Chapter 143 - Rotisserie Kaiju

  It turns out that determining what to do with a giant dead chicken carcass that’s had zombies chewing on it was a little more complicated than it looked.

  First off, folks wanted to be sure there was no risk of infection. There’s a whole lot of zombie movies out there in the old world, and pretty much everyone had seen at least one version, if not more. Since the real-world zombies we had did pass along zombification to anyone they killed, folks had some real questions about whether or not that was passed on by way of a virus, or something else.

  Fortunately, we had a necromancer on hand who could answer some of those questions. I knew, via my crystals, how the zombie stuff worked. It wasn’t a virus; that was for movies and TV. Real zombies (as weird as it sounds to say those words, still) made others into zombies by way of the magic that animated them. It was a feature of the spell, not an infection. If a zombie killed someone, it turned into a zombie.

  Once I pointed out that both Alfred and I had been bitten by zombies on one occasion or another and hadn’t turned, that made folks feel a lot better about the whole infection risk aspect of stuff.

  Hours later, we were all eating enormous slabs of roasted chicken as it came off the fires. There was no way we could cook and prepare all of that meat quickly enough. A good chunk of it was going to spoil no matter what we did.

  “The smoker is working,” Clay said as he rejoined Kara, Alfred and I where we sat munching on bits of kaiju chicken. He'd used a couple dozen pounds of salt from our stockpile to help preserve some of the meat, and it was now hanging in his jerry-rigged smoker. “Got over five hundred pounds of meat curing in there.”

  “And it’ll last a while?” I asked. I’d eaten jerky before, of course. But I’d never made the stuff!

  “Weeks, certainly. Maybe a month if we stick it somewhere cool enough and seal it off from bacteria,” he replied.

  “We’ve got ziplock bags by the thousands, thanks to raiding the supermarkets. We can use that to seal it off, but what we really need is a root cellar to store cold things in,” Kara said.

  “That’s a good idea. I can set the zombies to digging one out.” I wondered what other tidbits we were going to need that I wasn’t thinking about. Walls were obviously essential, but we needed more than that. “How’s the carcass looking?”

  Farnsworth chuckled. “Still a lot of meat on those bones, and that’s not even including the parts we really don’t want to eat. Gonna take a little while before it’s been picked clean.”

  “Crap. Well, that sucks,” I said. “I was hoping we could strip enough meat off that I could just animate the thing as a skeleton.”

  “You will be,” Farnsworth said. “Just gonna take a while before the local animals eat it all. The birds are already going after what we left behind, last I looked.”

  “Gross little cannibals,” Kara said.

  We all chuckled at that.

  “What does this mean, anyway?” Alfred asked. We all looked his way, and he went on. “Giant chicken attacks are a new one. Should we expect more giant animals? Or do you think this was a one-of, and now that it’s dead we won’t have to worry about it anymore?”

  “Well, we’ve all seen giant animals before,” I replied. “There were those giant spiders from day one, and Kara and I ran into an even larger spider at one point. We saw giant snakes, too. Then there were the giant ants I killed. So I don’t think we can call this a single case. That said, I don’t know that we need to worry about more giant creatures of exactly this type. Maybe next time it’ll be a giant cat.”

  We all paused and looked at one another, eyes wide, as we considered the implications of a twenty foot tall house cat.

  “You just had to say that, didn’t you?” Kara said.”

  I chuckled. “I doubt what I say has any impact on whatever weirdness the world throws at us next.”

  “You say that now. But Murphy is always listening,” Kara replied.

  I rolled my eyes at that, but gave her a grin before growing serious again. “Our best bet is going to be to build up our defenses. That Domain south of us is so much more secure than us. It’s nuts how strong their defenses are.”

  “They’ve had a lot more time to build,” Farnsworth pointed out.

  I nodded, agreeing on the point. “That’s true, but we need to catch up. The next alliance meeting is here in under a week. I’d feel a whole lot more comfortable with Peter and his people coming to call if our defenses looked a hell of a lot stronger.”

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  “Makes total sense,” Farnsworth replied between bites of chicken. “Show strength, and he’s less likely to be interested in challenging you. Show weakness, and…well.”

  “That’s what I’m talking about,” I replied. “Control stones can be captured. He kills me and he gets the Domain and it’s tier two stone. Since Peter already has a tier two Domain, he’d be able to instantly rank it to tier three. He’d be the first tier three domain in the area. We don’t even know what strengths that would earn him, but I don’t think we want to find out.”

  “Especially not by you dying, Selena,” Kara added.

  “True, that,” I replied. I shook my head. I’d put to bed my fears on that topic a while ago. “But I knew when I set up the Domain that I was taking a risk. Every other Domain ruler in the area can sense my Domain. Yes, it put a target on my head. There’s no denying that. But I still figure it’s worth it to get something going here.”

  We all munched in silence for a few minutes, lost in our thoughts and the delicious hot meat.

  There was one other thing I needed to bring up, and folks probably weren’t going to like it, but it needed to be said. I opened my mouth, then shut it again. I knew I was going to get push-back on this one. I also knew I was right.

