I don’t know what frustrated me more: the loss of the clearly-stolen squirt gun or the fact that Mason was taking the fact that it hadn’t turned up as evidence that I’d gotten upset over nothing. I knew someone had taken it. Maybe whoever took it was going to come back for it, or had slipped it into their bag after demonstrating that it was empty, but the gun didn’t just walk off on its own.

I couldn’t prove it, though, and people were right: we couldn’t stay. There wasn’t any more water here, and most of the food had been looted, stuffed into people’s bags. A few lonely boxes of pasta waited in the cupboard, and I stuffed them into the Tagon next to Cassie with ill-grace, then helped my kids into their armor.

I tried to remind myself that not everyone deserved my anger. Most of these people hadn’t taken my stuff. I couldn’t alienate two dozen people just to get back at one dirty thief I had no way of catching or punishing anyway.

“Fine,” I snarled. “I’ll take the lead. Micah, Gavin, the colonel will pull the wagon. I don’t want either of you out of arm’s reach of him for any reason. Let me get a little bit in front, first. I’ll tell you when to follow.”

Real smooth there. Totally calm and friendly. That’s me.

Carlos stuck an arm out, stopping me as I made for the door. “If you want to go first, that’s fine, but let me open the door. If there’s leafenrat out there and close, they’ll charge the first person they see. No reason for that to be you.”

I nodded, rather than speak. I probably should have thanked him, but I didn’t think it would come out sincerely.

Carlos opened the door wide and stepped onto the front porch. He did draw the attention of two leafenrats. He dispatched them efficiently, sending one sailing nearly to the street and hammering the other into the ground. The second leafenrat wailed as it struggled to push itself up on its front limbs, back clearly broken. Carlos finished it off and waited another few seconds, but nothing else came.

“Alright,” he said, stepping back. “After you.”

“Just don’t follow me too closely!” I said. “I’ll tell you when.”

I walked away from the house with tiny steps. I hadn’t been able to find a spot inside the house where no one was in my range, so I was startled when my perceptions emptied out after about 10 feet. I hadn’t been able to gauge distance very well on the playground, but 10 feet wasn’t that far. I took one more step, then called to those behind me. “Okay - you can come out, but make sure you leave at least this much distance between me and you.”

My plan, insofar as you could call it that, was simple. I hadn’t mastered my new sense yet, but big things like people and dogs and so forth were definitely noticeable in a way that tiny things like ants and worms and mosquitos were not. I now knew how big my range was, so as long as I could tell the difference between “something” and “nothing,” I should be able to pinpoint the badblankets.

Two others - the father of the teenagers, and a mother traveling with her 12-year-old - also had Draw Attention. They’d agreed to pull any leafenrats that charged me back to the group.

We’d only just entered the street in front of the house when I felt something. I held up a hand to ask the others to wait and then did what probably looked like a stupid little dance - a step this way, a step that way, right, left, forward, back - as I tried to figure out exactly where along the front arc of my range our camouflaged foe sat in wait.

“There,” I said, pointing. “I’m pretty sure there’s one about eight feet away from me, right there.”

“Alright!” yelled Carlos. “Anyone with a ranged ability, get ready. We attack the pavement on my count. Three! Two! One!”

The attacks didn’t land simultaneously. Micah’s tiny flame had no flight time, and instantly appeared where I pointed. A few other abilities arrived instantaneously, while the ping-pong-sized projectile that made up the center of a Fire Bolt and the rock a woman had accelerated with the Missile ability were part of another wave that hit instants afterward.

At the first wave of attacks, the ground snapped up, grabbing nothing. The badblanket had just enough time to realize it had caught nothing and begin grabbing at the surrounding pavement before the second wave arrived to finish it off.

I felt a swell of elation and pride. I’d really found one!

“Shit,” I heard a voice mutter behind me. “I can’t believe she really found one.”

Way to rain on my parade, asshole. I glared over my shoulder, but couldn’t pinpoint the speaker. After taking a second to check that my kids were still safely ensconced in the middle of the group, we headed out.

We were taking a different route back home, up Viridian Way. That was the route Dog Guy -

Uh, I mean Scott. I’d written his name down, it was Scott something-or-another. I could stop thinking of him as Dog Guy.

I could.

Viridian Way was the route Dog Guy Scott had taken to the playground this morning. It turned out he’d never returned home after speaking to me last night, but simply camped in an empty house and picked up anyone he could. With all the dogs to guard their flanks, almost everyone he’d spoken to had been willing to take the risk of coming to the meetup, and that meant nearly everyone’s homes were along that road.

It wasn’t the fastest route back to our house, but it wasn’t enough out of the way that I felt like suggesting something else. The thirty or so of us of had cleaned out the drinkables and a good portion of the edibles from one house during lunchtime. Getting people back to their own stockpiles was definitely more sustainable than dragging them to our house.

