Police Officer’s Point of View
It had to be staged or spliced. It was just too sudden to be anything other than that. One moment, there was a normal-looking man; the next, the man was a foot taller and built like a Roman gladiator. I didn’t have much time to look over this assault, but it vexed me. It was like a puzzle that I wanted to solve. If it were just a normal assault, I’d have already written about catching the culprit, but my curiosity had me coming back to the case over and over again.
“Lopez, stop looking at that department store footage. It’s clearly fake, we've got another theft to visit. Someone kidnapped a bunch of people from the hospital's ICU. We've got another case involving stolen construction vehicles if you’d rather take a look at that one.” I sighed as I put down my phone. It was against the rules to put crime scene footage onto an external device, but as the captain’s daughter, I got a little more leeway than other police officers.
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I looked down at my phone as I followed the GPS to my third construction site. I had already driven here and taken a dump truck, but I was back for the last construction vehicle I needed. Even though I drove there already, I still needed to follow the GPS as it was about a forty-minute drive from the gated community. I found a wrecking ball at the first job site, which I took. You never knew when you’d have to break down a house, and that was by far the fastest way to do so. Destroying the nearby houses after the flood ends would make the area safer and allow us to build up an actual second city around the gated area.
The earthquakes destroyed most buildings on the west coast, but the east coast survived mostly intact, considering everything. At least this construction site had the rest of the vehicles I wanted. You’d be surprised at how often keys are left on or around these costly vehicles. One out of three vehicles so far(the wrecking ball crane), and we’d see if that number went up with these two.
I knew enough about locks and key making to make keys for them, but it was nice not to have to for one so far. I had developed a very wide and varied set of skills from my time in the apocalypse. I could pick locks, make keys, bullets, weapons, armor, clothes, and just about anything else because of my power. Filling my inventory with materials and just knowing how to make something would allow me to slowly make the item.
I could forge swords and keys if I had iron, clothes if I had cloth, or even electrical components if I knew how to make them and had the materials to do so. The item duplication power I had was spent duplicating the enhancement fluid and power activation syringes since I came back. Certain things couldn’t be duplicated, like the storage items or the enhanced sword. Everything had to be mundane and not made using someone else's power.
The ten of each had increased to sixteen over the past two days of duplication, and I wasn’t sure what else I should duplicate. Most of the time, I would duplicate food, but with the one-pound limit to start, that only now increased to five pounds, it wasn’t as useful as it sounded. Sure, I could duplicate gold for money… But what would be the point with the apocalypse dropping tomorrow?
This was the second time I visited this particular construction site, as I had already looted one of the vehicles I wanted and only had the backhoe to go, the forklift wasn’t going to happen, unfortunately, even though it would be super valuable to have. It just didn’t fit the area, maybe they had one at Walmart or Home Depot, but it wasn’t a deal breaker to not get.
“Freeze!” I turned towards the sound of the woman yelling at me and saw a police officer with her gun drawn in my direction. It was so surreal I couldn’t help but laugh, she didn’t like that. “What the fuck you laughing at?” I kept laughing harder as she just kept getting madder and madder as I laughed at this situation. “Of all the crimes you could show up for. A person walking around a construction site seems kind of insane. Aren’t you guys having tons of problems from people assaulting each other over food?”
I kept teasing her to try and get her to drop her guard and take me less seriously. “You must be pretty low down the totem pole to work the graveyard shift and get sent out on this goose chase. What are you going to take me in for, trespassing? And why do you have your gun drawn out like I’ve done something wrong, are you going to shoot me for being somewhere I shouldn’t?” As I mocked her, I could see she was getting angrier at me, but also lowering her gun as I kept heckling.
“They didn’t have a cat stuck in a tree that you could help out. This seems like an incredible waste of time.” I began moving toward the backhoe as she put her gun down and spoke. “You’re coming in to answer some questions. The person on the phone said one of the construction vehicles went missing, and you’re in the area where it went missing… Wait… I recognize you!”
I backed up against the vehicle before she finally noticed what I was doing, but assumed I was going to do something different. “Hey, don’t jump into that vehicle!” I smirk as I quip. “I wasn’t planning to.” As I stored the backhoe, I took off running. The second or two it took her brain to process what just happened I had already knocked her on her ass.
She still had her gun in her hand, but the instinctive reflexes that drove her to try and catch herself instead of falling made her toss the gun into the air. Before it could hit the ground, I stored it into my space as I jumped onto my moped and drove away with her getting up to chase behind me. When she realized she couldn’t catch me, she turned towards her patrol car and started to talk into her two-way radio.
I was already out of earshot of what she yelled, but I could assume she was calling for backup. I made it most of the way down the road before picking up my moped and running into the woods at full speed. I had been wrong about them being too busy to bother with me, but surely they didn’t have the police on duty to form a perimeter around me before I could get outside the net.
Running until I got to another road, I put the moped down before driving back in the direction of the gated community, before I thought better. If I was already being followed, why not head to what I wanted to try and do? I wanted to see if I could store a boat in my vehicle storage. It made sense in my head at least, most people knew instinctively what their power did, but some needed to do research like me, while others had to strengthen their power with constant use.
I could load the moped up onto a boat and appear in a different area altogether before stashing the boat and taking the construction vehicle home first, then coming back for it. There was a dock with some boats on the Ohio River. If I steal it and drive to the Allegany River, I can shorten the distance I need to make it home. Jumping into the back of the boat, I couldn’t help but feel like a kid again. Hotwiring a car and worrying about people spotting me over zombies felt nostalgic.