Wasteland Warlords Episode 4: Chapter 7 - Debts Due

That night, the Jaeger squad bedded down in a maintenance room the Brothers of the Dew used as a rec room. The space was small, but surprisingly well supplied and thankfully didn’t smell as overpoweringly of sewer as the rest of the brothers’ temporary home did.

Griff stretched out on a broken-down recliner that was leaking stuffing, while Joe and Chonk spread out their sleeping bag under an old ping pong table with chewed corners. Bacon Bits swam in a circle three times above the tabletop before finally settling down to sleep across the saggy center of its loose, fraying net.

Clay and Alex squeezed into the last available space between the back of Griff’s chair and a leaning bookshelf holding stacks of board games with taped-up boxes and missing pieces and a handful of dog-eared romance paperbacks. They didn’t have enough room to stretch out their double sleeping bag all the way, but with Alex half draped over Clay, it wasn’t so bad.

Alex dropped off to sleep in no time, exhausted by the hours of accelerated Dao of the Dew training. Probably didn’t hurt that she had a clear conscience because she was doing everything she could to follow the path the brothers had set out for her. What she had to do was so damned cut and dry compared with what Clay was expected to do. He envied that clarity as much as he did her insta-sleep.

In spite of the pitch-black of the underground room, Clay could barely get his eyes to shut. He kept seeing that Incant Cassidy ripping the healing potion away from that settler. People were being exploited, probably killed, so these jerks could make a quick buck, and he was supposed to do nothing. Worse than nothing—he was supposed to sit around with his thumb up his ass thinking about some idiotic soda.

Clay lay awake listening to the snoring duet coming from Chonk and Bacon Bits and the occasional creak of Griff shifting on the recliner. From inside his ruck, an extra clip for his M4 poked him in the back of the head. Alex’s warmth seeped into his side. Her head rested on his bicep, making the arm all numb and prickly.

At least part of him was falling asleep.

Maybe if he gave “meditating on the divine elixir” another shot he’d feel good enough about working on his path that he could finally pass out. But when he concentrated on Mountain Dew, all he could think of was those collector’s glasses of brilliant green MD Classic in Diebolt Neiderdorf’s cramped little living room. And that led to thinking about how they were still in the red with the frogman. They had the collectible Squishies from the Haunt Topic in his ruck, ready and waiting for their future home in the D of the former Hollywood sign.

It sucked having unpaid debts hanging over your head, constantly nagging at you, eating away at every bit of peace in your life. He’d gotten more than enough of that while Alex was sick, back when they’d leveraged everything they owned just to get her a healing potion and ended up not only losing it all but finding out that healing potions didn’t even permanently cure diseases, they just temporarily restored health.

With a sinking feeling, Clay realized the healing potion had probably even come from the same assholes who’d taken over the Temple of the Dew.

Dammit, he had to get out there and do something. He couldn’t just lie around waiting for Lightning Fury to strike while people were being enslaved.

Switching over to his thermal vision, he eased Alex’s head off his tingling arm and slipped out of their double sleeping bag. More than likely she wouldn’t have noticed him getting up in her dead sleep, but he kept as quiet as possible as he grabbed his rucksack and M4. Gear in hand, he slipped through the thick darkness toward the cool blue of the door.

“Headin’ out?” Griff’s low voice was almost lost in the noise from the Greater Blue Wyrm and mechacoon’s snoring. The old weed’s orange-and-red form was still stretched out in the recliner, hands laced together over his narrow old man chest, but the yellow shape of his wide-brimmed hat had been tipped back as if to look out from under it at Clay.

“Can’t sleep,” Clay said, shrugging. He felt a little stupid for the motion, then he remembered that Griff could see in the dark. “I figured I’d go pay off our debt to Diebolt while we’re holed up here.”

“Gotta sneak out in the dead of night for that? You can’t go when everybody’s awake to see ya?”

Clay shifted feet. “Diebolt’s been around these parts at least as long as the abbot and his buddies. While I’m there, I might ask him for some info on the Temple of the Dew, see if he knows any back ways in or weaknesses. Just in case this Mountain Dew Enlightenment thing doesn’t pan out.”

