I have nothing with them. The girls cook food, do laundry, clean up, and do community service. We sleep in separate beds, in separate rooms, separated by a thin partition made of OSB. The rooms are small, but how much bigger can they be, considering that we only sleep and get dressed in them? Others don't have those either, half the people are still living in tents and huts. Sometimes the conscience wakes up, but quickly falls to the ground after a hook of selfishness, saying that we do more than others, so we should get more too. And the house and the most beautiful girls. The only pity is that from hard work and bad conditions, tension, fear, and so on, the beauty fades a little.
Everyone works fifteen hours a day, turning the settlement into a small fortress. My golems with shovels in their hands help to dig ditches, cesspools, cellars for food storage, haul logs for log cabins and wood for stoves from the distant forest.
Using a homemade plough, which was attached to a tractor, they ploughed a small field near the settlement, which they sowed with everything they could find, from radishes to potatoes cut into cubes with one eye, the net of which was found in the trunk of the car when they were draining fuel.
Two other groups of earthlings were found while hiking toward the city. One was a very small group, just six not very old men and women, janitors from a garment factory, who were returning home after their shift and were caught in the transfer, after which they hid for almost a month in an abandoned construction site on the outskirts of the city. The second group consisted of nearly seven dozen men and women in their twenties and thirties, a medieval reenactment team, and their support squad of family and friends. These people were hiding in the grounds of a suburban scrap yard. A very large area was enclosed by a high fence of thick profile iron, with two structures of brick and reinforced concrete blocks, an office building and a warehouse or hangar. Neither mutants nor chimeras and zombies could sneak in, and they locked themselves away from night flyers. They had armor and weapons on hand, though blunted, and some of the knights, landsknechts, and even Lucas infantry had previously been in role-playing and therefore had a malleable psyche that helped them cope with the knowledge of the appearance of zombies and chimeras. After chopping the creatures down, they retreated and closed in on the metal reception area.
These guys and gals were so happy that they decided to have a feast and give everyone else the day off.
That same day Eduard, the magician, paid me a visit.
- Hi," he said and turned his head around. - Did you do anything new?
- Just the day before yesterday I was being kamlalaed over by Lucas. I ain't got time to recover my blood before I've had time to drain it. It's a good thing he can get rid of the puncture marks in no time, or I'd look like a junkie with bruises and wounds on my arms.
- Don't cry, plenty of people would have agreed to be in your shoes, even me. Fire is nothing, but creating other life forms... that's something! - And he rolled his eyes under his forehead.
- And then to lie around for two or three days with cold feet, weak and dizzy. Well, tell me why you're here.
- To check up on you.
- Don't lie.
He grinned widely in a sarcastic grin.
- I want you to do an experiment on my blood. We want to look into a town that is far away, where there are shadows and things that cannot be done with guns.
- What would you have me do with your blood? - I wondered. - You want me to build you a personal golem? Well, I'm sorry-you'd have to be drained, and you'd have to take a lot from me, too. Or don't need a big one, just another Silly Putty?
- No, not that," he shook his head negatively. - Um, I've only just had one run-in with a Shadow in the city, and that was while you were lounging here, when I had to take your place with the stalker party.
- Get to the point.
- Closer is closer. What's your hurry, though? All right, all right, don't look at me like that. When I ran into the shadow, I was able to kill it with my fireballs. The ball hit it and burned it to dust. So I was thinking, what if I tried putting my blood on the arrowheads and a mixture of yours? Maybe it would help.
I sighed and shook my head.