Chapter Twenty-One: Warrior Mama

  I laughed. It felt like the natural response to discovering that JJ’s mom both outleveled him and was a warrior—a warrior, for Pete’s sake! She’d be the first one I’d ever met.

  But JJ was still looking around the coffee shop, mystified by our fast teleport. He hadn’t seen the menu yet.

  “What is this place?” he asked.

  “Long story,” I answered, crossing to the counter. I glanced at my credit balance in my HUD. I hadn’t really conceptualized the value of credits: was five credits a lot or was it next to nothing? Was a healing potion an investment or a latte? But I’d gotten some from my quests and some from selling bug chitin, plus the pittance from completing the instances in my backyard, so I wasn’t feeling poor.

  And realistically, a healing potion when you needed one was priceless. Sure, it might feel like a waste—spending money in dribs and drabs, instead of saving for something amazing—but magical healing was amazing. I glanced over my shoulder at JJ, still looking around like he’d never seen a coffee shop before, and then I turned back to Chelsea with a sigh. “Five more healing potions, please.”

  “You used all three of them?” she asked, sounding surprised.

  “No, but…” I shrugged. “Marginal viability, remember?”

  She frowned, but the five healing potions appeared on the counter. I scooped them up, then turned to JJ. “Here,” I said, shoving the handful in his direction.

  “What’s this?” He cupped his hands to capture them.

  “Healing potions. For later.”

  “I don’t—” He tried to hand them back to me, but at the same time, his fingers closed around them.

  “Mom, sister, sister’s kids,” I said briskly. “They might come in handy. Let’s go rescue your mom.” I glanced back at the menu. “Well, maybe not rescue exactly.”

  I strode toward the door, then paused, looking at the dogs. Time in this apocalypse was feeling exceedingly strange, because every level-up brought with it the kind of energy and sense of well-being that would usually require a solid night’s sleep, some excellent meals, and maybe a week’s vacation in a tropical paradise. Not just normal, but better than normal.

  It made it really easy to just… keep going. And going and going. When had we last slept? I thought it was probably about five rift clears ago. Hundreds of bugs, a few slimes… I wasn’t tired, but did the dogs need rest?

  “You guys good to go fight some more slimes?” I asked.

  Bear loped over to stand next to me, tail held high. Riley padded after her. And Zelda’s willingness had never been in question, of course. With a tilt of her head, she reminded me of Soul Dog Rule #1: Anywhere you go, I’m going, too.

  “All right, let’s do it,” I said.

  “I am so confused right now,” JJ said. “How did we get here? Where are we? What is this place?”

  “A figment of my imagination,” I replied, holding the door open and waving to indicate he should go through. His mom might be doing okay, but she was still only Level 4, fighting in a rift with monsters that could reach Level 10. I didn’t want to linger in the RMI any longer than necessary.

  “Your imagination is gray?” JJ asked.

  I pulled the door closed again. “Gray?”

  He looked around, his gaze traveling over the tables, the counter, the shelves, the map on the wall. “Gray,” he confirmed. “Or maybe black-and-white? Shades of gray? It’s like a comic strip, not the Sunday version. Or that old video from the ‘80s.” He hummed, then sang the chorus of the classic A-ha song.

  I followed his gaze. It all looked normal to me; full color, three-dimensional.

  “Interesting mental model,” Chelsea said. “Metaphorically speaking, your interface is grayed out for your visitor.”

  “So he can’t interact with anything here?”

  “Exactly,” she responded.

  JJ was staring at me. “Who are you talking to?”

  Chelsea shrugged. “Me included. It makes sense. I am your personalized interface construct, after all, not any random wannabes’ construct.”

  “Gotcha.” I sighed, then spoke to JJ. “This place is—eh, think of it as a waystation. And not your waystation. It’s useless to you, except as a way to get to your mom. So let’s do that, yeah?”

  I opened the door again. There was no point in giving JJ a tour of the coffee shop since he couldn’t use anything in it, although I could probably buy him a coffee if he wanted one. I kinda wanted one myself. Was it morning already? It felt like it might be, but I’d hold off until we found Alma.

  This time, JJ followed me over to the door. I mentally selected the right instance, and all of us stepped out into the swamp.

