Chapter Twenty-Six: Penelope

  Bear thumped her tail against the ground.

  I put a hand to my throat, embarrassed as anything.

  And the girl that was petting Bear scrambled to her feet.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, her voice soft but her words rushed. “I don’t mean to bring my troubles to you. I just needed to rest for a bit.”

  A whole bunch of thoughts went rushing through my mind at once.

  First, the Murder Hobo had been right. That was annoying.

  Second, Bear was letting a stranger pet her. WTF?

  I stared at her, and she gave me the most sheepish look I’d ever seen from her. Nice pets, she told me, with a sideways glance that looked like the dog version of a shrug.

  Third, this girl was possibly the most beautiful human being I’d ever seen in real life. Probably about sixteen or seventeen years old, heavy blonde hair, intense green eyes, perfect features, and curves that landed just shy of voluptuous. That must make life hard for her.

  Fourth, she was filthy. Like, filthy. The fact that I could tell she was beautiful through all the dirt said something about just how beautiful she really was, but she looked like she’d been scrambling along dusty ground and fighting her way through dense vegetation.

  “I’ll just be on my way,” she said, dropping her gaze to the ground and taking an awkward sideways step. It looked like she wanted to edge her way around me, but I was standing in the dead center of the doorway.

  “Don’t be silly,” I said absently, my brain trying to sort through the potential problems that had just fallen into my lap. And then I hesitated. “I mean, unless you want to go home? If you’re going home—”

  “No,” she interrupted me, the soft voice turning sharp. And then it returned to its previous softness, eyes back on the ground, as she finished, “No, I don’t plan on doing that, ma’am.”

  Ma’am. I was a ma’am. I didn’t roll my eyes, although I thought about it.

  Bear woofed at me.

  I glared at her. “You do not get to boss me around,” I said to her. “And of course we will.”

  The girl’s green eyes darted to my face and then dropped. “Excuse me, ma’am?”

  I sighed. “Talking to my dog. Come on inside. The water’s still working and I’m sure you want to get cleaned up. Might as well take advantage while we’ve got it. And you’re probably hungry, right? I’ve got to use up the food in my fridge before it goes bad. We can have eggs. Maybe toast. Probably some bacon, even.” I ran a hand through my hair, thinking, then turned away from the door and started walking toward the house.

  “I’ll grab you a clean towel, and find some clothes. They’re not gonna fit, but I’m sure I’ve got something that’ll do for the time being. You can shower upstairs. There’s a lock on the bathroom door. I mean, I’m the only one in the house, and I’ll be downstairs getting the generator running and then cooking some breakfast, but… if you want, Bear can stay outside the door on guard duty for you. If you’re nervous about showering in a strange place, I mean.”

  If this girl wasn’t nervous about showering in a strange place, she was an idiot. I’m not sure why—maybe it was my Perception attribute at work—but I didn’t think she was an idiot.

  I didn’t look back. She’d either follow me or not and if she didn’t, well, that might make my life easier in the long run. I could see the problems looming—number one being that Murder Hobo brother who was searching for her—and if I didn’t have to deal with them, I’d survive.

  I’d survive either way, actually. I wasn’t in any danger from a Level 3 Fighter, even if he was a Murder Hobo. But my imagination was spiraling around worst-case scenarios. I had to sleep sometime. What if he set the house on fire? What if he came back with friends? Tougher friends, or even just lots of friends. I’d slaughtered my way through crowds of goblins, but I didn’t think I could do the same with teenage boys. I just wasn’t sure it was in me.

  Since I wasn’t watching, I don’t know if Bear herded the girl all the way toward the house, but I suspected it when I turned around at the door from the sunroom to the kitchen. Bear was right behind her, nudging her along, and she had her hands clasped together under her chin, elbows tucked into her sides. If I could read people the way I could read dogs, her body language would have been screaming, I don’t know what I’m doing and this might be a terrible idea and maybe I should run.

  I smiled at her, a little wry. “It’s okay, honestly. I’m harmless.”

