The next morning came and no one was exactly rested. A big part of that was the near miss with a dragon. The other side of this was we had crammed everyone into the vehicles. That was phenomenally cramped. Most people don’t know how rough it is to have no space for yourself. The worst bit is everything gets worse with time. The noise, the smell, and knotted tension all just fester.

  We were going to drive slower today. Taking more breaks.

  Hopefully the kids would sleep tonight.

  We were going to travel less distance anyways. The battle between the dragon and the giant’s cloud city had fucked up our path pretty bad. We tried winding our way through it, but it was too slow. We ended up backtracking three times. So we altered our course and swung wide of it. That meant when we hit our first stop. We had traveled a long way and gotten basically nowhere.

  I watched goblins milling around. It was still ruthlessly cold but everyone needed to have some space.

  “What are the odds that the dragon comes back?” I asked.

  “Depends,” Angelica said. “It and the giant’s were heading South and East. The dragon isn’t going to want to keep going that way. It doesn’t want to get too close to Zach so it is going to head north at some point. Where it turns is going to affect those odds.”

  “What was it doing out here?” I asked her quietly. People were scared and I was doing my best to not look over concerned.

  “The dragon was probably finding old towns from the world that was. A lot of them got buried in the ice after being abandoned. Items can become higher scale with age. Since this place is Rare Scale the odds are higher still. Who knows what sort of treasure is buried out here.” Angelica replied.

  Spine showed up out of the crowd.

  I nodded to him, “How’d yesterday go?”

  Spine raised his hand and tilted it side to side, “Nanny Shank let me assign the tasks to people. Seven out of ten went off without a hitch. Two of the last three got done. The last one would have been an issue but everyone got distracted.”

  “Is the last thing done?” I asked.

  “Now yeah. I spent the morning scrambling to take care of it,” He said, not happy with it.

  “That’s pretty good for a first outing,” I told him.

  “What are you talking about? I screwed up a third of it.” Spine argued.

  “Thirty percent,” I corrected. “Did all the work get done?”

  “Yeah but-” Spine started.

  “Did anyone get hurt?” I asked.

  “No,” Spine said.

  I nodded, “You know what you need to do next, right?”

  “Nope,” Spine said, shaking his head.

  “Talk with Nanny Shank, tell her what worked and what didn’t. Then get her feedback on what to do better next time,” I told him.

  He blinked at me, “Admit mistakes?”

  “You are trying to grow, not pretend to be perfect. Everyone knows you are new to this. Take the opportunity to learn as much as you can,” I said, doing my best to not sound like I was lecturing him.

  Spine considered that, “That makes a lot of sense. Thanks.”

  “Have you talked to Janky?” I asked.

  “Not today?” He said.

  I put a hand on his shoulder,“Take time for that. I think your dad is stuck trying to find us a path. He would appreciate you doing that.”

  “Will do,” Spine said. He turned and waved as he walked away, “See you next stop.”

  Once Spine was out of earshot Brunhilda shoulder-checked me. She was gentle this time and didn’t knock me down, “Look at you being a big brother and all.”

  I picked up on the hint and heft her into the truck. She didn’t like climbing. I stepped out of the way for the others and said, “He had my back when it mattered. Besides I can’t count the number of times I wished someone, anyone, would help me. So few people ever did. The thing is I want to be like those people. If I can, I want to help.”

  Our new path got us moving at an appreciable rate again. We stopped at roughly midday. I was concerned to find out that the stew shower had been upgraded. Someone had scrubbed out the interior of a fuel truck. So they could then fill its two thousand gallon tank with stew and from there fill drums. Apparently that was the one thing Spine had to scramble on. People hadn’t cleaned out the drums. So the first 126 gallons of stew had a bold diesel flavor. He was afraid the big tank hadn’t been cleaned. That would have been a huge waste.

  This is how the new terror of the Stew Crew Cab was born.

  Honestly it was a fairly ingenious creation. That central tank could fill a drum a minute give or take. That worked out to about 47 drums in an hour. Assuming each person got 8 ounces of stew. That worked out to 512 servings per barrel. So that meant this thing could produce enough food for 24,000 people in an hour. Distribution was still the hard part, but lugging a barrel was manageable. Ladling meals out from there would make cooks work but they could do it.

  Goblins were clever people. I never would have thought of that.

  The story has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the violation.

  We were looking at the three barrels that hadn’t been cleaned.

  “Should we just tip them over and clean them out?” Spine asked.

  “Probably the best answer,” I said. “What do you guys make the fuel out of?”

  Spine shrugged, “Vegetable oil, grease, and fat from mobs.”

  “Biodiesel then,” Brunhilda said. She stuck her finger into it and tasted the concoction, “So hear me out. It adds some flavor to it.”

  “Are you sure you should be doing that?” I asked.

  “I can’t be poisoned and I strongly suspect I can no longer get sick,” She said. She pulled a bowl out of her inventory and scooped out some stew.”

  Shit like this is why I am a sandwich man.

  In the end we dumped those three barrels of danger strew. Specifically because we found out that people had dubbed the barrels danger strew. I am not going to pretend I know everything about goblins, but I knew enough to understand this is how someone got food poisoning.

  I was not going to deal with that today.

  The rest of the day was concerningly uneventful. We stopped early because we hit a massive crater. Angelica had been right. Something had dug into the ice to reveal a town. The dig was a rough square, maybe a rectangle roughly three miles wide on each side. It was also about twenty feet deep. In the tremendous hole I saw the remains of a small town. I doubted the population of this place at its height ever topped a thousand. But it had a bog standard Main Street, lined with small shops. Some of the buildings were damaged but the place was mostly intact. The Dragon seemed to have taken great care not to harm the place.

