Bo had little experience with dogs. His family had never owned any pets, due to a combination of their frequent travel to barbecue competitions and the old man’s reluctance to take on any more responsibility. Bo had always regretted not having a puppy to train and care for. He’d even considered getting a dog of his own now that the rest of his family was dead or so far out of reach they might as well be.
Maybe having a dog as a child would’ve helped Bo deal with this pack of spectral canines who stood four feet tall at the shoulder and looked ready to rip Martin and his friends into bloody chunks of dog chow.
Or maybe not.
“Easy,” Bo said, raising his hands to show the dogs he meant no harm. He wasn’t sure what else to do. Any sudden move could kick the dogs into fighting mode. If that happened, Bo wasn’t sure he could save all his allies before some of them were torn down. “Everybody, just be cool.”
The dogs responded by lowering their heads a fraction of an inch, but their eyes were still fixed on the men inside their circle, their lips peeled back to reveal rows of ghostly fangs. One of the phantom hounds raised its head higher, though, and fixed Bo with an unflinching glare. Sparks of power ran up and down the creature’s hackles, and its growl was as loud as an idling semi engine.
“I bet that’s the alpha,” Jenny said. “I don’t think he likes you.”
“Thank you for that insightful piece of information,” Bo replied. “Any idea how to fix this problem?”
The alpha, if that’s what he was, was clearly paying attention to Bo’s conversation with Jenny. Its eyes were opaque balls of silver light, but Bo could feel the weight of their attention on him. A keen intelligence shown behind that featureless stare. It wasn’t malevolent, nor was it benign. The creature’s intent balanced on a razor’s edge, and the slightest misstep could tip it either way.
“Beat it’s ass?” Martin suggested. “I saw a Discovery channel episode where this MMA guy got lost in Alaska and had to fight a pack leader to keep the wolves from eating him.”
“That sounds like some Call of the Wild bullshit,” Bo said. “And what’ll keep the rest of these monsters from ripping your tender bits off while I wrestle with the boss man?”
“An excellent point,” Martin said. “If these things pile on us, we’re screwed.”
Once again, Bo found himself caught on the horns of a dilemma. There didn’t seem to be a good choice, so he made the least bad one he could imagine.
“Hey,” he called out to the alpha. “Yeah, you. We came here to rescue the Holy Roast from a demon. We’ve got no reason to fight you. Let us take what we came for, and we’ll get out of your hair.”
The ghostly hound perked up its ears at Bo’s words. It eased away from the rest of the pack, yapping and snapping at them. The hounds closed the gap their leader left behind before any of the humans trapped inside their circle got any ideas about escaping. The alpha approached Bo with its head held high and its eyes fixed on his. Then it almost knocked Bo off his hooves with a pair of clearly enunciated syllables.
“Two legs,” the hound said.
Bo couldn’t deny that he did, in fact, have a pair of legs. They ended in hooves, not feet, now, but they were still legs.
“Four legs,” Bo said.
Hey, if the dog was going to state the obvious, Bo figured he might as well join in on the fun.
That conversational gambit didn’t get him anywhere, unfortunately. The pair stared at one another in silence after that, neither sure of what to do next.
“Oh, for Pete’s sake,” Jenny said, clearly exasperated with the lack of progress in their standoff. “Look, we come in peace, okay? Let us go, and we’ll be out of your hair before you know it.”
“Fur,” the dog said, shaking itself from the tip of its nose to its tail. “Not hair. Champion not leave. Challenge must answer.”
Bo wasn’t sure what the hell that meant, but he was already exhausted just hearing the word “challenge.” The dog clearly had some quest for Bo to undertake, and it probably had an onerous time frame on it. With a sigh, Bo resigned himself to yet another unwanted job about to land on his plate.
“What do you need from me?” Bo asked.
“Champion protect. Champion provide.” The dog raised its head every time it said Champion, its nose pointing straight at Bo, so there’d be no mistake who he was talking about. “Share meat. Kill two legs.”
The first part of that, Bo clearly understood. The dogs wanted some of the Holy Roast. That seemed fair enough. If what the Knights said was true, the hunk of beef would continually regrow itself, anyway. If they split it in half, that actually meant twice as much meat to go around.
