Cross a dinosaur with a mammoth, give the mammoth natural armor plate, now put ugly gray skinned lizard like humanoids on their backs. If that isn’t enough put partial metal armor on the assholes and equip them with bows and spears. That’s what I saw coming towards me out of the setting sun to our west across my twenty acres of good farmland, that we had just planted in winter wheat. I had only gone out for a stroll, for some reason I had been keyed up today and I just couldn’t concentrate on my work. So thinking to clear my head I had come here, it was lucky that I had but who the fuck wants to see something like this?

I started screaming my head off when I spotted the enemy that was only six hundred feet away and coming in fast with too many reinforcements behind them. They may have been scouting us for days. The open ground of the farm field gave them the best chance to make a mass charge against us, what with those massive animals. We had made a lot of short barreled three inch mortars during the past eight days. They were mounted on turntables and had gears for elevation. Each outside fence line got at least two of them. Once we put one in place it was test fired to get its range and marker flags were placed outside the fence. I was now regretting my own cowardice regarding explosive shells. I dropped a premeasured charge down the tube, put in the cannonball, primed the pan, aimed as best I could for the estimated center of the attacking forces and pulled the string triggering the flintlock action. I might not have hit anything but I spooked them. The two people patrolling this fence line were shooting steadily, the damn fools were standing out in the open and appeared to be trusting in their armored vests or maybe they didn’t realize their own danger. I screamed at them. “They’ve got bows get behind some sandbags you idiots.” They looked startled, turned to look at me and then ran to do what I had told them. We had little sandbag forts all over the place.

Thankfully someone else was operating the other mortar. I fired mine off again. I was hoping that this was the only point of attack when the first mammoths hit the fence. Surprisingly it stopped them; I had been thinking I was going to die. The fence was helped no doubt by having twice as many uprights and far more crosspieces than was the norm but the fence posts did bend alarmingly. At least ten of our people had quickly showed up and they began firing in volleys. Steve was controlling their rate of fire. He was our chief firearms instructor besides everything else he did. The first wave of mammoths had hurt themselves; by hitting the fence and didn’t look happy about it. But a second wave of elephants had just arrived and they were simply leaning against the fence which then began to bend over even further. A rain of arrows had been going on but their shooting wasn’t very accurate, maybe our noisy weapons were scaring them? The monsters were taller than our fence before it was bent; some of their riders began to jump over the fence by simply leaping from the mammoths’ backs. My fire magic wasn’t very powerful yet but I could do some things with it. I launched two blasts of flame that swept along almost thirty feet of fence line. It looked really impressive, and maybe I even scared the enemy and their beasts but at best I caused only second degree burns to any exposed skin.

I fired another mortar round and then the Priest thankfully showed up. Bless me father for they have sinned, now shoot their asses! The 105 was gone and had been replaced with six gunners, each firing their own little 20mm cannon. They were firing at targets bigger than elephants and at close range too, they didn’t seem to miss. Clyde stopped the Priest broadside to the fence. The vehicle is basically an open steel box that sits on top of a Sherman tank chassis. There is no overhead cover, the mammoths were far taller than the Priest and our enemies had bows. We started to take casualties. I could hear yells from the gun crew. I fired off two more bursts of flame trying to sweep the backs of the mammoths and distract the archers there. Then I climbed into the box on the Priest and I took over a vacant gun while straddling the body of the former gunner. I am such an asshole. The little cannons were killing the mega elephants in short order and without those beasts the lizard men could not so easily get over our fence which gave us time to kill them with fifty caliber rifle fire.

The fence slowed them, the mortars spooked them, the bolt action cannons killed the elephants, and Hawken rifle fire killed the lizard men.

With all the big monsters dead and the lizard men dying while not seeming to getting anywhere with their attack they finally began to retreat. But we kept shooting and perhaps only forty of them got away, I don’t know how many we killed. We’ll have to count the bodies and see. Now it was time to help the wounded and pay the butcher’s bill.

Out of twenty combatants we had six seriously wounded that might die. My magic was exhausted and for medics we only had Peggy and Gloria. Which I guess on second thought is pretty damn good; I imagine that there are a lot of people in this world right now; that would be happy having available both a nurse practitioner and a nurse. I could only pray that my magical energies would recover quickly and that my healing ability had magically improved.

