by Eddie Patin
"Ready?" Jason asked.
"Yup."
Jason let out most of his breath slowly, tried to keep the muscles of his right arm and hand calm, then slowly squeezed the trigger...
The Rigby Magnum Mauser boomed, sending a wave of recoil into Jason’s shoulder and torso as the .416 big game round flew away. Jason did his best not to blink. Jason peered at his target—automatically cycling the bolt of his rifle—and watched as the black form in the distance partly popped as if a section of its silhouetted body was an exploding watermelon. Nearly the same instant that he fired, Jason heard the thunderous report from Riley’s Marlin firing the other direction. Riley cranked the lever action immediately.
The distant, popped form settled down and didn’t move.
A thrilled flashed through Jason and he grinned broadly.
"I think I got him!"
He turned to Riley just as the soldier was rising from his own prone position, dusting off his armored legs. Riley squinted at Jason’s target then smiled. He scratched his beard.
"Yep. Good job. Let’s go."
"Are you sure there aren’t any more inside?" Jason asked, slinging his rifle and picking up the railguns again. "What if there are some in the tent?"
"Then I’ll send them to bug Hell," Riley replied. He smirked. "But there aren’t any more. I can tell."
Jason followed Riley along the ridge toward the Nothrix camp. When they came close, Jason peered into the yellow, hazy distance, following the top of the sandstone maze walls with his eyes, searching for Rush’s camp. He couldn’t see it from here, even though he figured that he was looking in the right direction. The breeze was stronger up on top of the sandstone labyrinth and Riley’s duster jacket tails whipped around in the wind as they approached the camp.
The top of the ridge was only fifteen feet wide and the edges of the walls were badly eroded and very rounded. As such, the camps Jason had seen so far were fairly compact since they had to balance along the narrow ridges. Rush’s camp was pretty small indeed—nothing more than the tent, crates, and that generator thing. The Nothrix camp had a good bit more gear and plenty more storage. The portable gate was straddling the top of the ridgeline, and it had barely enough space for its eight-foot-wide frame to sit flat. The tent was at the end of the ridge, where the maze wall stopped at an intersecting corridor down below. In between the gate and the tent were multiple stacks of storage and crap that Jason didn’t recognize.
Close now, the wind in their faces brought a stink unlike anything Jason had ever known.
"Ugh! What the hell is that?!"
"Bug shit," Riley replied. "Watch where you step."
Jason felt a flash of fear and looked down. A little ahead and to one side was something like a cow pie in the sand. Under the yellow sky, it looked greenish. It must have been blue or grey in normal light.
"Gross!"
The two of them had to step through the gate to get into the camp, so they did. Jason looked down and around them to the canyon floor and noticed that he could see the splattered bodies—he could see the area where they had rifted in from home. Jason looked back to the horizon in the direction of Rush’s camp, squinting against the intense yellow sky and searching the air for a pack of flying Nothrix bodies. He looked for Ghrag, but couldn’t see any bugs out there. The sky city was now in full view from up on the ridge—mind-bogglingly huge and complex, floating up there among the maze-patterned clouds...
Riley immediately started throwing open the various crates around them. He searched through several, tossing pieces of gear and junk out behind him, gently collecting various things he found inside that must have captured his interest. Riley then moved on to a very large crate, throwing it open and bending into it to look around.
Jason walked up behind the soldier, craning his neck to look inside.
Looking back over his shoulder at Jason, Riley was grim, and pulled out a large, neatly-folded minotaur hide. It had been meticulously cleaned. He dumped it onto the ground then pulled out another, then another. Moving to another large crate, Riley pulled out a fourth that was dramatically darker than the others, then a fifth. He made a pile of them in the sand, then glared at the large, furry skins. The soldier’s dark eyes were gleaming with anger—Jason could feel it radiating off of him.
"Hides..." Jason offered. "Is ... um ... is that an alpha?" he asked, pointing at the black one.
"Yeah," Riley replied, clenching his jaw. "These must be Rush’s kills."
"How do you know that?"
