Declan looked at Crowe, “That’s a fair assessment,” he said with a grimace. He looked at the Sarah in the doorway, “You wouldn’t happen to have a shotgun by chance, would you?”

Her eyes widened at the question, “I . . . don’t l-like guns.”

Crowe rolled her eyes and Declan nodded, “That’s what I thought. Lock up, we’ll take care of her and be right back.” Declan shook his head, “No, I think I can see something that I can use.” His vision suddenly went red, and he knew his HUD battle overlay had kicked on. He hadn’t used this before, but there was no time like the present to get a feel for the thing.

He looked at the woman and now saw a Tag over her head that read as immature abomination. A bar glowed green at her knees indicating that she was at full health. The bar, he noted did not indicate how many health points that she had. So there was still going to be some guesswork unless that information popped up when she took damage. He looked at the left side of the hallway and his eyes fixed on what he hoped would be his next weapon.

He had hoped it would be there, since one existed on his former world. There was a fire axe and a fire extinguisher, both read as weapons on his screen. He ran over and smashed open the glass case holding the axe. He’d expected an alarm to go off, but nothing happened unless there was a silent alarm ringing somewhere far away. He ripped it from the case and held it like a baseball bat. As he did so his HUD read:

Fire Axe

This is a multi-use tool. It can be used to chop through obstacles such as doorways or as a weapon. The axe does 10 health points of damage if the blade edge is used, plus strength bonuses are applied. The blade will apply Bleeding to the target until the blood flow is staunched. The pick end will provide 5 points of Health Damage and apply a bleeding DOT, but cannot be staunched without proper medical treatment. Strength bonuses only apply if a full swing is used. Proficiency with the fire axe will increase damage and DOT duration.

You currently are at 0% proficiency with the fire axe. Would you like to expend Expy to increase your skill? YES/NO

Declan didn’t even think about it and hit the YES button. The response made him sick to his stomach. Headnet is currently unavailable. We apologize for this inconvenience and will provide ten extra Expy to your account in recompense. He grit his teeth. He didn’t know what it was about these abomination things, but they seemed to play hell with Headnet and Mother’s connectivity to him. On a lark he opted to see if he could turn this to his advantage in some way. He hit the YES button again and received the same response. He noted that his part of Headnet now stated that he was owed twenty Expy. He set his HUD to hit the YES button once a second, and then turned back to the battle before him.

The woman at the end of the hall did not look completely alert. It was as if she had been hibernating and had just been awakened by a strange noise. Her focus was off, but he could tell that she was still deadly however, and had no intentions of treating her like a drowsy bear. As far as he was concerned she was a rabid Grizzly.

Unfortunately, Crowe saw a sleepy squirrel and sprinted passed him firing both pistols as she went by him. He’d hoped to keep this quiet and not draw more attention to themselves, hence his going for the axe as opposed to letting Crowe put one in the thing’s ear. Surprisingly, both of Crowe’s shots struck the multi-limbed woman in the eyes. Her health bar dropped to half and she stumbled back as they rounds struck her. Unlike the creatures they had faced on Crowe’s world the one here were different. The seemed incomplete, and did not have the same strengths that the others had. Declan wondered if they were even the same things. For all he knew this was the result of a demonic summoning gone awry or an airborne alien virus. Similarities did not mean connections.

He rushed after the screaming Apocalyptic Valkyrie. He swung the axe in an overhead arc and brought it down on the top of the woman’s head. Somehow he’d used the pick end, and it drove into her skull like a needle through fabric. Her health dropped to zero, and he withdrew the axe. Crowe gave him a satisfactory wink. “Cut off head. Then chop up.” She began to reload her expended cartridges. He noted that he’d received a notification saying that he’d earned 25 Expy

He knew why she had said that. There were to ways to make damn sure something was dead. One was to kill it with fire. The other was dismemberment. It was gruesome, but it was pragmatic. He began the grisly work. Declan noted that his proficiency with the axe was climbing quickly, and that he was almost at 9% from just the one chop and the subsequent blows that severed her limbs. He didn’t know why, but he had the feeling that he needed to investigate the apartment she had just come from. He was pretty sure that the little Asian lady wasn’t going to get back up and attack them.

He shook the reddish but green tinged goo from his axe’s blade and stepped in though the open door. The apartment was a mess. Furniture had been knocked over, lamps were broken, as were some chairs that he could see, and the walls looked like wasps had begun building a nest over them. He went from room to room, and found one other body that looked to be cocooned. It was enmeshed in a green gel, the body floated inside, suspended in the gelatin like a piece of fruit. Declan could see that the man inside was undergoing some sort of transformation. His face has fish-like features rather than a cephalopod like the woman in the hallway. His eyes had grown huge, were round without eyelids, and were as black as coal. Similarly, his lips and lower jaw had taken on a protrusible form and he swore he could see gills forming.

Declan didn’t hesitate, he whipped the axe over his head and swung with all of his might. The blade struck the gel, causing it to ripple as it bit into the infected man’s brain. His HUD flashed for an instant and declared that he had achieved an insta-kill. He received another 30 Expy. Declan wondered if everyone was gone because they were also undergoing the same process as Sarah’s neighbors down the hall. It made sense. If they were all in this state then all he needed to do was go from apartment to apartment and he could clear them out until he reached a two hundred yard distance that he would need to reestablish contact with Mother. He wasn’t even sure if he could leave until he did so. He swept the apartment one final time, and when he was certain that it was all clear he stepped back into the hallway.

