“David, what do we do?!” Jasmin called from the front seat.

 

“They are just sitting there, it looks like they are making food,” Lena replied from her position.

 

“I don’t see many guns, do you think they are hostile?” Harry asked.

 

David looked at the large convoy that was surrounding the compound they all lived in, but he instantly recognized one of the busses that had been armored. It bore the logo of the school he had been going to and he noticed several students from some of the classes he had attended. He almost felt his jaw drop when he saw an old man wearing a red kilt, a red beret, and a green button-down shirt with a long ponytail.

 

“Mr.Rawlins is here… I thought I would never see him again after I finished world history class…”David muttered.

 

As if he was trying to make a statement, he had an English longbow on his back and a Scottish claymore. The sash from the boy scouts company he led was across his chest and many young men could be seen following closely in his shadow. A similar sash that was less ornate could be seen across their chests and they also carried a variety of different weapons.

 

“What is that old woman doing?” Harry asked as he pointed to a woman wearing elaborate green robes with golden moons and stars on them. 

 

A large cauldron had been set up over a raging fire and various plants and ingredients were being tossed into it as several young women wearing robes could be seen producing light that caused the mixture to move.  The woman leading was older with long gray hair and a plump figure. The smoke coming from the cauldron changed into a variety of different colors as it bubbled and hissed while being magically stirred.

 

“She ran the new age store near the campus… I want to say they are making potions... but it is so barbaric…” David responded. “I think she taught biology courses as well… she is pretty out there for sure.”

 

“Mrs. Franken was her name,” Jasmin said hesitantly.

 

“You know her?” Harry asked Jasmin.

 

After a few hesitant nods, Jasmin responded slowly. “Her husband was my dentist, she is also good friends with my mother.”

 

“Pull up, I don’t think they are a threat,” David said calmly. “There is even an open path to the gates.” 

 

While the various vehicles could be described with the words ‘fitting of an apocalypse’ covered in thick metal plates and metal fencing, the people didn’t seem nearly as desperate as he would have assumed. A large mobile grill was being pulled by a truck that had been converted for cooking monster meat and a trailer carried several large plastic containers for hauling water. It was clear that they had at least one awakened in the group or possibly even many.

 

Order was being maintained and David had a feeling that there would be several people who had been training in the group. The more melee weapons he saw the more convinced he became and people began pointing at them as they approached the gate. He could see repurposed police and swat armor that was painted with their stamps, but more commonly he saw leather and the hide of monsters.

 

He saw hammers, axes, bows, and clubs but very few swords since they required skill to forge or complex machines to be able to complete the same task although he saw plenty of various knives. One of the things that caught his eyes was an ice cream truck that had ‘MemeMachine’ written on the side in spray paint and armor over the windshield. The moment he saw it he immediately wished he could rename the van and give it a new paint job. 

 

“David!” A voice called and caused him to look towards the gate.

 

The image of his friend Tray was of a man with short hair that was cut almost weekly and in moderate shape from his time in a gym. A long beard and dreadlocks were something that Tray had always fantasized about during his dark days in middle school, it got even worse when you added in the leather trench coat. The bent lead pipe looked like a plumbing nightmare that was covered in rust and his boots didn’t match.

 

“I see you looking at me like that! I didn’t choose to look like this, you know!” Trey called out in anger.

 

Unable to help himself David leaned out of the passenger seat so that Trey could see his face and mouthed out the name he called himself when he created the character.

 

“OH HELL NO! You best forget that shit real fast!” Trey yelled out in embarrassment.

 

“What brought you here? What happened to Boulder?” He yelled.

 

“All gone… we held on the longest in the campus, but it is gone too,” Trey replied solemnly.

 

“What?!” David called in shock as he decided to hop out of the van as it came to a stop.

 

“We have 218 people, everyone else either ran to Denver or was eaten by the plants,” Trey said sadly.

 

“What are your plans, are you wanting to stay here, or are you moving on?” David asked.

