30 – Recruitment

As soon as his feet touched the asphalt, Andy pulled his spear the rest of the way through the fence and then darted toward a pallet of potting soil. Crouching there, he peered around the garden center, wondering if the door to the main structure would be guarded despite the fence. Sure enough, another lantern burned there, but this one was dimmer—it looked like an old-school kerosene lamp. Sitting in the flickering glow, back to the door, was a woman in a folding lawn chair.

Trusting his ability to blend into the shadows, Andy darted from pallet to pallet, from one rack of potted flowers to another, and soon he was only ten yards from the woman with a clear view of the double doors that led further into the building. The guard cleared her throat, grumbling something to herself as she flipped the pages of a magazine.

Andy stared, wondering if he could justify going to war with normal-looking people like her. She seemed to be in her forties, with a complexion that said she’d worked outdoors for much of her life. She wasn’t armed, as far as he could see, but there was an airhorn sitting on the concrete beside her chair. Andy was thinking about moving on, trying to make his way to the back of the store to check on the loading dock entrance, when shouts erupted in the parking lot.

He turned toward the noise, and so did the woman. The fence was a good twenty-five yards from him, but he could see more lanterns bobbing in the darkness out by the car wall. People were talking in loud, excited voices, and then Andy realized they were moving toward the gate to the garden center. Cussing under his breath, he retreated deeper into the racks of garden…things—watering hoses, rakes, hoes, leather gloves, ant killer, and a hundred other odds and ends.

He hunkered behind a row of potted ferns. The plants were dry and turning brown on the ends. Realizing he’d moved under the covered portion of the garden center, he looked up, frowning. If he had to leave in a hurry, he was going to have to get past those people who were, even as he watched, unlocking the gate. There was plenty of light to aid his eyes as he watched two men come through, one with a spear, a good deal cruder than Andy’s, and the other with a big axe.

The second man tugged on a rope, and Andy realized he was leading a train of bound prisoners—seven of them. Their heads were hooded, and their wrists were tied before them, and it didn’t seem like they had much fight in them as they shuffled along behind the two men. Meanwhile, the woman who’d been sitting in the lawn chair was up on her feet, watching them approach.

“The hell is this, Lucas?”

“Got a fresh batch of possible recruits,” he said, emphasizing “recruits” with a snicker.

“Okay, but why you coming in this way?” The guard lady put her fists on her hips, and Andy noted she’d taken a minute to put on leather gloves. Now that she was out of her seat, he could appreciate that she was a big woman, with broad shoulders and hips, and she carried herself like she knew it.

“Hey, don’t get on my ass about it! Brooks said he don’t want any more unvetted folks in the building, whatever the shit he means by that. He wants you to set ’em up out here.”

“The hell am I supposed to do with them out here?”

“I don’t know. Throw some blankets in the corner back there. I don’t give a shit.” The man, Lucas, threw the rope to the woman, and he and his partner brushed past her, aiming for the doors to the interior of the building.

“Goddammit! Send someone out here with some blankets and stuff, then!” she called after them. She turned back to the line of hooded figures, most of them wearing torn and bloodstained clothing, and cleared her throat. “Alright, listen up! I’m Gwyneth, and I’m a hell of a lot meaner than you might think with a pretty name like that! Number one, I was a sergeant in the sheriff’s department. Number two, I’m a level seven brawler, and I will

beat your ass if you get out of line out here. We clear?”

Andy felt his neck get hot as the woman continued to berate the prisoners, dragging them harshly by the rope down the aisle of garden supplies, not ten feet away from him, toward the back corner of the garden center. He clenched his gloved fists on his spear haft, wondering if he ought to try to do something. It was clear the moral philosophy of the people running this place didn’t match up with his or, he hoped, the other people in the trailer park. Was it worth going to war over, though?

***Bonus Quest Unlocked: Rescue the prisoners being held in the garden center of the Hardhead Construction City Settlement. Reward: Settlement Boon Enhancement Crystal. Accept? Yes/No.***

“Ah, shit,” he hissed, then, without much hesitation, “Yes.”

