Chapter 1: The Day After (B)
Jesse James cracked the window of his car, and pulled his bulk out of the vehicle. His eyes squinting against the wintery mix and sunlight as he hand rested on the glock. He ran his tongue over his bottom lip, even though it wasn't busted like it had been the night before.
The gate to the property was open, which he didn't take as a good sign, but the fact the truck was here, even if it was beat to hell in all the ways that didn't suggest their buddy had hit a deer, was probably a good sign. He was a tall man, pushing to just under six and a half with thinning blonde hair up top and a full beard. A descendant of the legendary outlaw Jesse at least had the luck to not be named for any more notable confederates.
The door on the other side of the vehicle opened letting the third man out. Randy was a much more slight man, almost willowy build not quite as tall as his friend and a few years older. Randy had missed the army stings Jesse, and John had taken up ... he had ended up going straight to the family farm after a bit of college then after inheriting it had to give it up in favor of a job in the city that actually paid the bills and allowed him something of a life without putting him further in the hole.
Jesse had gotten out of the army, come home and gone into the county sheriff's office, and while Randy was comfortable enough around a gun he was just as happy after the previous night to let Jesse take the lead on things. Jesse appreciated the lack of push back. The blonde was currently squatting and looking at the body damage to the side of the toyota his face scrunched up in thought trying to think about what could have done that.
"Doesn't look like a car." [did this] Randy said walking around, snow crunching under his leather boots, "cause its on this side and down here." His own F 150 wasn't in great condition but all that had been already done he just hadn't had the time to take it to a body shop to fix the damage to the front and rear of his Ford.
Jesse stood back up, threw a look at the house, "Nah," He agreed, before mumbling as he scrutinized the indentions on the body, "No car accident. Airbag probably should have gone off for a car," It didn't ... the impacts were too big to be a baseball bat, or something like that. "Got anything on stats?" He asked.
Randy blew out a breath and activated his level one sensory ability check, and bit down a curse almost falling backwards on his ass and he was too far for Jesse to grab. Randy steadied, and straightened "You know what the mana level is for here?" He asked whirling around to look over the fields for any kind of threat... he'd only had the ability a couple hours now but the system had explained what low versus high mana had meant and... he didn't like that.
"Well come on fuck it, if Joe is here great if not," He didn't want that to be, but they'd need to drive into town and try and find out something, find people they knew. He crunched around through the snow and pulled the gate not catching the luminescent eyes watching from the door as he moved towards the door of the big house.
The neo georgian colonial revival home sprawled out its porch wrapping around the exterior its face looking south out along a stretch of the state highway built long after the farmhouse. Where Randy had left the family farm more than a decade earlier the dairy farm here had been broken up in the seventies into lots as partitioned inheritance before John had been born. Some of those lots about had been developed into a subdivision that had formed in the early nineties with plots big enough for light agriculture or horses.
The snow crunched under Randy's boots as he followed him up the short brick stairs, and on to the porch waiting at the top of the stoop presumably for Jesse to knock. Jesse shot him a look and took a step further to the door, and then Randy spoke up. "Why's he not answering his phone?"
Jesse stopped halfway to knocking on the door and turned around, "I don't know." He replied... it hadn't escaped him... but it wasn't that early in the morning. The yard looked fine, but the car had been messed up. Whatever had smashed up the body had been hitting just the bottom half, but he wheels and front end had looked fine... but the back end ... "You think he got a level out of it?" the deputy asked as he thought about their own surprise the night before. Randy made a grumbling half inaudible statement Jesse assumed had been that the two of them, Jesse and John had both deployed multiple times, while Randy had never signed up for all that. Jesse shrugged, and turned back to the door, and rapped on the wood. "Broskii, dude I'm freezing my balls off out here." He called... trying to be loud but not loud enough the neighbors would necessarily hear him, and he wasn't sure why he cared in the situation.
He gave it a minute before going to knock again, but pulled back as his points augmented perception heard the dog scrambling across the hardwood, and presumably footfalls on the landing of the stairs. The kangal slid to a halt its massive box like head looking out the window giving a solitary bark as it saw them. Jesse eased back.
--
John stepped back from the fireplace and put the poker in the rack. "So what the fuck happened to you guys?" He asked having scoped out that obviously something must have happened. Randy was shook, and Jesse seemed jittery as if he'd come out something... well the come down from after having shots taken at him... but given his line of work that wasn't that outlandish.
He was also asking so they didn't ask the same question of him.
"So like..." Jesse threw a glance at Randy and started to recount what he might have otherwise considered an outlandish story... if not for the fact that he was looking at their Level 1 'holographic' display of health and mana and for the fact that he'd gotten attacked by ugly ooze monsters in the woods... at the same time though he couldn't help but get antsy enough to interrupt as the story was told...
"Wait, so you got jumped by the starter villians from Dies the Fire?" He asked referencing a now twenty plus year old work of fiction.
"The guns work." Randy pointed out.
Jesse nodded either to his question or to Randy pointing out the obvious, "Yeah, maybe they got the wrong impression from my ink." He cracked the tattooed covered knuckles for emphasis. "Course got to wonder what the fuck they were thinking ... but started babbling some bullshit about zombies and how it was the end of the world."
He didn't know about zombies but, "Anything else?"
"I mean you said you were going hunting yesterday so when you didn't pick up about going to dinner I didn't think anything of it."
Jesse let the statement hang, so John went and answered to reciprocate if nothing else, "busted my phone in the woods getting run around by a bunch of slime monsters. Then came home and crashed."
"Woke up to the video game lights, yeah?" Jesse replied. "Yeah I was sweating the conversation I was gonna have with the department, but we went back to Randy's place." Not like there was a better option.
"So you left O and Portia there?"
Randy grunted in acknowledgment leaning back on the couch across from the fireplace, "Oh fuck yeah, its back enough in the woods if things have flipped upside down." Jesse replied as John walked into the kitchen to check on the coffee he had set the machine to brewing.
The comment about Dies the Fire had been a bit on the nose. Jesse had gotten sloshed one time and been pretty upfront that if shit hit the fan he wanted to be a big shot... and that on the fiction side of things Arminger had had the right idea... or at least not completely wrong. He had just been pretty trashed alcohol wise that he had ambitions to being a big shot if the old system went to hell. That didn't make him okay with a stupid evil plan of lets enslave black folks. Jesse wasn't a racist it was just his drunk self had self admitted he liked the idea being in charge and making a neo feudal order cause that made more sense to him. The Dies the Fire reference was a little on the nose because Norman Arminger seemed to in Jesse's opinion have something along the lines of the right idea... "There is also magic... did you see the patron deity section?" The big guy asked after a minute.
He was in a sense changing the subject... "Yeah," He replied unsteadily, "I wasn't … I wasn't really sure what to do there." and not because … well germanic neo paganism had helped him, probably more than Jesse, get through the war on terror, and they had both agreed that the faith did have its problematic members. "Active magic makes things different."
That was a fucking understatement.
Randy took the offered mug of coffee, and looked up at him "So what do we do from here?" That was the question wasn't?
"Did you bring a rifle?"
"It doesn't have a scope on it," Randy replied knowing it was inevitably going to come up, while Jesse shook his head... which made sense if they'd gone out to eat on Sunday and only been back to Randy's place.