Chương 12: Chapter 11: "Passphrases and Polyurethane"

Before I closed out the status screen, I noticed two small tabs I had completely missed on the side of the menu: one labeled Parties and one for Quests. I tapped the Party tab first. A notification popped up explaining that the user-created party feature didn't unlock until you hit Level 5. It looked like the System had simply auto-assigned me to a generic, invisible group with Dan and Frank based on our real-world proximity when the initialization hit, splitting the experience points equally across the board.

It made me wonder: now that I had officially passed Level 5, if I didn't manually form a party with Frank, would I only get experience for the things I killed with my own hands? More importantly, would the System stop giving me experience points for the threats Dog neutralized? It was definitely a mechanic I needed to test later. I clicked over to the Quest tab next. Sure enough, the completed notification for Damsel in Distress was logged cleanly in the history section.

The realization that we could actively trigger quests and earn structured rewards out here in the real world gave me a massive surge of excitement. This apocalypse was a nightmare, but at its core, the System ran on pure gaming logic. Finding quests, adventuring, and using them to level up was something I actually understood. satisfied for the moment, I closed the interface and looked over at Frank.

"Did you manage to level up?"

"Yeah, I sure did," Frank said, leaning back against the wall.

"Pushed all the way through. I even picked my class."

"Oh, nice," I said, adjusting the duty belt on my hips.

"What did you end up taking?"

"Warrior," Frank replied simply.

"There were a couple of other options on the list, but I'm really not into all this complicated gaming stuff. I'm comfortable with just smashing heads, so it felt like the right fit." A wide grin broke across my face, and I chuckled.

"See? I told you. That's the exact reason why I knew the System wouldn't give you a Monk class choice. I would've bet every single one of my stat points on it. If it had been an option, you would've taken it in a heartbeat." I leaned in closer, raising an eyebrow knowingly.

"Come on, be honest—did you get a Berserker option?" Frank looked down at his boots, a sheepish, guilty smirk breaking through his beard.

"Ha! I knew it," I laughed, slapping him on the shoulder.

"What spell and ability did you end up locking in?"

"For the spell, I took something called Stunning Blow," Frank said, tapping the heavy handle of his sledgehammer.

"And for the ability, I went with a passive dodge modifier. My Dexterity is pretty low right now, so I figured anything that helps me avoid getting hit in a tight spot is a massive win."

"Smart move," I nodded.

"What about you? What did you pick?" He asked.

"Ranger," I replied.

"With my wilderness survival skills and bow mastery already sitting at Apprentice tier, it was the only choice that made logical sense. For my active spell, I picked up a crowd-control trap called Spike Growth, and for my passive ability, I grabbed Dark Vision so I can see better when the lights are out." Frank blinked, looking around the dark, shadowed hallways of my house.

"Seriously? Are you actually able to see clearly in this pitch black?"

"Yeah," I murmured, blinking as I scanned the room.

"It's like watching an old black-and-white movie. No color, just sharp grayscale details. It's a little weird to get used to, but the visual clarity is incredible. I'm willing to bet it's even sharper when we get outside under the moonlight."

"Not bad at all," Frank said, rolling his shoulders.

"Are we ready to boot up and get moving?"

"Just one more quick chore, and then we're clearing the perimeter," I replied.

"The looters missed a few spots downstairs. Most of my heavy gear was cleaned out of the walk-in safe, which means Denise and Chad definitely made a supply run before they evacuated. But I need to double-check the garage cabinet and see if they left my personal bows behind." I pushed through the door into the attached garage. The space had clearly been searched, but the disarray wasn't too severe.

My garage was usually an absolute disaster zone of storage boxes, tools, and project junk anyway, meaning an intruder would have to spend hours dragging heavy crates into the driveway if they wanted to find anything of real value. My eyes tracked to a deep, dark corner of the shop. To my absolute relief, one of my heavy utility cabinets remained completely untouched. I quickly cleared away a few stacked buckets of hardware, threw open the cabinet doors, and let out a massive sigh of satisfaction.

