The city beyond the portal looked the same as before. Destroyed, smouldering, and abandoned. The place didn’t even smell burnt, just empty. As if all worldly creation gave up on this place.

  The lack of smell might have been caused by my helmet though. It somehow improved my hearing, though it blocked a bit of my field of view.

  Since I didn’t hear anything other than the wind wailing through destroyed skyscrapers, I headed to find Francesca’s lair.

  I thought I remembered the path, but after thirty minutes of wandering around, I realized I may have overestimated myself. No sign of Francesca or her lair or any hint.

  Damn it.

  I pulled out my phone and checked for signal.

  None, obviously.

  It would have been too easy to have coverage here. I checked for WiFis and found none.

  Of course. Things could never be easy.

  I pocketed the phone and saw Francesca ducking under a pile of debris. At least that solved itself.

  She didn’t look like much. Skinny, a face one would miss in a crowd. She had blonde hair hacked short and uneven, and the bruises under her eyes matched the dried blood crusted along her cheek. She cradled a wine bottle in her hand and giggled when our eyes met.

  “Comes into the apocalypse, and still dresses in a suit,” she said, grinning from ear to ear. “And I thought I wouldn’t recognize you. Well, cheers to good suits.” She took a long swig from the wine bottle.

  I couldn’t help but smile. With no marks of serious wounds, she was fine. “I’ve brought you some supplies. Do you still have your hideout?”

  Her eyes widened, and she bounced on her feet. “I usually go to the boy’s place, but you have none here, and you’ve already been to mine. It’s all in place and well. Still as cozy as ever. What did you bring for me? Is it booze?”

  “Maybe. Let’s go.” I didn’t actually know what all I brought, and knowing Isabella, it could have been something weird. Yes, I checked the bag, but that got me through just the top layer, underneath which could be anything.

  Francesca led the way through the rubble. She had this strange way of stumbling as if she was about to fall, but also weaving through obstacles without slowing down at the same time.

  As I followed her, I wondered how she snuck up on me. How everyone snuck up on me, actually, because Takezo had no problems either.

  If only there were a perception stat… then I wouldn’t have put points into it, anyway.

  Her path took us back through a ravaged mall, a few hundred yards to a spot I had walked through three times in the past fifteen minutes.

  Francesca stumbled to a pile of debris, kicked aside a fragment of a steel beam, fell, giggled, jumped up to her feet, and opened the hatch under the beam.

  I did not notice that hatch.

  At all.

  She slid down, and so did I, closing the hatch after me.

  The bunker looked just like the last time, and smelled even worse. But it most likely didn’t have any radiation. Or at least not too much.

  I removed my helmet and pulled off my mask.

  The stench of blood and sweat punched me in the nose.

  Francesca giggled again and dropped onto the floor next to her booze pile. “What did you bring me?”

  Her eyes shone as if this were Christmas Eve. Even considering the alcohol, I couldn’t comprehend how she could look so happy.

  I put down my weapons, took off the backpack, and opened the main zipper. Item by item, I laid out what Isabella packed for me.

  Water, packed food, cans, a med kit, I had a surprisingly sensible stack of supplies.

  Francesca carefully looked over the items. “Did you bring any booze? Or chips? Or at least some candy bars?”

  “Well, there’s chocolate.” I motioned at a box with a big chunk of chocolate wrapped in plain brown paper.

  “Awesome.” Francesca grabbed it and bit into the chocolate chunk as if it were an apple. She chewed with a full mouth and mumbled something incomprehensible into it.

  I chuckled. “I’ll bring more sweets next time. You should eat some proper food too.” I shook a bit a can that had beans plastered on its side.

  She chewed the chocolate for quite a while longer and swallowed. “Nah, no point in doing that. There’s no way out of this hellhole. I’ll die the moment something randomly gets past my shields, so I might as well drink all the booze and eat all the sweets.” She reached for the booze pile, grabbed a tequila, pulled the cork open with her teeth, spit it out, and took a long swig.

  That sank my mood. By the inflection in her voice, she meant every word. “I’ll get you out of here.”

  She giggled. “You wish. But if you could take someone else through the portal, you wouldn’t be coming alone. All the equipment you bring isn’t something you could just buy yourself. It’s Secret Societies stuff, and they wouldn’t send you alone unless they had no other options.”

  “Do you know the secret societies?”

  “Yeah, I’m technically a certified mage of the Mage Guild of Rome.” She reached into her pants and pulled out a little badge from her pocket. The circular badge had a symbol in the middle, and a text in a language I didn’t understand, most likely Italian, etched around the rim.

  “Well, I’m a lowest-tier lackey in the US branch of Lucielle Legal’s interventions. Or, was anyway, I’ve got no idea what position I have now.”

  “Lucielle Legal?” She giggled. “Have you been to the headquarters? It’s pretty awesome, and I heard Lucielle has a literal garden floor for herself up in the executive section. It’s the tallest building in Rome, too.”

