The fourth room I tried was locked, so I reared back and kicked the door in. The wood of the door exploded inward like I’d thrown a grenade, way out of proportion to the kick, but I just stepped through the now-empty doorway, my fists at the ready.
When I saw what waited for me in that room, I froze in my tracks. Standing in the center of the room, on a carpet that probably was worth more than my car, a wolfish grin on his face, was my kid brother Jason. The same kid brother that I killed in Athens almost two years ago. But now here he was in Fairyland, grinning at me the same way he’d grinned when he shoved Great-Grandpappy Beauregard’s sword through my guts.
I opened my mouth to ask Jason what the hell he was doing alive, and here, but just then a bright pain exploded in the back of my head, and some asshole turned out my consciousness.
10
It wasn’t the first time I’d ever woken up face down on the floor with a blinding headache and no memory of how I got there, but it was the first time I didn’t remember having a few drinks first. I was face down on a dusty stone floor, with torchlight flickering on my face. Dried blood crusted my face and had pooled beneath my nose, so obviously I wasn’t dropped here very carefully. I was cold, but it only took me a few seconds to realize that was because the bathrobe I’d confiscated as a shirt was gone.
Dammit. I flexed my fingers and saw that my hands were bare. Whoever had knocked me out took my caestae, so I didn’t have cold iron protecting my hands and helping me pummel faerie assholes to death. I rolled over, pressing my back into the cold stone, and reached for Bertha. Nothing. The usually comforting weight of my second-favorite girl in her shoulder holster was gone, as was the knife on my belt and my sword. I still had on my pants and my boots, but otherwise I was defenseless. Most of the gear could be replaced, but that shithead faerie was going to have to give me back my gun and sword.
“If you think I’m gonna thank you for not leaving me face down with lilies planted in my bare ass, you’ve got another think coming, you pointy-eared shitweasel,” I called out toward the ceiling, which was a lot farther away than it had been in the last hallway I remembered before being knocked out. I struggled to my feet, rubbing the lump on the back of my head. I wasn’t concussed, so whoever knocked me cold knew just how hard to hit me to put me down without causing any serious damage.
I was in a different corridor altogether, this one completely devoid of doors. There were just blank walls stretching a good twenty feet up into the air, with nothing above but blackness and more stone. Torches jutted out from the wall every eight feet or so, sticking out of rings in the stone. I walked over to them, and they were the same kind of magical light that I’d seen before, not real flame. That explained why it was not only cold as balls in here, but not smoky. I grabbed one of the torches and made to lift it out of the ring, but it was lodged fast. I pulled harder, but it didn’t even wiggle. I planted a foot on the wall and pulled with both hands, but all I got for my struggle was a splinter.
Whatever. The hall was lit well enough without carrying a torch, but it would have been nice to have some kind of weapon, even if it was just a glowing stick. I sucked on my sore thumb and looked up and down the hall. It seemed to run about twenty feet in each direction, so I turned right and headed down into the featureless corridor. When I got to the end, I crouched down and peered around the corner, not wanting to get ambushed again. I didn’t have to worry since that hall was just as empty as the one I was leaving. It ran about fifty feet in front of me, with a door set into the wall about fifteen feet ahead of me.
I crept to the door, as much as somebody my size can creep, and pressed my ear to it. Hearing nothing, I turned the knob and heard a very soft but distinctly mechanical click that seemed to come from the wall behind me. I’ve seen enough Indiana Jones movies and played enough video games to know that sound meant something bad was about to happen, so I dropped flat to the floor and skittered back from the door on my belly, just as the swish-THUNKTHUNK of a trap went off over my head. I looked up to see a pair of axes lodged deep in the door, one at just the right height for my knees, and the other right about where my neck was. Nice to know I got custom-designed traps built just for my size, since that upper axe would have floated right over the head of almost everyone I’d met in Fairyland.
“You missed, asshole,” I yelled at the ceiling, my annoyance at almost getting chopped into thirds momentarily making me forget that I was trying to be all stealthy. I almost might have flipped off the empty air over my head in a fit of pique. I’m not sure if that’s what it was, I’ve never had a fit of pique before, but that’s what I always thought one would feel like.
