George and Priya were gone for a while. After Micah had volunteered to help with the shields, all of the other children also decided that this was a Super Interesting Great Idea, so I tried to find ways for all of them to help. Or to “help.”

I only had one socket wrench, so I had Anju and Micah take turns unbolting the slats from sections of the roof. I found some sandpaper, and set Samar and Gavin to sanding the rough ends of the wood. This probably wasn’t necessary - they weren’t that rough to begin with - but it wouldn’t hurt anything. Cassie’s job was to carry each slat the oldest two unbolted into a stack, and Arnav got to hold a little toy bucket for Anju and Micah to drop the extra bolts in. I was a little concerned about that last one, so I quietly asked Pointy to keep an eye on his cargo, to ensure he didn’t lose any or try to eat them.

I raided our library for everything that looked slightly relevant - an Eyewitness Book about Ancient Rome, a fold-out detail book about medieval times, and basically anything that showed a picture of a shield.

More than half of the shields had a big metal thing in the center - either a disc or a point - but that wasn’t really an option for us, at least not until Tori’s prices came down. If Tori’s prices did ever come down. Most of the shields seemed to be made of multiple layers of material, and I definitely planned to replicate that. The two sections I’d claimed for the base of the shields had been load-bearing sections, intended for the kids to stand and jump and play on. The roof was made of thinner wood, but I thought I could layer the slats over our shields. If I laid them perpendicular to the wood underneath, it should help distribute any impact over a much greater proportion of the shield.

One thing troubled me - when illustrations showed the backs of shields, a surprising number of them showed the straps or grips in the center of the shield, even on the really large shields. I’d been kind of assuming we’d put the grip near the top and let it hang down off our arm. Neither Priya or myself was that much taller than our intended shields. Maybe a foot? If I needed to put the grip in the center, I wasn’t confident I could hold it low enough to see over.

Maybe it wasn’t necessary. Some of the illustrations had shown the grips at the top, like I’d intended.

The cartoonier illustrations.

After dithering a little bit, I decided to test. I got out two of my trashy plastic belts and fed them through the thin gaps between two of the top pieces of wood. I threaded my left arm through, imagined an enemy in front of me, lifted the shield protectively.

The bottom edge immediately swung and slammed me in the shins.

Oh.

I moved the belts to the middle slat and lifted it again. The shield wobbled a little bit, but it was far more stable… I just had to hold it uncomfortably low to see over the top of it.

I was still wrestling with a solution when Priya and George returned. Priya was carrying a huge pile of pillows bundled together in a fitted sheet, and George had about eight belts and two leather jackets. I was curious about how the rest of their trip had gone, but I couldn’t ask in front of George. They didn’t seem more stressed, so I assumed it had gone okay, at least.

To distract myself from my inappropriate curiosity, I explained what I’d learned and how frustrated I was that the shields were just barely too large for us.

Priya laughed. “Silly! Just switch. Little shield for you, other for me. Take some slats off, use saw. Can adjust size on that one.”

Her solution was obvious and perfect. We got some good work done during the rest of the afternoon, but didn’t quite finish before the sky dimmed and the heat started fading. We could finish the shields that evening, but now was a great time to get some points for the kids and try to hunt something.

There were a lot of people out this evening. Most of the neighborhood had been cleared earlier in the day as we cooperated to take down the rams, and it didn’t seem like everything had respawned yet. My Life Sense came in handy once again, helping our group find badblankets others had overlooked, so we did manage to get a few points.

I had tried to prepare the kids for my plans to try to hunt: I’d pointed out that we all ate meat all the time, demonstrated the use of my sling, and explained that we couldn’t go to the grocery store anymore.

It hadn’t helped.

When Priya pointed out a chubby bird picking at the ground under a tree, Anju was horrified. “Mom, we can’t eat that bird! It’s beautiful!” The nine-year-old had grabbed the end of my sling before I could get it started. By the time we’d talked her down, the bird had been flown away.

