Chương 83: 3.8 Black Betty - Spiderbait (3:26)

Z3ke (Original Poster) So there we were, racing through the Deadlands with the Black Teeth on our tail. Jackie was practically wrestling the jeep through the desert, fighting to keep everything under control while we tore over sand dunes. Every time we hit another rise the jeep rattled and shook like it was trying to tear itself apart, and Jackie would jerk the wheel to try and stop us from fishtailing around.

At one point her face was so close to the windshield that I genuinely thought she was about to headbutt the glass. Sand blasted into the windshield in waves and we occasionally drifted sideways over the sand. The entire time, a single thought kept racing through my head: please let this thing have actually been repaired before Jackie stole it. For all I knew, the jeep had been sitting idle in a repair bay, waiting for parts to fix it.

Knowing my luck, the whole thing was probably held together with duct tape and prayers. With how fast we were going, I kinda expected us to hit a dune and then the jeep would just disintegrate. I was squished awkwardly in the backseat, getting thrown around every time we hit a dune or Jackie jerked the wheel. Eventually I was able to get myself situated and twisted around in my seat so I could look out behind us. Smoke billowed out of the Chapel Pit.

Huge black clouds rolled up into the sky and I could make out the flickers of orange fire buried in the smoke. The whole Cathedral looked like it was just about ready to collapse in on itself. I couldn't hear the riot anymore. The roar of the jeep's engines and the screaming wind and the sand blasting against us drowned everything else out. But I knew that the riot was still happening and the chaos was still spreading. The Chapel Pit had exploded into violence during my solo.

The slaves had stampeded and the Black Teeth had been tearing each other apart and the fires had been spreading, and just because we weren't there anymore didn't mean the place had stopped destroying itself. Jackie was a completely different person behind the wheel. Back in the holding pens she'd been somewhat timid and cautious and quiet. Now that she was driving the jeep and racing through the Deadlands, she'd become a complete lunatic.

I swear I caught her grinning at one point as she slammed her foot down on the gas pedal, but I couldn't really tell because I was too busy getting bounced around in the backseat. Elnor was in the passenger seat which, for some reason, my brain kept finding funny. The guy was literally riding shotgun while holding a massive shotgun in his hands. Now that I'm typing all this out, I realize it's probably not going to be funny to all of you.

But my brain was doing strange things at that moment and I guess it's what it decided to latch onto. The weapon he was cradling was completely absurd. It looked like an anti-aircraft gun that was shotgun shaped. Elnor had the stock braced against the jeep door while calmly looking out at the vehicles behind us. The Black Teeth were chasing after us. Trucks and cars and jeeps and buses and motorcycles poured out of the Cathedral after us, and the convoy was growing by the second.

I guess they really didn't like what we'd done back there and decided the best use of their time was to chase us down. There were two enormous bus monstrosities that were chasing us. I watched for a second and I could swear they were gaining on us which I felt was incredibly unfair considering they were roughly the size of apartment buildings. Their engines roared loud enough to shake the sand beneath them while their giant tires tore through the sand.

Behind the two buses came armored trucks that were covered in scrap metal and jagged spikes. Some of them had cages bolted onto the sides while others had huge slabs of metal bolted to their front. They looked like they were designed to ram smaller vehicles off the road. Massive plumes of sand exploded behind them as they thundered towards us. The worst of all were the motorcycles that spread out in loose packs and started weaving across the dunes way faster than the trucks could manage.

Their engines screamed at us while their riders leaned low over the handlebars. As soon as I saw the motorcycles something in the back of my mind clicked. I recognized those bikes… or at least, bikes like them. They looked almost exactly like the motorcycles that the train bandits had used back when I first arrived in this world. It was the same kind of stripped-down frame and they were all decorated with the same type of bones motif. For a second I started wondering if these riders knew the two bandits I'd killed.

