Apocalypse: 2.14 Burnout (Patreon)

Burnout 2.14

Shayne HayesSeptember 2015

Five stones, each the size of my head and torso, flew through the air. Scout dipped between them all in an impressive show of aerial dexterity. He wasn’t the fastest pokemon out there, but his short, wide wings allowed him to swerve on a dime.

Sir Swagsire and Scout were sparring against one another. My wooper hurled stones at his aerial teammate to practice Rock Tomb. It wasn’t a ground type move, but I considered the two similar enough that learning it was a possibility. After all, he already condensed mud into a semi-solid state using Mud Bomb. Maybe this was part of a wooper’s natural “moveset,” maybe not. Either way, we’d give it a try since no one could tell us it’s truly impossible.

Nearby, Rocket was putting Spike and Nibbles, the two poochyena, through their paces. Rocket taught them Dig and it became hard to tell whether they were playing wack-a-mole or training. Then again, they were puppies. I heard that “playtime” was the biggest way wolf pups learned to hunt. The same thing probably applied with magic hyenas.

At first, I was reluctant to let the pokemon practice like this. We had no pokemon centers. No matter how fast a pokemon healed, getting hurt was likely to put us back days or weeks. That had been my position for months. We drilled moves, but seldom sparred.

It was only recently that I began to reconsider my position. Yes, sparring was risky, but so was any football scrimmage, boxing match, or any other contact sport. There had to have been powerful trainers before the advent of modern pokemon centers in the pokemon world.

At the end of the day, it was that I began to understand that pokemon weren’t that fragile. An ariados half my size and a third of my weight was strong enough to overpower me with just its neck muscles. I tried hacking at a gligar’s neck segments with a knife. I knew just how durable even a “frail” pokemon like sneasel could be.

Really, I’d been coddling my team. I’d still be careful, but sparring was too important for developing combat instincts. And besides, we’d soon have oran berries. With Dr. Nguyen’s pharmacological expertise, I hoped that would lead to rudimentary potions.

Soon after, Rocket exhausted the two poochyena. He popped up out of the ground like a furry snake, tongue lolling in a goofy grin.

“Did you have fun?” I asked wryly. 

“Lin,” he barked happily.

“Well, come on, then. You may as well have lunch.”

“Oone.”

I could tell by the slight drooping of his ears that he could do with a rest as well. He wasn’t physical exhausted, but there was a mental weariness that everyone who’s ever babysat a pair of energetic twins could relate to.

I’d moved my outdoor “kitchen” so I could be next to my little garden in the putting green. Well, I said that, but it was just a hole in the ground I’d lined with bricks to create an oven and a fisherman’s portable table I found in Guilermo’s sporting goods shop.

In front of me was my take on a “pan pizza.” I grated potatoes and dried the mush before slapping it into something resembling a pizza base. I then covered it in gravy for sauce, with bits of mushrooms, onions, and smoked and cured rabbit. There was no cheese because dairy obviously wasn’t an option. Salt, pepper, and garlic rounded out the flavors.

I cut Rocket a generous portion, making sure to take from the crispiest part where the pan had been hottest. No matter what we ate, he still loved the crunchy bits most. I was then immediately beset by two, pitiful whines. With no choice, I surrendered another two slices to the ravenous twins.

I then ate my quarter before getting started on a second pan for Sir Swagsire and Scout. We usually just ate what we could in the wild, but now that we were back in town, I saw no need to skip a hot meal. It did mean I needed to cook multiple times, but that was a small price to pay to keep my friends content.

I made the final two portions and relaxed. The loamy soil of the putting green had yet to sprout anything, but there was a tranquil quality about this place that I couldn’t quite put to words. Just being next to the garden filled me with an optimism that reminded me of the New Year.

We finished eating and I nudged my partner with my foot. “Oi, Rocket, you still have energy, right?”

“Linoone?” he asked as he rolled over onto his back. He reminded me of an uncooked baguette like this. “Lin… oone…”

“Run ten laps around town.”

“Oone.”

“No?”

“Lin.”

“Fine, we’ll try something new, then. No exercise necessary.” He perked up at that, the lazy bum. Smirking, I pulled out two pieces of copper wire and a potato. “Here, stick the ends in your mouth.”

“Linoone… Lin-linoone,” he huffed. He looked at me skeptically.

“I’m not asking you to eat the potato raw. I know you don’t like the taste. The wires. Keep them in your mouth.”

“Oone…”

He complied with great reluctance. The look in his eyes said, “This is stupid. I do this because I love you. See how much I love you? You should feed me more tasty things as much as I love you.”

