Bo spent a couple of hours checking out the other campsites on the upper lot. Most of them were in terrible shape: the tents didn’t stand a chance against the jackalopes, and the RVs and campers had fared little better. Disheartened, but not surprised, by the destruction, he made his way back down to the lower lot where work on the barrier ring had wound up.
The pitmaster was surprised when a sentry perched in the driver’s seat of one of the RVs challenged him as he approached the perimeter . Surprised, but glad someone had thought to post watch. He’d completely missed that trick.
“Who goes there?” The man asked, grinning at Bo from beneath the brim of his dingy trucker’s cap. “Jenny figured we should probably keep an eye out for more trouble. Not sure what we’ll do if another herd of jackalopes shows up, but at least we’ll see them before they hit us this time.”
“That’ll be a big help,” Bo said, squinting against the sun. He really needed to get a cap of his own. Maybe he could find one where he was headed next. Knowing the casino, though, it’d be covered in rhinestones and glitter. “You see anyone, lay on that horn.”
“Doubt it’ll work,” the sentry said, then spit a glob of tobacco juice out the window. “Anything with electricity’s getting wonky. Firearms are punked out, too.”
To illustrate his point, the older man produced a shotgun shell that looked about a thousand years old from his shirt pocket. The plastic casing was brittle and cracked, and a thick ring of corrosion had chewed through the brass base to reveal the steel beneath. Threads of weird purple mold had crawled all over the thing.
“That’s not good,” Bo sighed.
“It is not,” the watchman agreed. “We’ll be back to fighting with sticks and stones, real fast.”
Bo was very glad he had the Carnivore’s Cleaver card. It had proven very effective against the monsters roaming this changing world. Maybe he could find more cards to outfit the people in his camp.
You are the only champion in this hex. You could provide equipment and some skill cards to your people, but that is the most they could use. I’m not entirely clear on the classification of roles on this world. You should try to find a manual soon, so we can figure out where we stand.
“Feeling all right?” the sentry asked, looking at Bo with a mixture of curiosity and concern.
“Huh? Yeah,” the pitmaster said, shaking his head to banish Barbie’s intrusive thoughts. He really needed to get the devil to shut the hell up unless they were alone. “Just a lot on my mind.”
“Didn’t figure you’d be in charge of a bunch of smoke rats?” the man asked, revealing rows of teeth in dire need of dentistry.
“I surely did not,” Bo said, waving. “Maybe we should talk Jenny into taking over for me.”
The sentry laughed and slapped the RV’s steering wheel. “That girl’s quick as a whip. But I don’t think she’s leadership material, Bo. Everybody thought real highly of your daddy, and now you. Best to leave things as they are.”
“Well, thank you for that,” Bo said. “I’ll be seeing you around.”
Bo threaded his way through the labyrinthine ring of vehicles that encircled the campgrounds. It looked like something out of a Mad Max movie, which suited Bo just fine. But as the pitmaster searched for Slick and Jenny, he passed by a lot of families and a dark new thought entered his mind.
Food would become a problem. Soon.
When he presented this issue to Slick, the older man agreed.
“We’ll eat like pigs tonight, because all that rabbit meat will be garbage by tomorrow,” Slick said with a sigh.
“Maybe not,” Bo countered. “I know the electricity’s down, but we could use some cooler that’ll keep things frosty if we fill ‘em with ice.”
“Ice that we’ll need electricity to make,” Jenny said as she joined them around the pile of rabbit pelts at the center of camp. “Unless you’ve got a magic card for that, too.”
“I do not,” Bo said. “But that casino must have plenty of ice. There were dozens of drink stations with icemakers in there.”
“Might salvage some from there, true,” Slick said. “Load up some coolers and keep the food on ice for a few days.”
“There were a five big restaurants in the casino, not counting a buffet that could feed five hundred people at a time. Those all have walk-in freezers and refrigerators, right?” Bo was getting more excited as he came closer to a solution for at least one problem. “Even without power, those will stay cool for days. And they might have back-up generators to keep the coolers running for even longer.”
Though the pitmaster wasn’t sure if the generators would even work. The shotgun shell was a lot simpler and less technologically advanced than an internal combustion engine, and the ammunition already looked untrustworthy. The pitmaster kept that thought to himself, though. He had no desire to add worries to his friends and allies.
“Those restaurants probably have food that doesn’t even need to be refrigerated,” Jenny added. “Canned soup, vegetables, fruit.”
That all sounded great to Bo, but there was something he knew the others didn’t.
