Chapter 22 - Midnight Raid

  It was full dark by the time the fires burned down, and Tom said he didn’t want us to have to risk crossing the street to get to my apartment building. Personally, I thought he was trying to keep me around because he wanted to recruit me, but I was fine with staying near MGH for a little longer. Unlike my apartment, they had plenty of bottled water stockpiled, and even a fair bit of food, although Tom explained that was being strictly rationed.

  He brought us to their cafeteria and ordered us each a helping of some sort of stew they’d made. It was hot and filling, which was about all I could say that was positive. Hot and filling was still a step up from the handful of granola bars I still had in my backpack.

  “We can get water from the river and boil it,” Tom said as we sat down to eat. “But food’s going to be another matter.”

  “Water’s easy for another reason,” Alex said with a smirk. He used his power to Create Water, making a little sphere of fluid above his hand. He guided it through the air with Control Water and dropped it into a waiting pitcher.

  Tom’s eyebrows shot up. “Nice one! I guess that’s from crystals? It would be very useful to know the names of the stones, and what you killed to get them. We’re building a list.”

  “I’d be glad to share,” Alex replied. “We all need to work together if we’re going to survive this, after all.”

  “I’ve gotten a fair number too. I’d be happy to tell you what I’ve seen,” I added.

  “Excellent. I’ll get Gary or someone else to write your info down. Meantime, enjoy some food. I’ll get you both set up with a place to crash for the night. No need to take up guard duty tonight; you two have already been through a lot,” Tom said. “But if you want to stay here, you’re going to have to pitch in, just like everyone else.”

  We told him that made complete sense to us, too. Everyone was going to have to do their part if we wanted to make it through this. I kept most of my personal thoughts on the future to myself and just dug into the food.

  I didn’t want to commit to working for Tom until I had a better idea how things were going to play out. This was one place, one very small set of buildings in a very big city. While I was sure I could help make MGH more secure, bring in more people, and help Tom and the others build it up stronger, I wasn’t certain that was where I would be of the most use.

  Amanda had never been as into RPG games as I had. D&D and Pathfinder were my teenage obsession. I mostly grew out of it once I hit college, but I still remembered it all, and I kept feeling like I’d been dropped into a particularly weird RPG session here. It had all the right stuff—there were monsters, magic, and we could even ‘level up’ by killing the creatures.

  Sure, it wasn’t quite the same. I wasn’t being asked to pick whether I wanted to be an elf or dwarf, or to choose between paladin and ranger classes. But there was enough of the same vibe that I felt like I had a sense of what was coming.

  The monsters were out there. They were building their nests and forts, for now, but eventually they’d get hungry. Humans absolutely were on the menu for at least some of the creatures I’d seen. They weren’t going to sit around and wait for us to come to them, either. They were going to come after us.

  Which meant if I wanted to help people, I needed to get stronger.

  Could I do that by working with Tom and helping defend MGH? Probably, yeah. But was that the best way to do it? That, I wasn’t so sure about.

  Tom showed us to a hospital room with two beds and told us to get some rest. He’d come get us in the morning, after the sun was up. In spite of my Stamina, I was utterly spent. I’d held back the flood of tears for Amanda pretty well for most of the day, but letting them all go during her cremation was exhausting, especially on top of all the walking, fighting, and just the stress of watching out for monsters every step of the way.

  Alex was just as tired, so by mutual agreement, we both went to bed early.

  It turned out that was a good thing.

  I woke up to the sound of someone screaming. The sound brought me around instantly. I sat bolt upright in my hospital bed, and for a moment I had absolutely no idea where I was. The second scream helped ground me. I remembered the attack, the hospital, getting Amanda back, all of it rushing back in a flash.

  That was also about the same time I realized those screams weren’t coming from outside the hospital. They were coming from inside it.

  I was out of bed and moving faster than I’d ever woke up back in the old days. I threw my jeans back on, grabbed my boots, and glanced at my backpack, then decided if there was a fight I was probably better off without the extra burden, so I left it next to the hospital bed where I’d been sleeping.

  Alex woke up at the third scream. He sat bolt upright in his bed, looking around in alarm. “Huh? What’s going on?”

  “Don’t know yet, but it doesn’t sound good. You want to stay here and lock the door, or come with me to check it out?” I asked.

  The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.

  He jumped out of bed about as fast as I had and grabbed his bat. “I’m with you. Let’s go.”

  The hallway outside our room was so dark it was incredibly hard to see where we were going. At least the window in our room had let in a little moonlight, but the halls were pitch black. I swore under my breath and went back to my backpack so I could grab two chem lights. I opened one and cracked it, then stashed the other in a pocket.

  “Good thinking,“ Alex said. “What’s the plan when we run out of those?”

  “Hope there’s a magical equivalent?” I didn’t have a better answer than that, unfortunately. I quickly used the bits of cord I’d used to tie the old glow stick onto my spear to do the same with this one, fixing it a couple of feet below the tip. That gave us plenty of light to see by.

  We set off toward the stairwell, looking for trouble. It didn’t take long to find it. As soon as we opened the stairwell doors, a woman saw the light from my spear and ran toward us. She was wearing scrubs with dark splotches all over them. It took me a moment to realize that was fresh blood I was seeing on her uniform.

