Jigsaw World

by JD Lovil

  “Welcome to the Catcall City Walmart, Happy campers!” Tom announced. “Another of the thousands of cities in Texas that doesn’t appear on our maps.”

  “Shouldn’t we be way out of Texas by now?” Charla ventured. “We have been traveling for more than two days since Sidney and I came on board, and I am quite sure that we should have passed through Dallas and into western Louisiana or Arkansas by now.”

  Tom and George exchanged amused looks. They had argued this point many times on this never-ending trip. As best they understood, the State of Texas now contained an almost infinite number of miles of road. Tom roughly estimated that he had traveled nearly ten thousand miles since starting out on this trip.

  “Welcome to the New Earth.” George said. “You can travel all you please, but the destination may always be out of reach. It is a good thing that the fun is in the trip, and not in the destination.”

  Even though Charla had been exposed to the oddities of the road life for quite some time, and experienced it with the group for more than two days, she didn’t seem to be able to wrap her head around the idea that trip reality was very malleable. She could see and accept the monsters, but the scenery not obeying the rules bothered her.

  “Okay, everybody, let me go talk to our neighbors, because I got the biggest dick.” Tom said. “Markus doesn’t count. That’s not his real body.”

  Tom got out and went to rap on the door of the nearest RV. The man who opened the door said that his name was Edwin, so Tom called him Bubba at every opportunity in their conversation. Fortunately, the conversation was brief, and no weapons fire was exchanged.

  In a few minutes, Tom was back in the vehicle with the scoop. It seemed that Bubba (AKA Edwin) was getting ready to leave, and advised the group to follow suit. It seemed that there was some sort of mass insanity taking place in this town. Bubba had claimed that the town’s folk would be talking normally one moment, and would start to rant and rave the next. During these bouts of insanity, things would start happening, such as object flying off of their resting places, and strange mass movements of insects and other crawling things.

  Edwin had also managed to get his hands on a drawing that one of these afflicted Town’s people had drawn. When Tom saw the drawing, he had a shock of awareness of what they faced in this town. On the page were several shapes, including the broken triangle with an open summoning spell written in Latin around its periphery.

  Anyone using that ritual would summon a demon that was not bound by geometry or by name. Once the demon was freed, he would bring a horde of others. The Summoner would subject his entire world to a plague of demons.

  As Tom recounted his visit with ‘Bubba’, the RV next to them pulled out of the parking lots, and headed for the road. Edwin might have been dumber than a bucket full of rocks, but he was showing some rare common sense in leaving. Time for the group to show a similar level of intelligence.

  “I suggest that we might want to head out ourselves.” Tom proposed. “I don’t know of any good wards against possession. I don’t know if any or all of us carry any form of immunity to possession. I don’t know if a demon can kick Markus out of that body and possess it. We should run from the danger we don’t understand.”

  “Any against leaving raise your hand. Unanimous vote to leave.” Markus joked. “I don’t think I want to see if this body will hold three spirits, and eviction is no fun.”

  “Alright then, let’s get some gas, and head out.” Tom said. “We can postpone our Wal-Mart shopping for the next town.”

  George cranked up the RV, and started to move toward the parking lot exit. A sign on the way into town advertised the existence of a gas station about a half mile up the road, which was also the way out of town and to the on ramp. George stopped at the Stop sign at the exit, and turned right toward the station.

  Charla came to the front of the vehicle, excited and wanting to show Tom something that she had drawn on a notepad. What Tom saw drawn there was a Circled pentagram with a number of either Arabic or Hebraic letters or characters.

  “This is a general protection against magic that was in the Keys of Solomon.” Charla said. “I remember it, because I was going to get a tattoo of it on my leg. I think it should protect us from possession if anything will.”

  “Why not?” Tom said. “Why don’t you draw that on everybody, just in case it works?”

  Charla got happily to work, starting to draw the relatively simple symbol on George. Everyone else was busy prepping their weaponry and watching the surroundings. It took all of two minutes for the RV to reach the gas station, and George got out to gas up the RV, since his drawing was already done.

  This was one of those self-serve stations with the outdoor ATM style payment stations, so George would not have to go inside to see who or whatever manned the cash registers, unless he overpaid at the stations. He fed enough Wal-Mart cash into the station to buy a hundred gallons of fuel, so he would have no such problem as picking up the cash inside.

  While George was pumping fuel, Charla completed the process of drawing the warding symbols for everyone in Sharpie ink. No one quite knew what to do about Bailey, so eventually she just took the drawing she had, and slipped it into a pouch that she hung on his collar. Bailey seemed to be happy enough to receive his new ornament, as long as the charming Charla deigned to touch him.

  George had pumped maybe eighty gallons of fuel into the RV when it happened. The air suddenly obtained a substantial chill, from an eighty odd degree warm night to something that felt decidedly close to the freezing point. A full moon was out, haloed with that vaporous effect that thin clouding has on the moon. Even with the clouds, one could almost read a newspaper by the moonlight.