 

“We were following the tracks of the military but there were monsters everywhere and I wanted to see how my momma was doing. I saw that her house was trashed so I came here remembering that your Dad had these walls, fortunately, she was here. I just got done talking to her when you pulled up.” Trey explained as the two hugged briefly.

 

“I came here after waking up from a coma, I have only been here for a couple of weeks myself,” David explained. “Fort Carson and the Springs are gone, the whole area is like something out of a zombie movie. It took almost a week to hike here. After we got out of the city, we couldn’t find anything to drive, thank god we didn’t take the highway since there is a lake there now.” 

 

“I could almost say that the last few months for us have been like an adventure. Mr.Rawlins, Violet Franken, and my friend Mavis are all awakened.” Trey began. “They helped pass on a lot of information and are the reason we could hold out for so long against the monsters that kept attacking us. We got attacked by an entire forest, trees, vines, flowers, it all came alive and attacked us.” 

 

“Did we have a forest in the area? I thought we just had a nature walk.” He commented.

 

“It just appeared one day, boom! It was in the middle of the city and everything was stretched around it like the city had been built around the forest originally. Then the trees stood up and began tearing apart the homes and highways and killing any of the humans they saw and flowers began blooming everywhere that ate the people and monsters…” Trey took a second to pause. 

 

David could see that he was recalling a lot of painful memories, and at times it looked like he even had to fight back tears. 

 

“There were a lot of different groups that formed in the city, the prison, the library, the mall, they all fell one by one and some of them ran to Denver to live with the monsters.” Trey recounted. “Amanda, my ex-girlfriend, found a way to become a plant and joined the monsters. She went out hunting and then came back as nothing happened, there were seeds or something inside of her body and they burst out and began growing. It was bloody and she started spewing all kinds of cu-” 

 

“Was there a flower growing out of her head? It would look like a snapdragon and have an almost pot shape to it?” David pried.

 

“How did you know?” Trey asked in shock.

 

“I’m also an awakened, I know exactly what happened to her,” David explained. “When she released the seeds, it was bloody and that is when she began acting erratically. She probably began screaming and crying. Am I right?”

 

“What happened to her?” Trey asked.

 

“There are several types of plant monsters that release spores that burrow inside the body of an unsuspecting victim. Once inside they usually bloom near the head and then they become dormant until the target encounters lifeforms. Then the seeds eject violently off the target usually causing a lot of damage in the process and the target is fed a lot of chemicals to stimulate rage and other emotions.” David explained sadly.

 

“The seeds entering a wound is what starts the transformation where it begins replacing your body with plants. The walking trees, the vine monsters, the carnivorous plants were all sentient lifeforms at one point or probably monsters.” David explained. “They can rarely take root when the person is still alive, it’s usually fungus that has that ability but it is too dry to grow them effectively here.”

 

“Is there a way to save her?” Trey asked.

 

“How long ago did it happen?” David asked.

 

“3 weeks… and 3 days,” Trey said counting it all out.

 

“No, maybe if she had been put on ice. By now she has been completely replaced by a monster. Plants don’t have a brain so they steal one and remove the functions they don’t need like memory and different senses. They can’t leave a certain distance from where the main bodies are planted, so you probably weren’t chased once you got a certain distance away.” David told him sadly. “It takes them a week to finish the process.”

 

He wasn’t going to go into detail about how it leads them to the main body that looks like a rafflesia and how they climb into a pod filled with enzymes that aid the plant in breaking down and modifying the body. Then they move to the forest, plant themselves, and start the growing process until they are strong enough to contribute to the defense of the main body. At this point she should be in the forest and resemble a flower bush, is what he was figuring.

 

“Those plants were all people once?” Trey asked, shocked.

 

“Maybe not humans, but they were all sentient at the least.” Even regular monsters would fall prey to parasitic plants. 

 

Trey could recall that many other people had also disappeared, he was starting to wonder if Amanda might have just been the only victim he had seen the process happen to.

