by Eddie Patin
Jason reached into his focus key pouch and pulled out the infinity crystal. As soon as his finger touched it, he felt that weird, strong magnetic pull in his belly toward the portal. With hardly any effort, Jason opened the rift. It roared to life, blazing with orange light and swirling like a vertical whirlpool of spitting sparks as loud as a driving rain. Darkness appeared in the center.
This was easy for him now; opening the rift to the Wilderlands with the focus key.
Jason put the key back into his pouch and zipped it shut.
Gliath stood by, waiting for Jason to lead, holding unconscious Riley in his mighty arms.
"Okay, let’s go," Jason said, hefting the heavy bags of meat and water.
He stepped through into universe 312, the Wilderlands, immediately immersed into a hot, humid stink and surrounded by darkness. The cavern was wildly lit up by the orange fire of the rift. As soon as Jason stumbled into a pile of old bones, kicking a big rib out of his way, he saw the gleam of the portal’s brilliance lighting up the faces and strange eyes of a pair of cannibals crouching in the dark.
Firmly inside the cave and its stench, Jason dropped the bags of water and meat, threw his jacket tail aside, and drew his Glock 26. As the two reptilian-humanoid cannibals stood—one of them raising what looked like a stone axe in one hand—Jason brought up his pistol and shot them both dead.
The pops of his gun panged at his ears and the man felt something like painful pinpricks pulsing in his eardrums. He'd be deaf if he kept this up. Surely there must be some kind of really fancy hearing protection that he could buy with his earnings...
Gliath followed Jason through the rift, carrying Riley.
Jason pulled out his flashlight and panned the white LED spot around the cave until he found an area with less bones and more dirt.
"There!" he exclaimed. Jason could barely hear himself over the roar of the portal. "Let’s get you guys set up over there! You can take care of any cannibals that come in while I’m gone, of course?"
Gliath walked through the bones with Jason, carrying Riley’s limp form. The leopardwere nodded. "Yes, Jason Leaper 934," he replied above the noise of the rift. "I can defend us adequately!"
"Adequately!" Jason shouted back with a smirk. "I bet!"
Jason felt the crunch of the situation—he knew that he had to hurry. Time was different here. Every second back home would stretch out to ten or more seconds here. But with each second that Jason was still in the Wilderlands, the monster was causing chaos on Kestrel Drive. If he couldn’t catch up in time and somehow keep this situation from exploding on Earth, the whole world would change because of this! At the very least, many of his neighbors could get hurt...
"We will wait for you here, Jason Leaper 934," Gliath said, looking around the cavern.
"You can’t get back without me I guess," Jason shouted back over the roar. "Remember, time passes slow here. It might be a while! I’ve brought a lot of meat and water. There’s a creek to the east if you really need it. The cannibals taste bad, but lots of dinosaurs to hunt ... uh ... if it comes down to that!"
"I will be okay!" Gliath bellowed over the noise.
Jason looked up into Gliath’s impassive eyes for a moment then took one last look down at Riley’s face. He turned back to the blazing and sputtering rift. Using his flashlight, Jason navigated the foul remains of long-dead dinosaurs and God knows what else, then he stood in front of the spinning portal for an instant, looking through at the slope and his backyard on the other side.
Jason’s death was probably waiting for him there...
He turned, and looked back at Gliath and Riley again.
"I’ll be back as soon as I can!" Jason shouted above the roar of the rift.
"What will you do, Jason Leaper 934?" Riley bellowed back.
"I’ve got to stop that alpha minotaur! I don’t know how—don’t know what I’m gonna do—but I have to kill him!"
Gliath didn’t respond. The leopardwere stood near the cavern wall with Riley in his arms, face devoid of emotion.
Jason turned away again, looking at the snowy slope through the blazing portal, not knowing what in the hell he was going to do.
Then he stepped through the rift, intent on killing the alpha minotaur...
Chapter 25
It felt great to get out of the humid stink of the wyvern’s cave.
