I had wondered if these guys were going to come back. I left a sapient monster to its own devices. I should have know they were going to come back. I just couldn’t have predicted that it would be in the middle of the day, in broad daylight.

  “This is new,” Beaker mutters.

  I don’t correct him.

  “We’re looking at you, of course,” Pete answers. “I’ve never seen a talking possum before.”

  “Opossum,” the animal corrects. “We’re opossums. There’s a difference.”

  “I didn’t know that,” Wing says.

  Pete lifts his hands up in front of him. “Sorry to offend.”

  There’s a moment of silence. I’m getting tired of thinking this is weird, but, well. This is weird.

  Nancy nudges me with her elbow. I shoot her a look, like what do you want from me? And she shoots me one right back, gesturing to the animals.

  “Do you, uh, live here?” I ask, throwing my thumb out at the house we’re beside.

  “Inside the building? Oh no, never,” the talking opossum says. It glances over its shoulder at the two behind him. They, I realize, still haven’t said anything, and they have a placid look in their eyes. I think it’s just the one leader who can talk. I guess that’s a relief.

  “Then…?”

  The opossum follows my movement and throws its paw out behind it. “Under the deck, like any civilized animal.”

  Sure, okay. “Right,” I say instead. “I don’t suppose we can ask you to… move to another deck?”

  The opossum cocks its head, a movement that is so animal that Beaker takes a step toward me. “Like next door?”

  I try to keep my tone neutral. “Like a different neighbourhood?”

  The opossum frowns. It’s a vastly human expression, compared to the head tilt. It gives me a sort of whiplash. “Why? We like this deck.”

  I suppose that’s a fair question. “Well, eventually, some new humans will be moving into this house,” I say. “They might not like a pack of opossums living under their deck.”

  “They definitely won’t,” Pete agrees. Wing shushes him.

  The opossum’s frown turns from curious to angry. “It’s always humans, getting in the way of our homes,” it says.

  “It’s not like that,” I say, holding up my own hands to placate them. Though, of course, it pretty much is exactly like that. The bigger issue, that I don’t say aloud, is that I don’t think the Game will let us designate something a safe community if there are monsters living within it. Assuming it’ll let me designate something a safe community. It still hasn’t answered me about that. It hasn’t said anything at all since our quick chat yesterday morning, and I’m a little worried about it.

  Now is not the time.

  “I think it’s exactly like that,” the opossum says. “What makes you guys so different than me? Do I not walk, and talk, and feel, and think?”

  “He’s got a point,” Beaker mutters.

  Wing shushes him, too.

  “We’ll help find you a good deck,” I offer. It’s the least we can do, I guess, and it shouldn’t be too hard considering how many homes are vacant.

  The opossum takes a step toward me, though whether to agree or to disagree, I don’t know.

  Because seemingly out of nowhere, a legitimate freaking tiger bounds over our heads and pins the opossum down.

  Everyone—human and opossum alike—shrieks. I nearly trip into Nancy scrambling backwards.

  “What the fuck!?” screeches Beaker.

  “Hold him,” another voice calls out, female and salty and unrecognizable. The tiger gives a grumble of acknowledgement.

  “Please don’t eat me,” the opossum leader says. Its two friends have scampered away back into the backyard. It continues to make keening noises, something like a sob but not quite as human as that.

  A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

  “Who the hell is commanding a tiger!?” Nancy whispers, her grip on my arm a vice.

  “Forget that,” Beaker says. “Where the hell did it come from?”

  That female voice lets out a small scoff. “From the zoo, of course.” And then from around the group of us walks a…

  A white cat.

  She sits down politely, licks her paw a few times, and then looks up at us. No, not the group of us. Me.

  She’s bigger than she was when I last saw her, having grown into the oversized fangs that the early surges gifted her. But I recognize her all the same, and I suddenly, desperately, wish Ryder were here with us.

  “Elsa,” I say, rather calmly I think, “can you please ask your tiger to let go of the opossum?”

  “It was going to attack,” the cat says. “I’m just trying to protect you.” Her tail flicks.

  “I don’t think it was,” I tell her. I glance over at the opossum, the giant tiger still pinning it down. “Um, were you?” I ask it.

  “Definitely not,” the opossum says. “You were going to help me find a new deck!”

  Relief slumps through me. “See?” I say, turning back to the cat. “No one’s attacking anyone.” I crouch down, looking Elsa more in the eye. “Please let the opossum go.”

  The cat blinks at me, slow and lazy, before letting out a sigh. “Very well. Mazy,” Elsa commands. The tiger lifts her head from where her snout was basically touching the opossum’s face, and slowly turns her gaze back to Elsa. “Mazy, you can let the vermin go.” Mazy lifts her paw from the opossum’s chest.