Were they from the same clan? Were they friends? Were they family? Then they started shooting at us and I decided that mystery could wait until later. I ducked lower as the rounds snapped past us. A bullet slammed into the windshield and spiderwebbed the glass. Jackie swore loudly and jerked the wheel sideways. The jeep nearly rolled over and I got launched across the backseat and slammed into Elnor's chair.

"You want to maybe HELP?!" Jackie shouted at me over the engine.

"What the hell do you want me to do?" I yelled back. That was probably the worst answer because Elnor looked over at me, struggling to sit upright in the back seat, and he looked like he was wondering why they'd bothered to grab me from the arena. One of the motorcycles suddenly broke ahead of the pack and came flying over the crest of a dune straight at us. The rider had a pistol in one hand while the other was wrapped around the handlebars. I was able to get a good view of the guy as he hung in the air.

He had goggles and was covered in black leather and there were bone charms hanging from his bike. Then Elnor leaned halfway out the jeep and fired his shotgun. I've got no idea what kind of ammunition the thing used. I heard a thunderclap and the recoil from the gun slammed Elnor backwards into his seat and the biker disappeared into chunks and a bunch of pink mist. The motorcycle, now riderless, cartwheeled through the sand until it shattered apart.

"Holy shit," I muttered to myself. Another burst of gunfire hammered the jeep and I couldn't help but wonder where the Black Teeth were getting all their guns and ammo. Everything that I was told about Frontiers suggested that guns were pretty rare. Most people treated them like antiques, or they were pieces of rusted garbage. So how was this gang out in the middle of the desert able to pepper us with bullets?

One of the larger Black Teeth trucks was gaining on us, roaring over the dunes like some kind of giant armored monster. Men clung to the sides of it while firing wildly in our direction. Mounted on the front of the truck was a giant… thing. It took me a second to realize that it was a harpoon launcher. Before I could warn Jackie or Elnor, the thing fired. The harpoon screamed through the air, trailing a thick metal chain behind it. Jackie yanked the wheel and I was thrown sideways into the jeep door.

The harpoon missed us by maybe three feet - which is not a lot - before slamming into the sand beside the jeep hard enough to explode dirt and sand all over us. The chain snapped tight and ripped a huge hole in the dune as the truck started to reel it back in. Jackie's eyes went wide as she looked into the rear-view mirror.

"Why the hell do they HAVE that?!"

"Probably for this exact reason," Elnor shouted back. More motorcycles surged around us, their engines screaming like angry hornets. Behind them, the Black Teeth trucks gunned their engines and started closing even faster. Gunfire cracked all around us and every couple of seconds another bullet slammed into the jeep. We hit another dune hard enough that my teeth clicked together, and that was the moment Elnor finally snapped at me.

"DO SOMETHING USEFUL!" he shouted as he shoved another shell into the shotgun. I opened my mouth to yell at him that I wasn't exactly built for high-speed desert warfare, but the words caught in my throat. A thought started pushing through the panic and the adrenaline. What can I do? Look, in my defense, I didn't really have magic for all that long. I know that I've got skills and everything, and those skills would probably be considered magic. But they're a quiet kind of magic.

I can play the guitar and Persona calms me down when I lie. Even the glyphs, which is the most magical thing that I was able to do, wasn't really magic. It was more a weird science that I didn't quite understand. I think it's because none of my powers looked magical. Maybe if I could throw fireballs or shoot lightning out of my eyes, I'd think in terms of magic. But my entire life, both on Earth and in this world, had drilled into my head that if I wanted to do something I had to do it physically.

I could shoot a gun or swing a sword or punch a guy in the face. But what I couldn't do was just magic up a solution out of nowhere. Except… I guess now I can magic things. The riot I'd created in the Chapel Pit was magic. I caused it with my skills. When I played the Free Bird solo, all my skills merged together into something bigger. I'd taken all the fear and the aggression and the adrenaline in the arena and amplified it until the entire place had exploded into violence.