Griff chuckled softly. “Can’t say as I blame you, lad. I never was a fan of the ‘wait and let the universe reveal it to you’ style myself.” The recliner creaked. “Fair long way to Hollywood, though.”

Clay got what the old man was saying: they could’ve dropped the Squishies off when they’d come through LA or waited until they were headed back to do it. Either one would’ve made more sense than driving all the way back from Malibu. But he felt like this was a step in the right direction, even if it was going behind the backs of the Brothers of the Dew.

“Fair point. There’s a good chance I won’t be back by morning,” Clay said, slipping the M4’s sling over his head. “Could you let Alex and Joe know where I am so they don’t freak out?”

“Will do, lad,” Griff promised.

Clay realized belatedly just how much a simple gesture like that from his daughter would’ve meant to the old weed, how much pain and bewilderment and hopeless searching it might have saved him.

“Thanks,” he said awkwardly.

“Yep. Watch out for yourself,” Griff said. “Wasteland’s a dangerous place—more so when you’re on your own. Take it from an old weed who was out there by himself for too long before a buncha tumbleweeds rolled into camp.” With that, he leaned his head back and settled his hat over his face once more.

Clay nodded into the darkness anyway. He wasn’t going to die out there on some stupid collectible-delivering mission; he had something Griff hadn’t had since Cassidy and Rhett took it away—a family to come back to.

***

It was just after midnight when Clay slipped out of the sewers. Apparently, the Brothers of the Dew liked to turn in early.

He was careful to keep Obscured on the drive. He saw hardly any wasteland creatures; either the local monsters were on the verge of extinction or they had learned to hide out around the clock. On the outskirts of Malibu, however, Clay came around a sharp corner and almost ran down a pair of tired and tense-looking settlers scouring the place for something to kill and loot. His head snapped forward on his shoulders as he slammed on the brakes.

“Place is overhunted,” a big guy with more beard than face grumbled. “We’ll never meet the quota.”

“Devin saw those tire tracks out by the dunes,” said a wiry kid who looked like he ought to be stressing over pimples and pop quizzes in high school, not stalking monsters in the IZ. “Nobody’d get this far out if they didn’t have at least some magical items.”

“Are you back to suggesting we start taking down humans?” snapped Beardface. “I’m not a murderer, Marly, and I seriously doubt you are either.”

The kid blew his top. “Then you tell Rhett why we came back empty-handed again! Hey, it was nice knowing ya! Tell Lyle and Jen and Derrick and the others I said hi when you see them again—or what’s left of them!”

With the Camera Obscura covering him, they had no idea Clay was there. He let out a long slow breath and got the buggy moving again. While Beardface tried to snap his hysterical hunting partner out of it, Clay skirted around them on the sidewalk, careful not to drive on the sandy ground alongside. That was something they should’ve thought of—the Camera Obscura hid their party from enemy lookouts, but its item text had never said anything about hiding their tracks after they’d left. Something to keep in mind for the future.

The rest of the trip went considerably smoother. The area around LA was a hotbed of activity—the weird little kokopellis playing their eerie flute tunes, herds of enormous rhinocorns crunching on Joshua trees, and Crocturnals coming up out of their UV-proof lairs for the night. But since most of the activity came from the monsters allied with the Warlord of the West, Clay wasn’t in any danger of being attacked. A vicious-looking naga drinking a mug of coffee or hot tea on a street corner even shot him a nod when he stopped to renew his Obscurement.

The Warlord of the West might’ve acted like an overgrown teenager, but Clay had to hand it to him, PwnrBwner kept his territory peaceful. No wonder he’d been pissed when Clay set off that powder keg between the black widow and the king kong crooner.

The moon was high and bright when Clay made it to the Hollywood sign. Drone shots of the OLL burning had been a favorite of the news bloggers back during the Merge, and you could still see the soot marks on the H and Y. The WOOD had somehow escaped damage—maybe because Diebolt had already secretly set up shop in the D.

