By mid-May, Beth was ready to allocate her first stage improvement. She was slower than people who’d levelled up only a single skill, so she’d had plenty of time to hear about it from her network. Every twenty-four levels, the skill changed and expanded in scope. The improvements to the common skills were mostly known, but no-one spoke about the accelerator skill. Beth probably wasn’t the first, but it was being kept very much under wraps. She’d had to wait to find out, and it had been excruciating.

  She stepped aside to assign that final point. Levelling experience would not continue to accumulate until the level point was assigned, so no-one found it odd that she would do so immediately. She opened the menu, clicked through… and instantly deflated. The skill now additionally changed the levelling points gained from passive skills from barely anything to almost nothing.

  Good to know passive skills were even contributing at all. Beth had never noticed.

  Beth told herself, again, not be greedy. It was still amazing skill. The real power would come in the long run. And it hadn’t even been the worst case – the skill hadn’t simply maxed out. That had happened, she’d heard. Some of the most amazing and useful skills had reached level twenty-four and then just stopped improving.

  Back to work.

  The allotment clearing team had been temporarily diverted to help with the potato harvest. The very first of the super-earlies from the big commercial farms were ready, just in time to restock the rations. Everyone had been on-edge about that after they reclassified flour as a luxury. The supps helped alleviate the fear of starvation, but real food was still a relief.

  “How’s living in the high school?” Jumpy asked Gwen, as they turned over dirt and raked through it for potatoes with their hands. It was a lovely day, the sun warm without being oppressive, and the work was new enough that they were all still pleased with the change of pace.

  “Good,” Gwen replied. “Not everyone has claimed their spots, so there’s plenty room. We have a nice lot of skill users who’ve stepped up and made it a right proper home.”

  “You have empty spots?” asked Silent. “They aren’t giving those places to other people?”

  Silent was becoming an increasingly inaccurate nickname. He’d never become enthusiastic about the job itself, but he’d relaxed and began connecting with the rest of the group.

  “Not yet,” said Gwen. “There’s talk. Let some people sublet. But more people don’t like that. They like that only allotment owners are allowed on the grounds.”

  “I suppose with them re-opening Greenmouth,” said Cranky, “there isn’t really as much call for properties.”

  “People are actually moving to Greenmouth?” asked Jumpy in disbelief.

  “They’ve fully cleared out all the zombies, you know. All those people still stuck in those ‘temporary shelters’ need somewhere to live.”

  “I know, but still,” Jumpy replied. “There can’t be any jobs there.”

  “There aren’t any jobs here, for most people,” Silent pointed out. “I’d be tempted if I didn’t have this gig. Three-bedroom house, no mortgage or no council tax for the two years? Sign me up.”

  Jumpy put his hands on hips and leaned back into them, stretching out his chest and shoulders. “They could give me the house for free and I still wouldn’t want to go.”

  “You just think it’s haunted,” taunted Cranky.

  “Oh, shut up.”

  Some twenty minutes before the end of the day, Theo called them all together. He did not look happy.

  “I’ve been asked to share a prospect with you all. I’ll start by making it clear that none of you need to do this. It’s been offered to existing employees first, but if we don’t fill up the numbers, there are plenty of other people who would be thrilled to have the opportunity, you know.”

  Was this finally it? It sounded like it might be.

  “Opportunity for what?” asked Cranky with an appropriate amount of suspicion.

  Theo sighed and consulted the small slip of grey paper. “The military has determined that we can no longer tolerate the threat of infected on the mainland—”

  “Have zombies learnt to swim?” interrupted Jumpy.

  “No, not that anyone’s discovered anyway,” said Cranky, which was probably not as reassuring as she’d intended.

  “Are they going to bomb the place?” asked Silent. “Do we have the fuel for that?”

  “Maybe there’s some sort of skill,” suggested Jumpy.

  “But how would that create any sort of opportunity?” Gwen asked.

  “If I can finish!” said Theo.

  Everyone quieted down apologetically.

  Theo started reading again. “—and will be working to clear the port of the menace. In the interest of the public good, and with all appropriate reverence and care, we will salvage essential supplies—”

  This was finally it. It really was.

