I pushed my way through the metal freezer door, fully expecting to step out into a kitchen or maybe a school cafeteria. That sort of fit with what I was expecting of a level called the Everlasting Suburbs. I was willing to bet dollars to donuts that there were at least a few school zones. But nope. I was dead wrong. Instead, I stepped out into the cramped confines of an ice cream truck. One of those old-school boxy ones from the late eighties or early nineties.

  There were stainless steel counters, but the interior itself was a muted yellow color, which was a dead ringer for the awful wallpaper in the lobby. Additional rectangular refrigeration units lined the wall opposite the large sliding glass window where the attendant would serve ice cream to all their prospective kids lined up outside.

  Except there were no kids, and from the look of things, this ice cream truck hadn’t seen any action for a decade or more.

  There were stains everywhere and patches of black mold clung to the corners and inched along the ceiling. Pieces of broken glass, courtesy of several busted beer bottles, crunched underfoot as I took a few tentative steps forward to make room for the others. Odd, snaking vines that looked almost like fleshy veins crawled over the countertops and curled around the seat and steering wheel at the front of the truck.

  A rancid stink, even worse than the stench in the Sales Siren lair, radiated from the freezer units. It smelled like rotten meat mixed with burnt hair. I’d had a buddy die in Iraq, blown to pieces by a daisy-chained IED left on the side of the road outside Ramadi, and seeing it happen over and over again left me feeling queasy to my stomach. As awful as the ensuing carnage was—and it was fucking horrendous—the smell was the thing I’d never been able to shake. This was just like that, only worse, somehow.

  The odor crawled into my nose like a living creature, and I found it harder to think. As though my thoughts were dull around the edges.

  “Mein Gott and I thought the Howlers reeked,” Jakob said, stepping through the door behind me, his nose wrinkled in disgust. “What do you think died in here, hmm?”

  “No clue, but I’m pretty sure whatever it is, it’s inside that ice cream freezer,” I said, hooking a thumb toward the rectangular box pushed up against the wall.

  The fridge was off-white with colorful stickers plastered across its surface. Serendipity Swirls, Frosty Fantasy Creamery, Polar Pals Crunch Cones. They all looked like ice cream brands, though none I’d ever heard of before.

  “You’re welcome to check,” I offered, while shuffling over to the driver’s compartment, “though you’d have to pay me in gold bricks to open that thing up.”

  “No, I think not. We Cendrals have a much better sense of smell than humans and this is already overwhelming. I wonder what happened here? This is all much more… widerlich than I remember,” he remarked with a grimace. “My time here is fuzzy, but I remember everything being clean. Almost spotless. Perhaps the Blight has spread?” he offered in answer to his own question, though he didn’t really sound convinced.

  “No idea,” I replied with a shrug. “And honestly, I don’t really care. I don’t want to get dragged into another bullshit mission like we did with the Howlers. Let’s just keep it simple. Grind some levels, loot some bodies, and find the next kiosk. In and out, quick and easy.”

  I dropped into the driver’s seat, which was upholstered with faded, multicolored polka-dots, and found the keys were still in the ignition. That was interesting. The derelict vehicle looked as though it’d been sitting here, abandoned and unused, for years, but I figured it didn’t hurt to try. I mashed the brake and turned the keys over. The engine rumbled to life with a guttural growl, followed by the distorted crackle of an old timey Ice Cream jingle, blaring through a pair of external loudspeakers.

  Oh shit.

  I fumbled with the key and killed the engine, cutting the music off abruptly, though I was afraid the damage was already done. As I focused on the steering column, a prompt swam into view.

  The truck was an Artifact, because of course it fucking was.

  Twilight Treats Ice Cream Truck

  Rare Artifact

  Type: Enchanted Vehicle

  Cost: 15 Miles / 1 Relic Shard

  Most kids end up with a part-time summer job. Maybe they work at the rec-center as a bright-eyed lifeguard or pick up shifts at a fast-food joint. A few get a paper route while others work weekends at the local movie theater. Then there’s the neighborhood ice cream truck… Seemingly, the perfect summer job for a teen, yet invariably it’s always a middle-aged man with thinning hair and dead eyes slinging cones from behind the counter.

  His name is usually Gary or Dave or Stu and he always reminds you of your best friend’s divorced dad who says he’s fine, but definitely isn’t.

  If you’ve found yourself behind the wheel of this bad boy, you’ve clearly made some poor life choices and things have gone horrendously wrong. I’d say I feel bad for you, but let’s be real: you probably deserve this awful fate. On the plus, this is one mean machine. Instead of running on gasoline like the pitiful 2004 Ford Fiesta you probably drive, this thing runs on the power of shattered dreams—err, I mean Relic Shards.

  Yep, just pop a few into the Shard Port and BAM! You’re good to go.

  This tale has been unlawfully obtained from Royal Road. If you discover it on Amazon, kindly report it.

  And go you shall, because this thing has a beastly engine block and one helluva need for speed. Which you’ll absolutely need to outrun the legion of screaming crotch goblins who will come wriggling out of the woodwork when you fire this thing up and the Ice Cream Jingle starts blaring over the loudspeakers. The Kannibal Kids sure do love their ice cream, and they are hungry, hungry, hungry.

  “Wonderful. So much for any advantage of surprise we might have held,” Temperance said in cold judgement as I waved away the Artifact description.

  “Guys, I don’t want to concern anyone unduly,” Croc added while staring out the serving window with a very concerned expression on its rubbery face, “but it looks like we’ve got company headed right for us. And there are a lot of ’em.”

  “Screw me sideways,” I grumbled, scrambling from the driver’s seat, then squeezing by Temperance, so I could get a good look at what was coming.

