I continued on, crossing another street to reach the start of the next block, then I stopped to stare at the brown-and-yellow sign next to the sidewalk.
The shield-shaped logo of an international transportation company of the same colors adorned the sign, and a thought struck me. Shipping companies kept records, right? It might not have the information I was looking for, but it wasn’t like I had any better leads at the moment. I crossed the parking lot and started looking for a way into the building.
An empty parking deck made up the first story on the end of the building nearest to me with a number of freight docks farther down the front side of the structure. Since all of the docks looked to be shut tight, I headed for the parking area.
Above the single level of parking were windows that looked as if they could be for an office area, so that’s where I needed to be.
My eyes quickly adjusted as I stepped out of the afternoon sunlight and into the parking garage. On the far side of the shadowy area, I saw the outline of a door and crossed to it. A quick push and pull on the door confirmed it was locked. Some mechanism must have remained engaged when the power failed. A card reader and an intercom sat on a panel set into the wall beside the door, so I poked the buttons there. When nothing happened, I rammed my shoulder into the metal door, bouncing off the door with no effect. I wasn’t getting in this way.
I left the garage and went around the back side of the building, easily hopping over the chain-link fence that blocked my way.
My next attempt to access the building came when I tried to dig my fingers under a closed garage door but had no luck. The door was shut tightly enough that my fingers couldn’t get a purchase under the metal frame, and even when I pressed upward on the door’s panels, the door refused to rise in the slightest.
I hopped another chain-link fence into an area the goblin work crews had not yet stripped. This stretch of the warehouse-like building contained recessed bays that held a fleet of the company’s distinctive chocolate-brown delivery trucks. I squeezed between two of the trucks, pushed myself up onto the dock behind them, then I stopped to look around.
The loading bays had seen better days.
The dim warehouse was lit only by the sunlight that filtered past the tightly parked trucks, but I could clearly see the collapsed stacks of parcels strewn across the floor. Many of the boxes had been ripped open, the contents spilled out. Toys, tools, and dozens of other household objects littered the few open spaces that I could see from where I stood.
I could almost trace the path of destruction through the warehouse.
Deep in the room, I heard a box fall to the floor with a slam, then something shifted in the dimly lit depths. Light glinted from a glossy, segmented surface that rippled through the shadows, and I heard the skittering of hundreds of legs across the concrete floor.
I focused on the movement and activated Greater Observation.
Giant Thousand Legger (Level 41)
HP: 2186/2186
“Oh, hell no,” I muttered and pulled the railgun from my inventory, aiming toward the front of the writhing carapace that snaked through the storage depot.
The rifle whined as I squeezed the trigger, then it bucked back against my shoulder. Light flared from my weapon, and its hypersonic projectile streaked across the room before blasting completely through the arthropod. Gore splattered from the wound, and a chunk of the creature’s health disappeared.
The flash from the weapon also gave me a better glimpse of the monster I faced.
Cylindrical in cross section, the millipede stretched through the warehouse. Its body consisted of hundreds of segmented sections with each segment containing a pair of spike-tipped legs protected by an armored exoskeleton.
The creature had a rounded head with a pair of jagged mandibles that gnashed together menacingly. Above its maw, a pair of antennae swung from side to side as the monster searched for its attacker.
Then the antennae pointed in my direction, and the massive millipede surged toward me. It flowed up and over the mountains of packages littering the warehouse. Its sharpened feet tore through boxes and sent cardboard flying.
I fired the hybrid rifle at the approaching monster, and it reared up, twisting away from the attack. Instead of a decapitation shot, the projectile impacted several segments below the raised head. The blow ripped away several of the legs along the giant insect’s side before it lanced deep into the body of the millipede.
The monster shrieked in pain, and I took the opportunity to cast Frostbolt. The icy bolt flung from my open palm and pierced the carapace. The attack did little damage to the armored creature, but lines of rime spread from the impact point and slowed the monster further.
I darted down the loading bay, putting more distance between myself and the approaching millipede. As I ran, I tossed out a handful of flares to light the darkened warehouse. The crimson light from the flickering flares cast eerie shadows around the space, but it was far better than running face first into a wall and knocking myself senseless.
The creature pursued, but slower now that it had taken serious damage to the forward sections of its body.
I proceeded to lead the monster on a merry chase through the warehouse. I took shots when I had a clear line of fire and stacked applications of Frostbolt to slow it more.
In desperation, the creature flailed its lengthy body, and a number of shelves around the warehouse collapsed. One after another, shelves topped like dominoes as I sprinted to get clear.
I almost made it.
A powerful blow battered into me from behind and flung me through the air. I hit a support column and groaned as I slid limply to the floor.
Hearing the monster’s skittering legs grow closer, I pushed myself up and staggered to my feet. It had almost reached me when I activated Hinder. I dodged the mandibles as they snapped closed where I had just been, taking a chunk of concrete out of the support column.
