Silverfield, which was what the Silverbacks’ settlement was called, was only twelve miles away from the gymnasium. It shouldn’t have been that long of a trip. However, the Creepers made it so that it was.
Three of the Silverbacks had remained behind at the gym, because they were going to be part of the ten shifters that would be on “loan” to the community for the next five years. This made it so that I began the journey to Silverfield with just Tom in his truck. Behind us, a shifter named Mark and his wife, Alicia, drove a truck hauling the trailer that had contained the two cows.
We were maybe two miles from the gym when Tom and I came upon a large group of Creepers blocking the road. Swearing under his breath, Tom stopped the truck and got out, shifting into his wolf form almost before he was even fully out of the truck. Still buckled in my seat, I made a little gasp, not having ever seen a wolf shifter up close before. My little gasp was also in part because of the Creepers. Although I’d thrown orbs at them from a distance as close as twenty feet before, I never fully got used to seeing them and always felt a tiny ripple of terror anew.
About the same height as regular human men, the Creepers were well-built, with muscles that bulged from beneath their jade green, scaly skin. Wearing no clothing, they were always naked, although this didn’t mean that they had any private parts that were visible. Between their legs, there was just nothing, as if they were creatures from a comic book illustrated by an artist who’d been told that nothing even remotely graphic would be allowed.
However, the Creepers apparently didn’t need genitals in order to reproduce. We humans called what they did “splitting,” and it was only rarely seen. In my year of running defense patrols at the gym, I’d only witnessed the phenomenon a handful of times. When it happened, it would appear that a dark shadow simply stepped out from behind the Creeper. Then, this shadow would slowly take solid form and become just like any other Creeper. Fortunately, they didn’t seem able to replicate themselves using this method very often, which gave us humans hope that if we just kept killing them, eventually one day, they’d all be dead, unable to replenish their numbers quickly enough.
It wasn’t the Creepers’ muscular bodies or their “splitting” phenomenon that scared me the most. Instead, it was their faces. If they had anything that could really be called lips, they were scaly, just like their skin, and their mouths were usually curved in gruesome sneers, revealing razor sharp teeth that could and often did rip human flesh from bone. Their noses were just small bumps with holes. Their eyes, large, greenish, and glowing, were about the size of baseballs. The only benefit to them having these spooky, luminous eyes was that it gave us humans ample opportunity to spot them in the dark.
Currently, because the day had become extremely overcast, I was able to see additional Creepers coming in the distance, with their eyes glowing green in the depths of the forestland that bordered the road. Tom was already dealing with a group of maybe seven or eight of them, the ones who’d been blocking the road, and it looked like he was having difficulty. Large and silvery gray in his wolf form, he was wrestling one Creeper to the ground with his jaws clamped around the Creeper’s throat, while other Creepers piled on his back, trying to sink their razor-sharp teeth into his fur.
Knowing that he needed help, especially with the second group of Creepers coming over from the woods, I flew out of the truck and began throwing orbs at the Creepers that were attacking Tom. Despite the fact that I was well-practiced in throwing orbs at Creepers by this point, my current task was a harder one than I’d anticipated, just because I had to take care not to hit Tom with one of my glowing, silvery orbs.
Soon, Mark pulled up behind us, threw his truck in park, and charged out of it in wolf form, making a beeline for the fight. He joined the fray so quickly, in fact, that I nearly hit him with an orb, having already launched it just a split-second before, aiming for a Creeper who was also charging toward the fight.
With Mark and Tom tearing the Creepers to shreds, assisted by me temporarily stunning the Creepers with my orbs, it wasn’t long before maybe only ten Creepers remained from the two groups combined. Ten was still a significant number, though, and I was quickly losing steam, not having eaten anything yet that day. I really hadn’t eaten much the day before either, sharing my rations with a seven-year-old boy who was still hungry after eating his.
My little group of three fighters was definitely struggling when Alicia emerged from her and Mark’s truck with a gun, quickly shooting at a particularly large Creeper who had broken free of Tom in order to charge at me. Alicia took this Creeper down with two shots, and with her assistance, the Creepers soon numbered a half-dozen. At this point, with some of them injured, Tom suddenly shifted back into his human form, shouting.
“Back to the trucks, everyone! Let’s go!”
Fortunately for me, he seemed able to intuit that I was quickly losing steam, and he and Mark seemed to be getting tired too. Covering us, Alicia shot at the remaining Creepers until we could all get back in our respective trucks, leaving a few Creepers stubbornly staggering toward us.
After throwing the truck in drive and stepping on the gas, Tom began swerving around the Creepers, glancing over at me. “You okay?”
A little breathless, I nodded. “Yeah. But what about you?”