Then, the two pieces of wire went into his mouth. I jabbed the other ends into the potato. His eyes widened in surprise and he quickly spat it out with a pitiful whine.

“Oh, don’t be a baby. Your tongue is sensitive enough to feel the charge of electricity from a potato battery,” I chided as I stuck the wires back inside.

“Oone…” he continued to gripe. He tried to spit them back out but I clamped his muzzle shut.

“Nope. Keep them there. I know they’re uncomfortable. And yes, you do look silly. Also yes, Sir Swagsire is laughing at you.”

“Lin?”

“But that tingly feeling is electricity.”

“Lin…?”

“Learn the way it feels. Try to harness it. You should be able to generate a similar tingly feeling along your entire body.”

“Linoone. Linoone-lin.”

“The goal is to get you comfortable with electricity. After that, we can start learning moves like Thunder Wave and Thunderbolt.”

“Linoone…”

I chuckled as my pokemon went back to training. This wasn’t my idea, of course. I wasn’t that creative.

Sabrina, on the other hand, was worthy of being called Professor Kush. Marijuana may or may not have been involved in this, but it was a good plan nonetheless. Even if it failed, it was funny.

Besides, if Rocket could learn Thunder Wave, we’d have a really nice way to incapacitate people without relying on powder bombs. Swagsire had Toxic, but it was far too dangerous to use on people.

X

Carnelian Bay, being the tiny town it was in the Before, did not have a school. Students used to be served by the Tahoe-Truckee Unified School District. There wasTahoe Lake Elementary School in Tahoe City, Kings Beach Elementary School in Kings Beach, and two North Tahoe Schools that catered to middle and high school students respectively, also in Tahoe City.

As I’d been told, North Tahoe High School used to have a student population of about four hundred fifty students. Which meant a graduating class of about a hundred fifteen students each year. Which was tiny, a laughable fraction of the high school I’d attended. And that was supposed to be every student in the Truckee-Tahoe area.

We wished we could have a class size that large. With a population of around two thousand, everyone under the age of eighteen could fit comfortably in a single building. And while the town would have loved to use one of the schoolhouses nearby, by the time people began to consider the education of the youth, they’d settled in Carnelian and already built the walls.

In the end, some concerned mothers repurposed a community center near the golfing club as a schoolhouse. We didn’t even have enough students to divide them by each grade so we just lumped them into younger elementary, older elementary, middle, and high school sections.

I knocked gently on the doorframe as I entered. Here, I found Austin McAllen, the mayor’s son who’d gotten injured in the crustle incident.

He… He’d seen better days. He’d been the one who wanted to try to negotiate with the crustle. And for that, he’d received a Rock Throw to his hip. It wasn’t a fatal injury, but having his pelvis shattered like that, in our conditions, meant he’d likely never walk again.

I felt a surge of pity for the man. He’d tried. And, truthfully, he had reason to believe it’d work. He was the one who convinced the geodude and graveler to join the town before I arrived by offering them bones from hunted animals. He guessed, rightly, that bone would contain minerals and organic compounds the rock types wouldn’t find in abundance in their normal diet.

Now, he worked here at the schoolhouse. He was one part teacher and one part school administrator. I didn’t know what he studied in college, but he did a good job of wrangling kids from what I’d been told.

“Yo, how’s it going, Austin?” I asked with a friendly smile.

He looked up from his desk with a fragile smile. He’d put on a bit of weight, probably inevitable since he was wheelchair-bound. “Hey, Shane. Fancy seeing you here.”

“We’re thinking about another scavenging trip to Truckee. I figured I’d ask what the school needed. Heard you’ve been doing good work with the kids.”

“What we need? Paper and stationary would be nice. Pencils, erasers, crayons, that sort of thing.”

“No textbooks?”

“Those would be great too, but we’re having some trouble keeping the younger kids focused,” he admitted with a fond chuckle. “And, we need them to be able to take notes. Hell, if you can find a toy shop or something and stumble on one of those miniature whiteboards, that’d be cool, too.”

“That’s a good point. Thanks, Austin. I’ll see what I can do about that. There are probably reams of printing paper and office supplies no one’s bothered to touch, too.”

“Yeah. As for the books… Anything to do with pokemon, obviously. Practical instruction guides are worth more than high-level academic textbooks these days. Woodshop, mechanics guides, that sort of thing. Something about child psychology or education for us teachers wouldn’t be bad, either.”

I nodded and pulled out my journal to take notes. “I’ll see what I can do about that.”

