The rifle shots intended for Rick were still echoing across the water. In the distance, a murmuration of blackbirds flew out of the trees. Concentric ripples spread from the rocking boat across the calm surface of the lake.

Rick’s hands trembled. He looked between Elrich and the two bodies in the boat with the swordsman, one headless and the other a withered husk, and Walt, who was hurrying onto the boat dock, shouting, “He’s with me!”

Walt ran to the edge of the dock, pleased with his new bodyguard’s performance. “Great work! You saved my brother-in-law’s life!”

Elrich, face stoic, plunged his broadsword into the headless redneck’s corpse. Stormbreaker fed, absorbing the remnants of the life force still in the corpse.

Interesting. If Stormbreaker is feeding on souls, does that mean the soul still remains after getting your head separated from your body?

Rick exhaled, frozen in place.

“You can lower your rifle,” Walt said. “Or you can shoot him. But I doubt it’ll do much.”

Rick realized he was still aiming the rifle at the swordsman. He slowly lowered the weapon. His mouth was slack as he put two and two together. “He’s…” Rick said, gesturing at Walt’s gauntlet, “one of your cards from there?”

“Yeah, he’s my bodyguard.” Then he corrected himself. “Well, our bodyguard. He’s protecting us and the cabin.”

Behind them, the back door of the cabin flew open and Janice sprinted across the deck. She slid to a stop when she saw Walt and her husband on the dock. “Is everyone okay? What happened? I heard gunshots!”

Walt waved at her. “We’re fine!”

He looked at Elrich and the mess of the two bodies on the boat. Considering the slaughter, there wasn’t much blood. A string of red arterial beadlets were on the interior of the boat and on the side, but Elrich’s sword had done a good job of drinking most of the blood. “Shit,” Walt said. “We gotta do something with the bodies.”

Janice jumped off the deck and raced towards them. She collided into Rick, hugging him, pressing her face against his shoulder. Then her eyes found the rifle in his hand. She leaned back and looked him in the eye. “What the hell happened?”

“These two,” Rick said, trailing off as he looked at the remains. Then he swallowed, composing himself. “These two thieves were looking to steal our gasoline and who knows what else. I was giving them a warning to back off, then well, Walt’s man here arrived.”

“Our bodyguard,” Walt said, explaining to Janice. “His name is Elrich and he’s in charge of protecting us all.”

Janice stared at Elrich, who had sheathed his blade into his scabbard. His violet eyes met hers and he nodded, “Milady.”

Walt’s sister was taken aback. Her jaw dropped and her eye widened. And then she started cackling, delighted. “Did you hear that, y’all? I’m a Lady!” She continued to laugh, as if tickled by the circumstance of this man who looked like he had been transported out of a sword and sorcery novel treating her like royalty. “He’s one of your minions?”

“Please,” Walt pleaded. “Show some respect and call him Elrich.”

“We can do that?” Janice asked. “We can just pull minions out of our gauntlet to protect us?”

Walt nodded. “There’s a few rules, but yeah. Basically.”

Janice hit Rick’s shoulder, excited. “That’s so fucking cool! You hear that baby? Pretty soon we’re going to have our own monsters and creatures protecting us.”

“Uh,” Walt said. “You still haven’t earned your gauntlet so let’s slow it down a bit. Just a bit.”

“You know it’s as good as mine,” Janice said. Then she turned to Elrich. When she spoke, she changed her voice to sound more proper, as if she was in a Regency romance or something. “Thank you for protecting my husband and my brother, Elrich. If it wasn’t for your skill with the blade, they might not be standing now. We are in debt to your service.”

She did a little bow. Elrich bowed in return.

“You’re not bothered that he killed these two guys?” Walt said.

Janice shrugged. “It’s the end of the world. Besides, they decided to fuck around. And then they found out. Right, Elrich?”

“Whatever you say, milady,” Elrich said.

Janice started laughing again.

“Right,” Walt said. “Okay. Elrich. Will you take this boat to the center of the lake and dump the bodies overboard?”

Elrich nodded and took control of the rudder. He began backing the boat away.

