Caleb, as it turned out, was up in their room. Jeremy wandered back up after finding something to eat and found him lounging on one of the beds. The fluffy white towels from the bathroom were spread over the mattress to protect the duvet from the gun parts scattered around. Gun oil was thick in the air.
“Hey.” Jeremy plopped himself on the opposite bed.
Caleb brushed a lock of hair out of his face with the back of his hand. “You’re back.”
“Yep.”
“You know,” Caleb wiped his fingers off with a cloth, eyes down, and concentrated on the task. “You do this thing where you are totally anal and controlling about stuff. And you always have a plan or whatever, but then you go totally off the rails and make these decisions to do things that are spur of the moment, but you make it look like they are super-rational, and everything will be okay cause that’s how everything else you do is. But I’ve seen that shit backfire on you because I know sometimes you aren’t thinking, and you just let yourself get dragged into shit.”
Jeremy squinted at the TV and their vague reflections on the black screen. For all his joking and lightheartedness, or perhaps because of it, Caleb always had a difficult time saying something serious when he wanted to. He was correct that Jeremy tended to let himself get dragged into things. He let ideas sweep him into plans of action, which have consequences he often never fully considered until faced directly with them. It was happening now, and he could see himself chasing that rabbit down the rabbit hole, but also, it was the apocalypse, so…well, fuck it.
“I’m just saying I don’t know if it’s such a good idea to get wrapped up in whatever the hell the military is going to end up doing.” Caleb tossed the rag aside. “I don’t like it here.”
“You don’t like it here,” Jeremy repeated. “But they gave you guns.”
“Right.” Caleb’s eyes scanned across the bed. He started to piece the M4 back together. “So, we have guns, and you went into a dungeon, and now we got everything we could from all this, so let's move on.”
Once again, Jeremy marveled at how quickly calling the space beyond the portal a dungeon caught on.
“Aren’t you curious to know how it went?”
Caleb huffed.
“I found a spell,” Jeremy told him. “I’m not sure exactly what it does yet, but there are actual words in it, which is different from all the spells in the book that are entirely of runes. We’ll have to try it out once we get away from people a little bit in case it is a weapon of mass destruction or something.”
Caleb remained silent.
“Alright.” Jeremy leaned back on his hands. “What’s wrong?”
“I just don’t like that you went into that place alone.”
“With a whole squad of highly trained guardsmen, but okay.”
“No, like, we…” Caleb gestured between them with his hand. “…are supposed to be a team. Us against the apocalypse or whatever. Not you assigning homework to me while you go off to fight.”
“Okay, well, um.” The memory of Daughtery shaking his head and muttering about people, thinking that all this is going to go down like it does in the movies popped into his head. Somehow, Caleb envisioned some scenario of them against the apocalypse and then sat and stewed all morning about how reality did not fit the bill he drew up in his mind.
“If it’s going to be like this, I might as well go back to my family like we probably both should be doing anyway.”
Caleb would not do that, but Jeremy decided against pointing that out. Instead, he tapped his fingers on the bed and tilted his head to the side. “Did you do your homework, at least?”
Caleb glared at him.
“Alright, look.” Jeremy smiled. “I just came from talking to some of the people down in the command center.”
He’d run into Captain Byrne in the mess hall tent they set up to feed all the extra mouths that had arrived and might be packing up just as soon. She had been understandably distracted as he snagged her for just a minute to explain that he was grateful for the opportunity but wanted to move on. She’d thanked him for his assistance and probably had too many other things on her plate to say much more than that before she carried her food out of the tent to go work while she ate.
“I told them we are heading out,” Jeremy continued. “I don’t want to stick around here either. We still have to get to the REI before all the tents are gone.”
“Pretty sure they are all already gone,” Caleb grumbled. “But that’s alright because I raided their supplies. They had these huge boxes of military surplus stuff in one of those trucks, along with the guns, and I managed to get some sleeping bags and tents.”
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Jeremy rolled his eyes. Caleb was doing a pretty good job at trying to appear as though he still felt upset, but the corners of his mouth were fighting not to curl up into a smile. So, he just looked petulant. He was probably relieved that Jeremy had already come to the conclusion he wanted to head out and didn’t have to try to convince him.
“You want a pat on the back?” Jeremy teased.
Caleb huffed. “And here I was going to tell you about all the practice I did while you were distracted playing soldier yesterday and today.”
“Oh please, you are dying to show off,” Jeremy shot back. “Let’s see it.”
“Okay, so…” Caleb shifted, so he knelt above the pieces of the M4. He narrowed his eyes and stuck his tongue out. Jeremy straightened up to watch as the bumper spring lifted off the towels and floated through the air to insert itself into the receiver. Caleb held down the pin to allow it to get in there, but the spring just animated itself with a burst of runes from Caleb’s hand. Then he cast the same spell again, and the buffer lifted from the towel and fit right in behind the spring.
“Nice,” Jeremy said. “You figured out how to teleport stuff around.”