  “Wait, they’re just straight up looting the mainland?” asked Gwen.

  “What do they want from us?” asked Jumpy. “Zombie bait?”

  “I suppose that what happens when you don’t have an army or police to protect you anymore,” said Cranky. “Your neighbours swoop in like vultures to pick your body clean.”

  “It’s just infected left,” pointed out Silent. “Why shouldn’t we take it? It’s just going to waste otherwise. We should have started months ago, when there was still food we could have grabbed.”

  Cranky leaned back to consider that herself. “Rice and canned goods and such should be fine. It hasn’t been that long.”

  “Nah,” said Silent. “The survivors have already eaten it all themselves. It’s been ages since they had any food supplies.”

  “If they had time before the got infected.”

  Theo pushed into the small silence. “—proper records will be maintained, and all rightful owners will be properly compensated when the situation stabilises.”

  “Once the situation stabilises!” repeated Cranky in disbelief.

  Beth agreed. If the situation wasn’t considered stable already, she didn’t see what would change it.

  “Who even are these rightful owners they’re planning to compensate?” asked Gwen.

  “I mean, there has to be some family member in some other area that didn’t get overrun,” said Jumpy.

  “Do you think the inheritances will just waterfall from one will to the next until they find someone alive?” asked Silent.

  “There isn’t some grand international archive of wills,” objected Gwen. “Pines isn’t going to know who the inheritances belong to. The heirs probably don’t even know.”

  Cranky snorted. “Even better. If you die without any inheritor, then everything goes to the state. And funnily enough? That’s the same if your inheritors can’t prove anything.”

  “There isn’t a state. Not anymore.”

  “Even better,” said Cranky. “It doesn’t belong to anyone. We might as well take everything before it goes to waste.”

  “What is Pines asking us to do, anyway?” Gwen asked Theo.

  Theo gave up on reading and summarised as shortly as possible. “They want us to be the salvagers. Military kills all the zombies. We go in and loot.”

  “Huh,” said Silent.

  They all took a moment to consider that.

  Eventually Cranky asked, “What’s the pay?”

  “The pay will be … generous,” admitted Theo.

  “Better be,” said Jumpy. “If they want people to volunteer as zombie bait.”

  “How much exactly?” asked Cranky.

  “Thirty ceeps per expedition,” said Theo. “But Pines has decided that participating is a high-stress activity, so civilian participants will be restricted to once every two weeks.”

  Thirty per day was a lot. Sixty a month was terrible.

  “If we accept,” said Cranky, “Does that mean we will be military employees? Will we have to give up this job and become part of them?”

  “No,” said Theo firmly. “To both. You’re still civilians, and you still work for me. You get the day off on the day of the scavenging, and the day after. Other than that, it’s business as usual.”

  Three hundred a month, roughly. Not a fortune, by any means. But a significant amount.

  Beth didn’t contribute to the conversation. For all the time she’d had to think about it, Beth still hadn’t made up her mind. Or perhaps she was just lying to herself. She had chosen skills that would be valuable while scavenging. She had converted all the extra tokens. She had even gone further in debt to order fruit trees.

  She wouldn’t be taking any unnecessary risks. A careful reading of The Book didn’t include any mention of scavengers dying. And she had The Book itself. Once she volunteered, it would give her more predictions about her own chances in plenty of time to withdraw. She had already decided on this path, way back when she had first read about it.

  Beth wondered what she was going to tell her father. She realised uncomfortably that her first thought was to flat-out lie. Claim it was part of some scheme to help Peter. She wasn’t considering telling her father the truth – that she was seriously considering putting her life in danger to clear the debt he had gotten her into.

  Beth realised with an abrupt start that she didn’t just resent having to clear the debt. She resented that she had to cater to her father’s ego when she did it. Even more, she resented that her father prioritised Peter so much that bringing him up was a virtually guaranteed way to win the argument. She was doing the work, saving the family, and she had to pretend to be helping Peter to get it done. Because the only person her father ever showed any consideration for, was a family member who was doing his best to pretend they didn’t even exist.