There was a large metallic rack of shelves between the aisle where he lurked and the one Gwyneth had taken the prisoners down. He crept down his side of it, peering through the gaps in the shelving, matching their progress. He observed Gwyneth carefully, eyeing her movements. She wasn’t gentle with the prisoners, most of whom appeared to be women.

She shoved them, disregarding the fact that they had hoods over their heads, so they stumbled and bumped into tools and racks. One of the two men, at least as far as Andy could tell, stumbled to his knees, and she kicked him in the center of his back, sending him sprawling onto the concrete. “Move your ass, you little wimp!”

Andy scowled, sorely tempted to jump into the fight, but he knew it wouldn’t be smart, not yet. She’d asked those two men to send someone with supplies. He needed to wait until that person came and left, and then it would be time to move. At least he hoped things would work out that way.

In his experience, though, things rarely went exactly as he hoped. That proved true when it came to Gwyneth and the prisoners. When the man she’d kicked sprawled out on the platform, the other man reached up to tug on his hood—a burlap sack with a drawstring. It didn’t come loose, but Gwyneth saw him trying to get it off and laid into him with a brutal right hook, punching him just beneath the ribs.

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He gasped and staggered back, tripping over his downed compatriot and stumbling into a short barrel filled with wooden handles—replacements for shovels or rakes or, if you were living in an apocalypse, cheap spears. The racket of the handles falling and clattering to the concrete enraged Gwyneth, and she proceeded to berate the man, kicking and punching him while he was down. Andy couldn’t take it anymore.

He vaulted through the shelving rack, clambering over a shelf at waist level, knocking aside some boxes of battery-operated hose timers. She didn’t notice in her fury, yelling, kicking, and spitting, red-faced. Andy didn’t think he intended to kill her at that point; he flipped his spear and jabbed the butt-end into the back of her head. Clearly, that indicated he’d tried to spare her life, right? The problem was, he was behind her, perfectly poised for a sneak attack, and his damn talents didn’t pull punches.

His heavy staff thumped into the base of her skull with bone-crunching force, and she collapsed like he’d hit something a lot more critical than an off-switch. She sprawled out before him, one leg bent awkwardly beneath her, face up, eyes open and rolled back. She was as still as…death. Andy frowned, then bent to snatch the ring of keys that was clipped to her belt.

As he unfastened it, he said, “Listen, folks, I might have just killed your jailer. I’m not from this damn place, and I’m going to get you out of here.”

“What?” a woman asked.

“I was spying on these guys, trying to see what they were up to when they brought you in.”

Several of the prisoners started to speak; two began to cry, and the man on the ground groaned. Andy saw that Gwyneth had a box cutter in her back pocket, so he pulled it out. “You have to be quiet! I’m going to take your hoods off and cut the rope around your wrists. Can you all please be quiet? I don’t want to die trying to get you out of here!”

Andy moved to the first man, the one who’d been kicked to the concrete. He was struggling to his feet, so Andy grabbed his elbow and hauled him up. “Hold still.” He cut the rope around his wrist, then cut the tie on his hood. The man pulled the hood off and gasped, blinking his eyes rapidly. “You good?”

“No,” he said, licking his lips, dry and cracked and bloody; he’d been beaten.

“Just try to keep it together.” Andy aimed his words at the group as a whole. “We have to hurry. That woman asked them to send someone with blankets.” As he spoke, he freed two of the women. One of them immediately darted toward the man whom Gwyneth had been beating, working on his bindings. Andy moved to the next woman. “After I get you all untied, we need to sneak out the gate, then… Shit, I don’t know. They have guards out there. Honestly, we should climb the fence.”

“I c-can’t,” the man on the ground rasped, coughing as he finished.

The woman tending to him said, “His wrist is broken.”

The other man said, “We can cut it. There has to be something out here. Some snips—something.”

“A lopper!” one of the women said, darting toward a section of saws, garden shears, and branch cutters. Andy figured it might work; some of those heavy-duty ones could cut big-ass branches. By then, he was cutting the rope off the last woman’s hands, and when he cut the strings holding the hood on, she ripped it off.

