Critical Failures IV

by Robert Bevan

  “Fuck, I’m smart,” Stacy whispered to herself. This was some real Sun Tzu type shit happening in her mind. And while she hoped it would all be unnecessary, she was also kind of eager to see how it played out.

  The dog’s barking grew louder and more excited. They were close. Stacy drew the sword from the sheath on her back, squatted behind her chosen tree, and focused on the road.

  Part of her was a little disappointed when she made out the shape of a big shaggy sheepdog, identical to the one which accompanied the other elf in the party. Still, maybe it was just a popular breed. She continued to wait.

  “This is it,” said the elf as he, a human, and a dwarf caught up to the dog. He put his hand on the dwarf’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, man.”

  The dwarf shrugged the elf’s hand away. “Don’t act like you know what happened here.”

  “It’s obvious what happened here,” said the elf. “I mean, don’t get me wrong. They were the only onesin your group I actually kind of liked. I’m sorry to see them go, but we’ve got to face reality.”

  She and Julian being two exceptions to a mostly unlikeable group. The evidence was piling up for these guys being from the Whore’s Head.

  “I don’t know, man,” said the human. “It looks pretty cut and dried to me.”

  “Oh please,” said the dwarf. “After that CSI bullshit about severed owlbeararms and paladins?”

  What the fuck is an owlbear?

  “This isn’t the same,” said the elf. “There’s no mystery to solve here. This is O.J. with the bloody knife in his hand. You said you saw a Fireball in the sky. Our friends were in the sky. They obviously got hit by the fireball, fell to the ground, and got blasted with a second Fireball. I don’t care how tough they were. They didn’t survive two Fireballs and a fall from that height.”

  “Then where are the bodies?” asked probable Dave. Mentions of O.J. and CSI had removed most of Stacy’s remaining doubt, but after her tangle with the Horsemen, she couldn’t be too careful.“And look over there. Are those hoofprints?” Stacy suppressed a giggle as Dave waddled excitedly to the epicenter of the blast.

  “If a horse was incinerated here, you can bet your ass that Julian was – OW!” Dave collapsed.

  “What’s wrong?” asked Chaz, ducking low to the ground and scanning the trees.

  “My fucking foot!” cried Dave.

  Oops. Stacy had forgotten to pick up her caltrops.Time to come out of hiding.“Hey! Sorry guys. My bad!”

  “Stacy!” said Dave. He glanced snidely at the elf guy before quickly turning back to her. “Where’s Julian? Is he okay?”

  Stacy frowned. “He’s in bad shape. He took a direct hit from that Fireball. Do you think you can heal him?”

  Dave tossed away the caltrop he’d removed from his boot and unsteadily rose to his feet. “I won’t be able to pray for my spells until dawn.”

  “Are you, um…” said the elf. “Are you sure he’s alive?”

  The question angered Stacy, perhaps more than it should have. “I’m not stupid. He’s breathing. His heart’s beating. I got him stabilized.” She walked over to where Julian was fitfully sleeping and kicked away the branches she’d concealed him with.

  “Jesus Christ!” said Chaz. Dave and the elf averted their eyes.

  Stacy started to tear up again. Julian’s face looked even worse than before. The water she had applied had completely evaporated, leaving his skin burnt, scabby, and dry.

  “Dawn’s only a couple hours away,”the elf said somberly. “We’ll camp here until then.”

  Chapter 14

  Katherine huffed as she beat her little bat wings defiantly against the wind. What the hell was with all the attitude?

  All she’d needed was a simple answer to a simple question. Did Tim and Cooper stop by here?

  Instead, with valuable minutes of night slipping away, they gave her a lecture on how her brother was becoming more and more of a degenerate drunken idiot. She knew this. He was going through a rough time. He had probably figured out what was going on between Julian and Skanky, and was dealing with his problems the best way he knew how. Tim never had handled rejection well.

