Ruthless: Path of Conquest

Claudius Galt wasn’t sure, but he thought, as he caught his breath, that he might have soiled himself.

That’s fine. Don’t care right now. Even his thoughts were breathless.

He tried to suck air in as quietly as he could, though. He ignored the hot, wet pain radiating from the area on his back where the monster’s claws had raked him. And he resisted the urge to peek out from the crevasse in the cave that he’d vanished into.

He’d only just barely managed to get out of sight of the dinosaur that was chasing him. If he poked his head out now, he thought he’d probably lose it.

Come on, man, he told himself. Just stay calm. If you keep calm, you can wait this out—

A clawing sound interrupted his train of thought. The unmistakable scrape of the Vorpal Velociraptor’s talon against the stone of the cave chilled Claudius’s blood.

No! God, please no! I just need a little more time. I’m so damn close. Please!

Claudius wasn’t an especially religious man. He went to church when his parents took him as a boy. After he left home, he stopped, just like most of his generation. He didn’t exactly look down on religious people. He just wasn’t part of their number. He still sort of passively believed in God, just in a completely noncommittal way.

But he’d found himself in the middle of an extended religious epiphany through the duration of Orientation.

Surely, this was the end of days foretold in the Book of Revelation. Since he and his family arrived in this terrible place, they had been chased and harassed by a long line of monsters. From creatures that looked like giant insects to what Identify assured him were actual dinosaurs. These Vorpal Velociraptors seemed to be the final enemies in this place.

Either the Galts had been sent back in time to the prehistoric age, or God was bringing on the Apocalypse, and He had judged them insufficiently faithful.

Per the timer that still ticked down in the corner of Claudius’s vision, the ordeal was almost over. But if his siblings and father didn’t make it, he felt in his gut that it would be because he personally had been faithless. Hadn’t taken his beliefs seriously. Had barely spent any time on his knees in his whole adult life. He was only twenty-four, but still.

God knew.

His attention jumped back to his present predicament. He could hear the Vorpal Velociraptor stepping onto the ground just outside the crevasse. The clicking of the claws on the ground. The rustle of its feathers as it walked.

Claudius couldn’t help himself. He whimpered. And he felt the warm trickle of urine roll down his thighs and down to his calves before seeping into his socks.

It seemed he hadn’t vacated his bladder before after all.

The monster jammed its head into the crack where Claudius had hidden himself, and its eyes went wild with ferocious hunger. The yellow eyes locked onto his, and Claudius thought he was doomed. The beast snapped its jaws and stretched its neck, trying with all its might to reach its prey where Claudius shuddered and cringed with fear. But the monster’s muscular body couldn’t get very far into the crevasse.

The head stopped a foot away from Claudius’s body. He knew it was too early to feel relieved, though. He’d had trouble cramming his body into the tight space at first too. It had taken determination, driven by fear, to force himself in. He’d suffered a claw strike to the back and witnessed the disembowelment of another human being to get that motivation.

And now, he was here, back literally pressed against a wall. He couldn’t run; he could only trust in the inaccessibility of this place he’d chosen to hide.

God, please, please save me, he silently prayed, staring into the gaping maw. I’ll be Your most faithful servant forever. But he remembered that God helped those who helped themselves. That was from the Bible, right? So God might not show him any particular favor until he’d demonstrated that he was worthy in some way.

Undoubtedly, He was receiving similar entreaties from billions of people right now. Some of whom would have been better Christians than Claudius was.

I’ll show I can help myself, Lord. I just have to survive a little longer, right?

There was only a short window of time left according to the countdown that had appeared at midnight when the ninetieth day began.

[00:01:48]

The Vorpal Velociraptor finally pulled back, and Claudius thought perhaps it had given up. Then it began clawing at the opening to the crevasse. To Claudius’s shock, the long claws proved able to carve through stone fairly easily. They were apparently composed of something hard and sharp enough to slice rock like butter. Thick chunks of the stuff crumbled to the ground before his eyes.

In a few seconds, the monster was snapping at Claudius again, a few inches closer this time. When it became obvious it still couldn’t reach him, the monster pulled back again to repeat its effort at widening the gap.

Claudius turned his head while he had a little breathing room. He looked deeper into the darkness that he’d forced himself into. He knew what he had to do now.

The one advantage he had—besides the fact that he was a being with a soul who fervently hoped that he might receive divine help, rather than a soulless monster—was that he was thin.

