“What’s your name?” Elvis asked as my wildly diverging thoughts distracted me.
“Grant,” I said, still working the fledgling train of thought over. “What do you want? Exactly, what do you want? I’ll give you an example of my initial plan as an example so there’s no confusion.” I half expected him to interrupt. When he didn’t, I kept on. “I’m going to finish figuring out my powers and fortifying my house. While that’s going on, I’m going to scavenge and loot anything that isn’t tied down and has no current owner while simultaneously cleaning out anything I consider evil or rotten. Cassie and her team, if you couldn’t guess, counted as evil in my book and her fucking zombies too. When I’m done and I’m not sure how long that’ll take, I’m going to find my family and either bring them to a safe place or fortify their area. Now, what do you want?”
“You’ve thought about this a lot more than I have,” Elvis replied, stumbling over his words.
“Clearly.”
“Look man, I was just visiting a college, and a football scholarship was my only hope of getting to one!” Elvis said fiercely, still glaring at the ground. I watched in disbelief as he actually stomped on the ground like a two year old throwing a tantrum. But the ground cracked underneath his super strength as if he were stomping on styrofoam. “I’m not that smart and I know it but she did something to my head!” He was talking about Cassie now. “I’ve never hurt anyone until whatever yesterday was happened. It’s not fair! Life was about to be great! Hot girlfriend, probably a nice scholarship for playing a sport I love!” His head hit his hands as he sniffed, the words barely escaping as he blubbered on. “I would have been rich and famous and mama could’a retired!”
“That’s enough!” I barked. He looked up at me, shocked that I yanked him out of his feelings. “I get it! Jesus. So, no family, no friends, no nothing around here for you huh?”
“No.”
I made my decision even though it pained me. Long term, this could really help me out. Short term, it would take a lot of work. And I’m lazy at heart. “How about we make a deal then? I warn you, it’s going to be pretty one-sided at first but at least I’ll be straight with you. I’m no necromancer or fire flinger; my abilities are simple but powerful. And I’m not even going to tell you about my wife’s powers cause she can flatten me if she’s mad. I love her to death but I’d be a fool not to admit that her powers completely overshadow mine. She’s a nuke compared to me being a tank.”
“What kind of deal?” His thick brow scrunched as he forced his diminished neurons to fire properly.
“First, you help me out today gathering shit from different places and back me up. You’ll get a third of what we gather since I’ll probably be doing most of the work and that’s my wagon. Don’t break it. If you do good work, then maybe we can see about putting you in a house near mine. We can work together to make this part of the city a nice, safe place to live where a community can actually thrive. You, if you do good, and yes I am repeating myself so that I am crystal clear, you will be a soldier working for me. I lay down fair rules and you follow them. You step out of line and there will be hell to pay. You do well and I will make sure that you are fed, healthy, well equipped with armor and weapons.”
“Cassie said the same thing.” He grunted sadly without a hint of malice, cracking his knuckles.
“And I’m not your psycho ex!” I growled back, getting in his face and making sure that I had his full attention. Taking a deep breath, I stepped back. “First, I’m just a normal dude that was enjoying a normal life. I served in the military and have led teams at all the different places I’ve worked.” He didn’t have to know they were non-combat teams. “And if you agree to do this, you still have an exit clause. If you honestly disagree with me or don’t want to do something I say, then let me know and at the end of the day we will divide up the stuff we gathered that day and you move on. And I mean move on literally, as in the house I set you up in will be mine again.” I waited for him to nod before I continued. “And my biggest rule is that you don’t go near my wife. You stay away from her because I don’t want to explain your presence to her. She has a bleeding heart and I need a soldier, not an orphan to take care of. I need someone who will fight with and for me. I’ve already fought feral dogs the size of wolves and freaking zombies and been forced to kill two people with powers today that wanted to end my life. I have zero problems now with violence.”
A lie, but a necessary one.
A fragile spark of hope lit up his face. “You promise to feed me?” Elvis said with disbelief. Of course that was all he heard. “And give me armor and weapons? Like yours?”
