Wasteland Warlords Episode 3: Chapter 8 - Breakfast of Champions

Before they headed out, Diebolt gave Clay a scarf covered in anime girls and books and moons with the express purpose of delivering it to Mogrifa.

“She seems to have taken a liking to you, perhaps for your appreciation for books,” the frogman said. “She may not set your hair on fire if you’re the one to tell her I’m sorry about her birthday and that I already had her present, I just lost track of the date.”

Like Diebolt predicted, neither of the Mogrifas—or the two halves of her?—set Clay’s hair on fire when he handed over the scarf and the message. The old one still acted sour as an unripe lemon, but before he left, she tied the scarf over her wiry gray hair and smoothed it with what seemed like reluctant appreciation.

The whole thing made Clay think of those couples in high school who were always fighting but never broke up and usually got married the day after graduation.

“I think it’s cute,” Alex said as they huddled together and watched the campfire.

Clay couldn’t agree. “Sure, if you like giant hassles. Too much drama’s a big turnoff.”

“Well, you got the perfect girl on the first shot,” she teased.

“You mean the perfect girl got me.”

“Hey, you asked me out.”

“Yeah, after months of this pretty girl following me around dropping hints.”

She laughed. “I’m just lucky you finally looked up from your library books.”

In a rare turn of events, they were alone for the night. Joe and Chonk had gone off drinking with an owlbear he’d befriended over previously owned campers and their mechanical problems. Griff was last seen headed for the Lady of the Sooq’s battle wagon with a bloom from a prickly pear. According to the slick old weed, he and the aging cat lady had made a date for dinner and cards with another couple of oldsters from the nomadic market.

Clay and Alex weren’t wasting their privacy. While Clay had been delivering Diebolt’s calamitously late birthday present, Alex had bought a bottle of Myrtleberry Homebrew from a one-legged pixie running a potion stall and mobile brewery.

In their quiet little tent circle, they sipped the dark purple wine from a dented canteen bottom and an old coffee mug with a broken handle, watched the fire crackle, and talked about everything but what tomorrow might bring. Alex turned grim once and a shiver ran down her back—either reliving what had happened to Bacon Bits or looking ahead to what might happen to the rest of them—but Clay put his arm around her and hugged her close, and pretty soon they headed inside, leaving the bottle of Homebrew half drunk by the fire while they enjoyed being alive for at least one more night.

***

Clay and Alex woke up the next morning before the sun. In quiet companionship, they revived the fire and started gearing up in the predawn gray.

Joe joined them before too long. Clad in his sleeveless flannel and jorts—no tin pants yet—he climbed out of his tent and stretched, letting out the longest, loudest jaw-popping yawn. Clay was surprised half the Sooq didn’t lean out their camper doors and yell at them to keep it down. But maybe the elderly retirees closest to their little circle of tents hadn’t turned on their hearing aids yet.

Joe was chipper as always, seemingly untouched by his late night out. Chonk not so much. The little mechacoon cussed his owner in Racoon as he crawled out of their tent. His fur sticking out in different directions, and his beady eyes were bloodshot.

“Chased beer with wine,” Joe said affectionately scratching the little coon’s bedhead. Chonk shoved Joe’s hand off and slumped down by the fire. “He got into that bottle you two left out here—guzzled the whole thing when we got back from Buzz’s. I told him, ‘beer after wine and you’ll wish you were dyin’,’ but the greedy little drunk wasn’t having any life lessons last night.”

By the fire, Chonk grumbled and crossed his arm and hedge trimmer.

“Don’t worry, Chonky old buddy, we’ll find you some ibuprofen,” Joe promised. “Friends don’t let friends go into battle hungover.”

Clay dug a bottle of Vitamin I out of his ruck for the furry little lush, then got back to helping Alex take their tent down. Meanwhile, Joe was busy banging around with pots and pans, making enough noise to wake even the old folk with their hearing aids off.

“I know y’all are dyin’ to get a move on it, but let’s not be too hasty now,” he said, slapping a frying pan on the coals. “We need to start things off right, with the most important meal of the day. I’m making a big ol’ mess of scrambled eggs.”

Alex raised an eyebrow. “Where did you get eggs at out here?”

“Those Squatches had a bunch on them.” Joe held up a dark-shelled egg the size of his fist. It sparkled with what looked like flecks of glitter. “Astral Condor Eggs. I looted a bunch of ’em.” He cracked the one he was holding into the pan, sending up a sizzle. “They’re insanely good for you. Twenty-four hours of lowered Stamina costs, and probably chock full of nutrients we’ve never heard of like Alpha-5s. Eggs always are.”

Clay was just glad they looked like regular eggs inside and weren’t green or purple polka dotted or something. He’d eat them either way, but it was nice every now and then to be able to relax and not wonder the whole time he was chewing whether they would all get some kind of weird food poisoning from the otherworldly fare.

Besides, anybody could cook eggs. Surely Joe wouldn’t Joe those up.

