CHAPTER 7: Bismarck
"Free stat points available: 97"
I had gained ninety seven stat points in less than five minutes. Even with my ridiculous stat point per level reward, that was more than three full levels worth of stat points, and nearly fifty levels worth for a “standard” human. The Reaper class was an abomination, and I prayed that nobody else on earth had “earned” it. I obviously didn’t receive all of their stat points, but this was far more than the “few random stat points” that Chris had mentioned. Even a few pilfered points would be all your run of the mill sociopath would need to justify mass murder. The Reaper class was something altogether different. It was as if the System intended to create a boogeyman for the whole world to fear. I may not be the best man in the world, but I will not be running around murdering anybody for easy power. That being said, I wasn’t necessarily opposed to rooting out bad apples… I knew for certain that this new world would have more than its fair share of them.
Surrounded by snacks and drinks, and currently eating a canned tuna fish snack pack, I did some housekeeping. First off, the wound in my hip could have been much worse, but it was not entirely negated by Reactor Shielding, only blunted. Following three fingers advice, I dug around in the vitality menus and discovered that I could instantly heal pretty much anything short of death if I had the required mana in the tank, or allocate all, or a portion of my absorption to the task. I was down three vitality from the wound, but spending ten mana, I got one vitality back, so back up to 16, leaving me ten mana for a rainy day. Or a few cups of coffee. You know how the second after you hit send on an email, you realize you forgot the attachment, or misspelled the recipient’s name in your greeting? About half a second after I confirmed that I wanted to spend ten mana on healing myself, it occurred to me damage quantified as a number was just a percentage. Had I allocated some of my new ill-gotten gains to vitality, I could have bettered the ratio of current to maximum, effectively getting a free heal. If you are down one vitality and you only have a total of two, you are half dead. If you are down one vitality and you have a total of 100, you basically just stubbed your toe. I sighed … mental math was never my strong suit.
I was tempted to dump all the points into intelligence, as that 1,000 mana settlement price tag would have been within reach, but that was short sighted, and I was nowhere near ready to do anything with a settlement at this point anyhow. I may not have been great at math, but I knew that the compounding gains from absorption would always win out. No, I would stay with a relatively balanced approach overall, other than leaning heavy into absorption. I distributed my points, and worked on the math of how many points in agility I would need to be able to dodge bullets. My hip hurt.
My new stats ended up at:
Strength: 25
Agility: 25
Vitality: 23/25
Perception: 25
Intelligence: 50
Absorption: 77
Free stat points available: 0
Fifteen minutes later I was wrapping up my work on a whiteboard in the office supplies aisle. I knew that a ten second hundred yard dash was basically peak human performance. I also knew that my service rifle muzzle velocity was 3,100 feet per second. It’s a military thing … we had to know useless things. So if thirteen agility equals thirty three feet per second, then each point of agility gives you about 2.5 feet per second. So, for 3,100 feet per second, I would need 1,240 agility to dodge a bullet. Well shit, scratch that, I would need 1,240 agility to keep pace with it, 1,241 to outrun it. But how much perception would I need to be able to see it coming? I rubbed my temples and headed for the Ibuprofen aisle.
After downing a handful of Ibuprofen I know I didn’t need other than for the placebo effect, I proceeded to go wild with my storage space. It turned out that while stat stealing was not a one to one conversion, storage space was. I was up to 288 cubic meters. I did decide that this must have been purely a function of my class however, as they didn’t see to have an excess of the standard one cubic meter each, despite being post-purge murdering fucks. I sighed and moved on. Although I know my vitality was at a point where I would naturally heal nearly twice as fast as a peak health human, I knew that that was not the norm, so I started with the pharmacy. I certainly hoped people who had health issues previously had bumped their vitality, spent mana on healing themselves, or both, but I was gonna load up on prescription drugs and drop them off at Starbucks anyhow. You never knew who may desperately need some insulin or something. A couple dozen cases of Barq’s root beer, massive quantities of canned foods (and a can opener or 9), six end caps worth of beef jerky and probably 100 cases of bottled water later, I was rolling my shiny new bike out the front door and was headed, once again, back to Starbucks.
