Since Baxter was awake, he thought he might as well ask him to scope out the grounds of the building. He should be able to find any reason that the humans had left. Baxter went up and hopped out the window and was gone for quite a while.

When Baxter came back he was hauling a dead Eastern Collared Lizard, known pretty much all over Oklahoma as a Mountain Boomer. He did the now-familiar routine and hauled it to his tunnel and bit its head off.

Jake had about 152 mana points left after all his work, so he made Baxter’s favorite, the Giant Red Meat Drumstick. Baxter pulled it down to the room and started to chew on it. For some reason, Baxter liked the small room where Jake and he had woken up the best out of all of the rooms and spaces that Jake had created since.

Jake asked, but Baxter said that he didn’t see anything on the grounds that looked different, but that he'd smelled two new humans. “Maybe they had something to do with the rest of the human’s leaving?” he’d asked. Well, actually he’d said, “New humans?” but Jake was pretty much an expert on figuring out what Baxter meant by this point. Their connection seemed to help them understand each other.

Jake thought about it and that sounded like as good a reason as any. Perhaps the new people had some information that had caused the other humans to leave? He didn’t know, but he wanted to get better spies in place the next time. He didn’t like having people next to him and not know what they were up to.

He also received a pattern for a Giant Eastern Collared Lizard. At that point, he had a flash and looked at his soul patterns. All were Oklahoma natives or at least he’d grown up with them. He was pretty sure that despite the eastern in its name, the lizard had never seen New York or the east coast. ‘Did Bob move me home to Tulsa?’ he thought. ‘Is that why I’m digging through all this sandstone? Is that why I recognize this place? Is it someplace that I went to with my family?’ He didn’t think of them as his stepfamily because they were all the family that he’d ever had. His real dad was a kind of drifter that hooked up with his mom during one of his respectable phases and then drifted off after she became pregnant. Jake had never even met the man. Jake was the oldest, then he had two brothers and two sisters.

He definitely wanted to see the outside of the building now. It's different to worry about your family when you’re 1200 miles away, but yet another thing to be in the same state or even town. He could actually do something to help them. He could see his mom again. He created a Giant Cooper’s Hawk inside the tunnel’s mouth and sent it outside the window.

Neither the black rat or the rats in the nest were happy about the presence of the hawk in their building. The hawk flew out and landed in the trees outside the building that looked planted in rows. It stopped and then looked back at the building.

Right beside the doorway was a wooden statue of an Indian. What they used to call a Cigar Store Indian statue. Above the doorway, was a metal teepee. I guess it wasn’t damaged by the apocalypse.

“Holy shit!” Jake yelled. “I’m at Mighty Max’s. I’m in Oklahoma. I’m in Sapulpa! My mom lives down the street.” Although he told everyone in New York he was from Tulsa, he was from Sapulpa/Sand Springs. He went to high school in Sand Springs because they had better schools than Sapulpa. Both areas were on the outskirts of Tulsa.

“Mighty Max’s?” asked Baxter.

“It’s a truck stop in Sapulpa. Near where I used to live before I moved to New York.”

At the dog’s still puzzled expression, he explained some more.

Mighty Max’s is in what used to be an old Walmart back before Walmart. It was set off the highway and after the Walmart closed, the store sat abandoned for several years. Finally, a low-budget entrepreneur named Max Greene bought it with the idea of turning it into a massive Truck Stop, Flea Market and Indian Trading Post, well, basically a Truck Stop.

He dug up a lot of the parking lot, installed a huge number of diesel and gas pumps, then installed Wifi, an internet café, showers, locker rooms, a bunch of truck parking as well as a big convenience store with a built-in pizza place and a soda fountain. That took up most of the area both inside and outside, the rest he filled with cheap Chinese-made Indian (that’s Native American for you people that don’t get that in Oklahoma, Indian means well, Indian as in Cowboys and …) souvenirs and allowed people to rent booth space around the outskirts of the interior of the building to make up the flea market.

It amazed everyone, but the combo worked. The shakes and burgers at the soda fountain were great (gourmet quality) and the pizza was excellent too. Locals started coming for the pizza and shakes and burgers, and the truckers came for the showers and the food, and the tourists came for the cheap souvenirs. He also had this stuffed buffalo that had a vacuum in its mouth that would suck up your trash. People loved to get their pictures taken with it. He named it, Mighty Max’s Truck Stop, Flea Market and Indian Trading Post. A big cigar store Indian by the front door welcomed you and Max had a teepee made and put on the roof. Aluminum, but painted to look like leather.

After I explained this, the dog thought for a moment and then said, “Buffalo? Eat trash?” I sometimes wondered how much of our conversations we were having and how much we just perceived ourselves as having.

Jake’s family used to come to Mighty Max’s for both the pizza and the burgers. It was a good place for a family’s night out. The food was good, you knew people and you had a selection. His youngest brother, Jon Jon, ALWAYS wanted pizza, but the rest of the family sometimes didn’t. Max’s was a nice compromise. And was not too expensive. Jake’s family was not well off. But they were close!

