Chapter Four: The Boys Go from Bad to Worse
Before Weevil could scream again, the hand around his ankle gave it a tug, sending him falling face-first on the floor. He tried to get up, but the unseen menace pinned him down with its elbows. Then the predator lifted one of its arms from Weevil's back, and Weevil felt something cold slip down his shirt—and the unmistakable point of a knife a fraction of an inch away from his neck.
In a rough whisper, the thug said, "We know what you've done. Now you must pay."
As his attempted murderer edged the knife closer to Weevil's throat, Weevil discovered that he recognized that voice.
"Mister Jones!"
"Speak out of turn again, and your throat will be slit. What have you done with the Wyrm of the Wastelands?" He pressed the knife against Weevil's neck, barely scratching it. "Answer me."
Suddenly, something heavy struck Mr. Jones on the head, causing him to drop the knife and lay his arms flat across the floor. Weevil rolled out from under his assailant's arm and stood up, whereupon he pulled the chain dangling from the bedside lamp.
Leaning off the bed was Rex, his Duel Disk strapped to his arm.
"Brute instincts win out!" said Rex. "He's out cold. Let's tie him up."
"With what? We don't have any rope."
"Damn it, you're right!"
For a few seconds, the two duelists stared into each other's eyes.
"Let's scram," said Weevil.
"Yeah."
Thanking his lucky stars that neither he nor Rex had bothered to unpack their backpacks except to remove the pajamas they now wore, Weevil grabbed his backpack and Duel Disk and slipped into his shoes. Rex followed suit, and the two of them ran out of the bedroom, down the stairs, and into the Watering Hole's garage as though the house were on fire.
"You got the keys?" Rex asked as they sped to the jeep.
"Of course!" Weevil patted his pocket. "I'm going to drive. Let's get outta this madhouse!"
Both men opened the car doors and practically jumped into their respective seats, not caring that they still wore their backpacks. Weevil turned the keys in the ignition, pressed the button on the garage door-opener that Mr. West had thoughtfully left on the console between the driver's and passenger's seats, and peeled out into the desert. He could always buy another copy of The Green Brain. Meanwhile, Rex's gift of the soothing dream leaf would have to wait.
"Do you think we should've told the Wests that one of their guests was a murderer?" asked Rex once Weevil put a few miles between their jeep and the Watering Hole. The outback stretched before them like the desert from an antipodean variant on an Arabian Nights story.
"For all we know, they were in on it. Besides, there was no time to leave a polite note! That guy was about to kill us."
"Why do you think Kiki told us to go here, if she knew we might not survive? We're in the outback, away from civilization, and the only place to stop was some crazy B and B she probably never heard of…"
"Come on, don't you suspect Kiki of something? The last assignment she gave us almost got us killed. Why would this one be any different?"
"But we're not stealing some exotic statue this time. We're rescuing Pegasus, the most important person in all of Duel Monsters! She wouldn't knowingly send us to our death when we have to save someone else's life, especially Pegasus's."
Rex had a good point, Weevil had to admit. But when he contemplated Rex's very argument, something dawned on Weevil with sickening clarity.
"Rex, if Pegasus had really gone missing, we would have heard about it. The creator of Duel Monsters just falling off the face of the Earth would be somewhere in the news. But it wasn't even in that stupid tabloid that that stupid woman made me read the other day."
The dinosaur specialist paused. "…What are you saying?"
"I'm saying"—Weevil swerved to avoid hitting some sort of small, fuzzy shape that darted into the middle of the road, cursing at the obscured mammal mentally—"that we don't even know that this mission is legit. Kiki could have sent us here to get rid of us!"
"That can't be right! It wasn't just Kiki's idea for us to come here. Ishizu told us that Pegasus was in Australia, remember?"
Oh. Right. Still, something was wrong with these circumstances.
"If Ishizu knew what she was talking about, she'd have given us a better idea of where Pegasus is. We don't have anything to go on except that she last heard from him when he was in this part of the country."
"Well, we gotta find him." Rex, who had not fastened his seat belt, removed his backpack from his shoulders and set it by his feet. He bent down, unzipped his backpack, rummaged around inside for a few moments, and pulled out a pair of toaster pastries sheathed in a silver coating.