I looked him up and down, his misery only exaggerated by his size. He really was just a messed up teenager with way too much muscle. I made a mental note to swing by the church so I can get someone there to heal his brain, which means I have to be careful to not take advantage of his mental state. Can’t have a rampaging human Godzilla on my hands. Maybe I’ll get Isabella to do it. She’s a bleeding heart like my wife but I don’t have to handle her.
I took a deep breath. “If you do well, if you work hard, then I’ll give you all the supplies you need. I’m a hard boss, but I’m a fair one. If you’re unsure, we’ll do today as a trial run. If you like it, then yes, if not then you can go and I’ll give you food in a backpack for wherever you’re goin’.”
He stood up, wiping the grit out of his eyes. “Deal!”
The first stop we made was Kenmore park where I saw the women die yesterday. Parking the wagon on the street, I motioned for Elvis to follow me as I walked over to the picnic tables. “What are we doing here?” He asked, looking around dubiously. The place had already started to overgrow in the last twenty four hours.
“Well, I’m not going to invest the time in making a full set of armor for you yet, but I am going to get you something worthy of your size, a big ass shield and a big ass weapon. Don’t want you dying on me just yet.” Focusing the bare dirt in front of me, I changed it to stone and shaped it into a large flat ritual circle. Taking a moment, I wolfed down a few protein bars and two bottles of water before getting back to work. Once it was big enough to fit a full size picnic table, I had Elvis stack two conveniently located park picnic tables in it and then I tossed in two stop signs and a streetlight.
“Watch this.” I said after I made him back up twenty feet.
Within five minutes, I had tapped into the slow-moving flow of energy from the earth, feeling it trickle into my reserves. Carefully using that flow only, I allowed it to fill the ritual circle completely, breaking down the wood and steel that made up the stop sign and picnic tables. After twenty more minutes of slow shaping due to splitting my attention so I wouldn’t get ambushed by my surroundings, a large warhammer and a massive cross-sectioned shield materialized. I let Elvis swing them both around for a minute before giving me a bit of feedback, I took five more minutes to resize everything perfectly.
“Not only did I greatly increase the density of the wood so that this should be able to stop rifle rounds, but the wood making up the shield itself is multilayered, the grain of the wood itself having different angles so it should never split.” I picked up the oversized shield with one hand and rapped my armored knuckles against the backside of it. “See?” Turning it over, I rapped my knuckles against the front with a clang. “I embossed it with metal and also put a layer of metal on the front and reinforcing strips of metal on the back. It’s too heavy for normal people but should be just right for a man of your size.” Setting it down, I kicked the weapon a bit closer to him. “And that right there is a warhammer. The blunt end shaped like a sledgehammer is for bashing through armor and the other side is shaped like an axe which is pretty much for anything else. That thing is magically hardened wood and unusually dense steel. You could take apart a tank with that bitch.”
“This is so COOL!” Elvis yelled, picking them both up and looking at me for permission. Giving him a slight nod, he spun around, whipping his warhammer completely through a nearby poplar tree. The blade of the warhammer cut through the nine inch thick tree with zero issues. Before the tree completely fell, he assisted the tree with its descent by shield bashing it to the ground. “I am Goliath!” He screamed. For another few seconds, he tested the axe part on more trees and the blunt part on the brick wall where the basketball hoops were set up. The brick didn’t stand a chance.
No kids were ever going to play in this park again.
“I see you like it,” I said, grinning. “Which means you’ll love the armor I can make you tomorrow if you want to keep our deal.”
Elvis’ childlike exuberance meant that he wasn’t as attentive to his surroundings as he should have been but luckily the hungry puma that launched itself out of the nearby thicket landed on his upraised shield. “Wha-” he yelped, spinning around at the unexpected weight. Lifting his left arm over his head, Elvis smushed the feral cat against the brick, putting his shoulder into it so that blood spurted out across the brick wall in all directions.
“Yuck!” Setting his warhammer down, Elvis peeled the dead cat off.
I started laughing and found it hard to stop. “It just, he just, well, HAHAHA! Thought he was getting lunch and then got pancaked! Elvis, you look like a fat snack to him! HAHAHA!”
He looked at me with a sheepish grin. Holding up the squashed cat, he snickered. “Can I interest you in some pressed pussy?” I howled with laughter. “Ok, it wasn’t that funny.”