Under the moonlight, the remaining letters glowed like a line of alphabetical wraiths. Clay shut off the dune buggy and headed for the end of the sign, where the D was shifting back and forth between its illusory flatness and its true depth. Hopefully Diebolt wouldn’t be too upset at the late-night visit.

As Clay reached up to knock, the door swung open wide, revealing the lumpy little frogman.

“Clay Jaeger!” Diebolt grabbed Clay’s outstretched fist with both slimy green hands and shook it heartily. “You got my invitation!”

Clay hesitated. “What invitation?”

“To my all-night classical Mojave Comics Universe movie marathon.” He leaned around Clay to look out into the night. “Where is your family? I sent the invitation via Long Distance Divination to Mogrifa just yesterday. Didn’t she say that you were all invited? Well, we did have a bad connection, she must not have heard me. Come in, come in!” Diebolt ushered him inside excitedly. “Two can have just as much fun watching the MCU movies as ten can.”

Clay ducked through the low doorway after the frogman and absently rubbed at the back of his neck. “Actually, I’m not here to watch movies. Mogrifa might’ve tried to tell you over your, uh, Divination, but we left the Sooq a few days ago with the Warlord of the West…”

He felt bad admitting that this wasn’t a social visit because the guy seemed genuinely happy to see company, but Diebolt waved his apologies off and listened intently, bulging eyes shining as Clay filled the frogman in on the quest they’d been given by PwnrBwner, the Incants who’d taken over the Temple, and the Brothers of the Dew hiding and brewing their precious soda in the sewers. He mentioned Alex and Joe’s paths but glossed over the trouble he was having with his own as he opened his ruck.

“Anyway, since I had some downtime,” he said, holding out the collection of TTIGRAS Squishies, “I figured I’d drop off your payment for the Wyrd West Quickdraw Set. They didn’t have any of that Veldora Tempest guy, so we just grabbed what we could find.”

Diebolt sighed. “I expected as much. I suppose I’ll just have to find it on eBay like everyone else.” He started pawing through the Squishies. “Have it. Have it. Have three of it.” He gasped and snatched an autumn-colored one with a horn jutting out of it from the bag. “The Fall Festival Shion! Excellent! This is a satisfactory substitution for Veldora.” Raising one hand ceremoniously and hugging the Squishy to his round belly with the other, the frogman bellowed, “I declare the three moderately difficult but not impossible labors of Clay Jaeger complete!”

The influx of Experience points from the quest wasn’t quite enough to push Clay over the edge to the next level, but the boost did put him within spitting distance of Level 9.

“You can keep the rest,” Clay said. Even if he hadn’t given up collecting anime stuff when his mom sold off his Total Metal Alchemistminis, he couldn’t afford to pack around a lot of junk just for its nostalgia factor. Every bit of gear you had out in the wasteland had to serve a purpose or it was just extra weight dragging you down. “Maybe you could sell them on eBay if you don’t want them. Fund that Veldora Squishy.”

“Capital idea!” Diebolt unloaded the extras and placed them carefully into an airtight plastic bag for protection. “Now that we have attended to business, Clay Jaeger, how about some MCU action?” he said, shuffling toward the living room. “I have popcorns of the kettle, caramel and extra butter varieties—pick your poison!”

“I don’t really have time to watch a movie,” Clay said apologetically as he followed Diebolt into the cramped sitting room. “But I was hoping to get a little advice while I was here.” He paused, glanced at the floor, and ran the toe of his boot along the fuzzy carpet. “I told you about what Joe and Alex are up to, but I didn’t mention what the brothers have me doing. It’s this whole Oracle of the Deep Mysteries thing. And honestly, I just don’t get the Paths of the Dew thing. I mean, Alex and Joe are in their element, but I just can’t figure out why in the hell I’d want to spend time meditating on Mountain Dew—no offense—”

“None taken! It’s complete nonsense,” Diebolt said, completely shattering the speech Clay had spent the ride to Hollywood coming up with.