"Wanna listen to some tunes?" he asked, breaking open the wrapper.
"Sure." If nothing else, some music might take Weevil's mind off the dire uncertainty that pervaded his mind. He pressed the button to turn on the radio, and the opening strains of a 1980s new wave song streamed forth from the jeep's speakers. Rex broke off a piece of one of the toaster pastries and handed it to Weevil, who stuffed it in his mouth and tasted a burst of sugar and blueberry flavoring.
The next few songs the men heard continued in the same vein as the first one, with electronic punk-adjacent sounds and lyrics that ranged from consciously artistic to deliberately bizarre. Weevil wondered what a shark would want with candy, as one song indicated that it would, when he realized that he had not thought about the mission for several minutes.
"Damn it!" he cried.
"What is it?" Rex licked at the filling of the last piece of his toaster pastry.
"I had just gotten my mind off how creepy our mission is, and then my mind congratulated me for not thinking about it. Now I'm thinking about it again! Grrr!"
Rex sighed. "Dude, we could really use some weed right now. We should've gotten some from that Geoff guy before it was too late." With three crunching noises, Rex finished his late-night snack. From the sound of it, crumbs scattered on the seat and floor, but the jeep was Rex and Weevil's now to do with as they wished. If they wanted crumbs in their jeep, then they would have crumbs in their jeep.
A messy car did not compare even remotely to the gravity of the mission, however. Regardless of the danger and ambiguity of the situation, if there were any chance that Pegasus was lost in the Australian wilderness, then Weevil and Rex had every reason to find him. Kiki was not the most trustworthy or well-intentioned person in the world, but Ishizu had proven her reliability by giving them and them alone the Other God cards. When Weevil contemplated the matter, he thought that Ishizu ultimately ensured his and Rex's survival against the Pink Pangolin and her lackeys. Ishizu even told Rex and Weevil that she knew they would make the right choice in the end, and they did. She would never let them die on a mission.
Yes. They were under capable authority. This mission had to be legitimate. They would not surely die…
The music faded out, and suddenly a tenor voice addressed the listeners.
"Just about one o'clock in the morning! G'day to you folks who are still awake! You just heard 'Journey Through the Eyes of Madness' by Death of Comedy on the only station in Australia that would ever play such a song." The disc jockey chuckled at his own remark.
Despite the corniness of the deejay's words, Weevil breathed a sigh of relief to hear them. The presence of a live voice on the radio reminded him that he and Rex were not alone out in the open desert. With the rambling now providing background noise to soothe his nerves, Weevil cleared his throat.
"Rex, I need to tell you something."
"You really are going to become a woman, like I asked about?" said Rex as he reached down into his backpack again. "I mean, I don't care, but…hey, I thought there were more toaster pastries in here! Did you eat my other toaster pastries?"
"No! And no to that, too! Get serious, Rex. This is about our mission."
"I thought you weren't sure if the mission was even real." With a grunt, Rex zipped his backpack shut and sat up to face Weevil, who slowed down his driving.
Weevil did not bother to address that comment. "I have to tell you about this, though. I wanted to keep it a secret, but I can't."
"Ooh, this sounds juicy. Go right ahead."
"Just before Mister Jones jumped us, I dreamed that the Red Eyes Black Dragon crawled out of the ground and talked to me."
Rex snickered. In a bad imitation of Weevil's voice, he replied, "Monsters talk to you in your dreams? You must be going crazy!"
A current of guilt shocked Weevil's heart and spine. With an exasperated sigh, he said, "All right, Rex, I said I was sorry! You don't have to bring that up again!"
"Aw, you know me. I couldn't resist. So…" Rex's voice took on a wistful tone. "You saw good ol' Red Eyes, huh? What'd he say? And what'd it have to do with the mission?"
"He said that Pegasus was in greater danger than we knew."
"What? Did he say where Pegasus was?"
"Yes. He said it so weirdly that I remember it exactly: 'just beyond the fountain in the heart of the continent.' Isn't that like something out of an old movie? And we'll save the world by rescuing Pegasus…" And Red Eyes sounded like your lost lover, but I'm not about to tell you that. "If we have to save the world, the reward had better be good. Other than getting to see Pegasus, I mean."