Riley scoffed. "Are you fruking kidding me, Jason?!" he asked. "Of course they are. That’s the alpha Rush and Tommy were tracking. That’s the one they were skinning when we met up with them."
The soldier nudged at a hide with his boot. Jason crouched down to look at it more closely. The furry side of the hide was brown with tawny spots.
Riley was right.
The bugs were killers and thieves.
"So now what?"
Riley scratched his beard then looked down at the hides, the gate, then the stacks of stuff he’d tossed into a pile on the sandstone ridge-top. With the speed of utmost confidence, the soldier strode over to the gear he’s put aside and picked up two brightly-colored packs with bands around their centers and small black rectangular shapes attached. Everything was harder to interpret in the yellow light.
He held up the two packs to show Jason with a smirk.
"Now we blow up their gate..."
Chapter 22
The explosion was tremendous. Jason felt buffeted by the concussive force even though he was taking cover inside the bugs’ disgusting tent. An instant later, shards of metal pelted the shelter's leathery walls and Jason heard pieces and chunks of the portable gate raining down on the tent roof.
Riley hooted and laughed.
"I thought you couldn’t read the keypads!" Jason exclaimed, taking his hands off of his ears and standing next to Riley in the fetid interior.
The soldier kept laughing. Stuff was still falling onto the ridge wall that the camp was built upon and into the adjacent canyon corridors all around them. "Yeah, it was in some weird fruking language but it was still a number pad. Or, at least I figured that it was..."
"Holy shit..." Jason said slowly, allowing himself to smile and forcing his shoulders down away from his ears. "Those were some powerful explosives!"
"Let’s hurry now," Riley said, bursting forth back into the open air from the stinking tent. "Ghrag probably heard that. Let’s get all of this shet back to the garage and get Gliath. He’s probably fine by now."
The inside of the Nothrix tent was beyond foul and in the dim light, Jason could make out a few bunks and all sorts of mystery shapes. He didn’t pull out his flashlight this time to look around—he didn’t want to. They just needed to hunker down inside for just a moment.
"Alright," Jason replied, stepping out from under the leathery flap at the tent entrance. They had stacked all of the hides, weapons, more weapons that Riley had found, the fusion cores from the gate—removed before the explosion—along with all of the other various things that Riley had considered useful behind the tent to weather the blast.
Stepping around smoking debris from the portable gate, Jason pulled out his OCS and found the bookmark to the garage. Riley pulled chunks of hot and shattered metal off of their stack of goods while peering into the yellow, hazy distance.
Looking for Ghrag no doubt, Jason thought, focusing on the coordinates. He stared at a spot in the middle of the sandy ridge-top and imagined that point in space tunneling all the way back to the inside of his garage in universe 934. He imagined the white, fluorescent lighting, the unfinished walls, the stainless steel table and huge sink. He imagined connecting to a point through space-time right into the middle of Riley’s portable gate. Sure, he didn’t need to use the gate—he just thought it looked cool. Like something out of the movie Stargate...
A fluttering rose above the whistling wind. Then a small fireball burst into being with a s
nap, unfurling and flattening out into a big, swirling vertical disc of orange fire. The rift spun faster and faster, shooting brilliant sparks like embers out around it as it whirled. As the disc darkened in the center, surrounded by the madly-spinning hula-hoop of orange sparks that stood out like a beacon under the yellow sky, the clearing vision into Jason's world undulated and rippled. It eventually smoothed into a surface like water. When the window into universe 934 was clear, Jason saw the inside of his garage.
Relief washed over him.
Home.
"Okay, help me with this shet!" Riley shouted over the roaring, sputtering noise.
As the soldier carried two folded hides toward the thundering portal, Jason felt a sudden jolt of panic. He double-checked the coordinates and settings, looking back and forth between the rift and the OCS’s screen. The minotaur hide that they'd thrown through before was gone! Was this the right universe? Fear flushed through Jason. Jeez—or had he sent the hide to the wrong world again?!
