Chapter 140: Hey Handsome

She came down the wooden steps very slowly, with the double-barrel shotgun still broken open over her forearm.

Stopping about four feet away from me, she looked me up and down, taking in the gold-rimmed augmented-reality specs, the black jacket worn over the hundred-thousand-credit tactical rig, and the general absence of blood.

And then she opened her mouth and completely derailed the entire conversation.

"Well, hey there, handsome. You certainly clean up nicely."

I honestly do not know exactly what my face did in that moment.

I just know that my brain basically short-circuited on the spot.

She actually just called me handsome in front of everybody.

Behind me, Nia made a very distinct, small choking sound of amusement.

And I turned around immediately, found Leo standing right there with his hand on his injured ribs, and took him by the shoulder with both hands and proceeded to shake him back and forth like a ragdoll.

"Did you hear that, Leo? Did you just hear what she said?"

"Nikki, please let go of me," Leo groaned through gritted teeth.

"Leo, listen to me right now. She just called me handsome."

"My ribs are literally cracking right now, Nikki."

"I am handsome!"

"Right," he hissed through his teeth, carefully keeping his eyes slightly crossed. "Good for you, man."

I let him go and turned back around toward the porch, grinning like an absolute idiot.

When I turned around, I found three different faces staring directly at me.

Nora stood there with her arms crossed and her cap tilted back.

Nia stood there with one eyebrow raised as high as it would possibly go.

And Kara stared at me with the single flattest expression I have ever seen on a human being.

Three women were staring at me with one collective face of absolute judgment.

"She is at least a sixty-year-old woman, Nikki," Nora said with a heavy sigh.

"She obviously has terrible cataracts, big guy," Nia added with a wicked smirk.

Kara didn’t say anything at all to me.

She just kept looking at me until I finally stopped grinning, which took a surprisingly long while.

[It was completely worth it. I am handsome, and it is now a matter of public record.]

The older woman watched all of this unfold with her arms folded and the corner of her mouth curling upward.

"You are definitely not police," she stated with absolute, unshakeable certainty.

And I instantly recognized that specific voice from day zero.

It was flat, tired, and didn’t seem scared of anything in this world.

That voice had come out of the back of a shipping container while I stood in the doorway, dripping blood onto the concrete floor.

She had asked me the only sensible question anybody had asked me that entire day.

"No, I am definitely not a police officer," I answered her honestly.

"I didn’t think so," she said, leaning the shotgun against the porch railing without even looking at it. "My name is Ruth."

"Niklaus Abernathy, but you can just call me Nikki."

Ruth then looked at Nia, who was standing at my side wearing her own hundred-thousand-credit tactical suit with the SR-25 rifle across her chest.

"So, you finally found her, then," Ruth said, her voice turning genuinely warm. "This must be Kara."

Nia just smiled a remarkably polite and normal smile, not saying a single word to correct the woman, and she absolutely refused to look at me.

She simply let the awkward silence run its course just to torture me.

"No, you have the wrong girl," I quickly clarified. "That is Nia."

"Nia?" Ruth repeated the name, looking somewhat confused.

"Yes, this is Nia. Kara is over there," I said, pointing clearly across the yard. "That is Kara. The girl holding the calico cat."

Thirty-one heads turned all at once, shifting their attention from the woman standing next to me to the woman standing six feet away.

Ruth looked closely at Kara, then she looked at Nia, and finally she looked back at me.

"So, let me get this straight," Ruth said slowly, actively trying to work the logic out in her head.

"The girl you tore that entire mafia building apart to save is not..." she said, nodding at Kara.

"Yes, that is completely correct. Kara is my best friend and the only family I got." I admitted, rubbing the back of my neck.

"Huh," Ruth muttered aloud, raising her eyebrows in surprise.

Nobody decided to help me out of this incredibly awkward situation.

Kara was suddenly pretending to be fascinated by the architecture of the barn.

I was staring very intently at the wooden fence surrounding the property.

Nia was still wearing that innocent smile, and I would have paid a massive amount of credits to know what evil thoughts were running through her head.

And then there was my wonderful little sister, Nora, with the most absolute smuggest expression I have ever seen on her face.

She stood there with her arms crossed and her chin proudly lifted into the air.

"I would like everyone present in this yard to note," Nora announced loudly to the crowd, "... that Nikki tore an entire building full of mafia apart."

"Nora, please stop talking right now," I pleaded.

"He did it for my sister. That is all I am saying. I am just noting it for the official record."

"Wait a second," Leo interjected, completely bewildered by the sudden influx of information.

He was still standing exactly where I had left him, clutching his broken ribs with his mouth hanging open.

He looked back and forth between me and Kara as though he had just discovered that the sky was blue.

"What building are you guys talking about?" Leo demanded to know.

[Ah, right. Leo doesn’t actually know any of this.... actually, none of our group knows about the mafia compound because Kara and I never told anybody about the horrors of that first day.]

"You went into an armed mafia compound?" Leo asked, his voice rising in disbelief. "On the very first day of the apocalypse? For big sis?"

"Yeah, I did exactly that," I confessed to him.

"Did you go in there completely by yourself?" Leo asked incredulously.

"I had Tikki," I offered as a defense.

Mr. Norton, who was sitting on the Ascender’s metal step with his taped ear and cracked glasses, simply shook his head with a low chuckle.

"Well, that certainly explains the rest of his unhinged behavior," Mr. Norton muttered to himself.

So I proceeded to tell them the story using the most explicit, straightforward sentences I could possibly find.

I explained that Kara got kidnapped by mafia thugs that morning, and I knew exactly where they had taken her.