“I’ll carve the meat,” Bo agreed. “But I’m not killing my friends.”
The dog paced in front of Bo, whining and shaking its head. The frustration was obvious in the creature’s posture and vocalization. The poor thing’s mind was far more advanced than its speech. Finally, it reared up on its hind legs and said, “Two legs.”
“Right,” Bo said, lifting one hoof, then the other. “Two legs.”
The dog snorted, then shook its head. It lowered itself onto its belly and raised its head barely a foot off the ground. “Two legs.”
Bo frowned. The dog was trying to tell him something, but he couldn’t put it together. “I don’t get it.”
The dog barked and tossed its head, sparks of power shooting off its hackles. It stood, paced for a moment, then sat down in front of Bo. Finally, it stood up to its full height again. “Two legs,” it said, then bobbed its head vigorously. “Good.”
“Thanks,” Bo said. “I guess.”
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The alpha lowered itself to its belly and left its head touching the dirt. “Two legs,” it snorted. “Kill.”
Bo let that percolate in his mind for a moment, and a light bulb went off. “Gnomes,” he said excitedly. “You’re talking about gnomes.”
The dog barked happily and nudged its head against Bo’s hand. Just for a moment, before it realized what it had done and backed off to a more polite distance. But it nodded vigorously, as if Bo had given it a word that had been stuck on the tip of its tongue for days.
But as happy as Bo was to understand the alpha, his mood immediately crashed. He couldn’t kill any gnomes. He’d promised Wizdang to rescue the gnome refugees. Slaughtering them would certainly fly in the face of that promise. And Bo could not risk having someone that powerful pissed at him. Especially not someone that powerful with a claim on Bo’s soul if he failed his quest.
He also knew that flat-out refusing the dog’s demand would start a fight that would be bad for all of them. Especially for Martin and his friends, who would be on the wrong side of some nasty dog bites. Bo wasn’t even sure how they’d fight these ghostly dogs.
“Look,” Bo said. “I will look into the gnomes, but there’s no guarantee I’ll kill them.”
“Evil,” the dog said. “Kill.”
Bo stared at the dog. The ghost hound looked both stern and unyielding, but Bo had a stubborn streak a mile wide. He would not be bossed around by a dog, ghost or not.
“I’ll check them out,” Bo said. “But I won’t kill anyone who doesn’t have it coming.”
“Evil,” the dog repeated.
“So you say,” Bo replied. “I don’t know what happened between you and the gnomes, but I bet their side of the story doesn’t make you look good. There’s been enough blood spilled today. I want to end this peacefully. Show me the Holy Roast, and I’ll split it up for you.”
The ghost hound snorted, and its silver eyes narrowed into suspicious slits. “Do job, first.”
Bo could have pushed the matter, but he didn’t see the point. The dogs didn’t have any reason to trust him, so wanting to keep the Roast’s position a secret only made sense. The pitmaster didn’t like it, but such was life.
You are wise not to offend these creatures. I cannot sense the extent of their power, but they are not weak.
Bo was glad that Barbie agreed with his decision, though he couldn’t help but wonder why the devil had been so quiet. Maybe he was just scared of dogs.
“Fine.” Bo said. “Tell me where to find the gnomes.”
“Two legs,” the silver hound said, in a voice that dripped with derision. Finally, it lowered its head and said, “Look.”
A bark summoned the rest of the pack, who followed the alpha as it trotted past Bo.
CHALLENGES ASSIGNED!
Meating of the Minds
What a dilemma. How will you ever satisfy both the hounds and Wizdang?
GOAL: Save the gnomes. Somehow, satisfy the dogs that they do not need to die.
REWARD: One Community Building Token.
GOOD LUCK, CHAMPION!
“Well, that went better than I expected,” Jenny said. “I was sure that thing would eat you.”
“It’d try,” Bo said, stomping his hoof. “The amazing barbecue goat boy would stomp that sucker flat.”
“Can you stomp on a ghost?” Martin asked.
“I’d give it my best shot,” Bo replied. “Then I’d call the Ghostbusters. Because I ain’ afraid of no ghosts.”
The alpha barked from where it had stopped at the end of the street.
“Come on,” Jenny said. “Let’s catch up to the dogs before they change their mind about being friendly.”