When I spotted a squirrel and started to spin up the sling, Gavin grabbed my arm, almost getting himself hit in the process. “Mommy, no! I love squirrels!”

When a stray cat crept out from underneath a car to approach us, meowing cutely, every single child turned to look at me with frightened eyes. I didn’t even try.

Honestly, if I kept this up, I’d probably accidentally injure a child long before I ever did a thing to an animal.

“Priya, would you and George mind taking the kids home? We’re not getting a lot of points right now anyway.”

“You staying out alone?” asked Priya, frowning.

“Not for long. I’ll be right behind you guys.”

Micah squinted. “You just want us to go home so you can kill the cat, don’t you?”

That kid was just the wrong combination of smart and dumb sometimes.

“I am going to try to hunt food so we can eat, yes. But if you will all promise to be very good and listen to Ms. Priya and Mr. George and go right home, I will promise not to hunt that cat.”

“Will you hunt a different cat?” asked Micah, suspiciously.

“I will find something to hunt today that is not a cat,” I promised. “If you go home, right now, and stop pestering me about it.”

Micah clearly wanted to keep asking me questions, but he knew I stuck to my deals: his silence spelled safety for our neighborhood’s feline population. Reluctantly, he let George and Priya shepherd him home.

I wasn’t really a drinker, but sometimes that kid made me think about becoming one.

The cats and dogs were safe from me today, anyway. I wasn’t looking forward to killing a real animal, and I sure as hell wasn’t going to start with someone’s pet. I couldn’t rule it out, eventually - there wasn’t that much actual wildlife in the neighborhood - but for now we had other options.

I scanned the area, doing my best to move quietly. I would have taken just about anything, just to get this over with, when a soft brown bunny poked its nose out from under a bush a house away. It took a few tentative hops forward through the slightly overgrown grass and started nibbling at a dandelion.

This was ideal, I told myself, trying to ignore my own internal voice shouting about how adorable it was. I started spinning up my sling. The rabbit sat up at the noise, perking its ears up high. I activated Assisted Strike, loosing the slingstone, and then closed my eyes. I didn’t want to see the stone hit.

The noise of impact followed soon after. I waited a moment, then trudged forward to inspect the rabbit’s body. From a distance, I could see only that it was no longer upright, and had slumped over backward.

When I got close, I could see that it was dead.

Extremely dead.

Like, “part of its head is missing” dead.

I tried not to inspect the gore around the rabbit’s instantly fatal wound. Inside things were outside. I could see things meant to be decently hidden away. Let’s leave it there.

I gingerly tried to wriggle a hand under the rabbit’s body.

The rabbit’s leg kicked out into my wrist. I couldn’t help it: I screamed and fell on my ass.

It’s a ghost rabbit! I thought wildly. No. Ghosts don't have bodies. A zombie rabbit! Maybe a lich rabbit!

I was clearly thinking nonsense. After a moment, the electric shock of panic faded into a lukewarm wash of embarrassment. The animal was clearly dead. Nothing was going to live through that. It had moved, though. I frowned. Did that… maybe just happen sometimes when you killed things? Like… reflexes or something? The idea sounded vaguely familiar.

Tentatively, I poked it.

There was no repeat of its former mimicry of life, and I picked it up, trying to hold it far from my body so any… stuff… dripping out didn’t fall on me.

The body was still warm, and while its fur was slightly tangled and matted, it was amazing how much it felt like I was holding a living animal.

One of my good friends had a pet bunny when I was little. I would have honestly preferred to kill any other wild creature, but guilt had pressured me into hunting the bunny when it arrived. I couldn’t in good conscience say it wasn’t a clearly superior option to a songbird or a squirrel. I wasn’t even sure you could eat songbirds. I mean, all animals were made of meat, right? So… probably? You’d probably have to kill a lot of them, though. A single robin was probably two chicken nuggets. Or… maybe less? I remembered being startled by seeing pictures of wet birds, how little volume they actually had when their feathers weren’t all fluffed out.

