The pressure on my mind was gone, finally. It was like the giant spikes being jammed in my brain had suddenly disappeared. I have no idea what caused me to gain an ability. It could have been flooding mana into my resistance, or something else. I really hoped it wasn’t some higher power taking an interest in me. In any story I had ever read there were always strings attached to that attention.

  I placed the gun on the table and put my hands up as soldiers stormed into the office. Colonel Smolders yelled, “What the fuck, Cassland. Why would you shoot our CIA…” The words trailed off to mutters. I turned my head to look in his direction without moving the rest of my body. He had finally turned to face me and saw the body. The body of Miss Gostiva was gone. The half-demon had the same long dark thick hair cascading halfway down her body. The outfit was no longer a suit, but a simple black shirt and stretchy leggings. The two most obvious things marking her as a demon were her horns and her wings. The horns curved up and back from her forehead, while the wings were nearly two-thirds the height of her body. We would never find out if they helped her fly.

  There were a lot of questions that got answered simply by me pointing to the demon corpse. Deep down some of them probably realized they were being manipulated. Admitting that would be another issue entirely. The consistent question that I got to answer, “How did you know she was a demon?” I always answered with my class ability, assess. Several protocols changed in short order. Soldiers that had the assess class ability were immediately moved heavily towards guard duty, both at the gates and at key rooms throughout the temporary military base. The colonel gained an increased appreciation for abilities as well. He realized that they needed to organize squads as much around classes as anything else. Having a mix of abilities for the field, until front line troops could be given additional abilities was essential to survival. Part of me was shocked that this was the situation that moved the needle, but having the base commander compromised and not knowing it was a pretty big deal.

  The next challenge for them was to convince higher ups that this was the best route, but I wasn’t being asked to stay around for any of that. I was content to get on with my day. I knew that I didn’t have the weight behind my words, despite being charismatic, to really move the needle on those issues myself.

  It was a few hours before I was allowed to leave. I narrowly avoided handcuffs, but the half-demon corpse essentially exonerated me. That said, I was eventually able to go about my day with giving up very little information beyond what assess was. I didn’t want to spend the time to go over all that we had learned, and I didn’t trust them to not betray me. Natalie and Frank split off from us at my urging, to spend a few hours with Nora and Brittney who were knee deep in Operation: Food Run.

  During that time I took the opportunity to actually examine my new ability.

  Charismatic Defiance-Tier 3(Passive)-Charisma, Mind, Arcane, Performance, Divine

  This passive ability always adds half of the users charisma stat to their wisdom saves. As well as any ability that seeks to alter their mind, or dominate it.

  That is super powerful. It scales with my increasing charisma. It also means I don’t have to raise my wisdom just to gain better resistance to charms, illusions, compulsions, domination, or mind control. Or at least that is how I am interpreting it. It simply makes me more mentally durable. I will keep that in my back pocket for now. When I reveal that people can sometimes force abilities to manifest, it will be a massive revelation. I can see people trying all sorts of stuff to create abilities. We don’t know what the rules or even rough parameters yet. Oh well, simply need to add more questions to our ever increasing list of questions.

  With Natalie and Frank headed to Nora, this allowed me with a new grand total of 3 Humvees to head to the senior care center. It was some sort of end of life palliative care place. There were supposedly over 300 residents there in varying states of dying. I hoped the system improved some of their chances or made some of their illnesses more curable.

  I got really worried when I saw the pile of dead lupin bodies outside the massive hospital like structure. I stood four stories tall and over the outer dimensions of a football field. The trails of blood coming from the front area was ominous, but it also looked like it had been partially cleaned. I never noticed lupin cleaning up spots of blood. As we stepped towards the front door the second and third squad started rolling into the parking lot. Extra help was always appreciated. The front sliding doors had streaks of blood that were also partially cleaned on them. We stepped forward and the sliding doors didn’t open. Though we saw humans on the other side barricaded behind a receptionist desk, none of them moved to open the doors.

  “Hello. We are with the National Guard.” I waved at them and tried to smile a little bit.

  The three people barricaded on the other side all stood up slowly. Two were younger and dressed as nurses, while one was a little bit older and dressed in t-shirt and shorts. The older woman looked at me hard, like she was trying to determine if I was a threat or not. We all carried rifles, so I shouldn’t have been surprised. Her darkened skin and grey streaked hair all looked a bit disheveled, like she had been through something severe recently. She finally spoke up, “If you are the National Guard, why weren’t you here yesterday and the day before when those little wolf demons attacked?”

  “I wasn’t aware you’ve been under attack. We’re here to help get everyone out of Oakland, Missouri. We are getting everyone we can back to Fenton, and outside the range of the portals.” I looked at her a little closer; she was Hispanic and somewhere in her mid to late 40’s. I used Assess, as it hadn’t failed me yet.

  Human, Dedicated Nurse, level 2

  At least she isn’t still level 1. The two younger folks looked like they had been through quite an event as well, but I kept my focus on the older woman. We looked at each other, taking a measure of the other person. Finally, she relented, “You can come in.” She hit a button on the wall to her right and the doors slid open.

  Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site.

  “My name’s Neal Cassland. And what might your name be?” I asked as I walked in calmly.

  “Nurse Matilda. Aren’t you a congressman or something? I saw you on the Facebook and the YouTube.” She still hadn’t relaxed, but at least I had her talking.

  “Just your State Representative. My father would be your congressman. How many of you are there?” I kept walking towards her, but glanced around at other staff members. They were both in their mid to late twenties, though it was hard to be exact. The woman was Asian, while the guy was white. I didn’t do more than glance at them, so I didn’t really pay much more attention than that.