“How much gasoline do we have for the generator?” Walt said, looking at Rick.

“About a week’s worth.”

Walt called back after Elrich, “And bring the boat back and park it in the boat shed!” He turned to Rick and Janice. “Looks like we have enough gasoline for a few more weeks, then.”

#

They retreated back to the deck and waited for Elrich to finish the disposal of the bodies. Since he was out on the water, Walt wanted to be near his mother, who he could hear in the kitchen, humming a Loretta Lynn tune, Coal Miner’s Daughter. That was one of his father’s favorite songs. She always hummed it when she was thinking of him. He was lost in the past for a second, wondering how things might be different if he had never been a fuck up, when Rick clicked a gun case open, the sound pulling him back into the present.

Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

“I didn’t know you guys owned guns,” Walt said, watching Rick return the rifle to its case.

“And we didn’t realize you owned monsters and strange men with swords,” Janice said.

Walt brushed his hair out of his face with his finger tips, suddenly self-conscious at how his Voidlock appearance might seem to his brother-in-law. He wanted to take the attention off himself. “Do you know how to shoot?”

“Damn right I do,” Janice said. “Rick taught me when we were still dating. Hell, some of our dates were at the range. There’s no stress reliever like blasting holes through paper and pretending it’s a real person you dislike.”

Walt tilted his head. “Huh, I never knew you were into that.”

“Ah, you were off at Georgia Tech,” Janice said. He knew she was letting him off the hook. He was grateful for it. She could have said it was because he had been too busy self-destructing and playing with cards, but maybe she remembered the card playing part had come in handy.

He looked at Rick. “Where’d you learn? Was your family into hunting?”

“My dad,” Rick said, shaking his head. “Shot my first deer when I was twelve. Shooting was always something I was good at. I got even better at it when I was in the Army, though.”

“I never knew you were in the military,” Walt said. He fidgeted with his fingers. “I’m sorry, I feel like I should have known that. I feel like I should know these things about you guys. God, I’m such an asshole.”

“No need to be sorry,” Rick said. “It was something I didn’t really advertise.”

“I still feel bad.”

Janice punched him in the shoulder “Stop that. No sense in beating yourself up about things in the past. What matters is you’re here now. And we have plenty of time to catch up.”

Walt scratched the back of his neck and just said, “Yeah.” But then after a moment, his eyes wandered back to the lake. He could see Elrich and the boat off in the distance, smaller but still visible.

“Do you think I did the right thing?” Walt asked.

Janice looked at him, confused. “Which right thing? Finally quitting the job you hated? Too bad you waited until the day of the invasion. That’s what happens when you can’t decide to shit or get off the pot.”

“What? Get invaded by humans from an alternate earth? No one could have predicted that was what was in the cards.”

Janice laughed and even Rick chuckled.

“I meant getting rid of the bodies by dumping them in the center of the lake,” Walt said. “What if someone sees Elrich dumping them?”

“What could they possibly do?” Rick said. “Call the police? Every policeman in the world already has enough shit on their plate. Trust me, if they see something strange that looks like it came from another world, they’ve experienced enough to stay away.”

Elrich was turning the boat around and steering back. His presence made Walt feel safer. Maybe he should put more minions on duty and put the swordsman in charge of them. Give him his own security detail to be in charge of.

“The way I see it, if someone wants to act like it’s every man for themselves,” Janice said, “then they can deal with the consequences when their actions backfire.”

#

Back in the house, Walt set up the card forge in his room. He went through his belongings and saw the HAM radio. He brought it to the desk and sat down, fiddling with it. He turned it on. He set it to the channel and frequency Richard had shown him.

He adjusted the volume. Calm static came through the device. There was a fuzz to it, yet it was silent as far as communication went.

Walt held down a button and said, “Hello. Richard?” He felt awkward, speaking into the radio, broadcasting himself to the world via the frequency. “Are you out there? It’s um, it’s Walt.”

