Chapter Five: Dollar General

  Bear had gone through the rift first, maybe inadvertently, maybe driven by curiosity and overconfidence. Once here, though, what would she have done?

  I looked down the street at the Dollar General and the donut shop and winced. She’d have gone straight for the trash cans, just like her namesakes. I hadn’t called her Bear because she was a cuddly teddy bear. Black bears in Ocala were notorious for treating human garbage as their personal all-you-can-eat buffets, and my Bear shared their tastes.

  I sniffed the air. I couldn’t smell the sugar from the donut shop, but Bear probably could. I started walking, grip tightening on the handle of my shovel.

  Where would Zelda have gone? She’d followed me in, so she would have been upset when she couldn’t find me. But Bear couldn’t have been more than a minute or two ahead of us, so Zelda could have tracked her scent easily.

  And the Unknown? Yeah, he or she, whoever they were, would probably head for the Dollar General, too. It was the obvious direction.

  I scanned the street like an escaped convict expecting the cops to appear at any second. Paranoid, maybe, but I knew there were monsters here. I just didn’t know where. Or what.

  Not mana-crazed squirrels. The rift description had said they’d be from that other planet, whatever it was called. My first alien species.

  Unless goblins counted. Or the stalker.

  That thought made me stop in my tracks. I wasn’t used to this whole magic thing, and I kept forgetting what I could do. Like not leveling up to heal in that last goblin battle. Or, now, forgetting that I could use [Pack Instinct] to teleport to Zelda.

  Use Pack Instinct to teleport to Zelda, I told the System.

  Nothing happened.

  I waited a few seconds, then looked around me, turning in a full circle, scanning the pavement, the shadows, the buildings with their faded paint and empty windows. Was Zelda here somewhere?

  I couldn’t see her. So why hadn’t [Pack Instinct] worked?

  I opened my status screen and looked at the ability’s description.

  Pack Instinct—When a soul-bonded creature is threatened, instantly teleport to within 5ft of them or pull them to within 5ft of you. Useable once per bonded creature per hour.

  Threatened, that had to be the key. Apparently Zelda wasn’t in danger, or I didn’t believe she was, not enough to let me trigger the ability. I’d have to experiment to see how it worked, although I didn’t know how I could. What constituted a threat?

  Disappointed, I kept walking.

  Slowly, the tension in my shoulders started to drain away. I knew I was in a rift, and I knew danger lurked in every corner, but it felt like a late-spring morning in a dull small town. Quieter than it should be, with no cars on the road, but if you’d told me I was actually in Oklahoma, camping at an Army Corps of Engineers campground down the road, I wouldn’t have argued. That’s what it felt like.

  And if this were a horror movie, some terrifying shadow monster would leap on me and drain all my blood, just because I was getting so complacent. But it wasn’t, and so it didn’t.

  I reached the Dollar General, circled around the back, and found my dogs.

  All three of them.

  Bear had knocked over a garbage can, ripped open the plastic bags, and was happily rummaging, with Riley right next to her, nose deep in the debris. Zelda sat a few feet away, back turned, her eyes on the treeline behind the parking lot.

  I planted my hands on my hips. “Seriously? Do you not know better?”

  The stern voice was faked. I was so relieved to see them it was hard to keep my inner delight from shining out of my face and in my voice.

  Zelda responded first, whirling around and launching herself at me with her tail moving miles a minute. There you are! Where were you? I missed you, my person, thank goodness you found me! She hurled herself into my arms, whole body vibrating, tongue attacking my face.

  I caught her and held her close, half laughing, half tearful. She hadn’t leaped on me like this for years, not since the arthritis started bothering her. The System was healing her. All those dead goblins were rejuvenating her, which made it hard to regret killing them.

  Looking over Z’s head as she tried to give me kisses, I saw Riley entering guilt mode. He’d frozen, body stiff, as if he could somehow turn seventy pounds of muscle invisible if he just stood still enough, ears tipped toward me, tail down. He knew he wasn’t supposed to eat garbage.

  Bear, though, gave me a defiant tail wag. She stopped digging, but her head tilt said, I found good stuff. It’s good. Good stuff. I shared. Good girl, I am.

  I laughed helplessly. By Bear standards, yeah, sharing the garbage made her a good girl. In her first weeks with us, coming near something she considered hers—rightfully or not—would have meant bared canines and low snarls. Sharing was progress.

