I did really have something like a plan. Well, really, I had a series of plans, many of which I expected to fail. As soon as I got the kids started on securing water - step one in any plan - I tried starting the car. All I got out of it was a strained noise that died off almost as quickly as it began. I wasn’t sure if that was due to whatever they’d done to “ruin wiring” or “neutralize combustible materials.” I imagined my dad, several states away, was probably elbow-deep in my parents’ car, trying to isolate and repair the damage done. He had a shot at doing that; I didn’t. I could probably identify a few major parts if I lifted the hood, but most of it was a mystery to me. I vaguely remembered hearing that diesel motors could run on almost anything, even cooking oil. If that was true, that might be helpful… if I knew what sorts of cars had diesel motors. Semis? Not a lot of those in the neighborhood. Maybe pickup trucks? That seemed plausible, but I wasn’t sure. Oh well. That was for Future Meghan to figure out. Current Meghan needed to focus on what was in front of her.

So, trash the “raid the stores” plan. And postpone the “locate a landline” plan. It was possible they’d slagged the telephone wires when they messed up the electronic wiring anyhow. For now, we had only what was contained in the walls of our house.

Step two was weapons and protection. I wrestled open the child lock on the Danger Drawer, where I kept the matches and sharp objects. A quick test confirmed that the matches weren’t working. I imagined a lighter would - didn’t they just use flint and steel to make sparks to light the oil? Er, the lighter fluid? Was lighter fluid oil? I didn’t have a lighter, but if I could find one, I could probably make a spark, at least. There was a house a block away that regularly had what I assumed were smoking parties, with a thick funk of cigar you could smell from the street. They’d have a lighter for sure, but I was sure there were other houses closer that had lighters. Where was I going to build a fire anyway? Problems for later.

I grabbed my nicest 8” chef’s knife and shut the drawer. I wrapped the blade in an old shirt to protect it (and me). There was plenty of space in the garage with my husband’s car at the airport, so I set it down on the ground, grabbed the sledgehammer, and slammed it down on the handle as hard as I could.

This produced a slight scuff on the handle and a feeling of disappointment.

Part of me thought perhaps I should give up on this plan and just use the sledgehammer as a weapon. But the sledgehammer was heavy, and slow, and that creature outside had looked fast… and to be blunt, I wasn’t very strong. If I didn’t hit the monster on my first or second try with a sledgehammer, I doubted I’d have enough force to truly harm it on subsequent blows. I kept at it, although I gave up on the hammer, instead using a combination of hand saw, utility knife, and chisel to remove the handle. I then unscrewed the wooden handle from an old rake and used the hand saw to cut a slice down the middle. The resulting slot was a little narrow for the knife. I traced the handle - and its holes - on a sheet of paper, then wedged it into the slot. It was tight enough that it almost held by itself. I put the paper over the wooden pole and matched it up to the knife, then drove two nails through where the holes ought to be, then flipped it over and pounded the other ends to the side. I sort of felt like I had gotten away with something when the nails actually went all the way through. True, they were narrower than the holes on the knife, but… still. Copious amounts of duct tape to cover the nail points and help keep it all secure, a little. Tah dah.

Honestly, it looked better than I expected. It felt a little unbalanced, but I didn’t have a great idea for how to fix that right now.

Three more smaller knives and a few more sacrificial garden implements later, and I had three more makeshift spears. The latter ones went more quickly. Partly, due to experience, and partly because the sledgehammer actually shattered the handles on two of the other knives. Micah’s spear was quite similar to mine, while I sawed a pole in half to make weapons for Gavin and Cassie. I’d rather they have the long pole between themselves and an enemy, but I doubted they could control such oversized weapons. Without control, they’d be more of a danger to their siblings than the monsters.

I grabbed a utility knife and duct tape and headed indoors, setting the newly-crafted spears gently on my bed. My target was a big plastic jar currently full of magnet blocks. It had previously held Cheez Balls, but we’d finished those and It was such a nice big clear jar, I thought it would make good toy storage. Dumping the toys to the ground, I cut away most of the bottom and the top, then sliced the remainder four ways, leaving me with four curved sheets of plastic. More duct tape affixed these to the bike helmets, and another thin strip along the edge would keep plastic from slicing us. They wouldn’t hold up to much punishment, but I felt better about it than having no protection for our faces at all.