  Well, not to goblins. Or giant bugs. Or slimes. But I probably shouldn’t mention all that.

  I moved into the living room and across to the stairs. Under normal circumstances, if I brought someone new into the house, I’d introduce them to the dogs and vice versa before doing anything else. But that was mostly about Bear. Neither Zelda nor Riley would do anything to scare the girl and Bear had obviously decided that she was welcome.

  Moving slowly, she entered the house. She stood in the doorway, looking around with wide eyes. It felt like she’d never seen a living room before, which would be weird. The room seemed pretty normal to me. Maybe a little cluttered; the walls held a lot of art, and the bookshelves were overflowing.

  Okay, maybe a lot cluttered.

  Not in any kind of hoarder-ish way. The clutter wasn’t trash or cardboard boxes or mass market consumerism gone mad. But my dad had been an architect who would have liked to be an artist, and he’d collected beautiful things.

  The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “Shower’s upstairs,” I said briskly, unwilling to dwell on what she saw in my living room—my dad’s living room—for another second. “I’ll just run up and set out a towel and some clothes for you. You might… well, I’ll see what I can find.” She was going to have to wear her own bra, no matter how dirty it was. There was just no way anything I owned would fit.

  She took a few more steps into the room. “This is awful kind of you, ma’am. I really do appreciate it. But I don’t—”

  She was mid-sentence when a live missile hit her in the chest. She reeled backwards, putting her hands up to catch the orange ball of fur that had appeared out of nowhere. I yelped, maybe louder than she did. Zelda woke up with a bark. Riley half-fell, half-jumped off the couch, with a deep warning bark of his own, and the General… the General went mad.

  He was in non-stop motion, not letting himself be held, but twining and winding and climbing all over the girl like she was a tree. And he was making this noise. It was a sound I’d never heard before. It wasn’t a meow or a purr. It was like a wail or a trill or—was he crying? Was that the sound of a cat crying?

  “I’m so sorry,” I said hurriedly, rushing back down the first steps of the stairs. “I’m so—”

  The girl burst into tears.

  Twenty minutes later, everyone had settled down. The dogs were calm, all retired to their respective beds, although Bear was sulking because I’d sent her to hers. The girl was sitting on the couch, used tissues clutched in her hands, a cat butting his head against her chin and kneading her flimsy shirt.

  The cat was not the General. Or rather he was, but it turned out the General had a soft side, and it was named Gus.

  The girl was Pen, short for Penelope, and Gus was her cat. His real name, the General Ulysses S. Grant, was a secret the two of them shared. Pen wasn’t sure she wanted to believe that Gus could talk to me, but the fact that I knew his secret name made it tough to deny.

  Between the two of them, they told me their story. Here’s how it went: Pen tried to soften the truth, Gus told me the hard version, I told Pen what I knew, she reluctantly conceded that yeah, maybe that was right. And then eventually, she just started with the truth.

  She had five older brothers, a downtrodden mother who didn’t speak much, and a cult leader for a father.

  Okay, cult leader was my interpretation. But the church wasn’t quite a tax scam. Her father held services there every day of the week and most of them involved him ranting at his children.

  The General had very strong opinions on those rants. I did not share all of those opinions with Pen, because hearing that her cat thought her father was evil would probably just have made her cry harder. That’s what it would have done to me if Zelda thought my dad was evil, anyway. (For the record, Zelda loved my dad. He gave her cheese behind my back ALL the time.)

  When the System arrived, one of the older brothers—not Robbie, who much to my surprise was Pen’s “nicest” brother—had been the first to kill. Pen thought it was a snake, but she hadn’t seen the fight. His next act had been to try to kill the General.

  I got the distinct impression that the brothers, despite being mostly in their twenties, were the kind of guys who would have tied a tin can to a cat’s tail had they lived back in the 1900s.

  Pen saved Gus, but her brother’s attack hit her instead. Gus thought she was dead and did as much damage as possible to the brother, all claws out, before fleeing into the darkness when a second brother appeared. After a miserable night in the forest, Gus found my house in the morning.