“I learned something while messing with my cards,” the pitmaster began. “We’re lucky being out here in the middle of nowhere. In places where there were a lot of people, the system that makes the cards also made dungeons.”
“Dungeons,” Jenny said, with obvious skepticism. “Big hole in the ground where you put people you don’t like dungeons?”
Bo shook his head. “More like a big hole in the ground full of monsters.”
“Dungeons do not sound good for my health,” Slick said. He scrubbed his cheeks with the palms of his hands, the sandpaper rasp of his five o’clock shadow punctuating his words. “I’ve played Dungeons & Dragons. Dungeons are where the dragons live. I do not want to fight any dragons.”
“It is also where we can find loot,” Bo said, not sure if he should encourage his friends or not. It would probably be safer for them if he went alone, but the idea of taking on a dungeon by himself worried him. “Maybe even more magic cards. Whatever we find down there, the better we’ll be able to take care of our camp.”
“You sure we shouldn’t hunker down for a few days?” Slick asked. “Wait for the National Guard or Texas Rangers to show up?”
“For starters, the Rangers won’t come this side of the Red River,” Jenny said with a chuckle. “And if Oklahoma deploys its National Guard units, they aren’t coming to tribal land to save a casino. They’ll be too busy trying to protect Tulsa or Oklahoma City from the jackalope hordes. We’re on our own, Slick.”
“You can’t know that,” he scowled. “The army might show up tomorrow.”
Bo put his hand on the smaller man’s shoulder and gave him a little shake. The pitmaster had doubted all this was real at first. Then he’d fought a bunch of meat, lost both his legs to a crazy devil, grew them back, and currently had a devil living in his head.
“Jenny’s right,” Bo said. “The world has changed, Slick. I know it sounds crazy, but denying it will only cause you a lot more grief down the road. All this shit is real. Monsters are real. Magic cards are real. We need to find as much loot, including cards, as we can before monsters or something worse show up to attack the camp again. No one can save us but ourselves.”
“What could be worse than monster jackalopes?” Jenny asked, seeming more curious than concerned.
“People who carry cards are known as champions—”
Or experts, or denizens, but that’s not important at the moment.
“—and there are more of them out there trying to drain the magic out of our world. If they do, we all die.”
“Sounds peachy,” Slick said. He held up his hands defensively. “I get it. I don’t like it, but I get it. We need to find cards to defend ourselves from the bad guys. And you really think there’s food and cards at the casino?”
“I do,” Bo confirmed. “Also, medicine. And I think we can get all that without getting ourselves killed, or I wouldn’t ask the two of you to come along with me.”
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So sweet. I can feel my mind’s fangs rotting from the syrupy emotions now. Disgusting.
A dark look crossed Jenny’s face. “I’m not worried about killing monsters. Honestly, punching holes in those jackalopes got my blood pumping. But there were a lot of people in that casino before this went down. They may not want to share their supplies.”
You are the champion of this hex. They will bow down before you. Or you will crush them and take what is rightfully yours.
“We’ll ask nicely,” Bo said, countering the devil’s words. “We won’t know what’s up until we look, right?”
“Right,” Slick agreed.
“Best get after it,” Bo said. “It’s only a half-mile hike from the RV park to the near end of the casino. We can get there and back before all the rabbit finishes smoking.”
“It’s too bad,” Jenny said, a thin smile creasing her features.
“What’s that?” Bo asked.
“That we’ll never know if you could have beaten me with that Wagyu slab of yours,” she said. “Because what I’ve got on my grill is gonna knock your socks off.”
“I guess we’ll see if you can live up to that promise,” Bo said with a grin of his own. “It’s been a while since anyone knocked my socks off.”
“Get a room,” Slick said, rolling his eyes.
“Already got one,” she said. “Maybe later I’ll put my RV to the use God intended.”
Slick and Bo looked at Jenny like she’d grown a third eye. She laughed, slapped her hands on her knees, and shooed them both away. “You should see the looks on your faces. Go on, get out of here. Both of you. Let’s meet at my rig in fifteen.”
Slick watched the slender woman walk away and gave Bo a weak punch in the arm.
“Watch out for that one,” he said with a wink. “She bites.”
“Like you’d know,” Bo said, waving his friend off.
When the two parted ways, the pitmaster looked back over his shoulder at Jenny’s back. He’d seen something in her eyes. Something that worried him.
But he’d be a liar if it hadn’t excited him, too. There’d been a time when he thought the two of them might have a chance. They’d been close, and then…
He shook his head. That was the old world. In the new one, anything was possible.