“No, but your face was when the cat thought you were an overgrown marshmallow! You caught it without even realizing what it was and then smooshed it!” Finally getting a grip, I wiped a few tears away. “Damn, I needed that. Ok, I like you a lot more now.” I examined the carcass. “Yeah, that ain’t worth saving. You completely split the skin in all the wrong places, unless . . nah, not worth it.”
I looked at the ritual circle and then back at the puma carcass. “You know,” I said, tapping my chin. “Maybe I can use that.” I had Elvis toss the body in the center and then had him tear the two basketball rims and backboards down and put them in as well as the two metal poles holding up the basketball rims. “The cat was just a normal tiger tabby that had gotten a version of mana-steroids but its fur coat can be put to good use.”
And testing out my Alchemy some more is always at the top of my list. Unable to hold back my eagerness any longer, I infused the ritual circle with mana, determined to take this a step at a time. First, the double-rimmed basketball hoop broke down and coalesced into a block of solid metal and then the backboards broke down and then reformed into a large block of plexiglass. Turning my attention to the rest of the contents within the ritual circle, I thought about how to get what I wanted from what I had.
“Leather, leather strips,” I muttered. “I need cloth or its equivalent.” After a few minutes of work and playing around with feeling out the extent of my Alchemy ability, I could feel the dead matter of the mutated cat- the skin, fur and sinew, I dried it all out. Then, I broke down the brain matter and let the tannins within combine with the skin fur and sinew. As I didn’t know the exact process, the energy cost ended up being higher than I expected, however, two stretches of soft tanned hide sat next to the metal and plexiglass.
“This is taking a while,” Elvis said, scratching his head. “What are you doing?”
I kept my hands on the ritual circle, making sure to keep up the energy flow. “Making helmets.”
Again, my mana infused all of the materials and they dissolved into a flood of pure, soft white light before reforming, coalescing into the exact end product I envisioned. Two helmets sat next to each other, a cross between a post-apocalyptic motorcycle helmet and a Corinthian brass helmet. The inside was coated in enough leather to help absorb kinetic impacts and the outside was a dull steel gray; the eyelets were filled in with perfectly clear plexiglass.
More time was spent getting the helmets to fit our heads than I wanted but I was proud of my work. I handed one to Elvis. “Here, the metal and plexiglass were actually layered on top of each other about ten times so not only is it incredibly dense but it should be bulletproof for small caliber rounds even though guns don’t really work.”
I waved off his effusive thanks as I’d spent more time on this than I wanted to but properly protecting your brain pain is critical to long term survival. Especially since melee weaponry is probably going to be the standard go-to for now.
********
Putting our game faces on took some time but it did eventually happen. It does help that I have a completely juvenile sense of humor which I’m starting to think is part and parcel of being male. Mutated animals of various stripes kept popping out of nowhere with a particular kind of rabid hunger forcing Elvis and myself to scrounge for clean water of any kind to rinse off. With the crimson shower mostly taken care of, we got back to my planned mission. Taking the canal path west towards Route 1, Elvis followed me as we went under the bridge then up and around the bend to the CVS. It upset my inner nerd that we didn’t find a troll camping under there,
We paused just as the alternate walkway on the canal path curved up and to the left. Angry shouts and disgruntled arguing disturbed the peace of the early afternoon.
“This isn’t fair! I need my insulin!”
Crossing the underside of Route 1 brought me and Elvis to what had become the busy part of town. We could easily hear crowds of people yelling and screaming, mostly for things they wanted. It took a minute, but we did hear some cries for order.
“My fridge stopped working, my medicines will go bad!”
A shrill whistle cut through the noise just before an almost inhuman shout.
“ALL RIGHT! EVERYONE QUIET!”
Elvis and I crept forward, finally catching a glimpse of almost a hundred people surrounding the CVS while others in small groups both joined the main crowd and left. Not one child was in sight, confirming that my neighbor’s situation must not have been unique. I was astonished at the sheer amount of old people though.
“Yes, there is a major power outage. No, we don’t know the root cause or how long it will take to get it back up and running.” An overweight police officer wearing a bulletproof vest stood on top of his car and I could see that he suffered from Napoleon syndrome. His pudgy red face was at odds with his very muscular but oddly short build, the man was built like a small brick house. He had enough fat to round out the sheer amount of muscle that made him more square than barrel. “I will have order or this store will not open!”