Dusk was coming and we had to secure our perimeter. Steve went out with a detail making sure the dead were really dead, that sometimes took the use of a bayonet. I had to wonder if that was the right thing to do or if I could do it to a human attacker but I still didn’t stop Steve. Mack started repairing the fence. A steam powered air compressor was brought out and used to power our carbide cut-off tools. Mack cut out the damaged posts, dug holes for the new posts, put posts in the holes, filled the holes with gravel and once he had the new posts almost perfectly vertical he called me over to fuse the stones. By that time I had enough magic that I could deal with that small chore. With living and probably pissed off enemies out there; repairing the fence became extremely important but was it more important than our own wounded? We had six posts that needed to be replaced. The power posthole digger attachments on two of our tractors made very short work of that so I was able to fuse all the holes in less than a half an hour. Once I was done I left the rest to Steve and Mack and I hurried to our infirmary which was in our sole triple wide modular home. Grace was in bad shape. She was on my “I can tolerate her” list. Gloria and Peggy were standing next to me when I dumped all my healing ability and magic into her, then I passed out.

I woke up with my head splitting while puking onto the floor.

DING

Due to your stupid, reckless and profligate use of your healing talent, when you were magically and physically exhausted you moron, you nearly killed yourself. Because of that act you have greatly increased your own reservoir of magical power. Despite knowing only a few spells (what are you doing just sitting on your ass and farting?), your magic levels have gone up slightly because of the amount of sheer power you now possess, you unbelievably lucky son of a bitch.

Furthermore, since you recklessly exposed those close to you, to such a powerful and desperate flow of magic they have now been altered. They will soon become human-cat hybrids and grow ears and tails; they will also end all of their sentences with the sound “Nyaa”. And if you believe that you’re an even a bigger dumb-fuck than we thought you were. So get your mind out of the gutter hermit boy. Gloria Bennett and Peggy Barnes have both acquired level one Healing Magic. Grace Lee has acquired level one in both Fire Magic and Earth Magic. Those types of magical skills are most in tune with their personalities, mental traits and former professions.

Don’t do this again! Don’t just dump healing magic into someone with no plan and next time leave a little energy for yourself, if you had done this anywhere else besides on your own land you would have died. And more importantly, I would have lost the bet for when it’s going to happen. By the way, Tuesday of next week doing this two or three times is perfectly okay with me or maybe you can try putting a pound of black powder down your shorts and hit it with a burst of your Fire Magic just to test your new one hundred percent invulnerability to explosions and heat, I can guarantee that you have it. You can trust me.

Oh, what a nice message. After puking and reading it, I passed out again.

The next morning I once more regained consciousness. Peggy was looking at me. “Hi Boss.”

“Hello; how is everyone?”

“Alive but they wouldn’t have been if you hadn’t have been here. Somehow you saved Grace and changed both Gloria and I into healers. Grace is not only healed now but she seems healthier than before but the others will need a little more time to fully recover unless you want to do to them with what you did to Grace.”

“Maybe in a day, I might try something but right now I’m too whipped. Is the compound safe?”

“Yeah, the fences are fixed, the enemy bodies have been looted and the useable meat harvested from the mammoths. Now they’re trying to figure out what to do with all the corpses.”

“Okay, I guess I’ll get up, eat something and then see how I can help.”

“Boss when we got our new powers, we got a message saying that the only reason, that we got them is because our idiot Boss nearly killed himself expending his energies to save Grace. You got to take care of yourself or we’re all screwed and not just the injured person lying in front of you. You stay in bed and I’ll bring your breakfast here, then you can leave; Healer’s orders.”

I nodded my head and laid back down, I still felt awful.

Breakfast was pancakes and sausage with coffee. I would survive. After I ate, I went out to talk to Mack who looked completely exhausted but when he saw my grumpy looking face he perked right.

“Hey Boss, I’m glad to see you up and moving. At first, I thought you were a few cards short of a full deck, like Clyde did, what with buying those tanks but I’m ready to kiss your feet at this moment and I’ll never doubt you again. I wish we had a hundred armored vehicles now and more of those big steam engines too. It’s a good thing that you insisted that we keep their boilers hot or they would have never made it in time.”

