Chương 4: Chapter 3: “A Meeting in the Shade”

After Frank and Dan crawled into the lean-to, I set to work processing the oversized squirrel. I unclasped my E-tool and dug a deep hole about fifteen feet from our camp to bury the entrails. Under normal conditions, I would have pushed the processing site at least a hundred meters out to keep predators from smelling the camp. But given that we were only staying a few hours before moving on, I figured a short-range burial would suffice.

Once the meat was cleanly quartered, I wrapped the pieces neatly inside the hide, secured the package with a length of 550 cord, and hung it high from a sturdy pine branch well away from both the fire and the gut-pile. With the chores done, I settled back down by the hidden glow of the Dakota pit, feeding it a couple of dry branches. I didn't own a mechanical watch, and my broken phone was useless, leaving me completely blind to the passage of time.

I tried counting the minutes to track my shift, but after what felt like an hour, the internal monologue grew mind-numbing. When I estimated my three hours were finally up, I shook Frank awake, handed over the watch, and immediately collapsed onto the pine-needle mattress. I awoke the next morning to the firm grip of Dan shaking my leg. The sun was still a few minutes away from breaching the horizon, but the eastern sky was already bleeding a pale, smoky amber.

I stoked the dying embers back to life, retrieved the hanging package, and began roasting the squirrel quarters over the flames. This was the first time either Dan or Frank had ever tried squirrel, and I watched their expressions with a bit of dark amusement. Squirrel is a remarkably lean white meat—very similar to rabbit, but significantly less gamey. I dug into my ruck's MRE accessory kit for a couple of stray salt and pepper packets, seasoning the meat as best I could.

To their surprise, it was a solid breakfast. The hot protein put a spring back in our step, and we quickly dismantled the lean-to, packed our rucks, and resumed our trek south toward Dan's house. By my math, we were roughly at the halfway mark. I kept my fingers crossed that his wife would be at the property; knowing she was safe would lift a massive weight off Dan's shoulders.

We had barely transitioned back into a steady marching rhythm when we spotted a solitary figure sitting on a tree stump in a small grove ahead. The grove sat directly across the open field we were currently traversing. The man didn't look immediately aggressive; in fact, he flashed a wide, disarming smile and gave us a friendly wave. Still, alarm bells instantly rang in my head.

"Stay sharp," I muttered under my breath, slowing my pace. I casually slipped my framing hammer from my tool loop, resting the heavy head nonchalantly over my right shoulder. To an untrained eye, the posture looked relaxed—even a little arrogant. In reality, it was a tactical grip I'd learned from years of primitive small-game hunting. Holding a weapon over the shoulder allows you to hurl a "rabbit stick" or a hammer instantly with zero windup.

No windup means the target has no visual cue to dodge before the weapon is already flying at them. I called a halt about thirty feet out. It was a calculated distance: far enough to prevent a sudden melee rush, but well within my effective throwing range. Dan and Frank read the play perfectly, stepping up two feet behind me to flank my left and right shoulders.

The stranger was dressed in standard blue jeans, a tan Carhartt jacket, brown cowboy boots, and a ball cap—the unofficial uniform of Central California dairy country. But as my eyes tracked downward, I spotted a heavy machete sheathed on his hip. Worse, there were faint, dark splatters of blood drying on his denim and sleeves. My stomach dropped. I didn't believe for a single second that blood was from field-dressing game. This man had murdered someone, and he wasn't sitting in the shade to be neighborly.

"Hey there!" the man called out, rising from the stump with his hands open.

"I'm Jack. I caught the scent of your cooking fire a while back and figured I'd come say hi. Saw you guys heading this way, so I thought a meeting in the shade would be a hell of a lot more pleasant on what's already looking like a scorcher. You guys wouldn't happen to have any leftovers, would you? My friends and I are terribly hungry." On cue, the brush rustled. Two more men stepped out from the trees, flanking us in a deliberate pincer movement.

One man held a modern hunting bow, the string drawn taut and aimed dead at Dan's chest. The other closed in on Frank's side, holding an unsheathed machete low and tight against his right leg.

"Now, just hold on a minute," Jack said, his friendly demeanor instantly hardening into something cold and predatory.

"We're just looking for some breakfast. Nobody needs to go trying to be a hero here."

"We don't have anything left," I replied, keeping my voice level and even.

"We only caught a single squirrel." Jack chuckled, a nasty sound.