“We all know your guns don’t work!” Some snot-nosed teen skinnier than a telephone pole stepped forward, his thumbs in the pockets of his jeans. “I’ve seen something like this in a movie! There ain’t nothing you can do! No cars work, nothing electronic does neither!”
“It’s not a power outage! It’s the end of the world!”
“Back up off me man! Ain’t nobody comin’ to help us!” Different people yelled out at the same time in various states of panic, while other small groups pressed in on the entrance to the CVS and some more around the cars. Some were screaming while others saw the devolving situation and scattered.
The teen with a ratty jacket and not enough teeth gave an evil smile as his arms turned into blades of liquid silver. His equally skeevy buddies popped out of the shadows, backing him up. As one, they stepped up next to him, lightning and fire crackling around their fingertips. “Damn right, no pig can stop us! We have the power now!”
I had to hand it to the immature gang leader. He had a pair of balls on him despite the fact that he talked like a shitty movie villain. He thought nothing of mouthing off to a bunch of jacked police officers who looked like they were having a bad day and were just one insult away from rounding up the entire crowd. I squinted in the bright light as two more cops jumped up, one on the first officer’s car and the second onto the hood of an abandoned truck. I noted that they clearly were no longer normal humans. Both cops used zero effort to jump five feet straight up into the air and they even landed without shaking the vehicle.
That should not have been possible, all of those men except one were over two hundred pounds. Most were pushing three hundred, probably packing on slabs of magically enhanced muscle. I rubbed my eyes, noticing that all of them were unusually wide. Probably got some form of upgraded body or super strength power as part of the Advent.
“Lotta big man talk coming from some kids who watched too many movies.” All of them pulled out firearms, one of them firing into the air and another firing directly into the engine of the car he was standing on. “Looks like it works to me.” The skinny cop on the truck snidely grinned as he leveled his weapon at the teen.
The genuine version of this novel can be found on another site. Support the author by reading it there.
“How?” The teenagers shrieked, falling back as their powers fizzled out in their hands, their fear overcoming their control.
The big officer shrugged, the veins in his arm pulsing as his grip tightened on his firearm. “Magic, crazy ass voodoo like my mama warned me about. Come on now, just like you punks. But unlike you, we’re a bit more used to actual violence instead of video game bullshit. By the time today is over, our armory will be back up, running fuller and better than ever.”
Officer Rodriguez, the one looking like a brick shithouse whose name tag I could barely make out, pulled out a thick billy club that crackled with electricity. “And our other equipment got an upgrade as well.”
The crowds of people had all backed up, dispersing into their families and groups as everybody else was no longer eager to swing around their dicks. We could hear a lot of people talking about the medicines they needed, as they clustered around the CVS, some of them holding wounds closed with torn bed sheets and shirts while others eyed the pharmacy like a jackal.
Elvis and I backed up, not wanting to get involved initially with the dick swinging contest. “Go around back,” I whispered, placing the handle of the wagon in his hand. “Stay there and wait, I have an idea.” Well, I mainly didn’t want Elvis getting involved. People of his size are always considered a threat no matter the situation. They’re just too big. At some level in the hindbrain, we’ll always look at a human of that bulk and think ‘DANGER’.
Taking a page out of the officers’ book, I hopped up on a half-smooshed car just outside the parking lot and yelling, “HEY! Everybody! LISTEN UP!”
A few people stopped and turned around. Taking my helmet off and raising my voice even more, I kept on. “I know you all are looking for your medicine, but you do know that magic is real now!” I reached down and easily tore off the roof of the car while standing on the hood. People stopped talking and looked at me, a general hush falling over the crowd. The officers all spun, their weapons at the low ready. I tore the thin metal sheet in half with my bare hands. A quick flex of mana molded one part of the jagged metal sheet into a shiny orb the size of an orange.
“I’m not here to trick you or get you to do anything you don’t want to do, but I will give out some information. I recommend all of you who are injured, sick, or need medicine, go find a local church.” I stared pointedly at those with obvious injuries. A young blonde lady was holding her left arm awkwardly and two men leaned heavily on crutches. “I have seen them heal people, their faith actually does something now. Faith healers are no longer tent revival con artists.”