  Even if he was a degenerate drunken idiot, he was her brother, and they could all go fuck themselves. Katherine grinned as she flew, hoping they were all having a good time dealing with their mysteriously sudden rat infestation.

  According to the information she’d finally been able to drag out of the judgmental pricks, Tim and Cooper had about a thirty minute head start on her. Not a problem. She had a clear path, while they would have to walk around buildings through unusually crowded streets full of people shouting at each other. There was no point trying to find them in that mess. It would be much easier to wait at the South Gate until they passed through it.

  She arrived at the gate sooner than she’d expected to, then kept flying above the road for a while, just in case Tim and Cooper had been traveling improbably fast, or the lazy bums at the Whore’s Head had underestimated how much time had passed.

  After flying down the road for five minutes and seeing no sign of the boys, she took on her half-elven form mid-air and dropped to the ground, landing with her right fist in the air, and her left leg extended sideways.

  A bit too high. Her left knee hit the pavement pretty hard, and she knew she probably had a nasty burn under her jeans. The pose was all wrong anyway. Something to keep working on.

  She walked back to the South Gate, where she immediately caught the unwanted attention of the guards on duty.

  Dull as it must have been, guard duty wasn’t a slacker’s position. The two men standing at either side of the gate were both tall and muscular. Personal hygiene, however, was held to a lower standard.

  The guard on the left side of the gate grinned at Katherine with yellow teeth. “Now what’s a fine young miss doing out alone at this time of night?”

  “It ain’t safe for a lady to travel unaccompanied at night,” said the guard on the right, abandoning his position to move in closer to her. “There be predators out here, don’t you know?”

  “And scavengers,” Katherine said flatly.

  “Will you be needing a place to stay, m’lady?” said the first guard, crowding in just a little bit closer. “Mayhap, I can put you up for the night. My shift ends at dawn.”

  That wasn’t all that would end at dawn. “I’m trying to find my brother. Maybe you’ve seen him?”

  The two guards glanced knowingly at each other, grinning even more broadly as if sharing a secret.

  “I don’t know,” said the guard with the yellow teeth. “What does he look like?”

  And then Katherine understood their secret. They were closing in on her with their creepy intimidation thing, and thought that she had pulled the brother thing out of her ass to get them to back off. Just like a man. Always thinking ‘Don’t you know it’s dangerous for a little girl to be out alone at night?’, and never stopping to think ‘How is it that this little girl was able to survive out there all alone at night?’.

  “He’s a halfling,” said Katherine. “He would have been traveling with a half-orc.”

  The two guards halted their advance. They looked at one another, and Katherine shifted her gaze back and forth between them, trying to read their thoughts on their faces.

  If she made up the brother, why would she invent such a preposterous tale?

  Can a halfling even breed with other races?

  And why a halfling? They’re not very intimidating. Could it be she’s telling the truth?

  How would you even go about fucking a halfling?

  This is one of them mind games. She tells me a story that’s so ridiculous that I have to doubt her motivations for even telling it...

  Would you stand her up on a chair? You could lay her down on a table, I suppose.

  ...and therefore have to entertain the possibility of it being true...

  I don’t think I could bring myself to do it. They’re so tiny.

 
...which lends credence to the half-orc companion, which is then supposed to frighten me.

  Bloody hell, now I can’t stop thinking about it.

  She’s a clever one, I’ll give her that.

  How much would a halfling and an orc together cost me. Would they charge by the quarter-hour?

  Katherine cringed, reminding herself that she did not, in fact, have psychic power, and that the thoughts she had been projecting onto the second guard had been born in her own mind."

  “Bwa ha haha!”Yellowteeth finally blurted out.

  His partner followed his lead, though with less conviction.

  “Have you ever heard of such a thing, Mosley?” said Yellowteeth. “A halfling, sibling to a half-elf?"

  Mosley’s laughter grew a touch more genuine. “Don’t forget about her other brother, the half-orc.”