“And, if you can find room in the back of your trucks, some of the popular fantasy and sci-fi stuff from Before. You know, stuff we grew up with.”

“I’m sure there’s something. Why those?”

“People need an outlet, Shane. Kids especially. Those kids who went off on their own? They weren’t dumb. I mean, not more than any of us were at their age. They were fed up. They can only live life on a slow simmer for so long before something boils over.”

“That… Fair enough. I guess I haven’t taken much interest in the town itself. I’m starting to learn that it might have been a mistake,” I admitted softly. “It’s just… There‘s always something to do, always something else to plan for.”

“You got them back, the ones who could be brought back anyway,” he said with a melancholic smile. “You know, I used to hate you a little bit, back after the crustle thing.”

“Me?”

“Yes, you. You had a pokemon partner. As much as the geodude and graveler worked with me, none of them clicked like Rocket did for you. And… And when you came back after clearing a dungeon, with berries and information about how this is all supposed to work… I guess it felt like you were moving forward while I’m stuck in this chair.”

“I…” I wasn’t sure what to say to that. I thought I understood, but only in an abstract sense. “I’m sorry.”

He shook his head with a melancholic smile. “No, don’t be. I’m not saying this to make you feel bad. I was the one who decided he wanted to talk to a pissed off crustle. I’m saying this to say… I get it. I get what Pierce and his friends felt because I feel it too. The world is changing, Shane. You’re changing with it. We, a lot of people in town, sometimes feel like we’re just along for the ride.”

“I didn’t mean for that to happen. I just want everyone to be safe. I’m not a people person, Austin. Not really much of a leader either, no matter what everyone says about the rangers. I guess I figured that if did what I could to keep people safe, brought in meat and berries and whatnot, and gave people the space to breathe, it’d kinda work itself out.”

“It helped. You helped a lot. I think things could have gone so much worse without you. The berries, people know what they are, what they represent. Even the grass type pokemon are friendlier because of them.”

“Yeah… For what it’s worth, I don’t think you’re wrong,” I told him softly. I thought about the dungeons. “Trust isn’t wrong. I wouldn’t have gotten the oran berries from the Stampede Reservoir if I didn’t choose to trust a wooper. I wouldn’t have completed the Rubicon Trailhead Dungeon as smoothly if I didn’t help the lilligant.”

“I guess that’s the difference between us. You know when to trust, how to trust, without it costing too much,” he laughed bitterly.

“It’s not all hopeless, you know. Your legs…”

“I know. Magic berries and whatnot. Dr. Nguyen told me. But life isn’t a video game, not even for you.”

“Yeah… But it’s not nothing. If not oran berries, then sitrus. If not sitrus, then a pokemon with Heal Pulse. Or a blueprint from the dungeons. There’s gotta be something.”

“It’s not nothing,” he agreed. “For now, Dr. Nguyen made me a salve to numb the pain. Small doses of oddish Stun Spore mixed with some topical cream. She’s already innovating. She’s brilliant.”

“I’ll check in on her, see if she needs anything from the hospital in Truckee,” I promised. It was the least I could do.

“You’re a cruel man, you know, giving me hope like that. Hope can be cruel.”

I paused at the door. “I’m an antisocial hermit who prefers to talk to his ferret than people. Aren’t you the weird one for thinking otherwise?”

X

I made my rounds after that. The town was at once small enough that everyone knew everyone else’s business, but big enough for plenty of diverse interests.

Pat wanted bags of fertilizer and gardening tools. If they weren’t available, he wanted scrap metal that could be fashioned into tools and planters. And sturdy gloves, those were always useful. The fertilizer especially would be heavy, but they could make work easier for the oddish, gloom, and skiddo. Hell, if it made the grass types happier, that was worth doing on its own.

Doctors Nguyen and Lansdowne wanted medical supplies. Not medicine, those had shelf lives depending on the exact chemicals in question. Mostly, they wanted syringes, nitrile gloves which were probably still good, cloth bandages, and something called the plaster of Paris. It was gypsum which could be used for dental work or to harden medical casts.

According to people way smarter than me, gypsum took on moisture from the air naturally. It’d all be hydrated by now, even those in sealed containers. But, Dr. Nguyen said she should be able to dry it back into usable powder through a process called calcination. Basically, she wanted to slow-bake rocks.

The town also broadly wanted clothes, blankets, and canned food. Any kind of book or guide about how people managed in the days before electricity were also welcome. And of course, there was the need for charcoal briquettes with winter coming in.

