Grant

  I woke in a panic, sitting up so fast that I almost hurled myself out of bed. The frame creaked underneath me and I froze.

  “What the-, babe?! You ok? Am I okay? Where is everybody?”

  I didn’t hear any of the sounds I’d come to expect, people walking around and talking or the sounds of fighting outside. I looked around again, verifying that I was alone. My hands almost didn’t feel like hands even though I could see them in front of my face. Light streamed in through the window illuminated my English/Irish white skin. I was so white that tanning wasn’t an option for me, I just burned. Looking down, I saw that I was clean and wearing underwear and shorts but nothing else. Rotating so that my feet touched the ground, I felt a twinge in my head but that’s it. If anything, I was starving.

  [You’re awake!]

  My wife’s voice in my head was much quieter than usual but no less enthusiastic. It also served to remind me that the last week or so was in fact, real.

  [Where are you?!] I asked, slowly standing up and searching for some clothes.

  [DON’T MOVE! STAY RIGHT THERE!]

  I stood there frozen, my clothes in my hands as I reeled at the strength of her mental command. My short blonde wife bustled into the room like a SWAT team going after a slippery drug dealer. The weight behind her tackle normally wouldn’t make me fall but considering the weakness of my limbs, I bonelessly flopped back into bed.

  “DON’T!” WHAM! “EVER!” WHAM! “DO THAT AGAIN!”

  Her fists beat against my chest as tears escaped her beautiful blue eyes.

  “I thought I’d lost you!” Sniffing back more tears, Sandra stuck her finger in my face. “You’re lucky Isabella saved your life or I would’ve beaten your dead body until you came back to me!”

  Our reunion was tearful and sad and joyful all at the same time, relief at still being able to hold each other instead of a tattered picture made all the difference. I pulled the hair out of her eyes and wiped the tears from her cheek.

  “I’m still here, babe. I’m not going anywhere.” Leaning forward, I hugged her until her ribs creaked.

  “GAAAAK!”

  Chuckling, I let her pull a breath in. “Sorry, still working on getting used to this new strength.”

  We sat there enjoying the silence for a few minutes before my stomach rumbled audibly.

  “I know what that means.” My wife said, hopping up and taking a deep breath. “Time to feed my man.”

  I couldn’t keep the eager grin off my face. Delicately at first but moving faster as I verified that I didn’t feel any pain, I put some clothes on and went to meet her in the kitchen. It caught me by surprise as I caught the sound of the door to the back porch closing. Following her out there, I kinda caught myself feeling exposed and vulnerable so I turned to go back inside for my armor.

  “Forget it! Your armor is trashed and all the animals are gone.”

  At least the weather was nice. Sunny. A solid seventy three degrees. Only a slight hint of blood in the wafting on the light. All in all, you’d never know that anything was wrong in the world.

  I looked around in wonder not believing my senses, listening for the screams and shrieks of insane mutant insects and deadly chimeric mammals. Nothing. All I heard was the breeze rustling through the leaves and the soft crackle of an open fire.

  “What the hell happened?” I said, cautiously taking another step onto the back porch. “I remember the big bug and smacking my head pretty good-”

  “I”ll tell ya what happened! You saved my fucking bacon!”

  That familiar voice made me freeze. My younger brother Thomas stood there next to my large stone Alchemy circle with a humongous grill made out of those stone Lego blocks I’d made for Elvis’ house. A healthy fire crackled at its center and thin spears of wood with meat on them lay over it. That wasn’t even the weird part. My weird Alchemically altered crystalline apple tree was full of seed pods bursting with energy. They were glowing like flashlights underneath a thin blanket.

  I just gaped trying to process all of the information in front of me. I wanted to know everything that my brother had gone through but I also wanted to examine the magical tree I’d created that had cracked my main Alchemy table in half. My brain kept trying to go in two directions at the same time.

  Twenty minutes later, I’d gotten the scoop. After profuse greetings and hugs, Thomas added more prepared skewers to the grill as my wife sat me down with a plateful of spicy skewers of meat-on-a-stick.

  My shock almost kept me from eating with my jaw hanging by my feet. Both of them regaled me with the events of the last eighteen hours to include the hustle from this morning. Sandra admitted with a red face that she was the one to actually blow the thing to bits and then taking charge of everyone like an absolute boss. I could barely believe it. That didn’t stop me from stuffing my face and looking back and forth as the damn stories got wilder and wilder.

  My half-baked plan actually worked!

  Not only had the big bug chased off just about everything else, but turning that gigantic bug into paste got the rest of our guests into high gear too. Isabella and her team fixed up injuries. Denise’s low grade regeneration spell combined with Rochelle’s ability to patch up small wounds took care of most issues while Isabella could focus on completely healing the big injuries. Mike, Elvis, and Paul got to work cleaning up the area, hauling bug corpses into a big pile near the house for sorting while Boris and his annoying wife Lannie sorted the big pile into smaller heaps. Apparently my big wagon was coming in handy hauling all that around.

  Stolen novel; please report.

  The smallest pile was made up of things that were skinnable and cookable because our food supplies were getting low and everyone could use a few sets of new clothes. Sandra had designated the biggest pile as plant food. While I had been knocked out, her magically enhanced mutant plants used their roots to drag the carcasses into the earth to serve as fertilizer for her now much larger garden and our guardian predacious plant.

