Ruthless: Path of Conquest

Mitzi stood in her kitchen, cocked her husband’s service pistol, and listened.

The noises of movement outside seemed to be getting closer and closer. She responded by positioning further back in the kitchen and making certain that she had a clear line of sight on the front door to the house.

If Orientation had taught her anything, it was that she could not trust most of her fellow humans in a crisis situation. And her penetrating questions to the System Homunculus in the white room had validated her fears that humanity’s crisis was far from over.

“I have a gun!” she shouted—or tried to. Her voice sounded quavering and weak from nerves. “I’m not afraid to use it.” She began chanting quietly under her breath, gathering fire Mana. If a bullet didn’t stop this intruder, she would throw something stronger.

The door burst open, and she instantly drew a bead on the intruder. A second later, she lowered the pistol and stopped chanting. She let out a breath, then shook her head.

“Jesus, you startled me!” Mitzi scolded. “You know, I was ready to shoot you!”

“Oh, is that what you were yelling?” Alan asked. “My hearing’s not what it was.”

He stood in the doorway. Her old, nearly bald, beautiful knight. She just shook her head again. It’s impossible for me to be mad at you, she thought.

“Next level you get, you need to put some points into Perception!” she finally said.

Alan smiled. “I’m glad you were ready for anything,” he said. He closed the distance between them and pulled her in for a long, passionate kiss. Electricity traveled through her whole body, all the way down to her toes. “You know, I thought I might never see you again.”

Mitzi felt the raw passion in her husband’s voice that had somehow never faded over the five decades of their relationship.

And she smiled, any tension between them now completely broken. “Why did you think that?” she asked softly. “The last thing we discussed before Orientation ended was that I would stay here and wait for you to come home.”

She had appeared outside, strangely, but reentering the house had been as easy as remembering where she kept the spare key—inside a hollow rock in the front yard. Then it was simply a matter of waiting. She had been nervous, briefly, when she heard other people passing—and then again, at his approach.

But she had never truly been in danger. Not the way she had sometimes been back in Orientation.

“You haven’t seen what’s happening out there, then,” he said.

It wasn’t spoken like a question, so she simply waited for him to say what he was getting at.

“It’s pandemonium,” Alan continued. “On my way here from the office, I saw people looting and fighting over food. Buildings burning. That’s not to mention the damage the System did.”

“What did the System do?” Mitzi was less interested in knowing the answer than in taking her husband’s mind off of the human side of the problems outside, which she could tell was wearing at him.

“Oh, nothing much,” he said, expression shifting to a slightly crazy smile. “Just moved the whole Earth around, it seems like.” He explained the state of the buildings he’d seen. How some were just farther apart than they used to be, but most were collapsed ruins. “We’re lucky that the office was barely affected. Even the house—” he gestured around them—“it’s listing slightly to the left now.”

“Listing, huh?” was all Mitzi could come up with. It was mildly shocking to think that she couldn’t just pop down to the local Walmart if they needed supplies now. “I guess we’re on our own as far as fixing things like that now,” she said. “Basically back in the Stone Age.”

“I’m just glad that the house is still up,” Alan said, taking her hand. “Did you try getting hold of the kids yet?”

“You know, I couldn’t think of it,” she admitted. “I was too worried about you.” She walked over to the landline phone and raised it to her ear. There was no dial tone, but she tried to dial their younger son’s number anyway. Nope.

She shook her head wordlessly.

“I should’ve known,” Alan said. “If the buildings have moved, power won’t be on anywhere unless there’s a generator. Phone lines are probably down too. And my cell isn’t working—I tried it on the way here—which means yours isn’t working either.”

A calm settled over Mitzi as her husband listed off problems. It was strange, but it restored a certain sense of normalcy to the situation. Even if it was only surface level.

“What do we do now, you think?” she asked. “Stay here and wait for the kids to show up?”

“That’s one option,” Alan said. “I told the folks from the office that I’d be back if it made sense for us, but I don’t know if it does.”

“We have the best chance of the kids finding us if we stay here.” Mitzi stated the obvious, knowing that neither she nor her husband really wanted to just sit in place and wait.

“If they look for us,” Alan said slowly, only meeting her eyes after he stared at the ground for a long moment.

Only Stephen, their youngest, had stayed local. Joe and Marcy were both out of state now. All three of their children had grown up and grown middle-aged. Had lives and families of their own to worry about. Joe’s daughter Sandra was engaged to be married now.

All three would certainly be more concerned about their own children than they would be with checking in on their aging parents.

“They probably assume we’re dead already,” Mitzi said, uttering the safer of the two unspoken thoughts they were both mulling. The other thought being that one or more of Alan and Mitzi’s children might have died in Orientation. If that had happened, did they really want to know?

We can only learn so much and still endure in this life, Mitzi thought. That’s why people die of old age. They get too full of ugly truths and collapse under the weight of an accumulated lifetime’s worth.

“You’re right.” Alan nodded slowly. He looked relieved, Mitzi noted. She imagined the same look on her own face. This was a truth that they didn’t necessarily want to know, even if they could. They couldn’t learn it, though. Maybe that was just as well. “I’ll at least leave a note, in case they come looking for us,” Alan added.