  She could do it, she knew. It wasn’t any more humiliation than she’d already swallowed in previous situations. After all, she wouldn’t be doing it for her father, would she? He didn’t care. Even if she completely cleared the debt, it would be purely to make herself feel better. Beth decided in that instant that she wasn’t going to bother. She just wouldn’t explain herself at all. It would be the birthday test again, but this time it wouldn’t hurt her if he failed to notice.

  “If you’re interested in participating,” said Theo, “I’ll be in the meeting room for a half-hour before we set out tomorrow, and we can submit the paperwork. Once again, there’s absolutely no reason you need to do this.”

  Beth wasn’t the only person to join Theo in the little room. Cranky was there as well.

  “Look,” said Theo. “I know the official line is no danger, great opportunities, vital assistance to the island. But we know that’s bullshit. Why?”

  “I need the money,” said Beth. “The allotment job isn’t enough. It isn’t just me I need to look after. We’re a family of five. And we’re in debt. More than just what I spent on seeds, I mean. If I can just pay that extra bit more, we’ll be positive every month instead of negative.”

  “You shouldn’t—” Theo cut himself off.

  Beth could imagine what he intended to say. She shouldn’t endanger herself. She shouldn’t be responsible for the whole family. She shouldn’t have let herself get into that position in the first place.

  This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.

  None of that mattered, and none of it was Theo’s business.

  “And you, Helen?”

  “I’m just in it for the thrill of it.” There was a beat before she finished impatiently, “I need the money, too. Why else?”

  “This job isn’t enough?” said Theo.

  “My boyfriend—” Cranky cut herself off. “Is knowing an official requirement?”

  Theo looked more surprised than was kind to Cranky – Helen, Beth corrected herself, a little ashamed herself – but he didn’t seem tactless enough to question her relationship.

  “No, it’s not,” he said instead. “I apologise. I just wanted to see if there was any other solution before you commit to this.”

  “Believe me, I’ve tried everything,” said Helen. “I’ve even done some home brewing to supplement this job. But every possible way of making money has five different people trying to make money that way.”

  “I guess I can’t stop either of you,” said Theo. “But think about it carefully. Remember that you can pull out at any stage.”

  They both thanked him and didn’t change their minds. They were shepherded through rounds of training that consisted almost entirely of sitting through dry lectures on uncomfortable chairs. Beth wondered if the strategy was to bore the fear out of everyone. At the end, they were given another chance to back out. Beth remained committed. It would be okay. It would. It wasn’t like she was being asked to kill infected herself.

  Beth was one of the first groups sent to assist the military. Her dual skills made her an excellent candidate, and she was positioned as being one of the forwards. Not forward of the clearing team, of course. Those would all be military. But forward of the rest of the civilians. Most of the other volunteers had strength or speed skills that would be of more use in the actual looting than in facing infected.

  On the boat trip over, the civilians and military stood as far apart from each other as they possibly could. Beth drifted over to the person who would act as her partner, Sebastian. Helen had been assigned to a different tutorial expedition, and there was no-one present she knew from more than that mild bond from suffering through lectures. Beth held unto the railing, watching to see if she could spot the approaching shore.

  After looking at her clenched hands, Seb said, “The clearing team is good at their role. They’re well trained, and they all have the good skills.”

  “I know,” said Beth. “I— this is just ridiculous of me. Did you know, I haven’t seen an infected in real life yet? Just on screen.”

  “That’s certainly going to change,” said Seb.

  “Yeah.”

  Too long and too quickly, they arrived on the mainland. It should have been familiar. Beth had spent many hours walking those streets and visiting those shops. But the scars of looting and old fires distorted everything into unfamiliarity.

  The boat slowly travelled up the coast until it reached a private pier. They’d be starting in the most expensive neighbourhood, with the least damage. The military had already cleared the area of free-ranging infected. Now it was time to start scavenging.

  The process had been explained to them. The military would break open the building. They’d use a taunt skill that would pull any infected out into the open, even during the day. They’d shoot them. Only then would the support team do anything. Beth’s job would be to sort through goods and ferry them to the boat, no more. In a way, it would be even safer than the allotment clearing.