Getting to my feet while avoiding the axes, I pulled them out of the door and tried to wiggle them loose, but they were attached to their mechanisms with some serious bolts. I couldn’t even get them to move an inch, much less rip free to be useful to me. They pulled free of the door easily enough, though, and I swung them out of the way and opened the door. I twisted the knob and shoved the door open, swinging myself out of the way and pressing my back to the wall beside the opening, just in case Puck had a crossbow rigged up on the other side or some other such bullshit. When nothing shot out of the doorway, I stuck my head out and took a look.
The hallway stretching out in front of me was pretty anticlimactic, given that it looked just like the one I was standing in. Same stones, same torches in rings, same big ol’ pile of nothing. It went about ten feet, then ended in a T-intersection. I checked the doorframe for tripwires, and when I found nothing, I stepped through. Nothing fell on me or otherwise tried to kill me, so I walked down the ten feet and turned from side to side. I couldn’t see any difference in the left and right hallways, so I turned left this time. This took me another ten feet, then the hall T’d off once more. I looked left and saw a dead end a few feet in front of me. The right-hand hallway stretched a good fifty feet before ending and turning to the right, so that was the obvious choice.
Before I took that obvious choice, I went into the little alcove to the left and searched over the stone walls to see if there was some kind of secret door, or mechanism to open a passage, or anything. If something was there, it was hidden way too good for me to find it, so after a couple of minutes of poking at stones, I turned and walked off down the long hall.
I’d gone about thirty feet when I froze. Under the faint whisper of air through the halls, barely loud enough to be heard over my footsteps, there was a sound. I couldn’t tell what it was, just that it was coming from around the corner ahead of me. I pressed myself against the wall and crept forward, trying to move silently. It was admittedly a lot easier to move without making noise now that I wasn’t carrying a bunch of weapons, but if given a choice between quiet and armed, I’ll wrap myself in a tank every time.
When I reached the end of the hall and stuck my head around the corner, there was nothing there, just another corridor. I thought for a second that I saw something flit around the corner to the right about fifteen feet ahead of me, but when I blinked, it was gone, so I wasn’t sure what, if anything, I saw. I crept along the passage, keeping tight to the near wall, and listening for anything that sounded out of place. Of course, I had no damn idea what this place was supposed to sound like, so I just figured anything I heard would count as “out of place.”
As I reached the corner, I could see the hinges of another door set into the wall. I dropped to one knee and checked the door frame for traps as best I could, then tried the knob. It turned easily, without the tell-tale click of a trap being sprung for a change. I thought about it for a few seconds, weighing the benefits of a cautious entry versus a charge, then I shook my head.
“Nobody’s ever called me Bubba the Ballroom Dancer,” I muttered to myself, then took a couple of steps back and flung myself through the door. I dove into the room in another clumsy forward roll. They make that crap look so easy on the WWE pay-per-views, but when you’re six and a half feet tall and close to three hundred fifty pounds, there’s
nothing easy about throwing yourself to a stone floor and then getting back up. But I managed to come to my feet with only a modicum of new bruises.
Only to find myself surrounded by skeletons with swords. Yep, skeletons. No shit, Dungeons & Dragons, Evil Dead, pick whatever movie you want, skeletons. There wasn’t a scrap of flesh on them, and they even had the cliché red glowing eyes. And every damn one of them was armed to the teeth.
They didn’t all have swords. No, we can’t be predictable when we’re building our stereotypical human-killing dungeon. Hell no. We have to have some skeletons with maces, a couple with quarterstaffs, four or five with swords, and one with a damn giant claymore that would give Mel Gibson sword envy. And, of course, I popped to my feet right in the middle of them.