“Where is that bitch?” she hissed, spitting blood through split lips.

Andy gestured with his spear at Gwyneth’s downed form. “I hit her harder than I meant to.”

“Good!” The woman stalked toward Gwyneth’s body and kicked her right in the ribs, grunting with the effort.

“Bella, chill!” one of the other women said. “She’s dead, I think.”

“Fuck her, Madi!” Bella snarled, kicking Gwyneth again.

“Alright, we gotta move,” Andy said, hoping to forestall further outbursts.

The woman who’d gone for the loppers returned with a heavy-duty pair. It was the kind of tool you looked at, realized the price, and then picked the much cheaper version. She held it out to Andy, and he shrugged, taking it in his left hand, still gripping his spear with the right. “Cool, let’s try it.” He ran forward, out of the covered, built-up section of the garden center past the door with the lamp, then off to the right toward the fence where the pallets of potting soil were stacked.

When he was next to a section of the chain-link fence, he looked to be sure all seven of his rescuees were with him. They were, though the guy with the broken wrist was just arriving, helped along by one of the women. Andy knew he should learn their names, but it wasn’t the time; they had to move.

He leaned his spear on the fence, then put the lopper’s blades around a segment and bore down on the handle. To his surprise, it slipped through the metal without much effort, and the chain link separated.

“I knew it!” the woman who’d grabbed it said.

“Nice one,” Andy grunted through clenched teeth as he cut another segment. “Keep an eye on the door.”

“Where are you from?” the woman named Bella asked.

“I have a settlement not too far from here. What about you all?”

“We were set up in the Safeway down the road. These fucking assholes came and attacked us.”

“Shh!” one of the other women said. “Let’s just get out of here! Can we come with you, um, mister?”

“Andy. I’m Andy, and, yeah, you can come with me.” He cut the fifth link, working his way toward the ground. A dozen more and they’d be able to crawl through. “Was it just you seven at the store?”

“No!” Bella said through gritted teeth. “We were almost twenty, but they came in, acting like they wanted to be friends, and when our guard was down, they just—” She choked back a sob, and one of the other women hugged her.

The man with the broken wrist finished for her, “They started killing people. They were brutal! This damn System stuff—some of them had to have magic skills or something. After they killed most of the men, they started yelling for us to lie down, promising we’d be spared.”

“Well, that tracks from what I’ve seen, I guess.” Andy realized the blade on the lopper was getting notched from clipping the metal links, but he was almost done. He cut the last two links, then handed the lopper to one of the women. He bent, grabbed one side of the cut fence, and pulled it wide. “Go on, crawl through.”

As the former prisoners began to make their way out to freedom, Andy looked toward the door to the main building, and his heart nearly stopped. The door was closing. Someone had come through. He scanned the garden center, his eyes darting toward the back corner where Gwyneth’s corpse awaited discovery. He saw a tall, thin figure—a woman, he thought—and her arms were laden with blankets. She hadn’t discovered anything yet. “Hurry,” he hissed. “Someone’s here.”

Three were out, the fourth halfway, when the woman called, “Gwyn? Where the hell are you?”

“Go, go, go,” Andy whispered, giving the man a boost with his shoe. He cleared the opening, and the woman with the lopper slipped through almost gracefully.

“Gwyn?” the woman called again, this time further away. How had she not seen the corpse?

Finally, the last prisoner was through, and Andy followed, dragging his spear behind him. Outside, he was almost immediately slammed with System messages:

***Bonus Quest Complete!Rescue the prisoners being held in the garden center of the Hardhead Construction City Settlement. Return to your settlement to receive your reward.***

***Congratulations, Andy! You’ve slain an enemy and earned experience toward your next level.***

Andy couldn’t help wondering how close he was to the next level, and the information danced across his vision:

Experience toward next level: 96%

He pointed with his spear across the street at the gas station on the corner. “We’re going that way. We need to move quietly; there are monsters and stuff out here, and we also don’t want these assholes to know where we went.” They’d barely crossed the street when a shrill scream echoed out of the garden center behind them. Andy started jogging. As another scream split the night, he said, “That’s our cue to move our asses!”