  Except for one place, the graveyard. That had been reduced to a molten wreck. The dragon had slagged it.

  I had seen enough horror movies to be deeply concerned about this entire setup.

  “I think we should loot the place,” Helen said. Clearly she had never seen Phantoms.

  “Wouldn’t that anger the dragon?” Grimset asked. He nudged a small piece of ice over the side of the hole. It fell down and we heard it shatter on the exposed pavement below.

  Toad nodded, “We should simply load up and drive through the night. Better to sleep during the next morning.” Now this guy was genre savvy.

  “My scouts are working to find a path. I worry we might get ourselves cornered if we try and press on now. Plus we are getting close to the Sasquatch Dungeon. “ Philip spoke up.

  Nanny Shank lit her pipe as she puffed on it and said, “Tomorrow is going to suck.” She looked at me. “That Grond fella gave you three days right?”

  “Yeah, yesterday.” I said. Grond shouldn’t be back till the day after tomorrow.

  “Which makes this day two. I am guessing he is going to be the type to short you on time,” She said.

  That sounded pretty true. I gazed at the area, or would be better to call it an arena. “I think we should at least survey this place, but I don’t think it is a good idea to send a bunch of people down there.”

  Brand frowned at the town, “Shouldn’t we be more circumspect? This is America. That village is old, are we sure there isn’t any risk of undeath?”

  “The viral version was on the west coast,” Brunhilda said. She considered, “Whatever zed-word things that could happen would be mystical.” Her eyes glazed a moment, “I am not picking up anything beyond the normal necrotic energies.”

  “We know to decap and ash,” Helen said.

  The shadows were lengthening inside the draconic excavation sight. Small town USA was taking on a distinctly more menacing American Gothic vibe. I was mentally running through the scenarios. Option one, there was something bad down there. That meant it was all but certain to come out of that hole and wreak merry hell on us when the sun went down. So the play would be to go down there now. Option two, there wasn’t anything bad down there. This had two likely sub outcomes. A, this was a trap. In that case us messing with this could piss off the dragon or something and we should fuck off right now. Trouble was option b, it only looked like a trap. Which meant it was probably trying to scare us away. Which meant we should stay.

  As I gazed down at the still ice encrusted town. My eyes lingered on the church. The front door had been smashed open. In the dark beyond something glinted in the dimming light of the setting sun. The pinpricks of light snuffed out. The sun hadn’t moved enough for that.

  Something was down there.

  I turned to Angelica, “What do you think?”

  She’d been watching the town the whole time, “I think you and I should check that,” She pointed her spear at the church. “Everyone else should get ready for whatever spills out of there.”

  It looked like we were going with Option one. No one had any objections. Time was never on our side anyways.

  “Would you like my assistance?” Sunit asked.

  “Nah, but if it looks like we are having trouble feel free to step in,” I told him. I willed stairs into the side of the cliff. Angelica and I descended in silence.

  Abandoned houses have… I guess energy to them. Or maybe the absence of energy is the better way to describe it. On a fundamental level we all understand that a house is someone’s home. People live there. So when we see one clearly empty it feels like a drain. It isn’t right. The emptiness is like a vacuum. It’s unnatural. Seeing a town abandoned is so much worse. In order for that to happen something truly terrible must have occurred.

  Looking through the open door of a house I saw coats still on hooks and shoes in the entryway. There weren’t many cars in driveways though. People must have fled in a hurry.

  The church was one of those old timey prairie type houses of worship. It was wood construction. The outside was painted white. The roof was covered with gray shingles. A steeple on the front housed a bell. The windows were small but intricate stained glass. Plain concrete steps and a wheelchair ramp lead up to the doors. The large double doors lead into a single room with five pews and an altar and pulpit beyond them. A large plain wooden cross was on the far wall. This must have been a Protestant church. No Jesus was nailed to it.

  Angelica and I stood just in the doorway. The interior was dark. An organ was in one corner and stairs leading down were in the other. Over the door someone had scrawled in black paint “God Is Great!” Someone had later painted a red X over great and then written Gone.

  “That’s ominous,” I muttered. I looked at the inside of the kicked in door. It was scored with hundreds of bloody splintered furrows. I put my hand up to them. My hand was too big but they were clearly scratches from human hands.

  Someone had tried and failed to get out from the inside.

  We both looked at the stairs leading down.

  “You wanna head down there first?” Angelica asked.

  “Not really no,” I said reading the message above the door again.

  That was when the snow lion hit me. It was one of those great big Alphas. A good five hundred pounds of mauling feline knocked me off my feet. Angelica screamed. She was not prepared for the jump scare. I wasn’t either, frankly. To tell the truth I was relieved when I realized it was just a snow lion biting down on my neck.

  I seized the scruff of its neck and pulled it free, “You jump scaring motherfucker!” A good right hook and it was dead. I sat up expecting further attack, but none came. I turned to Angelica, “You scream?”

  “I was surprised,” She admitted. She then decided to change tracks, “And I am going to claim it was a battle cry.”

  “Tell you a secret, I would have screamed too,” I told her, getting to my feet. “The damn thing came out of nowhere.”

  We both looked around.

  “I am not going to say it,” I said.

  “Good, don’t,” Angelica agreed. Neither of us was going to say something that would no doubt cause the terror in the basement to rise up and attack us.

  Like I said, I have seen enough horror movies to know where this was going.