I think part of me was trying to rationalize all that away. Maybe the Black Teeth were already unstable and violent and all it took was one punch to start the riot. Maybe the slaves had reached a breaking point without me and had just decided to start fighting. Maybe the entire Cathedral had been one spark away from collapsing. But that's not what happened. I'd done something to them. I'd grabbed hold of all those emotions already sitting in the arena and I'd turned them into a wildfire. I had magic now.

And before you all start typing out "NO SHIT ZEKE," please understand that I was in the middle of a high-speed car chase through a post-apocalyptic death desert while psychopaths tried to harpoon us off the road. My brain was being a little panicky. But once the realization clicked, all the pieces started fitting together. My Persona skill manipulated emotions and my Performance amplified my presence and Instrument Mastery gave me an instinctive understanding of the music itself.

Separately they were all useful skills, kinda, but together they became something else entirely. My music didn't create sonic blasts like ReCoil had been hoping for. At least… they didn't yet. Maybe some day i'd melt faces with weaponized dubstep or something, but right now it was more that my magic amplified what was already there.

"A chase song," I mumbled to myself. Elnor shot me a look, almost like he wanted to know what I'd just said but then decided I was being completely useless in this shootout/car chase and instead went back to reloading his shotgun. I needed a song that was fast and aggressive. I needed a song that screamed keep moving. What if I could use my music to put Jackie into some kind of hyper-focused flow state? What if I could sharpen her instincts and reaction speed?

What if I could steady Elnor's aim with that massive shotgun? As soon as that idea hit me I yanked my Tech Slate from my storage and jumped onto the forum. I started screaming at all of you for some guitar tabs. A few moments later I refreshed the page, hoping you all gave me something good, only to discover all you idiots arguing about chase songs. You were talking about what songs would give the best vibes. ReCoil was patting himself on the back for helping me escape the Chapel Pit.

I was being shot at and you guys were just dicking around. I stared at the screen in complete disbelief.

"ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING ME RIGHT NOW?!?" I yelled at the slate. Elnor twisted around in the passenger seat and shot me a look that said he thought I'd finally lost my mind. We were in the middle of a chase through the desert and I'd just pulled out a tablet and started angrily typing on it instead of doing anything even remotely useful.

"What the shit?" he yelled at me. I didn't answer him and instead tossed the Tech Slate onto the seat next to me and reached into my dimensional storage again. I pulled out my guitar and that got some reactions. Jackie looked into the rearview mirror and saw me somehow holding a full guitar in the back seat and nearly drove us straight into a sand dune. Elnore froze completely. The old investigator stared at the guitar for a full two seconds, his brain obviously trying to figure out what it was seeing.

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"Where the hell did that come from?"

"Long story" I shouted back at him. Elnor looked between me and the guitar with growing horror as realization slowly dawned on him.

"You cannot seriously be planning to play music right now." Another harpoon launched at us from one of the trucks. It screamed through the air and Jackie yanked the wheel hard enough that we started drifting sideways across the sand. One of the Black Teeth trucks tried the too-aggressive turn and flipped end over end across the desert in a shower of scrap metal.

"You are NOT helping right now!" Elnor screamed at me.

"I'm trying to."

"You're holding a guitar during a firefight!"

"I have a plan." Another motorcycle came screaming up beside us and fired wildly into the jeep. Thankfully he didn't hit anything before Elnor cut him in half with a blast from his shotgun. I grabbed the Tech Slate again and refreshed the forum page. You shits were still arguing. And then finally… FINALLY, Crush uploaded the tabs for Black Betty. I opened the file and the guitar tabs filled the screen and I felt my pulse spike. It was a fast tempo and aggressive song. It was absolutely perfect.

I looked up from the slate and towards Jackie. She was fighting the wheel with both hands while the jeep bucked violently beneath us. Her eyes were laser-focused on the dunes ahead. Elnor was halfway hanging out of the passenger side with his shotgun. I shoved my Tech Slate into Elnor's hands.