  If this were really the small town it felt like, I would have gone into the Dollar General, bought some trash bags, and cleaned up their mess. As it was, though, I whistled them over, still holding Zelda in my arms.

  Riley hurried to my side, grateful to escape the scolding he was due. Bear objected, though, telling me with her posture that she wasn’t done yet, there were more good tastes to be found.

  “Leave it,” I told her. “Breakfast’s at home.” I turned away, letting Zelda jump to the ground, and started walking, showing nothing but absolute confidence that Bear would follow me.

  Did I have that absolute confidence? Not so much, no. Under normal circumstances, I only let Bear off-leash in areas that were fenced in. Unlike the other two, who had beautiful recalls, Bear had, let’s say, an independent spirit. But I hadn’t brought a leash with me, so I hoped she’d follow.

  She didn’t.

  I dropped my hand to Riley’s head and stroked his ears. “You’re such a good boy. Your friend’s a bad influence, that’s all.”

  This tale has been unlawfully lifted from Royal Road. If you spot it on Amazon, please report it.

  I looked down at him and thought, Analyze. The results popped up over his head like a tooltip.

  [Canine - Level 0]

  I stayed focused on it and it expanded.

  Name: Unknown

  Species: Canine

  Level: 0

  How interesting. I hadn’t used the skill on Bear, but I moved my gaze over to Zelda, and used [Analyze] again. Her tooltip held a lot more information.

  So Riley was the Unknown and the System didn’t know him because he hadn’t gained a level yet. I wasn’t actually surprised to discover that Bear was the one who killed the extra squirrels yesterday. Riley didn’t have much of a killer instinct.

  That had always been fine by me. But it was probably not a great trait during the apocalypse. I wasn’t sure I needed Riley to kill goblins, but I needed him able to defend himself. A mana-crazed squirrel was bad enough, but soon we’d be facing mana-crazed raccoons. Mana-crazed alligators. Mana-crazed black bears.

  Ooh, that was not a pleasant thought. The odds were never on the side of the dog in a dog-versus-bear confrontation, not even when the bears were black bears, not grizzlies. Mana-crazed bears would be even worse.

  “Riley, my friend,” I said to him. “You’re going to need to get tougher.”

  He looked up at me, mouth open, tongue hanging out. I didn’t hear any words, but I felt the need. He was thirsty.

  We’d circled around to the front of the store and were standing in the parking lot. I wasn’t sure whether to start walking to the breach or go back and grab Bear by her collar when the girl in question loped around the side of the building.

  She slowed, then sauntered over, her body language screaming nonchalance. So loudly, in fact, that I knew she’d had at least a moment of concern that her pack had abandoned her. She held a recognizable brown paper bag with red markings between her teeth: fast food fried chicken leftovers. Great. Just what every dog mom enjoyed taking away from her food-obsessed rescue.

  Zelda’s Bag o’ Treats held treats, of course. I could try for a trade, which would be infinitely better than a tug-of-war. But it was going to have to be a really good treat to beat out chicken bones in Bear’s mind.

  I had a better idea. The Dollar General was right here. It would have luncheon meat to trade for Bear’s chicken bones, bottled water for Riley’s thirst, and most likely a leash that I could use to get my less-than-obedient pup safely home.

  Of course, it probably also had monsters. They had to be somewhere, right? I hadn’t stuck around in my RMI long enough to learn what 18% progress meant, but nothing I’d learned about rifts so far made me think they were friendly lands of milk and honey.

  You know what, though? It didn’t matter. Alone, Bear was maybe not tough enough to face the monsters. Riley definitely wasn’t. But together, the four of us ought to be able to kick ass, no matter what kind of monsters they were.

  They were cockroaches.

  I screamed like a kid seeing monsters under the bed, and I didn’t care in the least.

  Palmetto bugs—the Florida version of cockroaches—were bad enough. These cockroaches were a hundred times bigger than a palmetto, with teeth, but practically fragile. I killed so many in the first five minutes inside the Dollar General that the experience point notifications rolled in like a summer thunderstorm hammering my roof, a nonstop barrage.

  It added up to nothing.

  The XP for the Rhescan roaches was meaningless to me and Zelda. Literally, I was getting a single point per bug killed. But after killing most of the swarm, I got smart enough to make Bear take point, Riley moving in after her.

  My boy, sweet as his heart is, didn’t object to chomping down on bugs a tenth of his size. I’m not sure he even understood them as living things. Honestly, I’m not sure I saw them as living things either. I had guilt about the goblins, but not so much with the roaches. As far as I was concerned, the world was going to be a better place when they were all squashed into bug goo.

