Critical Failures III (Caverns and Creatures Book 3) (17 page)

Chapter 21

Stacy, Mordred, and their waiter, Josh, spent a few minutes hacking and coughing until the pepper cloud began to dissipate.

“I’m so, so sorry!” said Josh, rubbing the side of his head. “Some homeless kid’s got it in for me tonight.”

“Homeless kid?” said Mordred.

Stacy didn’t like the doubt in Mordred’s voice. She thought it best to corroborate the waiter’s story. “Oh yeah,” she said. “I saw this on the news. It’s a new trend. The little street urchins are storming into restaurants, stealing food, and assaulting the wait staff.”

“Why?” asked Josh. His eyes were watery, making the question sound like he was genuinely distraught about the plight of suburban family restaurants. But it was probably just the pepper lingering in his eyes.

Stacy shrugged. “Dunno. Something about the one percent?”

“But I’m just a –”

“Would you mind getting me another drink?” said Stacy. Mine’s got a layer of pepper on top.

“Yes, ma’am,” said Josh. “And I’ll put your order in again and be right back to clean up the mess.”

Stacy gave him a friendly, tight-lipped smile and a wink. Her own eyes still stung pretty bad.

“I’m going to head to the bathroom now,” said Mordred. “Maybe rinse my eyes out.”

Stacy didn’t know how long her next drink was going to be, so she tried to skim the pepper off the top of her current one. She had actually been having a good time before Tim showed up. Sure, Mordred was a big dork, but there was something adorable about how passionate he was about his little game.

What the hell had Tim come inside the restaurant for? He was supposed to be covering the entrance. The little control freak probably didn’t trust her not to screw this up. She would laugh at the irony of that later, when her eyes weren’t full of pepper.

To be fair though, Tim’s shenanigans had been entertaining as well, but Stacy was hungry, and determined not to fill up on breadsticks and salad. She scowled down at her chicken parmesan on the floor. Her stomach grumbled. The food smelled better than she would have liked to admit.

She eyed a piece of chicken resting atop another piece of chicken, and therefore technically not touching the floor. She was strongly considering reaching a new low in her life when she heard the screech of tires outside. She looked out the window. Cars were crashing into each other on Promenade Parkway. She was about to write it off as drunks when she noticed a giant, gray wolf lurking in the shadows on the other side of the road. The thing was bigger than her apartment. It could only mean one thing. More of her new friends were close by.

Diners at nearby tables gasped.

“Look at that!”

“What is it?”

“Quick, get your camera!”

The wolf crossed the street on top of the cars. A few seconds later, a huge bat flew after the wolf, carrying a guy in a Papa Joe’s uniform. He looked like the big one… Connor, was it? Whatever his name was, he was waving around a big Dirty Harry gun. Stacy wondered if she’d lost her ability to be surprised.

“What’s all the commotion?”

Stacy jumped and turned away from the window. Mordred was rubbing his eyes and being careful not to step in any of the spilled food on his way back to their table.

Stacy stood up, positioning herself between him and the window. “Oh nothing,” she said. “Just a little traffic accident outside. Nothing to –”

A series of loud, booming gunshots rang out. The lights in the restaurant dimmed as the crackle of electricity rained down a shower of sparks outside the front windows.

Those patrons who had been pressing against the windows trying to snap a picture with their cell phones now dove onto the floor. Stacy and Mordred squatted down over their spilled dinner.

Stacy felt a strong urge to abort her mission. She couldn’t keep Mordred from hearing about the chaos going on outside, and he was bound to suspect that the timing of their date and said chaos was more than just a coincidence.

“I need to use the bathroom,” she said.

Mordred gave her a strange look but nodded silently. The wheels were already turning.

Stacy stood but remained stooping as she walked to the ladies room, taking what cover she could from any more potential errant bullets. Her gut told her to run for the exit and put all of this behind her, but her brain reminded her that there was a huge fucking wolf out there.

She ducked into the ladies room and frowned at her disheveled, flushed reflection in the mirror.
Calm down, Stacy. Think.
She fumbled through her purse for her pack of stale Virginia Slims. Her hands shook as she flicked the lighter. Just as she got a flame going, one of the stalls opened, scaring the shit out of her.

“Sorry,” Stacy said to the large, middle-aged woman stepping out of the stall. “Just a little jumpy.” She got another flame going and lit her cigarette.

The woman frowned at her. “You can’t smoke in here.”