  “Help! Oh god, help, please!” she screamed as she raced up the stairs toward us.

  “What’s wrong? What’s going on?’ I asked. She ran straight up to us, still in a panic, but I didn’t see a threat.

  “They’re coming! We have to run!” She was too terrified to make sense, but I caught a glimpse of movement from the stairs below, so I had a hunch whatever scared her so badly was about to make itself known.

  I turned to the woman. “Go find one of the patient rooms and barricade yourself in.”

  “What about you?” she asked.

  “We’ve got this. You go.”

  She looked confused as hell, but she did as I asked, which was good enough for now. Having more people alongside me to fight whatever was coming our way would be a plus, but only if they were ready to actually fight. With her level of panic, I had a feeling she’d be more of a risk than a help.

  I turned to Alex. “I see movement down there. You ready for this?”

  “As much as I can be,” he replied.

  I gave him a nod. That was all we could expect from anyone, really. Then I stepped out onto the landing. The stairwell continued both upward and downward, but now that I was out of the doorway I clearly heard the tick-tick-tick of many little legs clattering against something. For a moment I thought the stupid pill bugs were hunting me down for invading their turf earlier, but what came around the corner of the stairs wasn’t oversized crustaceans.

  “Shit, ants, too?” Alex swore.

  “Looks like.” I tried to count them and couldn’t. There were too many of the bugs. They were like a living carpet slowly rolling its way up the stairs toward us. Each ant was about the size of a small dog. None of them looked like a substantial threat on their own, and all the ants I could see were tier one. That was all in our favor. The downside?

  There were a lot of the little critters.

  “What’s the plan?” Alex asked.

  “Fight. Don’t die.”

  “Good plan.”

  Then the ants reached us, and there wasn’t time for more conversation.

  Alex took out the first one to clamber onto the landing with us with a mighty swing of his bat. The ant shattered on impact, sending bits of carapace sailing into the wall.

  That seemed to piss the rest of them off, though, because they came at us even faster. I stabbed one with my spear, then batted another one with the butt end. My weapon just wasn’t fast enough to deal with this mess, though, so I went back to the same method I’d used against the pill bugs and just waded into the mess, stomping an ant with each footstep.

  They were all over me in a heartbeat. Ants swarmed me, climbing over each other to get a grip on my jeans, then using that to leverage themselves even higher. It was like stepping on a regular ant nest, how they’d all swarm your foot and try to bite through it. Except instead of being a few millimeters long, these guys were half a meter.

  Try as they might though, they couldn’t bite through my skin. The first few tried and only managed to damage my jeans some. I let a few more take their best shot, but it was more of the same. They bit down with jaws longer than my fingers, but they just weren’t getting through my Natural Armor.

  About the time they started climbing my t-shirt and trying to bite my chest and arms, I broke out laughing.

  “Castle! You okay there?” Alex asked.

  He sounded worried, so I cut off the laughs, dropped my spear, and ripped two of the ants off my chest, tossing them against the wall hard enough to turn them each into splatters of ant goo. “Yeah, no worries. It’s my Natural Armor crystals; the ants can’t bite through my skin.”

  “That’s excellent for you, but I don’t have that level of protection, so you think you can…?”

  I glanced his way and saw a small flood of ants had slipped past me. Alex was doing his best to smash them with his bat, one after another. He looked like he was playing whack-a-mole, the bat just going up and down, splattering another ant with each blow. But he was right to worry; in spite of the batch he’d killed, they were inching closer to him by the second.

  “I’ve got you,” I said, stomping my way over to his side. I ripped two more away from my hips as I stepped on more ants with each footfall. It was a very good thing I’d decided to grab my leather boots before I left the apartment to find Amanda, because my sneakers would have been destroyed already, and even with Natural Armor, I didn’t feel like running around like I was some sort of barefoot cave-man.

  Between the two of us, we stemmed the tide of ants. The rush of bugs coming up the steps slowed, then finally stopped. Both of us were panting by the time it was done, and my clothes were a lot more tattered than they’d been, but I was uninjured.

  “You hurt? Did they get you at all?” I asked Alex. I didn’t know if these ones had venom like the pill bugs.

  He shook his head. “Not even a scratch. We did that well. Hey, we should gather the crystals from the ones we killed, right?”

  “Agreed.” I didn’t want them to go to some random person. We’d killed the monsters, so we’d earned the reward was the way I saw it. “Let’s do that quick, though, then see what else is going on. I want to make sure the threat is really over. You good with a fifty-fifty split?”

  I figured that was fair, even though I was pretty sure I’d killed more than half of them, because Alex had taken on at least half the risk. I wasn’t in too much danger from these ants, but he was.

  “If you are okay with that, I am,” he replied.

  We went to work gathering up all the stones as fast as we could, touching one ant body after another. We’d killed a lot of ants, so it took a few minutes to gather them all up.

  We’d just about finished when I heard more screaming, from somewhere below us. Seemed like the threat wasn’t done, after all.

  “You up for round two?” I asked Alex as I touched one of the last few ants we hadn’t looted.

  He tapped another one, gaining another new stone. “Yes. Let’s get down there and see what help we can offer.”

  That was the last of the ant bodies. I snagged my spear back off the floor and set off down the steps, taking them two at a time as I raced downward toward whatever new danger awaited us.