by Eddie Patin
"Nothrix," Riley said suddenly, staring at the distant figures. "Shet..."
Maybe he’s zooming in or something, Jason thought. Didn’t Riley mention that his eyes were cybernetic?
The name 'Nothrix' rang a bell in Jason’s head. "Those people you see are Nothrix? You mean those bug people from the market?" A small rock of cold fear tumbled around in Jason’s stomach.
"Hopefully they're not the same ones," Riley replied, finally looking back to Jason. "Nothrix are nasty enough as it is without us having to deal with fruking Ghrag. He’s a real piece of work."
"What are they doing here?" Jason asked.
"Probably hunting minotaurs," the soldier said, "just like us." He turned and looked at the ruins next to Jason. "That’s an old rift gate of some kind," he said. "Looks like that’s where your focus key came from."
Jason realized that he’d been holding the focus key that whole time, still clenched in his bare palm. Looking down at the shard of eroded metal, he saw that it was the same material as the ruins of the gate. "Oh shit," Jason muttered, stuffing the shard back into his focus key pouch. It would suck to lose it. "Speaking of losing it..." he said to himself, pulling up the OCS and unlocking the screen. Jason flashed through to where he could bookmark coordinates. Where the hell is it?! he thought.
"Let’s get moving," Riley said. "We're exposed out here. I don't want those bugs to see us."
"Just a sec..." Jason replied, finally finding the right screen and bookmarking the spot, making sure that the third and ninth dimensions were both flagged. He knew that he wouldn’t be able to use the OCS to get back here without the focus key—at least not until he removed Jason 113’s block—but might be good to have this spot bookmarked for later. Maybe. And they could definitely use this space in the third dimension if they needed to—
"What are you doing?" Riley asked, shifting while he stood. He looked impatient.
"Bookmarking this spot."
"Why? We have a focus key."
"In case we want to teleport back to where the focus key dropped us off," Jason said. He turned on the temporal dimensional markers too, hoping that he understood the OCS correctly. He remembered Riley mentioning using those dimensions to sometimes fix things if they had an emergency. When he was finished, Jason let the OCS drop back down to his side then shouldered his dad’s big game rifle.
Riley shrugged.
"Should we go up to the ridges, Ranaja?" Gliath asked, speaking quietly but deeply. The leopardwere scanned the canyon up ahead of them. "Elevation will be an advantage here..."
Jason was amazed by how straight the maze floor ran along with the edges of the cliffs on each side. Aside from natural differences and deviations in the sandstone walls, the lines were pretty straight. The three Reality Rifters stood in a purplish-grey rocky and sandy corridor full of foliage natural to semi-arid environments. The huge corridor continued off ahead as far as Jason could see. He couldn't see either end of the passage—before or behind them—but he could definitely see turn-offs in the distance.
"Let’s walk along the bottom for a while, Gliath," Riley said, starting off. The soldier veered toward the ridge-wall that would conceal the group from being spotted by the Nothrix.
Jason followed, looking up at the distant figures. He was hardly able to make them out before. They were gone. The tops of the ridges—the upper edges of the maze walls—weren't as square as the bottom was. They were rounded like the tops of actual Earth ridges. Jason figured that being up there would probably be good for scouting and making camp.
We’re not making camp here, are we? he thought with a jolt of dread.
No. Riley had mentioned that at nightfall, they’d simply rift home.
If Jason could get them there...
The three of them walked along the wall for a while, leaving the ruins behind. Jason eyed the iron sights of his father’s Rigby Magnum Mauser and hoped that he’d be able to contribute to the group. He was a pretty good shot and he practiced with his Glock and some of his rifles a lot at the range—especially his AK-47. But he hardly ever messed with this big Rigby; not with its ammo costing five dollars a round. He knew that it would kick like hell. He figured that he'd have to be extra careful not to tense up and resist the recoil; he’d have to let it rock through him...
