by Deck Davis
Prologue
Dr. Aitken Screws Up the Universe
Dr. Benny Aitken wasn’t just a scientist; he was a god-damned genius. Or at least, that’s what he told himself. No other fucker agreed with him on that point. He’d earned his doctorate, and after years of writing research papers that nobody bothered to read, he got bored. He wanted glory, riches, recognition…and he wasn’t getting an ounce of it.
That was why he started experimenting with dark matter. Don’t ask how; Benny didn’t have time to explain the specifics. It took weeks of getting up at sunrise and working until the sky darkened, but he did it. Again – don’t ask how. Suffice to say that after six months working in secret, he opened a dark matter portal into another dimension.
Yeah. Bet you’re impressed with him now, aren’t you?
He messed around with the portal for a while. He threw all kinds of crap through it, before finally having the balls to step through it himself. When he did, he found himself in a world that, to all intents and purposes, was like a video game. The world was called Rapto, he discovered.
It was a land completely alien to Earth. Rather than smog-filled cities and roads crammed with traffic, this was a place where small towns were joined by dirt roads, and lonely adventures wandered along them with swords swinging from their backs. Creatures unlike anything he’d ever seen prowled through shadow-filled forests, only to meet their demise at the swing of a warrior’s sword.
When he first got to Rapto, he saw blue orbs hanging from trees. They looked like massive testicles. Against all sensible instincts he touched one, and a weird blue energy rushed through him. He found himself looking at this new world through a menu overlay, again, like in a game. His new status in said game was that of a level one illusionist.
If he killed something he earned experience points. When he used his illusionist powers, his skill levels went up and new spells were unlocked. It was sweeter than chocolate spread on a juicy tit. Magical wizard powers would have been enough, but the blue balls didn’t stop there.
The blue orb had also given him the power to understand the common language of Rapto which, to an untrained ear, sounded like a mixture of Swedish, German, and caveman grunts. He began talking to locals and learning the lore of his new world. He took on quests, went on adventures, and he stayed in taverns and drank as much ale as his stomach would hold.
Since he lived alone and hadn’t seen any of his family in years, he had no qualms about spending time in the land beyond the portal. He began to explore this unfamiliar environment. Green-skinned goblins ran around with level bars over their heads, and dragons flapped across the sky and shat fire. Benny was more than a little worried at first, but he kinda got used to it.
The trick to it, he found, was staying on the outskirts of towns and levelling up by killing creatures much weaker than he was. The problem was that the stronger he got, the harder it was to improve.
He thought about taking on tougher beasts, but was reluctant after he witnessed a muscled barbarian get his throat torn out by a troll. After that, Benny exercised a lot of caution. It seemed like almost everything in Rapto was deadly, right down to the plants. Back home, plants weren’t really anything to worry about. Here in Rapto, some flora had poison thorns that they fired at you, while others had vines that they used to strangle the air from your lungs. Nice place.
Despite the dangers, it all started to go swimmingly, and he had the time of his life; killing stuff, earning gold, spending said gold in taverns where he got rat-assed drunk. What a time to be alive!
But then it all went to hell in a handcart of his own making.
He’d stay in his new portal world for a while and have a great old time. Eventually he’d always get an itchy feeling, like the portal was going to close behind him or something like that.
Whenever he felt like that, he went back home. The longer he spent in Rapto the braver he became, until soon he was spending months there at a time. He found that time filtered slowly through the portal from one world to another, and that a month in Rapto was just thirty minutes back home.
Once he’d gotten all of the killing and whoring out of his system he decided it was time to make some money. He tried taking things back home through the portal with him; sacks of gold coins, gems, even a frost-enchanted sword he’d gotten in a quest. Nothing survived the trip; when it reached the other side it resembled melted mush.
This made sense, since as soon as he walked through the portal from either direction, he’d find himself in the other world completely naked. In Rapto he placed a magically sealed chest near his spawn, where he stowed all his stuff. On earth, his portal was in a garage he owned outside of the city, and he always kept clothes there. It was a good thing he could lock the damn thing; imagine if someone saw a butt-naked man falling out of a dark matter portal?
Despite not being able to take anything from one world to the next, it was for the best, he guessed. It wouldn’t have been sensible for anything from Rapto to be able to go to Earth.
The reason he believed this was a story he’d heard about how in Australia, cane toads had been introduced into the wild to control the Frenchi beetle population. The toads bred beyond all expectations, and over two hundred million cane toads prowled the outback to this day. If that happened with toads in Australia, what would happen if Benny accidentally let a goblin through the portal?
With that way of making money ruled out, he wondered if it was time to start telling the world about his discovery. He imagined founding a company where he’d earn fame and fortune as the tour guide into another dimension. That was the plan. Private jets and sunny beaches here I come, he thought.
