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The night passed without further incident. For once, Erik was actually able to sleep soundly, the confines of the shed not fazing him much. But as he slept, the farm didn't rest. At sunrise, Will was already outside, sitting on the porch, speaking with a raccoon woman. She sat hunched over, her hands clasped between her knees as she spoke to Will.

“Are you sure about this?" He asked her.

She nodded. “She's demanding to see him. You know how she is when she wants something."

“How did she even find out? She never leaves the house."

She laughed mockingly. “Come now, nobody in this town is talking about anything else. I'd be surprised if she didn't hear about him."

Will sighed, and rubbed the back of his head. “But was she angry?"

“No, not in the least. You have to understand, Will, if this guy is for real, he's the only connection she might have."

Will reluctantly nodded. “Far be it for me to deny the Elder, we both know what they've gone through. But he should at least have some breakfast first."

The raccoon stood up and bowed her head. “Of course, you know where she is, so I will let you lead him. But please, do not keep her waiting."

“I won't."

Soon, there came a light sound at the shed door, the sound of a claw tapping on the thin sheet metal. He awoke with a bit of a start. “Hm?!" For a brief moment, he wasn't even sure where he was, then it hit him: the tool shed.

“Erik, I've brought you some breakfast." That voice. It was Shirley.

Realizing who it was, he reached up and opened the door, still partially laying down, blinking heavily. Before him, she stood, holding another tray of food. As she knelt down to deliver the tray to him, she noticed the tray he had received the previous night. “Ah, that tray. I'll just take that one and trade it for this!" She said happily, as she placed the new tray down. Another wide but simple assortment of foods lay waiting for him.

“Thank you, Lady Decker. I'll make sure I have energy for the day's work."

She waved her hand dismissively. “Oh, psh, you'll be fine."

“I mean, I really am grateful for this place to have taken me in. I'm trying my best to fit in."

She waved him off with both paws this time. “Erik, I appreciate that, but relax. We're happy to have you, even Will is, secretly." She smirked. “Now, when you're finished, come see Will at the house. There's an important job for you today."

He nodded as he started to dig into the food, picking up a hard-boiled egg with his slightly dirty fingers. “Will do, thank you."

“I wonder what I'll be doing." He spoke to himself lightly as he devoured what Shirley had made for him. “It can't be that important, right? I'm only a farmhand, or slave, whatever." One could only imagine what kind of labor he would be in for.

He made sure, when he finished his breakfast, to clean off as much of the hay and dirt as he could. If he had something important to do, it was best he looked presentable in his stupid grey jumpsuit.

He left his shed, closing the squeaky door behind him, and approached the house. Will sat at the top, waiting. “Ah, there you are. You're going to be meeting someone today, a very important person, and I want you to be on your best behavior."

Erik nodded. “I understand."

“You've been demanded by the Elder, Vera. She rarely ever sees anybody, and even fewer see her... I haven't even seen her, actually. She's very particular." He groaned. “I'll lead you to her home, but I'll probably have to wait outside."

“Huh. Why so secretive?"

He held the back of his neck awkwardly, not wanting to reveal too much. “Well... she's a bit of a hermit, let's say. The Elders are an odd bunch, but they mean well."

“I see. Alright, lead the way."

As Will and Erik began to leave the farm, Kelsey left the house to join her mother and sister on the deck, looking out to the two. “Where are father and Skinny going?"

Kerry looked to her sister. “He's been beckoned by the Elder."

“No way! Nobody gets to see the Elder."

“It makes sense, if it were anyone, it would be him."

Kelsey turned a bit to look elsewhere over the farm. “Bah, lucky sod. I wonder what she's like."

A sudden screeching noise came from inside the house. Shirley quickly turned and rushed towards it. “Oop."

Will and Erik did the walk of shame through the town again, but there was a bit of a different tone this time. People weren't sure what to make of him. They must have heard that Vera wanted to see him as well. Was she that influential? Erik continued to study the town, still, it looked as destitute as he remembered. In fact, even Will's home was run down. Maintained as best it could be, sure, but like it hadn't seen a good makeover in ages.