Riley reached out and briefly touched the rift. It rippled under his fingers.
"Gliath!" he called through it. "You there?"
An instant later, Jason saw the leopardwere’s head appear from one side of the spinning, sputtering edge.
"Yes, Ranaja!" Gliath shouted back.
Jason then understood. The rift was invisible on the Earth-side until Riley had touched it, breaking the seal, so that he could communicate with his friend.
"Take this stuff!"
Riley handed all of the hides and equipment through the portal to Gliath on the other side, bundle after bundle, which the Krulax stacked out of sight.
He moved the hide, Jason thought. It wasn’t the wrong world. Gliath had just moved it; that’s all...
"Get the guns, will ya, Jason?" Riley shouted over the roar of the portal.
Jason looked away from the spinning rift. Riley was hunched over moving hides and the orange sparks shined in the soldier's dark eyes. Nodding, Jason felt inside for that part of him that flexes to open these gateways. He found it and focused on keeping the rift open as he walked to the pile, a lot like keeping his stomach muscles tight while doing something else. He picked up a pile of half a dozen railguns then a dirty bag of ammunition with a worn-out shoulder strap. Jason passed the weapons through to Gliath just as he saw a red flash in the corner of his eye...
Riley was standing with his blaster in hand, shooting the leathery tent. He fired the laser weapon three times, starting a respectable fire inside the shelter. Oily, black smoke curled and drifted up into the yellow sky. The roar of the rift was louder than the snap and the hiss of the soldier’s sidearm, so Jason only realized it was happening by the bright flashes of red light.
Jason passed along a heavy bag of what must have been power supplies for the railguns—he recognized the capacitor-type-things from carrying the rifles before—then was left looking at an empty plot of sand.
"That’s everything, I think!" Jason shouted to Riley, who was changing out the little cylindrical magazine on his blaster. "Let’s go!"
Riley looked over with steely eyes that reflected orange fire—staring at nothing at all for a moment—then bent into the portal until he could see the leopardwere arranging things inside the garage.
"Come on, Gliath!" Riley called. "Come on through!"
What?! Jason thought.
Gliath appeared in the center of the rift—no worse for wear—still decked out in his armor with his Glock 21 on one hip, kukri on the other, and the big railgun strapped across his back. The leopardwere nimbly stepped through the portal, his sleek fur becoming even blacker once he emerged under the yellow sky.
"What’s going on?" Jason asked above the noise. "Let’s go back! We’re done! How many hides is that? Close to ten, right? We should go before we run into Ghrag and find more trouble!"
"We’re not done yet!" Riley shouted back, crossing his arms over his chest. His hellhound-hide duster jacket fluttered in the wind. "Let’s finish this, Jason!"
Jason stared at Riley, wondering what in the hell was going through the soldier’s head.
Riley’s eyes just stared back at him, gleaming in the brilliant light of the rift. He wasn’t smirking.
"Come on, man!" Jason cried. "We killed—I dunno—at least ten of those bastards? We took the hides that would have belonged to your friends! And we got an alpha one, too! Isn’t that enough?"
The smoke from the burning tent was now making a black plume in the sky, being pulled like a tail of darkness by the wind. Jason noticed that maze-like lines were constantly cutting through the oily, dark haze in all directions, through and through.
"Ghrag is still alive!" Riley shouted back. "We’ve got to kill that fruker! He killed my friends and tried to kill us! Shet—" The soldier gestured roughly at the leopardwere. "He shot Gliath—twice! We’ve gotta take him out before he hurts anybody else!"
The rift spun and spun, spitting and casting sparks all over into the sand and yellow sky.
It was their way home. Staying here was madness. Riley was getting too emotional.
"We have nine hides total, I think, right?" Jason shouted. "Their gate is destroyed! Ghrag and the others that are left here are as good as dead! They’ve got no shelter, no gate, no more guns—they’ll be killed by minotaurs ... or slime! They’ve got no way back!"