Crowe, he noted, was waiting for him at Sarah’s door. Her guns were returned to their hiding place, and he wondered if she had proper conceal and carry paperwork for this world. He rested the axe over his shoulder and walked over to her. “What’s going on? Why aren’t you inside with her?”

Crowe snorted, “She too scared-ed to open door again.” He could see her disdain for the woman written across her face in big bold letters. It struck him that your counterpart could be more annoying than a stranger might. It was when you saw things in yourself that you didn’t think were there that you got upset. He himself could not conceive of any Sarah being capable of doing something that he wouldn’t be able to deal with. She was simply too amazing a woman to ever disappoint him via a perceived personality fault.

A quick rap on the door and he could hear Sarah refuse to open up. “I told her to go away. I don’t want to deal with you. It isn’t safe out there.” Declan inhaled slowly and counted to ten. He didn’t want to sound aggressive or upset. “Look, Sarah, we know you’re scared, and you have every right to be, but we are here to help you. We are going to take you to a safe place. A place where there are no things looking to make you into one of them; I promise, we can and will get you there.” He knocked on the door again with light little raps. “We just need to come in and talk for a few minutes, but we really don’t have a lot of time left before we have to go. Believe it or not, everything here will be obliterated in about half an hour. We’d really like to take you with us.”

He turned to Crowe. “These people have been infected by something, but I don’t think it’s the same as it was on your world. The things on your world hurt you to look at them, these ones don’t do that. Can you clear these apartments out while I talk to her? I’ll come to help as soon as I can. We need to get a distance of about 200 hundred yards from all of these things to get clear.” Declan began running the numbers in his head. A story was ten feet. There were three feet in a yard. That meant that a story was just over three yards in height. Ten stories would only equal thirty yards! They could kill everything in the building and still not be far enough away! He needed to rethink everything.

“Crowe, stay here. There’s no point in doing any more damage. I’ll need to rethink this whole escape plan.” He faced the door again. “Sarah, change of plans. We need to get inside now, and we need to leave five minutes ago. I am really trying to be patient, but there is more riding on this than just you, me, and Crowe here. So, with all due respect if you don’t open the door I’m afraid we’re going to have to break it down and let ourselves in.” He let that sink in and then continued, “It would be really bad if we were forced to do that and more of those things suddenly woke up and came looking for you. So, please open the door.”

He heard the bolt being slid aside very slowly, and then the chain fell and the door opened enough for them to go in. Crowe slammed the door shut and began locking it back up behind them. Declan surveyed the room. It was almost identical to his Sarah’s place, with the exception of some brand names on her electronics.

“Who are you people? Why does she look like me? What is going on?” Sarah began to vomit a torrent of questions that didn’t seem to end. They were legitimate things any sane person would ask in her situation, and she would receive answers to all of them eventually. Right now he had more pressing concerns to attend to; like getting back to the home world so that he could get to where he was supposed to go.

He opened his HUD and ran a search on travel. He noted a fast travel menu pop up and he looked it over. He had no idea of where he was, but it looked like he could see where he had come from. His problem was that he needed a starting location for the fast travel to work. His landing readout hadn’t provided him the full location. It had read, Earth 24,862,048XA ----***** full designation not available. Without that designation he could tell it where to take them from. He was in trouble. He had ten minutes left on his timer, and no way to escape.

He chewed his lip. What was it his dad used to say? When in doubt, wing it. He supposed that he could just punch in a random number or letter or two and see what happened. The worst thing would be they’d be stuck here and die.

The fast travel menu popped open before him. It gave him a list of options, but he just looked at the travel from and travel to options. In the empty bar labeled Travel To: He punched in 0.001. That was his home world, or at least he hoped it was. The Travel From bar worried him, but he filled it with 24,862,048XA *****. There were five empty digits that needed attending, so he just picked a letter and a few numbers so that when he was done the bar now held the following sequence: 24,862,048XA85R26. When the screen didn’t any problems he figured that it was a viable code. He had no idea of what would happen when it tried to grab them from that location rather than his proper one.

That dilemma solved he turned to destroying the place. All sapient life had to die. The problem was that those things were in what looked to be life pods. He doubted environmental changes like dropping everything into the oceans or ripping away the atmosphere would do what he needed done fast enough. He needed something big and dramatic. He hoped there was a towel nearby because they were going to need it.

“Sarah, grab your cat. We are leaving right now. Crowe come to me!” The women obliged him, Crowe listening without question and Sarah hesitantly obeying. She had grabbed her cat when a loud voice could be heard outside.

“People of Earth. You had been given two hundred years notice to evacuate this planet as the Intergalactic Confederation of Intelligent Species had designated this spatial area to become the location of an intergalactic garbage dump via black hole generation on this date in your history in exactly one minute of your time. We respect the fact that you claim sovereignty over this quadrant, and expect you to file a complaint if you are unhappy with the results of our restructuring of your solar system.”

Declan hit the Fast Travel button and watched as the world went black.