  I’d known intellectually that this was a different instance of the swamp, that it wouldn’t have already been destroyed by my abilities, but I was still somehow surprised by how lovely it was. It was almost like a scene out of a fairy tale, all mysterious purples and blues, nature sprawling out before us like a half-wild garden. Only the light had changed, the full moon no longer high overhead and a pale glow on the horizon suggesting dawn might be on the way.

  Alas, the smell was still just vile.

  I coughed a little, trying to clear the taste of it out of my throat. Zelda huffed in agreement, although Bear and Riley, in classic dog fashion, seemed to find the noxious odor interestingly piquant rather than objectionable. But what could you expect from creatures who loved rolling in dead things?

  JJ covered his mouth and nose with the back of his hand, his fingers still closed around the healing potions. “Ugh. I forgot about the air in here. I guess I got used to it after awhile.”

  The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

  “Yeah, that first breath is a shock to the system,” I agreed ruefully, glancing around.

  If I were JJ’s mom, which way would I have gone? The map in my head gave me a clear sense of what was where—the quicksand trap off to our right, the slime monsters straight ahead, a mutant gator nest to our left. And beyond all of them, the gargantuan slime in the Rift Control Chamber. The breach to Dendrys, land of purple methheads, would be beyond that.

  Bear nudged my hand with her head, and I started to scratch behind her ears, the way she liked, before realizing that her message wasn’t an invitation to pet, but a request for attention. Her tail said, Scout now? Scout, please?

  “Good plan,” I said to her, taking my hand away.

  “What?” JJ, of course, thought I was talking to him.

  I tipped my head to the side, in his direction, and said to Bear, “We’re looking for his mom. She probably smells like him, at least a little bit. Same soap, most likely. Can you find her?”

  Bear’s tail wagging went from tentative to full-blown enthusiasm. Her nose lifted, and she inhaled. I almost gagged at the thought of deliberately taking a deep breath of the miasma, but I could practically see her analyzing motes of different scents in the air. She put her head down, scouting along the ground next, then started moving on a direct beeline to the left.

  Shit. Mutant gators. Of course.

  Less than Level 10, no threat, I told myself, but my shovel popped out of my pouch and into my hand without a conscious thought. Reminded, I turned to JJ. “Hey, do you have anything like a weapon?”

  He shook his head. “If I’d been thinking, I woulda grabbed the gun from that alien junkie, but it didn’t even occur to me until I was already running around this place. Well, not this place exactly, but you know.”

  “Yeah.” I shrugged my shoulders, feeling the weight of the backpack on my back and considering what I had. Next time I went to Dollar General, I was going to check the toy aisle for squirt guns. Or maybe empty spray bottles in the cleaning products section. Bleach would be a more useful weapon with a better delivery mechanism. I had a couple bottles of Windex, though, and the fire extinguishers.

  I slipped the backpack off and set it down, then started rummaging one-handed, still clutching my shovel in the other. “I knew there’d be slimes in here, so most of my ideas were sort of chemical warfare with traps. Salt, kitty litter, bleach.”

  “Kitty litter?” JJ laughed, but in disbelief, not mockery.

  “I thought it might dry them up, do some damage that way, but they just budded new slimes. Kitty litter is definitely on the Do Not Recommend list now. Bleach worked okay, but we’re gonna head to the mutant gators, and I’m not sure I want to get close enough to pour bleach on a gator. Also, I think it might just piss them off, which, eh. Mutant gator is bad enough without making it an angry mutant gator.”

  I started to hand JJ a spray bottle of Windex, then realized that his hands were still full of healing potions. I nudged the backpack by my feet with my toe, considering. It was dirty from the mud I’d landed in earlier, and filled with items more useless than useful. Snacks, dog treats and bottled water would have been better than lighters, lighter fluid, and salt. Next time I’d know better. Meanwhile JJ had more use for it than I did.

  I nodded toward the open pack and said, “Stick the healing potions in here. You can keep it. Sorry about the mud.”

  JJ did as told, then slung the pack over one shoulder as I handed him the Windex. “Ammonia in the eyes will also probably just piss them off, but at least you can spray it from more of a distance. And maybe it’ll work to blind them?”

