[ 22 ]
“LET’S SEE IF WE CAN FIND WHO’S MAKING THESE SIGNS,” I SAID.
We passed three more of the rounded entrances before we came across the encampment.
It was a full quarter turn from where we started, at the end of another artery. My heart swelled when I saw the sheer number of people there. There were about forty blue dots gathered at what appeared to be a drawbridge leading into the round maze.
My enthusiasm waned when I saw the manner of people waiting for us.
Almost all of them were still level one. And they were elderly. Not cool grandpa dude at the club elderly. But holy-crap-I-love-you-gam-gam-but- how-the-hell-are-you-still-alive elderly. Most of them were in wheelchairs.
Those who weren’t had walkers. Most were in robes and caps, and piles of blankets littered the hallway. They sat gathered together. Most appeared to be asleep.
Another older woman stood apart from the group. This one was pushing 70, not 100 like the others. She stood stiffly, her black eyes watching us. This woman was wrapped head to toe in an endless amount of scarves, and her skin was like a relief map of a shriveled prune. A red checkered trapper hat with ear flaps sat skewed on her head. She leaned on a shopping cart filled to the brim with blankets and other odds and ends including a plastic pink flamingo that had an arrow stuck in its head.
I remembered the stairs I’d had to descend, and I wondered how they’d managed to get the wheelchairs and shopping cart down here.
I caught sight of a group of younger, more able-bodied crawlers. One of
them, a chubby black guy, saw us approach and waved. He came jogging up.
“Oh thank god,” the man said. “Did you see our signs?”
“We did,” I said. I examined his properties.
Crawler #12,330,671. “Brandon An.”
Level 6.
Race: Human.
Class: Not yet assigned.
He had a single bronze star by his name. The man wore a heavy winter jacket despite the heat. He had a gigantic hammer looped over his shoulder.
The weapon was comically big. The round head was almost as wide as the tire on my Chopper. It glittered, obviously made of some sort of magical, lightweight metal. He didn’t appear to have any other armor or gear.
“We?” the man said, frowning as he examined my properties. He took a hesitant step back, as if he was startled. “Is there more than one of you?” He looked down at Donut, and his frown deepened.
For a moment I was afraid that I had received a skull next to my name without realizing. But then I remembered what my real title was. It didn’t say my name was Carl. It said I was Royal Bodyguard Carl, and Donut was Grand Champion Best in Dungeon Princess Donut.
I could only imagine how that looked to someone meeting me for the first time.
Another man approached, this one was Chris Andrews 2. He was also level six. The two men were clearly brothers. He was taller and less stocky.
Chris wore a metal skullcap but didn’t appear to have any weapons.
“Yes we are we,” Donut said. “I mean, really. I am right here. Rude.”
Chris and Brandon just looked at each other. Then Brandon burst out laughing.
“I’m sorry man,” he said to me. “I didn’t realize. I saw your name, and I thought…”
“Yeah,” I said. “You thought I was a nut. She talks. She also probably has higher stats than anybody else here.”
Brandon went to a knee and patted Donut on the head. She looked simultaneously outraged and thrilled that he had touched her. “Well it’s nice to meet you, Princess Donut. I’m sorry if I offended you, pretty girl. I’ve never met a talking cat before.”
“It’s quite all right,” Donut said, mollified. “Apology accepted.”
We walked back toward the group. Despite what I had seen earlier with
the goat corpses, it appeared there were only four people here in fighting shape. Both Brandon and Chris were level six. A round Hispanic woman —Yolanda Martinez 13—was around fifty years old and only stood about four foot 11. She was level five and carried a bow and had a quiver hanging over her shoulder. The quiver was so big on her, it almost dragged on the floor. She was in medical scrubs, and she wore a plastic ID on her breast. It read “Meadow Lark. Yolanda. CNA.”
The fourth was another woman carrying a longsword. She, too, wore scrubs, though she also wore a magical cloak. Her name was Imani C. I guessed the woman weighed about 90 pounds, if that. She looked to be about 20 years old. Her terrified, hollowed-out eyes suggested she had seen some shit.
All four of them had a single bronze star after their names.
Imani also had skulls.
A lot of skulls.
On the interface, it was one big skull followed by two more regular ones.
When I hovered over it, it said Crawler Killer X 12.
She was also level 10, the highest we’d seen so far.
Donut: CARL IT IS ANOTHER VILE MURDERER.