  “I’ve never been to Rome.” And actually, I’ve never been to many places. “I grew up in Ireland, and then moved to the States for college. Haven’t travelled at all since.”

  “Still more than me. I’m a child of Naples, and the only place my parents ever took me was on vacation in Croatia. An absolute shithole, by the way, but cheap and mostly peaceful. There’s this thing with my parents that they are kind of wealthy, but refuse to spend any of it… But I’m getting sidetracked, again.” She drank from the tequila bottle. “Sorry, I ramble a lot sometimes.”

  “It’s fine. Are you up for something a bit dangerous?”

  “I’m a dead woman drinking herself to oblivion, so sure.” She smiled. “Especially if it’s fun.”

  If you come across this story on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen from Royal Road. Please report it.

  Fun wasn’t what I expected, but it could be. Theoretically speaking. “I need to find some functioning computer, laptop, server, or anything of that sort. I’ve got an external power source that can power almost anything, just need to find that something.”

  She frowned. “For what? It’s not like there’s any internet coverage here.”

  “No, but there might be news history saved there in browser history. Ideally, I need to find out if Tokyo is the only city with a demon invasion, and if this one has spread anywhere. Really, any information that could help the world to prepare a bit better.”

  She jumped to her feet, stumbled, but didn’t fall. Instead, she grabbed a fresh bottle of vodka as she bent. “Sure. Let’s go.”

  I packed my stuff up, leaving behind the supplies. The hood slipped well over my head, and the helmet still somewhat fit me.

  We emerged from Francesca's bunker into a world painted in shades of ash and shadow. "I was thinking about trying the office skyscrapers. Maybe something in there isn’t fried."

  Francesca laughed, the sound hollow against the dead air. "I’ve spent days searching for them. There’s nothing that isn’t four times re-fried." She kicked a piece of concrete, sending it skittering across the broken street. "But I haven’t searched for server rooms, and I think I know where to look for one." She led the way.

  We headed toward what had once been the financial district, where glass towers had scraped the sky and housed thousands of networked systems. Now they were just crooked fingers of steel and concrete, pointing accusingly at the heavens that had abandoned them.

  We walked for about half an hour, Francesca uncharacteristically silent, gaze searching for demons. The first building we entered had been some kind of tech firm. Logos I half-recognized were scattered across the office floor as we walked into what was roughly the fifth floor.

  We passed through the building, everything covered in burnt fragments of shattered glass and plastic. The stairwell was a twisted mess of metal, forcing us to climb the outside of the structure using exposed support beams as makeshift ladders to get to the lower floors.

  This would had been a lot easier if I wasn’t wearing the heavy anti-radiation suit. My hands ached by the time we reached what was once the basement.

  Half the ceiling had collapsed, revealing the floor below, where cubicles stood in eerie formation, their contents spilled like guts across the dust-covered carpet. Francesca moved with surprising grace for someone who was stumbling drunk less than an hour ago, balancing on a beam that I wouldn't have trusted with my weight.

  "Here," she called, pointing to what had once been an IT department. Rows of desktops sat on cracked desks, their screens blank and accusing.

  I picked my way over to the nearest terminal and pressed the power button. Nothing.

  As expected, I put down my backpack, pulled out the power source, and connected the machine to it. I pressed the power button again. Still nothing. Not even a spark. I tried another, and another, my hope fading with each silent machine.

  "The blast probably wasn't just heat and force," Francesca said, tapping a cracked tablet she'd found, the screen dark. She tossed it aside with casual disregard. "I don’t know jack about physics, but I think I once saw a video that talked about EMP being also released by a type of nuclear explosion, or something."

  "Some machines should be able to survive the EMP," I said, prying open a desktop case to examine the motherboard inside. It was intact but lifeless.

  She shrugged, balancing on the edge of a desk that groaned beneath her slight weight. "I’ve tried everything. Even found a generator once, the damn thing wouldn't spark no matter what I did."

  Well, servers had to do. We spent the next two hours digging down to where we expected a server room to be. As I moved fallen debris around, I realized the endurance had a use.

  Francesca got tired after ten minutes, more lying around and toying with her vodka bottle than doing anything. But while I did catch some sweat, I wasn’t even breathing heavily after a couple of hours of hard manual labor.

  My build has made me the perfect pack mule. Every tyrant’s dream, a peon that can handle any menial labor that the dexterity-built nobility tasks him with.

  I cleared out the path, and we walked in, using my phone for the torch.

  The server room looked like a pan of scrambled eggs. The reinforced walls and underground placement protected it from direct blasts, but the whole place still shook.

  With server blades crunching under my boots, I searched for one that looked intact.

  And I found one, just needed to clear a bit of debris to reach the power source. Five minutes of work later, I did, and I connected the power source.

  Sweat budded on my forehead as I took a deep breath and pressed the power button.

  Nothing.

  I pressed it a few more times.

  Nothing

  “Fuck.” I yanked the cable out and started packing my backpack. “This was an absolute waste of time.”

  “I had fun,” Francesca remarked. “And hey, you tried pretty hard too, that counts for something.”