"Hold this us." What?!"

"Hold it where I can see it." I could see him getting ready to bitch me out but something in my face must've gotten through to him. Maybe it was desperation or maybe it was some slight bit of insanity. Elnor stared at me and then swore under his breath and grabbed the slate with one hand. With the other he reached out and yanked open the glove compartment and pulled out a battered pistol. Again…how the hell did the Black Teeth just have guns lying around?

"You get thirty seconds," he barked.

"The song is three and a half minutes," I shouted back. I stood from the back seat while the jeep bounced around me and I grabbed one of the seat belts. Well, I say seat belt but it was really just a cord that people could hold onto so they didn't go flying. I wrapped it around my legs and waist to try to make sure I didn't slip out of the jeep. When I stood up I found myself halfway out the jeep and exposed to the bullets and the wind and the sand.

Elnor held up the Tech Slate in one hand while gripping his pistol in the other, and he was looking at me like I was absolutely insane. I played the first note for Black Betty and felt something click into place. By the second note, the magic was rushing through me. It wasn't like back in the Chapel Pit where everything was explosive and chaotic, like I'd dropped a match in a room soaked with gasoline. This felt different. It was more focused and controlled. I wasn't playing for an audience of hundreds this time.

I was playing solely for Elnor and Jackie. Whoa, Black Betty, bam-ba-lam. The sound rolled through the jeep and suddenly everything started syncing together. Jackie's driving changed first. She was already ridiculously good behind the wheel, but now it was like something had clicked in her head. The jeep drifted sideways over a dune and instead of fishtailing out of control, she threaded us perfectly between two ridges while bullets tore through the area we'd been occupying a half second earlier.

The jeep bounced hard enough to almost throw me overboard but Jackie corrected instantly. Whoa, Black Betty, bam-ba-lam. The music was flowing out of me. Persona latched onto my emotions and Performance amplified everything. The song was calling for speed and urgency and motion and it dragged us along in its wake. It was hitting Elnor too. He still looked deeply offended that I was standing in the backseat of a moving jeep, playing a guitar during a firefight.

But I saw him twist himself sideways in the passenger seat. He rested his back against the dashboard and he wrapped a leg around me to keep me from getting launched out of the jeep. It was weirdly thoughtful of him. A motorcycle shot up beside us and the rider was screaming something through his mask while leveling a pistol at Jackie through the driver-side window. Elnor calmly raised his handgun and took the shot. The biker dropped instantly and the motorcycle flipped sideways and disappeared into the sand.

Elnor blinked at the shot, surprised at how easy it was for him, and then he looked at me and then at the guitar and back to me.

"What the shit?!" I wanted to agree with him. I saw the shot and wanted to shout out I know, right? But the music was working and the sound of the song was blending into everything around us. The growl of the engine matched the beat and the gunshots cracked in time with the song. The suspension hammered against the dunes like drums while Jackie whipped the wheel side to side in perfect rhythm. The whole chase started moving to the music.

Dust blasted against my face and trucks rumbled behind us and the motorcycles whirred past and I kept playing. Bam-ba-lam. I could feel the magic of the song spreading outwards, but it wasn't touching the Black Teeth chasing us. It stayed tightly wrapped around our jeep, like it knew that its magic was meant for only Jackie, Elnor and me. Jackie leaned harder into her turns as her confidence grew. Elnor fired out at the trucks and the motorcycles with a steadier aim.

My throat was burning as I screamed out the lyrics into a sandstorm. She really gets me high, bam-ba-lam. You know that ain't no lie, bam-ba-lam. Jackie jerked the wheel again, dodging a truck that had come up alongside us, and suddenly we were facing south and I saw a storm ahead of us. At first it just looked like a large wall stretching across the horizon, but then I realized that the wall was moving. Massive spirals of dust twisted up from the desert floor.