With his mind made up, he went back in to Rapto, resolved on just one more night getting rat-assed drunk and starting a fight with someone.
And that was when he met Fiona.
She was a blue mage passing through a town named Festwiche, and she and Benny had found themselves sharing the same table in an inn. Hours of beers led to them sharing the same room. This, in turn, led to him completely ignoring world that waited for him back beyond the portal, he was so enraptured with her. Days turned into months, then into years. A casual bang became a steady relationship, which then became marriage. Screw fame, fortune and all the rest of it. Dr. Benny Aitken was happy, and Rapto was his home now.
That was when they found the portal. Benny didn’t know it, but some level thirty-four rogue bastard had been watching him for months. He’d seen him drop out of the portal like an egg from a chicken’s ass, and he’d decided to make some money from it.
After selling Benny’s secret to an extremely powerful, but rather unscrupulous, mage guild called the Umbra, Benny found himself imprisoned in a dungeon while they messed around with his only way home.
The Umbra, he learned, were a sect of powerful mages whose moral compassed pointed straight at the chaotic side. They were a real set of bastards, and they seemed to hold Benny in the kind of contempt that a prison guard would a rapist.
The worst thing wasn’t his imprisonment, though; it was how much they gloated about what they were doing. When they told him that they’d worked out a way to for their minds to go through the portal, he was pretty worried. He was going to be famous, alright, but not Dalai Lama or Mahatma Ghandi famous. No. Dr. Benny Aitken was jumping the queue and getting right beyond J Robert Oppenheimer, who invented the atom bomb, as the most dangerous idiot the world had ever produced.
He didn’t know how the hell they managed to do it, or why. The only thing he knew, was this: somehow, the fabric of the fantasy world and the real world melded together, and the dark matter portal visited the apocalyps
e upon Earth.
It’s starting point? A small town called Pasture Downs.
Chapter One
Mob Justice
Ash Hobbes was born April eleventh nineteen eighty-nine. Ash Hobbes the Asshole was born September twenty-third, two thousand and fifteen at eight PM.
The reason he could be so specific about it was because Al Jones’ radio show had just started as he pulled up to his house. When he got inside, he found a little black box and a note waiting for him. His stomach lurched; he knew what was in the box.
You see, not only had his girlfriend of eight years accidentally found the engagement ring he’d stashed in his sock drawer, but she was so non-plussed about the idea that she’d collected her stuff and left him. At first, he thought it was a joke, but as the days turned into weeks then into months, he failed to hear the laughter track.
So, if that was the birth of the asshole in him, he guessed the conception was buying the ring. Whatever the order of events, that’s what he was now. Not an in-your-face one – he rarely sought people out to shove an ounce of assholery their way. He was just kinda done with screwing around.
Years after asshole day zero, Ash drifted in and out of towns doing what he did best but had stopped because his girlfriend had wanted him to go straight; conning the hell out of people.
That particular night in, some slack-jawed locals watched him as he left the mayor’s office and walked to his car on the parking lot. It wasn’t much of a lot and it wasn’t much of an office, but what else did he expect from a shithole town like this?
Pasture Downs was the kinda place that map makers pretended didn’t exist so they wouldn’t have to set it on paper. It was full of folks who spent their days laboring and their nights drinking, and it was rare that the local bar didn’t play host to a drunken brawl.
The locals who’d gathered in the parking lot that day, a guy in a shirt with a pack of smokes in his pocket, and a woman with a skirt that barely covered her ass, were joined by another couple of men. They stared at Ash with troll-like looks of anger.
They want to kill me, he thought. Seems like a natural reaction.
It was a sunny day, but the mood of Pasture Down was gloomier than a broke drunk who’d just spilled his last drink. There was a good reason for this; the life savings of half its residents had been wiped out. The problem was, you see, that the poor folks of Pasture Down had invested their money in a promising investment.
Or Ash had told them it was promising, at least. The fact was that he’d swindled them out of as much money as he could, and he didn’t feel the slightest touch of guilt. That was the kind of son-of-a-bitch he was.
He pressed his fob and unlocked the car. The bleep seemed to distract the bystanders for a few seconds, as though for them the sound was some kind of wizardry that they couldn’t comprehend. Before long, their burning stares were back on him.
There was really nothing for them to be impressed about. His car ranked among the shittiest on the lot. Maybe he could have bought something better if he didn’t give the proceeds of his scams to various charities. The thing was, the money meant nothing to Ash. He loved the feeling of the con; the adrenaline rush of knowing when he’d gotten away with it.
Ash’s phone rang. He wasn’t going to answer it, but he glanced at the screen and saw that it was the number of the care giver service he’d paid to look after his mum and dad. He pressed answer.
