CHAPTER ONE
It was a sunny day in September when the wolf shifters sent a messenger to my group’s encampment, an act that ultimately put the lives of fifty-some people in my hands.
The messenger’s name was Tom, and he first asked for a private meeting with the group’s leaders.
A seventy-two-year-old man named Norm looked at me. “I guess that’s us, right?”
After a moment or two, I gave Norm a little nod, realizing for the first time that I was considered co-group leader alongside him. I’d certainly never been officially called a leader, and nobody had ever called me Cap, short for captain, like they sometimes did with Norm. I supposed that I’d just kind of fallen into my leadership role without really realizing it, just by going about the business of doing what needed to be done.
It probably hadn’t hurt either that I was one of the only fully able-bodied adults in the entire group. Most everyone else was either too old or too young to really be of much help with crop planting or defense. Norm himself was pretty much too old to really be of much help with crop planting or defense, although he was still decent with a shotgun, and he was usually able to weed the community garden for at least an hour before his gnarled, arthritic hands simply refused to work anymore. What he lacked in physical capabilities, though, he more than made up for with wisdom gained from decades in the military, and then decades as a farmer.
Norm and I took Tom the wolf shifter’s messenger into my “apartment,” which had formerly been an athletic trainer’s office inside a high school gymnasium. Although it was dark, cramped, and cheerless, with its painted cinderblock walls, I still felt grateful to have a space of my own with a door that shut. Some families in the group lived and slept out on the basketball court, with “apartments” made up of a few pieces of furniture surrounded by “privacy screens,” which were just sheets hung from wooden frames that Norm had constructed.
When we’d first settled the group into the gymnasium just over a year earlier, we’d done a lottery drawing to determine who would get the “prime real estate,” which included two locker rooms, two offices, and a semi-private hallway near the gymnasium’s entrance. I’d fished a slip of paper that read Office #1 from Norm’s hat and had immediately tried to give it to a family who’d drawn a slip reading Basketball court.
However, the family wouldn’t hear of this, with the grandparents saying that they and their three grandkids wouldn’t all fit in one tiny office anyway. Norm wouldn’t hear of me switching with anyone either, saying that fair was fair and everyone should just stick to the “apartment assignments” they’d drawn. I’d reluctantly agreed, although I still felt a little guilty about it.
Now in the present, I sat Norm and Tom down at a tiny circular table in my tiny apartment, asking if either of them would like anything to eat or drink. Fortunately, they both declined my offer, and I considered this fortunate for two different reasons. For one, as far as food and drink went, I only had a single bottle of water and a single can of sliced peaches in my apartment, and I wasn’t sure how I’d divvy those things up, being that I only owned one cup and one small plate. Obviously, I wasn’t quite accustomed to having guests and entertaining. For another thing, I was just kind of eager to get right down to business with the visiting wolf shifter and find out what he wanted. Currently, I couldn’t even imagine.
As soon as I joined Norm and Tom at the table, Norm addressed Tom, seemingly just as eager to find out the purpose of his visit as I was.
“What brings you our way, Tom? I hope it’s not to borrow a cup of sugar, because believe me, we don’t have any.”
Norm gave Tom a wry little smile, which Tom returned before saying no, he hadn’t come to borrow anything.
“Although, maybe you could say I’m here to barter.”
Looking wary, Norm gave me a quick side glance before speaking to Tom again. “We’ve heard that some of you shifter groups are setting up bartering networks, but as far as our little ragtag group of human survivors here…we certainly don’t have much to barter. In fact, we don’t really have anything. As you’ve probably seen, we’ve planted a community garden out on the football field, and we’ll have a crop of pumpkins and squash ready to harvest in a few weeks…but we need to keep it all. The truth is that when it comes to food, we’re barely hanging on, and with winter coming in just a few months….” Frowning, Norm paused to sigh quietly. “Our group simply isn’t doing as well as some of you shifter groups, from what we’ve been able to gather.”
That was an understatement, not that Norm and I had been able to gather much info about the shifter groups in the area. Still, we knew enough about them to know that none of them seemed to be starving. On the contrary, the three times that Norm had run into different shifter groups while out on supply runs, he’d reported that their people seemed very fit and well-fed. He’d also reported that their clothes were in decent shape and clean, too.
One of the shifter groups was even said to have a fleet of a dozen or so trucks that they used for supply runs, having enough gasoline to drive as far as a hundred miles away. This was in contrast to the single vehicle owned by Tom’s and my group. It was an older SUV with almost two hundred thousand miles on it, and because of frequent breakdowns, Tom didn’t like to drive it further than four or five miles away.