Stacy narrowed her eyes and exhaled a prolonged plume of smoke from her pursed lips. “Go and call the cops, lady. Good luck with that. I’m sure they’re not busy right now.”

The bathroom door swung open. Mordred stood in the doorway.

“Stacy!”

Shit.

“I’m getting the manager,” said the angry woman, shoving her way past Mordred.

“Mordred,” said Stacy taking stock of her immediate surroundings, looking for something she might be able to defend herself with. The best she could come up with was a toilet paper roll poking out of the top of the garbage can. She held on to her cigarette. “This is the ladies’ bathroom. You can’t be in here.”

Mordred locked the door and turned around. His eyes were red, and his cheeks streaked with tears running into his beard. He looked worse than the pepper should have accounted for.

“Did you bring them here?”

“Who?”

“Don’t play with me,” said Mordred. He closed his eyes and swallowed hard. “I’m not stupid. The whole Olive Garden is talking about giant bats and wolves, and some kind of monster waving a gun. Does any of that sound familiar to you?”

Stacy couldn’t get a fix on his tone. Was he angry? Heartbroken? Scared? Maybe all three. Under his gut she noticed a bulge in his pants. It might have been an unfortunately placed roll of fat, but then again…

“You need to go right now, Mordred!” said Stacy. She tried to sound threatening, but her heart was racing, and her only meager defense was turning quickly into ash.

“I’ll go,” said Mordred. “Just as soon as I give you something to remember me by.”

Chapter 22

Dave felt the relief of a cool breeze on his face and opened his eyes.

He was standing on a sunbaked yellow sandstone balcony overlooking a river in the distance. The air smelled of honeysuckle. The wall in front of him was warm to the touch as he stood on tiptoes to look down at what was immediately below him.

The balcony stood about ten feet off the ground. Down below was a large rectangular pit, a quarter of the way filled with water. On all four corners lay gleaming steel pitchers pouring endless streams of water into the pit.

“How do you like the pool?” said a voice from behind. Dave turned around.

The Horseman who called himself War was standing in the doorway of a gorgeous villa. He looked like a porn mogul from the seventies. A white, linen robe hung open from his shoulders, showing off his tanned chest and surprisingly well-sculpted abs. He wore a thick-chained golden amulet around his neck. His fingers were all decked out with rings, most of them boasting gaudy gemstones of every color. One ring on each hand was more tasteful and simple, which probably meant they were magical. He was holding a glass full of some Windex-blue liquid, which actually had ice cubes in it. He joined Dave at the wall.

“I put it in yesterday,” he said, not having to stretch to look over the wall like Dave did. “It’s taking forever to fill, though. Even with four Decanters of Endless Water, and those don’t come cheap, you know.”

“You put in a swimming pool yesterday?” said Dave. “Do you mean you
finished
yesterday?”

“Nope,” said War. “Whole project, start to finish, just one day. It’s amazing how easy construction projects are with a little higher-level magic. I almost can’t wait to get back home and build me one of these on the beach.” He took a sip of his drink. “I’m telling you, man. I’m gonna be neck-deep in pussy.”

“That would have to be an extremely large pussy,” said Dave.
Heh heh, not too shabby.

“I’ll park my Hummer in your mom’s.”

Goddammit.

“Ha ha!” said War, snapping his fingers. He pointed at Dave. “Feel the burn!” An orange jet of flame shot out of his fingertip. Dave didn’t have time to jump out of the way, but he didn’t feel anything as the fire passed right through him, leaving a black smoking hole in the sandstone wall behind him.

“Oops,” said War. “I’ll patch that up later.”

“Any idea on when you’ll be heading back home?” asked Dave, trying to make it sound casual and disinterested.

War smirked. “Wouldn’t you like to know. Truth is, I have no idea. Mordred’s been pretty antsy about you fags chasing him all over the gulf coast, but we convinced him to let us hang out here for a few more sessions. Power up a little more. The other guys are out killing a nest of dragons right now.”

“Why aren’t you with them?”

“They asked me to sit this one out. They were getting pissed at me for disintegrating everything before they had a chance to fight. So I stayed home and built a pool instead. To tell you the truth, killing monsters is starting to get a little boring.”

Dave looked up at the villa. “It must pay well, though, huh?”

War swigged back what was left of his drink. “You don’t know the half of it, dude. Come on inside. I want to show you something.” He walked through the doorway.