  The serving window was streaked with rust brown smudges, which may or may not have been dried blood, and so much caked on grime that it was almost impossible to see through. I yanked the window open with the power of my mind and finally got my first good look of floor twenty-four.

  We were in a sprawling residential neighborhood, flat as an ironing board, which was the kind of place you might find in any suburban area across the American Midwest. Cookie cutter two story houses stretched off in either direction, hemmed in by neatly manicured lawns. Tiny sapling trees, freshly planted and too young to provide any real semblance of shade lined the sidewalks. Like the bizarre ice cream truck, however, everything about those houses were wrong.

  Hell, everything about the entire neighborhood was wrong.

  Problem was, I couldn’t exactly put my finger on what or why. It was just some core, gut feeling that screamed at me like a gibbering chimp, angrily hurling feces. A hazy sheen seemed to coat everything, making it hard for me to focus. Almost as if the landscape itself didn’t want to be seen. The sky overhead was deep crimson, the color of a fresh nosebleed. When I squinted and really tried to look at the houses dotting the road, they didn’t really look like houses at all, but rather fleshy, house-shaped growths protruding from the ground.

  I shuddered at the notion and the terrible images seemed to swim out of focus again, replaced by a legion of unobtrusive and unremarkable homes. It was like my eyes were refusing to work while my mind was actively rejecting the horrors it saw.

  That’s when I heard the faint sound of bells.

  Ring-ring. Ring-ring.

  It wasn’t the ring of a doorbell or the thunderous chime of church bells tolling the hour. This was the soft, unmistakable trill of bicycle bells. Dozens of them. The kind little kids liked to mount on their handlebars.

  The sound brought back a sudden flood of nostalgic memories.

  Me and my brother tearing across the sidewalks, sweat beading on our foreheads as the scorching July sun beat down on us like a hammer. Except we didn’t give a shit about the heat, because we were just kids and the only thing that mattered was that school was out for another month and we were on our way to Nick McCready’s house. Nick had a whole bunch of left over bottle rockets from the 4th and we loved to shoot ’em at each other from the ends of old beer bottles.

  My brother even had a special rig mounted to his bars so he could fire them while riding through the neighborhood.

  The memory hit so hard that I swayed on my feet, and when the moment finally passed, I blinked a few times and had to steady myself against the counter. What the hell was that? I wondered, shaking my head before refocusing on the encroaching threat.

  Riding toward us was a gang of what I assumed were children. Most were on bikes, though a few moved along on scooters or roller skates.

  They were still too far off to see clearly, but even at a distance I could tell Croc was right. There were a lot of ’em. Twenty? Could be as many as thirty. Enough that I knew we were in a metric ass-load of trouble. Clearly, these creatures weren’t in any way deterred by our Titles, which meant they were all at least level twelve or higher. And since we were on the twenty fourth floor, I was guessing it might be a lot higher.

  Even with our upgrades, we might not come out alive. Not if they rushed us all at once.

  I quickly consulted my mini-map and noted that the approaching kids weren’t marked the bright red of enemies; instead, they were a cool white. Neutral. It was possible they were human, though I doubted it. The fact that they were white, however, told me they weren’t inherently hostile. Not yet, anyway, though that could change in a heartbeat.

  “Alright, what do we do here?” I asked, turning away from the window.

  “Ach du meine Güte,” Jakob grumbled. “I was really hoping we wouldn’t have to use these so quickly.”

  He pulled an elixir from his coat pocket and shoved it rudely into my hands, then quickly handed identical potions to both Temperance and Croc. Unlike the elixirs and potions that the store generated, these didn’t look like Zima bottles or cans of soda. They were glass test tubes, quirked with rubber stoppers, and crudely labeled using masking tape and a sharpie. The potion was sludgy brown in appearance, and I could make out the words Cognition Booster in Jakob’s blocking writing.

  “What is this, pray tell?” Temp asked, shaking the vial with extreme skepticism.

  “A special brew of my own design. Although the inhabitants of this floor can be physically dangerous, the greatest threat they pose is to the mind.” Jakob tapped one finger against his temple. “They emit powerful psionic auras that can have devastating long-term effects on the psyche. It is quite possible they will not attack us. Not at first, and not directly.

  “They play a longer game here,” he continued. “Their attacks are less overt but far more insidious. This”—he shook the vial—“will temporarily boost Grit and should help inoculate us against the contagion they carry.” He paused and grimaced. “At least, I hope so. I haven’t had an opportunity to test it yet, so there’s no telling how effective it will be. Still, it is the best hope we have. Quickly, now. Zum Wohl.” He popped his vial and threw it back in one long pull.

  I examined the elixir with the same skepticism Temperance seemed to have.

  Gross Looking Mystery Brew

  Uncommon Elixir

  Type: One-Time Use

  It’s brown, sludgy, and gross looking. I’ve got no idea what’s in here. Could be mud or literal shit. Hope you trust whoever made this stuff…

  That didn’t exactly inspire me with great confidence, but I did trust Jakob.

  The Cendral had saved my ass more times than I could count, and he was the only one who’d survived an encounter with the twenty-fourth floor. With a grimace, I chugged the vial. I was pleasantly surprised to find the sludge didn’t taste half as bad as it looked. A little bitter, like a cup of day-old coffee, with just the faintest whiff of dark licorice. I slipped the empty vial into my toolbelt, then wiped my mouth clean with the back of one hand.

  A moment later, the goop landed in my stomach like a shot of Everclear and a comforting warmth spread outward from my belly and along my arms and legs. I blinked a few times as the legion of bicycle bells chimed again. The bikes were so close I could hear the crunch of rubber on asphalt and the squeak and squeal of brakes. I mentally prepared myself to Hydro Blast these little shitheels into the next century, but paused when I heard the sweet, chipper voice of a child.

  “Heya, mister? We’d like to buy some ice cream if you’re open.”