“Pollycock!” The oldest person still alive that I’ve seen so far stepped out of the crowd. The lady must have been in her late sixties, clutching her cane like she was wringing a duck’s neck. Her dress was conservative but her face was stern, like the kind you’d find on a headmistress of a girl’s only academy. “Medicine still works, science is the only proven concept to work with here, especially with our lives in the balance! Tomfoolery won’t work on us!”
“Lady, who talks like that?” I said. “What were you, a hundred and five before this craziness kicked off?”
Sighing in exasperation, I shrugged, tearing the other piece metal several more times like a phonebook before tossing it on the ground. “Wait around here if you want . . . but a freaking dog almost tore off my calf yesterday and a woman from the church up near Kenmore park healed it good as new.” I pulled up my pant leg to show the white lines of the bite mark scar. “They have more than one healer but I warn you, they have a bunch of magical weapons too, so don’t think you’re gonna just run over them. You ain’t dealing with pushovers.”
“Hey, you!” I turned to see the officer who hadn’t spoken yet point his .38 special at me. He was a thin white guy with a sallow face but looked like his one and only hobby was running. “That’s enough from the peanut gallery. I’m not going to have a mob on my hands because you say some pretty things that sound nice.”
“Whoa, they can do whatever they want,” I cautioned, putting my helmet back and before putting my hands above my head with a chuckle. “And where’d you get that gun? .38 special? That’s not standard issue for a cop. Y’all usually get .45s or 9 mils if I’m not mistaken.”
His glare intensified as his other hand darted to the holster on his left where the pepper spray lived. I started working the truth out for myself. A little light bulb went off in my head. This whole time, the cops kept glancing at their spare magazines and putting their other hand on as if to just make sure it was still there. They did have bullets and guns and all that jazz, and they did work, but they didn’t have the supply that they claimed. Their ‘armory’ that they claimed was going to be full by the end of the day, that’s what they’re lying about, their timeline. The part that scared me though was that the cop that fired into the engine of the car, I could feel the bullet in the earth beneath it. The round was sitting eight inches deep into solid dirt.
It hummed with an unnatural life, like the earth itself wanted to spit it back out.
Now, I wasn’t going to bet my life on that hunch but I did come here for a reason, I needed that damn CVS for my Alchemy experiment, but that reason left my brain as the remnants of the dispersing crowd exploded in a fireball of dust and blood.
A flaming meteor of a human crashed into the parking lot. Multiple shockwaves landed like a hailstorm of missiles, blowing apart the remaining cars and creating a massive burning crater. Something followed up that human meteor out of the sky, slamming into the same crater like a second missile. More shockwaves blew me off the car I was standing on, the layers of armor barely able to keep me from getting blown to bits as I was flung into the bank of the nearby canal. Whatever was left of the mass of people, which was most of it, was swept away in a wave of force and fire.
Repeated thuds reverberated through the earth, the sounds of giants doing an a-synchronous African stomp dance. Slowly pulling my beleaguered self up the steep bank as I held down my almost concussion induced nausea, I watched as two veritable titans exchanged blows. I couldn’t make out what they were screaming about. The first one, the flaming meteor from before, I could barely see that he was a hispanic dude in his early twenties, I’m guessing with an anger problem. His blue and orange flames sheathed his body in a protective layer yet lancets of fire danced around as if they had a mind of their own. Tongues of flame lashed out, smacking away the other man’s fists while even more flames kept him aloft.
The other person was a short Indian guy with no muscle to speak of but his punches caused concussive blows of air to hit everything around him. An errant foot smacked the wreck of half a truck through the front doors of the CVS and concussive blasts of fire spewed out from Mr. Temper. They both fought while flying, their rampage taking them in and out of the CVS and then into Route 1 like Roman candles erratically shooting off into the distance.
I wish I had a camera. It was like watching the flaming Hulk fight crackhead foreign Superman. Individual pedestrians and groups of people that weren’t smashed to pieces scattered like cockroaches in the sun. After a few minutes of cowering on the slope of the bank of the canal, the sounds of their fighting faded as they moved further south. Columns of thick greasy smoke marked their continuing rampage.