  The medium pile was much less a pile of corpses as it was a loosely organized sprawl of potentially useful material like bones that were as hard as metal and salvaged pieces of bug chitin that felt like construction grade plastic but held the strength of thick aluminum.

  And I certainly wasn’t going to argue with my wife about her commandeering my large Alchemy stone table for food processing or with my recently almost dead brother over grilling on top of the circle. All the meat that Lannie and Boris had stripped out and cut up was either skewered and getting seasoned in preparation for smoking or grilling. Then, Thomas glossed over his horrific journey down Interstate 95 up to the point where he decided to rodeo the massive beetle.

  Putting down a half-eaten skewer and taking a drink of water, I just kinda sat there for a few moments taking it all in. “I don’t even know what to say.” I coughed twice, taking another sip of water. “The fact that you’re alive is crazy enough, but you’ve got powers crazier than ours?” I turned to my wife. “And you! Killing that bug and whipping everybody into shipshape while I’m knocked out? God, you’re sexy!”

  She blushed, tucking her hair behind her ear. “Stop it, you’re the one that saved your brother.”

  Thomas laughed. “Stop it! We all would’a been dead if you hadn’t nuked that thing into oblivion. I was mostly dead and barely hanging on and bro-ski here was halfway there. Plus, you’ve got a killer mutant plant sentry thing guarding your house? What the hell kind of powers do you have?!”

  Sandra blushed again, even harder. “Oh stop, I’ve only got half my powers figured out.”

  I reached forward, grabbing her hand. “Don’t worry babe, we’ll figure out the other two.” I turned to Thomas. “She’s got a sort of super powered short range telekinesis which can either make her fly or project barriers to hurl things like a catapult. She also has plant magic, mutating them, growing them, all kinds of craziness. And if that’s not enough, she’s got something called . . . harmonics and wayfinder. I think?”

  Sandra pulled up her status sheet and showed it to us. “Show full status.”

  “Oh, there it is. You have ‘Wayfinder’ and ‘Enhanced Senses’ which I think are tied to the traits ‘Harmonic Senses’ and ‘Well-traveled’.”

  “That is awesome!” My brother said, geeking out. “You’re a psychic nuke!” He then scratched at his chin and leaned back. “But I mean, doesn’t she also play instruments? You tried doing that? That’s the only thing I can think of? Seems kinda obvious to me.”

  My wife froze as Thomas nattered on. “Only makes sense right? I got my powers right as I was straight up getting chucked off a motorcycle. I should be dead, instead I got powers related to my broken bones, a barrier magic that could’ve saved my life if I’d had it ten seconds earlier, and the kinetic redirection power from the crash itself. It’s like this magic wave bullshit played a joke on me.”

  “Hold on, hold, back up.” I interrupted, holding up a skewer. “Do you remember those crazy messages before this shit kicked off?”

  Sandra harshly bit into her own skewer. “How could anyone forget that?” She handed me another skewer before quickly saying, “Isabella and her team said you both need to eat a lot more to recover.”

  I added yet another to oblige my wife. “No, no, I mean the part about ‘going really fast’?” I said, furrowing my brow. “God, I wish this damn status screen could pull up a log or history so we could review what it said exactly. I remember one of them having a signature at the end, like it was a message but that dude was different from the dude who sent it out originally.”

  Sandra stood up suddenly. “That first message said ‘We’! As, more than one! ‘We’, not ‘I’.”

  She turned to glare at me. “Hey! How come we can’t stay on topic? We were talking about two of my powers not making any sense.”

  I shrugged. “Until you go test that out, all we have are guesses.”

  Thomas put his plate down. “Right, but that’s about right for these circumstances. Nothing really makes sense. It’s a magic apocalypse. But I don’t think that’s why I’m alive. I think I’m alive because I hung on, clinging to life. There was that part in there about the deaths of others empowering the people around them. I think that that did something to me. There were a lot of dead and missing people.”

  He rubbed at his temples. “It’s all so hazy in the beginning though, my head hit the ground pretty hard and I thought it was all a crazy hallucination for two days.”

  “I mean, you’re right. That doesn’t make any damn sense. None of this is truly adding up.” I argued, putting my empty plate down.

  “What’s to figure out? Rain that melts anything not natural and people getting godlike powers makes about as much sense as this lull in the psychotic animal attacks.” Sandra picked up another skewer and set to it as if she hadn’t eaten all day. “It’s like the rain made them all go extra crazy and turned the insects into mutant monsters, but then everything calmed down. It’s too quiet.”

  Thomas glanced around. “Yeah, I don’t trust it. I barely slept and fought my way down miles of animals hell bent on eating me. It IS too quiet.”

  “I bet it’s because you killed the biggest, nastiest thing around.” I said, poking my wife with my glass of water. “It’s also maybe cause Elvis and Paul are out scavenging for supplies and killing anything aggressive enough to attack.”

  My brother looked me dead in the eye. “I still don’t trust it. There’s something going on.”

  “Where is everyone?” I asked, loading up my plate with more food. “This is enough food for us three, but Mike and Isabella . . . Denise and Rach . . . Boris and Lannie?”

  My wife let out a long sigh. “Yeah, about that-”