  I have no idea how long it took to clean out the swarm. Killing cockroaches the size of bunnies is the kind of timeless event that could last three minutes or three hours. The pure revulsion, the sheer disgust, works like its own form of time dilation. I’m gonna guess it took about five minutes to clean out the aisles of the Dollar General. But it felt like an eternity.

  The boss was lurking in the back. It was still a cockroach. Well, or a general bug-style monster, at least. It had a long armored head like an aerodynamic weapon, bulging eyes, sharp teeth, and feet that almost looked like bird claws. The [Rhescan Roach - Level 5] reared up on its hind legs and hissed at us, and I wanted to vomit.

  Instead, I swung Warden’s Edge at it, and smashed its head just as if it was a normal-sized bug scurrying around my bathroom. It died as fast as any of those palmettos and I had the weirdest realization ever.

  Here it is: I was so incredibly grateful that I’d gone through the challenge scenario.

  While it was happening, it felt like a nightmare. But Jack had been right. Yeah, it was terrible, but it gave me the tools I needed to survive—maybe even thrive—in the moment I was in.

  I was lucky.

  And damn, I was pissed as hell that I could feel that way.

  I stomped up and down the aisles of the Dollar General, looking for bugs to smash, and radiating fury. I finally calmed down when I realized Bear had picked up her fried chicken bag again—she’d dropped it when we’d confronted the bugs—and was looking for a place to dig into it in peace.

  “Leave it, Bear,” I said, voice tired. I was ready to go home. I wanted a shower like nobody’s business, not to mention real clothes and actual shoes. Sure, the [Invisible Armor] technically protected me, but nobody wants to deal with cockroaches in bare feet and while wearing pajamas.

  Bear ignored me, of course, so I put on my best fake cheerful voice and said, “Turkey? Turkey? You want some turkey, Bear? We’re all gonna have some turkey, right, guys? You want turkey, Riley? Yes, of course, you do!” and headed to the refrigerator cases along one wall.

  At the best of times, Dollar General was not my preferred grocery store. It was no cheaper than ALDI, but it was desperation cheap, the kind of food you ate when life was grinding you down.

  This Dollar General was worse. Not just because of the bugs, although the bugs were plenty of reason to not want to touch anything. But everything was just a little… off. All of the labels were almost familiar, but when I looked closer, they weren’t right. The Doritos were Doritas, and instead of Cool Ranch and Spicy Nacho, the bags were Cold Farm and Spicy Chow. Nothing in the candy aisle was familiar, and the canned foods were all some generic brand with white labels and almost fluorescent green images.

  But the refrigerator case was cold, and the food inside it—even with the wrong labels—still looked like real food. I pulled out a couple of packages of turkey, the kind that was processed into shiny round slices, and opened one up. It smelled okay, like your basic processed turkey should, so I offered Riley a slice.

  He thought it was beyond fine and well into delicious, gobbling it down in a heartbeat. I gave Zelda a slice, and she agreed. Finally, I waved a slice at Bear, but I held it high in the air with one hand, putting my other hand underneath her chin.

  “We trade,” I told her. “You give me the garbage, I give you the yummy, yummy turkey.”

  As soon as she let go of the bag, I grabbed it and handed her the turkey. I stuffed the fried chicken bag into the refrigerator case. Okay, not the nicest thing to do. But you know, I didn’t really think I was leaving it for some Dollar General employee to clean up. The store was abandoned. Or maybe it wasn’t even real. Did that turkey have calories?

  Bear wasn't happy about losing her trash, but I let all of the dogs have another piece of turkey as I wandered the store aisles. I grabbed a collapsible water bowl and a basic leash from the pet supplies, and some bottled water. While the dogs drank, I looked at the stuff on the shelves, puzzling over the weird product labels.

  I wondered if the store would magically restock itself, or if the goods on the shelves would slowly decay. Not all of them, obviously. Expiration dates were mostly irrelevant on your basic ultra-processed food stuffed with preservatives. But the stuff in the refrigerator case would go bad eventually, sooner if the power went out. Would the power go out? How was the power working anyway? The rift couldn’t be connected to a local power grid, could it?

  I had questions, lots of them. Maybe it was time to take the dogs home and then revisit that rift management tutorial.

  I was almost out the door when I turned back, returned to the pet section, and loaded their entire stock of cat food into Zelda’s Bag o’ Treats.

  Just in case.