Death by Cliché (16 page)

“That leaves us out of the adventure,” Omar said.

“Yeah, that’s why I say we just turn around and walk away,” Damico said.

“But the adventure is right there,” Omar said, whining a little.

Damico rolled his eyes. “I’m not going in there. It’s a death trap.”

He almost said it was a stupid adventure too, but he knew Carl wouldn’t pass that along. If this really was real. Which it wasn’t. It didn’t really matter. If he was in Hell, he still had to play by the rules the Lord Satan set for him.

“So, do you have a better plan?” Gorthander asked. “I didn’t come here to eat Brian’s Cheetos.”

“Hey!” Omar said as if he’d just noticed something in the real world.

“I say we back off, stake the place out, and wait for Hraldolf to leave. Then we nab him and ransom him back to his people for the Artifact.”

Gorthander smiled. “I like it. Thinking outside the box.”

“But the adventure is storming the castle!” Omar said.

“Screw the adventure,” Damico said.

They both looked at him funny. Carl hadn’t passed
that
on of course. Or at least his eternal tormentor didn’t want him to think Carl had.

“Fine!” Omar said too loudly.

The moment they moved away from the castle, the sound of the gate rose up behind them, then the sound of booted feet. Damico scouted ahead, found a grove of gnarled oak trees, and waved for them to follow. Once the others were inside, Damico hid them, the skills coming easily.

Then he snuck out to the edge. Ten guards walked over a green hill of waving grass and straight toward him. He pulled back and waited for them to come into the grove, cursing Carl, or Satan, or whoever.
Someone
wasn’t happy they left the Heart of Darkness without sieging it.

He waited until the guards tromped into the woods and then fell in behind them, stepping between the leaves and acorns without a sound. He raised his sword, inserting it between the shoulder blades of the rearmost guard. He caught the man, a hand over one mouth, and eased him to the ground, cutting his throat and moving onto the next one.

Easy.

Too easy. He’d just killed a man. Killed him. Damico stared down at the body, stunned. These were men. He’d killed a
man
. No. These were targets in a game or they were his tormentor’s tools. Either way they weren’t real. They weren’t people. They were just
things
.

He kept telling himself that. Over and over again.

The next one fell just as easily, if not more… and the next. And the next. Each time it didn’t just become easier physically. Each time it became easier to convince himself these weren’t Humans. They were objects. A sociopath kills because he wants to. A psychopath kills because he doesn’t believe you’re
real
.

No, Officer. He was such a quiet young man. Kept to himself. Of course, he played those evil devil games.

Damico dropped two more before the guards walked straight to his people. Then another fell, sleeping, to the ground. The remaining three turned, their faces screwed up in confusion then looked up in horror.

Gorthander and Omar stormed out of their hiding place even as Damico attacked one more time from behind. The bad guys fell in seconds.

They moved on, sliding to the edge of the grove. Damico checked both ways then headed to the right, down a valley of green fields of waving grass gone to seed. They made whispering movements as he walked, the rest of the party falling in behind him.

He came to the end of the valley and peered around the corner. He could see a large, open area ringed by hills. The ground was muddy in places, dusty in others, the hills covered with bits of bare bushes and a single skeletal tree. It resembled a Bob Ross painting, if Bob had just discovered his wife was boinking the producer.

In the middle of the basin stood twenty guards.

“He’s persistent,” Damico whispered.

He held up a hand to stop the party and then led them up over the ridge and down between hills to the east of the basin. They glided along, Damico a ghost, the rest clanking and clanging as they came.

At the next ridge, Damico crawled up through the dirt and the mud, poking his head over the top. In front of him, grubs and cockroaches writhed and squirmed like the people in the final scenes of Conan. He raised his head farther.

Forty troops.

“Well I’ll be damned,” he said.

He led them back and around and through another valley, quiet like a cat. Subtle like a Dennis Miller joke. Unrelenting like Arianna Huffington.

“Mr. Damico,” a voice said.

Fifty guards surrounded them, appearing on the ridges as if from nowhere. They pointed down at the party with crossbows and alert expressions, great mountains of beef with weapons of pointy death. Behind them stood a man in tights, a doublet, and a mask.

“Dammit,” Damico said.

There would be no escape. It didn’t matter what he did. It didn’t matter how clever he was. Carl would cheat if necessary because in Carl’s head, there was one thing more important than skills and plans and characters’ free will.

The adventure said they were supposed to go to the castle.