My handmade traditional recurve bow and my modern compound hunting bow were still resting securely on their foam mounts. Right below them were two independent quivers, each tightly packed with a couple dozen arrows. The moment my fingers wrapped around the riser of the recurve, a bright gold text box materialized across my vision: [You have found: Hybrid Recurve Bow. Rarity: Rare. Quality: Fine. Damage: 25–30 Piercing. Property: Damage Resistant.] I was absolutely ecstatic.

This specific bow was incredibly sentimental to me; my father had meticulously handcrafted it out of raw timber back when he was in college. It featured a gorgeous, dense alder handle and riser section, with heavy fiberglass custom-laminated directly onto the limbs. My dad had never actually gotten around to stringing the weapon during his lifetime, but when it finally passed down to me, I took it straight to a local archery shop to have a custom dacron string spun for it.

The shop owner had taken one look at the vintage wood and flat-out refused to string it, terrified that the aged glue joints would catastrophically shatter under the immense structural tension. I wasn't about to let it sit as a wall hanger. I brought the bow back to my garage, lightly re-sanded the entire frame down to the raw grain, and applied a thick, protective seal of heavy-duty hardening polyurethane.

Once the coat cured into a glassy shell, I went a step further, backing the exterior face of the limbs with a genuine diamondback rattlesnake hide and high-grade epoxy resin to reinforce the tensile strength. The defining characteristic of this particular hybrid was its sheer, imposing scale. Unstrung, the tip of the upper limb stood nearly as tall as I did, and the flat limbs were easily two inches wide across the belly.

Once the epoxy cured and I carefully brought it up to tension, the bow settled into a perfect thirty-inch draw length with a punishing sixty-pound draw weight. The second I saw my Bow Mastery skill translate into the System, I knew this rattlesnake bow was destined to be my primary weapon. And with my Strength stat now sitting at a boosted eighteen, I could cycle the heavy draw all night without my muscles burning out.

I grabbed the modern compound bow and both quivers, navigating my way back through the garage door to rejoin Frank. A notification popped up informing me I'd found a good-quality compound bow, but I swiped it away absently. The compound was heavily customized with high-visibility fiber-optic sights, a modern drop-away arrow rest, and a tuned weight stabilizer on the front stabilizer threads.

It was undeniably the more mechanically accurate weapon of the two, but in a survival situation, simplicity beats complexity every single time. I stepped into the living room and extended the compound rig toward Frank.

"Here, Frank. I think this one is going to be more your speed. I know you've got a solid rig sitting at your place, but mine's tuned down to a comfortable cycle and it's heavily tricked out. I'm sticking with my snake bow." Frank accepted the compound and the quiver with a nod of approval, and we made a swift line back toward the idling Ford van with Dog effortlessly leading the formation. I slid the heavy side panel open, and the dingo vaulted into the rear cabin before I could even issue the command.

Utilizing my newly enhanced Dark Vision, I slid back into the driver's seat and threw the transmission into gear. The grayscale clarity allowed me to navigate the labyrinth of rural back roads and neighborhood streets completely blacked out, leaving the headlights switched off. Moving like a ghost car made it incredibly easy to traverse the grid without pulling unwanted attention from local looters or rooftop snipers. Stolen story; please report.

Within ten minutes, the van rolled to a silent halt a few doors down from Chad's property. I reached up to my shirt collar, clicked my whisper-mic three times in slow succession, and waited for a response on the net. The airwaves remained completely dead. I keyed the ignition off, letting the engine die into the quiet of the street. Frank shifted his weight in the passenger seat, his eyes scanning the dark front porches of the block.

"What's the move, Derrick?"

"Now we wait," I murmured, keeping my hands resting on the wheel.

"I know how Chad operates. Someone is definitely manning the base station inside, and they'll execute the mandatory mic clicks right at the top of the hour. I have zero desire to walk up and knock on that front door in pitch darkness. Do that to a hardcore prepper right now, and you're liable to catch a face full of buckshot through the drywall." We sat in the darkened cab for roughly fifteen minutes before the silence in my earpiece broke. Three slow, distinct static clicks pulsed against my eardrum.

I immediately pressed my push-to-talk button, mirroring the three clicks in response.

