A Fortress of Pebbles

Orion was starting to think that maybe things would be okay – that the whole apocalypse wasn’t such a big deal after all. Yes, the words “social unrest” had increasingly been in the news lately. And yes, there were jets flying over the property every few hours. But so what? Weaksauce apocalypse as far as Orion was concerned.

Plus, Johnson Village was about to get pretty cool. He’d been up all night working with the five life pebbles he’d extracted from the bees. When he placed any of them near his forehead, he discovered that the system the Master of Language had been designing for him and Cassandra was still in effect. There was only one life spell in his inventory, but it was called “Wild Growth” – which sounded pretty cool.

At first, he was bummed that there was no way to gain XP or levels anymore. According to the user interface that floated before his eyes, he was still at Level 2. “Cassandra is probably way ahead of you by now,” fake-Cassandra pointed out.

“No one cares,” he said.

It was a lie. But still, the thought of Cassandra returning at a higher level than him didn’t stop him from fantasizing about the Big Reveal, demonstrating to the citizens of Johnson Village that he wasn’t just the son of the town marshal. The coin tricks he’d been casually performing whenever Keely was nearby were not the sum total of his abilities. He was a real-life wizard – like something straight out of one of Mom’s books. Until such time as Cassandra inevitably returned to ruin everything, no one needed to know that he had only achieved Level 2. They didn’t even know about the level system.

According to the description provided by the user interface, Wild Growth was a spell that could “accelerate metabolic processes,” and he wasted no time testing it on a baby cockroach behind the locked door of the bunker's master bedroom. The creature grew fatter and fatter while his hand was hovering over it. Then, when it seemed ready to burst, all shiny and full of life, it began to shrivel up and die of old age.

The whole process was fascinating, even though he somehow managed to destroy one of the small life pebbles in the process. It happened at approximately the same time that fake-Cassandra commented, “Poor thing’s probably one hundred years old by now.”

The pebble he was palming inside of what Mom called his “life line” burned him as it poofed into nothingness. The cockroach gave a twitch before settling into its final resting position in the concrete corner of the bedroom, probably not far from where it had been born.

But then, the user interface before his eyes did something incredible: the XP counter increased by 1.

“Lucky you,” said fake-Cassandra. “Looks like they left some basic game mechanics active.”

Level 3 was still 892 points away, which was a lot – but on the other hand, just one cockroach lifetime ago, it had been 893 points away. Orion chose to see the bright side, and it occurred to him that, in doing so, he was growing as a person.

His optimism and sense of personal growth continued to increase with the deaths of several more cockroaches and one house spider. By noon, he discovered that if he didn’t push the Wild Growth spell too far, the life pebbles (and occasionally the cockroaches) survived the procedure. It was incredible – much more sophisticated than simply squashing them. By hovering his hand at varying distances above the creatures, he could control their rate of growth and the exact age at which they expired. Or he could let them live, fat and ripe, to be squashed under his sneaker a moment later.

“You could let them get away,” his fake sister pointed out. “That’s also an option.”

Just for that, he squashed several more cockroaches on the floor of the bunker’s storeroom. “Dad wants us to decontaminate the room,” he said.

“I think he just wants you out of the way,” she said.

“Not for long,” he shot back. And he knew he was right. He could already imagine the look in Keely’s eyes when all of the gardens began to sprout in the middle of winter. What everyone was calling a “long term investment” would, with a wave of his hand, become a “short term payoff.” Dad had a specific way of talking that pretty much everyone in Johnson Village was starting to adopt.

***

As luck would have it, his Big Reveal did happen – but not with life magic. He was taking a casual stroll through the gardens, pretending to be interested in the carpentry of the various houses that were being erected. In reality, he was waiting for the gardening team to come back from their lunch break crowded around the living room TV.

Keely was on the gardening team.

It was the middle of winter, so the gardening team’s primary objective had been to establish a few empty greenhouses and row after row of barren plots. Long term investments. The hope was to survive on the local supermarket’s dwindling supplies for as long as the National Guard was managing to stock the shelves. Dad figured it would be a week, tops.

After that, they would have to dig into the bunker’s storeroom. The food reserves had been bolstered by the scavenging of cans and dry goods from the nearby wreckage of households. Also, the jets flying overhead had, twice, dropped boxes of food with parachutes.

