Chương 111: 108: The Easy Job

"I've never really gone for easy. It's not my style. And I'm very busy today. But, you know, I'll keep it in mind." I gave him a polite smile, but I didn't let it reach my eyes. If he had [Uncanny Insight], he could have read the 'fuck you and all of yours' message in them, but it might have been obvious, anyway. I wasn't surprised by the openness of his threat. It's what I'd expected all along.

If anything, I was more surprised he wasn't ordering his soldiers to take me into custody, but perhaps Bryce's experience was a useful lesson. Or maybe he was just intelligently cautious. He'd made it to Level 6, so he hadn't been sitting around doomscrolling for the past week. Behind him, Bryce was smirking. I let my eyes meet his, dropping my polite smile, and said, raising my voice a little so I could be sure the soldiers in the parking lot would hear me, too.

"I should maybe mention to you that my very best abilities are entirely defensive, and I don't consciously control them. The last person who attacked me exploded. Literally. Brains everywhere. It was… messy. Very messy." I moved my gaze from Bryce, who'd stopped smirking, and returned it to his father.

"Your son got very lucky when he was… prevented from attacking me." I shot a quick glance back at Bryce and gave him my own smirk. Yeah, it was mean of me to remind him of his girlfriend's—well, ex-girlfriend's—intervention, but he deserved it. Turning back to his father, I said, "If anyone else comes up with any injudicious ideas, you might warn them.

I don't accept responsibility for the consequences of attempted violence against me or my animals, but I assure you that we will not be the ones feeling those consequences." I tapped my finger against my lips, and added, fake thoughtfully, "Not that my neighbor really had a chance to feel the experience. Well, at least it was fast." Was it a good idea to let the government know they shouldn't attack me directly? Eh, who knows? They'd probably start looking for roundabout routes.

But I didn't want to wind up inadvertently killing some poor soldier who was just following orders. Colonel Whitaker's smile was a little crooked, but his tone was easy as he said, "I'll be sure that's added to your file."

"Thanks," I said, looking to Missy. She was standing at the car door. When I caught her eye, she lifted her hand, showing her fingers closed around the key fob.

"Ready to go?" she called in our direction, without moving.

"A pleasure, Colonel," I said with a nod.

"Enjoy your day."

"Wait." He put his hand out to stop me. I side-stepped the reach, and Zelda, at my feet as always, seemed to inflate, straightening into an alert posture and pulling her lips back over her teeth just a little. I jump? I big dog now?

"Not yet," I said, holding an open palm flat to ask her to hold. The colonel noticed our byplay, but didn't take the sensible step back. He did, however, drop his own hand.

"If you could just tell me about this contract with another species? My superiors would consider me positively negligent if I didn't at least try to find out what that's about." I hesitated. I, of course, had no idea what the contract with the Sarathi entailed. The System gave me credit for the contract because my presence—well, or maybe Zelda's presence—had influenced the negotiations, but I hadn't really had anything else to do with it.

"I can tell you this," I temporized.

"A System-enforced contract is one the System has deemed fair. So if someone shows up offering you a handful of beads for Manhattan, the System won't approve the contract. If the System doesn't approve a contract, you should probably turn it down."

"That doesn't tell me much," Colonel Whitaker said.

"No. But it tells you what you need to know." I didn't wait for him to respond, just walked away with Zelda right behind me. When I got to the car, Missy whispered, "I wasn't sure what you'd want to do. Going back into the rift—""Yep, yep," I replied equally quietly, cutting her off.

"Let's drive away. Better than…" I didn't finish my statement, just in case our audience had been taking points in Perception. My hearing was a lot better than it had been, so theirs might be, too. Neither the colonel nor his soldiers made any move to stop us as we got into the car. Fortunately, it started. Missy even gave him a friendly wave goodbye as we exited the parking lot. I stayed focused on the rearview mirror, waiting to see if they followed us, but when they didn't, I collapsed against the seat back.

"Oh, my gosh!" Missy burst out, apparently deciding we were safe.

"That was so awkward! I had no idea what to say to him. What horrible timing!"

"This was supposed to be the easy job," I said, feeling grim. We'd already taken more than ten minutes and we hadn't even looked at the map yet.

"Driving back to Durham will take much too long," Missy said.

"Can you find another rift?"

"Yes, but he let us go too easily," I said.

"What's the chance the government equivalent to an AirTag is on the car somewhere?"

