Chapter Seventeen: A Very Bad Idea

  “Jerrold?” I called out.

  “Hey! Hey! Here! I’m over here!” His answering call started surprised, then turned to bellowed relief.

  I followed the sound, still sticking close to the trees, until they gave way to a wide patch of something that my brain wanted to translate as water, but my senses told me was something much less pleasant. Water didn’t smell like that, not even swampy water. The ground cover extended out from the trees, just like the surface we’d been walking on. But it was like lily pads floating on the goo, something I wouldn’t have noticed if it weren’t for the dogs, immersed to their shoulders, and the man in the middle of the clearing, buried chest deep.

  “Don’t come any closer,” Jerrold yelled, his voice already hoarse from screaming. He finished with almost a sigh. “You’ll get stuck.”

  He was a big guy, middle-aged, bald, dark-skinned, with the kind of face that said he smiled easily, laughed loud. Even with most of his body hidden, he had to outweigh me by a good hundred pounds, maybe closer to two.

  Pre-System, I wouldn’t have had a chance of pulling him out of the muck. Of course, pre-System, I could have called 911. Not to mention that pre-System the muck wouldn’t have existed.

  “No worries,” I replied. “Are you Jerrold?”

  “JJ. I go by JJ. But yeah. Did my mama send you? She’s the only one who calls me Jerrold. Is she okay?”

  “Um, no. I mean, she might be okay, I don’t know. She didn’t send me. It was … it’s a long story.” I mumbled the last. I hadn’t thought about how to explain my presence and I wasn’t sure how much I wanted to share. Obviously, JJ was no threat to me at the moment. But I hadn’t forgotten Chelsea’s warning that human beings would be the first danger. “I’m Olivia.”

  “Well, it is damn good to meet you, Olivia. I’ve been stuck here for hours. I was starting to think I might never get out. Not how I wanted to go, if you know what I mean.”

  His tone invited a chuckle, so I responded with one, but it was distracted. How in the world was I going to free him? If it was easy, he would have done it himself. Needless to say, my bag full of slime-killing ideas didn’t include any rope or pulleys.

  I did have the dogs’ leashes, though. If we all pulled together, maybe we’d be able to free him?

  I nodded toward the dogs. “Bear, Riley.” With a slight lift, I indicated the dog in my arms. “And Zelda. Introductions, ‘cause I think I might need their help to get you out.” I set Zelda on the nearest visible tree root and pulled out the leashes.

  The problem was immediately clear. Two six-foot leashes did not add up to a long enough rope. If I clipped one to Riley’s collar and tossed the end to JJ, I’d still have to get pretty far into the swamp myself to help him pull.

  Believe it or not, my objection to that idea wasn’t just the smell and the sheer ickiness of getting covered with that blue goo. I’d get dirty if I thought it would help. But I didn’t want to get stuck myself, and I wasn’t sure how far out I could safely go.

  I waded a few steps into the clearing, grateful for my dad’s boots, but I was still at least fifteen feet away from JJ by the time the goo reached my shins. I took one more step, but I could feel the muck pulling at my boot and my foot almost sliding free. I wasn’t going to make it the three feet closer that might let the leashes reach, not safely.

  “How’d you wind up in this mess?” I asked, stepping backwards and starting to scan the surroundings. Maybe I could find a long, sturdy branch. Or some vines. Not that I’d seen any vines or broken branches, but there could be some somewhere.

  “Oh, man.” JJ shook his head. “It was so crazy. The past couple days done been wild. This is some crazy end of the world bullshit. But I was trying to get my mama over to my sister’s house. Figured we all ought to stay together, y’know? All of a sudden, a couple of methheads showed up outta nowhere. In the middle of the road. Purple. They were purple. Like…” He strained to pull an arm out of the goop, and finally managed to with a sucking pop. He used it to gesture alongside his cheek, indicating skin tone. “Really purple.”

  Huh. Methheads or aliens? Given the predominance of purple tones in our current surroundings, it wouldn’t be too surprising if the inhabitants of the other side of the rift were tinted purple, too.

  “They had these weird light guns,” he went on. “Like laser tag, kinda, only when it hit, it hurt like a bitch.”

  On behalf of my girl dogs and my own female self, I gave him a Look for the misogyny. He didn’t notice. But that was fine. He might be the very definition of a captive audience, but it didn’t feel like the right time to lecture him about his vocabulary.

  He moved his hand toward his shoulder, but didn’t touch it. I saw the mark on his t-shirt, a small black ring with burned red skin underneath. “I told Mama to run and I started swinging. Assholes were made of sticks or something, ‘cause one punch to the face and the first one just crumbled.”

