Page 12 of Backpacking through Bedlam

The bat wheeled and flew off closer to the two. Fucker was still looking for a meal. I couldn’t blame it for that—instinct and all—but given the size of the explosive it had just swallowed, I didn’t want it getting too near the tents. “Dammit,” I muttered, rolling to my feet and waving my arms in the air as I hopped up and down. “Here! Over here! I’m defenseless and alone!”

The bat banked back around, clearly seeing me as the easier target. Good bat. Thomas stopped running, grabbing Sally’s arm and pulling her to a halt along with him as he realized I was actually up to something. Better husband.

I stopped waving and ran away from the tents, as fast as I could.

I made it about ten feet before I felt the wind from the bat’s approach on the back of my neck, and knew that if this grenade was a dud, I was about to have a big problem.

The grenade wasn’t a dud.

I had a different problem. Namely, I had a massive bat less than a foot behind me when the grenade it had swallowed went off and the whole damned thing exploded, splashing bat guts and gore absolutely everywhere. The blast flung me forward to the rock. I managed to catch myself with my hands before gravity helped me catch myself with my face, and I lay there, as flat as I could make myself, while bat pattered down all around me in a thick, horrible rain.

When it finished falling, I rolled onto my back, spitting out a bit of muscle that had somehow managed to wind up in my mouth, and started laughing.

I was still laughing when Thomas and Sally reached me, Sally looking alarmed, Thomas looking resigned. He leaned down to offer me his hands, and I took them, letting him pull me to my feet. My boots slipped in the gore. I tightened my grip on Thomas, holding on until I was sure I wasn’t going to just fall down if I let go. Once I had my footing back, I released him and wiped the bat out of my eyes.

“That was surprisingly fun,” I said. “Think there are going to be any more of those things?”

“Try not to sound so happy about that idea, maybe,” said Sally dryly.

“Ordinary bats live in colonies, although they generally hunt solo when not in a target rich environment,” said Thomas. “This is not a place where a bat would normally expect to find a solid meal. I think tonight’s guest was an opportunist more than anything else. We should set a watch, but chances are good that we won’t have any more visitors.”

“Great,” I said. “Do we have enough water on hand for me to have a bath?”

Sally rolled her eyes. “Woman explodes a bat all the hell over herself, and wants a bath.”

“Well, yes. There’s blood in my hair.” I smiled at her, aware of how distressing the expression would be with the gore covering my face. “It gets sticky.”

“It’s gross.”

“You could have exploded the bat, if you’re that interested in me staying clean.”

“I can’t even—” Sally threw her hands in the air, announced, “I’m going to go set watches,” and stalked off back toward the tents, leaving me and Thomas alone with the remains of blasted bat.

I bent to retrieve one of the larger chunks, holding it up to show him. “Want a roast?”

Thomas laughed, and everything was going to be okay.

Four

“Every journey has an ending. Sometimes they’re a new beginning at the same time. Sometimes they’re just where things . . . stop.”

—Juniper Campbell

Standing on a rock in an unfamiliar dimension, watching the sun come up

THANKS TO MY PROXIMITY to the explosion, I was the only one covered in inside-out bat, meaning we only had to find enough clean water for me. Thomas was conserving magic, and thus couldn’t heat it at sorcerous speed, but everyone we approached was willing to let me set a pot on their campfire, especially once I started offering them pieces of fresh bat. It wasn’t long before about a quarter of the camp was spit-roasting bat bits for dinner while I shampooed guts out of my hair, and everyone who hadn’t received part of the first bat hoped that more of them would come along.

Luckily for my hair, our water supply, and Thomas’s nerves, they didn’t. None of the members of Sally’s excellent watch spotted anything else in the sky above us, and the things they saw moving in the distance of the plains all stayed far enough away to be nothing more than dark smudges against the inky, star-streaked night. The hours passed peacefully, and I was able to rejoin Thomas in our tent for a few precious hours of being left alone.

I was getting way too accustomed to having him with me when I went to bed, the sound of his heartbeat as familiar now as it had been when we’d been together back in Buckley, young and foolish and convinced that we could overcome absolutely anything, as long as we stayed together. And maybe we hadn’t been so wrong about that. After all, most of our problems seemed to come from us letting people keep us apart.

Thomas wrapped his arms around me and kissed the crown of my still-damp head, and if I had any bad dreams, I didn’t remember them when I woke up. We rose to find the camp already halfway to being torn down, and sentries standing at the edge of the rock, watching anxiously as guinea pigs the size of elephants grazed in the tall grass of the plains below. I joined the watch briefly, shielding my eyes against the sun.

“Can’t decide whether everything in this dimension is unreasonably large, or whether we’re unreasonably small for this dimension,” I said finally, turning away. Maybe we were the Aeslin mice here, too small to seem real to anything local. And maybe it wasn’t our problem, because we weren’t sticking around to play the residents of Lilliput.

Thomas came up behind me, sliding his arms around my waist and pressing a kiss to the side of my neck. I leaned back against him. “How are you feeling?”

“Better,” he said. “I’ve tapped into this dimension’s pneuma. I think I can get us out of here.”