“Yes, but we’re going through all of our firewood and cooking oil far too fast. All the petroleum based fuels we have, don’t do squat anymore not even coal. I expected that to happen because of how the warnings were worded but it makes things harder for us. Hell, not even methane burns anymore but I’m not even sure that it’s being produced when things decay in our newly altered world. The only slight saving point we have is that our wood and organic oils seem to burn hotter, cleaner and last longer than they used to. But we’re still in trouble.”

“What do you think we can do about it?”

“You heard my ideas before, I still think that we need to learn how to harness Fire Magic and produce the needed steam that way. My work in creating a fire pin for our rifles has given me an idea. I just have to scale it up to a much larger extent for our boilers. Do you any ideas what we are going to do about all those bodies out there?” I pointed beyond the fence. “We’ll be all day and then some digging holes with our two working tractors.”

“I was honestly hoping you had an idea. My only thought is to cut up the mammoths and drag them to that ravine on the northern edge of your property. We can use those air powered chain saws your shop people built to cut them into pieces.”

“That ravine is a long ways from here and we can’t be letting our people go out there unprotected. Get together with Clyde and then you two have to figure out a way for the Scorpion to do the job. We won’t be sending out anyone in an open tractor or on foot. There are still a bunch of those lizard men out there and I expect that they are looking for revenge.”

“Vince we need walls, admit it you only had me put up fences because it was the only thing you could get in a reasonable amount of time and my company wasn’t busy.”

“You’re stating the obvious Mack but you forgot that fences are also cheaper than walls. On top of that, without the fences you built, I suspect that we would be dead many times over by now and not just from this latest attack.”

“How about we start bringing in more stone from the gravel pit? I’m talking about a whole shit load of stones. We build giant boxlike forms; dump the stones into them and you fuse the whole mess together?”

“It’s too far to the gravel pit, we need too much gravel, and we don’t have enough people to keep our compound and any workers at the gravel pit safe at the same time. However I got an idea about building some walls. It’ll take a lot more work right here on my own lands or maybe some magic but it should be far safer.

The problem I face is that I have a lot more than one thing on my plate right now. First thing we need are repeating firearms for every adult here. I was just going to make my first attempt today to create one but I’m exhausted. Next thing we need is a magical heat source for our steam engines. But I’ll probably postpone that and work on the walls since we got enough firewood for now.

I’ll speak with Glen about making more body armor for people. I just wish I had been able to buy some more readymade stuff before they stopped selling it to civilians. We need the Sherman working as soon as is possible and equipped with a breech loading cannon firing grapeshot. Face it we have too much work to do. If we can have a week without another attack like last night we should be good but this next week is going to be precarious.”

“Shit, I’ve been seeing too many of those damn night fliers out when I have late watch. Do you know what they are?”

“I thought you knew; they’re owls, damn big owls. They’re not cutesy little wise old owls but big nasty night flying hungry predators. The funny thing is that I’ve been seeing them flying in formations of four or five, I thought owls were solitary predators. I think our lanterns are keeping them away for now but that’s another drain on our oil.”

“Damn it, now we need anti-aircraft guns.”

“I already thought of the same thing and it’s on the to do list, while I can’t do any magic right now I can do some planning so I’m going back to my office and prepare for the work I’m going to attempt tomorrow.”

“Okay, I’ll get with Clyde about the bodies.”

Before heading home I went to the shop and I talked with Glen about all the projects we had going on. It turns out that there were some problems with the Sherman conversion and now he was actually further ahead with the Hellcat. He wanted my permission to stop working on the Sherman and concentrate on the Cat. I gave it. The prototype fifty millimeter cannon, was almost ready for testing and that would go in the Hellcat if it didn’t blow up. It shouldn’t, it was overbuilt and heavy as a result. We had separate bags filled with powder and fifty caliber balls to use with the cannon.

We still had a lot of black powder but I would need to start on that powder mill as soon as I had time to do so. I’ll probably blow myself up but I’ll make damn sure not to do it on a Tuesday!

Miles away people huddled scared in their basements. They heard the battle last night and took hope that someone was out there and still fighting the horrors that had come into their world.