By contrast, rabbit meat was a real thing that people I knew ate on purpose. I’d never eaten it myself, but this was Real Food.

I wasn’t attacked on the way home, through no virtue of my own. It seemed that enough people in our neighborhood were trying to get points that monsters were thin on the ground.

George was waiting outside with a couple of knives. He waved when he saw me. “Priya asked me to wait out here for you. We noticed you didn’t have any good knives in your kitchen, so she sent me to get some from across the street. Grabbed a cutting board while I was there, too.”

“Yeah, thank you.” I thrust the rabbit corpse at him. “Here you go.”

He took a step back. “Uh - I don’t know how to… I’ve never hunted, and, um…”

“But you were a Boy Scout!”

“So? Weren’t you a Girl Scout?”

The pair of us glared at each other, as if the other might be hiding some secret prowess with butchery. We didn’t so much stop glaring at each other as slowly slide into a shared resignation.

“Shit.” I said.

“Yeah.”

“Give me a knife, I guess.”

The pair of us desecrated the corpse of that poor damn rabbit. It was messy as hell. Blood kept leaking and even squirting out at us as we compressed the pitiful mangled remains.

I was grateful for the face shield I’d added to my helmet, let me put it that way.

“How does it have so much blood?” I asked, incredulous. “It wasn’t that big.”

“I don’t know!” George said.

I shook my head. “I think we were supposed to get the blood out first, before we started trying to cut this up. I know that’s a thing with like, deer and stuff. Bigger animals. But maybe it’s a thing with smaller animals too.”

He grimaced. “I think you’re right. It’s a bit late now…”

We’d managed to cut off the rabbit’s head and get most of its fur off its body before another one of our ameteur cuts punctured both the stomach and the intestines. Our mishap added to the already-unpleasant sight and smell. It had already been a struggle not to throw up as we’d worked, and the scent of stomach acid did not help.

“Okay,” said George. “That’s it. We’re done. We tried this the hard way: we failed. I’m out. Time to cheat.”

There was a sudden ghoulish contortion of the corpse, then a nightmarish rush of organs and bones was swept to the grass on the side of the cutting board. Left behind was a small pile of fairly normal-looking meat.

George looked tired. “Couldn’t do that twice in a row.” He caught my questioning look. “Cleanse is… really flexible. It seems to rely on what you think isn’t right. So I just tried to think really firmly about meat and fat being good, and everything else being bad, and…”

He gestured at the gruesome pile next to the cutting board.

“Handy,” I said.

I picked up the cutting board and we headed inside.

Priya lit up when she saw us. “Nice!”

George grimaced. “Kind of. I figure we’ve got maybe 1,500 calories of meat here? Assuming it’s not nearly as fatty as chicken or beef. I ended up using Cleanse to butcher it, and it would be a stretch doing that ten times a day.”

“That little?” I flinched. I had assumed it was a lot more, but looking at it again it was clear that I’d been optimistic. The amount of meat there looked like a single meal for two or three adults. “I’d have to hunt a lot of small animals each day if that’s only 1,500. I don’t think there are that many around here.”

Priya clapped her hands, meeting our somber faces with her cheerful one. “Don’t look so sad! You did it. You can hunt! If we have to leave, we’ll leave. Farms to the west, lots of trees to the south… we can go.”

Leave home? I glanced around my house. Its walls and roof had sheltered us, and there were so many useful things within its walls. But if we didn’t find another solution to our food issues soon, Priya might be right. Our neighborhood wasn’t far from the edge of town. They’d built another subdivision to the west of us a few years back, but beyond that it was just farm fields. Mostly cotton, but not entirely. I knew for sure there was a big Pick-Your-Own farm/orchard about fifteen minutes down the road. I had no idea how far that was in miles. Three? Ten?

We’d be leaving a lot, though. Shelter. Beds. Community. We might have to, but I wasn’t in a rush. There might be other answers.

Besides, if we left home, how would Vince ever find us?