I had lost the hybrid rifle at some point, either when I had been hit by the falling shelving or when I had crashed into the pillar. I cast Frostbolt again, the ice materializing before my raised palm before shooting out to hit the arthropod. This time, the force behind the jagged icicle pierced through the weakened carapace that protected the monster's head. Green goop dripped briefly from the shattered carapace before freezing from the spell’s chilling effect.
Without my most powerful weapon, I hoped that my other ranged weapons would finish the job.
I pulled my pistols from their holsters and opened up on the monster, even as it recovered and lunged toward me once again. I stepped backward and focused my fire on the weakened part of the carapace on the creature’s head, looking to exploit the cracks where the Frostbolt had punched through the monster’s armor.
The hard chitin dissipated the damage from the first several energy beams and deflected the first round from my projectile pistol. Then the second round punched through, and the following rounds widened the opening. With the armor breached at that point of attack, the energy beams finally added damage to the destruction begun by my projectile weapon.
The millipede chittered and changed tactics. It looped its lower body around itself to put a fresh section of its trunk between my assault and the exposed area of its head. Then it flailed the rear third of its length around the area in an attempt to crush me beneath the writhing plates.
I swapped out my pistols for fully loaded weapons from Right Tool for the Job and ran toward the thrashing monster. I leaped onto the end of the tail as it bashed into the floor, then I vaulted higher on the monster’s frame, using its momentum as it lifted the section of the body back up. The leap brought me from the rear third of the millipede to land on the middle section it was using as a mobile shield.
Then I launched myself airborne once again, flipping over to fire straight down into the millipede’s already broken head. The barrage of fire shredded the last of the health from the monster, and it collapsed below me.
Gravity reasserted itself as my reckless acro
batics ended, and I crashed back to the floor. I tumbled through something that could only be called a landing if I was being especially generous, and I slid across the cement warehouse floor, my body battering itself through stacks of boxes until I finally rolled to a stop.
Confirming the monster’s death from my latest experience notification, I lay still for a minute and reveled in the silence. My health had taken more damage from the damn boxes in the warehouse than from the actual insect attacks, though the impact with the support column had also hurt me a fair bit.
The concrete floor quickly became uncomfortable, and I forced myself to get up. I looted the giant millipede, then I spent the better part of twenty minutes searching through the dimly lit warehouse before I found my dropped hybrid rifle.
The weapon had taken a few hits to its durability, and a few scuff marks now marred its glossy shell, but everything still seemed to be in working order when I inspected it. The rifle reloaded without any problems before I activated Right Tool for the Job once again and stuffed it back into my specialized System armory space.
The flares I had tossed out during the fight were burning out, and the light in the loading bay grew dim as I headed through it, looking for a way up to the offices I had seen from outside.
I passed from the wide-open warehouse section of the building into a small hallway that showed no sign of the millipede’s passage. The short hall contained bathrooms, a janitor’s closet, and an employee break room with a small kitchenette. Nothing drew my interest, so I continued through a door at the far end of the hall and into a dark stairwell.
I held the door cracked open and stood silently, listening for any sounds in the darkness. I heard nothing, so I pushed the door open and stepped onto the landing. Dim light filtered down from a skylight in the building’s roof far above, providing enough light for me to see that stairs led both up and down. I already knew that I needed to get to the level above the ground floor.
All light cut off as the door behind me swung closed, and I reached out with one hand to grab the railing. With the rail as a guide, I climbed two flights of stairs before reaching the next door out of the stairwell. I pulled the door open a crack and peered out.
Natural light filtered through tinted windows to reveal a maze of cubicle walls just beyond the doorway. Still hearing nothing to hint that something else might live within, I slipped quietly into the office and let the stairwell door latch closed behind me.
I walked around the floor, looking for any indications of a record archive and finding nothing obvious. With no other ideas, I picked a cube at the end of the row and began a more methodical search.
The desk was covered with standard office computer peripherals, like a keyboard and a mouse with the mousepad showing a cute cat picture. A pair of dark LED monitors were centered in the workspace. The desk itself held the typical variety of office supplies but a frustrating lack of paper records.
I glared at the dead monitors. Or course everything had been electronic. With the arrival of the System, terrestrial computer equipment was little more than junk, and I had no hope of retrieving any records from the lifeless electronics. I shuffled through the desk drawers anyways, hoping to find some kind of records. My search turned up personal effects, a few manuals for various shipping applications, and an employee handbook.
No shipping records.
I sighed and moved on to the next cube. Then the next. And the next.
It took about five minutes to rifle through each cubicle, and there were about twenty cubes in the office, plus a half dozen closed-door offices around the outside walls that I went through after I finished the cubicles. None of them contained any paper records.
As I headed toward the last corner office, I saw an alcove that I had overlooked during my first lap around the office. One side of the cubby held a large copier and scanner unit. Across from the copier sat an industrial shredder with a full bin of waste beneath it, which explained the lack of hardcopy laying around the office.
Shelves at the rear of the alcove contained stacks of paper stock in different sizes for the copier. On the lowest shelf, half hidden behind the bulk of the copier itself, a thick tome lay flat under several discarded magazines. I almost dismissed it as another manual, but something made me take another look.
