I dug the hole.

  It was a deep hole, mostly because I kept digging. Something about digging was therapeutic. Mindless, yet goal-oriented. Active, but peaceful.

  Simple, straightfoward, satisfying.

  I was careful, smoothing the sides of the hole so it didn’t collapse while I was inside it, and I was also careless, tossing the dirt any which way.

  Honestly, if I had to choose, I’d say that digging that hole was my favorite part of my first twelve hours post-apocalypse.

  Okay, the competition wasn’t tough. But still.

  By the time I finally scrambled out of the hole, night had settled in fully, with stars from some completely unfamiliar night sky barely visible through the trees.

  “Whoa,” I said appreciatively.

  Jack laughed from somewhere in the warm glow ahead of me.

  Zelda wagged her tail.

  On general principles, I’d mapped out my hoped-for Wild Sanctuary area before I began digging, literally drawing a line in the dirt. I’d made a circle that encompassed enough space to touch upon one edge of the clearing and give Jack, Zelda, and me plenty of room to make ourselves at home inside.

  Had I thought it would do anything? Eh. I’d hoped.

  And then I’d stepped outside of that line and started digging a hole, and I’d dug my hole through two whole goblin visitations and the slow fade from late afternoon into night.

  One goblin had scooted by me and Jack had taken him out with a fireball; the other had landed on top of me.

  Cue the screaming. Mine.

  But Warden’s Edge smashed it into paste, as if it was a cockroach in a Florida kitchen. (We called them palmetto bugs, as if changing the name changed the reality. They were twice the size of NYC cockroaches, but squashed easier, and you could call them whatever you liked: they were cockroaches at heart.)

  Wild Sanctuary, though, saw my hope and raised it.

  Outside the hole, Jack and Zelda sat inside a dome of flowers lit by the warm amber glow of a properly built campfire. Roses, to be specific. Bougainvillea would have made sense, I suppose, but the roses were so much more magical.

  The dome arched over Jack and Zelda like a living cathedral, roses in every stage of bloom climbing invisible supports. Deep red, pale pink, creamy white, even a few that shifted colors as I watched—and all of them glowing softly in the firelight, petals catching and holding the warmth of the fire. The thorns were there—oh, the thorns were definitely there, long and sharp and gleaming like tiny daggers in the light of the flames—but they were almost artfully arranged, part of the beauty rather than detracting from it.

  Jack sat next to the fire. The kid showed definite signs of having been a Boy Scout. He’d built a proper stone ring, with enough wood stacked nearby that the fire could last a few hours at least. In the firelight, his burns looked better—not healed, but definitely improved. He was actually smiling as he watched me climb out of my hole, covered in dirt and probably looking like I’d been buried alive.

  Zelda was sprawled next to him, her squeaky ball forgotten beside her. She lifted her head when she saw me, tail thumping against the ground, but she looked utterly content. Like she was lounging at a campfire outside our tent at one of our favorite national forests, not this… whatever it was.

  The air inside the dome shimmered faintly. I could barely breathe. The scent of the flowers, sweet and heady, mixing with the clean scent of woodsmoke, was almost overpowering, but that wasn’t it. Or not only it. It was more that I was stepping into a fairy tale. Literally, climbing out of the dirt and entering a dream.

  “How long was I down there?” I asked, brushing dirt off my hands.

  “About two hours,” Jack said, poking at the flames with a stick. “The roses started about an hour ago, right around sunset.”

  I looked at my hole. It was definitely large enough to break a goblin’s leg, maybe even its neck. But compared to the rose dome, it looked almost pathetically mundane.

  “Next goblin arrival?” I asked.

  Jack tipped his head, looking at his own countdown timer. “Twenty-two minutes, approximately.”

  “And your hit points?”

  “Thirty-five out of forty-four. Looks like I’m regenerating about six per hour in your sanctuary,” Jack replied, not quite beaming.

  “Nice. So another hour and a half or so to full health?”

  “Looks like it.”

  “Excellent.” I joined him in the sanctuary, sitting beside Zelda at the fire. It was so strange to sit under the dome of flowers. I’d been sitting in this exact same spot just a couple of hours earlier, but it had looked so very different back then.

  “Protein bar?” Jack offered, holding out one from the small handful remaining.

  If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been stolen. Please report the violation.

  “I think I’m good, thanks.” The goblin I’d squashed in the pit had dropped a slightly-bruised apple. I’d offered half to Jack, but he’d passed, possibly because it was almost as dirty as I was.

  Not that anything could be as dirty as I was. I craved a shower with every fiber of my being.

  Reminded, I pulled out my water bottle and took a long swig, then passed it to Jack.

  “Thanks.” He accepted it gratefully, gulped down his share, then shook his head. “This water…”

  “Yeah.” I took the bottle back, then poured some into my hand for Zelda. I could practically see the dirt turning into mud as she lapped it down, but she, of course, didn’t care.

  I would have rubbed her ears, but I didn’t want to smear the mud onto her coat, so I wiped my hand against my leg instead. Maybe the mud would mix with the goblin blood and turn into some kind of fantasy-level camouflage. +2 to stealth.

  I snorted out a laugh at the thought.

  “Something funny?” Jack sounded a little wary, like maybe he was worried I was losing it.

  I turned my gaze away from the flickering flames and shot him a wry smile. “I would kill for a shower or some clean clothes. And, you know, every time I’ve ever said that kind of thing before, I meant it entirely metaphorically. But now?” I gestured at myself. “Yeah, I would kill a goblin for a shower. Maybe two of ‘em. Even three.”

  His chuckle mixed with a rueful sigh. “Maybe your next goblin will drop some shower wipes. The loot in this thing does seem a little spot-on.”