"Damn it," Missy swore under her breath, then said, "About 100%, I bet. I didn't hear your conversation, but I'm sure half the country would like to get their hands on you right now."

"The country?"

"Oh, you're right. Yeah, the entire world." She shot me a glance, and added, "Are you okay?"

"Nobody's phones are working, right? So how are they communicating?" I ignored her question. I wasn't okay, but there wasn't anything she could do about it.

"Satellite, probably. Solar still works to charge phones. Cell phones don't work because so many towers are down."

"Right." I peered into the side mirror again, checking to see if we were being followed. Was I being paranoid? It's as the saying goes: you're not paranoid if they really are out to get you.

"All right, I can't worry about this. I have too much else going on. We'll just find the closest rift—well, the second closest rift—and get back to New Jersey. We can worry about the feds later." Help support creative writers by finding and reading their stories on the original site. Missy huffed out a laugh.

"That sounds so ridiculous. And yet…"

"I know. I guess it was optimistic to think the government would just collapse."

"That's optimistic?"

"If you make the government small enough to drown in a bathtub, you really can't complain when it's not big enough to help you out in a crisis."

"Oh, I think you underestimate people's abilities to complain." Missy pulled up to a stop sign.

"Still no sign of them?" I shook my head.

"Nobody back there."

"Definitely a tracker on the car then. What do you want to do?" I put my hand to the collar of the Wayfarer's Jacket and thought about finding the second closest rift. Not the one in the grocery store parking lot, but the one farther away than that. The sense of intuition was enough for me to give Missy directions, but it still took us twenty slow, deeply annoying minutes to find the rift, including an absolutely tedious period of backtracking because of blocked roads.

Fortunately, the rift was not on the top of a mountain, accessible only by goats and hawks. Unfortunately, it was guarded. The rift itself shimmered in a clearing beside a narrow two-lane road, half-hidden by scrub pines and a sagging fence. Three pickup trucks were pulled off the road, parked at random angles.

"I don't have a good feeling about this," Missy said, staring through the windshield at the rift and the armed men clustered around it. There were about eight or nine of them, standing with their backs to us, a couple of them bent over, with something—or maybe someone? —on the ground between them and the rift entrance. I didn't have a good feeling about this, either. These guys were wearing the same type of gear as the soldiers with the colonel in the grocery-store parking lot, but they were not soldiers.

Frankly, they were too dirty to be soldiers. I mean, yeah, we were in the midst of the apocalypse, but still, shower wipes were a thing. And most places had at least some access to water. If showers didn't work, soap, a pitcher, and a washcloth had been mainstream for centuries. Were they militia guys, maybe? Preppers? Maybe they'd been on a backwoods training exercise when the System hit and they hadn't made it home yet. But what were they doing? They also…

well, I had a momentarily vivid memory of Chelsea—the real one, not the pixie living in my backyard/brain—asking, "What if the colors you see are real?" I'd scoffed, having already been thoroughly indoctrinated by my psychiatrist to know, for a fact, absolute truth, word of God, that the colors I thought I saw were hallucinations, and that with the right drugs, they'd disappear. They never had, but I'd gotten good at ignoring them, and even better at staying away from people who might radiate them.

At least two of these guys were radiating red to my hallucination sense. I didn't think it was mana. But the red felt sticky, as if my hallucination sense was telling me that these guys were bloodstained. How does a color feel sticky? Your guess is as good as mine, honestly, but that's a hallucination for you. Obviously, if I was now hallucinating, I needed to find a shrink and get a prescription for the appropriate drugs.

I did have to wonder, though, under the circumstances, whether maybe my hallucinations had always been a touch of magic.

"Chelsea?" I whispered. Pixie Chelsea appeared next to me, floating above the center console.

"What did my namesake say? Extreme sensitivity isn't always pathological? Visitors from the multiverse have been wandering Earth for centuries, so yes, it's possible that you inherited a trace of a magical ability from some distant ancestor." The next question didn't even have to be said aloud.

"Yes, it's also possible that you inherited your bipolar disorder from the same ancestor. And no, that doesn't change anything. Whether it originated on Earth or not, it's still the same condition with the same issues."

"Yeah, but it would be cooler if it were from some magical ancestor," I said.

"What?" Missy glanced at me nervously. I waved away her concern.

"Sorry, just talking to my invisible friend." She didn't look less nervous.

"Should we skip this rift, and look for another one? I don't think they've noticed us."