The skeletons turned to me, their red eyes managing to look surprised, which was impressive without faces. I wasn’t surprised because I’d dealt with Puck before and knew I was in for a shitshow the second the door didn’t try to kill me. I reached out with my right hand for the nearest skeleton’s shield and snagged the top edge of it. I played tug-of-war with the skeleton’s shield on my left side while reaching out with my right and dragging another undead assclown toward my by his sternum. I picked the bag of bones up one-handed and flung him sideways, taking three other walking dead dickheads to the ground. They fell to the stone with a thunderous clatter, disassembling on impact.
“Gimme that,” I growled at the skeleton holding the shield, and gripped the round metal disk with both hands. I gave a mighty yank, and the shield came free, arm still attached. I used the arm as a handle and smashed the skeleton to parts with its own shield. I had just shaken the finger bones out of the shield’s grip when pain exploded across my upper back and shoulders. I sprawled face-first on the floor, rolling over and pulling the shield up just in time. I blocked the quarterstaff rushing at my skull and kept rolling over as the undead dickwhistle slammed the staff into the floor again and again, keeping me moving.
His buddies soon joined in with the Bubba-bashing, and in a few seconds, all I could do was curl up in a ball and turtle under the shield as best I could. A few shots got through, though, and soon my legs and arms started to go numb from the beating. Then something struck my shield with a mighty CLANG, and I felt the vibration all the way down to my balls. And not in a good way.
I figured that the big boss skeleton had arrived, so I braced myself for another shot. Sure enough, seconds later, my shelter rang like a church bell, but this time, I knew it was coming. It didn’t make it hurt any less, but it made me mad enough to spring up half a second after the weight of the blade came off my shoulder, and spin around, using the shield’s edge to shatter skulls and arm bones in a wide circle. I bashed two other skeletons in the head, sending their pieces to the corners of the room, then turned to the skeleton with the giant damn sword.
“Come get some, asshole.”
11
He didn’t have ears, but I coulda swore the boney asshole heard me lay down my challenge. He leveled his sword at me like a spear and charged, moving pretty fast for a guy with literally no muscles. When he came at me, the other remaining skeletons closed in from the sides, so I had nowhere to dodge. I didn’t mind. I had no intention of trying to spin out of the way. I thought for a brief second exactly how stupid I was about to be, then lowered the shield and charged.
I slammed into the point of his sword and lifted the shield, driving the point of the blade to the sky. Then I let go of the shield completely, flinging it to my left, and I wrapped my arms around the skeleton’s ribcage. I counted on the fact that since he had the biggest sword, he would have more magic pumped into him to hold him together, and I was right. He didn’t fall apart as soon as I grabbed him like some of the other bags of bones; he held together all the way through my grabbing him under his arms, lifting, and spinning around to slam into the stone floor on top of him in a belly-to-belly suplex that would have brought tears to Magnum TA’s eyes.
He had a lot of magic holding him together, but not that much magic. His ribcage exploded under me, and the big two-handed sword fell to the floor. I picked it up in one hand and pushed off the floor with the other, barely getting my head out of the way of a couple of maces and one broadsword that clattered to the stone behind me. I got to my feet in a whirl, slicing the claymore’s blade through empty torsos and severing spinal columns as I went. I kept turning and turning, whirling the sword around me like a Ginsu-wielding Tasmanian Devil. With every rotation, more bones clattered to the floor, until finally I stood alone and dizzy as hell in the middle of a room full of shattered skeletons.
I staggered to a wall as the room spun, leaning against it to get my bearings, and heard a thunk from a door as it sprang open. I hadn’t even taken the time to look for an exit, I was so focused on the fight. Probably a good thing because, apparently, this was a Legend of Zelda dungeon, where the door wouldn’t open unless I killed all the bad guys. I took a couple minutes to collect a shield, a broadsword, and a mace, then tossed the claymore to the ground. It was a good weapon, but I’m not enough of a swordsman to use it, and it would just be dead weight in the tight hallways. Better to have something I could actually use to defend myself.
There were no traps on the door that I could find, so I stepped out into the short hallway. It looked just like all the others, and I gotta tell ya, I was starting to really feel like Puck overpaid for his decorator. I mean, what’s the point of having a deadly dungeon maze if every corridor just looks like the one before it? Why not spice things up, add in some paintings of the people you killed before, just for variety and intimidation?