  Pen’s night had been worse.

  It sounded like the attack was some type of crushing ability. Pen hadn’t died, but she knew her ribs were broken. Reading between the lines, she’d suffered from internal injuries well beyond whatever had happened to her ribs. Her mouth kept filling with blood, she said. That sounded like impending doom to me.

  Despite the crazily strict religious upbringing, at least one of her brothers played video games or read fantasy. He’d dragged the whole group of them out into the forest where they killed anything they could find until they finally managed to capture a mana-crazed armadillo. It was half-dead, maybe more, but they’d brought it to Pen and forced her to give the final blow. It had been enough for her to join the System and get her first level, which, of course, fully healed her from her injuries.

  It would have been nice if the story ended there. Heroic brother, saved sister, all can be well and happy in the Barrow family, except maybe for the missing cat.

  But, of course, it didn’t. Nobody becomes a Murder Hobo by sitting at home, nursing their beloved sister back to health.

  It sounded like the Barrows—brothers and father both—were treating the apocalypse like their own private chance to “fix” society. And society’s deepest problem, of course? The prevalence of black and brown people in the community.

  Pen had grown up in her family. I wasn’t going to challenge her belief system. But she’d named her cat after a Union Civil War general.

  As gently as I could—no, really, using a super gentle, kind, nice voice, I swear—I asked, “And how did you feel about that?” I sent a moment of gratitude out into the universe for all the therapists who’d taught me so well and waited with bated breath for her answer.

  She closed her eyes.

  When she answered, it was oblique. “I took a healer class. It seemed fitting. And I can’t say I wanted to do any of the rest of those things. Magic was tempting, but I could just imagine what Daddy would say if I started throwing fire around. Work of the devil, for sure. Healing felt safest. I got a nice little ability called Mend. And I didn’t mind healing up my brothers. But then Daddy brought some other folks by. Men folk, only, no women. I… I didn’t like the way they looked at me, but I healed ‘em up when I was told. But then I heard them talking. And… it wasn’t just what they said about me.”

  She’d been staring down at the General’s fur, stroking him where he’d finally settled in her lap, but she looked up and her intense green eyes met mine. “I didn’t like what they said about me, you understand, but I got five brothers and I knew if I told Luke or even Robbie that those guys would get the shit beat out of ‘em. But they were talking about the people they’d killed, and I’m not healing nobody so they can go out and murder my neighbors.”

  She dropped her eyes again. “I told Daddy I wouldn’t heal ‘em no more and he told me I’d do as I was told.”

  She swallowed hard. “I did.” The words were so soft I could barely hear them.

  “But then I knew.” She shook her head. “I just couldn’t anymore. But if I stayed…”

  She stopped talking. I let the silence last for as long as I could, but she didn’t try to fill it.

  Finally, I said, “Okay, well, you can stay here as long as you like.”

  She shook her head and when she looked at me again, her eyes held an ocean of sadness. “I really can’t. I appreciate the thought, but they’ll come looking for me, and…”

  She forced a smile. “Like I said, I’m not okay with them killing my neighbors. And I’m not going to reward your kindness with what’ll happen if they find me here. When they find me here. ‘Cause they will.”

  She looked toward Bear. “We got dogs, too. Only reason Robbie didn’t have ‘em out this morning is ‘cause he wouldn’t have wanted anyone to know I was gone.”

  I hoped that I didn’t let my wince show on the surface, but I felt it.

  Dogs.

  Damn it.

  About nine months ago, I woke up from a dream about a girl called Pen who was running away from home in the midst of the System apocalypse. It was a weird dream, but it stuck with me. And then the story kept going in my mind. Olivia showed up, and the dogs, and I decided I'd write a short story during my vacation. A short one. I can't tell you how glad I am to finally get to Pen. She's so real to me, one of the most real characters I've ever written. I hope you like her, too!

  Thanks for reading!

  Next chapter... Wednesday, March 4, 2026.