While fighting in his wolf form, he’d sustained a deep wound on the side of his head that had stained his silvery fur crimson. Now in his human form, he still had a gash on the side of his head, and it was spilling blood down the side of his face.
In response to my question, he glanced at his face in the rearview mirror. “Oh, I’ll be fine. We shifters heal incredibly fast. How about if you just hand me a bandana from the glove box and wet it with a little water so I can mop up all the blood?”
Astonishingly, by the time I handed him the dampened bandana, the wide gash on the side of his head was already healing, visibly smaller in size than the last time I’d seen it.
We’d continued on up the road maybe just a mile or two when once again, we could go no further, having come across another large group of Creepers blocking the road.
With the wound on the side of his head now completely healed, leaving no scar, Tom brought the truck to a stop, swearing. “I really wish Alicia hadn’t used her gun back there. I know she was just trying to help, but she probably drew every Creeper for miles around with the noise.”
Creepers were attracted to sound just about as much as they were attracted to light.
Once again, a battle to fight them off soon ensued, although this time, Alicia remained in her and Mark’s truck with her gun. Just like the time before, Tom shouted for us fighters to retreat as soon as we’d mowed down enough Creepers for the road to be passable.
Once driving up the road again, he glanced over at me. “If we come across another large group of them, I think it might be best if we find shelter for a while. You, Mark, and I can’t fight them off all the way to Silverfield, at least not without taking the risk of being surrounded by a group too big for us to fight off.”
I agreed that taking shelter if we came across another large group of Creepers was probably best, especially since my orb-throwing power was quickly waning. “It’s almost like it operates on batteries or something, and after fighting for a while, I need to ‘recharge’ before I can do it at full strength again.”
“Well, with that being the case, and with Mark and I becoming a bit battle-weary too…” Slowing the truck, Tom paused to look up the road, where yet another large group of Creepers had assembled in the distance. “I think it’s time for us to turn down a side road and find some shelter for a few hours.”
A short while later, our group of four was barricaded inside a dark, empty convenience store while Creepers swarmed outside, leaving greasy prints on the windows of the two parked trucks while they peered inside, making the low, groaning/gurgling sounds that they always did. Other Creepers pounded at the boarded-up windows of the store, while others heaved their scaly bodies against the door which Mark and Tom had reinforced with an enormous metal freezer printed with the words Ice by the Bag. The freezer had to have weighed at least half a ton, yet Mark and Tom had dragged it over to the door seemingly effortlessly, displaying the increased strength that all shifters possessed, even while in human form.
The boarded-up windows only let a little light through, and Alicia pulled a flashlight from one of two large duffel bags she’d brought inside. “Well, I say we see if this place has any kind of a little office or a break room with a table in it, and we can fix ourselves some lunch.”
By her nonchalance, I assumed that she’d had more dealings with the Creepers up close than I certainly had.
With my heart still pounding, I glanced over at the barricaded door. “What if they come through?”
With her flashlight now providing a little more illumination in the store, Alicia gave me a little smile. “They won’t be getting past that big-ass freezer, I don’t think. See, the good thing about Creepers is that once they don’t smell human scent anymore, and once they’re not stimulated by noise, they seem to lose interest pretty easily. They’ll probably wander away from the door in a little while.”
Mark agreed. “Just the same, though, I’ll stay out here and provide security while the three of you eat. Then, maybe you, Tom, can take my place.”
Soon, Alicia, Tom, and I were having a picnic of sorts at a desk in a windowless office near the back of the store. From one of her duffel bags, Alicia had produced several tall, white pillar candles, which she’d lit with a match. In the warm light, she’d then set out paper plates, plastic cutlery, and large containers of food before putting a six-pack of bottled water in the middle of the desk.
“Dig in, guys. We’ve got some cold grilled chicken, pasta salad with vegetables and cubes of cheddar cheese, homemade honey-wheat rolls, and some apples. Oh, yeah, and some freshly-baked sugar cookies for dessert. I made them myself this morning.”
Incredulous, I just looked at Alicia for a moment. “Where did you guys get cheddar cheese?”
I hadn’t tasted cheese since the early days of the Chaos, when trucks had stopped delivering food to stores. I hadn’t had grilled chicken since then either, only the kind of chicken that came in a can and looked something like tuna. And even then, I’d only had canned chicken every once in a great while. It was so hard to come by and prized, in fact, that Norm and I had come to call it “apocalypse caviar.”
Alicia gave me an amused-looking sort of little smile. “Oh, we’re pretty much floating in fresh cheese in Silverfield. We get the milk from our cows, and then the cheese is made by my friend, Lauren. Before the Chaos, she was an artisan cheesemaker at some hipster-type deli in Ann Arbor; so, trust me, she knows how to make one heck of an amazing wheel of cheese. When she’s done with a batch, we divide it all up and keep it fresh in our refrigerators at home.”