  Then I reached into my pouch and thought, Fire extinguisher. I felt the solid weight of one filling my hand, pulled it out, and handed it to JJ. “Take this, too. It might be more useful if this was a fire swamp, like the one in The Princess Bride, but it’s better than nothing if you wind up hitting things, I guess.”

  “Hitting things? Like hitting a mutant gator, you mean.”

  I shrugged, feeling lighter without the pack on my shoulders. “You’ve got fire-starting supplies in there, too, but this place is so damp, I think they’re probably useless.”

  “Can’t you just do that thing you did before?”

  “That thing?” I began before realizing what he meant. “Oh, no. Uh, that was a bad idea. Not just because it could have killed you, but I would have died, too, if my dog hadn’t saved me.”

  “What? How? Which dog?”

  I gestured toward Zelda. “She’s got an ability called [Never Say Die]. Once a day, she… doesn’t let me die.”

  I could feel my cheeks heating up. Admitting that my twenty-pound dog needed to save my life often enough that she’d gotten an ability for it was weirdly embarrassing. It felt like the System recognizing my incompetence.

  Still, although my dogs were technically rescues, I’d always known who was saving whom. Not usually from goblins, but from my bad days, more times than I could count. Why should it bother me if JJ and the System understood that, too?

  I couldn’t quite rationalize my way out of my blush, but I continued briskly, “Plus, your mom’s out there. She would definitely die.”

  “Let’s definitely not do that, then.” JJ’s hands were full, a spray bottle of Windex in one, the fire extinguisher in the other, but he spread them wide. “Lead the way.”

  We moved through the trees, following Bear’s path. The air pressed in close, heavy with whatever made that horrible smell, but we crossed the soft ground almost soundlessly. I kept a careful watch on the plants underfoot, making sure the ground was solid, flicking my gaze up every few seconds to check for Bear.

  When I finally spotted her, she wasn’t moving. She was crouched, body low, ears tipped forward, tail tucked low. If she’d been a cat, I might have thought she was stalking a critter, but I’d never seen Bear act like an ambush predator before. She seemed more like she was… hiding?

  Okay, that was unsettling.

  I heard Alma a moment later. Unlike JJ, she wasn’t singing to keep her spirits up. She was swearing. Fluidly, passionately, with a heavy reliance on all varieties of the f word: adjective, adverb, noun, verb.

  Bear flicked an ear in my direction. The message was clear: Scary lady, stay back.

  Oh. Got it. My dog wasn’t hiding from the monsters; she was hiding from the person we were supposed to be saving.

  “Mama!” JJ yelled out, a laugh in his voice. “Imma gonna find the soap, you keep that up!”

  “Jerrold?” Alma’s voice hit a much higher register. “Jerrold, honey, you get your ass over here right this very minute—no, wait, no, no! Don’t do that. These fuckers got sharp teeth and they move fast. I don’t want one of ‘em taking a piece out of you. Where the fuck you been, baby?”

  “Soap, Mama,” JJ yelled back at her. “Got a nice lady here and a bunch of innocent dogs. You’re polluting their ears.”

  I snorted quietly. Nice lady? Innocent dogs? JJ must not have been listening to me much.

  JJ glanced at me and dropped his voice. “You think we can help her? ‘Cause I’m not sure my Windex is gonna do much against sharp teeth.”

  I hefted my shovel. “No worries. I got this.”

  Then I hesitated. Actually, did I? I’d smashed a lot of goblins with my shovel, but gators would be attacking from ground level. Instead of swinging, I’d need to, what, stomp on them? How was that going to work?

  “Maybe let’s go slow and see what we’re getting into.” I compromised.

  As we approached Bear, moving as quietly as possible, she stood and stretched. From where she’d been positioned, we could see through the trees to where Alma was standing on a mass of tangled tree roots. She was elevated, but not by much. It was just enough, though, to stay out of the reach of the three or four gators clustered below her.

  Fortunately, they were on dry ground. Gators are great at launching themselves out of water, but not nearly as good at jumping on land. One snapped at her, but Alma kicked its snout with a heavy boot, hard enough to bash it away. Another, the biggest, hissed, lifting its head and opening its mouth.

  Alma took aim with a device that was like nothing I’d ever seen before. A flash of blue light smacked the big gator almost in its eye.

  “Missed again, damn it,” Alma muttered. Then she yelled, “Fucking die already, you motherfucker!”