  As soon as the pressure is off the opossum, it scurries backward and out of the way, indignation on its little face. “Who you calling vermin!? You’re just a big bully.” Mazy lets out a growl at the tone, and the sound vibrates through the earth. The opossum isn’t swayed, though, and it turns its attention back to me. “If this is who you associate with, you are no longer a friend of ours. I refuse your help to find a good deck. In fact, I don’t want to be in your presence at all anymore. Anyplace you live, we will not.” It sniffs at me, a mocking sort of sound that feels like a grave insult, and then it scurries back into the backyard.

  Mazy the tiger takes a step after it, but a sharp sound from Elsa the cat has her remaining in place. I let my eyes close. That was unnecessarily stressful, considering the opossum was going to leave regardless, and now I have something much more complicated to deal with. I’m still crouched, and I let myself drop down onto the grass. “Elsa,” I say, and the cat stands and comes toward me. I hold out my fingers and she sniffs them, and then rubs against them and starts purring. The tiger sits, watches, and towers above me from my position on the grass. I’m terrified, but I can see just how strong a hold Elsa has on the thing. She’s my priority. “I’m glad to see you, Elsa, and thank you for helping us when you thought we were in danger.” She lets me scratch behind her ears. “But… why are you here?”

  Elsa pulls away, shakes her head, and blinks up at me. “Why, I came home,” she says simply. “This is where my family lived, and now that I’m creating a new family of my own, I want to be in the same place.”

  I can’t fault her for that. After all, that’s what I’m doing too. But my new family doesn’t include a five-hundred-plus pound tiger.

  With a sigh, I drop my face into my hands. And then I immediate pull my face away, the overwhelming scent of wet animal hitting my nose. Note to self: wash hands after patting the sapient-but-feral cat.

  She bumps her head against my hand again. “I remember you,” she says. She looks up at me. “From the beginning, when things were still changing and my body felt strange,” she goes on. “But I remember you from before, too. From when my world was still warm milk and little hands and soft pillows. That is all gone now, I know, but you’re not.” I can’t help it—I reach out again, and caress the soft fur of Elsa’s forehead. “You can be my new family now, too.”

  ***

  Being adopted by a cat wasn’t on my apocalypse bingo card, but very little of the last eight days would have been what I expected an apocalypse to look like.

  Ryder, however, is thrilled. A talking animal joining our team was on his apocalypse bingo card, and he can’t help the squeeing that comes out of him every time he looks at Elsa and Mazy the tiger.

  “But can the tiger talk too?” he asks in a moment of stillness. “Because that would be even cooler.”

  “No,” I say. “At least, it doesn’t look like it. And between Elsa and the opossum, let’s hope that don’t see another talking animal.”

  He shrugs and takes off to go chat with the cat some more.

  With nothing else to stop us, I spend the rest of my day with the construction team. We head back out and finish doing a loop of the neighbourhood, deciding where the lay out our fencing. We check under the deck in the opossum’s backyard and they’ve cleared out already, giving me both a sense of relief and one of surprising sadness. Being scorned by a magical miracle can hurt your feelings.

  And then we get to building. Wing and I handle the heavy lifting, Beaker crafts simple contraptions, and Pete supervises—though he still seems a little pale from the introduction of the tiger. I still have no idea what magic he and Portia have, and he hasn’t offered. So his company will have to be enough.

  I’ve accumulated enough building materials through the stores we pilfered and the display units I claimed, and soon enough our first stretch of cobbled-together fence is done. It’s far from pretty, made up of untreated wood, PVC pipes, and hollowed out grocery store fridges, but it does the job. “One stretch down,” Beaker says proudly.

  “And about one thousand more to go,” Pete reminds us.

  “I liked you better when you were scared silent at the tiger, Pete,” Beaker deadpans.

  “It wasn’t a scared silence,” Pete says. “It was… deference. Honour. Giving the gravity of the situation the respect it deserved.”

  “Sure, Pete,” Wing says.

  I’m grinning, but I don’t intervene. There’s something kind of magical in watching these relationships bloom, in seeing these people who are little more than strangers find their way together.

  It makes me all the more sure that this is the right way forward.

  We make decent work of our fence, even as the sky turns to dusk. I think about how this time of day, in the Before, the streetlights would start turning on. Houses would start lighting up. I’m daydreaming about finding someone with electricity powers, who can get us set up with solar panels for our community, when Elsa the cat comes around the corner with a few sleek, powerful bounds.

  “I have a message,” she calls out. I wonder who possibly had enough strength of mind to command Elsa to be a messenger—and where the tiger might be—when she completes her task: “Sutherland Beverly is awake."