Carl: I don’t think so, not this time. Also, I know you don’t have to type in all caps. I’ve seen you do it before. It makes you sound like you
are yelling.
Donut: I AM YELLING CARL.
“We are the night staff at an eldercare facility in Wenatchee,” Brandon was saying after I introduced myself to the others. Yolanda greeted me with enthusiasm. Imani said nothing. “We had a fire alarm and were forced to go outside because someone,” he eyed the woman with the shopping cart, “started a barrel fire outside our building and caught it on fire.”
I examined the woman with the shopping cart. She was obviously homeless. We’re all homeless now. She stood there, looking off into space,
gnawing on a blackened fingernail.
Crawler #7,450 “Agatha.”
Level 2.
Race: Human.
Class: Not yet assigned.
“Anyway,” Brandon said. “We had to evacuate the building, all 250 residents out into the freezing cold right when it happened.”
I looked at the group, counting for the first time. There were a total of 38 people here, including the four workers and Agatha.
“There were 250 of you?” I asked, looking the group over.
“Yeah,” Brandon said, more quietly. “Not everyone came down here.
And not everyone who did is still with us.”
He went on to explain what happened next.
The fire started and quickly engulfed the outside of their building.
Luckily, the fire had been on the side of the cafeteria, in an alley area where Agatha had been camped out. Nobody had been hurt by the blaze itself, but evacuations at elder facilities were always an especially dangerous affair. It was no simple task to get everyone out.
The local police and fire department had arrived by the dozens.
Firefighters assisted with the fire and with handing out blankets to the freezing residents and workers of the facility. They’d been in the process of getting the keys to a nearby elementary school to get everyone out of the cold.
“But how did you get them down the stairs?” I asked.
Brandon looked, again, at Agatha. “The entrance appeared right in the street, literally in the middle of the group. A bunch of folks fell in. There were stairs just like you said. But then Agatha over there pushed her cart right onto the stairs like she was… well I don’t know what the hell she was doing.
But the stairs transformed into a ramp. It wanted her to come on down. A long, easy ramp. Agatha was the first to voluntarily go down there, cackling like she always does. Hollerin’ she’d saved all our lives. The folks who fell in when it opened, we never saw them again.” He shuddered. “They weren’t there when we got to the bottom.”
“Did you go because of the cold?” I asked.
He eyed my naked legs. “We didn’t mean to go all the way in, but it was warm in there, you know what I mean? So I pushed a few residents right into the entrance where the ramp wasn’t so steep, so that hot air was blasting up on them. I figured we could wait there until we knew what we were going to do. Only a few of the cops and paramedics remained after the collapse. They just took off running in all sorts of directions, like they had some place better to go. But some stayed, and they helped me bring the residents into the warmth. It let me do it. We moved several over, but then, after we’d moved about half the residents into the warmth, it just stopped letting me leave. My foot was trapped. My brother wasn’t even in the hole, but when he grabbed
my hand, it wouldn’t let him move, either. And it started hurting after a minute. It only stopped when we moved down the ramp. When we got that twenty minute warning, when it said anyone lurking in the stairwell wouldn’t get out? We just went in. We didn’t have a choice.”
“What about the cops and paramedics?”
“We had about twenty guys with us, including a couple firemen and cops who decided to go in. Most didn’t. We all helped getting the residents inside the hall.” He pointed over his shoulder, indicating the artery that led to this quarter of the circle. “It was right there, just around that corner where we came in. Most of these folks haven’t moved hardly at all since we got here.
We’ve been bringing them food from a safe room that’s about a mile away.”
“Where are the cops and firefighters now?” I asked.
He nodded at the circle. “Most went in there when we first found this place. The gates closed, then about five minutes later, the gates opened up again, and those guys were just gone. Our tutorial guide lady, Mistress Tiatha, she said all borough and city bosses will have stairwells for the first four or five levels. But there will be a bunch of other stairs in random places, too. A couple of us went out searching for them, hoping we could find a stairwell that’s easier to get to than this one. This was just a while back.”
Brandon cast a nervous glance at the elderly patients. He leaned in and whispered, “They’re all dead. You can see when they die on the party menu.
They all got picked off by something that’d been hunting them one by one.
Even Doctor Gracie, and she was a damn MMA fighter. Us four? We’re the last of the non-residents left. Us and Agatha.”