Jason held one hand up in front of his face at times, keeping the rifle in the crook of his arm as he pushed the scrub oak branches out of his face. Riley was really hugging the wall...
"Up ahead," Gliath said suddenly, making Riley freeze at the head of the group.
The soldier lifted his Gauss rifle and peered down its sights, scanning the corridor before them.
They waited.
"What?" Riley asked.
"I smell a beast on the wind..." Gliath replied.
Jason felt his mouth go dry and he shouldered his rifle, looking ahead, trying to see whatever the hell Gliath had noticed...
There was a distant sound—a deep snort—and a monster stepped into view from around a far corner that Jason hadn’t noticed. Moving into the maze-like passage, Jason saw what was clearly a minotaur perhaps fifty yards away. It was taller than Gliath; a hulking brute with long, messy fur that looked muddy in the yellow light. Its powerful legs were inverted past the knees—like Gliath's hybrid form, more like an animal’s legs than a man’s—and Jason saw a short tail tipped with a tuft of dark hair whipping around behind it. The beast turned to face them, spotting the three of them instantly. The sight of its massive, wide head with long, thick horns that curled out to the sides ending in black points filled Jason’s guts with cold water and made his heartbeat quicken.
The monster called out with a deep, thick voice—something in between a shout and a roar—then started trotting their way. It wore nothing more than a loincloth, hardly noticeable among its thick, yak-like fur. Jason immediately noticed the heavy thumps of its hooves on the sandy ground...
"Well shet—that was fast!" Riley said, aiming and sidestepping away from the ridge wall. "Let's take it down. Jason, watch your field of fire! Go for the neck or its face!"
Riley immediately fired off several controlled bursts as the minotaur—thundering toward them—picked up speed. The beast charged, its weight shaking the earth! The soldier's Gauss rifle didn’t make the same reports as a normal rifle—a slug gun, as Riley would say. As the soldier shot, the rifle bucked against his shoulder with heavy, metallic thunks, and the instant the rounds left the barrel (without any sort of muzzle flash), there was a near-instant staccato of sharp cracks as its bolts broke the sound barrier.
As the minotaur picked up speed into a full charge and started to lower its head, Jason realized with horror that it didn’t seem to notice being hit by Riley’s rounds...
Jason stepped up to stand next to Riley’s side and lifted the muzzle of his Rigby. He flicked off the safety, lined up the iron sights on the charging beast—right between the eyes—and started squeezing the trigger, trying to ignore his hammering heart...
His rifle boomed—much louder than Jason expected, slapping his eardrums painfully—and an instant later, he saw the minotaur flinch its head, slowing down its charge with a bellowing roar of pain. Jason was dimly aware of the tremendous recoil rocking him backwards.
" Gliath, finish it!" Riley said.
The beast shook its head then picked up speed again. It was closing fast, and Jason felt its heavy hooves thumping through the ground. The shaking sand under his feet made his ankles and knees feel like jelly...
He cycled the bolt of his Rigby with a trembling hand, letting the brass fly, then aimed again.
Just before Jason fired a second time, he heard a weird sound on his right like a loud, high-pitched metallic shing, and there was a loud boom as Gliath’s railgun round split the air. The minotaur—now within twenty yards and charging like a freaking train—suddenly snapped its broad head to one side. Jason saw its massive horns tilt violently. Then it lost its balance and crashed to the sandy ground with a heavy,
thunderous slam!
Jason lined up his sights on the beast, trying to control his panicked breathing as he aimed at its head while the massive form slid to a stop. He heard his heartbeat pounding in his ears. He felt it in his face...
"Oh shit!" Jason breathed. The monster stopped, unmoving, no more than ten yards away from them. It was huge. Far heavier than Gliath. More like the size of Zayden Skinner—maybe thicker. Probably thicker...
Riley was also holding his Gauss rifle on the monster, who was crumbled up in the sand on its belly and massive chest. Its matted fur was caked with sand from the impact with the ground. Jason didn’t see Gliath—he assumed that the leopardwere was against the wall on his right side, and he couldn't take his eyes off of the beast...
