rooms. Unlike the other buildings we had visited, this one felt the most like it had been left ready to use. However, someone in the distant past had broken the locks on the doors to the pharmacy and various other cabinets and doors, stripping them of everything of value.
The final two buildings were a repeat of the first two.
On the next tier, the first building’s sign declared it to be Lovelace Hall. The ground floor was dominated by a large common area. There were seating areas made of what was once brightly coloured material, seemingly randomly placed, often surrounding tables. Several sets of the terminals we had seen elsewhere were arranged in pairs or quads.
Unauthorized tale usage: if you spot this story on Amazon, report the violation.
We were about halfway across towards the flight of stairs in the back of the room when we heard a high-pitched squeak erupt from above. A cacophony of sounds followed it, and then the unmistakable flutter of wings. It was the warning we had before a flock descended on us.
I’d like to claim we slaughtered them with ease… and no denying every attack took out at least one of them, but they just kept coming…and coming…and coming. At some point, the pair of us had dived behind cover and just waited out the swarm. In the chaos, we had gotten separated and ended up hiding behind different tables.
After a few minutes, the flock started to thin out, and I found myself staring across the room at Sam, pistol in hand, still scanning for birds. Our eyes met, and we both burst out laughing.
The floors above turned out to be dorm rooms. Most with doors wedged open. The common areas were quite open and airy. And with plenty of windows providing natural light, it struck me as probably being a very pleasant student accommodation. At least it had been a very pleasant student hall…before a broken or open window near the top made it an ideal roost for a large number of seagulls. Most of the top floors were covered in guano, and they had left a smell, which meant we didn’t spend much time seeing if there was anything to find.
The sign on the next building identified it as the Beaufort Atmospheric Research Centre. The thing which stood out to us, though, as we walked in through the door, was the model in the middle of the entrance hall. It was a large, six-foot-tall globe, not of Earth, but of this world.
Sam was the first to find the archipelago. The maps we had seen were only a part of it. Assuming the scale of this model was similar to Earth’s, it took up about the same amount of space as the United States. It sat just north of the equator and was lying between two huge continents. From what we had ascertained, Landing was to our north along the coast, and that landmass spread more than two-thirds of the way around the planet. The southern continent looked like someone had smushed South America into Africa and then moved Australia off the east coast.
Looking west, I found a landmass whose eastern coastline resembled the maps I'd been taught navigation on back on the Wayfarer. It was about the same size as Western Europe, and its west coast was probably closer to the eastern side of the northern mega continent. The doors on either side of the reception desk refused to yield to our attempts to open them.
“Think we need to restore power?” I asked after a few minutes of us being unable to find any locking device.
“Possibly,” Sam responded. “Feels like a place with answers…”
The sign above the door read ‘Tesla Theatre Hall,’ and in the foyer, there was a pair of cordoned-off Tesla Coils. On either side of the building, there was a staircase leading up to a small lecture theatre, oval in nature; this one had the seats circling an oval table. I could imagine debates could be held as well as anything where your audience is observing something being performed in the middle.
We looked in on the ground floors, a pretty standard-looking lecture theatre, and saw no reason to do more than look through the doors and look up at the seats. We then went down the flight to check out the one built into the basement. Sam spotted something shiny down near the podium and followed the staircase down to it, just in case it was something of value. He got to the last flat section of stairs when I heard a rumble, a groan of stressed metal and then the platform he was on tilted, pitching him forward, towards the growing gap in the floor at the bottom of the stairs, as that section of the auditorium collapsed, taking the rows of seats on either side down with it.
I held my breath for what felt like eternity and then heard a huge splash. Followed shortly by a “Damnit!” I quickly moved to the collapsed hole, careful of the ground’s stability. I got near the edge and looked down at the area below. Sam had fallen about 20 feet into a pool below. There was a thick, swampy scent rising from below, and I could see my companion treading the dark, murky water while wiping thick green slime away from his face. Somewhat unsuccessfully.
He had fallen into one end of a large swimming pool. Several broken ceiling tiles float on the surface of water, bobbing slightly to the waves coming from Sam and from the water trickling in from a broken pipe off in one corner. A mouldy lane divider was close enough to where Sam was that he must have missed it by mere inches, though, judging from how part of it looked a lot cleaner, something else had it recently. His health bar looked full, which reduced one of my worries, and I looked around to see if I could see any way for him to get out. I didn’t relish the idea of following him down, but it did beat splitting the party.
“Stay up there! I have an idea!” He called out and started cutting a path through the floating slime to the nearest poolside with a backstroke.
He had just reached it when movement caught my attention. There was a ripple in the water, moving quickly and heading for Sam.
There was something in the pool with him!
“Sam! Something in the water!” I shouted. I aimed my staff at the movement, but waited while he pulled himself out, unsure what would happen if my electricity-like spell hit the water with him still in it.
Sam turned his head, saw the wave moving in his direction and quickly pulled himself out and rolled. Just in the nick of time as the fast-moving creature rose out of the water, colliding with the part of the edge he had just rolled away from.
The first thing to notice is that it had tentacles, a huge mouth, large, snarling teeth and finally a crocodile-like body. The second thing I noticed was that it was not alone.