  Beth fiddled with the unfamiliar gear as they waited outside the first house. The military laid down a tarpaulin to catch the falling bodies and designate the kill box. Between that and the civilian team, they rolled out a ludicrous looking little fence, only one foot high. That was the line. If something went wrong, and an infected reached that line, Beth’s job would be to use her ‘Sovereign Sphere’ skill to push them back. Seb was to use his repelling skill on the fence itself. In theory, either of them could be successful alone, so it wasn’t like it all came down to her. In theory, no infected would even get that far for it matter anyway.

  Beth checked her ear-protection as the clearing team aimed their weapons.

  Crash.

  A couple came out through the empty doorway – no, she couldn’t think of them that way. Two infected came out. Beth had seen them on television and even tried to facetime Uncle Alex. She already knew they were creepy. In real life they were considerably more unsettling. They didn’t quite look like normal humans. They didn’t quite move like normal humans. They didn’t smell like normal humans. The hairs on every part of her body tried to rise and protect her.

  Once the infected were in position on top of the tarpaulin, the clearing team fired, almost shredding one of the two bodies. Some sort of skill was cast, and the other body jerked where it lay on the ground. A soldier approached closer and delivered a finishing shot. Then a moment of silence while the detector checked for any further signs.

  “All clear.”

  It was over.

  Beth sighed and pushed the hearing protection to hang around her neck. As they’d promised, she hadn’t been needed. It had been fine.

  “The do-nothing partners!” said Seb, holding up one hand for a high-five. “Don’t worry, though, no hetero.”

  Beth returned it with a laugh. It was stupid, but it did help her feel better.

  Beth forced herself to approach the bodies. The first job of the support was harvesting the tokens. Not to keep, unfortunately. They’d be turned over to the team leader and then to Pines. Each member of the team was paid in ceeps and had the right to exchange a full two hundred ceeps for a token later, but that was all.

  Another of the support team pushed past her to reach the body first. He removed the token but then went off to the side to wash his hands extensively with a jug of water and a small sliver of soap. After a glance at his expression, Beth decided to nickname him Sulky.

  Beth tried to be sympathetic. The others hadn’t been desensitised to handling the bodies of infected the way she had. But that was exactly why she knew that as soon as someone pressed past the idea, the infected weren’t particularly unpleasant to handle. It was something on the scale of handling fresh raw chicken. Sulky was cleaning his hands as if it was raw chicken that had been rotting in the sun for days.

  Serves you right for pushing me out the way, she thought uncharitably.

  They were allowed to get started in the kitchen while the military checked the rest of the house. It took a moment, but they slowly adapted to the smell. It was past the worst, anyway, and subsiding into mere earthiness. None of them were stupid enough to open the fridge or the freezer. Instead, they carefully picked their way through the kitchen cabinets.

  “I still can’t believe they’re actively telling us to go out and loot people. What is the government coming to?” asked Seb rhetorically.

  “This area’s been abandoned since the very start of the infection,” replied another support member she mentally dubbed Ponytail. “The only ‘people’ are zombies and corpses.”

  “So?” asked Seb. “There might be an evacuee somewhere who called this place home. Beth, here, is an evacuee. She has a place out there.”

  Beth shifted a little. Seb had used the politest ‘evacuee’, rather than even ‘refugee’, let alone the nastier slurs. And Seb wasn’t giving away any secrets. Not with the obvious evidence of Beth’s accent. But still, she would have preferred that he hadn’t drawn attention to it.

  “It’s a grand circle. We take this person’s canned tomatoes,” said Ponytail, holding up the can for emphasis. “Someone else takes Beth’s canned tomatoes, someone takes theirs’, and on and on until this cosmic canned tomato has returned to the person who bought it.”

  “Do you even have canned tomatoes at your place?” Seb asked Beth.

  “You know,” said Beth. “I think we did.”

  It was one of those things, wasn’t it? It was almost as cheap to buy a set of four as it was to buy a single one, and they kept for ages. There were eternally a few in the cupboard, waiting for a purpose.