They stopped outside of a small hovel of a home, made of bricks, but showing a great amount of weathering in its old age. The windows were covered with dark curtains, and may as well not have existed at all with how dark it was.

“Here we are. I can't give you any advice beyond 'just be good'."

“Right."

Will knocked on the door, quietly, and the door opened. The raccoon woman was there waiting. “Ah, there you are. I'll take Erik for now, if you don't mind." Will nodded quietly and she led Erik in. The woman closed the door behind him.

The house was stuffy, warm, and very quiet. Even so, the rooms were segregated by curtains, and he and the fluffy raccoon woman stood in a small vestibule. She looked him over quickly. “Hmm, this will have to do. I would have preferred you with some real clothes and not... whatever this grey thing is."

“I'm sorry, I haven't gotten new clothes yet."

The woman patted him down, knocking some excess dust off of him, and then held him by the shoulders, her black hands gripping his shoulders well. “It's fine. Now, there are some things to remember when meeting Vera. First off, she's very old and very delicate, so please don't touch her or speak too loud around her. She's had a... difficult life, so she may be a bit aggressive, I'm not sure how she'll react to meeting you. But I assure you, she means well. If she asks you things, please just answer her honestly, and see where things go from there."

There were a lot of demands of him already today. “I understand."

“Alright."

The woman took him by the hand and led him into the main room, the living room. Again, it was dark, lit only by a tiny crack of light that streamed in from between the curtains. There was a figure sitting in a large, comfy chair on the other end of the room, but it was impossible to see her tucked away back in the shadows. The rest of the room was decorated with gaudy things Erik might have seen at his grandmother's house, plus several pieces of broken tech: a flatscreen TV, a laptop, a few cell phones, and an oscillating fan without the front grill. And on the wall, a single picture of a woman, flaxen-haired and blue-eyed, leaning on a big oak tree, next to a golden retriever. The glass on the picture frame had a single crack across it, but no other marks. “Vera, this is Erik, the man you asked for."

A wavering, grizzled, but overall calm voice came from the darkened corner where the comfy chair was. “Yes, good... please, sit down." She invited Erik to sit in the nearby chair, not quite as comfy looking as hers. Erik quietly sat in the stained red velvet chair, as the raccoon servant bowed and left the room, closing the door behind her.

“Erik Barnes, was it? It's a pleasure to meet you, I am Vera Richards. You really are a human, aren't you?" She asked, slowly.

“Yes, really."

“I've heard you're from... 2025." She said the date carefully, almost spitefully.

“Yes."

She thought for a moment. “How did you get here?"

“The government kidnapped me and cryogenically froze me. They thawed me out to work in their hive city."

“But you escaped."

“Yes, barely."

“I'm old, but I-I remember 2025, Erik. That was when they first started talking... about the 'smart cities'. The Wildlands."

Erik nodded. He remembered that too. “That's right. It was when governments around the world started telling people to move to the smart cities, because the rest of the world was being declared the Wildlands, and we weren't allowed to be there. It was for wilderness only."

“Where we lived..." Vera's voice wavered in emotion. “We lived there, and... and we refused to leave. It was our home."

The reminiscing, as painful as it was, was fascinating. Erik remembered these things. “I didn't want to leave either. I walked out one day to get some groceries, if I could, and... that's when they grabbed me. That was the last time I was there."

“So you never saw 2026." She commented rhetorically. He shook his head simply. “So it seems. What did they tell you about it? Anything?"

“They glazed over it briefly when I was thawed out. Said that those who rejected the government were terrorists and started a war, and that they were 'vanquished' for 'violating nature'."

Vera was a silent for another moment as she heard this retelling of history. It was clear she didn't converse often, and she was getting back into practice with it now. Her tone changed a bit, the dialogue seeming almost younger. “Those bastards. What a beautiful lie they tell..."