As I walked through the door, back at Starbucks, I realized that I had a bit of a problem. Not only did I have way more stuff than would fit in a standard sized storage space, I didn’t really have anywhere to put it. I then recalled that the Target across the river had a Starbucks inside, so I took a chance and wrote out a note with a sharpie and taped it to the door, letting people know that the Starbucks at Target had a good supply of prescription drugs. I figured I could get over there and stock the place up before anybody actually acted on it. Trying to be a decent human being in the apocalypse was turning out to be a whole lot of work. A two mile bike ride back to Nora’s place and thirty minutes spent telling them about Starbucks, unloading a metric shit ton of food and water, and a chat with Sean about fixing up old tech, and I was finally off to Bismarck. With a quick detour to Target.
As I rode, I wondered if the safe zone around the Starbucks in Target covered the whole store or not. it was a pretty big store, and it would be absolutely wild if half the store was a safe zone, and the other half was gang controlled territory. it was the whole store, and a decent chunk of the parking lot. I made it without incident, swapped a couple of shelves full of useless supplements with the good stuff and taped up some signs pointing towards where to find it. I went back to the Starbucks near the entrance for a little pick-me-up. I was slightly disappointed that the only food on display was once again cinnamon swirl cake, but the coffee was just as good. This place was even more crowded than the Starbucks over on Highway 83, but I suppose that made sense given the fact that it was inside a giant store full of food and supplies, especially given the fact that safe zones still had power somehow. The employee breakroom was the hotspot here, with a line like fifty people long for the microwaves. I was impressed at how quickly word had traveled of the safe zones given the tension of the situation, but it did give me some hope that humanity was still, by and large, peaceful with each other.
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I did make a quick stop at the pillar to check the price tag of this territory, as I knew it had to be much smaller than the one up on 83, but it was still 1,000 mana. According to the territory globe map, there were 41,371 Starbucks locations world-wide. You didn’t need to be a genius to add a few zeros to that and figure out how much mana would be required to be the king of the world or whatever… it was a lot.
The ride to Bismarck took me less than two hours, which, for a hundred-mile death wobble down US 83, was either a miracle, or a testament to the awesome and terrifying power of a $79 Schwinn, when paired with the legs of a Greek god. I didn’t see a single living thing the entire way. Not a car, not a deer, not even a crow. The landscape was a grainy gray-brown blur, punctuated by burned-out trucks, the occasional house folded in on itself by fire, and the drifting, papery ash that I refused to think too hard about. I barely slowed to eat or drink, because the closer I got to Bismarck, the more a hollow, ricocheting dread built up behind my sternum. I didn’t want to go home. I had to go home.
The mushroom cloud was long gone, but the city still glowed with a color that didn’t exist in nature, somewhere between molten copper and the green slick of antifreeze. I could smell it before I saw it: not the acrid tang of burning plastic, or the sweet rot of charred meat, but something sharper, drier, like heated metal and ozone. It was the smell of a world trying to cauterize its own wound. I crested the overpass into town and stopped, looking down on the small city, and for the first time since the purge, I almost changed my mind about going home.
Bismarck was concentric circles of Hell. The outer ring was every cliché of post-apocalypse you'd ever seen: abandoned cars, gutted strip malls, the odd corpse slumped against a wall like a warning sign. The next couple of miles in was what I imagined Chernobyl would look like if you ran it through a funhouse mirror: buildings sheared in half like cake slices, windows melted or curdled, playgrounds sagging under the weight of a thousand years’ neglect. The inner circle, nothing moved. No birds, no bugs, not even a goddamn mosquito. I thought I caught a glimpse of something and with perception spiked, I could barely make out a single building standing in the dead zone center ring. One with a green blob on a signpost.
I moved fast through the ghost zone, sticking to the back roads, ducking behind dumpsters and half-melted delivery trucks even though my stats said I could probably punch a hole through most of the remaining walls. I wasn’t worried about people; I was worried about whatever the world had become. The System hadn’t specifically mentioned anything about monsters, but in a sick sort way, I was almost eager to see something with tentacles or teeth, just to prove that the universe had a sense of poetic symmetry. I was desperate to get stronger, but refused to become the monster the rest of humanity feared.
I got my wish, kind of, it was ghouls. Makes perfect sense in retrospect. The strike had happened so quickly after the start of the purge, that there wouldn’t be many murders yet, especially given the early hour. Far enough away from ground zero to last an hour, then recycled into monsters for not getting their kills in. So yeah … I was riding a cheap bike through a smoking city that would peg a Geiger counter from fifty miles away, that also just happened to be home to thousands of ghouls. Ghouls that most likely ate human flesh when they could find it on sale, and just stood around staring at the sidewalk when it wasn’t available.