Currently, this vehicle was parked about a quarter-mile from the gymnasium, where Tom had run out of gas returning from his last supply run. The two fourteen-year-olds who’d accompanied him, twins named Blake and Devin, had been unsuccessful in pushing the truck the rest of the way due to there being a hill. Not that this really mattered. By this point, Tom, Blake, and Devin had picked clean every grocery store, gas station, and pharmacy within feasible driving distance, anyway.
In response to what Norm had said, Tom just studied him for a long moment before asking a question. “How many people do you folks have here?”
Tom said fifty-four, but I shook my head.
“Fifty-three now. We lost an older gentleman last week. He and I and two young men from our group set out on foot to gather apples from a group of trees not far from here, and we were attacked by a group of Creepers on our way back. The two young men and I were able to fight them off and get back here to the gym, but the Creepers got Clarence along the way.”
Everyone seemed to have a different name for the bloodthirsty, otherworldly creatures that had invaded earth over a year earlier, but the term Creepers seemed to be universally understood. The shifter groups even called them Creepers, Norm had told me.
Their arrival had ushered in what most people called The Chaos. First, the night sky had glowed red with mysterious fireballs, from which things seemed to be falling. Later, most people guessed that the falling objects were Creepers, dropping to earth by the millions. These Creepers, which were about the size of human men, although covered in dark green scales, soon proved to have a taste for human flesh, killing millions of Americans within the first few days of The Chaos. News reports indicated that all countries on earth had been affected.
All branches of the military were called out to try to deal with the Creepers, although they were mostly unsuccessful, despite the fact that they used bombs and chemical weapons in the hardest-hit areas. People barricaded themselves in their homes. After witnessing the Creepers kill their friends, family members, and neighbors, some people killed themselves.
Soon came the Virus, which was a flu-like condition that seemed to affect only women and girls. Millions more died. Barricaded in my apartment, alone, with only a mild fever, I survived.
A few weeks into the Chaos, it became clear that the chemical weapons used by the military had had an unintended effect. They had turned many human men into half-animal, half-human hybrids that people began referring to as shifters. Most of these shifters, at least in my area, were wolf shifters.
These wolf shifters soon proved to be much more adept than the military at killing Creepers. While global civilization disintegrated, with power grids failing and bodies being piled up in the streets, the wolf shifters in my home state of Michigan formed militias, killing Creepers and driving them away with their sharp teeth, which easily pierced the Creepers’ hard green scales.
It was the wolf shifters who had allowed me to finally flee my apartment after several weeks, temporarily clearing the hallways of Creepers so that we survivors could flee the building in search of someplace that hadn’t yet been overrun. It was at this point that I’d met Norm, who’d lived in an apartment two floors above me.
Back in the present, Tom said that he was sorry to hear that I’d lost a member of my group while out on the apple run, adding that it was fortunate that I, and the two young men with me, had survived. I agreed, and Tom then asked me how old the two young men were.
Slightly embarrassed, I responded by saying that they were maybe closer to “older boys” than “young men.”
“They’re twins, named Blake and Devin…and they just turned fourteen about two weeks ago.”
Across the little table, Tom frowned at me. “And they’re the ‘muscle’ you take out on food-gathering runs?”
Further embarrassed, yet feeling a little bristly at the same time, I said yes. “They’re both brave and strong, and they’re the only males in our group older than twelve and younger than seventy. Since we all fled here to the gymnasium just over a year ago, they’ve both stepped up into adult roles, and they’ve both acted very heroically. In fact, I don’t think our group would have survived as long as we have without Blake and Devin.”
Looking incredulous, Tom snorted. “Frankly, I can’t believe that any of you have survived as long as you have, let alone an entire cohesive group.”
Going from “a little bristly” to “outright offended,” I snorted in return. “Well, we may not be wolf shifters, but it’s pretty amazing what strong humans can do when they all band together.”
Tom conceded that it was, then just studied my face quietly for a long moment before speaking again. “Please tell me the story of how your group all came together, Ellie, if you don’t mind.”
A bit proud of how my group had all come together, yet at the same time not really wanting to think about those dark early days of the Chaos, I hesitated before responding. “All of us lived in the same apartment building here in the town of Brackson. It was a building about three miles east of here. It was owned by a private charity that assisted grandparents raising grandchildren by offering them reduced rental rates; so, all of the tenants were older folks with children living with them…I guess except me, anyway.