"Give me a minute." I tapped [Analyze] to see what we were dealing with. Brawlers, fighters, and a berserker. That was a new one to me. Most of them were Level 3 and 4, but the berserker was Level 6. Also, a couple of unknowns, one of whom was the person on the ground. No Murder Hobos, so maybe I was wrong about the type of men we were looking at. But I wasn't, and I knew I wasn't. I kept [Analyze] open and focused on one of the guys with the sticky red aura, just as he looked up and spotted us.

The tooltip gave me his full info: Name: Dale Mead Species: Human Class: Brawler Level: 4 Condition: Optimal Affiliations: Sovereign Ridge Patriots Nothing useful, nothing that explained the red. But the affiliation definitely suggested a certain mindset. He was probably hoping the government collapsed, too, but maybe not the same way I was. Or was that just self-justification on my part? Dale turned and spoke to the men next to him, and then he and two others broke from the group and headed toward us.

"Olivia?" Missy hadn't turned the car off, but now she moved to put it into reverse. I put my hand on her arm to stop her.

"Don't worry," I said.

"They outnumber us, but we out-level them. Zelda could probably take them on her own if she needed to."

"You're sure?" Missy swallowed.

"Yep." I unclipped my seatbelt and opened the door. Zelda hopped out first and I followed her, just as the three men reached the edge of the road.

"Well, well, what do we have here?" Dale's eyes raked me up and down, in exactly the way of gross men everywhere. You'd think they took lessons in it: how to repulse a woman in one easy step.

"Come to join the Sovereign Ridge, ladies? You'll still have to pass the initiation."

"Which is what?" I asked flatly, not smiling. He grinned. It wasn't salacious, but it held a contempt that told me he'd already written me off and that he enjoyed that idea. What an idiot.

"You go in." He jerked his chin toward the rift.

"You come back out, you're one of us." I looked past him toward the person on the ground.

"And if I don't come back out?"

"Then you weren't one of us."

"Lovely." At my feet, I could feel almost more than hear Zelda growling deep in her throat.

"Let's go, then." He stared at me, the grin fading just a little.

"Lead the way," I said, letting my impatience show. A car door slammed as Missy joined me.

"Are you sure about this?" she muttered.

"Are you worried about the car?" I asked.

"Well, yeah. Sort of. I mean, it's not the most important thing on my list, but…"

"Gasoline engines are going to go the way of the dodo," I said. I hadn't taken my eyes off Dale. I felt like a five-year-old having a staring contest with a fellow kindergartner; mildly ridiculous and yet committed to the bit. He gave first, and yeah, I enjoyed the moment as he turned away and started walking back to the rift.

"Fine," he said.

"Your funeral." I didn't laugh. The guy on the ground was bruised and bloody. I stopped walking next to him and frowned down at him. That didn't look like monster damage. I hadn't run into any monsters yet that beat people up. I looked around at the men in their camo, and kept my sigh internal. I guess I had run into monsters that beat people up. They just looked like humans. The other unknown was standing, not bloody, but with a defiant look on his face.

"Make them give you a weapon," he said.

"This is bullshit. They're just killing people in there." Dale aimed a fist at his stomach. I saw the movement out of the corner of my eye, and snapped, "Go," to Zelda. She was so happy to oblige. She did the big dog thing first, and this time, she wasn't nearly as nice about it as she'd been before. Not content with knocking Dale down, she grabbed his arm and treated it like a chew toy, biting down and then yanking it back and forth.

It didn't look like she drew blood, but he screamed like a car alarm, higher and higher and higher. And then Zelda dropped his arm, threw her head back, and howled. The guys in camo scattered. Dale cowered on the ground. The two unknowns watched wide-eyed.

"What the hell?" Mr. Upright breathed.

"What would you guys like to do?" I asked, leaning down and grabbing the arm of Mr. Bruised and Bloody. I hauled him up, trying to assess his injuries. I was pretty sure he was just battered, not dying, but since he was unknown, I couldn't use the System to confirm.

"I… I… what are our options?" asked Mr. Upright, a little more breathless and squeaky than he had been before.

"Enter the rift. Get away from here. Go someplace else in the world. Level up? I don't know. What feels right?"

"Get away from here," Mr. Bruised and Bloody said through swollen lips.

"Cool. Let's go." I whistled for Zelda and then stepped into the shimmer, dragging Mr. Bruised and Battered with me and trusting that Upright and Missy would be smart enough to follow.