"Okay," Riley said finally, taking cautious steps toward the fallen minotaur. "Keep your distance for a bit, Jason," he said, approaching with his rifle trained on it.
Jason realized that his ears were ringing from his rifle’s shot. The supersonic cracks of the Gauss and railgun rounds had been loud as hell too, but nothing like his Rigby. He lowered the muzzle and flipped on the safety, taking tentative steps forward.
"Is it dead?" Jason asked.
Riley approached on one side and Gliath padded along in the sand on the other, the leopardwere’s sniper rifle similarly trained on the monster. Riley shared glances with his Krulax friend for a moment, then approached, giving the beast a solid kick in the skull. The minotaur’s head moved a little with the blow, but it didn’t react. There was a crack in the back of its skull. Blood was still pumping out of it as if pushed by a massive, slowly-beating heart.
"Dead," Riley said with a smirk. "There’s number one!"
The two warriors lowered their weapons and Jason sighed, walking up.
"Did I hit it?" Jason asked. "I couldn’t tell..."
Gliath slung his railgun over his broad, furred back and lifted up the monster’s head by its huge horns, twisting its heavy body until they could see the minotaur's face, neck, and upper chest. Jason could see dark blood—strange-looking and almost black under the yellow sky—running freely to pool in the sand from three dark, nasty holes in its neck. He noticed that the minotaur’s right eye was gone, replaced by a mess of ragged meat pressing out from the hole.
"You hit it in the skull, Jason," Riley said, pointing at a spot over the minotaur’s brow where the fur lined up differently. There was a shiny point there. If that’s where Jason hit, it was a good shot—it just didn’t penetrate.
"Holy shit!" Jason replied, looking down at his Rigby. That thing’s skull must have been ridiculously tough. "I hit it in the forehead and didn’t get through? Who shot it in the eye?"
Riley stood, scratching his beard, and smiled up at Gliath. "Gliath shot that railgun right through its brain. Good shot, old buddy." He looked back to Jason. "Yours was a great shot too, man—on a moving target, no less. But minotaurs are really hard to penetrate in most areas. Really hard, thick skulls and bones; really tough hide. You’ve gotta hit 'em either in the face or in the front of their neck—where I did—or in naturally thinner places ... like the armpits maybe. We generally don’t fight them so close; that was just bad luck. Big fruker, too." Riley kicked at it again.
Jason could see the crack in the back of its head. The blood was slowly running down now. "That must be the exit wound from the railgun," he said, pointing.
"Yep," Riley replied. "My three shots hit it in the neck. It probably would have bled to death, but not by the time it would have reached us, looks like."
Jason smiled and looked back up at Riley and Gliath. "Well there’s number one! We’re going for ten you said?" He picked up the bite valve from his CamelBak hanging over his shoulder and took a drink.
"At least ten," Riley replied, pressing his lips together in thought. "Okay, let’s rift this one home for processing and keep going. Jason, open up a horizontal rift under its body back to the garage."
That surprised Jason. "Horizontal?!"
"Yeah. So we don’t have to move it. These things are fruking heavy."
"You mean like ... flat on the ground? Under the minotaur?!"
"Yep."
Jason stared at the huge, dead brute. He suddenly smelled the thing. Its strong, wafting musk reminded him of horses and a little like wet dog.
"I can do that? I mean—Jason 113 could do that?"
"Yeah," Riley said. "I don’t know how, but he could. So ... you can too. Give it a try."
Jason stared down at the bleeding, dead monster, then reached into his shirt through his collar to feel the focus key. He closed his eyes and felt the wind play over his face and through his short hair. Imagining a connection through the ocean of multiverses, Jason connected a blazing yellow line from this universe to u934. He visualized his garage. Jason imagined the huge dead body bleeding slowly while lying on his concrete garage floor...