"Well now, some of those squirrels are running around as big as hounds lately. Surely you got a little scrap left over?"

"I'm sorry to disappoint you, but the pot's empty," I said. As I spoke, I locked my gaze onto his face, narrowing my focus. I was desperately hoping the gaming logic I'd read about in fiction applied here—that intense scrutiny could force the System to give up data. Right on cue, a translucent string of text flashed in my peripheral vision. [Skill Gained: Inspect (Beginner 1). Passive Skill. Cost: N/A. Cooldown: N/A. Actively focusing your intent on a target yields basic, minimal data regarding its nature.] The floating text box above Jack's head updated instantly. [Human. Level 5. Class: Bandit.] A cold rage kindled in my chest. Bandit. That single word confirmed everything. The world had ended less than twenty-four hours ago. For this bastard to have already surged to Level 5 and unlocked a dedicated criminal class meant he hadn't just been stealing—he had been slaughtering. God only knew how many isolated farmsteads this crew had butchered through the night.

"Fine," Jack barked, the cowboy charm vanishing completely as he drew his own machete from its scabbard.

"If you don't have any meat, just drop your weapons and your rucksacks right now, and we might just let you walk out of these trees. If you don't, we'll take 'em off your corpses. Trust me, you don't want to make this a bad morning."

"Look, man," I said, subtly shifting my weight to the balls of my feet.

"We're a long way from home. We got caught out of town when the grid went down, and we're just trying to get back to our families." I knew the words were a waste of breath, but I needed Jack focused entirely on my mouth. Unauthorized reproduction: this story has been taken without approval. Report sightings. Jack stepped forward, leveling the blade.

"I'm only going to say this one more time. Drop the gear. Now." I turned my head a fraction of an inch to the right, catching Frank's eye, and gave him a sharp, deliberate wink. It was the universal signal that the talking was over, and the slight rotation naturally pulled my right shoulder back, giving me an extra few inches of mechanical leverage without alerting Jack. Unfortunately, the thug on Frank's flank spotted the wink. He tensed, initiating a swing with his lowered machete.

Fortunately for us, Frank was faster. Decades of martial arts muscle memory and the raw instinct of a veteran nightclub bouncer overrode any hesitation. Frank dropped his right shoulder, explosive power radiating from his hips as he lunged forward. He didn't swing the sledgehammer—he used it like a battering ram, driving the heavy steel head straight into the thug's ribcage. A sickening, wet CRUNCH echoed through the grove as the man's ribs collapsed inward.

Instantly riding the momentum of Frank's strike, I uncoiled my torso to the left and whipped my framing hammer directly at Jack's face. The twenty-three-ounce steel spun flawlessly through the air, catching Jack dead in the temple with a horrific, metallic thud. He dropped like a sack of wet cement. Critical hit, I hoped, already moving. I spun on my heel, reaching behind my back to draw my seven-inch Tom Brown tracker knife from my utility belt, pivoting toward the archer aiming at Dan.

But Dan didn't need my help. The former cop moved with a fluid, terrifying grace that could only come from years of high-level Jeet Kune Do training. As the archer tried to track the sudden chaos, Dan twisted left, spinning his heavy aluminum paint pole in a vicious arc that slammed violently into the riser of the bow. The weapon was knocked clear out of the man's grip, sending the released arrow flying harmlessly into the brush.

Without breaking stride, Dan thrust the tip of the pole straight into the archer's face, shattering his nose, throwing him entirely off balance, and sweeping his legs out from under him in a textbook redirection of force. I whipped around to check on Jack. The bandit leader was groaning, his fingers clawing at the dirt as he desperately tried to push himself up. I didn't give him the chance.

I closed the distance in two lunging strides, driving my knee directly into the center of his chest with the full weight of my body and rucksack behind it. Jack let out a strangled, breathless gasp as the air was violently driven from his lungs. In one smooth, practiced motion born of cold survival instinct, I brought my blade across his throat, severing the carotid artery. Without access to a high-tier healing spell, Jack's timer had just run out. I turned back to check on my crew.

The man Frank had struck was lying motionless in the dirt, a visible, deep indentation crushing the side of his skull. The archer was flat on his back, his hands thrown up in a desperate gesture of surrender as Dan kept the tip of his aluminum staff pressed firmly against the man's throat. I sheathed my knife, walked over to Jack's twitching corpse, and retrieved my framing hammer from the dirt.