***
Each member of the trio had brought their firearm of choice. Bo had dug the holster for the old man’s 1911 Commander out of the food truck’s storage panel and managed to get it to fit, more or less. Unfortunately, it also held the last of the bullets he’d brought for the trip. His legs were filling out far more slowly than he’d like, so he had to root around camp for more bungee cords that he used to connect the pull loops on his footwear to the holster’s belt. Bo knew he looked ridiculous, but he’d worry about fashion after they took care of the dungeon.
Slick had a sturdy H&K P30L pistol carried in a rugged chest holster. He had three extra magazines for it tucked into neat little pockets across the front of the holster. He wouldn’t win any prizes for fashion, but Slick had enough bullets to seriously inconvenience anyone who gave him lip.
Jenny carried her Mossberg 590A shotgun on a sling that held a couple dozen shells. She grinned at Bo’s reaction when he saw the weapon.
“What’s wrong?” she asked. “Upset that mine’s bigger than yours?”
“Just hoping you can actually shoot it without the recoil knocking you in the dirt,” Bo replied.
“Keep sassing me and you’ll see how well I can shoot,” the young woman replied. “Ask Slick who put down the most jackalopes. There’s no guarantee this thing will even fire.”
“That’s why I brought this?” Slick said, patting one hand against the sheathed knife hanging from his belt. “Might have to get up close and personal with some bad guys if our bullets are duds.”
“I had the same thought,” Jenny replied, and half-turned to show them the big knife strapped to her back. “And, look, mine’s bigger than yours. Again.”
The three laughed at that and took off for the Red River Casino, or whatever remained of it. They let the sentries know where they were headed, and that they expected to be back in three hours.
“And if you don’t turn up?” the sentry asked from where he sat in the driver’s seat of his RV.
“Expect trouble on its way,” Bo said. “Get any volunteers and come looking for us.”
“Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that,” the man answered. “Good luck.”
Bo nodded to the sentry and his small party headed out.
Beware the wildlife. What we saw last night is only a taste of the dangers that wait for you out here. This world has changed, and not in the ways you might expect. Monsters wander these plains.
Bo silently thanked Barbie for the warning, though he didn’t need to be told the world was dangerous. The jackalopes were pains in the ass, but he’d seen much larger shadows roaming the darkness on his way out to the bridge. Even now, he saw signs of those enormous creatures. Wide patches of grass flattened, trampled earth, and a hoofprint nearly as long as he was tall.
“Glad whatever left that didn’t bust through the camp,” Slick said. “Would have smashed us all flat.”
“Speak for yourself,” Jenny replied. “I’d have gotten away clean. It’s just slowpokes like you who’d get smashed.”
“And Bo,” Slick said. “He can barely walk on those sticks he’s using for legs.”
“I move just fine,” Bo said.
And he really did. He had no trouble keeping up with the rest of his group, and his legs were filling in a little at a time. They still looked impossibly skinny, but he was no longer worried about falling over or snapping one if he rolled an ankle in a gopher hole.
Would have appreciated some pants, though. Walking around in the ragged remains of his jeans made him feel half naked.
“You really think this place is full of monsters?” Slick asked, worry clear on his face.
“I don’t know,” Bo said, honestly. “But there could be. If you’ve got second thoughts, Slick…”
“We’d be stupid if we didn’t have second thoughts,” Jenny replied. “I don’t know what’s really happening here, Bo. Magic cards, jackalopes, monsters from another world trying to suck the magic out of ours…it all sounds pretty far-fetched.”
“But—” Bo started, only to have her cut him off.
“But Slick and I both saw you use your cards to kill monsters,” Jenny said. “And there’s no normal explanation for what’s happening with your legs. So, yeah. I’ve got second thoughts. But they won’t stop me from helping you do whatever it is the cards are telling you to do. Because you’re the only one who seems to have a single damned clue about what’s going on, Bo.”
“Thank you,” Bo said, “for trusting me. And not thinking I’m an idiot.”
“No one said anything about that last part,” Slick said with a wide grin.
***
It took longer than they expected to arrive at the casino, and longer still to cross the vast, black ocean of its parking lot. Up close, the vehicles that filled the lot were not nearly as shiny as they’d looked at a distance. Scabs of rust had chewed through the paint on most of them, and thick, dark vines crawled up through cracks in the asphalt to strangle their tires and crisscross windshields like the world’s thickest spiderwebs.
