Death by Cliché (21 page)

“Please. Not another chapter quote.”

—Bob Defendi

attlesnakes can be comfy, once they’ve settled into
your bedroll with you. The trick is getting up without disturbing them. They can be grumpy too.

Damico slid out of his tent, freezing when he heard the telltale rattle. “Shh.” He started moving again. The snake slithered over into the warm spot and curled up. “Hmm.” Damico stood naked in the middle of camp.

“You airing out your unmentionables?” Gorthander asked, lounging by the fire.

“I usually change in my bedroll,” Damico said.

“Why didn’t you?”

“Because I didn’t want to change into a corpse.”

Gorthander grunted as if it were a joke.

They had camped in a lovely little clearing. The trees had been dark and solid, rustling like flowing water and swaying in the wind. The sky was so clear, and the stars so bright it had resembled a slightly fake green-screen effect. The grass was soft and inviting.

Today it looked like a Boy Scout camp after the entire troop had gotten poison oak pissing in the brush.

Gorthander shrugged and went back to making bacon for the breakfast beers. Damico realized what the dwarf was doing.

“Something wrong with Lotianna? I thought she hated your cooking.”

“She hasn’t gotten up yet.”

“Hmm,” he said.

He considered going over to her tent and then thought better of waking her up in his birthday suit. He was about to suggest to Gorthander that they switch, but then he considered the implications of cooking bacon au naturel. Finally, he decided to fetch a burlap sack and a stick to take care of the snake.

Even with the sack, it wasn’t as easy as it looked.

“Hey, Gorthander, I just got bit by a rattlesnake,” he said a moment later.

“This isn’t one of those friendship tests is it?” Gorthander asked dubiously.

Damico held the angry snake up in one hand.

Gorthander shrugged and stood. He seemed to think again, and picked up the pan. He poured the hot grease over the snake’s head
―
and Damico’s hand.

“Son of a bitch!” Damico yelled, leaping away and dropping the stunned snake.

Gorthander stepped on its head.

“Quit your whining.” Gorthander grabbed his hand. “It was like one hit point of damage.”

“This isn’t some fricken game!” Damico said.

“Sure it is,” Gorthander said, healing the hand.

The spell hit like a fresh breeze on a hot day. If you were naked. Falling out of a plane.

“Now for the poison,” Gorthander said and cast a second spell.

This one had no tangible effect.

Damico grumbled and headed back into his tent. He pulled on his small clothes, while cursing Gorthander, then his breeches while he cursed the dwarf’s ancestors. When he was fully dressed, he’d gotten to several broad and masterful profanities about the entire Dwarven race. He stomped back out.

“Feel better?”

“You know that word I was using…?”

“My father was a gunnery sergeant.”

“Did you know you can use it as almost every part of the Human language?”

“Yeah. You’re a regular Ernest Hemingway,” Gorthander said. “Now drink your breakfast beer.”

Damico pulled a strip of bacon out of the beer as Gorthander swilled a swig and started chewing. Damico went over to Lotianna’s tent.

“Lotianna?”

“Yes.” Her voice sounded distant.

“Are going to get up?”

“Yes.”

“Are you going to get up right now?”

“If you’d like.”

Damico shared a glance with Gorthander, who didn’t seem to notice.

“Yes, get up right now.”

There came several shifting sounds, then Lotianna crawled out of the tent, fully dressed. Her hair was messed up, but only in the back as if she had slept all-night without shifting. Strange.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes.” She stared off into space.

And Damico figured it out.

“Lotianna couldn’t come to the game today,” Damico said.

Carl must have passed that on, because Gorthander said, “Yeah, that’s why I was going to have her hold the horses.”

Damico was about to say something more but…

First the fun Lotianna. Then the bitchy Lotianna. Then the shy Lotianna. Now the absentee Lotianna. It all made sense.

Different people were playing the character.

Damico stood there, shocked. He’d wondered before about women willing to play out love scenes with Carl. This was the answer. They couldn’t. They lasted one, maybe two sessions. It was a testimonial to his charm that Damico could get them to last that long.

He would have to live here alone, after all. Have to live with no company but Jurkand. And let’s face it: Gorthander was killing him again in three, four chapters tops.

Alone.

Alone or destroy the world.

What choices were those?

He sighed. He took a drink of his beer. He was starting to get used to the bacony goodness.

“This is pretty good,” he said, his mind already searching for his next move.

Chapter
Thirty
-Seven

“I’m not writing any more chapters today.”