  He grimaced, looking troubled. “I’m not—I got points for it. For hitting him. For killing him. So freakin’ strange. But while I was dealing with the one dude, Mama and the other guy disappeared. There was this...” He hesitated, then sort of waggled his fingers in the air, as if trying to describe something with the gesture.

  I knew what he was talking about.

  “It’s called a breach,” I told him.

  “A breach?” JJ repeated.

  I gestured around us. “This place is a rift. It’s leaking mana into our world from some other world, and the mana has side effects. Those methheads were probably aliens that came through the rift. Given that they shot you on first sight, they’re probably not gonna be great neighbors. We might want to avoid them.”

  I wasn’t seeing any convenient branches or vines. But I had my shovel. What if I tied the leashes to the handle and used the shovel’s length to give me the extra reach I needed?

  “A rift? Aliens? How do you know all this?” JJ asked. He sounded suspicious. He clearly wasn’t going to demand to know whether I was working for the aliens myself, at least not while I was his only chance of rescue, but I could see the thought on his face.

  “A few of us got a little head start on the apocalypse. I got attacked by a squirrel right when it started, and then I got to spend a few days—three, so it’s not like a huge lead or anything—in a sort of test environment. I had to take a tutorial on rifts when I was done.”

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  Okay, so all of that was maybe not the perfect summary of the challenge scenario and how I wound up as a rift keeper. But it was close enough. I clipped Bear’s leash to the handle of Riley’s leash, then looped the end of Riley’s leash around the handle of Warden’s Edge.

  “Huh.” JJ sounded thoughtful. “So whoever’s doing this, they’re actually helping us out a little?”

  I made a scoffing noise deep in my throat. “We are the mice in the walls of a burning house and they’re putting out the fire with floods of mana. They’re not trying to kill us, but they don’t care and won’t notice if we die. When we die.”

  Technically, that was maybe not quite true. Chelsea had been clear that she’d care if I died. In general, though, I felt like it was the right idea.

  “Dark.” JJ grimaced. “About what I expected, I guess. We were glued to the news until the power died and, man, it is ugly out there.”

  “Yeah. So how’d you wind up in here?”

  “I ran through that weird spot—the breach—to find my mama. But I couldn’t see no sign of her. Then I got attacked by this thing. Like a pile of moving sewage, it was. I kept running and ran straight into this. Once you get too deep, it’s like glue. Or epoxy resin, maybe.” He demonstrated, straining to lean in our direction without accomplishing much. “It’s like it’s solidified around my legs.”

  That… didn’t sound good. “Well, let’s see if we can pull you out.”

  I hefted my shovel, leashes dangling from the end. Which end should I throw, the shovel or the leashes? It would probably be easier for him to grab the shovel blade, because it would make a much bigger target than the end of the leash.

  On the other hand, I didn’t want to hit him in the head with a big piece of heavy metal. Plus, throwing Warden’s Edge into the pit of goo triggered a surge of anxiety that I could feel down to my toes. Yeah, even more anxiety than just being in the apocalypse in general.

  But what if it sank? What if JJ refused to give it back? My shovel was my security blanket and I felt about as good at the idea of tossing it into a gigantic magical mud puddle as your average sleep-deprived toddler with their snuggly would.

  I decided I’d fling the leash end at him instead. I slid my hands down to a spot on the shovel just above the blade, then lifted it over my shoulder and hurled the leashes in his direction. It was like casting out a fishing line, more or less. Like casting out a fishing line that weighed too much, and flew too weirdly, anyway.

  The leash handle splashed into the goo a solid three feet away from him. Bear barked, Riley woofed, and Zelda shot me a look that was roughly equivalent to the doggie version of an eye roll.

  And then, in an outcome clearly predestined by genetics, Bear’s Labrador retriever instincts took ahold of her brain and made her stupid. She leapt into the goo and started doggie-paddling toward the leashes.

  “No, Bear, no!” I yelled, but yelling at Bear was one of my own more useless monkey instincts. It never did any good, even when the stakes were much lower.

  She made it about halfway to JJ before her motions stopped moving her forward. The blue goo thickened around her body, rippling and sucking as she kicked. She was churning away at it, but it was congealing, holding her in place.

  I started hauling the leashes back, looping them around my hand. If Bear could grab the handle… but how the hell was I going to instruct Bear to bite onto a device she never thought much of to begin with? If I tried to get to her, I’d just get stuck myself. Maybe I could chop down a tree, knock it into the goo, and wiggle my way along it? Could I use Warden’s Edge to cut through a tree trunk?

