Wilson Dixon was an older man, mid-forties, though he stayed fit.
He’d been in Group 1, though when RK had screamed at them to run, he hadn’t. Instead, he’d pulled back behind one of the remaining support pillars at the front entrance of the Casino and watched the rest of his group make their desperate, suicidal run through the field.
Unlike most people trapped in the Casino, he had only JUST walked in for a return trip, being a Las Vegas local, when the final showdown between the Book owners had occurred. All he remembered was a bright flash of light and then the Casino was falling apart around him, people running and screaming, pushing past him for the exit.
Just as he had then, Wilson had ducked back into a corner and observed. He’d seen the enormous storm clouds, roiling angrily and glowing an eerie green in the distance and had chosen not to venture back to his beat-up car. Anyways, the corner of the Casino he was crouching in hadn’t been affected by the so-called magic.
When everyone had taken shelter in the basement, he had as well. It was simple logic. The only safe place to ride out a storm. The Casino was situated on higher elevation than the other buildings in the neighborhood. If it flooded…well, they could move to one of the higher floors.
He scoffed at all the talk of magic. Wilson had never personally witnessed anything, just a bright flash of light that could have been anything. The destruction of the city and strange plant growth was likely some kind of government experiment. Yes, he was willing to believe in science run amok. But magic? Please.
The person who had been admonished for plucking the berries off the bush in the Casino had been him. Of course, he hadn’t thrown them away, merely collected a few more fruits and stashed them in a sealed container. When he escaped from the city, he would sell it to a foreign country and make millions, retire to Bermuda.
But when a man says he can predict the future and has your group run across a supposedly deadly parking lot, he got suspicious. Only reason he’d say something like that was simple: he was using group one as bait for finding all the puddles. Maybe there was a monster, but again, the most likely reason he’d sent his Group to their doom was as bait to draw the monster off his group.
He watched silently as his guess paid off.
While the other groups ran for their respective routes and were picked off by the enormous monster that had appeared in a mass of flailing vines and gnashing, slurping teeth or got stuck in the puddles, Group 5 waited, then followed one of the stragglers as they successfully made their way across the parking lot. They stepped carefully and quickly along the same path he had, practically standing in the footsteps he'd made in the tall grass.
Wilson smiled to himself and followed after them.
A few other survivors had been smart enough to have the same idea and joined him, evading the tentacles and the puddles. See, gamblers took risks, but the good ones knew how to weigh risks and make assessments. He liked to think of himself as one of the good ones.
Some of the others were people he vaguely recognized.
Diane, the receptionist, now human instead of a Lamia. Yuyaku, the Japanese magician who’d won every competition and his three assistants, Ivan the heavily muscled Russian, Scott, a weedy young man, and Danny, a rather fat young man. He recognized Susan, the waitress, from when she spoke up when the Book Group had been discussing the storm.
Then were the other three he didn’t recognize, all men.
Wilson thought hard, and his memory came up with names: James, Harry, and Johnny. He knew Johnny because he was the player in the Las Vegas strip and really famous as being the best gambler, kicked out of every Casino. James and Harry were a big question mark, only having met them in the basement.
He patted the containers in his backpack and hurried along, stepping over a probing tentacle. It nearly got him, the appendage clearly sensitive to movement, but he hopped again, evading it. Every one of the survivors gave each other nods as the escaped the parking lot and followed the Book Group into the city.