If Carlos, Darryl, the family with teenagers, and Dog Guy Scott had to camp out at my place overnight, that wouldn’t be the end of the world. We could get them home in the morning.

The end of the world.

My inadvertent mental pun was funnier to me than it should have been, and I tried to muffle a giggle so the crowd following me didn’t think I was insane.

Focus, I told myself.

We crept down the road, the group efficiently drawing off and dispatching the leafenrats I attracted.

We made it nearly 200 feet up the road before I sensed another badblanket, farther than I’d thought we would. I held up my hand and did my little Cha Cha Slide of Location.

“Alright,” I said. “Got one.”

“You heard her,” shouted Carlos. “Ranged, get ready!”

“Wait!” I interrupted. “Let’s try something different this time. We need to learn more about these things. Why don’t we just have one person hit it? Maybe we can Analyze it, and I’m really curious how fast it can move.”

“Yeah, okay,” Carlos nodded. “Good call. You, with Missile! Piss it off.”

The woman raised her eyebrows, but did as he said, pulling a piece of gravel from her pocket. She looked at me to double-check the location, then focused on the apparent pavement. She held up her rock, pinched between her fingers. As she let it go, it zipped off and slammed into the ground.

At the hit, the badblanket again tried to snap up around its nonexistent prey, just like the last one. Either they had poor senses or they weren’t very bright. After catching air, it sank toward the ground, flopping this way and that as if searching for something. I’d been poised to retreat, but relaxed after watching for a few seconds. This thing clearly had no clue I was there.

Missile Lady called out to me. “Get ready. I’m going to hit it again, see if I can get it to move.”

Another piece of gravel zinged out, hitting the edge of the badblanket nearest to the group. It lunged toward them and I hastily stepped out of its way.

It didn’t move gracefully. I’d been thinking of it as a flattened snake, but it moved more like an inchworm, bunching itself up and springing forward. It wasn’t slow, but not nearly as fast as a leafenrat. It might just barely be able to keep up with Cassie, but I had no doubt Gavin could outrun it.

As it neared the group, everyone who’d been holding their shots fired, and Carlos slammed it downward with his baseball bat.

I don’t know if it was watching the awkward way the thing moved, or the fact that we’d torn apart four of them by this point with no unhealable injuries, but people began to loosen up, suggesting different experiments.

Darryl wanted to try to take one out alone, and asked us not to help unless he seemed like he was in trouble. He led by spritzing it with his cayenne tea squirt gun, which didn’t provoke any reaction. Then he boldly stepped into the middle of it. The badblanket tried to grab him, but had trouble. It had to adjust its grip several times as it found new spikes. Darryl’s arms were partially pinned, making it hard for him to swing at it, but he’d crafted himself spiked kneepads and heavily spiked boots. The badblanket had a hard time getting a grip on his lower legs and he was able to kick it to death, emerging from its corpse with a whoop of glee.

“That is how you DO IT!” he yelled, pumping a fist in celebration.

Between Darryl’s experimentation and our last few fights, the guy with Analyze was able to give us some pretty decent information.

“The mouth and some weird eye variants are on the middle of its underside. No real weak points to speak of. Distributed nervous system. It can definitely change color. Kills by constriction. ”

“Like, it suffocates people?” I asked.

He shook his head. “No. It squeezes you and stops blood flow to whatever areas of your body it can reach. This could shut off blood flow to the brain, cause cardiac arrest, or just cause a pressure differential in your veins that’ll kill you a different way. If you can get out quick, you probably won’t suffer any major injuries. Maybe a nosebleed or some burst blood vessels in your eyes. If you can’t get out quickly, though, you'll be dead in a minute or two. Certainly no more than three.”

Wow. And here I’d been thinking that these things might not be that bad, since they didn’t seem to break bones. Nope. Apparently they were plenty deadly.

“These will make it hard for anyone to travel alone,” I said.

Dog Guy Scott looked thoughtful. “Do you think we could trap one?”

“Trap one? Why?”

“Well, they might be practically invisible, but that doesn’t mean they’re unsmellable. Smell’s like eyesight to a dog. If a pup knows the smell and knows it’s dangerous, I can promise you it’ll steer clear. No fancy training needed.”

People liked the idea, but trapping one was an issue. The next one we found, we tried throwing a concrete bird bath into, but it wiggled out from under it easily. A garden bench didn’t work either. Dropping a car on it was suggested, but while it was becoming obvious that our strength was growing, we couldn’t easily lift a car, even when we put eight of the adults into trying.

“What if-”

No. I didn’t want to suggest that. Did I? I mean, it would work. It would almost definitely work. The dogs would be able to smell it safely and it would definitely help convince them that it was dangerous. It shouldn’t be too risky, really.

People were looking at me, expressions hopeful. I gave them a slightly manic grin.

“What if we helped it bite off more than it could chew?”