Clarence covered his dead eye, but he couldn’t cover his dead ear enough to drown out the sounds all around him—and the various burned parts of him kept bumping into things that weren’t there, making his trek to the jeep slow and difficult. His dead ear heard children calling to one another, and orders shouted in other languages. There were sounds of battle, and the roar of engines high above. And then there came a heavy, decisive thud very close to him.

Still dizzy, still foggy in his thoughts, Clarence began to remember things. He remembered that the ghosties weren’t in his mind, they were real. There was an invisible war going on—and he was a part of that war. He remembered a boy with a face like a cat. Jix. Jix had told Clarence that he had a purpose—but the sounds around him were so chaotic, at that moment it was hard to imagine anything had a purpose at all.

Far far ahead, sat the Jeep—but with all these sounds crashing around him, he couldn’t stop himself from taking a peek with his dead eye. Immediately the barren desert wasn’t barren anymore. What he saw didn’t make any sense, though, because it was the exact same thing he saw before he covered his dead eye.

A trophy and a martini shaker.

Only this time, they were both huge. He made his way closer to the strange objects. The trophy was not a trophy at all, but a statue, and it was sparking wildly with multicolored electricity. The other object wasn’t exactly a martini shaker. It was shaped like one, but a bit stouter—and it wasn’t silver; it was dull green, with lots of wires. It was also upside down, and standing on its head, but closer observation revealed that it was hovering just above the ground.

There was something missing from this picture, wasn’t there? Yes! There had been a playing card between the trophy and the shaker!