Chapter
Twenty-Seven

“No, really. Where’s my thesaurus?”

—Bob Defendi

f you wanted us to go into the fortress,” Gorthander asked,
“why did you talk us into leaving?”

He sounded angry, almost petulant, and Damico couldn’t blame him. They thought he was a Non-Player Character, and so everything he said seemed to come from Carl. To have Carl railroad them into being captured right afterward, it had to seem like the cheesiest village in assholedom.

They sat in a ten by ten cell with benches along one wall. Lotianna sat in one corner, her feet curled up under her, her forehead against the wall, folded in on herself like a turtle who just found out she flunked her SATs. Arithian sat next to her humming because they’d taken his mandolin away. Gorthander sat next, his feet dangling in the air like a kid in a high chair. Omar stood in one corner… mainly because I’m tired of writing “sat”… growling and glaring at them all angrily. Jurkand stood in another, his expression pensive, like the IRS auditor when you’ve told him visiting grandma was a business expense.

Damico understood all their frustration. He wished he could say something that would make them feel better, but he was too scared. Most of them were in a game.
He
would experience everything in here as if it were real.

“It
is
real,” Jurkand said, as if reading his thoughts.

Damico scoffed at the middle-aged man.

“Go buy some Just for Men,” he said.

Jurkand frowned, puzzled. He was the only one here who
couldn’t
get that joke.

The thing he didn’t understand was why Carl had even passed his arguments on to the rest of the group in the first place. If he wanted them to go into the fortress, didn’t he just have to not tell them anything Damico said?

But then again, maybe Damico wasn’t the only one who had to play by the rules. Maybe Carl
had
to pass certain things along. Everything Damico said in character for instance. He passed along the out-of-character pop culture references too, but he probably
chose
to pass those on because they made him seem wittier. Actually, maybe Carl didn’t know what was going on any better than Damico did.

Hmm. That was an interesting thought.

“It’s your fault we got into this mess, dwarf,” Jurkand said. “You were so loud every soldier in three miles must have heard you.”

Damico wanted to correct Jurkand, but he didn’t see how. How did one explain to a person that their entire life was at risk not due to anyone’s actions but because the “adventure” stated they had to be captured in act two? Jurkand was alive. He had free will. He couldn’t possibly understand the portions of this that were still a game.

Damico cursed, and his frustration mounted. They were going to torture him. They always tortured you at this point in the story.

“Dwarf, are you listening to me?” Jurkand asked.

“Stop acting like your name,” Damico said.

“Come on, Dwarf. You got us into this mess, so now I’m going to be beaten to death,
she’s
going to be raped, and it’s all your fault.”

“Lad,” Gorthander said, his voice growling with threat. “Shut up.”

Jurkand’s voice sounded wild, a bit out of control. Just a tinge of hysteria like the forty-year-old Star Wars geek when he comes home and finds out his sister has let his nephew take all his little man-dolls out of their original packaging.

But that didn’t scan. Jurkand wasn’t acting right. Had he just changed personalities like Lotianna? Damico studied him but didn’t get any clues.

“You did this to us, you prick!” Jurkand shouted. That was
really
out of character.

“Shut
up
, lad,” Gorthander said.

“What, are you too stupid to keep up?” Jurkand asked, his voice desperate.

Was he claustrophobic? This was just a little bizarre.

Gorthander slid off the bench and walked over to Jurkand. He stared up at the man from chest height, his beard quivering. Quietly, he said, “Shut up, or I’ll shut you up.”

“Make me,” Jurkand said. His voice almost sounded hopeful.

Gorthander shrugged at the rest of the party, as if to say, “What are you gonna do?” Then he punched Jurkand in the throat.

The man reached up, his face turning white, then red. He grasped his voice box and collapsed, choking. He was still flailing when Damico rolled his eyes at Gorthander.

“Did you
have
to kill him again?”

“Technically, I’m just finishing the job from the first time,” Gorthander said, climbing back onto the bench.

Damico was really too worried to feel for Jurkand. That was just too strange for him to have any proper feelings about it. Was Carl taking over Jurkand? That didn’t make any sense either. It was almost as if Jurkand was egging the dwarf on. Did he know something the rest of them didn’t?

“We have to get out of here before the torture starts,” Damico said, ignoring the wet sounds coming from near the ground.

“You think we can?” Gorthander asked.

“I think the adventure says so.”

Chapter
Twenty-Eight

“Objects in this chapter are closer than they appear.”

—Bob Defendi

isten carefully, and you might hear it.