Dropping my rucksack by Frank's feet, I strode over to the archer, grabbed him by the collar of his shirt, and hauled him roughly to his feet, slamming him hard against the rough bark of a pine tree.

"Don't kill me! Please, don't kill me!" the man sobbed, his shattered nose bleeding profusely down his chin.

"We aren't planning on it, provided you give us exactly what we want to hear," I growled, pressing my forearm against his throat.

"But if you play games or lie to us, you're going to go sleep next to your buddies." I narrowed my eyes, activating my new skill. [Human. Level 4.] No class entry.

"How is it that your buddy Jack over there was Level 5 with an official Bandit class, but you're only Level 4 with nothing?" I demanded.

"I don't know, man!" the archer whined, tears mixing with the blood on his face.

"Right after the lightning hit, Jack came bursting into my house. He was already Level 2. He said the world was done for and we needed to start hitting the local properties for weapons and food. We picked up the other guy and started raiding the county farmhouses. If anyone was home... Jack just butchered them. He figured out early that murder gives you a massive chunk of experience points. The second he hit Level 5, the System gave him a prompt to choose a class, so he picked Bandit.

Said it gave him stealth perks and thieving bonuses! That's all I know, I swear!" My chest tightened.

"How many innocent people did you piece of shit murder to hit Level 4?"

"Aw, come on, man," the archer begged, his voice cracking.

"We were just doing what we had to do to survive!"

"And what about the families you slaughtered?" I hissed, my voice dropping to a dangerous whisper.

"Were they not just trying to survive before you broke into their homes and murdered them in their beds?" The archer fell apart, weeping openly. I looked back at Frank and Dan, silently asking for their input on what the hell we should do with a compliant prisoner in a lawless wasteland. But as my eyes drifted, I felt a sudden tensing in the archer's shoulder. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw his right hand dip rapidly behind his back, fingers clawing for a hidden weapon. Years of police reflexes took over.

I didn't think; I reacted. I whipped my right hand up and buried the sharp, curved claw of my framing hammer straight into the crown of the archer's skull. The blow landed with a heavy, definitive thud. The man's eyes instantly rolled back into his head, and his body went entirely limp, slumping to the dirt like an empty suit of clothes. I stood over him for a second, my chest heaving, before reaching behind his lower back.

Sure enough, his fingers had been inches away from a concealed, fixed-blade Buck knife tucked into his waistband. I looked up at Dan. The older contractor was staring at the corpse, a heavy, deeply regretful shadow clouding his eyes. I couldn't tell if he was mourning the horrific loss of life the archer had confessed to, or if he was unsettled by how quickly I had executed the final judgment. I let out a long, ragged sigh, wiping a splatter of blood from my cheek.

"Let's check the bodies for anything useful, and then we get back on the road. We can unpack what just happened later, when we're miles away from this grove." With nothing left to say, we began checking the corpses. I claimed the dead archer's Buck knife, sliding it into a spare loop, and picked up his hunting bow. I focused my intent, testing the limits of my new Inspect skill. [Item: Shortwood Bow. Rarity: Common. Quality: Poor. Damage: 3–6 physical.] I scoffed under my breath, tossing the weapon aside.

The raw damage rating on the bow was pathetic; I could inflict the exact same amount of damage simply by kicking someone with my steel-toed boots, and the boots actually had a higher critical hit modifier. The bowstring, however, was a different story. I didn't need a magical overlay to recognize high-quality craftsmanship. The string was tightly braided, heavy-duty dacron.

I had a beautiful, high-tier hunting bow sitting back at my house that was desperately in need of a new string, and this one looked like it would match the length perfectly. I unstrung the weapon, threw the useless wood to the dirt, and rolled the dacron string up, tucking it into an exterior pocket of my rucksack. Frank and Dan each claimed one of the discarded machetes, sliding the sheaths onto their utility belts, and pocketed a couple of utility knives. Beyond that, the bandits carried nothing of value.

Jack's rugged Carhartt jacket would have been a great asset for the cold desert nights, but between the hammer blow and the carotid cut, the canvas was entirely ruined by bloodstains. Whatever loot they had stolen from the local farmhouses was likely stashed at a base camp, and we had zero time to go hunting for a bandit hoard.

With the grim business of corpse looting concluded, we heaved our rucks back onto our shoulders, gripped our weapons, and pushed out of the blood-stained grove, heading south toward Dan's property. This time, I kept my hammer firmly in my hand, silently praying the next strangers we met wouldn't force us to balance the ledger again.