"If I know anything, it's that a dream that weird has to tell you the truth. Red Eyes wouldn't have showed up for nothing. What're we waiting for? We've gotta get to that fountain!"
Weevil pressed down on the gas pedal. "That's great, Rex, but your dragon didn't tell me where the fountain was! All it said was 'the heart of the continent.'" As he spoke those words, a nagging question occurred to him. "How close to the center of Australia are we?"
"I dunno. But we better keep driving there. It won't take us too long to get there, right?" Rex flashed a dopey grin at Weevil.
"It'd better not, but if Red Eyes knew more than that, he didn't say."
Conversation evaporated as they drove on through the outback. Until now, Weevil never grasped how much the city lights he grew up with obstructed his view of the night sky. Out here, all he could see through the car windows were an infinite ebon canopy studded with pinpricks of white light and the vast expanse of barren earth below. And he saw these sights behind the glass panes of a jeep. The thought of witnessing them with nothing between him and the outdoors made his heart beat faster. Oh, to be a spider wandering through this unforgiving land, looking for small animals to sink one's fangs into…
Later, he noticed his concentration fading. The interior of the jeep was perfectly temperate, and the outside environment was cold, and yet beads of sweat dripped from his hands onto the steering wheel. He felt himself start to slump in his seat. All that he perceived blurred into an increasingly indistinguishable mass of darkness. A pinch on his upper arm startled him back to alertness with a yelp.
"Hey! What was that for, Rex?"
"You're losing control of the wheel!"
"I can't help it if I'm tired. It wasn't my fault someone tried to kill us in our sleep."
"You wanna stop and get some rest?"
"In the car?"
"Where else? You know, we could both sleep in the back seat." Rex waggled his eyebrows.
Weevil pulled over and removed the keys from the ignition. As he sloughed off his backpack and followed Rex into the back seat, he reflected that at least they were both still wearing their pajamas.
Finding a comfortable position to sleep in proved challenging, but eventually the two men did. Sooner than he expected, given the weight on his mind, Weevil drifted off to the land of slumber.
This time, he sat barefoot on a wooden dock, letting his toes dangle above the still water. For a moment, he breathed in the faint zephyr that blew across his face and the smell of salt that suffused the air. When he brought his feet back down, they touched a hard, scaly surface.
You are standing on my head, said the thing in the water. Will you please get up?
Without thinking, Weevil sprang back onto his feet and watched as the Red Eyes Black Dragon's head and elongated neck emerged from the bay. The dragon snorted a few puffs of smoke from his nostrils.
"You can't give me another mystical dream sequence!" cried Weevil. "I just had a mystical dream sequence! Let me speak to the manager!"
No, Weevil, you want to receive this dream. I have more vital information to divulge.
"Oh, yeah? If you're so smart, tell me."
The fountain you seek is nearer than you know. You will find it within half a day's time from when you wake.
"How do you know that? You're a figment of my subconscious!"
Your subconscious mind can receive messages that your conscious mind rejects. Awake, you cannot tune in to this frequency; asleep, you can.
Weevil shook his head. "I don't know what you're talking about, Red Eyes. Can't you be straightforward for once?"
Yes. You asked me for an explanation, and so I gave one to you. When you find the fountain, you will be a mere hour and a half away from Pegasus.
"By car, you mean?"
Your mode of transport may or may not be what you expect, but you must get there. Rescue Pegasus and the world…and my heart…
As the dragon began to submerge himself, Weevil shouted, "Red Eyes, you're not a water-attribute monster! How can you breathe underwater?"
This is but the first of many surprises in store for you. Tell my former master.
In the morning, Weevil woke first, as usual. Even if it were not his typical habit to wake before Rex did, Weevil felt certain that Rex shoving him off the bench seat and onto the floor of the jeep would have done the trick.
Two could play at that game. He tugged on Rex's hair, which hung over the side of the seat and tickled Weevil's face.
"Ow!" Rex sat up with a jerk. "What was that for?"
"You pushed me off the seat, so I get to pull your hair. It's time to get going on our mission." Weevil rose to his knees and put a hand on his hip.
