Author's Note

Holy cow, this chapter sat in editing/writing purgatory for far, far too long. It's probably never left it, really. I just want this done with, so I can move on to the next part. Sorry in advance.

Peter. May23rd, 10:24 AM. Boston

Helping Beth clean herself up gave us ample time to take stock of our situation. That is, we are vaguely horse-shaped creatures, she’s adorable, and I’m not. Beth had been doing office work when The Happening happened, and this made her the first of us ‘survivors’ to have been awake at the time. You would have hoped she could shed some light on what had gone down. You would have hoped.

“—And when I woke up, I was face down on the keyboard and I was…” Beth held up her forelegs and awkwardly gestured at herself. “I-I was this… This thing!” Her voice cracked.

“So, you were filing a report, then, poof?” Beth nodded. “Seriously, that’s it?”

She sighed, and pressed her hooves against her cheeks, squishing them up and down. “Yeah, seriously.”

“Well do you remember what time it was?”

“A little after six.”

“Hm, six in the morning.” That was as convenient a time as any. Just before most sane people with regular day jobs would be waking up. Anybody who liked partying their night away simply conked out before whatever happened, well, happened. It was a disappointing revelation that gave the rabid background thoughts nothing new to work with. Although, the mental image of every night shift worker knocking out at once was kind of amusing. Of course, then I got the mental image of everybody falling asleep in a car, or in a train, or in a plane. Suddenly, this wasn’t so funny. What else could go horribly wrong if the operator fell aslee—Beth is wearing blue, and her fur is orange.

“What’s up?” Beth reaching out to poke me was enough to bring me back to the real world—a land that wasn’t entirely occupied by lists of horrible accidents.

“Ah, I was just thinking—” I wasn’t lying— “We should get moving.” I turned to look down at Beth. “I mean, I can’t tell if this is even real, but I don’t want to be caught with my pants down.”

“You’ve already got a plan?”

“Yeah, but first, we’re going back to my house.”

It didn’t take much at all to convince Beth to follow me to my awful pigsty of a house, even if we had to walk in the middle of the street to avoid the knotweed that was creeping onto the sidewalk. As soon as we were back indoors, I brought her to the living room and parked her next to Jake.

Jake’s spark, fortunately, had grown a little from the last time I saw it. It was a relief to see that the damage I’d caused wouldn’t be permanent, but his recovery was progressing slower than I would have wished. Although, I shouldn’t have complained, since it was a miracle that he’d recovered at all. I didn’t want to think of what might have happened if my stomach were just a bit larger.

I wanted to let him sleep, but the clock was ticking.

“Hey, Jake, you have a nice nap?” I nudged his shoulder until he woke up. He was obviously still all kinds of weak, but he had his faculties and could focus his eyes. That would be enough, for now. “Welcome back. I’ll go get you something to eat, okay? Hey, Beth, watch him while I go forage in the kitchen. Oh, and, sorry about the mess.” On my way out of the room, I conveniently tripped over a stray extension cord.

Once I’d fed and watered my brother, and given Beth equal treatment, I sweeped the clutter off the coffee table and hopped onto the new clear surface. I told them of my plans, and how we’d set them in motion. Just about every utility was going to fail in the next few days. The water system would lose pressure somewhere, something in the gas lines would break, and the power plants would bust eventually. These systems could only run so long without any kind of intervention. Boston’s power was almost entirely natural gas. The only place I could think of that might run off ‘renewable’ sources would be somewhere out on Cape Cod. I liked Cape Cod, but it was Cape Cod—that place was a giant sandbar hanging off the southeast corner of Massachusetts, and far as I knew, it was maybe only a couple feet above sea level. Any inclement weather would mean floods, and the snow would be horrendous.

Beth was a police officer, my brother parked cars, and I was a bum. As a group, we were short on both specialization and time. We needed information and we needed supplies. Our hierarchy of needs was being reset, and how we prepared now would heavily influence how we lived then.