 

“Is that you Davey boy?” An aged man’s voice called with the tenor of a former army drill sergeant.

 

“Mr.Rawlins… how have you been?” David asked awkwardly.

 

“Right as rain and straight as an arrow!” The old man called. “A man must live with dignity and honor at all times! Valor and courage will carry us through and lead to certain victory!”

 

“So you have been doing well, living as you normally do without forsaking your morals, and helping to fight the monsters,” David muttered after translating his speech into modern English. “That’s good, I am glad to see you doing well.”

 

“I am excelsior!” He replied.

 

This is why he would never have to worry about Mr.Rawlins wanting to lead a group, besides from the boy scouts who idolized him as a real man no normal person would be able to understand him. Being able to trace his ancestry back to the Normans, the Rawlins family had moved from Britain to Ireland, to Scotland, then to New Zealand before finally coming to America. A Rawlins had fought in every major war, sometimes on both sides, even his teacher had been a veteran of Desert Storm where you could hear his bagpipes played inside of his tank.

 

“Is that a Single Action Army?” David asked, noticing the pistol at his waist.

 

“The best handgun ever made!” Mr. Rawlins.

 

“It has history...” David muttered.

 

The handgun that won the west was so well known that he could recognize it the moment he saw it in the leather holster hanging off the side of his kilt. They said it was one of the guns that tamed the west alongside the classic lever-action rifle. The single-action army saw service all over the world and was one of the most iconic pistols ever created, even people like George Patton insisted on using one over the M1911. 

 

“We ran outta bullets in the first few weeks, we have been running the old black powder muskets that Mr.Rawlins brought along to hunt any animals we saw along the way,” Trey explained.

 

“And what about them?” David asked as he pointed to the bubbling cauldron and the group of practitioners who seemed like they were in the middle of a ritual.

 

“They are making soap,” Trey said before laughing heartily. “We could grind up the store-bought stuff and it kept the plants from being able to grow near the campus, so we used it all up.” 

 

“Really?” David asked with surprise.

 

“Yeah, it must’ve been the chemicals in it, but we ran out pretty quick!” Trey commented.

 

“We have a few hundred bars… we even have the off brands…” Harry commented as he joined the conversation.

 

“Who’s this?” Trey asked.

 

“I’m Harry, I am a shield warrior.” He announced with some hesitation.

 

“I wish we had more people with your balls! Most people don’t like being that close to monsters.” Trey commented.

 

“How many combatants do you have?” David asked.

 

“We have five teams who do the hunting and the fighting, it is about 40 people in all,” Trey reported.

 

“Any in the second layer?” David asked.

 

“Five. Me, Violet, Mavis, Kurt, and Ol’ Jorge(AN1:See bottom for details.) are the only ones.” Trey said.

 

“Ol’ Jorge?” David asked.

 

“The janitor… All the welding, repairs, and general maintenance is all done by Ol’ Jorge, you can hear his music coming from the RV back there.” Trey pointed to an old Rv that had several metal tool chests welded to the outside as well as a table and workbench that could extend, he could hear what sounded like a Latin radio station.

 

“He recorded days worth of their music, and some of the girls have taken up salsa dancing to keep in shape.” Trey laughed.

 

“It sounds like things haven’t been all bad for you guys. I am sorry to hear about Amanda though.” David replied.

 

“No… I am glad that it wasn’t her choice. When the seeds started coming out of her and she began screaming and yelling at me like I betrayed her I thought that she had sided with the monsters over her own race. That was hard to accept.” Trey told him with some relief.

 

“Most of the time there is a serious cost to giving up your humanity, if it sounds too good to be true it usually is. If it is ever gentle then you usually are becoming a slave.” David remarked.

 

“Billy! Stop shaking them so much! This is our future, you oaf!” A cat screamed at a young boy in a language only he could hear.