----------------------------------------
The dogs were not as forgiving in their pace as Bo had been. The pitmaster didn’t have any trouble keeping up with the ghost hounds, but the rest of his party suffered. Though the humans pleaded with the dogs to wait, the spectres never slowed for more than a few minutes. The hounds continued their punishing pace as they led the men and woman north, back through the hex next to Bo’s. The sun sank below the horizon, and night closed in around the party as they raced across the plains of what had once been Oklahoma.
Bo found his mind worrying at that little fact, like a tongue prodding a rotten tooth. What was the world now? When everything he’d ever known, when all the boundaries and borders vanished, what did you call the vast, undivided swathes of land? It couldn’t be Oklahoma anymore. But following that train of thought led to the corrosion of everything he’d ever known. You couldn’t have the United States of America without states. And without a country, you only had continents. Bo wasn’t sure if those natural borders even existed. The casino had changed, hadn’t it? If that monolith to greed and luck was so thoroughly transformed, it wasn’t much of a stretch to imagine the overlay from another world changing the very coastline.
And that’s where Bo kicked that train right off the track. He couldn’t let those worries take root in his mind. He had real problems right in front of his face. Worrying about what might happen, or what might have already happened, somewhere off the coast of the Gulf of Mexico would not help him solve any of those. Worse, considering a whole world changed at the stroke of some otherworldly pen left Bo feeling unmoored.
He couldn’t afford to get lost in flights of fancy or worry about problems that wouldn’t change his present circumstances. If the world had changed, so be it. He’d figure out how to handle the problem the same way he’d figured out everything else so far. By gutting it out and hoping his hooves landed where they ought.
Deep in the night, the dogs finally came to a stop. They had arrived at a wide, shallow valley that was bridged at either end by crumbling ribbons of black stone held aloft by thick stone pillars. The twin moons seemed too low in the sky over that defile, their silver faces glowering down at the strange scene spread through that vale.
And it was strange.
“The hell is that mess?” Martin asked when he caught up to Bo and Jenny.
The dogs snorted at the humans, then moved off to one side and lay down to stare at the sight that had puzzled the human.
“Some kind of tree,” Jenny whispered. “I guess those are roots?”
Bo didn’t answer. He stared down at the massive tree that had grown up out of the cracked, red clay of the Oklahoma plains. It stood nearly a hundred feet tall, and its crown of skeletal branches spread out three times that distance around its trunk. This hadn’t been here three days ago. Bo was sure of that. A tree this size would have been a tourist trap long before the world fell apart.
Just as he was sure that the tree was evil. There was a malevolent spirit down there, something dark and hateful, and it was brewing a storm of nightmares. Because the longer Bo looked at the tree, the more he was certain those weren’t roots.
The way they pulsed in the moonlight, the sense that they were moving something from the tree into the earth, made it clear to Bo those were arteries. The tree was a vast, malignant heart pumping poison into the ground.
“Where are the gnomes?” Jenny asked. “We came a long way to find them, and I don’t see any little red-capped bastards.”
The alpha raised its heard when it heard the “gn” word. With a low woof to the rest of its pack, the majestic creature stood and ambled over to the party. It stopped next to Jenny and looked up at her expectantly.
“What?” Jenny asked.
The dog lowered its snout and pressed the top of its head into the woman’s palm. Then it raised its head, stared down the hill, and slowly curled its left front leg in close to its chest. Bo had seen pictures of pointers before, but he’d never seen a dog do it in real life.
And he’d never seen Jenny’s eyes glow like a pair of headlamps on a foggy night, either.
“What the hell are you doing?” Bo asked the dog.
“It’s okay,” Jenny said, softly. “He’s showing me the gnomes.”
“And where are they?” Bo asked.
“The tree has them,” she said quietly. “Look at its branches.”
Bo peered down into the darkness, his eyes straining to see anything in the dark crown of leafless limbs. It took him a bit to see what Jenny was talking about. When he did, his blood ran cold.
Short, chubby, naked bodies hung from the trees by dense cords sprouting from their heads. Those were the only details he could make out, but their motionless forms told Bo they were in a lot of trouble.
How the hell could he save those gnomes from whatever the tree had done to them?