For the first time in my life, I wished I liked motorcycles. I would give a lot to own a sturdy leather biker outfit and a full-head helmet right now.

My next destination was the kitchen. I would have to open the freezer for a moment to grab what I’d need, so I made the most of it, also grabbing a couple half-eaten tubs of ice cream and a few ice cream sandwiches. I took two of the latter for myself and raised my voice. “Ice cream for lunch, kids! Eat as much as you can!”

My words brought Gavin and Cassie almost immediately. Both were soaked from head to toe, and if the situation was different I’d have worried about water damage to the house. How do you get that soaked filling up cups and bowls from a sink? They had managed to fill several dozen containers, though, so I’d give it a pass.

“Did you really say ice cream for lunch?” Gavin asked with barely-contained excitement.

“Yes,” I answered with mock sternness. “And I need you to eat as much as you can! The power is out, so it will melt soon and I don’t want to waste food.”

Micah, my rules lawyer, entered the room more sedately. “That doesn’t sound like a very healthy lunch, Mom.”

Well fuck you too, buddy! No.

There are monsters, and you’re trying to talk to me about the food pyramid? No.

Just fatten up as much as you can! It’ll help keep you from starving to death later. No.

“It’s a welcome party for Pointy Turtle?” I tried.

Micah gave me a skeptical look.

“If you don’t hurry, they’re gonna eat all the Cookie Dough,” I added.

Micah looked concerned at this, but stubbornly stayed put. I sighed, pulled him around the corner, and lowered my voice. “Listen. I know we usually talk a lot about vitamins, and nutrition, and healthy eating. And those are good things to think about, when we have a grocery store full of food and we can buy anything we want. Right now, we just want to eat as much food as we can before it goes bad, so we don’t waste it. We’re going to figure out new ways to get food. Those ways definitely exist, and we will figure them out, but it might take us a little time to get good at them. So we’re going to do what we can to make the food we have last as long as possible. Okay?”

“Okay…”

Mollified for now, he grabbed a spoon and headed over to his siblings. I sighed, unwrapping one of my ice cream sandwiches as I sat on the kitchen floor. I wasn’t too surprised that Micah was so stressed out. All the kids were bright, but he’d always been particularly practical, and he’d never dealt well with the idea of any potential danger to himself or his family. There’d been a few years were no one in our family could travel anywhere without Micah checking to see if there were volcanoes there or not. When my sister had honeymooned in Hawaii, she had done so over his fervent objections, and he still seemed to consider her a bit of a reckless daredevil.

His stress did present a dilemma, though. Even if the kids did have to fight, I wanted to get a better idea of what they’d be facing first. I wanted to go out the first time alone. I had been planning to give Micah instructions on what to do if I didn’t make it back - get Cassie and Gavin in the wagon, give them things to throw at any monsters, and book it as fast as possible to his former teacher’s house. It was summer, so she had a good chance of being home, and she didn’t live too far - just around the corner. I wished I’d ever gotten to know the neighbors across the street. The two houses on either side of me housed married couples who worked full-time. They wouldn’t be home, but I had no idea about the people right across from us. We’d lived near them for ten years and only ever exchanged a handful of sentences. To be perfectly frank, I couldn’t even remember their names. In normal times, I found this slightly embarrassing but not really an issue. Now, I wished I’d put more effort into being social. Maybe then I’d be sending three youngsters on a 50-meter-dash across the street, instead of a 200-meter-dash around the corner.

It was an awful plan. It was just… slightly less awful than leaving three children home alone in the middle of an apocalypse.

I considered the odds of me actually dying to one of those weird rodents fairly low. Was getting the instructions from me personally worth the freakout it would clearly give him?

Maybe not.

“Hey Cassie, can I borrow Pointy for a little bit? I will give her back.”