  His last goblin drop had been a can of Red Bull. Room temperature. I was grossed out by the thought, but he was saving it for an “emergency.” I couldn’t criticize: my gum drops were still sitting in one of the quick access slots of my pouch.

  Speaking of which… but no, I was so disgustingly dirty that the thought of putting my hand into a bag of sugary candy was semi-revolting. If the world really had completely fallen apart, those HEB gum drops might have to last me the rest of my life. Okay, possibly it was going to be a short life, but still… I didn’t want to waste them.

  A rose, loose-petaled and pink, drifted down in front of me, as if saying hello.

  I touched it. It wasn’t saying hello. It was saying, danger, danger, danger.

  I shot a glance at Jack. Had he gotten the message, too?

  He was staring at the rose, and then his eyes met mine. He swallowed, and I could see that he too had heard what the rose had to say.

  Wild Sanctuary had promised that inside its borders, allies could heal, resist damage, and sense threats. So I was guessing this rose was warning us. And not about the goblin due in fifteen minutes.

  A huge chunk of my personal processing power was stuck on the communication mechanism. A rose was talking to me.

  A rose.

  That felt simultaneously incredibly inefficient and like maybe I was living in Beauty and the Beast. It was a flower. What a strange way to send a message.

  And then Zelda sat up, abruptly alert, ears attentive.

  She has typical Jack Russell terrier ears, the kind that flop forward over themselves, completely adorable. Her ears were always folded, never upright, except when she went on extreme alert. Black bears in the yard, the occasional gator, and now.

  It took me another few seconds to hear it, too. Footsteps, stumbling and uneven, hurrying through the forest toward our fire.

  Twenty-four hours ago, if I’d been out walking the trails near home and heard a similar sound, I’d have been hard-pressed to tell you anything more than ‘something’s coming this way.’

  But apparently almost doubling my perception had, well, almost doubled my perception.

  These were the footsteps of a bipedal, upright being, weighing more than one hundred pounds but probably less than two, in distress. Maybe injured, maybe just exhausted, but moving too fast to be calm, too erratically to be confident.

  I remembered Jack Francis shooting me in the face with a fireball, but I jumped to a ridiculous conclusion anyway. Call it perception, again. Maybe it was serendipity.

  Maybe it was just instinct.

  But I knew—or thought I did, anyway—that the danger wasn’t the approaching footsteps. It was whatever was behind them.

  Zelda gave a gentle woof. She agreed with me.

  I stood, picking up Warden’s Edge.

  Jack stood, too, his hands clenching into fists.

  The footsteps got closer, and then a voice called out—female, exhausted, desperate.

  “Please,” the voice said. “I saw your fire. I’m not—I won’t hurt you. I just need help.”

  The woman who stumbled into our firelight looked like she’d been through a blender. Scratched up, clothes torn, dark hair matted with leaves and what looked like dried blood. She was young, maybe mid-twenties, with the kind of lean, outdoorsy style that suggested she actually knew what she was doing in a forest.

  The roses stirred, asking a question.

  I grimaced. Oh, fuck me. Was I really going to make the same mistake twice?

  But I waved my hand in acknowledgement, and the roses parted, the sanctuary opening a door for her.

  Okay, that was… well, a smile twitched at the corners of my lips despite the clearly terrible situation that was unfolding. That was cool. Right? I could admit that was cool?

  “Thank you,” the woman gasped, collapsing to her knees just beside the fire. “Thank you so much. I thought—I didn’t think I was going to make it.”

  Up close, she looked even worse. There was something wrong with her left arm—not broken, but she was holding it funny. And her breathing was off, like she was working harder than she should be just to stay upright.

  “What happened?” Jack asked, because obviously the stupid questions came first.

  “Who’s after you?” I interrupted him, because, hey, priorities.

  “Sam,” she said. She dropped her head, looking at her knees, but the tears were still obvious. “He killed them. He killed Matt and he killed Ari. I woke up while he was killing Ari.”

  A fellow human. Color me surprised. Not.

  “He was supposed to be standing watch.” She choked out the words like they were glass in her throat, pain in every syllable.

  I glanced at the participant counter, and grimaced. Yeah, between the last time I’d looked and now, we’d dropped to 5/24.

  Five.

  That meant three of us were here, one was out there in the forest, probably nearby, and the fifth… well, who knew where they were?

  The woman touched her shoulder. “I think he’s killed me, too. Unless you’ve got something that can cure poison?”

  I stepped closer, just enough to look at her back. I was reasonably cautious. I’m not an idiot. There was at least a possibility that this woman—who looked completely normal, like an average hiker out on a pleasant fall weekend—was a killer herself.

  But she did have a knife sticking out of the back of her shoulder.

  Jack Francis, on the other hand, showed no caution at all. He immediately dropped to his knees beside our visitor and said, “Let me help,” reaching for the knife.

  “Wait,” I said, stopping him with a hand on his arm even as I winced in sympathetic pain. “Do you want us to pull that out?”

  “Any bandages? Or—”

  “No, nothing.”

  “Protocol is to leave it until you get me to a hospital,” she almost whispered, before forcing a pained smile. “I’m an EMT. It didn’t hit anything vital or I’d be dead already, but if you pull it out with no way to stop the bleeding, I might bleed out. But—”

  She swallowed. “Like I said, I think it’s poisoned. I feel... really weird. Not good. More than just blood loss.”

  I was one hundred percent ready for disassociation to kick in and tell me what to do, but disassociation was having an incredibly tough time competing with the rose-scented flavor of danger, danger, danger that was absolutely shrieking at me. I didn’t know who Sam was, but I knew he was out there, watching us.

  So I did something stupid.