"Identify. Over," a low, tightly strained male voice commanded through the static. A massive wave of stress instantly evaporated from my shoulders; it was Chad. The confirmation meant my father-in-law had successfully made the run to my house to extract my family before the city collapsed.

"Red Rover, over," I whispered into the mic, delivering our primary family authentication code.

"Copy, Red Rover. What is your point of origin? Over."

"Poughkeepsie," I responded instantly. The passphrase was a deliberate reference to the television series Supernatural, a show that Denise, our stepdaughter, and I had spent years binge-watching together on the couch. Within our family security plan, the word Poughkeepsie was the ultimate green light—it explicitly communicated that things were secure, the operator was uncompromised, and we were coming in peaceful.

If I had been driving a captured vehicle with a gun to my head or arriving with a hostile tail, I would have used the alternative code DC. Because honestly, who on earth is in more catastrophic, irredeemable trouble than the political nightmare of Washington, DC?

"Red Rover, Red Rover, get your ass on over. Over," Chad's voice returned, the intense stress completely vanishing into a joyful, raspy chuckle.

"Copy that. Is the auxiliary side gate clear? We're rolling in hot."

"Gate's unlatched," Chad confirmed.

"Bring it in."

"ETA two minutes. Out." I turned the key, firing up the van's engine, and crawled the vehicle forward down the asphalt. The moment we neared the property line, the heavy wooden privacy fence swung inward. I guided the van quickly into the side yard, cut the ignition, and stepped out into the cool night air, making sure to click the door lock shut behind me.

I didn't want Dog vaulting out of the cabin just yet; my mother-in-law owned a small army of high-strung, miniature lap dogs, and I had no clue how a semi-wild, eighty-pound alpha dingo would react to a pack of yapping targets. Chad came jogging around the rear bumper of the van, instantly throwing his heavy arms around me in a crushing bear hug the second his boots cleared the fence gate. I pulled back, my voice tight.

"I saw the markings on my front door casing, Chad. Tell me you got Denise and the kids out."

"You know damn well I did," the old man growled softly, slapping my shoulder.

"She might be your wife, son, but she's still my little girl, and she is always my responsibility. So are those grandkids. No matter how old they get, family is family."

"Thank you," was all I could manage, my throat tightening up. Chad glanced over at the boxy silhouette of the Ford, his eyes tracking the fresh bullet dents along the quarter panels.

"Nice rig. Where'd you score a functional asset like that?"

"Ran into a few local sub-humans aggressively negotiating with a woman in an alleyway on the north side of town," I said, gesturing back toward the passenger side.

"Let's just say they won't be needing the keys anymore, thanks to me and Frank. You remember my stepdad?"

"Course I do," Chad said, stepping forward to give Frank's hand a firm, respectful shake.

"Welcome to the compound, Frank." He turned his focus back to me, his tone dropping into a serious whisper.

"The kids are all completely wiped out, sleeping in the back bedrooms. But your wife hasn't closed her eyes once since the sky opened up. She's up in the kitchen. We didn't know what happened to Alex, though. He wasn't at the house when we executed the breach."

"Alex was scheduled to head out to my mother's country property the morning the lightning matrix went live," I explained, checking the cylinder on my service pistol.

"I'm reasonably confident he's still locked down out there with her. Is your garage hardware operational? That's our next tactical objective."

"My daily work truck and Mamo's sedan are completely bricked—the computer modules are fried crisp," Chad said, gesturing toward the main structure.

"But my old, carbureted square-body rig in the garage fired right up on the first turn. No electronics to melt."

"Perfect. I need to borrow the keys to make the ten-mile run into the county to verify my mom and Alex are secure, then I'm coming straight back here," I told him.

"I'm leaving this van with Frank so he has a reliable logistical asset to check on his own family perimeter, since I'm certain their standard vehicles are out of commission."

"Not a problem in the world," Chad nodded, stepping toward the back entry door.