Then I explained that I went into the compound and violently killed everyone who got in my way to get her back.

I told them that was how I ended up finding a basement filled with ten kidnapped women locked inside a shipping container.

And that was absolutely everything I said about that miserable basement.

I was certainly not going to describe the gruesome details of the state the women hosting us were in that day to my own folks.

Ruth watched me omit the darkest parts of the story, and she gracefully allowed me to keep those secrets buried.

And then Kara did the only thing Kara was ever going to do in this situation.

"He came to save me," she stated flatly to the entire yard. "That is all that matters."

And with that, she turned around and walked straight up the wooden porch steps.

She walked right past Ruth and entered the farmhouse without looking back at anyone.

Ruth watched Kara disappear into the house before turning her attention back to me, wearing an expression much kinder than I deserved.

"Come inside the house, handsome," she offered warmly. "You look like you could eat a massive meal right now."

[I really, really could eat a massive meal right now...]

The farmhouse kitchen was long and incredibly warm, heated perfectly by two large wood stoves burning brightly.

A massive wooden dining table that could easily seat fourteen people occupied the center of the room.

They sat all of us down at that table as though we were long-lost relatives who had driven across the country just to get here before proceeding to feed us everything they had cooked for the evening and then some more.

And that was exactly where the entire situation went horribly wrong.

Because my enhanced metabolism forced me to eat four heavily loaded plates of food.

Nia easily matched me and enthusiastically devoured five plates of her own.

Then both of us shamelessly went back to the pots for even more servings.

Somewhere around my sixth plate of food, I finally looked up from my meal.

I suddenly realized that the entire farmhouse kitchen had gone completely, uncomfortably silent.

Over twenty women were standing quietly along the kitchen walls without saying a single word.

All of them were wide-eyed, silently watching us casually eat our way through a mountain of precious calories.

And that was when I finally noticed Kara, currently sitting right beside me with her face buried deeply in both of her hands.

"Please stop eating their food," Kara whispered desperately into her own hands.

"I literally cannot stop eating," I whispered back to her.

"Nikki, you absolute idiot, you are eating their entire winter supply of food."

"I know exactly what I am doing, Kara. I am fully aware of the consequences.... I have honestly never been more aware of anything in my entire life."

I put my fork down onto the empty plate, finished the last of my beer, and stood up from the wooden table.

"Which is exactly why I am going to fix this massive problem right now," I announced to the room.

"Fix this massive problem?" Ruth repeated skeptically from her position by the wood stove.

There was exactly one massive item currently sitting in my Inventory that came anywhere close to replacing what I had just consumed.

It was a forty-foot refrigerated trailer I had taken from that truck stop.

I walked straight out onto the front lawn, reached into the Inventory, and dropped the massive trailer directly onto the grass.

The massive steel trailer slammed into the ground with a deafening, earth-shaking thump, and two seconds later, thirty-odd women rushed out onto the porch and hurried down the wooden steps.

They stood in the evening snow, staring in absolute disbelief at a gigantic reefer trailer that definitely had not been in their yard eleven seconds ago.

"This trailer is packed with frozen meat and stuff," I announced loudly to the stunned crowd. "I also have one with flour, rice, sugar, cooking oil, canned vegetables, and massive pallets of coffee... and yes, I’m a wizard."

Nobody in the yard moved a single muscle for several long seconds.

Then a woman named Bill, who was easily the biggest woman in the yard, walked cautiously up to the open doors.

She stuck her head inside, looked down forty feet of stacked pallets, and made a sound I can only describe as profoundly religious.

"Holy shit, there is actually real butter inside this thing," Bill whispered reverently.

"Well then," Ruth remarked from the porch, her voice sounding as dry as a desert bone, but I could clearly hear her voice tremble slightly, "It looks like the handsome wizard is generously paying the bill for tonight’s dinner."

[Yes, he absolutely is. Handsome is a highly capable provider for this community.]

Afterward, the entire house was filled with the chaotic sound of thirty-one people arguing about exactly where to store a trailer’s worth of food, and the fact that they have a literal wizard at their place, and magic is apparently a thing now.

I eventually went out onto the front porch for some much-needed fresh evening air and found Nora already sitting out there with her drone controller resting securely in her lap, and Vera standing quietly beside her.

The camera drone was currently up in the sky, performing its routine evening security sweep of the surrounding area.

The massive horde of infected was still shuffling down the highway four kilometers south, slowly drifting west, completely uninterested in the state road leading to this farmhouse, which was incredibly good news.

"Hey, Nikki, come over here," Nora called out to me without looking up from her bright digital screen.

"What is going on, kid?" I asked, stepping closer to look over her shoulder.

"Look at the camera feed facing the south border of the property."

I looked closely at the small digital screen displaying the dark southern boundary.

And at the far end of the long driveway, right at the property line where the fence met the state road, a vehicle was parked, headlights off, while the rumbling sound of a heavy engine drifted across the snow.

The mysterious vehicle was not coming any closer to the property, but it also wasn’t leaving.

It was just sitting there idling in the cold, deliberately watching the farmhouse.

"Those men have done that exact same thing every single night this week," Vera told me in a very quiet, nervous voice. "They park in that exact same spot, using that exact same heavy truck. They just sit out there watching us until about midnight, and then they finally drive away."

[They do this every single night. A heavy truck full of unknown men, parking at the end of a private road, intentionally stalking a house full of women...]

I didn’t say a single word in response to that highly disturbing piece of information.

I just stood there on the wooden porch with my hands gripping the railing, staring in the direction of the car.

[Let me guess, these were the same dudes who shot at us today...]