Bismarck had three or four Starbucks, but I only knew for certain where one of them was other than the one in the middle of the crater. I made a beeline for the one at the corner of Main and 10th, a squat, brown-brick bunker of a building that looked like a prison with a drive-thru window. I cut through the outer ring as fast as the Schwinn would carry me, the tires humming and the wind cutting my face raw. I’d expected the ghouls to be slow, shambling, maybe even polite in that Midwestern way, but these motherfuckers were fast. Borderline Olympic sprinter fast, fast enough that I had to drop gears and pedal like the devil was at my heels since they were coming at me from nearly all directions. Perhaps the creepiest thing about them, was they were like stereotypical movie versions of radiation damage victims. In reality, anybody who had had this much physical damage would not have lasted much beyond the full hour, but once they were recycled, the System turned up the visible radiation damage dial to eleven. Half-exposed skulls, skin hanging down faces and torso’s like plastic bags stretched to the breaking point. And of course, they were all completely naked. The closer I got to the dead zone, the more of them I saw: packs of two or three, sometimes more, heads swiveling as if they caught my scent, teeth bared and hands out like they were late for a Black Friday doorbuster.
I didn’t bother to count how many were following me. At least a hundred, maybe more, a river of bone-white faces and gnashing jaws behind me. I made the mistake of glancing back, and nearly pissed myself when I realized how many were trailing me. It reminded me of this old movie I saw about this guy who found a love potion pheromone spray. At the end, some girl got ahold of it and instead of using a single drop, she used the whole bottle. She became very popular with every man in the city rather quickly. This was kinda like that… but different. The Schwinn whined in protest, but I kicked harder, ignoring the lactic acid burn that was pooling in my legs. I was maybe three blocks from the Starbucks when shit went sideways: a cluster of ghouls had figured out that instead of chasing me, they could cut me off at the intersection by funneling through the side streets. The first one barreled into me like a linebacker, sending me and the bike skidding across the asphalt. The world slowed to a smear of pain and screeching metal. I landed on my shoulder, hard enough to pop something, but the adrenaline said fuck it, get up and move.
I tried scrambling to my feet, but the ghouls were already on me, piling on like a good old fashioned game of smear the queer, but this one had far more biting involved than I recalled from my childhood. Strength maxed, I burst out of the dogpile like Rambo popping up out of the lake, a Glock in each hand, just blasting away. The bullets tore through the first wave, leaving nothing but red mist and chunks of bone. Both guns empty, I spun, pivoted, dropped one with the butt of the gun then sent them back to storage. Rinse and repeat. Second set of Glocks empty and no room to swing a long gun, I shouldered a couple of ghouls aside and grabbed the bike by the front wheel and used it like a damned club. Awkward to hold, and had the unfortunate tendency to hit things with an inflated rubber tire instead of oh, I don’t know, something that could hurt a ghoul. I eventually brained one with the frame, having finally lost the rear wheel, and started running towards Starbucks, swinging half a Schwinn all around me like it was a torch in a bad vampire flick. Reactor Shielding had soaked up the worst of the bites and slashes, but I had to get the hell out of dodge.
I was maybe fifty yards from the Starbucks when the rush finally thinned. I sprinted in a final burst of speed, for some reason still dragging the busted Schwinn behind me, my leg burning and blood squelching in my boot. The blue shimmer of the safe zone was visible now, like a soap bubble stretched across the parking lot. With a scream of triumph that actually made some of the ghouls stop and cock their heads like a dog, I was through the barrier, where I immediately took my worst injury of the day … a god damned tow hitch to the shin while running at twenty five miles an hour. I rolled around on the ground, clutching my fractured shin, cursing the stupid tow hitch and everyone who had ever had anything to do with its creation. I know that I would have wrapped my leg around the thing if my bones were as fragile as they had been a few days prior, but I knew for certain that the damned thing was broken. I slowly stopped my tirade as I realized that I had a very serious problem. The ghouls might not be able to get in, but I wasn’t so sure that I’d be able to get out. Every inch of the barrier now had ghouls pressed against it. They were climbing on top of each other, crushing the poor bastards at the bottom, stacking themselves up like cordwood against every inch of the barrier. It wasn’t long before the lights at Starbucks clicked on, only a small window of sunlight streaming down through the small, and rapidly closing gap near the top. I was fucked.