  “Does that mean your family is directly responsible for our safety?”

  “Not exactly. I am pulling everyone in my district back to Fenton, like I mentioned before. It’s large enough to accommodate twenty thousand plus people. It also has the defensive benefit of the Meramec River. Stretching across it’s eastern end, separating us from demons and portals. We have no Portals behind us, so it made sense to migrate everyone there.”

  She finally let her shoulders drop. “Thank God. We’ve had two different attacks by those wolf demons. I want to get out of this place as soon as possible.”

  “We’ll get you out of here as soon as we can, but we need to know how many people are still alive.”

  She looked at me, and then her head darted around like she was looking for something or someone. She must not have seen them as she faced me again. Her eyes were larger now, like she was terrified, “We’ve got about thirty of us including residents.”

  “Doesn’t this place hold almost 300.”

  She then broke down into tears. Through sobs she told her story. “Two nights ago, the demon wolves had been climbing up the outside of the building, sneaking in through open windows, and killing residents on the fourth floor. We lost over a dozen residents before an emergency alarm was tripped by one of the elderly patients. One of the medical students, Tim, along with a whole bunch of us eventually fought them off. Most of the orderlies and security had been killed, but Tim survived. Tim told us that we needed to provide assisted suicide to those that we couldn’t save. He was big on denying the demons what called, ‘easy experience.’ It made sense, but none of us wanted to participate. We tried to protect the residents, we truly did. Anyone that showed improvements from our new abilities was kept away from Tim. Tim seemed okay with that, but most were not improved. We originally had 286 residents. We now have 24 residents, 5 of us, and Tim. We were all afraid of Tim, and didn’t really know how to stop him. Tim patrols the roof and every floor above the first. We just want to get us and the 24 residents left out of here. I swear, we did nothing to help Tim.”

  “Umm, okay. We can do that.” I turned to Ted, who looked even more shocked than I did, “Ted, why don’t we work on getting all these folks out of here. Don’t bombard them with questions, but absolutely find out any medical conditions for the patients. Try grabbing their charts or something.”

  Ted gulped and saluted briefly, “Yes, Captain.”

  I reeled from all that information. If what she said is true I some sort of psychotic serial killer upstairs. He would have killed over 250 people. That is a mass casualty event. I didn’t go upstairs yet, as I wanted to put that off until we had the first floor and any basement areas cleared of people. I wandered the halls to an employee break room and sat down. Ted could get those people out of here, and there would be buses at the place soon to start transporting them to Fenton. I just was still trying to wrap my head around that much death. This guy sounds scary, and he probably had a bunch of levels. Why did I care about that? Is it this damn system that causes my mind to always goes back to gaming logic? What is wrong with me? How have people gotten that desperate? These were things that not only could I not answer, but that I probably didn’t want to attempt to answer either.

  I sat in the employee break room for a bit and then looked over at the vending machines. All four of them had their fronts broken. I guess when the apocalypse hits the concern for having the right kind of pocket change for a soda goes right out the window. This type of destruction I can fathom. It goes to basic needs. However, for survival’s sake, does leveling also speak to basic needs now. To fight predators in a level based world a person would need levels. I still didn’t want to think about any of it, but my mind kept going there. On some level I was trying to logically justify mass murder. However, I couldn’t morally justify it. Kant be damned, but I wasn’t going to be some sort of moral utilitarian who valued humans less if they had a medical condition. The apocalypse wasn’t that bad yet.

  I ended up wandering after that and checking in on these potential end of life care patients, but they all seemed way better off than I thought they were. Something wasn’t adding up. I grabbed a random chart and saw that the patient Fred Sanderson was supposed to be in a coma since 2004. The man was up and walking around. He was walking around using a cane, but he definitely wasn’t in a coma. I rushed through the halls to find Nurse Matilda. I nearly ran into a lot of my guys helping move several different sets of patients. While I avoided calamity, my dignity took a hit when I fell on my ass. I still haven’t upped my physical stats, so I shouldn’t be surprised. After I got up and did some additional searching I found the nurse in question.

  “Nurse Matilda, how bad off were these patients that are all walking out of here with little help?”

  “Bad. A lot of our patients were either on feeding tubes, some type of life support, or in the coma ward. The rest received palliative care while they slowly died from stage 4 cancer or similar illnesses.”

  “So your saying the healing abilities of the nurses did all this?”

  “Myself and the two nurses at the front desk all have abilities that heal people well. We healed someone with a blood disease, heart disease, ALS, and Parkinson’s. Some were also in comas, but Tim was the one that healed them.”

  “Where do you and the other nurses live?”

  “I live in St. Louis Hills, not too far from Ted Drewes.” Her saying that made me want ice cream all of a sudden, some sort of Pavlovian response to the name of the place. Sadly, the St. Louis hills were way outside of my area.

  “Do you have family there?”

  “Yes, my husband and teenage son.”

  “You live way outside of what I can manage, but I will send you and each of the other nurses with part of a squad to your homes to pack up essentials and get your families back into Fenton.”

  “You’d do that for us? Why are you being so nice?”

  “It is the right thing to do, but I also have this nagging feeling that healing abilities will be in high demand as this continues. You will be a popular woman for your healing gifts.”

  She smiled, “So you want my medical skills and abilities. As long as you appreciate what my staff and I bring to the table, then all is good.” She smiled and walked away with a bit more confidence.

  I had Ted arrange to have some of the second and third squads take each of the 5 employees to their residences to collect their things and then to head directly for Fenton. I knew that such a task would probably take a chunk of the day between driving, packing, and convincing family members. With those tasks all underway, I realized it was time to go up to the second floor and find Tim.