  “What?" said Katherine. "I didn’t say the h–”

  “Dear old Dad really gets around, eh?” said Yellowteeth. They both had a good, hearty laugh about that.

  “Who said it was the dad?” asked Mosley. “A man might have ten bastards around the city, all unaware of the others’ existence, especially given the racial diversity. A low-rent whore, on the other hand, might be bringing up half a dozen such mongrels under the same roof.”

  “Gods bless her,” said Yellowteeth. “The old girl must have a cunt like a Bag of Holding.”

  Katherine gasped. The situation had changed.

  She could handle the double-team intimidation game they were playing before. She’d dealt with that shit enough back home. Yowhassup, baby girl? It was more macho posturing to impress their buddies than it was a sincere effort to get anywhere with the girl. That’s the way I talk to bitches, yo.That sort of thing.

  And that's the same vibe she’d gotten from these two creeps, until now. Given that there was always the chance, however slim, that the target in the bars and clubs back home would have low enough self-esteem to welcome that kind of attention, the scumbag wannabe predators took care to not overtly insult her. But these two motherfuckers had just dropped a C-bomb on her.

  They weren’t even thinking of her as a sexual object anymore. She’d just been demoted to crazy bitch, object of ridicule, village idiot.

  Katherine was no village idiot, but she could be Crazy Bitch, if that’s how they wanted to play it. She considered tearing one of their heads off, just to teach the other a lesson about how to treat a lady. It would be sooooo easy. They weren’t even paying attention to her as they continued to make crude jokes about her imaginary mother. But she soon thought better of it. That’s how Cooper had gotten himself into trouble.

  A vampire’s gifts were not limited to brutality, after all. Katherine cleared her throat. When they bothered to glance her way, she batted her eyelashes like Bugs Bunny in drag.

  “I just love a man in uniform.” Katherine added a bit of southern twang to her voice to keep herself in character. “But do you know what I love even more?”

  “What’s that?” asked Yellowteeth. Both of their attention was fixed on her like she was about to unravel the mysteries of the universe.

  “A man out of uniform.”

  After a few seconds to process the insinuation, the two men began frantically scrambling to remove their armor as if it was crawling with ants underneath. Piece by piece, plates and chain garments haphazardly littered the ground just outside the gate. When they removed the thick padded shirts that buffered their skin from the metal, they revealed scars of battles past.

  Katherine almost felt bad for what she was coercing them to do, in a Support Our Troops kind of way, but those scars could have come from a drunken bar brawl just as easily as they could have come from defense of their homeland. But even if they had spilled blood for their country, it didn’t excuse the disgraceful behavior they’d displayed toward her.

  “Whoa ho hoho!” said Katherine as both men began to unlace the front of their underpants. “That’s enough fellas. Leave a little to a girl’s imagination.” She had no desire to see any more of their dicks than the tents they were both pitching.

  “Apologies, miss,” said Yellowteeth. Both men stood erect, pun very much intended. Yellowteeth had quite a nice body on him, and appeared to be very well endowed. Pity about the teeth.

  “How would you have us further serve you?” asked Mosley. Both men grunted out laughter like Butthead.

  Katherine thought back on how she’d lost control of Ginfizzle back at the Chicken Hut. She’d refused to let him eat Butterbean. Her vampiric domination ability was not absolute. It competed with the target’s baser instincts. Ginfizzle’s thirst for blood was stronger than Katherine’s will to control him.

  These guards, however, were all too eager to tear off their clothes at her command. The base instinct guiding them was lust, and her request only served to stoke the fire. This was useful information to keep in mind.

  Now… What to do with them?

  She could test her baser instinct theory by commanding them to perform sexual acts on one another, but that was going too far. They hadn’t earned that kind of humiliation. She needed a punishment that fitted the crime.

  “Dance for me.”

  Both men’s smiles vanished instantaneously.

  “I… I beg your pardon, miss.”