Before the Chaos, I was a struggling artist, so I worked at the front desk at the apartment building to pay the bills. I collected rent, took phone calls, scheduled maintenance work, and things like that…and, as part of my salary, I got to live in one of the apartments in the building rent-free. So, that’s where I was when all of the Chaos started. We were all in our apartments. We watched from the windows while Creepers fell from the sky and took over the streets.”
Tom looked at me expectantly, as if waiting for me to continue. When I didn’t after a moment or two, he spoke. “Then what happened?”
Once again, I hesitated in responding. “Well, we all survived barricaded in the building for a few weeks. Norm didn’t live in the building but was a part-time maintenance worker when everything happened, and he and I reinforced the doors and ground-level windows with two-by-fours and steel beams that we found in the basement. It maybe wasn’t the best security job, but it was enough to keep the Creepers out, at least at first.
But then, after a few days, the phone calls from local government telling us all to just stay put stopped coming. Then, the phone lines went out altogether, and all the TV and radio broadcasts stopped. Then, a few weeks later, just as everyone was running out of food anyway, the Creepers broke through our barricades. One of you wolf shifter groups soon cleared them out of the building, thank God, and that’s when Norm and I decided that it was probably time that we take everyone to a safer place.”
Tom asked if that was when we’d come to the gymnasium, and I said yes.
“Norm went out scouting and found that while most of the high school was just a pile of rubble from the government dropping bombs on the Creepers, the gymnasium was still intact…so, he came back to the apartment building and began ferrying us all here in his maintenance truck. Then, once everyone was inside, we started building fortifications like at the building, but this time, even stronger. For defense, we set up armed guard posts, too, to keep the Creepers away, using a cache of shotguns that Norm had at his house.”
Tom gave me a dubious sort of look. “And who’s been manning the guard posts?”
“Well, Norm, here, and several grandfathers from our group, although many of them have glaucoma or cataracts, so they’re sometimes not able to see the Creepers very well. But we also have Blake and Devin working guard patrol, too, along with a woman named Maryanne. She may be a seventy-nine-year-old great-grandmother, but she grew up on a farm, and she sure knows how to use a shotgun. She’s even teaching her eleven-year-old great-granddaughter, Sadie, how to fight off the Creepers too. Sadie’s actually becoming one of our best patrol guards.”
Tom gave me a look that I couldn’t quite read. “Jesus.”
A little offended again, although I wasn’t even quite sure why, I snorted. “‘Jesus,’ what?”
Tom once again gave his head a little shake. “I just really don’t understand how your group has survived this long.”
Thoroughly irritated by his dubiousness, I folded my arms across my chest. “Like I said, we might be a group made up of older folks and children, but we’re strong. We’ve all pulled together to defend our lives and our community. We’ve had to, because none of you wolf shifter groups that we know of in the area have given us any help. You folks just look out for your own, right?”
Tom scoffed. “We do tend to stick to ourselves; I’ll give you that. We don’t just look out for our own, though. In fact, Ellie, you probably have no clue just how much your group has been ‘looked out for.’”
“Well, please enlighten me.”
“Well, for one thing, even though the wolf shifter community I belong to is about twelve miles away from here, we’ve always been aware of your group, and we’ve always run a daily patrol near this area, just to make sure that you folks weren’t getting overrun by Creepers. Had we not been doing this; you folks would have been dealing with more than just the half-dozen or so Creepers that you probably have to shoot on a daily basis. You probably would have long since been overrun.”
A little surprised, I said nothing, and Tom continued.
“Also, it was us Silverbacks who just about dropped that diesel generator in you folks’ laps early last December, when you all were nearly freezing to death in this gym. That’s what my shifter group calls itself, by the way…we call ourselves the Silverbacks, since we have a lot of wolves who appear more on the silvery side of gray.”
Again, I said nothing, nor did Norm, and Tom continued.
“Anyway…it was us Silverbacks who gave you folks that generator and fuel so that you could heat the gym and have lights during the winter. Didn’t you all ever wonder how it came to be that someone just happened to leave a generator and several months’ worth of fuel just a short distance away from the gym parking lot, where you folks would be sure to see it?
Also, didn’t you all ever wonder how it came to be last March that a literal ton of canned food was left in a grocery store that you’d all already scavenged? That was us Silverbacks. We figured that even though you’d already cleaned out the store, you’d probably be back just to see if you’d missed anything.”