There was a flutter in the air in front of him, then the telltale sound of a rift opening in the distance. He heard the snap and roaring like never-ending lightning bolts but ... it was far away...?
Jason lost his concentration for a second, wondering if something weird was happening with his own portal.
"What the hell...?" he said, opening his eyes.
"It’s the Nothrix up on the ridge," Riley said, peering up there. Jason couldn’t quite see the area where the alien bugs were from where the three of them were standing. "Hurry up, Jason—open a rift while theirs is still open. Maybe we can keep them from noticing ours. Just use the OCS! You have coordinates, right?"
"Oh yeah!" Jason replied, putting his focus key necklace back into his shirt. He pulled up the OCS. Maze World—universe 408—was too different from Earth of u934 to let them travel to this weird place from home. But if the OCS was attuned to Jason’s universe, would they be able to head the other way—back home—using the device?
Jason zipped through the screens until he could search the bookmarks then looked for the garage bookmark he'd set previously—the one that Riley had him use to look back in time. He found it and looked at the sliders. Turning off the temporal dimensions, Jason focused on just using the ninth—he didn’t want to go back in time or anything! That’d be weird if they dumped a minotaur body into the garage two days ago...
"Hurry!"
"I am! I am!" Jason replied, focusing on the coordinates and trying to flex that rifting muscle in his mind. Then, he remembered that Riley wanted the portal to be horizontal, so shifted his focus to imagine a six-foot-wide blazing hole appearing under the minotaur's body through space-time. He imagined another horizontal rift just like it appearing four feet in the air in the middle of his garage...
There was a loud flutter and a snap, and a fireball appeared at waist height, unfurling into a normal, vertical portal that roared and spun, casting sparks all around in the yellow light.
"Shet," Riley said with a frown, casting a quick look up at the out-of-sight Nothrix up on the walls of the maze. The soldier looked through the rift as it smoothed into a circular window, and Jason looked too. It was his garage, alright. Riley glared at Jason then said, "Help me, Gliath..."
As Jason focused on keeping the rift open, Riley and Gliath lifted the minotaur by its sides, grunting and heaving—with a lot less effort than Jason expected to see—and humped the dead beast through the portal. It landed on the concrete like a thousand pounds of sand bags and Riley ducked through for a moment into Earth to help pull the thick, shaggy corpse through.
When the soldier darted through the rift back into Maze World again, Jason released his grip on the gateway, and it rapidly collapsed on itself, disappearing with a pop.
He could still hear the Nothrix portal still open up above. Its distant roaring ceased a few moments later.
"Good," Jason said. "Maybe they missed it?"
Riley shook his head, winded. Both he and Gliath were bent over, recovering from moving the huge body. Jason couldn't imagine how strong the two of them were—that carcass looked far heavier tha
n anything a mortal man should have been able to move. "You’re going to need to figure that one out, Jason," Riley said, putting a hand on Gliath’s sleek, black shoulder and leaning on his friend. "You need to be a master of rifting."
"I will be, Riley. I'll get it."
"Let’s move on," the soldier said, unslinging the Gauss rifle from his back. "When we’re far enough away from that Nothrix camp, we’ll head up onto the ridge to get a better look at—"
"We are being watched, Ranaja," Gliath rumbled suddenly.
Jason looked at the leopardwere’s black face. His yellowish-green eyes seemed white under the yellow sky, and he was looking up at the ridge on their left. The two men followed the Krulax’s gaze and Jason saw two silhouettes against the sky above them—perhaps forty feet away—crouched on the top of the eroded sandstone wall. Jason assumed that they were bug-men, but then he saw two strange appendages fluttering over their shoulders, shaped like long and limp ridged feathers—maybe more like fleshy fern fronds, two on each creature—moving like tired, limp wings.
"Is that...?"
"Yeah. Nothrix," Riley replied, glaring up at the onlookers for a moment. Then the soldier smoothed his face into a smirk and friendly eyes. He waved with one hand. "Let’s keep moving..."