As the dinosaur cut itself a wider opening to attack through, Claudius wedged himself even deeper into the tight, dark hole.

He slid in past the point of discomfort. Beyond where the uneven stone began scraping and cutting into his skin. Until he felt it was more and more difficult for his lungs to expand, and the walls of the crevasse pressed into his ribs.

[00:00:28]

The Vorpal Velociraptor clawed and clawed, but it seemed unable to reach him in the limited time that remained.

Thank you, God! Thank you for sending me a hole so deep that this monster couldn’t crawl into it after me.

Even as he watched the monster make its last efforts to shove its way in, his worries receded into the back of his mind. He had done it, as far as he was concerned. He had shown the lengths he would go to help himself. And surely God would reward him now.

Claudius spent the last moments of Orientation praying.

In a moment that he blinked and just barely missed, he disappeared from the dark, cramped crevasse, inches away from the jaws of death. He reappeared in the mysterious white room he’d been in before his ordeal began.

“Oh, thank God!” Claudius exclaimed.

The clay figure that had explained the Orientation ordeal to him earlier stood in its same place in the room.

“Congratulations on surviving Orientation,” it pronounced in a neutral voice. “Are you ready to take an inventory of the rewards you earned?”

“Yes, please,” Claudius said. “No, wait! Could you please tell me if all my family survived the Orientation?”

“I apologize,” the clay thing replied. “We cannot provide information about other participants, for privacy reasons. Now, about your rewards…”

In the end, Claudius just received a measly forty System Credits. He spent his meager winnings in the System Store to get a couple of Inferior Grade Health Potions. That was all he could afford. It hardly seemed worth the horrendous sacrifices he and those around him had made in the Orientation jungle.

But the point didn’t seem to be to truly reward them. It was an ordeal. If Claudius was right, it was a test from God.

“Do you serve God?” Claudius asked. He had little hope that the clay man would give him a useful answer to any other question, but answering this one would seem like the least it could do.

“We do serve the gods, under the constraints imposed by—error, error!” Those last two words came out with a strange staticky noise. Like interference on the radio. The figure slapped himself in the face twice, then returned to speaking as if nothing had happened. “I cannot answer that question with your level of clearance.”

Did he say he served the gods? Good enough.

If there were gods, Claudius thought that his would be the biggest and strongest. He believed it almost as much as he desperately wanted and needed to believe it. His was the desperate faith of a child throwing himself on God’s mercy.

Then Claudius was returned to Earth. He blinked and found himself on an Orlando street. Or what had once been an Orlando street. Because nowhere, as far as the eye could see, was there a traversable stretch of pavement.

The pavement and sidewalk were shattered, split by fissures and new hills and simple stretches of unpaved soil that he was certain hadn’t been there before. In some places, he could see exposed piping that now led nowhere and carried nothing. Electrical lines lay dangerously across what remained of the streets where the power poles had toppled, though Claudius was all but certain the wires no longer carried power.

He had guesses as to what had happened. Claudius was no biblical scholar, but he thought he remembered something from the Book of Revelation about the Earth moving and lands shifting around.

For now, he focused on getting a grip on the physical reality confronting him.

What was left of the pavement was littered with broken glass and trash of all kinds, as well as heavily crowded with people. The mass of humans looked around with shoulders hunched like they expected to be attacked at any moment. Clearly, they had just returned from Orientation too.

The source of the glass was obvious. Everywhere Claudius looked, buildings had been moved or ruined. Almost all of them were farther apart than they had been. Most of them were toppled. And the skyscrapers in particular had been utterly destroyed.

Most of them looked to have been knocked over like Jenga towers, their pieces scattered across the tabletop of the landscape.

Claudius kept one eye on the other people around him who had returned from Orientations of their own. He didn’t recognize any of them from his Orientation, but that was unsurprising. The group that he and his family joined to survive had figured out that they seemed to have been grouped by surname. A random collection of people on an Orlando street was unlikely to be largely comprised of people whose last names began with “G.”

For now, the other people outside mostly eyed each other warily. They moved around slowly, cautiously. But he didn’t expect that to hold.

Any moment now, people would recognize the situation they were in. It was either the end of days or a natural disaster of some incomprehensible sort. Once these people grasped that, they would act like the dumb, panicky, dangerous animals that they always showed themselves to be in these emergency situations.

In hurricanes, in earthquakes, sometimes even in the aftermaths of blackouts, people looted. They destroyed their own cities even when it wasn’t a rational reaction to events. Claudius didn’t want to get swept up in that.