Elvis ran over to me, all hunched over as if he could sneak around. “Hey! Grant! Grant! Are you ok?” He whispered, still looking around while holding his shield above his head. “Did you see that? Did they get you?”
I moaned as I rolled over on my back. I stared up at the sky for a moment. A few whimpers, not my own, were barely heard above the soft wind. “Ants fear to tread where giants walk,” I groaned, rolling back over as I took stock of my body. Nothing was broken but there were some serious bone bruises on my arms, chest and back.
“What?” Elvis said, looking up and around like a frightened deer.
“Those are the kinds of things, the kinds of people we are going to avoid,” I grunted, slowly pushing myself into a standing position as I looked around. I listened for a moment, making sure I didn’t hear any big booms or sounds of superhuman conflict. “I went the magic and power route, and you went the bloodline route. Those people, I’m guessing, went the real superpower route.” Groaning as I forced my body to move a bit, I looked down at my trembling hands.
As far as I could see, the parking lot was empty of life but there was blood everywhere. Scattered parts of human bodies littered the ground, seemingly no different from the demolished cars that strewn everywhere, just adding to the scenery of death and destruction. Buildings were smashed, trees rendered done to splinters and craters were suddenly more common. Too many burning things added to the already everpresent heat of the day.
“What does that mean?”
“It means I don’t know shit!” I growled, limping towards the CVS. Bending over with a snarl of pain, I grabbed a random piece of junk metal off the ground and molded it with my Terrastria into a crude thick walking stick. I kept my head on a swivel checking for signs of life amidst the destruction. I knew I heard someone other than myself give in to the pain. “I know you saw the first messages too; there was a list of ability types and I went for magic and power, and I’m guessing some people went all in on the superpower shit. The two assholes who just murdered a bunch of people without noticing probably went the cheap Superman with a twist route; flight, super-strength, super-durability, fire control, shit like that.”
Elvis didn’t say a word as I talked out loud, my thoughts evolving as I mulled over what I just saw even as I kept checking around for anyone that still lived.
“Hello? Anyone alive?!” I yelled even though I’m sure I wasn’t louder than a cough. I stacked body parts while holding my breath at times, the charred stench of burnt death almost making me vomit over and over as I used my shirt to catch a few breaths. The shirt barely helped with the rancid smoke. The smaller pieces of gore, I simply forced the dirt to swallow them up so I wouldn’t have to touch them.
“Jesus fuck man, this is beyond gory. Focus . . . ok, I think, and this is just me hypothesizing, but I think everything kinda evens out.”
I shifted an overturned truck bed and then set it back down, working and focusing so hard on looking for survivors that I didn’t see all the details of the shredded limbs. I didn’t have to do it, I know, but if I could easily erase some of the gore then why not?
Muttering loud enough for Elvis to hear me, mainly so I could focus on my things other than a blood-strewn battlefield, I kept working on my train of thought as I spoke aloud, anything to distract me from hurling my guts out. My nose kept tempting my stomach to revolt every time I took a breath.
[Don’t think about the smell.] I repeated to myself internally, trying not to hone in on the horrible scene around me. [You got a job to do and a mentally-impaired Goliath to both worry about and direct like a fucking employee.]
In so doing, I droned on with surface level thoughts, speaking aloud to Elvis. “Superpowers seem to be easy to use and easy to figure out but they’re linear in terms of use. Super strength is just that, the ability to lift more, hit harder, take a hit, that kind of thing. Flight is simply the ability to fly. Now magic, that takes longer to figure out but it has more uses. I can make armor with my earth magic, shape building, dig tunnels, transmute dirt to stone, but it takes a lot of energy and is a slower process.”
Elvis worked next to me although he did most of the heavy lifting since hiding behind the CVS protected him from the explosive fight. “And my stuff is bloodline . . .” he started, coughing and retching off to the side.
I handed him a clean scrap of cloth from my pocket. “Right, bloodline, your abilities stem from the fact that you have the blood of Hercules in you, or at least that’s what your status screen says.” Elvis heaved a flat piece of scrap metal covered in stone off to the side.
