Just then the black rat heard a voice, a panicked voice mumbling to itself. “Where can I hide? Who are these guys? I don’t trust them. Oh my god. What about Billy? Shit! Shit! I never should have left him alone! Maybe I can hide in here?” And then a figure stepped through one of the windows and paused for a second.

Outside the rat could hear male voices talking to each other. Jake could tell that the voices were drunk or high or on something, just from their slurred nature.

“Hey! Hey! Baby! Wait, wait, we just wanna talk to you?” shouted the first voice.

“Come on! Don’t be like that? Don’t make us chase you?” said a second deeper and somehow rougher voice.

The rat could see the woman, well girl pretty clearly. Well at least as clearly as he could see anything at that range. She was only about twenty feet away from his hiding spot. From Jake’s perspective, it looked like the girl was several football fields away and, well, it was dark. He made another note to either invent rats with good eyesight or find another spy animal. He liked the hawk. The hawk could see! Now if he had a rat with hawks eyes, that would be awesome. Unfortunately, he just had a regular rat’s eyesight to use.

She looked young, maybe eighteen or so. Had long hair, but because of the lighting and the rat’s color-blindness, Jake couldn’t tell what color her hair was. It wasn’t blond though. She looked slender and her face was mobile, expressions ranging from determination to despair washing across it in short order. She had long fingers and large expressive hands which she used a lot. She was either sucking on one finger or chewing a nail while looking behind her toward where the men’s voices were coming from.

“Hey, Baxter,” Jake said. “We’ve got a guest.”

“A guest?” asked Baxter. Jake wasn’t sure why he characterized the girl as a guest. He hadn’t thought of any of the other humans as guests, but something about the helpless nature of the girl spoke to him.

“Yeah, a girl,” said Jake.

“Human?” asked Baxter.

“Yes,” answered Jake.

The girl decided that the men were coming closer and that she didn’t want to be where they could see her. She audibly sniffed and a frown crossed her face at the odor of rat piss inside the building. She moved back toward the windows, but then must have seen the men through the windows. She stood still for a second watching them, hoping that they would turn away, but when they continued on toward the building where she was hiding, she turned and ran toward the back wall, avoiding the center mass of the rat’s nest. There was enough light that she could avoid the litter scattered on the floor, not enough light for her to see the nest and the giant rats staring down at her from their holes.

“Help guest?” asked Baxter.

‘That is a good question,’ Jake thought. ‘Do I want to get us involved or not?’

Meanwhile, the girl had reached the back wall and scurried along it until she was behind the rat’s nest. She evidently found and hid in Baxter’s tunnel, because suddenly Jake could see her with his new senses.

Human Female, Age 18, Weight 59 kg, 165 cm tall. Red hair, blue eyes, freckles.

“What do you think, Baxter. Should we help her or not?”

“Girl Guest?” asked Baxter again.

“Yes,” Jake said. “She’s a girl, only eighteen years old.”

“You old?” asked Baxter.

“No,” said Jake. “I’m only 23. I’d be 24 on Oct 31. My mom used to call me her little Boo!” Baxter looked puzzled at Jake. “Oct 31 is Halloween. People dressed up and went to parties or Trick Or Treating if they were young enough.” Baxter still looked puzzled but now he had an overlay of ‘don’t care’.

“Help Girl!” said Baxter. “Help guest!”

“Ok,” said Jake. ‘If you’re sure. But you need to stay that size, Ok? Otherwise, the girl will be too scared.”

“Ok,” said Baxter. And then he stood up and started to race up the tunnel to the girl.

“Stop, stop,” said Jake. “I’ve got to give you something.”

Baxter stopped and then Jake did his Loot Pattern Creation skill followed by his Loot Creation skill.

On Baxter’s neck appeared a collar with a little glowing globe on it and a single tag that said, “Baxter.”

“Ok, you can go now Baxter. Be safe!”

Jake received a new notification:

Loot Pattern Gained

Expandable Dog Collar with Lighted Globe and Dog Tag

You have gained the loot pattern for an Expandable Dog Collar with Lighted Globe and Dog Tag. Really this should have cost you thousands of points, but we thought about it and decided that we shouldn’t have given you a dog with no collar. Collar will expand and fit any size that Baxter assumes. Baxter can turn off or on Lighted Globe as he desires. Light may grow brighter or dimmer at Baxter’s will. Globe always shows Baxter’s location and Jake’s current dungeon location. Name tag will show Baxter’s current name. Other abilities still discoverable.

There was a whole lot to think about in that notification, but Jake decided that now was not the time.

The men had stepped onto the porch and then moved as a group into the building. As if to reinforce Jake’s thought, he heard one of the men grumble, “Damn it’s dark in here? Anybody see her? She’s got to be in here? Don’t she? Anybody watching the back?”

“Yeah, Wade is. Along with Jack and Peter,” one of the men who’d just stepped into the building said.

“Figures,” Jake thought. “Another Wade.”

“Hey girl!” one of the men shouted. “You come on out now, you hear? All we want to do is talk to you!” At which a couple of the men sniggered. “Shut it, you morons,” said the man that was talking. “What’s that smell?”

Another man answered, “Rats, I think. Smells like my kid’s old gerbil cage did at his mom’s house.”

“Girl, you hear that?” the first man said. “There’s rats in here. Big ones too. You don’t want to stay in here with them. I saw a man who'd been chewed by rats once. It weren’t pretty. You come on out now, we just want to talk.”