Joe flipped the pan with a flick of his wrist and dropped half of the fluffy yellow Astral Condor scramble into the ashes.

“Five second rule!” With his fork, he scooped the pieces out of the ashes and back into the pan.

Clay exchanged nervous glances with Alex, then settled down by the fire to read Haphazard Cast. With everything they needed in the buggy and ready to go, he had time to learn the spell. He was so close; he could feel it.

After five minutes’ study, the spell unfolded in his brain. The Intelligence boost from his first difficult but not impossible labor had made understanding all the crazy symbols and diagrams in the weathered tome a breeze. If they survived Bacon Bits’s rescue run, he’d have to revisit the Mogrifas and see how many of their advanced spellbooks he could learn.

Griff showed up not long after Clay had tucked away the tome, just as Joe was doling out his gourmet breakfast onto their mismatched plates.

The old weed blinked in surprise at the first bite. “Huh.” He forced down the bite. “Thought maybe they had pepper on ’em.”

“You thought wrong,” Alex said, pushing her eggs around her plate with a bent fork. In addition to not being a morning person, she wasn’t big on Joe’s particular brand of cooking. Not since his Mac’n’Spam in green bean water experiment had made her sick. “It’s ash.”

“Hey, the little imperfections are what give artistic creations character,” Joe insisted. “These ain’t your run of the mill, cookie-cutter omelets that any goober off the street could make—they’re special. The secret ingredient is love.”

To prove his point, Joe shoveled in a huge forkful and immediately started coughing on a pocket of ash. He chased it with a spluttering gulp of water.

“See?” He coughed. “Delicious, delicious love. Now eat up, all of you. We’ve got a big day ahead and we need our reduced Stamina costs.”

Clay couldn’t argue with that. Didn’t stop him from scraping a bunch of the ash off his eggs before digging in, though.

***

With the most important meal of the day done, they loaded into the dune buggy. There wasn’t a lot of talk as they drove. The weight of the fight ahead seemed to get heavier every mile they drove. Bacon Bits was counting on them. Failure wouldn’t only mean leaving her trapped and enslaved to the lizardman dungeon lord, it could mean all of their lives.

The dark mood held as they parked on the viaduct overlooking the Haunt Topic. The sun was just peeking over the horizon, showing the Dayglo skeleton rave in full swing in the cemetery down below. Except now there were twice the number of spooky hipsters gyrating to the music, and all of them were concentrated around the weeping angel mausoleum.

Clearly, the Voodoo Daddy had learned from their first failed attack and shored up the defenses on the secret entrances.

“So much for sneaking in the back way again,” Joe said.

“Good.” Alex scowled down at the obsidian plantation house and cracked her knuckles. “I’m ready to bust some faces for Bacon Bits. No sneaking required.”

Clay studied the sprawling plantation house without comment. Another new feature graced the rotting wraparound porch—a pair of birdlike creatures in Victorian plague masks, wearing long black pleather coats.

The plague doctors crossed paths in front of the rickety screen door, thick-soled boots clumping on the wood. They stalked to the end of the porch, spun on their heels, and stalked back the other way, then did it all over again. Their route and their timing never varied. In theory, it should be an easy ingress.

But seeing them put a bad feeling in Clay’s gut. It wasn’t just their creepy garb or the glassy alien plague masks obscuring their facial features; it was the fact that for there to only be two of them patrolling the front entrance—when, by contrast, Saurian had posted a ton of Hauntsters in the cemetery—meant the plague docs had been chosen for their quality, not their quantity. They must be packing some serious power.

Clay might have the new Wyrd West tattoos and the Quickdraw set slung around his hips, but those weren’t going to do Bacon Bits any good if they couldn’t even get in the front door.

“All right, step one, get through those plague doctors without raising the alarm,” he said.

“Then we’re gonna need this.” Joe produced a rusty can of WD-40 from a compartment on his mechsuit. “I never met a screen door that didn’t talk back. If we want quiet, you better let me deal with ’er.”

Clay nodded. “We’ll cover you while you handle the door.” He pulled out the Camera Obscura and glanced from Griff to Alex to Chonk. “No attacks while we’re Obscured—not unless you absolutely have to. The less attention we attract getting inside, the more ammo and potions we can save for the Voodoo Daddy.” He received a round of affirmatives. “Alright, everybody squeeze in nice and tight.”

With a flash, the Jaeger squad was Obscured and the countdown timer started ticking madly away toward zero. Silently, they made their way down from the overpass. The razor-flowers on the carriage gate had been doubled, too, almost hiding the black iron beneath their climbing vines.

Clay’s shoulders tensed up as they approached. What if Saurian had guessed how they had slipped past his defenses the first time and found some sort of workaround for the Obscurement?

But the razor-flowers continued hissing and waving in their prescribed patterns, giving no indication they could see the intruders. One by one, they slipped over the gate undetected and started up the cobblestone path.