Mitzi found herself nodding, then stopped herself. “Wait, where are we going, then?”

“We don’t have any reason to stay here,” Alan said. “We’re still alive, despite everything. I want to believe it’s for a reason. Maybe we’ll be able to help restore some semblance of order in this messed up world. We have at least two options in terms of how we might do that. There’s James, who clearly wants to gather a following around himself so he can try his version of rebuilding civilization. That seemed to be going well enough last time we checked. And we know he survived Orientation, because the System said he was the one who ended it early. On the other hand, back at the office, Dean has the idea that we’re going to fortify the old law building and turn it into a base from which we can reclaim the world. The one problem with that is that there’s a pretty big pest problem in the area around it. I told him that I thought I knew exactly the right person to help solve that issue.”

“James?” All roads lead to James, it seems. Whether within or outside of Orientation made no difference.

Alan nodded. “James and Dean are both big picture thinkers. Ambitious and energetic. Both of them would want to tackle these problems even if they didn’t know each other existed. I figure if we can bring the two of them together, we’re giving humanity a leg up on the monsters that are trying to take over the world already.”

Mitzi nodded. It sounded like Alan had asked the System Homunculus much the same sorts of questions that she had. They both knew that the world was now crawling with monsters calling themselves rulers of various pieces of territory. Hopefully they weren’t in some monster’s patch of land right now. But that wasn’t something they could do anything about.

“How are we going to find him?” Mitzi asked. She thought her husband’s vague plan was a pretty good start to the two of them making a positive difference in the world.

Alan’s lips curled up in his usual charming smile. “It’s not strictly appropriate, but I took a peek at James’s personnel file before I left the fellows at the office. I looked at his address, and as it happens, I know the area.”

“Then away we go,” Mitzi said, returning the smile.

“Yep,” Alan agreed.

“Onto the next great adventure,” she said.

“You always make the best of things,” he said.

“It’s what we do.”

The two of them spent half an hour making preparations. They packed their bags from Orientation with nonperishable foods—the perishable stuff from the refrigerator still vaguely resembled food, but overall the interior of that appliance looked more like a biohazard zone than a storage area for edible items now. It overflowed with unnaturally blue, green, and gray, discolored and moldy items.

They also packed flashlights, some old sleeping bags Alan found in the attic, and a couple of sharp kitchen knives. Mitzi checked to make sure there was nothing else she wanted to pack before she returned her bag to where she typically kept it, secured around her upper arm with a velcro strap.

They each placed another knife on their belts, and Alan rested his service pistol in its hip holster. Alan went around making sure that all the doors and windows were secured, besides the front door that they were going to lock behind them. Mitzi spent those few minutes using their toilet one last time. She would miss her lavender-scented bathroom. She doubted that she and her husband would ever come back.

Then he wrote their children a note and placed it on the kitchen counter. It said where they were going, that they didn’t expect to be back, and where the kids might find them. He weighed it down with a small paperweight, as if he was worried that the wind might somehow come into the house and blow the note away. Mitzi thought he felt guilty about just leaving a note there. Maybe he really believed that their children would show up looking for them and be disappointed.

She didn’t think that any of the children would ever actually find the note, but she signed it too, with love. You never know.

Finally, they set out on their journey. Alan led the way as they ran for half an hour just off of once-busy streets that were now cracked and broken shells of their former selves, littered with wrecked cars.

The couple kept to the grassy areas rather than on the streets. They tried to stick close to tree lines where they existed, because the roads weren’t completely empty or entirely silent. Occasionally, they would come across people, and when they did, they would hide.

Mitzi didn’t like to be so suspicious of her fellow human beings, but she knew that Orientation had turned mundane, ordinary people into sun-worshiping murderers, people who made deals with monsters, and occasionally undead creatures. She and her husband were taking no chances.

They made good progress. Alan seemed to know where they were going, despite the many ways in which the landscape had changed since they left Earth. Then the sky became suddenly overcast. Mitzi and Alan exchanged a knowing look. Those dark gray clouds could only mean one thing in the Sunshine State.

“At least some things never change,” Mitzi said.

The pair began looking for a building they could break into, to stay warm and dry until the thunderstorm passed. Some things never changed, but there were some you could never see coming.

As the first droplets fell, the two of them spotted a gas station. They could see from the outside that the shelves had been ransacked, but glass doors weren’t shattered, so it seemed safe enough as a place to hole up and wait for the storm to pass.

Mitzi silently chanted as Alan walked in front of her, pistol drawn, into the abandoned gas station. She followed close behind him, looking out behind her in case an ambush was planned from that direction.

They were unmistakably vulnerable to danger now, in this post-apocalyptic world, and she had never felt that more keenly than now.

Then she passed through the second set of glass doors, and they were inside the gas station.

“I’ll check the aisles,” Alan mouthed at her silently.

Mitzi nodded, then started slightly as someone—or something—moved at the edge of her vision.

She turned to face the mover, and her husband whirled alongside her.

Then she let out a sigh of relief for the second time that day.

“It’s just you,” she said. “I’m scared of my own shadow today.”