***AWAKE***

The swelling had really set in, and Tom’s face felt like the Toxic Avenger’s, all swollen and throbbing in the most grotesque way.

Honestly, Tom was aching for the opportunity to do Grant the same favor. Intellectually, he supposed he understood why it might have been a wise precaution, but you never really forget your first bitch-slap.

He was still tied to the horse, his face jammed into stiff horsehair.

He could have tried going to sleep again, but the nearby knights were keeping a close eye on him, and Tom didn’t know if he was potentially signaling his abilities to them every time he Dreamed.

All he knew was that there was another group, and they were at Ellie’s location last night. It was a two-hour drive to Ellie’s. The horses were moving at about four miles an hour.

Assuming the two groups were moving directly towards each other…

Tom almost laughed as he realized he had found an actual use for the dreaded word-based math problem.

Okay, two hours by car is approximately one hundred miles.

The combined speed of both groups moving towards each other is eight miles an hour, So they’ll meet in about…twelve point five hours.

Now, that was assuming these boys didn’t need to take a break.

They sure looked like they did. Tom glanced around and noticed another knight smothering a yawn.

They had arrived at Ellie’s location and Tom’s location nearly simultaneously, which put their divergence point smack dab between the two, and their origin point couldn’t have been much farther beyond that.

Tom glanced over at the milepost on the side of the road. Mile 110. We passed Mile 120 shortly after we headed out, about two and a half hours ago. Means there’s ten hours of travel until the meetup. Forty miles.

One-ten minus forty equals seventy.

So, their origin point is somewhere within spitting distance of mile seventy on the tollway?

Did they just appear in the middle of some farmer’s field or something?

Tom frowned.

That might not be entirely inaccurate.

He’d seen a demon pass through holes in the air. Why not people and horses?

Now you’re thinking with portals.

If they had portal magic, why the horses, then? It kind of implied portals were rare, expensive, and/or strenuous, and they couldn’t afford to blip around the landscape willy-nilly.

That was good for Tom, at least.

“~!” The seniormost knight called a halt, and Tom watched, bemused, as everyone began to set up camp just off the road, in the middle of some farmer’s apple orchard, about five hundred feet beyond a motel.

A knight stepped up beside Tom and lifted him off the horse with astonishing ease. The man must have been wearing fifty pounds of gear and he was at least six inches shorter than Tom, too.

He set Tom down before untying his arms, speaking some nonsense and pointing at Grant.

Tom took the hint and approached Grant while the faceless knight went off to put up their boy scout tents. Grant had been placed onto a cushioned folding seat made of wood. His arms and legs were still bound, but they were resting up on a simple ottoman, a cup of water with an ice cube and a slice of apple in his hand.

“What do they want?”

“Oh, they want you to set up my tent and take care of my needs. They can’t risk untying me, so they decided you might as well do your job,” Grant said, taking a sip of his ice-water.

Where the hell did they get ice?

“How convenient for you,” Tom said, eyeballing the comfy-looking folding chair.

“Says the man with the ability to walk and scratch his own ass,” Grant shot back. “Now, my lord, if you wish to escape, you only need keep up the charade until things settle, find your opportunity and vanish. I, on the other hand, am watched much more closely.”

“They also won’t kill you at the drop of a hat,” Tom muttered as he glanced at the highway, not a hundred feet away.

Make it to the road, then hitchhike, perhaps? He glanced over at Jacob’s truck, laden with dead bodies and swarmed with flies.

Ugh. He could steal the truck and drive away; he knew where Jacob hid his emergency keys, after all. Unfortunately, the smell alone made it difficult for him to seriously consider that as an option.

And I might get a lot of unwanted attention driving a truck full of dead people.

No, Tom wanted to fade away, the closest thing to an afterthought to these men. Stealing the truck would cause a major kerfuffle, and Tom wanted them to cut their losses, not come after him for revenge.