This time there was no laughter from the men, but a sense of danger crept over the room as all the men stood and listened carefully for any noise telling them where the girl might be.

“Anyone bring any lights?” another one of the men said. “I don’t want to go after her if there’s giant rats in here. One of them bastards got my neighbors. Ate ‘em to pieces.”

There was a noise then, but it wasn’t from the girl, it was from the rat’s nest. Some squeaking noises, only deeper and longer sounding than a regular rat.

The men all shifted back a step closer to the windows and the front door.

Jake had his rat make some noise too. At that, the men stepped back out of the window and stood on the porch of the store. One of them kicked the wooden Indian over.

“Stop it, you idiot,” another man said. “Quit making noise.”

Jake could see the girl. She was curled up in the tunnel, crying, with both eyes closed and her hands up over her head. But she was quiet and she wasn’t moving. Jake respected her a lot then. Even though she was terrified, she was not giving in. ‘Good for her,’ he thought.

Just then Baxter came up the tunnel, doing his little dachshund walk. The girl evidently didn’t hear him because she didn’t move. Baxter moved alongside her and then poked his nose into her face and licked her cheek once, really quickly.

She screamed loud, opened her eyes and saw Baxter’s dog face directly in front of her and stopped abruptly. The light from the little globe cast a little circle of light around the dog.

The men on the porch moved and then settled.

“Did you hear that?” one of the men asked with a squeaky voice.

“Yeah, I heard it,” another one answered in a sullen tone like someone had just taken away his toy.

“What you think happened in there?” asked squeaky voice.

“Rats,” answered the guy that had been speaking to the girl inside the building.

“We going in after her?” asked the first man.

“Not much point is there,” answered the speaker. “Them giant bastards are fast. She’s done for now.” But before anything else could happen, the speaker leaned into the building and shouted, “Girl, if you’re still alive, we’ve got some men outside watching the place. You just come on out and they’ll bring you to us. We’ll keep you safe.” And then all the men turned and went back to the road, whistling for the guy Wade and his buddies who’d gone around back.

The girl reached out and held her hand for Baxter to sniff. “Good manners!” Baxter said.

Of course, the girl didn’t react which confirmed Jake’s guess that what he and Baxter were doing wasn’t normal speech.

Baxter sniffed her hand and then shoved his head underneath her fingers for some scratches which she promptly gave. “Good scratches! Good scratches!” Baxter crooned to Jake. “Good fingers. Jake fingers?”

“Sorry buddy,” Jake answered. “But I’ve got no fingers.”

“What do? Girl friend?” asked Baxter.

‘That is the question,’ Jake thought. He could see the girl being really useful to him, but that depended on communication and he couldn’t talk to her and neither could Baxter.

‘What to do? What to do?’ Jake thought, his mind humming along. ‘How can I talk to her? I need her help, dammit! And, I’ll help her too.’ He added the last part because he was feeling slightly ashamed of himself. ‘Nice guys don’t take advantage of women.’ That was one of the core tenants of his life. He’d grown up in a home where, if his stepfather, his real dad despite the genetics, hadn’t made it a home, he could have had a much different, a much poorer life than he had. He loved his dad, didn’t care at all about the other man who fathered him, but still, that sting of abandonment, left him focused in at least this way. ‘Nice guys don’t take advantage of women’. And then there was its corollary belief, ‘I’m a nice guy’.

He focused on her. She was cute, maybe even beautiful, but that was kind of abstract to him now. In the same way that he didn’t feel a lot of anger, rage, pain or loss, he didn’t feel that sense of attraction either. She was cute, but that’s where it stopped.

The girl wiped her face, smearing the tracks her tears left on her face.

“Did you hear that boy?” she whispered to Baxter. “Those bastards said they’d be watching for me. I’d rather die than go with them. I even knew one of them. Randy Thacker. His younger brother was in my class in school. What happened to him? He played football for Sapulpa. A week after the apocalypse he’s chasing me, probably wants to rape me.” Here she stopped and clutched Baxter’s head in her hands and looked him right in the eyes. “You wouldn’t do that, would you? I mean, if you were a man, you wouldn’t become a beast like that in only seven days, would you?”

Jake could hear her words and so could Baxter. They didn’t know what to do? Does Baxter let on that he’s more than a standard dog that somehow survived the apocalypse? Baxter went with his old standby and licked her face, somehow getting dog slobber all over her cheeks, mouth, and nose.

“Phhbt” the girls spit and then giggled a little. “That’s right, not you boy. That’s a pretty fancy collar you’ve got on boy. Does it have a name tag on it?” She reached out and picked up Baxter with an “Oof, my god you weigh a ton!” and looked at his collar and the tag there.

“Baxter, huh? I guess it kind of suits you!” she said as she cuddled the dog.

Baxter curled up on her lap and let the girl pet him. He could feel her slowly relaxing.

“What do?” he thought at Jake.

While the girl was petting Baxter, Jake had been thinking about how he could talk to the girl. In some of his novels, dungeons could talk either through dungeon bonds or by the dungeon creating an avatar. Given how much time it had taken him to create stairs, he figured that the avatar route was not going to work for him. At least for now. So that left dungeon bonds. He tried to remember if one of the Bobs had hinted at the possibility of something like that. He couldn’t remember anything, but then the Bobs hadn’t given him much information to go by. It was like they wanted him to figure it out for himself.

“Baxter, keep her calm. Ok?” he told the dog. “I’m going to try to reach out to her.”

“Ok, Jake,” Baxter said. “She nice.”