As the laughter and chatter of the gardening team came to him over the rooftops of shacks and sheds, he happened to glance out toward the property line. There in the distance were the ever-present bone dragons – more of them than ever. Some weren’t even made of bones anymore, but looked to have been cobbled together from scraps of the ruined houses in the vicinity. Through a light winter mist, Orion was pretty sure he could see two large bone dragons constructing a smaller one out of roofing shingles, corrugated metal, and pipes. By the look of things, they’d been at this for days – more than tripling their population.

“I guess that’s how they reproduce,” said fake-Cassandra. “When two bone dragons love each other very much…”

“You okay?” said Keely.

Holy shit! How had she gotten so close? He had to avert his gaze to avoid being blinded by all the pink she was wearing – puffy pink winter coat, a pink thing in her hair, pink earrings. It was beautiful even though all the pink was getting dingy because she wore it so often. Beautiful: like a wilting rose.

Orion pointed wordlessly at the looming shadows of the dragons.

“Yeah?” she said. “They’ve been doing that since Monday. Making babies.” She smiled at the Parrot King – who was, by the way, getting tall enough to probably wear his dad’s clothes without looking like he was too small for them. Also, his jawline was so big it looked almost fake.

He, of course, was on the gardening team, too.

“Figured you’d have seen ‘em doing it,” said the Parrot King. “With all the time you’re spending on the roof.”

They exchanged a glance that made it clear to Orion that they knew he’d been up there while they were making out that one time. If the Parrot King was still mad about what had happened at school, Orion couldn’t never quite tell. Fake-Cassandra had assured him, however, that pissing one’s pants and crying in front of his flock of ninth graders wasn’t something he was likely to forget any time soon.

“I’ve been decontaminating the storeroom,” mumbled Orion.

Orion didn’t make eye contact with the Parrot King either. He didn’t like to look at people who shouldn’t exist. Why did he have to be here, anyway? Surely, Johnson City could do without a kid who’d once shot a spitball into Cassandra’s ear. The thought of it still enraged him.

Cassandra was weird about germs – the kind of weird where she practically had to wash her hands whenever she thought about them. But still: messing with her was Orion’s job. No one else’s.

He didn’t realize he was trembling with rage until one of the trash dragons launched into the air, circled once, and came to rest on one of the garden plots, crushing it beneath talons made of pipes. It too was trembling and, with a head made from several discarded television sets, seemed to be looking right into the Parrot King’s soul. Dragons, apparently, had no trouble making eye-contact.

The gardening team scattered, but when the Parrot King tried to run, the dragon blocked his way with a wing made from hurricane fencing and barbed wire. Its long, serpentine neck brought the television sets face to face with the boy, making his fake-looking jawline tiny by comparison.

Orion couldn’t decide if he would prefer to see the Parrot King get eaten or to see him wet his pants again. But then he realized that Keely was screaming. At him. “Do something!”

He looked down and saw that his arm was pointed toward the dragon, fingers outstretched. Five or six bees were buzzing around him, glowing electric green. Orion couldn’t blame Keely for thinking he might be able to do something about the dragon. He looked like a wizard. Like he was controlling the creature.

“Well?” said fake-Cassandra. “You’re the Dragon King, apparently. What’s your decree?”

As much as Orion wouldn’t mind seeing a dragon with television sets for a head try to eat a human boy, he didn’t want Keely to have to see it. For the second time that day, he was struck by his own, ever-increasing level of maturity. Killing the Parrot King was something better done in private, he thought, as he lowered his arm and relaxed his fingers. In doing so, a calm descended upon the trash dragon. It straightened, unwrapping the wings of wire and fencing from around the Parrot King.

“Looks like Grandpa’s apocalypse stuff listens to you,” said fake-Cassandra.

Orion looked down at his hands – one of them still filled with apple seeds that he had brought for the Big Reveal. The trash dragon launched into the air and flapped its way back to its brethren, patrolling the property line. Keely ran to the Parrot King, who was on his knees in one of the empty garden plots. Members of the scattered gardening team were peeping out from unfinished doorways and windows.

And, oh shit. There was Dad strolling toward him with the kind of swagger that could only come from someone who had missed the entire ordeal. He adjusted the belt on which his holsters hung and looked around suspiciously. “What’s all the screaming about?”

Orion, sensing that he was about to be grounded, or at least end up on the receiving side of a Dad-lecture for the next several hours, went into panic mode. “I’m a wizard!” he said. “Watch!” Then, he cast the apple seeds dramatically onto the cold dirt of a Johnson City garden plot, palmed a life pebble, and began to focus.