Chapter 3

Uncle Norman was there with the farm truck and looked us over. “Y’all managed that ok? Y’wer gone four hours.”

“I was totally unprepared Uncle Norm, there were near 60 Zombies and one nasty fast monster all in black. I’d have died without Bruce...” I said quickly. I meant it too. That level could have gone either way.

The trick with handrails became known as the “Bruce & Bill’ and was a standard trick to use against zombies once we were freely allowed to publicly share our stories, tactics, and successes. Notes stacked and stored next to the portals would say things like ‘3x B&B on south stairwell =~30 Z ‘. Hacksaws and pipe cutters became standard for a team to bring to ‘The Factory’.

Bruce looked sheepish and asked to be taken to the hospital so he could get his fingers looked at. Norm made him shower first.

I was sweaty and gross, bleeding from cuts on the side of my head, missing a chunk of hair, and exhausted but I honestly couldn’t wait to see my kids. Reflecting back with 20-20 hindsight I can see that moment was the turning point. I recommitted to my children, but with an eye to what I would become in the future. I shocked myself by realizing for the first time that they would be grown and probably off to school while I was in my early 40’s ... the age most women are still with young kids.

Our reunion was a little bit of a denouement, as they had been eating one of Aunt Diane’s famous pies and had little time for their messy mom. I got an Eskimo Kiss from each of them as my nose was the only part I could clean with a napkin in a hurry before I got shuffled off to the shower.

The drive home was weird. My mind was full of Zombies and stories I couldn’t tell the kids, while they were telling me all about pie, barn cats, and chickens. It was surreal. The ‘Official’ story was that I was helping clear and clean the cow barn.

I pushed thoughts of Zombies and the Factory out of my head and focused on the cute stories coming out of the back seat, hoping that they hadn’t managed to sneak a kitten into the van.

I was exhausted, and so thankful that Diane had fed the kids already.

Bath time was fun again and I managed a few giggles with foamy soap in my bloody hair. I have this image in my head; Seneca and Ashley shivering, giggling and wrapped in frog-pattern towels on the floor of the bathroom. It wasn’t something to be shared on the Net or framed in the hall but that might make it the most precious image of them that I have.

Life never did get back to ‘Normal’ after that. The Portals and the stories about them dominated the media, stories about people going in and never coming out (easy to imagine) were everywhere. The group from the East coast was still the best source for real information, but there were smatterings of truth on Blogs and webpages too.

My face and neck healed well, very well. I confirmed with Bruce that he had the same experience with his hand. Two weeks is all he needed before the bones were set, or so he told me. Asking about further adventures into the portals on his father’s farm he was evasive. I got the idea that he had a different group to run with and didn’t want me tagging along for one reason or another.

I had a hard time when I went to his funeral four months later. Part of me knew he wasn’t really stable inside or outside the portal and I wasn’t really surprised he reached beyond his means. I know just how lucky we were on that first run, both for injuries and for item drops. Fortunately, the other three in his group made it out ok.

We spoke about him in ‘moderated’ tones since the rest of the family was in earshot, but I got the idea from what was inferred that he hadn’t been playing it safe at all and they all had real reservations about his methods before the final incident.

Management at work noticed a change in me. Margaret was my immediate boss and sat down outside with me one morning while my morning charge was wandering about the enclosed garden. I was watching but letting her have her space.

“You’ve made it through, ya know...” she said while lighting up a cigarette in the clearly no-smoking area. “We all do it ... go hard, I mean.” She paused and drew in a lungful.

“This industry will kill you if you let it. After a time, you either stay hard and resentful and then finally quit just to maintain your sanity or you learn to soften a little bit and enjoy your patients and their small victories and gains. For a long while I was just waiting for you to quit, but I was wrong about you.” She took a drag off her smoke and blew it away from me.

“We’re all on the same scale, I think. The patients here are a lot further along than I am, but I can feel it now where I couldn’t before. I got my own struggles, and my denial of that was part-and-parcel of my coldness toward them.” I replied. Surprised at how calm I was speaking to my superior like this.

“Take Cathy here, so full of enjoyment for her time here, just staring at the flowers. She doesn’t say it, but I think I can tell from subtle changes in her body language that she does. I was thinking ‘Why don’t I enjoy these simple flowers? Why can’t I just enjoy them with her?’ “ I continued, watching my charge while sitting next to my boss. “I was caught up in seeing the plastic bag stuck in the branches or the cigarette butts on the ground and just plain ignoring the flowers...”

We sat in silence for a while. By the time she’d finished her second smoke, I’d moved to Cathy’s side to prevent her falling into the flowerbeds. The light was great, so I whipped out my phone and got some decent photographs of them, zooming in for close images of individual flowers and also taking pictures of the whole gardens with the two of us in it. Her family had given her a digital picture frame with its own email address. I sent the photographs off through the net and knew they’d be there by the time I got her back to her room.

My kids might have noticed or not, but they never said anything directly. The reality of it was really telling though. The house was messier, the kids’ clothes or lunch wasn’t perfect but overall, I was being a better parent. I’m thankful for my (former) mother in-laws help when she gives it, but not ‘needing’ a perfect house, a perfect marriage, and a perfect life just made the day-to-day easier and better.

I learned to throw a baseball and a Frizbee (never really had before) with Seneca. All three of us joined a Martial Arts club and the kids got a real kick out of ‘throwing’ their mom over their shoulder. They would be in a kids class on Sundays while I took a different one on long-stick work. Strangely, I was a natural ... It was through this group that I met others who had been granted weapons. I wasn’t spying per-se ... but when a black staff suddenly appears in some guy’s hand, it’s kinda obvious.

I approached the group, two guys and two girls, all in their late teens or early twenties. “Is that one of those weapons from the Portals?” I asked, trying to appear naive.

“Yeah, I finally entered a portal last week and now I can actually call it up and use it. I’m a fire mage!” He said with bit of a cocky attitude. I’d drilled with him a few times, and he was kinda skilled but arrogant too.

“Does that mean that the rest of the group are weapons too?” I looked around as I said this.

“Yeah, we are. We’re discussing a portal run right now, so if you wouldn’t mind...” the blond girl tried to dismiss me. She was near six feet tall, couldn’t be over twenty: pretty with tits that defied gravity still. This cunt had the ‘I’m the fuckin boss of this school’ way of speaking. Maybe she actually had been the Queen Bee, but she was holding a wood staff from the class, not a Game Weapon, so I concluded that she hadn’t been inside yet.

I ‘had’ been inside and didn’t like her ‘poseur’ attitude one bit.

I wasn’t the Queen Bee at my school, but I saw how the process worked ... you put-down others and only doled out your approval to those who did what you told them to. If you were pretty enough (and vicious enough) you might just end up at the top of the pile.

I’d had a decade to reflect on my experience and to release my own insecurities yet still, for a moment, I felt like I was back in grade 9 with one of the bitchy cheerleaders telling me to go sit at another table. I wasn’t having any of that shit now.