Miraculously, as he turned to his right, he saw that the building where he worked—where he had been working before the apocalypse hit at least—was intact. Maybe it was because Orlando City Hall didn’t stand quite so tall as some of the neighboring buildings. Even though one of the skyscrapers next to it had collapsed, and half of the fallen building now leaned dangerously into City Hall’s South wall, the structure seemed stable.

It looked steady enough, at least, for Claudius to stick to the plan. He’d persuaded his father, Tiberius, and his brother and sister, Coriolanus and Julia, to meet at City Hall, where Claudius had worked security the last two years. It was a safe enough place to rendezvous, assuming that society wasn’t devolving into wanton human on human violence just yet.

Safer than any of their workplaces now, certainly.

Tiberius was a lawyer who had been visiting Orange County Courthouse when the apocalypse scooped him up. Coriolanus and Julia both had office jobs that would have had them working in the skyscrapers that now littered the ground.

At least Claudius’s old building was still standing. It was the only career success he could really boast relative to his siblings and his father..

He rushed up the steps, opened the front doors, walked around the metal detectors, and hopped the security barriers. No one to stop him. The lobby was deserted, as he’d expected.

If the System had said it was returning everyone to where they were, but dropped him outside, it stood to reason that the others in the lobby would also have ended up outside. Though there were only two others who’d been there that morning.

Emilia, the receptionist, and Oswaldo, the other security guy. When the System spoke into all their heads, they’d called the building manager, who had warned everyone else who worked there not to come in that morning.

He hadn’t seen Emilia or Oswaldo outside either, come to think of it.

They might both be dead now.

But Claudius didn’t want to think about that. Not yet. And not while there was still hope that the cheery receptionist and the kindly senior security guard would appear. There would be a time for mourning, but it wasn’t now.

He walked over to the security station and made sure that his gun was there. He grabbed that, his uniform, his baton, and his walkie-talkie. You never knew what would come in handy in the end of days.

Then he went back to the front of the building and locked the big, glass doors.

They didn’t look like much, but they were supposed to be bulletproof. He would unlock them, if and only if his family or someone he knew appeared out front. Emilia and Oswaldo had their own keys, and Claudius wasn’t interested in dealing with the mob if he didn’t have to.

While he stood at the doors, he took a last look at the slightly increased number of people on the ruined streets before he turned away.

Outside, people still weren’t fighting, but Claudius saw some of them beginning to pick through the wreckage of the nearby stores, looking for something, anything of value to take.

The looting would be in full swing soon enough, and it would be every man, woman, and child for themselves for the foreseeable future.

Claudius waited for his family with disciplined patience, trying to figure out if there was anything in City Hall that he could loot. It was the best distraction. The best way to keep himself from breaking down into sobs that wracked his whole body and despairing that he’d ever see them again.

Don’t think like that, he scolded himself. They’re all fine. Now what should we take from here?

It wasn’t as if anyone else was going to ever use any of this stuff again if he didn’t. Probably, even most of the City Hall bigwigs were dead. Most of them would have keeled over from heart attacks if they had to run half as much as Claudius had in the last ninety days.

Finally, he decided to break into the vending machines. He filled a couple of backpacks from the lost and found with junk food and sodas. Then he unplugged the vending machines. The building’s emergency generator power was still functioning somehow, despite whatever cataclysm had wrecked the city’s infrastructure. Claudius didn’t want to waste that power, even if it was going to go to waste anyway. Maybe someone would find some use for it.

After what felt like an interminable time, his family arrived. First his father, then his brother, and lastly the sister he’d been the most worried about. When they scolded her for taking the longest, she apologized and said she’d stopped to give a girl directions.

It felt surreal to think of Julia being a good samaritan as anarchy erupted outside.

Where before, people had looted tentatively, now they did it very openly. Some young punks had started lighting fires, too. It was still a block or two away, but they could see the thick black smoke easily from where they stood in front of the glass doors. Wherever one fire started, another was sure to follow, unless someone came along to put it out and disperse the arsonists. People were good at following bad examples.

“I wish someone would come down here and restore order,” Coriolanus said quietly, voicing what everyone else was thinking.

“I’m not sure if it will happen in our lifetime, son,” Tiberius said, in his usual stern, honest, gruff way.

“I have faith,” Julia said, smiling sadly.

For a long time, they all stared in silence as Orlando burned, until the sun went down and the only light came from the fires.