Erik decided to speak first, enthralled by the conversation. “Lady Vera... what happened in '26?"

She responded without issue, recapping what they had already agreed upon. “2026... those who went to the cities were spared, but those of us outside, who refused to budge, were mocked, called stupid names. Then branded terrorists when we refused to budge. Then, when we still wouldn't budge... they made their move. The city dwellers got a new drug, this time, one with a real effect."

“Was it a pill to make them drones?" He wanted to chuckle, but it was honestly too depressing.

She growled lightly, getting angry at the story. “No... it was the fucking antidote." Her lady-like pattern of speech began to crack, and her old country ways were coming back.

Erik was silent.

“They couldn't fight us all, there were too many of us remaining, but they had to keep the world outside wild, or they'd lose the Wildlands notion completely. They had to do something drastic. They turned to their Plan B... Operation Insolence, they called it. Terrible fucking name." Erik remained quiet as she explained.

“They gassed the place, rained gas everywhere. I don't know where they got all of this shit, where they even tested it before, but they gassed the planet with it, hazed out the sun for days. We had gas masks of course, so many people did, we were prepared for these attacks. Shit was kicking off. We thought we were ready, but this stuff, whatever it was, the filters didn't matter. It had already touched us, gotten into us somehow, soaked right through our pores. Some other... gene experiment." She growled again. “At first, we didn't think it did anything. We thought their whole plan was a failure. Then we started to see... changes."

“Changes?" Erik echoed, finally speaking up.

“Our skin changed. Fur, scales, wrinkles. Eyes changed. Hands and feet. Shapes changed. The pain of... bones being changed. Everything. We suffered, in agony, for years. We changed."

Erik didn't want to talk too much, but he had to speak again. “What did they change you into, Lady Vera?"

Vera stood up from her chair as fast as she could muster and moved closer to him, finally making herself slightly visible to him. “A monster!" He jolted back a bit, taken aback by her sudden appearance. A haggard, lanky, hybrid of a golden retriever and what was once a human. Bulging eyes, sullen and scarred face, patchy, mangy fur. “Look at me, Erik! I'm a fucking monster!" She practically barked at him.

“Oh no..." It was the best thing he could come up with that wouldn't offend.

“I'm like a dog, skinned by machine, and sewn back together into one of their fucking Hollywood werewolf movie props! And... and there were thousands of us. Millions of us. All suffering. So few survived the change at all..."

“What... b-but how?"

She started pacing about the room, lightly crying, but still explaining. It was unclear if she even had tear ducts. “There was... there was a scientist I knew, poor bastard turned into a rat monster. He... he said our bodies were altered, they absorbed nearby DNA from other living creatures. Didn't work for ants or spiders really, but dogs, cats, birds... anything big enough. Hair, dander, slobber. All it took was that, and what they did to our bodies did the rest. Walk through a field, touch the hair of a fox on a plant just the wrong way? Your body thinks it's yours. Dog slobber? It's yours." She coughed, her body not used to talking this much. “It explained everything, sort of. He had a lab rat... he became a lab rat. I had a golden retriever, I became one. My neighbor, he just wanted to farm and be left alone with his birds. He turned into a parrot."

Erik was speechless for a moment. “Is... this what they meant by vanquished? They didn't just war them by any conventional means. The resisting humans were vanquished, by making them not human?"

“That's it, Erik. They did that to make us not human. Humans aren't allowed in the Wildlands." She lightly waved her hand towards the window, motioning to the outside. “And there aren't any, except you. Just us mutants."

Erik shrugged at the notion of them being mutants. “The people don't feel like mutants."

It was almost exciting for her to be able to expound on all of this to someone. “That's the thing. My generation, we were freaks, mutants, monsters... as we struggled for survival, we had to abandon a lot of the towns and places we lived to congregate, to pool resources, we still tried to make a life for ourselves. And those who survived had kids. We weren't sure it would even work anymore, but the kids, they turned out just fine! Healthy hybrids, ready and eager to greet the world." She expressed her surprise with a calmly flailed hand. “Most of the kids grew up without parents because so many of them just couldn't survive the changes to their bodies. In the early 30's, there were a lot of deaths..."