At the bottom of the front steps, Clay signaled for everybody to halt.

Not ten feet in front of them, the plague doctors continued on their same patrol route, crossing paths in front of the screen door and turning back at the edge of the porch. Up close, Clay could see that each one carried a slender length of wood similar to his Lesser Wand of Inferno. Except where his had fiery red etchings, theirs had sickly yellow carvings.

Waiting for them to pass in front of the screen before moving, Clay waved a hand and led the way up the front porch, picking and choosing his steps as carefully and quickly as he could. The ancient-looking boards stayed miraculously silent, even under Joe’s cumbersome mechsuit weight. At the door, he, Griff, and Alex formed a protective semicircle around Joe and Chonk as they got to work.

The WD40 went on with barely a hiss. Joe eased the door open a fraction of an inch, then stopped, maybe spoken to by some unfathomable rust-magician’s instinct. He applied more lubricant, then wiggled the door back and forth a little to work it deep inside the hinges.

Satisfied, he gingerly swung the door wide.

It glided open on silent hinges.

Joe shot Clay and the others a thumbs-up, then reached for the cracked porcelain knob on the inner door. It turned a quarter turn, then stopped with a hair-raising clunk. Locked.

At the noise, both plague docs spun around, firing off sickly yellow bursts of noxious fog toward the door at the same time, visible target or no. Clay conjured a Shield of Minor Warding around them all, absorbing the brunt of the toxic-looking blasts on his pale blue barrier.

The Minor Warding stopped the shots, but when the second the plague landed, the shield fizzled and winked out. Obviously, the docs were slinging some serious power if two spells could deal out 250 points worth of raw damage in a matter of seconds. Probably why the lizardman put them on guard duty in the first place.

Clay couldn’t let them get off another shot. He didn’t have the hit points to survive a direct assault like that and he also didn’t have the magicka to stay on the back foot. He needed to act and he needed to do it now.

“Joe, get that door open!” he yell-whispered, hoping the Hauntsters wouldn’t hear him over their blaring music. “Griff, take out the other doc.”

Without waiting for a reply, Clay grabbed his Kbar and sprinted all-out toward the closest plague doctor, pinning its wand arm to its pleather-covered chest like a handgun and stabbing the creature in the side of the neck repeatedly as he forced it backward.

The doc didn’t want to go down, and a frisson of panic buzzed through Clay’s mind as he realized that if they kept this up until they made it off the porch, the rest of his squad would be outside the Camera Obscura’s 30-ft range, exposed for the Hauntsters and any other hostiles to see and raise the alarm.

Just as they hit the edge of the rotting porch, the flaming flail end of Alex’s kusarigama whipped around the doc’s leg. The log chain snapped tight, and down went the dying creature. With his enhanced Dex, Clay caught the doc and brought him down soft, finishing him off with a final knife to the throat.

When he turned back, Griff was pulling a shortsword from the other plague doc’s mask. The old weed had managed to put his threat down without drawing the attention of the Hauntsters who were still shambling and gyrating in the cemetery.

Holding up a wait a second finger, Griff bent down and grabbed something off the corpse.

A skeleton key on a chain. He came back and stuck the key in the lock.

The damn thing still wouldn’t turn.

Joe waved his hands to get the old man’s attention, then tapped his chest. I got this.

Putting his shoulder into the door, he jiggled the knob and door and at the same time he turned the key. The tumblers clunked open, and the door swung inward.

On the other side, a dozen pleather-wearing plague docs and a dozen glowing neon grubs stopped what they were doing and spun around to face the open but ostensibly empty doorway.

Overhead, a black candle chandelier dripped wax into the foyer.

“Close your eyes and hit the deck!” Clay yelled at his family as he cast Control Lights.

The candles blazed like a thousand suns as he turned up the intensity on the flames. Muffled cries of alarm and pain sounded as the makeshift flare momentarily blinded the inhabitants, but the docs all flung their sickly plague spells willy-nilly anyway, and the grubs barfed out brilliantly colored acid, heedless of the fact that they couldn’t see.

Clay cast another Minor Warding in the doorway, blocking that first wave of damage and using up the last of his magicka at the same time. Darkness washed in at the edges of his vision and his legs trembled and gave out beneath him. He dropped to one knee, groping with numb fingers for a magicka potion.

The foyer strobed blue and shook with a deafening boom as Griff lobbed an arcane bomb into the blinded creatures’ midst.

“Look out!” Alex said, leaping over Clay’s shoulder and into the thick of the combat.

Bertha roared and Chonk’s hedge trimmer gave a high-pitched yowl as Joe and the mechacoon followed hot on her heels.

Screaming, howling, crashing chaos filled the entryway, courtesy of the Jaeger squad.

So much for stealthing their way past those first couple rooms. Clay’s hand finally closed around a magicka potion. He gulped it down, then raised his M4 as the world finally stopped spinning like a top.

Looked like they were going in loud.