I was working on my own version of a magical language. I had taken symbols used in physics, chemistry, mathematics and blended them with binary code and a bit of computer language for if-then situations. It was admittedly an ugly cumbersome kludge but I was not enough of a mathematician or scientist to do any better. My only hope was that it was more important what I believed the symbols stood for than what they might actually look like to someone that was more knowledgeable and smarter than I am.

My test rifle was a Mauser Karabiner 98K, the reason I chose this rifle is because it’s my least favorite. I know Mauser rifles are supposed to be great and the ones I own do function perfectly. I just don’t like the name. Every time I hear someone say that word, I want to say Gesundheit! All the other military rifles of that same era have better sounding cooler names. My favorite rifle is the SMLE, the magazine is detachable and it holds ten rounds, enough said on that subject. But the Springfield has that big ass cartridge that can shoot for miles, which is pretty cool too. I used a permanent marker to trace all of the symbols I wanted to engrave tomorrow onto some scrap pieces of metal. Then without using magic I used an air powered engraving tool to practice what I needed to engrave on the rifle, bolt and firing pin. I needed the practice; I needed lots and lots of practice. I soon discovered how much I missed bright indoor lighting.

I got so frustrated that when I had a crazy notion, I dropped what I was doing and grabbed one of the few incandescent light bulbs I still had in my house. I looked up a few symbols in my books and gently engraved them into the metal base of the bulb. I had regained a little energy so I directed a small heat spell towards the tungsten filament inside the bulb. It glowed! I increased the power, it got brighter. When it was near the brightness of what I thought a one hundred watt light should be like, I pumped magical energy into the bulb to sustain the heat spell on the filament. It worked I am a genius, I am a master, I am, the bulb burned out, crap!

It took me three more attempts to get it right. Now I just have to figure out how to turn it off. That took making a simple metal shroud to cover the bulb and redesigning the spell I used to make it light it up in the first place. The shroud was easy; I used aluminum foil but the spell redesign took a couple of hours. I fixed it so that when the spell detects metal covering the bulb it instantly stops feeding heat magic to the filament. Removing the shroud and the spell resumes the flow of heat as long as there is any magic left stored in the bulb. It really doesn’t take much to heat up the filament so even the tiny amount of energy I had pumped into the bulb should be good for several hours.

I felt eyes watching me. I turned to look behind me, it was Jennifer. “Hello Jennifer.”

“Hello Boss, are we going to have electric lights again?” There was a real hopeful tone to her voice.

“This bulb is not lit by electricity but by but magic now, I needed better lighting to work on my repeating firearm idea.”

“Oh,” Her shoulders slumped down and she looked far too depressed for me to deal with it.

“Tell you what Jennifer I need to practice my engraving. Go to the shop and in the storeroom there you should find cartons of rough duty one hundred watt light bulbs. Bring me back a whole case of forty-eight of them, we’ll also need some aluminum foil to turn them off and that’s in the basement.”

She ran off looking quite happy. So I did bulbs for the rest of the day and it was decent practice. I only had four symbols to engrave unlike the firearms which would be a lot more work. I could do one bulb every five minutes, they didn’t take very much magic and I was feeling stronger. One thing I noticed when I was engraving symbols and simultaneously feeding my magic into them, was that they would slowly take on a slight orange glow. That evening every one of our thirty-two adults got a bulb, the infirmary got two, the shop got two, and the rest went to critical locations around our compound. I guess I’ll have to work on auto headlights, floodlights and spotlights next.

I finally got back to practicing the long set of symbols needed for our firearms. Before bed I checked on our five wounded, and I found that they were slowly recovering but I would try and speed up their recovery tomorrow.

Everyone seemed to be in a better mood the following day. Most people had crafted makeshift lanterns to carry and protect their light bulbs. Evidently the night flyers tried something last night but the added illumination seems to have scared them off at least according to James and Clyde. I didn’t spend as long with our patients as I had intended to. I helped them but I was asked to do what everyone felt was more important, more light bulbs. They wanted floodlights, spotlights and auto lights. My people were now afraid of the dark. I was greeted by a tearful Jennifer and boxes of the bulbs. I don’t know where they found so many. I hope no one went outside the fence but I had heard what I think was the Scorpion this morning.