"Now get your ass inside. You know exactly who's waiting on the other side of that glass. I had to physically block the doorway to keep her from sprinting into the streets to look for you. It's too dangerous out there." I didn't hesitate for another second. I pushed through the side garage door, crossed the threshold into the dimly lit kitchen, and froze. Standing on the opposite side of the counter was the most beautiful sight I had ever beheld in my entire life.

My wife, Denise, stood there trembling, her hands flying up to cover her mouth as a soft, choked sob escaped her throat. She couldn't even form words. Tears welled up in her eyes, reflecting the faint light of the room. I threw my bow aside, closed the distance in a single step, and hauled her tightly into my arms. I lifted her clean off her feet, burying my face into her hair, holding her against my chest as the dam finally broke and my own tears spilled over.

For a long, suspended pocket of time, the collapsing world outside completely vanished. There was only the steady, rhythmic beat of her heart against my ribs. I was the first one to break the heavy silence, pulling back just enough to look down into her face with a soft, apologetic smirk.

"Hey, honey... I'm home. But I completely forgot to grab the milk." Denise stared up at me, her expression deadpan and unmoving for a beat as she processed the sheer absurdity of the joke. Then, a beautiful, radiant smile cracked through her tears, and she let out a watery laugh.

"Well," she whispered, her fingers tracing the collar of my shirt, "at least it didn't take you fifteen entire years to get back here." We both laughed, the heavy psychological armor we'd been wearing for forty-eight hours finally dissolving. It was a long-running joke with our kids. Whenever I'd head out the front door to run a simple chore at the grocery store, Jace or one of the older boys would dramatically drop to their knees, grabbing my leg and screaming,"No, Dad! Please don't leave!

Don't be that guy who goes out for a gallon of milk and doesn't return until we're thirty!"

"The kids are completely dead to the world," Denise murmured, glancing toward the darkened hallway.

"Should I go wake them up so they know you're safe?" I looked toward the hallway, thinking it through.

"What's the current time? I don't have a functional watch, and my phone is a brick."

"Oh, sure," she quipped, a familiar, comforting trace of sass returning to her voice as she crossed her arms.

"Blame it on the cell phone for why you didn't call or text your wife for two entire days. It's right around three o'clock in the morning." I smiled. Chad had a beautiful, old mechanical grandfather clock standing in the main corridor that didn't require a single volt of electricity to keep flawless time. Because the old man had spent years meticulously prepping for an EMP, the entire household was running on a highly practical survival blueprint.

The interior rooms were dimly but effectively illuminated by solar-powered yard pathway lights. Chad had stored a massive box of the plastic stakes inside his Faraday cage for this exact scenario; they worked brilliantly, casting just enough ambient, low-profile light to navigate the rooms safely without throwing a visible thermal or light signature through the heavy window curtains.

It was a brilliantly simple survival trick, one I had never even encountered during my years editing and writing for my survival blog. After learning about that trick, I definitely wrote a blog chapter about it.

"No, let them sleep," I said gently, catching her hands.

"I still have to make the push into the county area to secure my mom and Alex, and then I'm coming straight back here. There's no point in waking the kids up just to watch me walk back out into the dark. By my math, we have about two and a half hours of true darkness left before the sun cracks the horizon. We'll be a significantly harder target to spot on the open roads if we move right now." I paused, looking down at my dust-caked clothes.

"I need to wash the road grime off my face and change into a clean set of clothes first. But let me ask you a stupid question—did you manage to pack my gear from the walk-in safe?" Denise gave me a sharp, mocking look of utter disbelief.

"Of course I did, Derrick. I've been married to you for a very long time, and I know exactly what your needs are. After all these years, I don't even comprehend why you'd ask a question like that. You should just automatically know."

"Oh, trust me, I do know," I grinned, pulling her back into my space.

"I just like hearing you explain how thoroughly you understand my mind, and how perfectly you anticipate my needs before I even realize them myself, simply because you are completely, head-over-heels in love with me."

"It's sass, right? You're giving me sass," Denise quipped, a beautiful spark in her eyes.

"Well, you know how it is, honey—we have to keep the spice alive in the post-apocalypse," I chuckled. I leaned down, pulling her slender frame tight against my chest, and kissed her deeply, blocking out the echoes of the trail.