Jason burst forth from the rift onto the wet ground below his backyard, his boots splattering the thick, melting snow. The sunshine lit up his face and the chill, mountainous breeze seemed to wash away the stench of rot from the cave.
"What the hell am I gonna do?!" he muttered, taking two steps from the rift.
Jason stopped.
He looked down at the OCS hanging at his side for a moment.
Pulling up the device, Jason unlocked it and immediately scrolled through to the right screen. He made sure that the fourth dimension was definitely set—he thought back to Riley’s brief lesson on using the temporal dimensions in case of emergencies—and set a bookmark.
Finally having a moment for his brain to catch up, Jason also realized that he had fired several rounds back in the crazy shit that went down with the Nothrix and the black minotaur. He could recall shooting at the Nothrix first, then the minotaur, then ... twice more at the bugs before rifting? Is that how it went? He couldn’t be sure. Or did I shoot the alpha twice, then the bugs twice? he wondered.
Jason shook his head, staring at the OCS again. "Doesn’t matter." He designated the bookmark as ‘Going After Alpha’ then dropped the OCS back to his side. "Time travel," he muttered with an absurd laugh.
Taking a few more steps forward, Jason released his hold on the portal. The roaring rift collapsed into nothing and he could suddenly hear a car alarm going off in the distance. No—two. He could hear two distinct car alarms whining and blaring, one more distant than the other.
This was definitely the right place.
Unslinging his rifle, Jason opened the bolt of the Rigby enough to peek inside and saw that there was a round in the chamber but the drop-box magazine underneath was empty. He retrieved three of the mammoth 400-grain .416 Rigby cartridges from a belt pouch and stuffed it full again, then closing the bolt over the fifth in the chamber while holding the all of the rounds down and out of the way. That was a trick that his father taught him with this gun.
Jason clicked the safety on—holy shit, it wasn’t on all this time?!—then started a careful, slippery run back up the hill toward his house.
Up into his yard again, Jason ran around the back of the house along the side, emerging in the front lawn and aghast at the chaos all over Kestrel Drive, starting at his garage. Jason shot a quick glance north on the street—that’s where the car alarms were going off—then looked back at his damaged car and shattered garage door.
Jason rushed up to the garage door, carefully laying his rifle onto his old Ford Escort's hood. There were shards of green-painted Masonite all over. Each panel of the overhead door was totally trashed—broken through the middle and barely hanging onto the tracks by its wheels on each side.
"Shit!" Jason muttered, hurrying around the driveway next to his car, picking up an armful of garage door chunks. He realized with a jolt of fear that—despite whatever damage the minotaur was causing right then—the monster’s path would lead the authorities directly back to his house!
After clearing out the biggest pieces, Jason cast his load of old, wood chunks into the area of his garage where Gliath had apparently been stacking the hides and other gear they captured from the Nothrix. Then, emboldened by adrenaline, Jason shoved at the broken panels of the garage door, forcing them up along their tracks until recessed up in the ceiling.
He stepped back briefly—looking over the garage door—and realized that it mostly just looked like an open overhead door. It didn’t look as much like a huge otherworldly monster had crashed through it to start a rampage through town...
Less obvious, at least, he thought.
&nb
sp; He could do more. Jason took several frantic steps to the driver’s side door of his crappy old car—now with a shattered window in the back and a hearty dent in the fender and back door—and stopped, reaching into his pocket. He fished out his keys while his mind raced and he imagined the minotaur stomping through town. He opened the creaky door, jumped into the sagging seat, and turned the engine on.
The familiar sunbaked smell of his car and the starting noises and chimes felt really weird. The radio turned on and a car sales commercial quietly played in the background.
"We’re overstocked on all vehicles from our Halloween sale and are offering four thousand dollars off of new cars with any trade in! Drag it in, haul it in—we don’t care! If you can get it here, we’ll give you up to four thousand dollars for your trade and get you in a brand new..."