  George saw a moving figure coming towards him out of the corner of his eyes. Turning away from the pump and toward the figure, he saw that it was a slender man, perhaps six feet two inches tall with dark hair, and maybe 175 pounds soaking wet. George took an instant dislike to the guy. The man’s facial muscles were jerking and twitching randomly, as though there was a limited epilepsy or syndrome happening just to his face.

  The man began to jabber something that might have been some sort of language that George had never heard before. It almost sounded like there was some sort of structure to the sounds, but he could not recognize a single one of the ‘words’ in the conversation. When the man came within six feet of George, several things began to happen.

  First, in the concrete at George’s feet, a jet black plant forced its way out of the cement, and grew into a foot tall plant with a jet-black bloom at its crown, all within ten seconds. Second, when the man stopped in his position close to George, the RV door slapped the side of the RV as Sidney threw it back and came out of the RV with his sniping rifle in hand. Third, the man smiled at George, and started to speak to him in cultured English.

  Tom watched with interest the animated discussion that George had with the man, with Sidney standing by with his rifle. George had a similar build to the man, slender and about six feet tall, but as he was slightly shorter, Tom was treated to the sight of George speaking to the man as he matched stares, having to peer slightly upward into the dark eyes of the dark haired man. George took on a slightly feminine air in this context, with his long and stringy hair being tossed about.

  Tom decided that he should go out and listen to the raving. He figured that he could hang back and avoid most of the problems and the danger, while still giving the appearance of assisting George with the situation. He picked up the Moon-Blade Knife, and strapped it in its holster to his belt, before he walked out of the RV’s door.

  When Tom got to where George was yelling at the possibly crazy man while Sidney watched and fingered his gun, he could tell that George was just about at the end of his patience. He got that ‘one more time’ look in his eyes.

  “Are you going to tell me how many of you there really are in this miserable excuse for a town?” George asked. “Give me more nonsense, and we are done!”


  “I didn’t lie to you, human.” The man said. “There are millions of us, enough to possess every one of you humans that we can catch. You can do nothing to stop us. You will die, and we will take this world from the light of God.”

  As the man completed saying this, three shadows broke away from the tree line next to the station. The fuel tank had finally finished filling and the hose had shut off. George took the seconds to put the hose away, and replace the gas cap. The three people that had walked up, two men and a woman, stood in a semicircle behind the obviously possessed man, and seemed prepared to attack him.

  “Sidney, why don’t you shoot me this asshole?” George asked.

  Sidney nodded, and raised the barrel of the rifle to sight it on the man. There was a small smell like burning solder, and the rifle barrel drooped and dripped away, to puddle at Sidney’s feet.

  “I told you that you could do nothing to stop us.” The Asshole started to say, just as Sidney’s ham-hock of a fist made contact with his jaw. There was a flash of bright, white light, and when Tom’s eyes cleared, he say a very confused looking man rubbing his newly bruised jaw.

  “Where the Hell am I?” Asked the man. “Who are you people?”

  “You are standing beside my RV, these are my friends, you are an idiot who got possessed by demons, and I don’t know these three.” Tom said. “What are you three doing here?”

  The three answered him. It turned out that they were Bobby, Darrin and Vera, and they were residents of this town until it became demon central. Then they became demon hunters. They were the only non-possessed people in town that they were aware of, and the only way they had found to defeat the demons was to cut their hosts’ heads off. They were very interested in what had happened when Sidney had hit this guy. They had lost several friends to possession when they had made contact with the possessed.

  “Far as we can tell, it is because we are all warded by our little Inkings here.” Tom said, as he showed them his key of Solomon version of the pentagram. They all huddled around and oohed and ahhed over the drawing. Tom called out Charla, and set her to work drawing the temporary tattoos on their guests.

  Charla worked quickly on the inks, and Tom questioned the guests on their immediate plans. The two guys were adamant about clearing the town of the demons, now that they had an easy way to exorcise them, and a protection that was easy to distribute to all the newly Unpossessed to keep them from being retaken.

  Vera was just as certain that she wanted to skip town as soon as possible. Tom had scouted the female territory under question. While Vera was beyond question north of Mature, she still maintained a very nice body which promised its share of delights for the modern jaded male. He certainly didn’t object to her tagging along. It had been a long time since Vicki, and that stingy Sidney did not want to share Charla!

  A few short minutes later, it was settled. The two lads would return to the fight to evict the demons from the town, with King Solomon on their side, and Vera would hop the RV and go with the gang on the eternal road trip, and would hopefully be hopping Tom soon as well.

  Five minutes later, the RV was cruising down the interstate once again, with the newly expanded group on board. Tom almost nostalgically thought about the beginning of the trip, when it was only him and Bailey, after Nancy and Susan had fallen to the darkness. His company had grown over the last several days. Now it consisted of him, George, Sidney, Markus, Charla, Vera, and Bailey.

  Tom thought about the strange and nebulous mission of this little group, and about the group itself. Through a series of less than instructive rumors and dreams, and in light of an even more suspect set of conversations, the group seemed to be embarked upon a venture that was loosely pointed toward the objective of fixing the world, and returning it to something approaching a normalcy such as the majority of the world already believed existed.