At least Beth knew something about guns—not like we would be able to use them in our current state—and a better working knowledge of the city than either of us men. But, before we got started on anything, we needed a real base of operations.

I looked over at Beth, then Jacob, then back at Beth. They looked back, and I came to a realization. They were waiting for me. I was in charge! I had units, waiting for my command! And their ears perked up when I opened my mouth. “I want to use the internet, but I can’t have you two sitting around. You got a PC at your place? If there’s anything you want to get from your own house, we oughta kill two birds with one stone.”

After a few more minutes of messing around and tripping over various objects in the house, the three of us decided to get our rears in gear. The beige Camry in the driveway next to our house chirped and flashed its lights twice, and I let the keys dangle with the ring around one of my longer teeth. “I’m driving,” I declared, as we approached the vehicle.

“But, you don’t know how to drive!” my brother protested.

“Wait, you don’t have a license?” Beth shouted at me.

“He doesn’t even have a learner’s permit,” Jake said to Beth, looking at her over his shoulder. Beth was about to say something else, before I cut her off.

“I do too know how to drive! I do it in simulators all the time. Give your baby bro some credit, he ain’t a total loser,” I growled, before I ducked down beside the car. I managed to wiggle my horn underneath the door handle, and with a few painful tugs, the mechanisms holding the door shut released. “Besides, if we’re abiding the law, are either of you even tall enough to sit in the front seat?” I asked, looking over the hood of the car at them, as I pulled the door open. Of course they weren’t.

It took some work to get car going, but once I put the automatic transmission into ‘drive’, it only took a few minutes before I was confidently wheeling the people mover around the vacant city streets.

We found Beth’s place pretty quickly. It was a nice little house somewhere in the tight, hilly neighborhood between the Green Street and Stonybrook subway stations. The tiny streets were just as tiny as they’d always been, with cars parked on both sides, but it wasn’t as though parking were an issue. Nobody was using these roads anymore, and with nobody to inconvenience, the law against double parking didn’t really matter.

We all just sort of barged into Beth’s place. Once we’d explained how everybody just vanished, she didn’t have much hope of seeing her family again. Naturally, we didn’t see her family again. The house was empty. She told me where to get at her computer—which had no password protection, might I add—and went off to grab a few things. Jake just kind of looked around.

We’d need a place that could ease us into living without the benefits of modern city infrastructure, given that most of it would be gone within the week. As it was, there were also some other needs that would need to be tended, and sooner or later, we’d very likely be forced out of the city, but we needed a better base of operations than my barely maintained, barely clean, hundred year old house.

Finding what I was looking for was easy enough with Google, since the servers had yet to die. I homed in on a totally hip and green design firm’s website within the first non-ad hit of ‘boston green homes’ and found a place in Brookline that not only had solar panels, but a storm drain cistern. Or something like that. Partially self-sustaining electric and water systems were about all I figured I would need. That way, if I found that those systems had to be expanded when the grid went down, I’d have an example to go off of.

The catch? No address was listed—for the client’s protection, I assumed—and I didn’t know Brookline that well. To be frank, I’m not sure if I’d ever even been to Brookline. I was a massive homebody, and I barely went out for anything other than school. I mean, with the ‘modern’ architecture the way it was, it would be hard to miss the place, but I had no clue where to start, other than that it might be near the country club Google Maps told me was also in the neighborhood.

The second problem was that Brookline was pretty much the beginning of the suburbs. Compared to the inner city, it’d be teeming with critters—probably the perfect hunting grounds for the packs of wild dogs and shit that’d rise up in a few days. If we set up there, we’d have to set up fast. I could probably handle a fight, considering I was covered in ceramic armor and had all sorts of nasty pokey bits on my body, but Jacob? Beth? They were these little horse things, not more than three feet tall. We weren’t yet dextrous enough to run fast, and they’d probably get torn apart by anything with teeth.

Both were, understandably, a bit unsettled when I told them this. But they also agreed that we needed a place like this Brookline house. It wasn’t as though any of us were plumbers or electricians. The prospect of finding a single house out of hundreds, with no real clues, and in a reasonable timeframe—hours, in this case—was not something I liked. So I continued my search, while Beth and Jacob talked out their problems and thought of what else we’d have to do.