  “Fighting that dragon down there…it taught me something important,” I said at last. All eyes went to me. I had their attention, anyway. Now to see if I could win their approval. “It was at ranked somewhere in the mid-teens, maybe higher. With monsters like that appearing and attacking Domains—for whatever reason it’s attacking KingsHaven, there’s no guarantee it won’t hit here next—we need to have people on hand to fight back. People able to fight back.”

  “And how do we get someone able to kill a tier fifteen dragon?” Farnsworth asked. “Or tier twenty? Because that’s what will be next, you know. That’s been the pattern from the beginning. At first the monsters were all tier one with a few tier twos tossed in. Now, we see tier four and five creatures like the orcs, some bigger ones like the damned chicken we’re all eating, and enormous things like that dragon that are even stronger. I don’t think this ends at tier twenty.”

  I nodded. “Yeah, that’s my sense of things, too. The monsters are continuing to grow more dangerous. It’s been a month, and tier five monsters aren’t especially uncommon. What’s it going to look like in six months or a year?”

  Nobody answered that. We all knew the answer, at least roughly. It was going to get worse, same as it had been ever since the Event kicked off.

  “What’s the answer, then?” Kara asked. “I mean, I think I know what you’re going to say. We need people to level up. Like, a lot.”

  “That’s about it in a nutshell,” I replied. This was going well, so far anyway. “We need to have a fighting population, able to support the defense of their home. Our population isn’t as big as the Guard base, and it’s nowhere close to the size of Peter’s Domain.”

  “We did pick up another two families while you were gone, though. It’s growing,” Alfred said.

  “That’s great,” I replied, and I meant it. “More people strengthens the Domain. But we’re not going to get to Peter’s numbers anytime soon, which means we need to build strength based on quality rather than quantity. We need to get the ranks up on everyone we can.”

  “Which means gathering a shit-ton of crystals,” Farnsworth said. “What are you thinking? I’m guessing from the way you’re talking that you have some ideas in mind.”

  “I do have a few. I see us as needing two things. First, the average person in our Domain needs to be able to fight. I want to get everyone who lives here to at least tier five as soon as possible,” I replied. “That’s sixteen crystals of the same type per person, and we have…?” I glanced questioningly at Kara.

  “You really ought to have these numbers memorized,” Kara replied.

  “You just told me more people arrived!”

  She rolled her eyes, smiling. “Fine. There’s currently two hundred and twelve souls living at the farm. Mostly ratkin, with about sixty humans. The ratkin have a higher tier average than the humans, so it’s them we need to work on the most.”

  “Just to get the ratkin force to tier five will take over five hundred crystals,” Farnsworth said. “Where are we planning to get all of them?”

  “If we only needed five hundred stones, it would be pretty easy,” I said. “The orcs are dropping tier four and five crystals, and there are thousands of them. We launch a few assaults north, and we can handle that. But there’s another problem, and that’s monsters like the dragon. Facing a big creature like that as even a tier five is just suicide. She’d eat any tier five for a snack and barely notice them going down her gullet. No, the problem with big monsters like that is you need to be at least in the same ballpark, rank wise, or you don’t have a chance at all. My spells were barely hurting the dragon.”

  “You’re saying we need heroes, basically,” Alfred said, his voice soft. “We need a handful of people who have very high ranks, high enough to handle whatever is coming our way both now, and months from now.”

  I nodded. “And it’s not going to stop, either. It’s not going to slow down, I don’t think. We’re just going to see the creatures get stronger as time goes on. Unless we grow stronger, too, we’re dead meat.”

  “Of course, you want to take the lead on that,” Kara snapped. She looked annoyed, but when I opened my mouth, she waved me off. “I get it. You’re already tier ten. You’re already ahead of everyone else, so it’s easier for us to get you to tier fifteen than it is to get one of us. It makes sense.”

  “But?” I asked.

  “But what happens if you die?” Kara replied. “Lord knows, I hope that never happens. But you almost died against the wraiths, then again fighting Lyonius, and it sounds like the dragon was another close call. Hell, even the chicken fight could have gone badly. I just about had a heart attack when I saw you go into its mouth.”

  She had a point. But I’d already come to the same conclusion. “You’re one hundred percent right. It can’t just be me that we grow. We need to get more of us up to a higher tier. I’m talking us here, this inner circle, and maybe a few others like Patches. Get us all to tier twelve or so, and we’ll have redundant superheroes, ready to face whatever is coming our way.”

  “And I’d bet that half a dozen tier twelve heroes can take down a tier fifteen dragon without too much trouble,” Farnsworth said. “The trouble is figuring out how to get us there, really. The orcs are one option, but I’m not thrilled with the idea of facing off against three thousand angry orcs. You have anything smaller in mind, first?”

  I gave him my most winning smile. He’d just handed me the perfect opening for the little plan I’d slowly formed since leaving Peter’s Domain.

  “As a matter of fact,” I said, “I do. Here’s what I have in mind…”