“Mr. Hobbes,” said a woman with a high-pitched voice. “It’s Clara from Cosy Carers. I’m sorry to interrupt you, but I have a delicate matter to discuss. You’ve been paying for our services for years, but I’m afraid that due to recent regulations, our prices are going to have to increase.”
This was the third time the damn prices had increased this year, and Ash knew when he was being gauge. Problem was that he’d already been tried four different care giver services, and these guys were the best. They didn’t have to do much; just tidy mum and dad’s house up a little in the mornings. They weren’t invalids, or anything, but the years were starting to show on them, and Ash wanted to help any way he could.
“Fine,” he said. “Just send me a new invoice and I’ll have the bank change the debit.”
With that he ended the call, because he had a more pressing problem to deal with. Just across from him, a slack-jawed local man was glaring at Ash as though he’d just taken a crap in his stew.
“You better get us our money back,” shouted the man with the cigarettes in his pocket.
“You’d only drink it away,” replied Ash. “I did you and your family a favor. You should be paying me for my services. Go home and spend time with your wife and kids.”
He knew he was goading the man, but he couldn’t help it. Ash was an asshole, and he knew that people were supposed to hate assholes. The thing about Ash was, that he never tried to hide how much of a dick he was. Surely a bit of honesty counted for something? An asshole in the hand was worth two in the bush.
The crowd of four had turned into seven now. Was that enough for them to be called a mob? He’d never had a mob after him before. He’d been chased out of one town a while back, but that had been by a meth-head in a pickup truck. This, though, this was a real mob. The only thing they were missing were pitchforks. First time for everything, he thought.
He’d just come out from a meeting with the mayor of Pasture Downs where he’d told him that the investment had taken an unfortunate turn. Delivering the news hadn’t been so tough, since the mayor was a real slime-ball, and Ash had relished watching his jaw drop when he realized he’d lost the tax-payers money he’d siphoned into Ash’s scheme for personal profit. Now, all that remained was for him to get the hell out of town. The locals, it seemed, didn’t want him to leave just yet.
A pissed crowd of men and women of all ages was slowly forming, though most of the population was curiously white. Guess diversity hadn’t hit Pasture Down yet. It was the kind of backwater hole where one half of the population farmed and the other half worked in the mines, and anyone who strayed from those choices of profession was looked at like they had a dick on their forehead.
“You goddamn thief son of a B,” shouted a woman old enough to be Ash’s grandma.
“Hey now,” said Ash. “You gave me the money, remember? Calling me a thief implies you didn’t hand it over willingly on the hope that I’d lay a golden fucking egg.”
He got into his car, but they had blocked the exit now as if they were challenging him to run them over. He felt his skin start to itch. This was becoming a little too real. Maybe he should have just skipped town straight away, but he hadn’t been able to resist seeing Mayor Dance’s face when he told him the money was gone.
“Judas has nothing on you, you thieving little scumbag,” shouted a man wearing a vicar’s collar.
“For a long time, Judas was a pretty good guy,” said Ash. “But he gets judged on a few days of his life. Maybe you better think on that.”
Ash had no idea what the hell he meant by that…but it stumped the man for a while, giving him a little breathing room.
He had only one thought on his mind now; he needed to leave. If he had to run any of them over while doing so, then that was their fault for standing there like rabbits facing headlights.
A man in dark blue jeans and an oil-stained shirt strode across the parking lot. His fists were clenched, and from the swell of his arm muscles it looked like he was used to throwing punches. Ash focused on the exit and revved the engine, driving forward at a snail’s pace.
He’d only driven a few yards when a man stepped from a hummer to his right and blocked his way. The oil guy crossed the parking lot until soon, he too stood in the way of his escape. A woman, with a single string of her fringe dyed purple, took a set of keys from out of her purse. She smiled at Ash and then scratched them across his Mercedes from the windshield to the bottom of the bumper.
“Really? What did my car ever do to you, bitch?”
The oil guy took shallow breaths and his che
eks looked ready to boil. As he stared at Ash his eyes became little black balls that burned with the fire. Ash didn’t feel so confident with anger anymore. His practiced words and slippery gestures left him, and he didn’t know how he was going to get out of this.
The people started to close in on his car in a circle. Pretty soon they’d try and drag him out or something. It was locked, but they were so angry they’d probably try smashing a window. He could almost feel the beating that was going to come his way.
“Gonna get my money back by carving up your belly,” said the oil guy. From the growl in his voice, Ash knew that he meant it.
The nature of his profession meant that he’d faced quite a few angry looks in the past few years. The trick was getting out of town before he had to face them, but he wasn’t always quick enough. Still, up to now he’d managed to avoid a beating that even he himself would admit that he deserved.
Right now, though, he didn’t really feel like getting a beating. The question was, what was he going to do about it?