I bent down and poked the dust-covered book enough to make the spine visible from the front. My eyes widened when I read the text printed along the spine, and I snatched the heavy volume from the shelf.
I flopped the phonebook onto the top of the copier and flipped through it, searching for the name of my bounty. It didn’t take long to find the name, and I could only hope that the one “Hayes, Archer” listed on the page was the man I sought. The phone number in the directory would be useless, but I read the address several times until I had it memorized before I closed the yellow tome.
I stared at the closed phonebook. The date on the cover revealed the volume as several years out of date, so I hoped my quarry hadn’t moved in the intervening time. Still, it was a far better lead than anything I had managed from the goblins or anywhere else.
I tried to put the phonebook in my inventory, but the item refused to enter my System storage. It gave the same red flash that the shotgun had all the way back on the first day, so it looked as if I still couldn’t store non-System items. I pulled a backpack from the survival supplies I had piled in my Inventory and dumped the phonebook within it, prepared to carry it on my back in case I needed it in the future. On a whim, before I slung the straps over my shoulders, I tried to return the backpack to my Inventory and blinked in surprise when it successfully went.
I shook my head. The System made no sense to me sometimes. Someone far smarter than me would have to figure out that System Quest because it just sounded like a headache waiting to happen.
I used a different stairwell to leave the office, which brought me out of the door in the parking deck that I had first tried to use to enter the building. It opened easily from the inside when I pressed the push bar, of course. That’s how my luck ran sometimes.
By the time I left the building, I found that the sun had dropped low in the sky. My search inside had eaten up the rest of the afternoon, and it would soon be dusk.
With the address of my quarry in mind, I left the shipping center and walked another block to the north. A cross street ran under the state highway here, and I was able to turn east without needing to climb the vertical berm to reach the residential neighborhood beyond.
The farther I headed into the neighborhood, the more quickly it became obvious which houses were still occupied. The homes here mostly fell into three categories.
First, and the rarest, were the structures where the owners had purchased them from the Shop. These stood out from the System-assisted upkeep that kept them clean and in good repair. Some of these structures even had some obvious System upgrades, built by their owners or purchased directly from a Shop. Solar collectors, Mana batteries, and upgraded defenses in the forms of reinforced walls and armored windows were all integrated seamlessly into the structures.
Few of the non-defensive improvements were on the ground floor of most buildings, and most were only visible from their attachment points on the sides of the upper stories or as glimpses where they peeked over the edges of a building’s roof.
The second category of homes were slightly more numerous than the System-owned houses but just as distinct in their own way. Whether their owners couldn’t afford to purchase the building from the System or just stubbornly refused to, these structures had more homemade defenses. Boarded-over windows, welded shutters, chain-link fences, and layered strands of barbed wire covered these homes and made them look like something out of a zombie apocalypse movie.
The final, and most depressingly common, class of homes sat empty and dark. Broken windows and shattered front doors gaped open ominously. Occasional crashes or snarls echoed from the abandoned buildings before silence, only hinting at what horrific dangers might lurk w
ithin.
The people I passed on the sparsely populated sidewalks gave me a wide berth, but I noted that everyone seemed on edge. It was the wary tension of those prepared to fight or flee at a moment’s notice. The locals had been forged in the crucible of the apocalypse, honed to react with the finely tuned instincts of survivors, and I once again felt the eerie similarity to the combat zones of my past.
The few monsters that poked out their heads were quickly dispatched by combined attacks from everyone nearby. Spells and shots from multiple angles stunned the creatures long enough for melee users to pile into the conflict. I limited myself to only a few shots from one of my beam pistols the two times I was close enough to be involved, first with a mutated squirrel, then with an eight-legged alligator that crawled out of a sewer grate.
Each time, I waved away offers of loot as I continued on foot. The locals needed the drops far more than I did, and I was more preoccupied with finding the address listed in the phonebook for my bounty.
Instead of loot, I did take the opportunity to ask the locals who stripped the dead monsters if they knew directions to the street I needed. The first two attempts were a bust, but the third time I asked, the woman told me to go north two blocks then turn left. I thanked her and left her to the bloody work of skinning the alligator corpse.
A short walk later, I reached the address from the phonebook and stood on the street, looking up the empty cement driveway that led to the house. The two-story home was one of the self-improvement types without System upgrades, so it looked as though someone lived here.
I walked up the stairs to the front door and pounded my fist against it. After I’d waited for about a minute with no sign of response, I knocked again. I heard faint movement on the other side of the door following the second knock, but it quieted quickly, as if whoever was inside couldn’t decide whether to answer the door or not.
While I normally preferred to be ignored by most people, I didn’t appreciate it when it got in the way of finding my target. I hauled back my armored boot and delivered a solid kick to the door that rattled the frame.
Fist Full of Credits: A New Apocalyptic LitRPG Series (System Apocalypse - Relentless Book 1) Page 26