“I can’t do too much or anything that’s very big or heavy or super fiddly, but I’m getting more consistent,” Caleb grinned. “Sorry I didn’t try out any of the spells in the book, but I just really wanted to see if I could teleport shit.”
“A spring seems pretty fiddly to me,” Jeremy pointed out.
Caleb shrugged. “I’ve been practicing a lot by disassembling and reassembling the guns. I couldn’t get it at first, but now I can.”
Jeremy concentrated on Caleb’s overlay. With all the practice, he’d gotten himself to nearly the same color as Jeremy, edging from yellow into green. If the progression followed the visible light spectrum, like Jeremy suspected they did, they were probably about halfway to getting their first rings. They just needed to get through blues and purples.
“Alright,” Caleb said after they had lapsed into silence. “Tell me about what the dungeon was like.”
“Well, it had one ring, and I think it would have been manageable with just the three of us,” Jeremy folded his hands between his knees. “There were these long hallways with rooms every so often, and each room had a couple of those imps in it. I mean, the guardsmen were taking turns with the kills cause it only took one person to clear each room.”
Caleb nodded along, continuing to piece the gun back together as he listened.
“A couple of the rooms looked like they were going to be turned into more hallways, and not all the corridors were actually complete. I think it was still building itself. Maybe after a couple more rings, it would have been like a fucking hell maze in there, but at one ring it was manageable.”
“So that was it?” Caleb asked. “Just walking along and killing a little creature every so often.”
“Up until the very end,” Jeremy said. “There was this witch who was keeping a bunch of them in one room, and they all attacked at once. Things got a little hairy there, but mostly because none of the guardsmen knew magic. I think if we keep practicing and have a plan for when that kind of thing happens, we would have been able to take them out much easier with a few well-placed fire spells and things like that.”
“A witch?”
“Yeah, I don’t know. She was very alchemical. Too bad she didn’t keep any records or anything.” Jeremy shook his head. “I don’t know how common a situation like that is in these dungeons, but it goes to show that intelligent creatures can spawn in them and that the creatures inside can interact with each other.”
Caleb slammed a pin home. “Huh.”
“Then the whole thing started to collapse after we killed her and got the spell, but it led us out,” Jeremy said.
“Sounds like a good way to farm experience and get some unique spells.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Jeremy agreed. “We just have to find some more of them. Places where the monsters are concentrated.”
“All the expanded wilderness areas seem like a solid bet,” Caleb suggested. “We just have to get to them before the National Guard does.”
“They are so overtaxed; I’m sure they won’t worry about ones that are away from people.” Jeremy fell back on the mattress and sighed at the ceiling. “We should get some ATVs or something.”
“Man, I think that they might be a little hard to come by right now.” Caleb pulled out his phone like he was going to check. “And I bet the prices are totally jacked up.”
“Oh, I meant, like, theoretically.”
“Theoretically?” Jeremy could tell from the tone of Caleb’s voice that he was looking up suspiciously from his phone. He propped himself up on his elbows to raise his eyebrows. Caleb raised his in response. “Like theoretically, as in, without money?”
“Yeah, theoretically.” Jeremy broke out into a grin despite himself.
“I mean, it is the apocalypse.” Caleb shrugged and looked back down at his phone. “If we come across some abandoned in a garage somewhere, I won’t turn down the opportunity. Gas is hard to come by, too, though.”
Jeremy sighed and fell back against the bed. “I’m just going to get real tired of walking everywhere. Horses?”
“Moira probably has horses somewhere.”
Jeremy mulled it over and thought that she probably did. But he had no idea how to ride, let alone care for a horse.
The sound of the key sliding into the lock came from beyond the door, and it swung open a moment later. Zanie stepped through, arms full of a cardboard box. She dumped it on the bed beside Jeremy’s head.
“Hey.”
“Whatcha got?” Caleb peered at the box curiously.
“Just some stuff they weren’t using.” She flipped open the lid and tilted it to show them a tablet and a couple of different cords.
Caleb’s eyes shot up from his phone. “Like that they…theoretically…weren’t using, or…”
Zanie looked between him and Jeremy like she was waiting for one of them to let her in on the joke. “They weren’t using it. I figured it would be easier to see the pdf of the book on a tablet, rather than a phone. Plus, I mean, Jeremy…come on. You don’t have a phone, but you can at least use this to keep in contact with people.”
“Oh, it's for me?” Jeremy dragged the box a little closer to look inside.
“It’s for the group, really, but I guess I was thinking about you using it for the book specifically, so yeah.”
“Zanie, we’re heading out of here soon,” Caleb said while Jeremy flipped the tablet over in his hands a few times. It had a super-tough-looking case, which was nice.
“Well, I figured we wouldn’t stay at this camp,” She sat down beside Caleb. “We’re out here to find monsters and gain experience, right? We can’t do that here. Let me tell you what. These people have to deal with so much stupid, ridiculous red tape, but at the same time, they kinda do whatever they want. It’s stressful. I think we’d do better on our own.”
“Cool,” Jeremy said. “That’s exactly what we thought. How about leaving tomorrow?”