Cassie waved a spoon at me, dripping ice cream on the floor. I winced, but ignored it. “Mmmhmm! She is on the couch so she does not get messy,” Cassie said.

“Thanks, pumpkin.”

I carried Pointy upstairs, snacking on the second ice cream sandwich as I went. I filled the turtle in on my backup plan for the kids, and asked her to pass it on to them if needed.

“Agreed. But, do your utmost to ensure it is not necessary. There are too many variables and risks in that.”

“Definitely,” I said. “Anything else you can tell me about those enemies specifically? Did they feature in your recordings?”

Pointy shook her head. “No. The previous Maffiyir race was amphibious but preferentially aquatic, somewhat similar to your frogs in appearance. The first opponents to appear for them were, essentially, oversized aquatic grasshoppers.”

“Well, that sucks. Not keen on finding out they can spit acid or something when they’re melting my face…” I opened the door to the walk-in attic and started hauling out an oversized trash bag.

“My assumption is that they are as they appear - aggressive small animals. I saw no evidence of particular intelligence or hidden abilities in the initial combats of the last round.”

“Hope so. I’ve never killed anything before. Never really fought anything before. Never really trained with a weapon before. I went to a naginata training camp one weekend with some friends in college, and that was fun, but it took up a lot of time and I never went back. I… wish I remembered it better.”

I dragged the trash bag downstairs and opened it up. Inside were all the things we almost never needed in sunny Alabama, but kept for visits to family in the north around Christmastime: snowpants and winter jackets. I’d been thinking about what we could do for protective gear, and this was the answer I’d come up with. It wasn’t really armor, but that thing wasn’t that big - hopefully, if it got its teeth on me, it would come away with nothing worse than a mouthful of fluff. It would be hot to wear, but not as bad as you’d expect - the insulation worked both ways. My body would heat it up, but it would shield me from a lot of the outside heat in the short term, and I didn’t plan on an extended expedition.

“Any thoughts on abilities?”

“Yes. From what I can tell, the proposed Fire Bolt ability does just that - shoot a damaging bolt of fire, with some sort of kinetic damage component. There’s another ability - I don’t know the name of it - that simply produces flame. It appears to do much less damage, but it can still be used at range and is far more flexible. It could be easily used to start fires for cooking or perhaps even used directly for cooking. I would attempt requesting an ability called something like ‘Conjure Flame’ or similar. I expect it to be of use both in and out of combat.”

I nodded. “What about healing? Anything better than Healing Touch? I can’t imagine we’ll fight perfectly every time, and I doubt we can afford the down time to heal naturally.”

“I think Healing Touch is your best bet. I saw no evidence of ranged healing abilities.”

I grimaced. That was too bad. I was hoping to find ways for the kids to contribute without getting close. Perhaps it could be used mostly following combat? “What about for me? I’d like something to keep enemies off the kids. If it made them easier for me to fight, too, that’s a bonus.”

“There seems to be an ability that slows the target, which would be useful in both applications. It does not, however, have the emergency-use application of the starter ability Draw Attention. That could potentially be used to pull an enemy away from your children even if it was already upon them.”

“But it doesn’t help me much on my own.”

“Correct.”

It wasn’t much of a choice, really. I couldn’t not take Draw Attention. Even slowing an enemy down wouldn’t let Cassie outrun it. Slow sounded useful, but maybe there would be another chance to take it in the future. I felt sort of sick, though. I wasn’t the most coordinated person in the world. I wasn’t a fighter. Even in video games, I had always selected the magic using classes - the ones where you could stand back and carefully consider each move. I wasn’t comfortable being right up in the teeth of a monster, even a digital one.

I didn’t have much choice but to become a fighter now.

I just hoped I could do it.

Pointy peered at me. “I haven’t yet isolated any other abilities I think meet your criteria.”

Time to stop stalling, then. “Alright. Interface: ability options. I select Draw Attention.”

You have selected: Draw Attention: restrict one target’s focusable senses, such as vision, on your person. Duration: variable. Confirm choice?

“I confirm.” My fingertips quivered as panic danced through my body. No turning back now.