  Not when the stakes were the deaths of millions of people. And definitely not before Isabella. “I can’t return empty-handed.”

  “Why? Would something bad happen to you if you did?”

  I caught a hint of worry in her voice. That almost made me smile. “No. I just don’t want to fail, again.”

  Francesca seated herself atop a destroyed server. She took a long swing from the vodka bottle. “Failure is a part of life. Often, no matter what you do, success simply isn’t possible. You know, my father always wanted a son. But I’m his only child. He really wanted me to be that son, but in the end, no matter what I did, I could never succeed at being one.”

  “And you’re drinking yourself to death over it,” I replied, and immediately froze in shame. Damn it. “Sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. I was just angry.”

  “You aren’t wrong.” She shook her head. “Being drunk in a world where the only thing I can do is to die ended up being surprisingly freeing. In retrospect, my life wasn’t bad at all. I just hated it too much to see the good things.”

  “Yeah, well, I don’t hate my life. I have something to do, something to live for, and I need to return with something substantial to keep doing it.”

  She smiled. “Did a girl steal your heart?”

  I slapped my face with my palm. No. But I couldn’t say that with a clear conscience either. “I don’t know. I wouldn’t say that, but I also refuse to return empty-handed, and yes, there’s a woman involved. She’s a forty-seven-year-old murderous, anti-social, bitch that’s made of five feet of highly compressed hatred for everything in existence.”

  “And you like her.”

  “Not in that way.” I headed for the exit. “But I owe her a lot. Like, a really lot.”

  Francesca hopped off her seat and followed me. She finished the vodka bottle and threw it away. “There’s a place where you’ll find something. The demons have a dome like twenty miles east.”

  Why didn’t she lead with that? Probably because it was actually dangerous. “I’m up for that.”

  Francesca giggled, bounced on her feet, and took the lead. We climbed out of the destroyed building and returned to the main street. We headed backwards though, in the general direction of her hideout.

  Then we turned and got on an empty square. “There,” she pointed at a bike lying on a pile of debris. “That’s my bike. We will get there on it.”

  I narrowed my eyes. That didn’t look like it could carry two people, especially when one of them was armed to the teeth and with a huge backpack.

  She already skipped to it though, and pulled the bike off the pile. “Sit behind me.”

  I moved the assault rifle hanging over my shoulder to press it between my backpack and my back. With the supplies being delivered, my backpack wasn’t that heavy, but still.

  Very carefully, I walked to her, flung my leg over the old bike, and sat onto it.

  “Hold onto me.”

  I caught myself by her shoulders.

  She laughed, grabbed my hands, and moved them straight above her hips. “There.”

  Francesca turned the key, and the bike roared to life. She grabbed the handles, lightly pressed the gas, and disengaged the brake. The bike jerked a yard forward, and the engine died.

  That didn’t sound good.

  “Too little gas.” Francesca turned the bike on again. “It’ll work this time.” She leaned forward, pressed the gas, and the bike bolted forward.

  Except that it almost immediately tilted backwards, destabilized by my weight. As I fell, I held onto Francesca, so I pulled her off the bike.

  I landed on my backpack, she on me, and the bike crashed into the wall.

  “Sorry,” I blurted. “Are you all right?”

  She laughed. “You’re too heavy with all that gear. Can you drive a bike? It would be a lot easier if you drove.”

  “I can try.”

  With another giggle, Francesca jumped up from me and offered me a hand. I took it, and she pulled me up.

  This time, I picked up the bike, dusted off a bit of mess from it, and sat onto it, as far forward on the seat as I could.

  “Your backpack takes up all the space. I can’t fit behind you. Can’t you just leave it?”

  “I need the power source. And ammo, and I’ve got more supplies in it, I think.”

  “You think? You didn’t pack it yourself?”

  My face turned red again. “No, I just got it from Isabella.”

  “Aww, so mommy packed it for you. Can’t be a bad boy by leaving it behind.” She walked to my side. “Sit in the back, I’ll sit in the front, but you’ll drive.”

  Red and lost for words, I moved back on the bike, as far as it allowed me to reach the handles.

  Francesca slipped before me, pressing herself against me and between my arms. She turned the key in the ignition for me.

  She sat so close that I started getting all the inappropriate thoughts. I squeezed the gas. The bike shot forward, tilted back, I lost grip, and crashed on the ground, again, the bike flying off.

  Damn it.

  Francesca landed on me, again, giggling. “Okay, third time’s the charm.” She jumped up from me, but did not offer me a hand this time.

  Fair enough.

  I turned and climbed up to my feet while she collected the bike.

  “This time, hold onto me, and lean on me.” Francesca mounted the bike.

  I sat behind her, gently caught her above the hips, and leaned on her.

  “More.”

  I leaned on her even more, the smell of burn and sweat filling my nose as my nose touched her hair.

  She turned on the bike, squeezed the gas, and we bolted forward.

  We finally didn’t fall, so we blasted through the streets.