“I think he’s alive!” Reaching down, Elvis dusted the large police officer off just before I held him off with my makeshift cane. Elvis leaned in to pick him up by the shoulders.
“Don’t touch him yet, Elvis!” I ordered, getting down on my knees next to the barley conscious man. I double-checked his name tag, yup, it said ‘RODRIGUEZ’ in bold letters. “Not sure how he’s still breathing. Put your hands above him and make sure that he doesn’t move yet, I need to check for big wounds and head injuries.”
The Army ran a bunch of us Reservists through a Combat Lifesaver course that took place at Fort McCoy in Wisconsin. I went every year in the summer for my entire Reserve contract. The two week-long training at that horrible almost deserted base only covered the bare bones basics that I could barely remember but it’s better than nothing. “Open the eyelids and see if his pupils are dilated,” I said, following my own instructions as I worked through what I could remember. “If so, signs of a head injury, if not, then it’s still possible. Find the pulse in the neck . . . yup . . . there it is, still alive.”
I checked Officer Rodriguez from head to toe, checking for broken bones or bleeders but I didn’t find anything. “Is he good?” Elvis asked, his hands shaking. “What are you doing now?”
Taking a deep breath, I ran through it again with Elvis. Never know when it might be him doing this for someone else. “Look for obvious wounds first, see if you can help the individual. If they are blown completely in half, try and save someone who isn’t. If they look like they’re ok, check them anyway. Check for head injuries, broken bones, large gashes. If you see broken bones or severely bleeding wounds then use a tourniquet.”
“A turn-a-whatta?”
Figuring it would be easier to get it across if I showed my work while explaining, I looked around until I found a torn piece of cloth that used to be a bloody shirt. Tearing it into long strips, I tied Officer Rodriguez’s arm off at the elbow making sure to put a thin bar of metal underneath the main knot. “If he’s bleeding on his forearm for instance and you can’t get it to stop, tie a piece of tough cloth with a stick underneath. When it’s freaking tight, twist the stick until you can see that the blood circulation is cut off and then tie that stick to the rest of his arm.”
Showcasing the officer’s arm as a case study, I pointed out his fingers as they lost their color. “If he was bleeding and you did it right then you’ll see the bleeding stop or seriously slow down. You can put another tourniquet on but at a higher point like at his armpit.”
As I gave the makeshift tourniquet bar a twist, Rodriguez came to his senses screaming, “AAAAHHHHGGGG!!”
I shoved him back down as I loosened the twist. “It’s also incredibly painful and useful for waking someone up. Remember, because we have greatly enhanced strength, we don’t go by the old adage anymore of ‘twist until you can’t anymore’, otherwise we would have popped his arm right off. Doing this actually hurts the person but it may save their life.”
“What the hell are you doing?” A fist awkwardly swung for my face and Elvis caught it before it gained any momentum.
“Checking you for injuries, asshole.” I said, continuing to pat the barely conscious police officer down. “And giving my big friend here a lesson in first aid since you were an unconscious yet willing dummy. I don’t see anything but you tell me. Sit up slowly. Don’t go for the gun, we’re helping you, for the moment.”
Officer Rodriguez sat up with my help as Elvis pulled his hands back, watching us and the surrounding carefully. “That hurt like a bitch but I think I’m fine,” he said, slowly moving each part of his body. “What the hell hit us?”
I gave a beleaguered grin. “Supers, man. We got caught in the crossfire of Superman’s wigger cousin and the Human Torch’s Mexican counterpart.” The noon sun was mostly hidden by cloud cover but I could see that Rodriguez’s face was slack with disbelief. “I don’t mean that literally,” I clarified. “A small part of that was a tiny joke. But take a look around, we are definitely not in Kansas anymore. If anything, I would hate to see the big cities. Think about it, millions of people suddenly given god-like power or magic? Forget about the billions that died when it kicked off, humanity is so tribal and warlike that we’ll probably boost those numbers by a ton. I bet New York city and D.C. and L.A. are basically rubble at this point.”