“Looks like people tried to run,” Slick said, pointing to one of the lot’s exits to the highway.
“Didn’t get far,” Jenny added.
Bo could see what had happened in his mind’s eye. People had panicked. Some of them got to their cars and trucks, took off like the devil himself was chasing them—
Devils have better things to do.
—and there’d been an accident. Cars snarled behind the wreck. Some drivers and their passengers had made a break for it on foot. Bo saw lost shoes and dropped hats, a few pairs of crushed sunglasses, all forming a trail toward the highway. But there was one thing he didn’t see.
“Notice anything missing?” the pitmaster asked.
Jenny answered in a low, worried voice. “No bodies.”
“Well, crap,” Slick added. “You think they ran back to the casino when whatever happened…you know…happened?”
“I don’t know.” Bo answered, truthfully. “Maybe something happened in the casino. People ran, then thought better of it after they ditched their cars. Headed back to their hotel rooms to wait out the craziness.”
“Maybe,” Slick said, clearly dubious.
“Won’t figure out what happened standing here,” Bo said after a few moments.
The team moved toward the casino’s nearest entrance. Things didn’t look any better in that direction. The building, once the largest casino in the world, was a massive square with a pair of hotel towers attached to its backside. Another tower, much larger and newer than the original accommodations, thrust toward the sky behind the others. The casino claimed fifteen hundred rooms on all its flyers, but it sure looked like more than that to Bo.
Yesterday, when Bo had swung by the casino to roll the craps dice a few times, a façade had covered the massive building’s exterior. The dominant feature of that façade had been a stylized version of the Red River, with a bunch of three-story tall longhorns sculpted out of concrete behind it. Even taller carvings of Chickasaw warriors had dotted the casino’s face, stern reminders that all this grandeur was on Native American soil.
The braves and steer were long gone, now.
In the space of twelve hours, those elaborate decorations had crumbled to nothing while the concrete behind them took on the craggy look of natural stone. Vines so thick Bo saw them from a hundred feet away crawled over the front of the building. They reminded him of a kraken’s tentacles trying to pull a ship into the briny deeps. Try as he might, Bo couldn’t think of a single natural way those plants could have grown so large in just shy of twenty-four hours.
This is the effect of the overlay. Other worlds have crept into yours as the mana returned, and their long shadows warp your reality. Whatever is in that place, it is much more dangerous than what you remember.
Bo relayed that information to his friends, who did not look amused by what he told them.
“You ever going to explain where you’re getting all this?” Jenny asked.
“It’s just stuff I saw when I got the cards,” Bo hedged. “Like a user manual burned into my brain.”
Your deception is so fluid, so easy. Perhaps there is more devil in you than you realize.
Bo did not like Barbie’s claim anymore than he liked fibbing to his friends. But if he told them a devil had taken up residence in his head, they’d never trust him again. He wouldn’t blame them for that, either. If either of them suddenly announced they were possessed…well, Bo didn’t know what he’d do.
Chop, chop, choppity, chopper chops. That’s what you’d do. You could use their meat to regrow your own. Think of the girthy legs you could grow with so much protein.
“It’s just weird you didn’t think to tell us our reality was warped before we walked all this way to a potential dungeon,” Slick said.
Bo shifted uneasily. “What I remember comes and goes,” he said. “Bits and pieces pop up when I need them.”
“Not gonna lie,” Slick said. “You are acting very sus, Bo.”
“Very sus,” Jenny confirmed. “I’ll get the truth out of you later, though. For now, we need to get food, medicine, and cards out of this place. And deal with any monsters that are inside before they come outside and mess with the camp.”
“What’ll we do if there are?” Slick asked. “Monsters inside, I mean.”
Bo sighed and mopped beads of perspiration from his forehead. He looked up at the mouldering cliff and the cavernous entrance that loomed over them like a portal to the underworld.
The idea of monsters filled Bo with dread. But it also drew another, more surprising reaction from the young pitmaster.
A cold, righteous anger.
He hadn’t asked for any of this. The last thing he’d expected was to become the defender of the Red River Hex, whatever the hell that was. Two days ago, his biggest worry was getting the Wagyu trimmed and on the smoker at the right time.
Whether he’d wanted the deck of magic cards didn’t matter, though. He was the only one who could stand against the invaders who’d come to tear the Earth apart.
“If there are monsters hiding here,” he said, a grim smile spreading over his features, “I guess we’ll find out if these bullets and shells still fire.”
Oh, this will be such fun.