Sand tornadoes ripped across the Deadlands and black clouds churned overhead. The storm swallowed entire sections of the horizon and lightning flickered deep inside the dust clouds and it all looked so impossibly wrong. My brain couldn't make sense of what I was seeing. Even the Reclaimer suddenly felt small compared to the storm. Jackie was probably thinking the same thing I was at that moment because I heard her mutter "oh hell no," under her breath.

I could feel her instinctively wanting to turn away from the storm. My brain was screaming for us to do the same thing. The storm looked like an apocalypse had decided to descend directly onto the desert. But then I looked behind us at the Black Teeth still chasing after us. I really hate what I'm about to say next. I read all of ReCoil's advice, despite the fact that trying to decipher the whole thing made me feel like my brain was bleeding.

He talked about the Janus Storm and I knew that he and Gnomeland were arguing about sending me into it because they worried whether it was safe or not. According to him, there was a supposedly safe path into the eye of the storm and it would benefit me. Gnomeland called the idea suicidal. It was. It was an entirely stupid plan that I was thinking of at that moment. But it was either head into the Janus Storm like Recoil wanted or stay out in the Deadlands and wait for the Black Teeth to kill us.

We weren't going to outrun them and we wouldn't be able to outgun them. Which meant our best option was to head directly into the storm.

"Jackie!" I shouted into the wind.

"Floor it." Jackie stared at me through the rearview mirror, then she looked at the storm and then at the trucks chasing us. Then she grinned. She slammed her foot forward and the jeep lurched forward hard enough that I almost lost my footing even with the seatbelt wrapped around my legs and Elnor trying to hold me steady. The engine screamed while Black Betty roared out across the Deadlands. Whoa, Black Betty, bam-ba-lam The storm swallowed us. Visibility collapsed in an instant.

One second I could see the dunes and the pursuit vehicles and the next the entire world became nothing but sand. The headlights of the jeep barely pierced ten feet ahead before the sand devoured the beams. The Black Teeth hesitated. The motorcycles started slowing and the trucks tried to turn away, but it was too late. A tornado ripped across the dunes and swallowed three of the motorcycles whole. They were picked up off the dunes and vanished into the spinning sands.

One of the armored trucks tried to break and got clipped sideways by another vehicle that couldn't see through the storm. The truck flipped end over end and Black Teeth went cartwheeling through the air. One of the trucks fired a harpoon at us. The chain disappeared into the dust wall and suddenly snapped tight. The truck attached to it jerked violently sideways before getting dragged directly into a tornado funnel. I watched the vehicle lift halfway off the ground before disappearing into the storm.

I kept playing. My Persona skill was fully active and it was feeding the song all my desperation. In the back of my head I was remembering what ReCoil was saying about cultists who ventured into the Janus Storm and were permanently changed by it. I didn't want hands to suddenly start growing out of my neck, and I put all that fear into the song and urged Jackie onwards.

Jackie was driving like she'd been born inside the storm, wrenching the wheel at the last possible second when another tornado appeared out of the dust. ELnor was half laughing and half screaming as he fired his pistol into the shapes moving through the sand. Every now and then he looked up at me with a completely unhinged expression before shouting: THIS IS INSANE! Then he laughed again and fired another shot. I heard a thump thump thump and thought that it was the jeep breaking apart.

We were going to get picked up and ripped to pieces and scattered all through the Deadlands. ReCoil was wrong in that there wasn't a safe space through the storm and my only regret was that I wouldn't be able to curse him out for sending me into it. Another flash of lightning lit up the storm and I saw one of the massive Black Teeth bus-truck things pacing us through the dust. People were trapped in the cages welded onto its side, clutching the bars while the vehicle crashed through the storm.