Rodriguez gave a bloody cough trying to sit up. “Where’s my partner and Karev, the newbie?” Rodriguez sat up straighter, his head pivoting to take in the pure destruction around him. Part of Route 1 that went over the Canal Path was demolished, the CVS had multiple holes in it, the Taco Bell just a hundred yards away was completely gone. Even its foundation was now a smoking crater. Every car in sight wasn’t even fit for a junkyard, each one used in the fight between demi-gods.
At least the weather was doing all right.
“Look around you,” I grunted, getting up and surreptitiously pointing Elvis to the pharmacy. “Probably in pieces.” I looked back, hesitating as I gave Rodriguez the cold hard truth and pointed out what nobody wanted to look at. Burnt corpses were strewn about, some in a pile and others spread across the landscape. “Sorry about your coworkers.” I patted Rodriguez’s shoulder and laid him back down. “When you’re able, best get yourself to a church, man.”
Taking a minute, I covered myself in dirt and held it there using my magic until only my helmet was exposed. There were small fires leaking out of the holes in the CVS and the dirt would help insulate me while I dug through it. It was my magicked version of a fireman’s suit.
Keeping Officer Rodriguez in my sight, I motioned Elvis over so we could start. “What are we looking for?” My big friend asked, grabbing big chunks of concrete and tossing them to the side. The big guy was a freaking bulldozer in human form. I loved it. I watched in awe as his fingers went right through the concrete as if it were clay. I want to be that strong.
“Anything and everything really,” I answered, going a bit slower. “Careful! There could be people still in there. All the medical stuff though, put it in the stone boxes in the wagon.”
It didn’t take long to fill up on all the good stuff and the best part was Rodriguez left us alone. Five minutes into our excavation, he huffed at us as we were covered in dust and rubble and limped away, muttering something about ‘freaking scavengers’.
“Hey!” I called out to Elvis who casually hefted a concrete block into the parking lot. “The main part of the pharmacy is back here! Go real slow and get the good medicine in their safe, I need some of that too!”
Elvis shot me a look. “Gonna try and be a drug dealer?” He asked halfway jokingly.
“Nah,” I laughed, digging through the rubble and torn up safes. “Way too much drama and headache for me. My goal here is to make some kind of Alchemical ‘cure-all’, something to take care of small wounds, infections, all kinds of first-aid stuff, and even allergies.” I pulled out all kinds of good stuff, everything from the Oxycodone to the antibiotics that I can’t pronounce. Stone boxes quickly filled up with bandages, isopropyl alcohol, neosporin, antibiotics, antihistamines, painkillers, and a couple first aid kits that weren’t completely smashed to pieces.
Elvis tore into a big bag of Cheetos and then poked the downed racks of chips. “Can we get the food too? I’m starving.”
“Yeah man, get as much as you can.” I looked around at the piles and piles of useful items lying around. The pragmatic side of me was actually very grateful that this turned out the way it did. Elvis worked like a horse and nobody bothered us picking through a half-demolished pharmacy. The fight between the titans drove everyone off and the fires inside were actually pretty easy to put out. A couple blasts of shaped dirt smothered them and that was super easy for me. Not everything was destroyed, some of the metal shelves propped up the walls so there were plenty of pristine supplies albeit covered in a far bit of dust. Most of the good medicine, the hardcore stuff, was in a safe in the back that Elvis had zero issues cracking open and the racks of edible goods didn’t compare to the storage space in the back where everything was neatly boxed up and ripe for the picking.
“I don’t think we can take all of this in one trip.” Elvis downed two water bottles from our pile of scavenged goods and cleaned off the Cheeto dust. Opening a bag of pretzels and a jar of queso, he tucked in as he looked around. Speaking through flying crumbs, he sat on a truck tire. “But it’s too good to leave out.”
“True, true,” I muttered. My wagon was filled to the top but it wasn’t teetering due to its wide build. “And that’s where my magic comes in.” One by one, I shaped boxes of dirt and then transmuted them to stone, filling them up with leftover goodies we couldn’t fit in the wagon and sealing them off. I buried each block in the parking lot, the broken gravel and dirt opening up for me and accepting my gifts. I felt like a squirrel, stashing away what I needed for the winter only my nuts were way bigger, hehe. Ten minutes of shaping, storing, sealing, and sinking later, everything I couldn’t take right now of consumable use was thirty feet deep.