“God, Vera... I'm so sorry all of this happened."

“So am I, Erik. We just wanted to live, not... this. And with so many of us Elders dying off when the children were still infants, there was so much knowledge and history that was lost. The new generations now, they don't really know what was lost, their parents are trying to build the homes and secure the safety that we used to have for them. But you look around outside..." She motioned to the windows again. “Those ramshackle homes? That's because they don't know how to make planks anymore, we can't get them anymore. Nails are rare, we can't make more, nobody knows how to mine, how to refine metal." She shook her head. “They didn't just mutate us, they set us back thousands of years. We're stone age monsters living in the ruins of our once great civilization."

Erik was silent, considering this.

She waved over to a small black box on a table, with a power cord wrapped around it. Another old piece of tech. “This is – was – a music box, one of the last things I ever bought in the before times. We could load it with MP3s and just play them. Nobody stopping us, no oversight. Remember MP3s, Erik? I had a terabyte of music on it. I want to listen to Zepplin again, Erik, but they're gone, buried forever in this box, buried forever in the sands of time. I can plug it in, I bet it still works, but we don't have electricity anymore, no gas to run a generator, so what good is this?"

He spoke. “It's a memory, a memory of what we lost."

She looked to the picture of her on the wall, young and healthy, the memory forever preserved. “So many memories..."

Vera approached him and put her large, gangly hands on his shoulders. “Please, Erik. I want you to make this town your home as much as anyone else, at least as much as they let you. And if you can, teach anybody how to do anything. Anything you remember from the before times could be useful. This is one of the main reasons Jarvis decided to keep you. You're important, like any Elder. But you're still young, capable, not like me."

Erik nodded to her. “I've resolved to stay here. I think I'm already earning their trust, and it's only been a day." He stopped himself. “But, I have a question, if you don't mind."

“Shoot."

“Where are we, exactly? What was it called in the before times?"

Her reply was rather quiet. “You're in Canada, Erik. What used to be eastern Ontario. Maybe central, I don't know anymore. We moved around a bit."

He had to chuckle. “Heh, that's funny. I was also from around here, but when they froze me, they took me somewhere else. Can't believe, of all the places they requested my frozen body, it was basically back home."

Vera smiled, in her own twisted way, probably for the first time in a long time. “Either they decided to send a local to their local area for some good reason... or fate has a funny way of biting someone. I guess it doesn't matter anymore. Now, you should stop wasting time on this freakish fossil. Please, go help the Deckers, they'll need you, but as far as I'm concerned, you're no slave here."

Erik bowed his head, happy to have met this old world survivor, and took a step back. “Thank you, and I will. Take care, Lady Vera." He turned, but before he could leave, Vera's raccoon handler was right there waiting to show him out.

“Right this way, Mister Barnes." She motioned with her arms, slightly bowed, towards the front door.

Finally leaving the dark and musty old house, the smell of fresh air, smoke and fur, filled his lungs. It took on a new connotation this time, it didn't smell like the place he was stuck, but rather, his new home.

“All done?" Will looked to Erik as he enjoyed the atmosphere of the world outside.

He looked back to Will with a slightly pleased emotion on his face. “The journey is really just starting, Mister Decker."

Will chortled. “Uh, okay then."

As they continued back to the farm, Erik looked at the people again. Where he once saw the unclean, the monstrous, the angry, and the judging, he now saw the dirty, the scruffy, the grizzled, and the tired. These people worked their paws to the bone every day to try to eke out a living, to try to catch up to life that had left them behind.

“So, did the Elder clear up anything?"

“Lots. I had no idea what I missed."

“Hm. Is that going to help?"

“Sort of. It helps me know that I have to do something to help make this a better land to live in, for all of us."

Will looked to him with surprise. “That's a heavy weight already. Maybe you should pick some apples first."

He smiled. “Sure. I love apples."