  The group itself was an even more unlikely set of adventurers. They were traveling in an RV with a newly patched hole in its roof, which were the proceeds from a roadside murder. The group consisted of a very average looking guy named Tom, with light brown hair and unremarkable eyes, the long blondish brown kinky haired George, The almost black haired Afghanistan vet Sidney, his relatively simple and pretty brunette squeeze Charla, the body of the young man who was currently being piloted by the Walk In known as Markus, the reddish brown frizzled-haired Vera, who had recently been a demon hunter, and now was a member of the band of adventurers, and last but not least, Bailey the dog, who quite possibly was the sanest of them all.

  What a group they were! One would hardly think that a group of mismatched people such as these could hope to save the world. On the other hand, Tom for one had never been privy to the composition of any other world-saving groups, so maybe it was a typical composition.

  ******

  10 Here lies Betsy the Cow

  Tom took a hard right up the off-ramp past the beat up looking lopsided sign which announced Grand Prairie, Texas. Population 181,824. The home of Lion Country Safari. This was the first city whose name he had recognized in the last one thousand miles on this trip. He saw nothing of the other suburbs or of Dallas itself in the surrounding area.

  As he straightened out the RV on the two lane blacktop, he found himself driving on, he noticed a few changes of this town from the last time he was here. For one thing, there seemed to be far fewer residences around than there should have been. Like ten percent of what should have existed. Also, it appeared that the lions from Lion Country Safari had tired of sitting in their cages and habitats, and they were currently strolling up and down the streets of this fair burg. As Tom watched, a female lion brought down something about the size of a transient, he couldn’t get a good view, but it did seem to be two-legged.

  Tom briefly considered taking a side trip to Plano; to see if a lady who operated a mail-order business there that he once had a fling with still existed. He decided that he would wait for that mission until (or if) he finished the current one and started heading back this way. Meanwhile, the group had beer and popcorn, and the modern version of American Christians and the Lions.

  They were in a section of the road where one family houses were present on both sides of the road. All of the houses were of wood construction, typical houses such as what you would expect to see in any 1950s movie, with a smattering of A-frame houses spread among them. Perhaps this was a section of the world that existed in the 1950s, but also had architect residents that had smoked that ‘newfangled’ reefer cigarette; went crazy and built A-frames. Or maybe not.

  Just as the RV slid by one of the regular houses, Tom saw the front door of the house sliding shut, with a hand guiding it shut. Since this was the first sign of a human resident of the town that he had seen, unless you count the possible transient, he spun the wheel to the right, and skidded to a stop in the front yard of the house.

  While Sidney and George stood guard with rifles, Tom and Markus walked up the front door of the house and banged on it. They had to pound on the door for almost a minute before the unseen resident decided the jig was up, and opened it. Tom almost felt sorry for the somewhat ominous pounding he had applied to the door, because he really didn’t want to spook such a pretty, long-haired blonde model looking girl as the resident turned out to be.

  It turned out that this beautiful estrogen driven creature was named Sally, and her family was missing in Action after her brother, mother and father had gone out to find some food after dropping her off in this house, which happened to be the home of her grandmother, who also appeared to be missing. After two days without seeing a soul, she actually was happy to see the group, even if she was a little scared.

  Tom wrapped his arm around her, ‘accidently’ verifying that her breasts appeared to be the genuine article, well-shaped and without padding. He was so tired of doing without that best of all possible exercises while all around him had exercise partners. He was damned well going to claim this little filly, and do a little calisthenics tonight himself. She
didn’t seem to object to the handling.

  Tom walked Sally right into the RV, sat her down at the table, and poured her a double shot of the best single malt. He lit a Pall Mall for her and for himself, and sat down with his own whiskey. He asked her about the town, and about herself.

  “What has happened in this area lately?’ He asked. “I don’t see any sign of the Dallas Metropolis, just a Dinky little town with a tenth of the number of houses I remember, and a bunch of open range ranches around it. You have lived here all your life. What happened here?”

  Sally looked confused by the question. “Dallas?” She said. “I remember something about a little town that used to exist, about a century and a half ago by that name, but it burned during the civil war, and everyone moved away. Grande Prairie hasn’t changed. It is still the same nice little Southern town that it has always been. Only with Lions, now.”

  Tom reflected that she seemed to have no idea about what were even a few miles away from her. The sign that he saw coming in was about right for the town he remembered, and ten times what she thought existed.

  “So, do you want to come with us down the Interstate, and see a little bit of the rest of the country?” He asked.

  “Interstate? What is that?” She queried. Tom explained what the Interstate was, and she listened, but it was obvious that she was unacquainted with the concept of Interstates, let alone that one existed within five miles of her home. After a few minutes of talking, she finally and reluctantly agreed to throw in her lot with the group. This relieved Tom no end, as he certainly planned to host her to a long bout of bed wrestling tonight.