“Uhh,” Louis said, “it’s a truck. An SUV. An older Tahoe.”
“That’s not so bad,” I said.
Britney grunted.
“It’s a neon-covered lowrider,” Louis said. “There’s like two inches’ clearance from the bottom to the ground. We kept bottoming out. Our gremlin says that it’ll get put back everytime, so next upgrade we get we’ll pick something that fixes it.” He sprayed water and then added, “It does have a great sound system.”
I laughed, imagining Louis, Britney, and Bautista in such a thing. “You didn’t fix it for your first upgrade?”
“No,” Britney said, her voice flat.
“We came in second-to-last place,” Louis said. “Britney got a little mad at me, kept saying I was driving like an American. There’s this hydraulic system, but I didn’t know how it worked. All our opponents have these superfast cars and animals, and we were late coming out of the gate. We would’ve lost if the tentacle guys hadn’t gotten eaten.”
“Oh wow.” A terrible dread was starting to seep in around the edges. Everyone here was acting happy, but this particular floor had an insidious rule set. It would be really easy to lose groups of friends at the snap of a finger.
“What did you get when the audience voted?” I asked.
“Wheel spinners,” Louis said. “They light up the road.”
“Shit,” I said.
Prepotente returned with a glass of something fizzy and a well-worn, stapled-together book of laminated pages. “Look, Donut. I found the karaoke list! I signed up to sing ‘Tarzan Boy’ by Baltimora!”
“Yay!” she said. Onstage, the ghoul guy was gone and replaced with a Bactrian camel. I was pretty sure it was the same camel who’d pushed me out of the way from the portal earlier. I could barely hear him and couldn’t tell what he was singing, but I could tell he was super flat.
“Hey!” Donut said a minute later. “These are all old people songs!”
“Yes, I believe the song choices are all from the 1980s,” Prepotente said. His tongue flicked out and tried his soda. He shuddered. “Delicious. It’s so much better when it’s from a tap.”
“I need to look at these drinks,” Jurgen said, standing up.
[ 16 ]
“You should singsomething from Creedence Clearwater Revival. It’s Elle’s late husband’s favorite band,” Linus called from under the table. “She had several of their albums in her room at Meadow Lark.”
“Shut the hell up,” Elle snapped, sounding genuinely angry for the first time.
“That’s the wrong decade anyway,” Louis added. “You should do a Misfits song. Or something by Anthrax.”
This started a whole conversation about songs from the 80s.
I moved to the opposite end of the table, leaving them to their conversation. I was happy, if just for a moment, for everyone to pretend this was a regular outing at a regular bar.
Prepotente slid down to my end of the table and sat across from me. He was looking down at his drink. He let out a strange little bleat.
“You doing okay, buddy?” I asked.
“I find myself having a conundrum. I am in need of advice.”
Donut, who’d been in the midst of the music discussion, was suddenly right there.
Donut put a paw on his hand. “You can ask us anything. Right, Carl?”
“Yeah, sure,” I said.
Prepotente looked down at the paw for a long moment before he retracted his hand and then pulled something from his inventory. He placed it on the table.
It was a glowing, familiar little item.