He let go of the button. He was just met with more static. Richard had said to give him three days. Since Walt had slept an entire day, that meant they were on Day Two since they had split up. He sighed and flicked the HAM radio off. He had to admit, he was worried about his friend. “I better hear from you tomorrow, old man.”

Then he had an idea. He turned the radio back on and scanned through the frequencies. They all seemed pretty silent until there’s a squawk and a burst of unintelligible chatter.

Walt turned up the volume, listening intently. It sounded like two people talking, except one of them was speaking really fast, and they both were so out-of-tune and distorted it was unintelligible. And as they spoke, he heard clicking.

But then the transmission stopped.

He waited about fifteen seconds, and was about to turn off the radio, when there was another squawk and the same distorted voices, with the underlying clicking.

The hell?

He was listening to the segment a third time, as if the transmission was repeating on a loop -- he couldn’t tell if these were different communications – when Janice’s voice came from the den. “Dinner’s ready!”

#

Dinner was fried chicken, potato salad and Iris’ jalapeno cornbread. For dessert she had made banana pudding, one of her staples. Walt was in heaven. It had been over a year since he had his mother’s cooking. No dining or gourmet experience could replace his mom’s homecooked meals. That’s why as long as his mom was around, he had no need for the personal chef card Catheryne had given him. Magical food or not, his mother’s cooking was a more powerful form of magic as far as he was concerned.

After they ate, Walt and Janice continued their Mythic matches while their mother retired to the recliner. They had wrapped her in a quilt with a cup of chamomile tea, and it wasn’t long until she was nodding off. Rick sat on the floor, his back against the couch next to Janice, watching them play.

Since their last match had taught her the power of a combo deck, she had built one herself. She played a minion she could buff in a loop, but her plan went to hell when Walt simply destroyed it with a well-timed lightning bolt, an early removal card.

“What?” Janice said. “That wasn’t supposed to happen.”

After another turn, she managed to play a duplicate of the minion. And this time Walt had no removal. Except when she went to cast her Rite of Destruction card to destroy the buffed minion and deal its damage to Walt, he simply hit her with a counterspell card, stopping the cast. He had effectively dealt with her combo pieces.

“That’s bullshit!” Janice said, realizing she had been hard-countered.

“Not bullshit,” Walt said. “Control.”

He explained it was the third deck archetype.

“So, here’s the thing about the three main archetypes,” Walt said. “Whether you’re going aggro, combo or control…you’re still putting all your eggs in one basket. Someone is just gonna come along and destroy the basket, right?”

“Rock, paper, scissors,” Janice said.

“So one would think,” Walt said. “The metagame clock shows us that aggro beats control, control beats combo, and combo beats aggro. So, if there are only these three kind of decks, it really is like rock, paper, scissors. But, therein lies the beauty of it.”

“There are other kinds of decks.”

#

Jason brought the twin Bloodhounds up the ridge where the NPC Voidlock was last reported. Up to the location where Shae had perished. He remained mounted on the griffin he had used to fly them up here and watched them get to work.

Mr. Nose, the one who could speak and hear, was kneeling in a charred area that had been warped by powerful poison effects. It had been where remnants of Shae’s remains had been found. The parts of her that hadn’t turned to ash and blown away on the wind were melted into the soil and rock. The Bloodhound inspected the ground.

His deaf brother, Mr. Fang, had walked up the ridge to the pine trees and was kneeling next to one, inspecting the chipped bark. He put his fingertips to the trunk and then brought them to his mouth. He licked his fingers as if he was getting the taste of the Voidlock on his tongue. Then he walked slowly down the ridge, following footprints he could only see.

When he got to some boulders, he hopped on them and then a card popped out of his gauntlet. A swarm of creatures appeared at his feet. They looked like a mutant cross between miniature chihuahuas, toads and bats.

“Witchhounds,” Jason muttered.

The witchhounds scurried across the ridge, sniffing. Then one of them stopped, raised its head towards the sky and yipped. The others ran to it, sniffing the ground around it. They all started to yip and release an unearthly howl.

They had caught the Voidlock’s scent.

Jason watched the witchhounds run down the mountain in all directions, disappearing into the wilderness around them.