Standing on top of the bus, clipped into it with chains, was a Black Teeth member holding a grenade launcher. Again… what the hell man? Where were they getting these things? Thankfully, he wasn't shooting at us. He fired three rounds at one of the tornadoes right in front of him. The rounds disappeared into the funnel cloud and exploded in a burst of strange blue smoke that got me thinking of the Veylstone that we'd been mining back at the Chapel Pit. The tornado died.

It collapsed, like someone had reached over and just switched it off. I have no clue what the hell had just happened there. The spinning winds unraveled instantly and dumped tons of sand across the desert floor.

"What the hell?" Elnor shouted, but neither Jackie nor I could answer. Jackie was too focused on driving and I was still playing. And even if I wasn't… I had no idea what the Black Teeth guy just did? He shot the storm and the storm died. I mean… do you understand how absolutely insane that is? The bus-truck vanished behind another wall of sand before I could see more. Then the sand grew all around us. The world disappeared entirely. I couldn't even see the hood of our jeep anymore.

Black Betty became frantic and wild and desperate in my hands. The song wasn't about escaping the Black Teeth anymore, it was about outrunning death by inches. Then suddenly… there was silence. The jeep burst through the storm wall and everything vanished all at once. There was no screaming wind and no gunfire and no engines roaring after us. There was nothing. Jackie slowly eased off the gas as we rolled forward into the eye of the storm. The storm was enormous.

Perfectly calm desert stretched around us beneath a dark sky while gigantic walls of swirling sands rotated in the distance. Lightning flashed through the sand like veins of blue fire. Jackie drove for another couple of minutes to move us away from the walls of sand and then finally stopped the jeep. None of us spoke. You'd think that we would have cheered over the fact that we'd just outrun death and escaped the Black Teeth. But all our attention was on the sight all around us.

Elnor lowered his pistol and stared out at the swirling walls surrounding us.

"What the hell is this place?"

"It's the Janus Storm," I said. Jackie and Elnor looked up at me like I'd just said something completely insane. Maybe they were trying to come to terms with the fact that we were safe now and I was partly responsible for that. Maybe they were wondering how I knew about the storm in the first place. I don't know and they didn't press the issue. They just looked up at me, shrugged, and then turned back to the eye of the storm and the peace.

Jackie pointed ahead of us and I followed her finger to what I first thought was some kind of hill. She drove us closer and I started revising my thoughts on it. Maybe it was where all the trucks and motorcycles that the storm picked up and scattered about had been collected. ReCoil said that there was some dude who was living in the middle of the storm and piloting it. Maybe he was collecting all the trucks. We parked right next to it and all three of us just stared at the impossible thing we'd just found.

It was a gigantic metal sphere, bigger than a house. Thick metal plates had been bolted together unevenly across its surface and huge scraps of rusted steel overlapped each other in messy patches. It was just a giant metal ball that was built out of junkyard leftovers. Wires and pipes stuck out of the sides at random angles. Some sections were welded together cleanly while others looked like they'd been slapped on by somebody who was drunk. Parts of the sphere rotated slowly with loud grinding noises.

I could see scorch marks all across the metal plating and several sections of the thing looked partially melted. Elnor stared at the thing in complete disbelief and I saw him open and close his mouth, not really knowing what to say about it. Right as it felt like he was about to ask what the hell the metal ball thingy was, the sphere let out a deafening metallic groan. One of the plates on its side slowly began to open, showing a massive cavernous entrance. Jackie shot me a look, wondering what I wanted to do.

"Uh… I guess we can park the jeep there," I said, not really knowing what would happen. I'd need to pull out my Tech Slate and figure out what ReCoil and Gnomeland and the rest of you guys thought. But at the same time, we were in the middle of a storm that was moving throughout the Deadlands. We needed to find somewhere that was safe, and as creeped out as I was by the giant metal sphere, I figured it was the best place for us at the moment. So, Jackie drove us into the sphere and we parked.

And now we're stuck here. I really hope you've got an idea of what we can be doing ReCoil. You wanted me to head into the Janus Storm. And that's where I am.