I had to get a bit more ambitious in my Googling. ‘Brookline green home.’ Nah. ‘MA brookline home for sale solar power water cistern.’ That didn’t lead me to the house I’d seen on that architect’s site’s portfolio, but it gave me results. The first one was a place in Belmont, which I found out was in Cambridge, once I did a little further research. Nah. I didn’t know shit about Cambridge, which, while basically close enough to be a part of Boston, was really a whole other city. I knew where some things in Boston were, and I knew what I could find downtown. I didn’t want to stray from that, not so soon. So I kept looking.

I found a website that apparently specialized in houses like the one I was looking for, but, of course, all the offers they had were out of town. That Belmont place, mansions in Weston, Needham, Marblehead, and Concord; places I didn’t really know the location of, but knew weren’t nearby. They might’ve been close by car, but gasoline had a shelf life. Google told me so.

I probably spent a good hour searching and writing down addresses, ordered roughly by distance from Boston’s ‘center’ area. I found a place in Jamaica Plain that could work out, but Google’s streetview car hadn’t been by since 2013, when the place was still under construction, so whether or not it’d actually been finished was a tossup. All of us agreed that it’d be worth a shot to check it out.

So, with Beth’s double barrel, some shells, and a few of her keepsakes, we all jumped back into the car and took off.

As it turned out, the house was finished, which was great news! Unfortunately, it was in JP, which was hardly a step down from Brookline in terms of suburban-ness. The front door was locked and, well, we didn’t have a key. So, the three of us stood on the sidewalk, looking at the place. As shelter for the rest of our lives, it was okay. There wasn’t too much room for more than a small garden, unlike many of the self-sufficient homes further away from the city, but it would do us well enough, until we got our feet—hooves, underneath us and knew what we were doing. Keeping just a couple mouths fed wasn’t going to be a big deal in the middle of a city—there were plenty of canned goods just lying around.

“Beth, you know a good, non-damaging way to get into a house?” I asked. She just kind of looked at me. Guess not. “Alright.” So I kicked the door in. What would you have done? Smash a window? I considered it, but once again, Beth and Jake were three feet tall, and I was maybe four, if I didn’t count the forehead spear. I might have been fine, but the two of them would most likely get all cut up, climbing over shards of broken glass. Never mind that if we, a trio of uncoordinated horse things, could get in through a broken window, what else might? At least I knew that, with a little elbow grease, we’d be able to replace the door, rather than a window that was probably custom made.

Besides, if there were a better way, I wasn’t about to waste the time it’d take to find out.

The house was everything I expected it to be. Nice on the inside. Clean. Vaguely minimal, stylish furniture. It was all I’d come to expect out of a new, $600,000 house in a slowly gentrifying neighborhood like JP. I told Beth and Jake to stay at the front door while I scouted the place out. The house definitely felt lived in, even though it’d probably only been owned for maybe a year before the occupants disappeared. If they had a toothy dog or something, I’d rather it try and bite through my exceptionally hard ass, than Beth’s, or my brother’s. Fortunately, I found nothing of the sort, and was happy to report that the coast was clear. We found a reasonably heavy, movable chair, and slid it across the polished concrete floor and used it to barricade the front door, while we set our stuff out in the clearest place we found.

I sent Jake to see what food these people had around, and told Beth to check the windows and see what we could do to fortify the property while I dug into these poor people’s tech. It wasn’t as though they would be needing it anymore, and it was their fault for not passwording their shit. Well, they did, but they used passwords like ‘Boston’ and ‘password.’ I did a bit more research on this place and found that it wasn’t simply energy neutral—it was energy negative. Which actually changed things quite a bit, since that extra electricity would be better off in batteries than earning pointless credit with a local power company that probably didn’t exist anymore.

This was about when I realized just how much work we had to get done. Like, metric fucktons of work.