"It can still happen, Jason!" Riley replied, glaring, shouting above the noise of the rift. "Maybe more can come looking for them when the rift doesn’t work. Maybe they’ll kill other hunters somewhere else and use their portable gate! We have to kill Ghrag! We owe it to Rush, and ourselves! And shet—then we can get one more minotaur and we’ll actually have ten! Come on, Jason!"
Jason stood, staring at Riley. He opened his mouth to protest, but the soldier cut him off again.
"We have to kill him now, or he'll come after us in the future..." Riley said with a much more reasonable tone of voice.
The portal raged on and on, sputtering and whirling and spitting sparks. Riley’s face was firm, but Jason could see the desperation in the man's eyes. There was something in there—some very important reason for Riley to get this done. Jason was suddenly reminded of how young Riley was. He frequently forgot that the soldier was at least five years younger than he was. Jason looked up at Gliath, who stood with eyes pale in the yellow light, his sleek form as black as ink, stoic and expressionless.
Gliath would side with Riley. Of course he would.
Jason sighed and released the rift, which quickly crumpled and collapsed into itself with a pop.
They were all thrust into silence again, save for the crackling of the burning tent and the whistling wind.
Jason realized that his ears were ringing. They hurt.
All of these loud gunshots couldn’t be good for his hearing.
"Okay, Riley," Jason muttered. "So what’s the plan?"
The soldier’s dark-brown eyes seemed to light up as if he was a child for an instant, then he immediately buried his emotions behind a mask of steel. Riley turned and looked past the burning and smoking tent at the hazy, yellow horizon. Jason smelled burning flesh and many foul odors that he couldn’t identify.
"Alright, so those frukers are somewhere over there," Riley said, pointing at the area where Jason had figured Rush’s camp was. "I can’t detect them yet, but they have to be in between here and there. Jason, you and I have been here for about a half an hour now...? I’m thinking we should head to the top of ... that wall over there..." He pointed at an area in between both points and off to the side. It would be a good ambush spot, of course. "Rift us over to that wall in the distance, Jason."
Jason looked at the distant ridge—or, at least he thought that it was the same ridge that Riley was referring to. This planet was a freaking maze, and the ridges were the tops of the maze's walls. The sandstone labyrinth went on and on forever...
He looked down at his OCS, thought about it for a moment, then sighed.
"Riley, I don’t know how to rift us som
ewhere without coordinates."
"Then try!"
"I don’t—I don’t even know where to begin for that, man! I’ve got to take some time back home to experiment with that concept."
Jason saw anger flash behind Riley’s eyes and felt a flush of embarrassment. He was suddenly crushed by a feeling that the soldier just didn’t like him. Jason was getting the idea that he really liked Riley, and that the two of them working together—three with Gliath—really just felt ... right. But it seemed that Riley was all mixed up right now—no doubt hung up on losing a loved one, maybe? The other Jason...
If he says ‘Jason 113 could do it’ one more time, I’m gonna lose my shit, Jason thought, feeling a hot burr of anger growing inside his belly.
Riley glowered and spoke slowly, choosing his words carefully. "Jason, if you want to be in the Reality Rifters, you’re gonna need to figure that out. Open the rift!"
Jason held Riley’s gaze for a while, aware of Gliath watching the exchange like a huge shadow without emotion.
He sighed.
"Riley, I’m not even going to bother with that right now. We’ve got to find another way. You’ve got to understand—I don’t have the coordinates to that spot over there, and I can’t just teleport at will or something yet. I can’t do it by sight alone. I can use focus keys. I can use the OCS, and I can even move through the third dimension now. But how can I get us over there if I don’t know the cosmic coordinates or whatever the hell these measurements are? Now, I suspect that I can get coordinates somehow using the laser part of the scanner, maybe...? But I have no idea how to get to that—to where I can scan for coordinates. Do you...?"
Riley tightened his grip around his own arms over his chest then looked down. "No."
" I can think of ways," Jason added. "We can hike over there, but that’ll take too long and we might run into more minotaurs on the way. Maybe Gliath can get over there really fast with my OCS and bookmark it for me? I dunno..."