I didn’t get all the bulbs done that they had brought me but I did change the enchantment slightly, hopefully the lights will now reveal anything their radiance falls upon, even the invisible. I pray that this will solve our Night Stalker problem. I told this to Jennifer and she seemed even more ecstatic than before. She wouldn’t even listen to me when I told her that I wasn’t even sure the new spell would work or not, because we had no way to test it.

I charged everyone’s personal bulbs and went to bed. I had honestly kind of enjoyed the new darkness; the stars looked beautiful at night and now light pollution was back again. I am such a fuck up.

That night, people from miles around looked out from their homes and saw small search lights pointed at the sky. They did see fearsome monsters flying in the beams, but the light gave them a little hope.

The Hellcat was working, and so was its new cannon; which made me feel better, now Glen needed to get the Sherman running. I spent two hours with our patients and worked an hour on exterior light bulbs. Then I went back to working on the Mauser, it only took me three hours since I had gotten so much practice in engraving. I also had the luxury of being able to engrave deeper in comparison to the thin shells of metal on the light bulbs, which I had been barely scratching. I hadn’t really needed the power tool for the bulbs but I needed the practice for the firearms.

Steve went with me to our makeshift range when I tested the rifle. I fired the gun and nothing happened.

“Damn Boss, this was only your first attempt. I’m sure you’ll get it to work next time.”

I looked at him, grinned and worked the action. “This time I’ll try it with a loaded rifle.”

I fired all ten rounds from the magazine, I think Steve called me a dirty name but I couldn’t hear him over the sounds of my rifle shots. I handed him the Mauser when I was done. “It’s yours if you’ll clean it. I went back and I did another Mauser which only took two hours and then a Mosin Nagant, I was out of Mausers, Gesundheit!

I handed out the rifles, charged some light bulbs and went to bed. I was woken up by gunfire. I grabbed my own Hawken rifle and headed out the door. I saw flying shapes but they weren’t owls, they were bat like and very large. I did an appraisal while running, Night Stalker Bat Hybrid. Oh fuck me.

This wasn’t a battle with clean lines, they were within our perimeter and unless you had true sight or they were illuminated by the new lights they were essentially invisible. I had given Mack the Mosin Nagant and James had the other Mauser. They along with Steve and a few others had true sight. The bats were thankfully not powerful enough to carry off their prey. So they had to get down on the ground to feed, and on the ground they were slow and clumsy. I stumbled on one bat feeding on Janet Cooke. I drove my bayonet through its head which broke its teeth lose from her shoulder. She was gasping for breath. I pumped a quick heal into her which would hopefully hold her for now and then I stood guard over her body. I saw a bat flying by; I aimed, led the bat by a little and fired. Its wings folded up and it hit the side of a house. Another bat was flying by but it was just out of reach of my bayonet. I roasted the son of a bitch. The Priest arrived on the scene and it was festooned with the new lights. All six gunners had more than enough illumination to see their targets. But they had to crouch low in the steel box to get enough elevation on their guns to hit the flying monsters.

Next to arrive was the Hellcat. It too had lights and its crew started firing as soon as it got on the scene, later I heard that the crew only hit one bat but grape shot blew that one bat to pieces.

Multiple fenced in areas might slow down attackers but it slows down the defenders too and made coordinating our defenses beyond difficult.

I don’t know what scared off the bats. We were just holding our own against them. I certainly didn’t do much. I might have killed five of them. We didn’t lose anyone but a lot of people had large chunks torn out of them and without Peggy, Gloria and I, they would have died. The three of us stayed up all night long with our patients. By morning they were stable but we were all exhausted. It was a combination of basic first aid and our new magic that did the trick. We needed more medical supplies and more people; which I was sadly coming to realize but I fucking didn’t want more people. Hell I didn’t want the ones already here.

My family’s and my former employer’s betrayal had left permanent deep scars in my mind. I recalled those first few prisoners which I had helped to regain their freedom, they were people that had been screwed over far worse than I had ever been, so there was no way I could not help some of them when they were homeless and from there this whole thing blossomed. I could act like a nice guy but this whole situation was grating on my nerves, especially when I saw the happy families here. Shit, I made a commitment to keep them safe and while no one else will live up to their commitments to me, I’ll keep on doing my best. I needed to talk to Clyde, Mack, Steve, Glen, James, Grace, Peggy and Jennifer.