The mundaneness of it all made Jason’s brain scream. He had to take it easy on the accelerator—there was so much adrenaline coursing through him that he was afraid he’d jackrabbit the car forward into the garage and crash! Jason thrust the shifter into drive and pulled the vehicle carefully into the garage, stopping when he barely made it past the garage door tracks. Cold air blew in his face from the heater being on full-blast while the engine was still cold...
It didn't feel real.
Jason wasn't sure what was more real: driving in his old car with its old smells and the sounds of the radio, or stalking through Maze World under its yellow labyrinthine sky fighting slimes and bug-men and great, horned beasts...
He'd been through fights with dinosaurs for fuck's sake...
It was a good thing Jason's parents’ house had an extra-deep garage. He could keep the car in it for now to help avoid notice of his weird planeswalking shit and still have room to rift in and out in front of the vehicle!
Shifting the car into park, Jason turned off the engine and leapt out, closing the door and locking it with frantic speed.
Then he grabbed his gun from the hood and ran to the north on Kestrel, trying not to slip in the melting slush.
Jason could already hear sirens.
Looking ahead, he saw a path of devastation. Many cars and trucks parked along the shoulder—even some in driveways—had obviously been charged by the monster or otherwise bashed into as it ran by. There was debris all over and the crunchy, cube-like safety glass of vehicle windows and windshields was everywhere! Jason leapt over a mailbox that had been ripped from its post as he hurried on. Ahead, he could see a single trail of smoke, drifting up into the air on the right side of the street.
Who's coming? Jason wondered, panting already. Cops? Firemen?
He blanched. Were people already dead? Were ambulances on the way?
Following the trail as quickly as he could without keeling over, Jason ran on, his father's rifle ready to snap up at a moment's notice. He probably looked pretty damned odd with his jacket and backpack over a suit of Merc armor. Jason remembered initially thinking that the suit was some kind of motorcycle armor when he saw Riley wearing his back at the movie theater, back when he was working...
Jesus, Jason thought. That seemed like a year ago now...
Dogs were barking.
Thankfully, no one was out on the street. Jason had to be just ten minutes behind the alpha at the most. Maybe most people weren’t reacting yet. A lot of folks would be at work. Hell—if a massive, black minotaur came charging down the street—damaging cars and crashing through anything in its way—Jason would probably stick to watching it through the curtains, too.
Eventually, the path of devastation took a turn—at least, Jason figured it did when Kestrel Drive up ahead of him started looking normal again—and the man scanned all around him to see if he could tell where the minotaur had changed course.
"Holy shit!" Jason exclaimed as his eyes followed heavily-churned craters in the front yard—dirt, yellow grass, and snow—of one house on the right. The path led across the yard, through a column that held up the piece of roof over the front porch—which was now sagging down without support—and finally, through a cedar fence into that home’s back yard.
Chunks of the porch and the broken wooden column were scattered throughout the spoiled yard and front garden. The fence looked like a car had driven through it. Sundered and splintered boards were everywhere.
Pushing down the fear boiling up in his belly, Jason followed the trail with his gun solid in his shoulder, delving into the backyard through the ragged hole in the fence.
The trail rushed into and across the backyard, eventually sweeping north again. Jason gasped and shook his head when he saw that the alpha minotaur had broken through the next fence—not into the green belt and wild area leading east and up to the ridge—but instead, into the backyard of the next house. As Jason ran through the yard, dodging around a kids’ little plastic house of multiple sun-faded colors, he paused when he saw a splash of red in the snow.
Blood.
He saw several more spots going in the same direction as the alpha’s trail.
"That’s right!" Jason announced to no one as he ran. Riley had shot it several times with his Gauss rifle. Gliath probably tore it up a little bit before they escaped. Hell—didn't Jason shoot it in the face himself? The minotaur was wounded.