  Bear and Riley were both barking, and JJ was saying something that I couldn’t hear over the dogs, but it sounded like he was trying to soothe Bear. Zelda was sitting almost on my feet, her tail curled around her body in a way that looked a little smug.

  Bad bath, her posture told me. Clean up?

  I gave an entirely half-hearted chuckle. It was a bad bath. I only wished I knew how to clean it up. I was guessing that there was no handy drain plug at the bottom, and my bottle of magical cleaning spray couldn’t possibly take care of that entire pool.

  That did give me an idea, though.

  “Riley.” I snapped my fingers at him. “To me, Riley.” I pointed at the more stable ground next to me.

  But Bear, his raised hackles told me. But Bear!

  “I know,” I told him. “I’m working on it, but I need your help.” That was a little bit of an exaggeration. It would be more accurate to say I wanted him out of the way. But obviously I would never tell him that.

  With great reluctance, he stopped his barking and turned to join me, pulling his feet out of the muck with squelching difficulty.

  When he got near, I crouched down next to him, eyeing the goo that covered his legs. The System was changing me and one of the strangest things about how it was changing me was how quickly I got used to the changes. Was that goo really blue, or did it look blue to me because it contained mana? Tentatively, I touched Riley’s fur while I mentally tapped the [Mana Absorption] button in my HUD.

  My finger felt a pleasant little tingle, like a buzzer vibrating, and the blue goo on Riley’s fur turned into mud. Real mud. Brown and gross and dirty, but no longer epoxy-resin-like blue goo.

  I waited to see what would happen next. The description of the ability said, “Absorption may strengthen, weaken, or alter you, and in unstable environments it may change local conditions,” so I was expecting… well, something. To be stronger, weaker or different.

  I didn’t feel different, though. It was just that little buzz and then it was over, and, apparently, gone.

  In unstable environments it may change local conditions.

  That was what I was looking for. I rubbed my fingers together, trying to wipe off the dirt, and sighed. I had a sneaking suspicion that my idea was a Very Bad Idea, but it was the only idea I had. Apart from chopping down a tree with a shovel, that is, and that plan didn’t exactly strike me as practical.

  “Bear, hush,” I said, fully expecting her to ignore me, as she did. Then I yelled to JJ over the sound of her continued frantic barking, “I’m going to try something. Be ready to move.”

  I kept one hand on Riley’s back to keep him with me, and stuck the other into the muck. And then I used [Mana Absorption].

  The difference between absorbing the little bit of mana clinging to Riley’s fur and the ridiculous amount of mana filling the pit was like the difference between a sparkler and a full-blown illuminations display. Or maybe a sparkler and a nuclear explosion.

  A nuclear explosion going off inside my body.

  Okay, I wasn’t vaporized instantly, leaving behind nothing but a shadow burned into the tree trunks, so it clearly wasn’t that bad. But it felt like nothing I’d ever experienced, like every one of my veins, down to the tiniest capillaries, was carrying condensed lightning through my body. Think of the worst electric shock you’ve ever experienced, the kind that makes your muscles involuntarily spasm, and then double it. Triple it.

  I think I screamed. Or maybe I just tried to scream. My throat was spasming along with all my other muscles, and I didn’t have conscious control over a single part of my body. I’m sure I was drooling, and yes, I peed my pants. Fortunately, I also fell face forward into the ooze and covered myself with disgusting slimy, smelly mud, so it’s not like anyone would ever suspect. Also fortunately, I didn’t give a damn, one way or another. I was too busy burning, searing, frying, scorching, drowning, and other such delightful sensations.

  It lasted forever, mana ripping through me, destroying me from the inside out, then rebuilding me as fast.

  There’s a condition called trigeminal neuralgia in which the trigeminal nerve, which runs across your face, randomly fires, causing acute pain at the slightest touch. Stroking your cheekbone with a make-up brush can cause agonizing, debilitating suffering. People with TN are so miserable that it’s known as the suicide disease.

  I'd never experienced it myself, but I suspect that absorbing too much mana too quickly felt a lot like a whole body version of TN.

  I have no idea how close I came to actually exploding. It felt like that’s what was going to happen, but who knows whether it would have? Maybe if I’d been able to hold all that mana, I would have become immortal, or grown wings or transformed into something really cool.

  But I couldn’t. It was too much, too intense, too overwhelming. And so with my last vestige of rational thought, I tapped my [Wild Sanctuary] ability, and passed out.