Again, I just looked at Alicia for a moment before responding, “You guys have refrigerators? And real homes?”
She laughed briefly. “I always forget how unusual our community is, but yes. We have real homes, because a few months after the Chaos, we took over an abandoned housing community and made it our own. Set up walls around it to keep Creepers out and everything. As far as our refrigerators, every home has one, and we run them with just regular old electricity.”
“But…I thought that all electrical power grids were down nationwide.”
Alicia began spooning some pasta salad onto my plate. “Oh, they are. We get all our electricity from our solar panels. We just recently converted to solar because the generators were just using too much precious fuel. In time, we can probably install some solar panels at your group’s gymnasium too.” After putting the serving spoon back in the pasta salad, Alicia began setting grilled chicken drumsticks onto my plate.
“Oh, yeah. Have I mentioned that we all have hot water heaters in our homes too? So, I don’t know what you guys have been doing for hot water at the gymnasium, but if you’ve been missing hot showers…well, just know that you won’t be missing them very much longer.”
I hadn’t had a hot shower since the Chaos started, and the mere thought of soon having one made me bite back a little whimper of longing and anticipation. That morning, like most other mornings since my group had moved into the gym, I’d bathed in cold water poured into a plastic storage container barely large enough for me to sit down in.
While Alicia told me more about her community, I began eating the most delicious meal that I’d had in over a year, starting to think that I was really going to like Silverfield. If the alpha I was going to be paired up with was any kind of a decent guy, anyway. Setting my expectations low so that I wouldn’t be disappointed, I just hoped that he would at least be a man that I could stand being around.
I hoped that I’d at least be able to stand sharing a bed with him too. It probably wouldn’t hurt if he were attractive like Tom and Mark, I figured. They were both well-built and fairly handsome, and after going so long without being around adult males near my own age, they’d started stirring primal feelings inside of me that I’d kind of forgotten I had.
It turned out that Alicia had been a little too optimistic in her thinking that the Creepers would very soon leave the convenience store, and that evening, Tom decided that we should stay put for the night, sleeping on blankets that we found in a utility room. In the morning, we all took turns washing up in the bathroom, rationing water from a few gallons that Mark had brought inside the day before when we’d been retreating from the Creepers.
Aside from the water rationing, though, getting cleaned up in a convenience store bathroom wasn’t all bad. After rifling through one of her duffle bags, Alicia gave me a toothbrush still in the package, a little tube of toothpaste, a washcloth, a trial-size bottle of vanilla-scented body wash, a trial-size bottle of vanilla-scented lotion, and a trial-size can of spray-on deodorant.
These items made the convenience store bathroom feel more like a spa to me, since it had been months since I’d used real toothpaste and deodorant, instead having to make do with baking soda for both purposes, making a paste of it for my teeth, and dusting some on my underarms. As far as what I’d been washing my body with at the gym, I’d been having to make do with generic bar soap that was terribly drying and smelled vaguely like nail polish remover; so, getting to use vanilla-scented body wash seemed like an unapparelled luxury in comparison, especially followed up by a few dollops of lotion.
When I emerged from the bathroom, Alicia even handed me a can of dry shampoo and a brush.
“Here. We can share my brush and dry shampoo if you want, just in case you want to get a little further spruced up before you meet Eric.”
With her mouth curving in a smile, she gave me a little wink, somehow making me think that Eric was indeed at least as attractive as Tom and Mark.
After eating a quick breakfast of canned fruit and granola bars from one of Alicia’s duffle bags, our group of four left the convenience store, finding out that while the Creeper swarm outside had thinned considerably, some of them still remained. However, we didn’t even take the time to kill them, instead just making a beeline for the trucks while I shot a few orbs in order to temporarily stun the Creepers nearest us.
After having to stop to clear the road of Creepers no fewer than four different times, it was early afternoon by the time our group arrived at Silverfield. Two men standing atop some kind of a guard platform quickly hopped down and opened a high metal gate to let our trucks inside, immediately closing it again afterward. After giving them a wave, Tom swung his truck into a makeshift grassy parking lot just a short distance from the gate, and we were soon joined by Mark and Alicia.
Once the four of us had exited our respective trucks, Alicia welcomed me to Silverfield. “Do you like what you see so far?”
I definitely did, because what I was seeing at the moment was a tall, very well-built man with dark hair striding toward us. And just from what I could see of his strong-jawed face so far, at a distance, he was incredibly handsome.
Alicia suddenly caught sight of this man too. “Oh, look. Here comes Eric, our alpha.”
Experiencing a rush of butterflies, I swallowed, thinking that just maybe I was not only going to like living in Silverfield but love it.