  “Dance,” Katherine commanded a little more sternly.

  “A thousand apologies, miss,” said Yellowteeth. “Weain’t never danced before. We don’t know how.”

  Katherine grinned. This was interesting. They were completely unbothered by stripping naked in public, but petrified of the thought of having to dance. Perhaps it was time to test her theory after all.

  “You may dance for me,” Katherine said to Yellowteeth. “Or you may suck your friend’s dick.”

  The sexual acts thing didn’t feel quite so reprehensible when she provided dancing as an alternative.

  Yellowteeth swallowed hard, glancing down briefly at Mosley’s fading erection. Mosley shook his head nervously.

  “Very well,” said Yellowteeth. He bent his knees slightly, then stood up straight again. Repeating that, he raised his elbows and shrugged his shoulders as well. Mosley followed his lead, and the pair of them looked like a couple of robots trying to invent the Charleston.

  “What the fuck do you call that?” asked Katherine.

  “I’m so sorry.”Yellowteeth lowered his arms, dropped to his knees, and turned to his partner. “Come on, Mosley. Undo your britches.”

  “Uh-uh,” said Katherine. “Get back on your feet, soldier.” When Yellowteeth stood up again, she continued. “Now both of you, put your hands in the air and move your hips back and forth like this.”

  Katherine demonstrated, humming to herself, and her two students followed her example.

  “That’s it!” Katherine smiled as they caught on. She’d seen plenty of worse dancing by far more confident people back home. “You’ve got it.”

  Yellowteeth grinned nervously. “It ain’t so bad, eh?”

  “Of course not,” said Katherine. “Now just keep doing like you’re doing, and move in a little closer. Mosley, you get behind me.”

  They loosened up and grew more confident as they followed her lead, thrusting their pelvises at her just short of dry humping her on both sides. They had the hang of it now. Aside from smelling like spoiled meat marinated in liquid fart, they were ready for the clubs.

  The timing of approaching boots on the wall above them couldn’t have been better. Katherine dropped to the ground and whispered, “I release you.”

  “Huh?” said Yellowteeth, looking down at her, presumably wondering why he was dancing nakedly in front of the South Gate.

  Katherine smiled and winked at him, then started shrieking. “Help! Help me! Somebody please!”

  “What in the name of…” the booming voice sounded familiar, but Katherine couldn’t think of where she might have heard it before. “You two! Step away from that woman at once!”

  “I didn’t…”Yellow
teeth stammered. “We weren’t…”

  “Where are the South Gate guards?” demanded the voice from the wall. “Why is no one manning the – Gods have mercy! Jennings! Mosley! Is that you?”

  “I’m sorry, Commander Righteous! I don’t know what –”

  “How dare you disgrace the king’s good name with such depraved acts of harassment on the peasantry! A New God has been born this day, and this is how you greet him?”

  Yellowteeth– or rather Jennings– and Mosley competed to out-apologize one another, and Katherine remembered their commander’s name.

  Righteous. He was that hard-ass who’d tried to lock them all up and execute Cooper. Fearing he might recognize her, she refrained from looking up at him.

  “Enough of your blubbering!” said the commander. “Report to Major Portheus at once! No, as you are. Leave your uniforms strewn about the dirt for dogs who are more fit to wear them.”

  As Jennings and Mosley hurried nigh-nakedly through the South Gate, Katherine pretended to get her sobbing under control.

  “Are you harmed, good lady?” the commander called down to Katherine.

  Katherine lowered her voice an octave. “No, sir. You arrived just in time. Thank you, sir.”

  “Your gratitude is unnecessary. I’ll not have such behavior from the men under my command. You may rest assured that their punishment shall be swift and just.”

  “Oh,” said Katherine. “That’s nice.” She felt like he was waiting for a response, but she didn’t know what to say. She continued not looking at him, trying to play it like a meek victim, rather than someone who wanted to avoid being recognized.