That means we play along, Tom thought, grabbing the tent beside Grant and beginning to set it up. It wasn’t rocket science, and a moment studying the others allowed him to assemble the hobo prophet’s abode in short order.

“Refill this, would you?” Grant asked, waggling his diminishing iced tea: Ice water and crushed fruit.

Tom squinted his unswollen eye, considering adding a little ‘homemade’ tea to the mix.

“You’re awfully used to this manner of living, aren’t you?” Tom asked.

“Unless my lord would rather help me use the latrine. I feel a bowel movement brewing.”

Tom snatched the cup out of Grant’s hands. A moment later, Grant began flagging down a soldier, who gave an unmistakable grimace as Grant spoke to him. A moment later, the job was foisted off on a younger soldier, who untied Grant’s feet and escorted him to the latrine dug into the farmer’s tractor-path.

Tom caught a brief whiff of the distant shit-hole and wrinkled his nose. Grant had a way of offering you two shitty choices and acting like he was doing you a favor.

Tom shook the thought off and scanned the group. Now, where am I gonna find water?

He stopped when he spotted a barrel that the knights seemed to be refilling their canteens from. The barrel was manned by another knight who seemed to be…refilling it?

In front of Tom’s eyes, the knight casually reached a finger down and a spout of water jetted out from in front of their finger, topping off the barrel while they idly talked with another knight.

If anyone is gonna be able to make ice on command, it’s this dude.

Tom spotted his chance to approach when the conversation lulled. He approached. He tried to put a smile on his face, but it hurt way too bad, so he had to settle on resting bastard face. It wasn’t ideal, but the swelling in his face wasn’t taking no for an answer.

“~?” The—woman?—spoke as he approached. Armor has a tendency to be unflattering and bulky, so between the voice and the face behind the facemask, Tom was surprised to identify this person as female.

Didn’t matter, though.

“Grant wants ice for his drink?” Tom asked, pointing at the cup with the slice of apple in it. He then pointed over at Grant’s chair. The man himself was a tiny figure in the distance, squatting over a hole with the assistance of an unfortunate soldier.

The woman rolled her eyes and motioned Tom forward. Tom held out the cup.

She idly waved her hand, and Tom felt a faint something before a blast of freezing cold water slapped Tom in the face, causing him to gasp and inhale more water.

Coughing, he opened his good eye and glanced down into the cup. It had a new mixture of fresh ice and water.

“Was that necessary?” Tom asked.

The woman waved him away, and Tom didn’t hang around to get splashed again. He stumbled away, shivering violently while he waited for Grant to get back.

The young soldier led their prized catch back to the campsite, sporting a thousand-yard stare. Grant, on the other hand, seemed refreshed, his mood only improving when he saw the ice-water.

“Yes, Melandra said she would do that if I bothered her for ice again,” he said as he spotted Tom’s soaked shirt. Thank god it was still warm outside, or the cold might have been fatal. As it stood, it was just wildly uncomfortable.

“They’ve got peaches on the other side of the orchard, my lord,” Grant said, reclaiming his throne of indolence. “Fetch me some for my drink.”

“How can you be tough and lazy at the same time?” Tom asked, genuinely curious.

“Product of my upbringing.” Grant shrugged.

Tom rolled his eyes and went to grab those peaches. The knights kept an eye on him as he walked away from them, but they quickly ignored him when they spotted Tom plucking fruit and returning with them for his ‘master’.

Interesting. Tom wondered if that was a legitimate play by Grant to habituate the knights to seeing Tom walk around on his own, or if he just wanted some peach in his tea?

Por qué no los dos?

The night deepened rapidly and without incident, as the farmer must have wisely decided not to heckle thirty men—and women—in plate armor. That was good, because Tom wasn’t entirely sure what would happen to him if he saw more people get killed. His brain was sitting on the rusty edge of a knife and his nerves were starting to burn through their protective sheaths.

Tom had heard a lot of stories about people coming back scarred after a war. He’d always assumed actual scars…like an idiot.