 

“I’m being careful! You don’t need to dig your claws into my skin!” Billy cried to the cat that was using the beanie on his head as her perch as she watched him carrying a bucket filled with fish in water.

 

“Who is in charge of your group?” David asked.

 

“I guess I am… I am the strongest fighter.” Trey said bashfully.

 

“You!?!” David asked in shock when he looked at his friend’s strange getup.

 

Trey wanted to rebuff his friend of almost 20 years but he realized that anything he said would be digging his own grave since he ironically looked similar to how he fantasized as a kid. The trench coat he had found in a strip mall and was the only one that fit him since he had recently put on so much muscle. Never would he admit that the stomach on his old coat had gotten tight after eating so many helpings of Ol’ Jorge’s bean and rice casserole. 

 

“Check this out!” Trey told him as he held his hand up and red sparks began to appear on his hands and gather before a small explosion occurred and he could feel warm air brush past his face and blow Trey’s dreadlocks in the wind.

 

“Huh? It can separate the oxygen and hydrogen from the air and create a small detonation…” David muttered.

 

“You know what it does?!” Trey remarked.

 

“Yeah, it is performing small-scale electrolysis, the reason your hand isn’t a paste is that the force isn’t directed. It is just like if you burn gunpowder out in the open it is almost harmless. Most of it is just noise…” David muttered.

 

If he had this ability, he would use a gun and caseless ammo since he could create his propellant effect. The barrel would need to be able to handle incredible pressures to avoid turning into a bomb, but the impact would be considerable. This is what he thought until he saw Trey take out the lead pipe and give it a couple of swings, he noticed an ax head had been fitted on the front of it in the opposite direction of the bend.

 

“No! No! No! No! N-” David was cut off when a burst of red flames shot out the back propelling the bent pipe forward like a rocket and driving the ax head deep into the ground.

 

“David! I tried shooting bullets out of a gun barrel I found! Do you know what happened?” Trey asked.

 

Before David could open his mouth Trey answered the question and cut him off.

 

“I can’t fuckin aim! Do you notice something missing from my face?!” He asked seriously.

 

“I thought you had contacts!” David commented.

 

“David! We have known each other for a long time! What was my favorite weapon in that game with the giant rings?” He asked seriously.

 

“The back of your hand,” David replied.

 

“David, I have changed a lot in the last year!” Trey told him seriously.

 

Being unable to help himself, he had to take a jab at him. “Enough to call yourself, Jay Trip-” 

 

“Don’t you dare finish it!” Trey then pointed at him with a mocking smile. “Don’t think I don’t remember the knight in a knight!” 

 

“Every man should fantasize about piloting a giant robot at least once. I have no shame.” David told him confidently.

 

“The advantages of having such unique parents,” Trey said as he gazed warmly at David’s mother and father.

 

The two kids were raised so closely together that Trey had spent entire months at David’s house growing up when he still lived in the city. The great thing about close childhood friendships is even a decade later you can pick them back up as they had never ended. It was nice for Trey after the exhaustion that he had endured in Boulder.

 

“I guess we are going to have to discuss plans, this is a lot of people…” David said with some trepidation.

 

“No we don’t, I don’t want it! Don’t want to lead! Don’t want to make decisions! I am done with that shit!” Trey complained.

 

“How did you even end up as the de-facto leader?” David asked.

 

“The boy scouts, the culinary club, the culture club, the gardening club, the game club, the newspaper club, the graphics design club, and the theater and art club,” Trey said as he pointed out several different groups. “It was a weekend when the forest appeared in the city, so only we were on the campus at the time when the monsters started streaming out. Ol’ Jorge took up a chainsaw and started smoking them! Don’t let his calm looks fool you!”

 

“So are you all wanting to stay here?” David asked.

 

“Look! We aren’t being attacked? Did you know we were being chased by a giant tree that just stopped when it got within a certain range of the property?!” Trey pointed out as the people were out of the vehicles and starting to congregate. “I’m not the only one with family here either, several of the students were kids from the area.”