  “Canned tomatoes are not high priority,” interrupted Sulky officiously as he finally joined them. “We’re looking for potatoes, organic brown rice, dried peas, lentils, popcorn…”

  Beth tuned out the rest of the list of crops that still had some possibility of sprouting. She most certainly knew it better than Sulky.

  Once they’d cleared that house, they continued down the line of mansions. Each house was surrounded by walls as high as they were legally allowed. Most were boarded up and bare. No infected and at most some canned food and milk powder in otherwise immaculate kitchens and pantries and storerooms.

  Then they came to one with six cars still parked in the driveway.

  The military tried to be cautious. They used infected sense repeatedly to try and nail down exactly where all the infected were. They made use of the extra setback provided by the long driveways to extend the kill zone. But Beth later thought that too much of their experience was Greenmouth – an area where people had either fallen fast or evacuated successfully. Not an area where groups that had time to accumulate and fortify before becoming infected. When some twenty men boiled out the door, the gunfire was dispersed and insufficient to even disable one of them.

  Before she could even blink, the wave was reaching that silly, symbolic fence. Beth heard an order through the communications in her ear, and perhaps the training had been good for something after all. She used her push-back skill without conscious decision.

  The skill now forced them back a full five meters. It didn’t help as much as Beth had mentally expected it too. The infected might not be able to sprint, but five meters wasn’t very far at all. They were so close that Beth could imagine that she could reach out and touch them.

  There was an outpouring in her ears. Swearing. Complaints. Inarticulate prayers. Beth did her best to ignore it. What felt like a moment later, she had to push them back again a beat early, not waiting for the order. The next time, she was a beat late. She’d never used this skill so often, so close together. It took more mental concentration than she was confident she could give.

  “Get it together,” demanded the security leader. “Concentrate on the rightmost only.”

  Now subject to intense fire, the designated infected finally fell. Then the second from the right. Beth pushed back again.

  It was working. She just had to hold on. Keep do what she was doing. Not leave it too late.

  After the next push, three more fell. Fifteen remaining.

  She regretted her level assignment. If she’d ignored accelerator, she would have reached the next stage already. It wasn’t just that the push back would have been a meter further. It would also have had an element of stun. It would all be so much easier with a few seconds’ pause. That extra brief moment to think when nothing was moving.

  Eleven.

  Beth was exhausted. She had reached her limits, but she couldn’t stop. If she stopped, they’d be overrun.

  Eight.

  Beth’s whole body was aching, and her vision was starting to swim.

  Five.

  The pain became less real as her spirit seemed to pull out of her body.

  Two.

  Only the certainty that this was the very last time she’d need to do it allowed Beth to cast the skill a final time.

  None.

  As soon as the last fell, and without waiting for the all-clear, Beth moved to the bushes to throw up. She was done using her skills for the day, perhaps even for the month.

  Sulky called out to her, “Elizabeth, you still have a job—”

  “Leave it, Kenneth,” said the leader of the clearing team. “She’s done enough.”

  Once the tokens had been extracted, Seb came to her and handed over a water bottle. Beth rinsed her mouth and took a few sips. The acid lingered at the back of her throat, and she wished she’d thought to scavenge some toothpaste.

  “Thanks,” she said.

  “Feel better?” asked Seb.

  “Not really.” Beth laughed. “I thought we were going to die. I thought my skill was going to fail, and we would have been infected before your skill could take effect.”

  Perhaps it would be more accurate to say she’d forgotten about Seb in the face of the infected. She’d been working entirely on an instinctual need to keep them as far back from her as she could.

  It hadn’t been that dangerous, she lied to herself. Seb would have been there to save us. The Book didn’t even bother to mention it, after all.

  “It didn’t come to that,” reminded Seb. “We made it. Let’s go get some loot.”

  Was he so calm because he was braver than her? Or had he just not realised how close she had come to failing entirely? Beth let Seb help her to her feet, and they returned to the house. The rest of the team certainly seemed to be acting like nothing concerning had happened.

  As she passed the tarpaulin holding the infected, she realised that the infected were all men. Beth couldn’t decide if that was because they had all been single, or because the women had been sent off somewhere else with the children. Somewhere out there, there might be entire extended families of widows and orphans, who would never know all the male members of the family had just been shot.

