“I’m asleep?”
The rat-like man smiled, exposing his jagged yellow teeth.
“Yeah, you’re asleep,” he said. “You still need to sleep occasionally, Gus. You’re still human, sort of. An hour or two a week should be plenty. You’d know this if you made any attempt to listen to me.”
I blinked and Keaton and I were in an open grassland, nothing but flat green in every direction all the way to the horizon — not even a single tree or hill to break the monotony.
“What are you doing, walking around at night, doing nothing instead of training?” Keaton said.
“Are you my—”
“You and Mickey killed one old lady and suddenly you think you’re hot shit, is that it?” Keaton interrupted me. “Do you know how fucking powerful the people coming after you are? Do you know what they will do to you, to your family, if they find you? You are woefully unprepared, and you’re sitting around doing nothing until some old man can teach you how to box. What is wrong with you?”
It was true. I had been enjoying the moment of peace we managed to find. It was nice to not have to fight anyone, or kill anyone, or watch over my shoulder while Mickey walked behind me. I had started to enjoy the company of Caleb and Anita. My mom seemed to mellow out a bit in her old age, and was damn near pleasant to talk to sometimes. Caleb mostly wanted to talk about my powers, which was slightly annoying, but it felt nice to have a little brother to be slightly annoyed by, and it was cool that he looked at me like I was some sort of mythical figure. It made all of this feel like it was a game, almost. And in the haze of comfort, I hadn’t been doing a damn thing to prepare for what was still coming for me. Keaton was right.
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“I know I’m fucking right,” Keaton said. “Now, I actually approve of the boxing lessons. Do those. But you need to be using your free time at night to train your powers as well. I gave you sludge powers that are completely untested at the moment. That needs to change.”
He put his palm on the ground and the dirt started to bubble in an all-too-familiar way. A clay hound the size of a skyscraper rose from the ground in front of me. Keaton disappeared.
The ground shook under my feet when the hound tried to step on me with its massive brown paw. I jumped out of the way, losing my balance in the process and rolling on the flat ground. It lunged for a bite with so much force that a gust of wind followed the path of its snapping jaw, but I rolled out of the way and stuck its snout with a booger bomb. It blew a hole in its upper lip, but it didn’t seem to mind.
“You’re gonna have to do better than that, Gus.” Keaton was nowhere to be seen, but the voice sounded like it was coming from right in front of me. I got up and ran from the hound; I needed to create some space between us if I had any chance of attacking.
I sprayed the ground with slime, but most of it seeped into the dirt and didn’t do much to slow down the clay hound, who was charging at me once again. I tried to shoot sludge instead, but it didn’t shoot. It just oozed out of my hands onto the ground in front of me. But it was thick and sticky and didn’t get absorbed by the ground, so I let it pour from my hands and splatter onto the ground behind me as I ran away from the hound. It dodged the trail, so I widened out the sludge into a thinner spray, splattering small pools of dark gunk on the bright green grass. It stepped in it, and it slowed down, but not by much. It was like the clay hound had gum on the bottom of its shoe.
“See? You have no idea what you’re doing with this power. Did you think you were just going to figure it out as another marked man was trying to cave your skull in? How much luck do you think one bum can have? You need to prepare, Gus. You need to start listening to me.”
I kept running, but the hound was gaining on me fast. Knowing it would catch up with me in a couple of seconds anyway, I faced it and stood my ground. I secreted the heaviest stream of sludge I could possibly muster, hurling a river of heavy, sticky goop directly at the hound’s face. It did not give the slightest dingleberry of a shit and sunk its giant teeth directly into my back and stomach. It lifted its head up and ripped my torso off of my legs.