"Aw, couldn't you let me sleep a little longer?"
"You were saying last night that you were sure Pegasus was lost out here and we had to find him. Now, let's get dressed and set out for him."
Rex yawned. "Get dressed? Can't we just wear our pajamas?"
"Are you serious? You want to wear pajamas in a desert?"
"Well, kinda. Most people haven't done it, I bet, and I sure haven't, so—"
"Argh!" Weevil smote his forehead. "Rex! We sleep in pajamas! That means you don't want them to get dusty and dirty, because then you'll be uncomfortable when you go to bed!"
"Okay, okay, Mister Bossy-shorts," said Rex, unbuttoning the pajama shirt he wore last night. "Let's do it your way." He began to pull down the trousers when Weevil found himself reaching out his hand to stop him. Rex looked at Weevil and smirked.
"You just told me to get out of these pajamas. What's wrong now? Don't tell me you don't want us to see each other naked! In fact…" With one swift yank, Rex removed his pajama pants and gestured as if to rip off the boxer shorts underneath. Instead, he simply laughed and began to crawl toward the front seat, where he unzipped his backpack.
Weevil supposed that his reaction was irrational—Pavlovian, if anything. They were in the outback, miles distant from anyone who might see them.
Except…no, he would not think of that. He returned to the driver's seat and opened his own backpack, whereupon he grabbed the first articles of clothing that greeted him. Weevil surmised that Rex would watch him undress himself, and while under other circumstances, Weevil might have removed his clothing slowly so as to prolong his enjoyment and Rex's, they could not afford to take any extra time today.
When he finished changing clothes, Weevil expected to see Rex gazing at him appreciatively, but his friend stared into space with a mixture of worry and guilt on his face.
"What's eating you, Rex? Come on, we need to get going. Why don't you take the wheel this time?"
"Uh…sure."
They both exited the jeep, and once again, Weevil stepped unprotected into the Australian desert. He could not savor the new feeling of standing beneath the outback sun, however; Pegasus awaited, and so Weevil walked around the car and re-entered the passenger's side. Rex maintained his troubled expression as he climbed into the driver's seat.
He turned the keys in the ignition, and the jeep rumbled to life again.
Driving through the outback in the daytime felt less troubling than traversing the terrain at night, despite the high temperatures. Perhaps leaving Mr. Jones far behind assuaged some of the fear Weevil felt previously, though he was unsure that he could ever be too far away from Mr. Jones.
Both men had decided to roll their windows down, and Weevil stuck his hand out to feel the breeze between his fingers. For all that Rex drove, rarely did another car enter his or Weevil's sights. The majority of what they saw while driving consisted of tall shrub grass, orange-brown plateaus, and trees of leafy and barren varieties. Occasionally, a rodent shot across their view, escaping just in time to avoid a violent death. The jeep passed several kangaroos lying about on rocks, possibly offering silent judgement on the driver and passenger. The radio played more punk-adjacent songs broken up by the over-the-top ramblings of the disc jockey.
Weevil filled his lungs with a deep inhalation of the desert air. "Mmm…after we rescue Pegasus, we have to explore more of the outback. Everything's so wild and pure here…and deadly." He snickered. "I can't wait until we meet some of the arthropods here."
"Um," said Rex, "I don't wanna ruin your good mood or anything, but I gotta ask you: do you have any food in your backpack?"
An icy feeling engulfed Weevil. "I don't think so…"
"The only food I have is one more pair of toaster pastries."
"What?"
"Yeah. It was at the bottom, too, so it's probably gotten crushed."
Rage bubbled up in Weevil's stomach until he remembered that he and Rex would have a difficult time rescuing Pegasus if one of them were dead.
Noon came and went, and Rex stopped the jeep to dig the toaster pastries out of his backpack. As he predicted, the pastries were split and cracking like the ground of the outback itself—or, as Rex himself said, an example of continental drift. The two young men consumed the artificially flavored blueberry treats nonetheless, swigging water from the cooler the Wests had provided all the while.