Jason continued on, ducking through another chaotic mess of splintered fence boards and beams. He followed the churned snow and dirt. There! he thought with a grin. Halfway across the next property were several more spots of blood. The pale movement of a face in a sliding glass door caught Jason’s attention. Jason felt a shot of adrenaline and tucked his face down as he continued chasing the minotaur, hoping that the person inside didn’t recognize him.
The alpha's trail led him through another fence into another neighbor’s yard, then the trail turned to the east, and Jason followed the heavy hoof-prints through a huge break in the rear fence, out into the open area of the ridge.
Climbing through the cedar wreckage, Jason paused and looked ahead at the landscape. Down the slope behind everyone's yards and across some scrub-filled open space was the hiking trail. Past that, the pine trees grew denser and denser as the ground steadily rose all the way to the ridge. Past the ridge on the other side—Jason suddenly remembered the valley with the Tyrannosaurus Rex back in the Wilderlands—was Rocky Mountain National Park, which would go on for miles. There were fourteeners back there; mountains that took hours to climb. If the alpha minotaur made it over the ridge, Jason would never catch up to it...
"Damn it," he muttered, starting a jogging descent toward the hiking trail. His boots crunched on the path’s gravel when he crossed it and Jason remembered that it was just a few days ago when he was hiking on that trail, experimenting with the OCS.
The minotaur’s massive hooves had left a path easy to follow—at least for now, while it was still frantic and on the run, no doubt confused as hell. Jason still saw spots and splashes of blood here and there. The monster was so heavy that it had dug deep furrows in the earth as it ran. The snow and half-frozen dirt and mud was all churned up into a chaotic mess.
As long as the beast kept up like this, assuming it stopped somewhere, Jason knew that he’d catch up to it.
"But then what?!" he asked himself, trudging up through the snow, panting. His heart pounded. He really needed to start doing some cardio now that his knee was better.
Was it so wounded that Jason could kill it himself with the Rigby? Would one well-placed shot to the neck suffice, like it did with that first normal minotaur he'd killed? The alpha was huge—a lot bigger than the others. How much tougher was it? Would it bleed out?
Jason’s mind raced as he briskly hiked up through the snowy forest after the monster. There was a much larger splash of bright red blood at one point, which eased some of the maddening fear that was coursing through his system.
That monster could squish him into the hill without a second thought.
Marching on—probably to my death, he figured—Jason followed the monster's path halfway up the ridge. He
stopped twice, gasping for air with his heart pounding in his head. He could feel his heartbeat pulsing in much of his skin.
"Gonna ... kill yourself ... before it ... kills you..." he said while resting for a precious moment, desperate to catch up to the beast.
He had to kill it.
So far, Jason hadn’t seen any dead neighbors, and he had to assume that the blood belonged to the alpha and not some poor old lady who’d gotten in the way. But if he couldn’t catch and kill this monster and cover up this whole thing ... well ... his world would get screwed up! What would happen if the cops or other government folks got their hands on an actual minotaur?! Everything would turn upside down! There would be irrefutable proof of the existence of monsters. It would be in the news. There might even be a quarantine of Ridgeview—who knows? And how could Jason possibly keep such a huge government investigation and media extravaganza from finding out that he was involved?
Jason had to keep his planeswalking a secret—maybe not from Ben; he still wanted to play with a business idea about the infinity crystals—and keeping that secret meant taking out this alpha minotaur.
The trail turned to follow along the ridge to the north, toward Lake Granby.
Jason followed.
There was another huge splash of blood.
Is the minotaur dying? he thought, then pressed his lips together and surged on.
He could do this...
His legs and lungs burned. His face and hands were cold.
As he crept toward the edge of the clearing in the trees, he saw the minotaur’s trail charge across the open ground. Another big splash of blood sat bold and red in the snow, halfway across the clearing. The sight of the slanted earth and snow and distant tree line suddenly triggered a memory in Jason's head. The area vaguely reminded Jason of the place in the Wilderlands north of the spider cave where he'd fought off raptors in the rain with his cane; the same place where he'd carried the big, feathery leg of that ostrich dinosaur he'd killed back to—