Jake sent the bird up into the air to get a better picture of what had happened to the world on the night of the apocalypse. For one thing, the roads had changed. The Bobs replaced Highway 97, which was the four-lane road outside the entrance of Max's, by what looked to be a cobblestone road, two lanes. It looked as if they decided asphalt must go. It looked from the air like the town, or at least the outskirts of the town had exploded. Not in the sense that a bomb had gone off, but rather like one of those ‘explosion’ engineering diagrams. A drawing of the whole machine broken up by its pieces. The suburbs of Sapulpa looked like that. If he had to guess, he’d say that each house, well, most of them, was still there, but the distance between them had increased. By a lot. The QuickTrip that used to be about 120 meters from the entrance of Mighty Max’s was now almost a kilometer away and there were trees everywhere. It looked like its Gas pumps had also disappeared and its awning replaced by trees, just like the ones in front of Mighty Max’s.

The woods came up and surrounded each little work of humanity as if they wanted to devour it, cause it to disappear into their depths. Jake for the first time understood why Baxter was killing and encountering all the monsters he’d brought back. It was nature, raw and primeval that surrounded, well, everything. Somehow, the world had, impossibly, grown larger.

‘Holy crap Bobs!,’ he thought. ‘While I’ve been puttering around in my little hole in the ground, real shit’s been happening.’

Far off in the distance, to the South, in the direction that the main town of Sapulpa used to exist in, there remained what still looked like denser housing. It looked like the expansion effect slowed down and decreased as it approached a former city or town’s center and then stopped at some arbitrary limit outside the city. If your house was within that limit, it stayed. If not, bye-bye.

The hawk had limits to its range too. At 900 meters from the dungeon, it began to falter, its wing's rhythm failing, it began to lose altitude, lose speed. As it approached 1000 meters, Jake had to stop it and turn it around. The hawk began to fall out of the sky, its wings flapping in a discordant rhythm that couldn’t sustain flight. It barely made it back to the around 900-meter limit where it could fly. Fortunately, it could still glide and did so until it reached its flight zone. Unfortunately, his family’s house was beyond that limit.

He tried having the hawk go up to its maximum height, again about 1000 meters, and use its eyesight to see if he could see his family’s house, but between the distance, the changes to the landscape and the damn trees everywhere, he couldn’t tell if the house still existed or not.

‘Shit, shit, shit!’ he thought. ‘Damn it! I’m so close.’

“Jake sad?” asked Baxter then.

“Yeah, buddy, I am. I learned that I’ve been down the street from my family for the past week during the apocalypse, and I didn’t know. I could have helped them somehow.

“Baxter help?” asked Baxter.

For a wild second, Jake considered sending Baxter to his mom’s house. But then he pictured the dog showing up at the door and the probable sequence of events. His dad, well stepdad, but he’d been his dad since he was one year old, would shoot him with either a crossbow or one of his big compound hunting bows. That is if his guns didn't work. And his other brothers would help. Not to mention his sisters. They were a close family and tended to share interests. They’d camp and all hunt during the various seasons. His parents had bought 150 acres of land between Sand Springs and Skiatook Lake. They used it as a hunting preserve and planned to retire there.

His oldest brother had married and bought a house on the same street that his parents lived on. His youngest brother, Jon Jon, was going to Sand Springs in the second grade. His sisters were in high school at Sand Springs as a Senior and a Sophomore.

“No buddy,” he said. “You would scare them because you’re so big now and they would shoot you with bows and arrows. We need to figure out another way.”

“Look Jake!” said Baxter.

Jake focused on the dog and it was pretty funny. The dog’s face scrunched up in this look of either concentration or constipation, Jake wasn’t sure which one applied. But he kept watching. And then he noticed something.

The edges of Baxter’s form blurred, almost losing their defined form as if they were being covered with a mist or fog. It began on his backbone and the dog’s ears but then spread. The fog grew deeper until it completely hid the dog’s form and then it retreated. Evaporated and left in its place, a tiny dachshund-looking kind of dog. Well, Baxter’s new form had the long body of a dachshund, but still retained the head of a pit bull. All in miniature. The dog looked actually dachshund-sized. It also was furrier than a dachshund should be. His new form kept Baxter’s thick fur coat, red and black camouflage. Somehow, Baxter had gone from black rhino size and weight down to a small lap dog.

“Baxter scary now?” asked Baxter.

“Oh my god!” said Jake. “You are so cute!” And he was. He looked like an adorable little mutt.

“Run for me!” said Jake.

And Baxter did. And just like with a dachshund’s run, his little legs seemed somehow officious, as if he were telling the world, ‘shape up, get in line, I’m in charge now.’ Jake lost it and began howling with laughter. The idea that his big dog monster could appear so small and busy-looking made him laugh so hard.

Eventually, Baxter’s ears began to droop and he started to look ashamed and Jake pulled himself together to stop the dog’s downward spiral. “I’m sorry buddy! You look great! You are the best dog in the whole world. Yes, you are. You’re my good boy.” After consoling the dog and getting Baxter happy again, Jake asked him when he’d learned to do that.

“Bob said. Skill, Shapeshift. Not used.”

Once again, Jake thought he needed to look into viewing Baxter’s status and other screens. He needed to figure out a way to make sure that Baxter was doing everything that he could right now. He’d figured out from what Baxter had said that Bob told the dog that he had the ‘Shapeshift’ skill and that Baxter had never used it until now. He wondered how many other skills the dog had and resolved to figure out a way to view the dog’s skills as soon as the current situation completed. He took a quick look at Baxter’s mana again and as he remembered, the dog had plentiful amounts of green mana. If he had to guess, he would say more than the average amounts for an animal. Easily enough to power a shapeshifting skill.