For the next leg of the trip, Weevil drove, wondering how and when to tell Rex about his dream. He spent the next couple of hours trying to distract himself and his friend by discussing Duel Monsters strategies, old creature features, and hypothetical sexual experimentation, but every line of conversation brought Weevil's mind back to Pegasus.
Then Rex interrupted Weevil's description of his latest deck build.
"Look at that!"
Weevil stopped the car and then pinched himself at the sight to which Rex pointed.
In stark defiance of the law of this desert, where nature barred all artificial matter but the sturdiest vehicles from the environs, something that bore the mark of human construction jutted out from the cracked orange ground: a fountain made entirely of crystal, shining blue and white in the sunlight. More incredible than the fountain itself was what flowed from it. Lavender liquid that appeared to have the consistency of water gushed from the top of the fountain and arced downward into the pool at the base. Unbelievably, the lavender water emitted a smell, a scent like that of honey mingled with jelly.
The fountain…this has to be it.
Rex leaned his head out of the window and took a deep breath. "I don't know how it's possible, but that water smells delicious! It's like a grilled octopus platter! Let's go outside and have a drink!"
What's Rex on about? "What? No, it smells like honey and jelly. How could you think it smells anything like meat?"
"Honey and jelly? No way. You would think that. It's got a tasty meat smell. And I gotta get a closer whiff of it." Rex unbuckled his seat belt, opened the car door, slid out, and strode up to the fountain. Once there, he brought his face so close to the arcing lavender liquid that it nearly splashed him. Then he leaned in and inhaled the scent of the water, and the fluid sprayed onto his face.
"You better come over here! This is great!" He filled his mouth with the streaming water, which he swallowed in an instant. "Ah, that hits the spot. Mmm…it's filling me up, too! This is way better than regular water! Whatever this is!"
With a sigh, Weevil obeyed Rex's directive. Shutting his eyes when he stood beside the fountain, the entomophile opened his mouth and received the spray...and it did, indeed, taste like a singularly sweet mixture of raw honey and grape jelly. As he swallowed, Weevil thought he detected a hint of strawberry.
"All riiight!" he said. "We oughta drink more!"
They filled their mouths and bellies with the sumptuous liquid for the next few minutes, until they had had enough.
In moments, Weevil's hunger dissipated…only for another, equally strong and nearly as demanding emotion to replace it. A fire that burned to out-blaze the desert sun ignited in his loins. When he looked at Rex's half-closed eyes, wry smile, and trouser bulge, Weevil could tell that his friend had fallen under the same thrall.
"Let's get busy in the jeep," he said.
Without saying a word, Rex put his arm around Weevil's, whom he let lead him back to the car.
Rex and Weevil's previous sexual encounters always resulted in vivid climax, but the bliss of this connection was beyond orgasm. No persons since the first sunrise on Earth had received the blessing of so much physical ecstasy at once. This superhuman splicing, not their initial groping session in the Venice Beach hotel room or the consummation of their partnership in their apartment, was their real first time together. On that latter night, after they made love, Rex had told him that he saw comets exploding in the night sky, rose and gold painting the air, and the world dying and coming to life again. Now, entwined with his friend in the back seat of the jeep, Weevil saw moons falling into seas and then tearing themselves out of the abysses—other planets exploding into cosmic rubble and then each piece of shattered stone rejoining to form a new world—entire galaxies fading into darkness and then bursting alight. The complete transformation of one planet did not equal the force of this pleasure.
Every square inch of his body became a bee supping nectar from a resplendent flower opening itself up for pollination. In reaching this undreamed-of height of carnal passion, Weevil felt like one virgin sacrificing another to a monstrous god hungering not for blood but for the throes of pleasure. Their union produced a thousand little deaths all at once, each one feeding the god they worshiped with their bodies. Was their spiritual master the Conqueror Worm? Something limbless and subterranean wriggled at the base of Weevil's spine and, he expected, Rex's too. Neither of them, he could tell, had ever known sex until this night.
Here, at the bottom of the world, was the gateway to Heaven.
When he and Rex returned to their senses, Weevil said, "We should bottle up some of that stuff to take back home with us."
"Great idea!" Rex rolled off his friend and onto the floor of the car.
Suddenly, something knocked at the door of the jeep.