I turned to regard the large group of elderly patients. Looking upon them gave me a terrible, sinking feeling. They shouldn't be here. This wasn’t going to end well.
Agatha had pulled a blue IKEA bag from her shopping cart. She produced a can of metallic silver spray paint from the bag. She hobbled over to the wall and sprayed a giant circle, then turned it into a happy face. Then she leaned in and sniffed the wall, muttering something to herself the whole time.
“Don’t waste the spray paint, Agatha,” Brandon called.
“It’s mine!” Agatha said, clutching the IKEA bag to herself. “You stole it from me.”
“And you stole it from Stan’s,” Brandon said. “Just… Just don’t waste it, okay?”
“Have you thought about moving all these folks to the safe room?” I
asked. “It has to be more comfortable than the hallway.”
“It’s already full,” Brandon said. “It’s a damn Waffle House from Alabama. Can you believe that? The place has a capacity of 30 people, and my brother Chris has been helping the more coherent, more mobile ones get over there. There’s this gnome thing in there that’s cooking them food and singing. They all love it.” He smiled sadly. “Those folks at the Waffle House.
They made a vote, and they decided they’re not coming out. They’re treating it like a giant party.”
“He doesn't talk much, does he?” I asked, indicating Brandon's brother, Chris.
Brandon shook his head while Chis looked at me impassively.
“He's not exactly mute,” Brandon said. “But he don't say too much.
Growing up, our mom thought he was slow. They put him in a special school because he never spoke. But he's not dumb. He does talk. Think of him as Silent Bob. If he says something, you better listen.”
Brandon nodded sagely.
I hesitated. “And her?” I asked, indicating Imani. I watched as she helped a woman to a nearby door. A bathroom. She made the woman open the door herself. The floor outside the bathroom was stained red. I shuddered, remembering the exploding “bug” from the announcements. After the woman was safely delivered to the bathroom, Imani turned and helped a man in a wheelchair take a sip of water. Yolanda also moved amongst the others, talking softly.
Brandon shook his head. “We got attacked once, right after we found that tutorial place. I… I don’t really want to talk about it, man. But Imani, she had that sword, and several of the residents, we were taking them in groups to Mistress Tiatha. They can’t move so quick. It was for the better. Letting those things burn them, that’d been much worse.”
I nodded. I had questions, but I knew some things were best left unasked.
It wasn’t lost on me that her high level was probably a direct result of her having to kill 12 of her former patients. And she’d probably gained a loot box or two.
“These people still can’t walk? So the dungeon’s fast healing and all those healing spells and such don’t work?”
“Oh, it’s amazing,” Brandon said. “But it’s a curse, too. All of these folks have been cured of hundreds of their little ailments. Not a one of them brought any of their medications with them down here, and it’s been okay.
But at the same time, they ain’t getting any younger. Or stronger. And those who’ve lost memories or cognitive function, that hasn’t been fixed. It’s like it cured anything that’s going to kill them, but it didn’t make them better than they were, either.”
I sighed, turning my attention to the large, rounded entrance to the maze.
There was a short bridge, an entrance about three times the size of the smaller portcullis entrances that peppered the way, with a raised, giant gate big enough to allow a pair of goblin dozers through side-by-side. It led to another, round courtyard with three exits. The walls shook as the monster sped by, but it didn’t appear to enter this courtyard area.
“So, what’s the plan?” I asked.
“The original plan was to gather as many people as we could and then storm the maze. We think it's shaped like a spiral. But nobody was coming, so they went looking for other exits. And that didn’t work out so well. Now it’s just us, and we can’t kill that thing. Nobody even knows what it is.”
“And then what?” I asked. “Even if we had free passage to the stairs…” I let it hang.
“I know, I know,” Brandon said. “But I just can’t leave them. I was hoping, maybe if we could get them all down to the second level, then we could do the same thing for the third level. And then they’d all get to choose a class and maybe they wouldn’t be, you know…”
“Useless?” Donut asked.
I nodded. I felt for the guy and the other three. Would I have stayed, continued with my duty? Even when it was so damn hopeless? What a nightmare. I thought I’d had it bad, but these guys… The world was over.
There was no hope for these poor people they’d been in charge of protecting.
This harsh environment wasn’t meant for the weak, the frail.
Yet to these four—Brandon, Chris, Yolanda, and Imani—the idea of giving up their duty wasn’t even a question.