Truth be told, Norm and I had wondered how these things had come to be. A deeply religious man, Norm had eventually come to the conclusion that God had simply provided for our group, maybe having one of his “angels on earth” make some special deliveries. I, however, had been a little more skeptical, thinking that maybe a group of human scavengers, maybe one who’d been about to investigate the gymnasium, had been forced to abandon their generator and fuel upon being attacked by some Creepers.
The wolf shifters had also crossed my mind, though, and I’d wondered if one of their groups had left my group some sort of a gift, for whatever reason. Then, when Norm, Blake, and Devin had come upon the cache of food in the formerly-cleaned-out grocery store, I’d wondered about the wolf shifters yet again, although this time wondering if Norm, Blake, and Devin had just stumbled across some kind of a storage cache.
I’d honestly been a little nervous when they’d brought all the food back to the gym, thinking that maybe the wolves would soon come after it. Norm, though, had told me that even if that were the case, they probably wouldn’t be violent about reclaiming their food. After all, he’d come across wolf shifter groups a few different times, and although they hadn’t been overly helpful or friendly, they hadn’t been hostile either, he’d said.
In response to what Tom had said about his group’s “gifts” to mine, I said a quiet thank you, slightly ashamed about my earlier irritation. “The generator, fuel, and food helped us to survive the winter.”
Tom said that I and my group were welcome. “We’d seen a few of you from afar and thought that a few ‘gifts’ might be badly needed. But, the generator and food aside, I’m still surprised that your group has survived this long, just being that us Silverbacks haven’t been able to monitor you all the time or even anywhere close to ‘all the time.’ With our gifts and our defense patrols running by near the area, we aimed to give you all a bit more of a fighting chance, thinking that the rest would be up to the fighting-age men of your group. We never dreamed that your group has never even had any men of fighting age.”
Feeling a bit defensive once again, I shrugged with my arms still folded across my chest. “Well, we still have some very good, strong men with fighting spirits, and as I’ve mentioned, we have some very good, strong boys, young girls, and women too. We’ve also had something to aid in our defense that I haven’t even mentioned yet.”
“Oh? And what’s that?”
I replied by saying that I was an orb-thrower. “Maybe you’ve heard of us.”
Looking a bit surprised, Tom said that he had. “We don’t have any in our group, though, so I’ve never actually seen the skill displayed. How does it work, exactly?”
I said that I really wasn’t even sure. “All I know is that when a lot of other women began dying of the fever in the first days of the Chaos, I only developed a mild fever, and I lived, obviously. Then, these silvery-white orbs began just flying out of my palms at different times. At first, I couldn’t even really control them, although now I can, and I can simply release them at will, just by thinking about it…and now I know that these orbs can be flung at Creepers to kill them. This is how I help in defense while I’m on guard patrol, instead of using a shotgun like everyone else. I just ‘shoot’ my orbs at the Creepers, just like lobbing a baseball.”
“And does a single orb kill them?”
I said no. “Not always, anyway…especially if I fling an orb without putting my full muscle into it. Usually, a single orb will just ‘stun’ a Creeper temporarily…and then another one or two flung at them while they’re still down on the ground will finish them off. It’s not quite as good a method as shooting them, but my orb-throwing has sure helped us to conserve our ammo.”
Studying me intently, Tom said that orb-throwing certainly seemed to be a rare gift. “Like I said, some of the women in our Silverback group are survivors of the fever, but none of them came out of it as an orb-thrower. It seems you were blessed, Ellie.”
I couldn’t help but scoff. “Right. I was ‘blessed.’ Blessed to live in a time where I’ve seen the near-destruction of the human population on earth, including the majority of women via some fever that was probably brought to us by creatures from another planet. I’ve sure been ‘blessed,’ all right.”
Frowning at me, Norm suddenly jumped into the conversation. “You have been blessed, Ellie. You survived a virus that took out many of your fellow women. You survived an invasion of human-eating creatures that took out the majority of people on earth. You’re alive. You’re breathing. You’re still fighting, and you’ve been given a gift that is helping you in this. God has blessed you. I don’t know how many times I have to tell you this before you’re finally convinced.”
Tom was a fairly attractive shifter of maybe thirty years old, just a few years older than I was. And now, because of what Norm had just said, I felt like I’d just been scolded by my father in front of the cute boy at school or something. Embarrassed, I said nothing in response to Norm’s rebuke, and after a long, uncomfortable moment, Tom suddenly spoke.
“I think I’ve heard enough. I’d now like to get down to the purpose of my visit, which is some bartering. I’d like to make the two of you an offer, Norm and Ellie.”
Nothing could have prepared me for what Tom said next.