Dave followed. The interior wasn’t very well furnished. It was obvious that someone had recently moved in. Sacks of coins were piled up in corners. Jewel encrusted goblets lay on the floor like discarded junk. The one major piece of furniture in what Dave guessed was meant to be the living room was a giant, solid oak rectangular dining table, lying on its side against a wall. It had three daggers embedded in it, as well as a large throwing axe. The surface was scarred with countless gouges, burns, and scratches, as was the wall behind it. Dave had some idea of what kind of pursuits these guys got up to when they were drunk and bored at night.

“We bought this place off a retired merchant for the price of ‘We promise not to kill your family’,” said War, kicking a gold-plated helmet out of the way as he walked to the next room. “Most of this crap is useless. We don’t need but one or two weapons a piece when we go back. We’ll stuff as much gold as we can into Bags of Holding, but we’ll probably burn this place to the ground just before we leave, because of course we will.”

Dave followed War through an archway into another room. “Why do you always choose me?”

“What are you talking about?”

“Why don’t you visit any of the other guys in their dreams? Why only me?”

“I don’t know,” said War. “I like you. Maybe it’s because you suck the most, and you don’t say a whole lot. Besides, whenever I’m looking to enter your dreams, you’re the only one that’s ever asleep.”

The room they had entered, while cluttered, appeared to have more of a defined purpose than the one they had just left. This was their arsenal. Weapons of various types and qualities were strewn about all over the place. Daggers, short swords, and clubs were discarded on the floor, while more powerful weapons were mounted on the walls. Greataxes, broadswords, ornately decorated halberds, and even a gorgeous dwarven urgrosh, which Dave was surprised he was able to identify as such.

“Are these all magical?” said Dave, peering into a barrel full of katanas.

“You bet your ass they are,” said War. “Those in the barrel are all vorpal swords. With a good roll, they’ll slice a guy in half. Famine dual wields them. You should have seen him fighting this mountain giant a few days ago. It was like he was chopping up a cucumber for a salad. It was sick! But come on over here. This is what I wanted to show you.”

Dave walked over to see what War was bending over. A polished wooden case. War lifted the lid and pulled out a gleaming silver mace. It was smaller than the one Dave was accustomed to wielding, but looked a lot more valuable.

“The Rod of Lordly Might,” said War, cradling the weapon like a newborn baby. The silver was polished to a mirror-like shine, a tiny, distorted image of the room reflecting off each stud. The near-perfect gleam of the handle was interrupted by six small buttons.

“Impressive,” said Dave. His past characters had never lived long enough to wield weapons that powerful.

“This is the weapon I’ll be taking back home with me,” said War. “So here’s my question for you. How do you want to die?”

It was not a question Dave had given much thought to before. “Um…” he said. “Old..
ly
?”

“Let me make the choice simpler for you,” said War. “You can go down in a regular old rain of fireballs,
or
you can die by…” He pressed a button on the handle of the mace. A four foot long blade of flame sprang out of the top, like it had been manufactured by the ACME Corporation. “…FIRE SWORD!” The flaming sword whooshed as he waved it through the air. “Yah!” he said, slicing at Dave’s incorporeal form.

“Shit!” said Dave, jumping back despite the lack of any real immediate danger. The sword passed through his belly, and he could just imagine his half-raw/half-charred entrails spilling out.

“What do you think about that?” said War, humming lightsaber noises along with the weapon’s natural whoosh as he twirled it around awkwardly. His performance was about as impressive as that of the Star Wars Kid on Youtube.

He spun around a few more times than what was good for him, tripped over a war hammer, and fell forward. The flaming blade sliced into the side of the barrel containing the vorpal swords, leaving behind a charred gash and tipping the barrel over. Vorpal swords clattered onto the floor.

Dave clapped. “Very nice. Can you do that again?”

War stood up, laughing at himself. “The Rod has other functions too,” he said, pointing to the buttons on the handle. “The battleaxe and spear options are actually more powerful weapons, but come on… FIRE SWORD!”

He held the weapon like a guitar with one hand, windmilling his other arm like he was performing the climax of a heavy metal song against a backdrop of pyrotechnics. “FIRE SWORD! FIRE SWORD!” he sang. “You better think of something fast! I’m gonna cauterize your – AAAHHHH!”