  The house had been stocked for an apocalypse that the stockers hadn’t lived long enough to experience. It was filled with things that had been illegal to obtain before the infection, and impossible afterwards. It was so well supplied that Beth wondered if they’d had access to the future as well. But if they had, it hadn’t been enough. They’d died anyway.

  The clearing team had radioed for the military to send another boat to pick up the untouched stockpiles of weapons and ammunition, while they were busy moving the canned and dried foods into the first boat. Beth didn’t do much more than open boxes, but no-one pushed her on that.

  “Look who didn’t believe in banks, either,” said Ponytail.

  They turned to see him holding a large stash of paper money in a zip-lock bag. Ponytail shook it a few times before dropping it back into the cooler it had come out of.

  “Not going to take it?” asked Seb. “Very law abiding of you.”

  Taking money or any luxury items was strictly on the forbidden list, but it wasn’t like they were going to get strip-searched when they returned. Not yet anyway. Not even with the increasing rumours of skill-assisted smuggling and thefts.

  Ponytail shrugged. “Well, it’s worthless now, isn’t it?”

  Everyone stopped what they were doing to look at him.

  “Come now,” said Ponytail. “When was the last time anyone was willing to take currency from you?”

  “I’m sure it will have value again when things go back to normal,” said Seb, but he didn’t sound sure at all.

  Beth could see the disbelief in the faces of everyone else. It was no longer just Beth living alone with the knowledge. Everyone knew that they were never going back to normal. The bank accounts weren’t just temporarily inaccessible. The stock markets weren’t just paused. Currencies and cryptocurrencies alike would never be traded again. Private pensions would never pay out. Assets or properties outside Pines were just waiting to be scavenged by some other team, just like them. Beth had mourned the loss of her own future, but now she thought of the pain for people who’d lost their entire past. Decades of work; wiped clean.

  With the abundance they’d discovered, that was the last house they visited. Seb helped Beth back to the boat. She didn’t know if it was fear, or exhaustion, or something more, but she was still staggering when they got off again, safely back at Pines. The leader took one look at her and escorted her firmly to a skill-healer. It was the first for her. Beth hadn’t experienced anything serious enough to justify the cost before. It was certainly less intrusive.

  “Skill fatigue,” he diagnosed. “Eat extra calories and go to bed early. Don’t use any more skills for forty-eight hours. Pace yourself for the next two weeks. And next time, stop before you get to this point.”

  Sure, thought Beth. I’ll just let the infected swarm me, shall I?

  “Any long-term concerns?” asked the leader.

  “No,” he said, sounding disappointed. “Not unless she does it again. She’ll be fine once she’s had a chance to rest.”

  The leader took her all the way home in a vehicle identical to the one Alistair had been driving back during the elections. Beth didn’t comment. She also refused his offer to escort her all the way to the door. This was not how she wanted her father to find out what was going on.

  “I’ll excuse you from your normal job for the rest of the week. You aren’t on schedule for salvaging again for the next two weeks, so you don’t have to worry about that. Be assured, we will have a system in place by then to make sure something like this never happens again. You have a landline installed, right? Let us know if you need anything.”

  Beth thanked him. She would have protested more about being put on involuntary sick leave, but all she wanted was her bed. She noticed that he didn’t remind her that she had the right to pull out at any time. She supposed that counted as a compliment.

  She pretended she was fine as she climbed the stairs and slipped down the passageway to her room. She had vaguely expected nightmares, but her exhaustion was an unintentional ally. If she had any, she didn’t remember them.

  Forty-eight hours, however, gave her too much time to think. The pain she had suffered had taught her a valuable lesson – the limits of her daily skill use weren’t at all where she had thought they were. Her regret had been aimed in the wrong direction. Her problem hadn’t been assigning skills to acceleration instead of her active skills. It had been in short-changing her progress. She had been playing it unnecessarily conservatively in her daily practice. A bit more work, and she’d start taking real advantage of her accelerator skill. This wouldn’t happen again.