When the camp finally went to bed, there were at least six men on watch, standing equidistant and staring out into the empty orchard.

What do they think, a monster is gonna pop out of nowhere and try to eat the people who are sleeping? Tom couldn’t rule that out. Maybe in whatever messed-up place they came from, keeping six men on watch was a good idea, but right now, it was just highly inconvenient for Tom’s escape plan, which was to slink off in the middle of the night.

Maybe some kind of distraction? Tom thought, staring up at the stars. This far out of downtown, the stars were fantastically bright, something Tom had never really seen before.

I could start Jacob’s truck, then ditch it and run the other direction while they poke it with sticks… Yeah, that’s a terrible plan. The people were backwards, but even a day should have been long enough to learn that cars don’t start without people behind the wheel, which would make them look for the one who did it. And it would wake people up.

Tom really wanted a plan where only one person was distracted long enough for him to slip away into the dark. Only, he wasn’t sure how good these people’s night vision was.

Tom glanced around.

It wasn’t actually very dark. Between the stars and the moon, Tom could still see all the way to the road. Damn.

Just as Tom was looking at the road, a garbage truck careened off the asphalt and into the orchard.

BOOM! Crash!

The sound of snapping wood and breaking glass echoed across the campsite.

The young apple trees were flattened by the huge truck as it bore down on the campsite, creating a path of devastation that didn’t seem to slow it down at all.

There, behind the wheel, Tom got a glimpse of the face of the madman who was suicidally charging the tents.

Is that a cougar?

The southern watchman shouted an alarm before thrusting his hand out, and an actual freaking fireball emerged from his hand, melting a portion of the charging garbage truck’s grille. Didn’t stop it, though.

People scrambled out of their tents, easily locating the source of the distraction. They hastily assembled a line and began tossing all sorts of stuff at the ‘creature’ attacking them.

Tom saw fire, ice, living shadows, and blood leap out of the knights’ hands and impact against the truck. One of the knights simply hulked out, his armor revealing shifting plates and stretchy bands built to accommodate a larger frame. He charged toward the truck, intent on smashing it.

Tom glanced around at the assembled knights hauling ass to the south, all looking towards the road.

Seems like a good distraction to me.

This way. Tom’s neck craned toward the east, where he could feel Suzie beckoning him.

No time like the pleasant, Tom thought, lunging off his blanket and sprinting that direction at full speed. There was no telling how long conquering that garbage truck was going to take them, but it probably wouldn’t be long. Not with people who could blow shit up with their minds.

Long legs, don’t fail me now, Tom thought as he devoured the distance between him and Suzie.

There was shouting behind him, but Tom didn’t bother to stop and glance behind him to find out.

Fifty feet in front of him, he could barely make out a dog-sized toad rapidly shifting color between dark and neon colors in order to signal him. Tom put his head down and sprinted, leaning down and snatching the squishy demon off the ground. A leather bag came up with her, dangling from the familiar’s grasp.

“~!” Tom heard shouting behind him, seemingly in his direction, but he didn’t bother looking over his shoulder. Maximum speed was the name of the game here.

The orchard behind him lit up, and for a moment, Tom thought he was going to get engulfed in a fiery explosion...but other than a little heat on the back of his neck, nothing happened. Tom kept running.

He ran until his lungs started burning, then he kept going, angling to the south. Cars represented civilization and safety to Tom, but not to these guys.

As he jogged, a cougar caught up with him easily, spitting a crypt into Suzie’s bag.

Together, the three of them gained distance and traveled along the road until they were able to catch a ride from a passerby.

Suzie pretended to be a backpack, and Mr. Fluffybottom hid in the ditch until the doors were closed, then followed the car through the fields.

After introductions were made between Tom and the driver, Tom glanced inside Suzie’s claw-marked purse, his eyes widening.

That’s five-star service, Mr. Fluffybottom, Tom thought, addressing the skeleton cougar sprinting tirelessly alongside them as he spotted four crypts, his soul engine…and Carol’s ring.