I spent some time recounting our story, including our clash in the last safe room. I told them of our two encounters with neighborhood bosses.
“I can do something similar with this boss,” I said. “I think I can build a bomb that’ll go off on its own when the monster hits it, that way we don’t have to get locked in there to fight.”
“It won’t work,” Yolanda said, coming up to stand with us. “You know those little doors, the ones that let you see the monster? They’re protected somehow. I thought to try to hit it with my bow, but the arrow bounces right
off. I poked at it with my finger, and it feels like thick clay. It even glows blue if you touch it. They look like entrances, but they ain’t. I think maybe you can go in that way if you push yourself really hard, but I wouldn’t try it.
And I wouldn’t be pushing no bomb through that. The only way in is through this big gate here. And the monster doesn’t go into that first room. So you can’t hurt it without first getting locked in.”
“But we don’t know for sure,” Brandon added. “Once the gate closed, we couldn’t see in there at all. We couldn’t hear. We couldn’t talk using the party chat, not with the ones in there. It was like they’d been cut from the party.”
I sighed. We had two choices. We could leave these guys and hope to find another set of stairs somewhere. Or we could fight the borough boss here.
Neither choice was appealing. Whatever that thing was, it would be almost impossible to kill. I remembered that scene from the latest recap episode. It had been forty against one borough boss, and it had slaughtered them. We didn’t even know what the hell the monster was.
I looked at the clock. We had 40 hours. Geez. Had it really been that long since we’d run away from Frank and Maggie? There would be another show in 10 hours. We’d done nothing today except travel a hundred miles or so from where we started.
And speaking of Frank and Maggie. I had a terrible realization. “Your people, the ones who died while looking for more stairs. Which direction did they go?”
“Mostly west, toward Seattle. They would’ve been north of where you were. I remember where we killed the chilly goats. That was the farthest out my brother and I had gone. We separated from the group right around there and headed back here.”
“And how long ago did the last one disappear?”
“It was earlier today. Barely five or six hours ago.”
I looked down at Donut, thinking. It could’ve been them, Frank and Maggie. But that would mean they’d gotten to this area before us. That didn’t make sense. We were pretty far from where we’d last encountered them.
Could there be another group of crawlers killing people off? Or was it a monster? Without finding their bodies, we’d never know.
Behind me, one of the elderly women started sobbing. Another, a man with a back so curved his chin rested against his own chest, scooted forward on his walker and patted her on the back. The hunch-backed man was
wearing a veteran’s cap. He had been US Army Special Forces once upon a time.
If I’m gonna die, I might as well do it in the pursuit of a worthy cause.
“Are there any other rest areas around here?” I asked. “Ones that aren’t full?”
“Yeah, we know of two. One of them doesn’t have anything in it except a vending machine that hands out wrapped candies. They taste like piss but give you a +1 boost to your dexterity for ten minutes. The machine only works for you once a day. The next place is further down. It’s a Taco Bell from Peru and has full facilities, including coffee.” He leaned in. “And beer.
Good beer.”
“What about the mobs near there?” I asked. “Also, how about training guilds?”
“We’ve cleared out the next two quadrants. Some of the other guys killed the first neighborhood boss. They said it was like a giant, demon man in a suit made of skin. We got the second boss. All of us here were in on that fight. That one was a floating crystal thing, but it shattered when I hit it with my hammer a few times. The next area after that, next to the Taco Bell, is still crawling with monsters. They’re lizard creatures. They jump and bite and poison you. I got hit once, and I thought I was going to die. The poison ran out on its own just before it killed me, and that was only because I kept taking health potions. We didn’t want to mess around in that neighborhood after that. But there are a couple training guilds in the area.”
“Okay, good,” I said. “This is what’s going to happen. Donut and I are going to spend the rest of today grinding. If you can manage to pry a pair of those rattle cans from Agatha over there, I’ll take them with us. I’m going to try to level up my skills as much as possible. You guys should do the same.
Be wary of any other crawlers. Especially ones with the skulls by their names. We’re going to watch episode three, get some sleep, and then we’re going to come back here. And then all of us—Me, Donut, and you four—are going to go into there, and we’re going to fuck that boss up. We’re going to get your people down those stairs. Sound like a plan?”
“And how are we going to do that?” a new voice asked. It was Imani, speaking for the first time.
I grinned. “Don’t worry. I have an idea.”