“Hey, Trey! Oh? Who is this?’ A young woman asked.

 

She had short red hair that had been dyed as her naturally brown hair was showing at the roots and it looked like she was still wearing makeup. Eyeliner, lipstick, and eye shadow with a light mask. A short black skirt and a red shirt made up her ensemble, she was wearing laceless stylish dress shoes.

 

“Hey, Steph. This is my friend, David.” Trey told her calmly.

 

“Oh? Hello, I have heard a lot abo-” She began but David suddenly lost the ability to hear her when he felt his head turned to the side and warm lips pressed onto his. 

 

In front of him, he could see blonde hair, and nothing else since the wind was blowing it into his eyes. He missed the glare that was directed at the other woman, but he felt her breasts press firmly into his chest and her arms wrap around him like steel bars. It was so sudden and so jarring that he didn’t know what else to do but just stand there and take it.

 

What… He felt his brain moving as it had suddenly been filled with sludge and from the side, he suddenly heard the cheers of an old man.

 

“David, when did you get yourself a girl?!” Trey asked with shock.

 

“We sleep together every night, we have even talked about kids.” She stated clearly enough for everyone to hear.

 

“David… David, what have you gotten yourself into?” Suddenly his friend turned a look of concern towards his friend of many years who was standing confused in the embrace of the shorter woman.

 

“Son, we have a problem.” his dad said from the side.

 

Seeing his chance to escape this situation, he decided to slip out of Lena’s grasp so that he could face his father seriously, like the perfect son that he was.

 

“Food, right?” David said flatly.

 

“Yeah, with this many people we will be out of food in a few weeks. I told them that they could stay on your behalf.” His father replied.

 

“This will make completing the work easier, we have a lot to build,” David said.

 

“For the farms?” His dad asked.

 

“No, we are going to be doing greenhouses and raising fish. Farming is too risky and uses too much land, I realized this when I found a lake that suddenly appeared where the highway was.” David explained. “How much wire did you manage to make?” 

 

“Not much, it is a lot of work.” His father agreed. “It would take several months to make enough wire to close off a field.”

 

“Dig some pools and line them with plastic, let the water flow and cycle, then introduce fish and plants… easy and only requires water and electricity. We can have it running in a month or two at most.  I can guarantee enough food to feed everyone in both of our groups as well as other things.” David explained.

 

“How should we run everything, do we vote?” Trey asked.

 

“That would be a bad idea, only the awakened have any idea what living in a world like this is like,” David explained. “If we are both the leaders and we decide to come together, it should be easy right?”

 

“Davey, don’t underestimate government! Even a small village has its problems.” Mr. Rawlins warned. 

 

“How has the order been among your groups?” David asked.

 

“Good, all of the fighting helped us come together and the people who weren’t happy with things left to go to Denver,” Trey responded. “Most of us just want to survive at this point. Being able to walk around outside and enjoy some fresh air outside of the vehicles is good.”

 

“The people in the ice cream truck look like they are playing video games…” David responded.

 

“That is the culture club, they played anime, video games, and manga. Kurt is their leader… he might come out at some point…” Trey muttered.

 

“At some point?” David asked.

 

“They haven’t been able to turn on the generators in a while so they are all suffering from withdrawals…” Trey said and shivered at the thought.

 

“From what?” David asked.

 

“Listen closely…” Trey muttered with some reluctance.

 

He could hear something mentioning friendship and courage saving the day, it sounded exactly like one of the shows he had watched as a kid.

 

“Is that sentai?!” David asked with astonishment.

 

(AN1: This would be pronounced ‘hor-hay’ normally but they are calling him George. This is wrong traditionally but it is quite common in America, especially in rural areas like Colorado. This isn’t meant to be disrespectful in any way but it happens commonly with rednecks and phonetics. I had a French friend I played games with named Louis and I always thought it was pronounced Lewis but it was lew-wee instead...)