—Bob Defendi

hey marched along in silence because Damico didn’t
start any conversations. He didn’t have the heart to detract from the other player’s fun. They would say something like, “We head off again that morning” hoping Carl would let time pass and say, “Okay. That night…”

But Damico craved attention, and some days, he’d try to start conversations to pass the time. This passed the time for him but was boring to everyone at the game table who didn’t
have
to live through the tedium of walking all day.

He exchanged a few words with Jurkand, but even those would get through to the party and bring them back into real time, he was sure. They answered at least. So he spent the rest of the time, as they walked along the dusty road, watching Lotianna.

She wasn’t just an automaton, even her features had blurred. She no longer resembled some player’s favorite actress. Now she resembled a mannequin.

And technically, he could probably do anything he wanted with her right now, but the thought of taking advantage of that sickened him. It sickened him more that the thought had even occurred to him. He was just so
desperate
for Human contact.

When they got to the next town, he needed to find some barmaid who had come alive and take her to a backroom where it wouldn’t disrupt the game and just
talk
. Dear God, when had he come to need human interaction so much?

The time slogged on. He counted the trees. He counted the villages and the bushes and his steps. He counted how many times Jurkand muttered to himself. He didn’t count them, but he was painfully aware of each swish of Lotianna’s skirts.

None of this was real.

But that wasn’t true, was it? It was real to Jurkand and Barmaid Barbie and all those people in that last tavern. To them, this was their lives, their world. And all he had to do to save his own mind was to destroy them.

Eventually, the sun began to set. There were villages pretty much every mile along this road, so when they realized night was coming, they stopped at the next one.

It consisted of a line of wattle and daub huts along a central road, their roofs bushy yellow thatch. A manor house stood at one end, squat and uninspired: a big frame house with some stonework and a wooden-shingle roof. There was an inn next to it, too big for this town.

As they walked through the streets, people peered out of windows and doorways at them. Emaciated, desperate-looking people. They wore dirty, tattered tunics and haunted eyes bruised with hunger. There were dogs, but they didn’t seem willing to break the mood, so they just sulked.

Damico led the group through all these people and to the inn, hoping beyond hope the place was alive. He needed alive. He could be happy just
watching
alive.

They moved through the front door and into a place bustling with activity, full to the rafters with the sights and the sounds of people. They found their way to seats and waited while a barmaid maneuvered expertly though jostling patrons. She stopped and smiled down at them.

“Hi, my name is Bunny, can I help you?”

She was perfect, like all barmaids in Carl’s world. She was full of life, and she seemed ready to burst out of that dress and the stained apron and yet not in a sexual way. It was like clothing couldn’t contain her because
skin
couldn’t contain her. She was a comet, not a person.

Or maybe it was just the loneliness talking.

“You have a lot of people here,” Damico said.

“It gets like this every night.”

He stared out at the downtrodden village, then back at the fat happy people in here. “I don’t understand.”

“We’re thirty miles down the road from the last town.”

And then he got it. In the real world, everyone traveled a different distance each day, but the game transit tables said thirty miles on foot on a road. It didn’t matter if they started early or late. Thirty miles. Everyone stopped here. The rule book said so.

“Why are those people so hungry if the inn is doing well?” Damico asked.

“It was a bad crop this year,” Bunny said. “The Overlord’s tax collectors, you know how they are.”

Damico faced the rest of them. “We have to do something for these people.”

“Isn’t that nice,” Bunny said, laying a hand on his arm.

Now he
really
needed to help these people.

He considered her. “If you have a high customer volume, you must have all sorts of food.”

“We have a lot,” she said.

“How much to feed the whole village a meal?”

“Five hundred gold,” she said. “Give or take.”

“I think we have that,” Damico said. “Everyone, how much do you have?”

“Nine hundred,” Gorthander said.

“Nine hundred,” Arithian said.

“Forty-two hundred,” Omar said.

Damico paused. He blinked. He examined Omar, as if he might have missed the giant bag of money. “Do you know how much that weighs?” he asked.

Gorthander looked over into Omar’s pouch. “Yep, it’s right there on his character sheet.”

“That’s eighty-four
pounds
of gold,” Damico said.

“I’ve played this character in other games,” Omar said.

“And Brian never spends any money,” Gorthander said.

Damico shook his head and turned back to Bunny. “We’re buying the village dinner.”

“That’s so sweet,” she said, touching his arm electrically.

“Get the chef cooking,” he said. “And what time do you get off work?”

“I’m not that kind of girl,” she said, skeptically.

“You don’t have to be. I only want you for your mind.”

Chapter
Thirty
-Eight