I jotted everything down in my notebook. It was a town-wide shopping list, one I’d have to prioritize. Having taken stock, I headed to the mechanics to see just how much space I was working with.

The Adams brothers, Hunter and Shane, were a pair of identical twins who knew a lot about cars and had transitioned to general repairs. They were tall and broad-shouldered, with curly, brown hair that they kept in a short crop. They even shaved the same way, with prominent goatees but no mustache.

Notably, they didn’t like pokemon. When I first arrived, Guilermo advised me not to show off Rocket to them. A while later, I learned why: They were at ground zero when the snorlax raided. They saw the enormous bear literally swallow their parents whole. To them, pokemon were nightmare fauna, not creatures that embodied the hopes and dreams of children.

At the same time, they weren’t stupid. They understood that pokemon were necessary now. They did their best to make the town self-sufficient, but the world had changed and they knew they’d have to change with it. Perhaps, they felt this shift better than anyone.

“Look, Shane, we’ve got four cars in town that work. Total,” Hunter said as he stroked his goatee in thought. “Not many people know this, but petroleum products degrade over time.”

“We used them a few months back,” I pointed out hopefully. “Any chance we can scrounge up enough gas?”

“You did. Because that’s what we did then. What you guys used? That was the last of it. Gas can go flat, kinda like a can of coke. Sure, you can extend the shelf life if you keep it airtight and store it in a cool place and whatnot, but there’s a limit.”

“Bro’s right. Bein’ real with you, we kinda passed that limit six months ago. It was a minor miracle that we even got those cars working last time,” Shane, the other one, chimed in. “Unless you can magic up a refinery in the dungeon, we’re shit out of luck.”

I nodded in reluctant acceptance. What else could I do? If the mechanics said there was no gas, there was no gas. “Alright, I’ll work with what I’ve got. You said we have four cars? How are they running?”

“Electric cars. The world ended in 2012. That’s actually a little lucky for us. Several mass-market plugin cars were released the year prior. We managed to find six electric vehicles, but they’re not exactly all-terrain trucks. Only four are working.”

“We tried to fit them with more appropriate tires, but there’s nothing we can do about the trunk space,” Hunter chimed in alongside his brother. “They’re mostly passenger cars or convertibles, with only one SUV.”

I looked over the cars they’d found. The space would be a problem, especially considering the rangers needed to ride in them. Or… did they? It wasn’t like we’d be carrying perishables. We could ride to Truckee, then walk back alongside the cars if necessary.

I did some quick math. It was about fourteen miles from Carnelian Bay to Truckee. Given a party of eight, we could hike back in two days at a leisurely pace. A three day expedition was hardly difficult.

“This is good. We can make this work. One day to get there and load, two days to walk back, easy,” I said.

“You’ll want to be careful. EVs are good for about forty or fifty miles. And that’s on good roads, not loaded down too much. I wouldn’t want to rely on them after that.”

“You’re kidding… So, on roads filled with potholes and over two days…”

“Thirty miles? Maybe? It’s about that far from here to Truckee and back. I’ll be real, Shane. This thing here? It’s basically a fancy golf cart.”

“You said this was one of the newest models. I’m guessing the others aren’t any better.”

“Yup,” other-Shane drawled. “It should mostly be good? We did find a solar panel but that’s still just a trickle charge. They’re not as efficient as you see in the movies. If you run out of battery, you’ll be stranded, possibly for a few days. Either that, or you’ll have to go back for it later.

I let out a deep sigh. “That’s… That’s fine. There’s no helping it. Anything you two need that I should be looking for?”

The twins grinned eerily in sync. “Funny you should say that…”

I groaned as they added more and more to my shopping list. Clearly, supply runs were a bit more complicated than I’d expected.

Author’s Note

Behold, the mighty potato battery.

EVs apparently became more common around 2011? Idk, I’m mostly going off the Nissan Leaf, which was released that year. I figure this is a better plan than the narrative conceit in zombie apocalypse settings where all cars still magically work.

Animal Fact: Pistol shrimps crack their claws, generating a shockwave that can stun fish. This “gun” is how they hunt and defend themselves. But how loud is that underwater?

As it turns out, very. The crack of a pistol shrimp generates up to 218 decibels. For comparison, the loudest sperm whale click was measured at 236 decibels. The loudest rocket launch by NASA was the Saturn V, which is logged at 204 decibels.

The human pain threshold is about 125 decibels. However, even if you were directly next to a pistol shrimp, it would not hurt you because of how quickly its blast disperses. The range of its “bullet” is actually only about an inch.