That last bit was almost certainly not part of the song. Dave looked at the window War was screaming at just in time to see the gaping maw of a dragon fly through it. The dragon had white scales and pink eyes. If Dave imagined its horns as floppy ears, it almost reminded him of Little Ron Jeremy. It had three rows of sharp, pointed teeth of varying lengths, suggesting that it fed primarily on a diet of children’s nightmares. It might not have been quite big enough to swallow a man whole, but the second bite would surely leave the creature hungry. Dave reined in control of his fear by reminding himself that he wasn’t actually there.

War shrieked and made a desperate swipe at the creature’s snout. The sword sizzled into the dragon’s flesh as white smoke hissed away from a black wound.

“Hey! Knock it off, stupid!” said a gruff, angry voice from outside.

The unresponsive dragon head continued into the room, followed by about three feet of dragon neck, and then the rest of the Horsemen on a flying carpet, and finally by four more feet of white scaly neck, which began to widen just before the sever point.

“What did you expect?” asked War. “You scared the crap out of me!”

The whole house shook when Pestilence hopped off the rug. He was even bigger than before, stuffed into a gleaming suit of spiked armor that made Dave’s look like a rusty tin can. War backed away as Pestilence stomped around the carpet to inspect the dragon’s face.

“Damn it, Scott!”

“Call me
War
.” War whispered, one eye on Dave.

“Screw you, Scott,” said Pestilence. “I was going to bring this back home and have it mounted. Look what you’ve done to it!”

“It looks better this way,” said Death, running a bony white finger along the length of the wound. Where his finger touched, he left a trail of scar tissue, closing the wound, but leaving a gross disfigurement. This lets observers know that the prize was won by means of fierce battle.”

“Hmph,” said Famine. “Yeah, real fierce. Pestilence walked up next to it while it was sleeping and hacked its head off…
again
.”

“Sorry,” said Pestilence. “I got carried away. I’ll let you get the next one.”

“That’s not the point,” said Famine. “Aren’t you guys getting kind of bored walking into the lairs of huge monsters and killing them in their sleep?”

“What are you whining about?” asked War. “Think of the Experience Points, and all the cool stuff we’re getting.” He waved his flaming blade around in the air. “FIRE SWORD!”

“Screw the Experience Points,” said Famine, drawing one of his twin vorpal swords from its sheath on his back. It was only slightly thinner than his arm. He looked like a marionette as he admired its construction, balancing the blade atop one slender finger, just above the hilt. “I want a real fight. I want to put all these Skills and Feats I’ve acquired to the test.”

Quick as a flash, Famine gripped his vorpal sword, spun around, and sliced Dave diagonally in half.

“Yah!” Dave yelped as the blade passed harmlessly through him. The polished, wooden column he had been standing next to remained upright, but upon close inspection, Dave could see a hairline imperfection where the blade had sliced it in two.

“Mordred has a greater purpose for us,” said Death. “He cannot risk our accidental death. We are beholden to his will.”

“
We are beholden to his will
?” said Famine. “Who talks like that? Who do you think you are?”

“I am Death.”

“Bullcrap you are, Nathan,” said Famine. “Your creepy vibe doesn’t work on me. You’ve copied my homework. Anyway, what’s this
greater purpose
? Babysitting?”

Both Dave and War looked back at the flying carpet. There was still one more person, dressed in black and bound with rope. A bag obscured the person’s face.

War pushed a button on his weapon, retracting the fiery blade. “Who’s that?” he said over the distant ring of a telephone.

“Some chick we found wandering around on the mountain,” said Pestilence. “Mordred says we’re supposed to keep her safe and keep our hands off her.” He sneered, picking the figure up and setting it down unceremoniously in a corner. He pulled the bag off, revealing a female human face with large, frightened green eyes, tracks of tears down the sides of both cheeks, and a thick gag of rope and fabric bunched into her mouth.

Dave shook his head, trying to concentrate as the nagging sound of a ringing phone grew less and less distant. For a fraction of a second, it seemed like her eyes locked with his. They were pleading and desperate, and oddly familiar.

The persistent telephone finally won out, and Dave peeled his face from the sticky surface of the table to find himself alone in the Chicken Hut. He wandered groggily to the back office and answered the phone.

“Hello? Er… I mean Chicken Hut. How can I help you?” He had no intention of helping anyone with any chicken related business.

“Dave!” said a panicky, high-pitched voice on the other end. “It’s me, Tim. We lost Stacy.”

“Huh?”

“I think she left with Mordred, but we lost track of his car. I need you to get Goosewaddle over here and see if he’s got any spells that will help us find them.”