These are the things that go through your head when you’re wandering through a dungeon waiting for the next thing to try to kill you. The only way to go was left, so I walked ten feet to the next T-intersection. “I went left last time, so we’ll try right this time.” Yeah, I started talking to myself. I couldn’t really help it. I’d killed everything I saw, so there was nothing to banter with, so I was my only company.
I turned right and walked down twenty feet before the hall turned to the left. I stuck my head around the corner and was faced with nothing but black stone and another one of those damn magic torches, faux-flickering along like it was real fire or something. I’ve played enough Baldur’s Gate to know that secret doors are a thing in dungeons, so I went down the short passage and pressed on the wall in a few places, then tried to turn the torch sconce. All I got was some rust on my hands, but no secret door. So, I went back the way I came, then continued down the passage, which stood clear for a good fifty feet before another coming to another T.
I looked in both directions, and the hall looked slightly longer to the left than the right, so I went that way. I kept tugging on the wall torches and pressing raised blocks, but I stayed disappointed in the lack of secret doors. They were everywhere in the video games, but I hadn’t found a single one yet. If I didn’t gut him, I was going to have a chat with Puck about getting sloppy in his design.
After another forty or fifty feet, the hall turned to the left, and after checking to make sure it was clear, I did too. After about twenty feet, I spied something different on the floor. I rushed toward it, not running, but walking fast and definitely not trying to open nonexistent secret doors. I got to the dark spot on the floor and realized that it was blood. I knelt beside it, then paused.
“Son of a bitch,” I said, then looked up. “SONOFABITCH!!!” I yelled. I looked at the small puddle of dried blood on the floor, then at the flecks of brown next to it. It was my blood. This was the spot where I woke up with a bloody nose and a headache. I’d managed to walk around in a complete circle.
I sat down, leaned my head back against the wall, and cussed. I cussed Puck, Mab, Oberon, Titania, and every faerie in Fairyland that wasn’t my mother. Then I cussed her. Then I cussed my own idiot self, Skeeter for getting hurt, Amy for getting kidnapped, and Joe for not doing anything cuss-worthy. By the time I circled back round to cussing Puck,
most of my frustration had turned into a cold determination to wear that bastard’s pointy ears on a necklace. So I got up, turned around the way I came, and headed off into the dungeon to do that very thing.
It was another half hour or so of walking, by my best estimation, and I finally came to another door. I’d spent the time marking my travel by bashing the mace into the wall under every torch. The metal dug a pretty good divot out of the stone every ten feet or so, and I was pretty sure that as long as Puck hadn’t made the dungeon out of self-healing rocks, that I’d be able to recognize my trail if I started to double back on myself again.
This was an odd little hallway, where the passage kinda doubled back on itself in a U-turn with a wall as the divider but set into the opposite wall was a wooden door. The knob turned easily, and I pushed the door open and stepped aside in case there was a crossbow rigged on the other side or something. No arrows came whizzing by, so I stuck my head into the room.
It was dark. Not just dim, but darker than the inside of a black bear’s butthole dark. There weren’t any torches set into the walls in this room, so I couldn’t see how big the space was, or if there was another door, or anything.
“You know, the smart thing to do would be to close this door and just leave it the hell alone,” I grumbled to myself. “So, of course, I’m not going to do anything of the sort.” I leaned in, holding onto the door frame, and something crunched under my feet as I took a step. I looked down, but the light from the hall seemed to get sucked up by the darkness as soon as it crossed the threshold. Did I mention I hate magic? Because I do. I friggin’ hate magic, especially when somebody I don’t like is using it. I don’t love it when the good guys are using it, but when it’s somebody like Puck? No damn thank you.
I couldn’t figure out a way to get more light into the room, and I sure as hell didn’t want to go in there blind, so I reached around for the doorknob and tried to pull the door closed. It wouldn’t budge. Because of course it wouldn’t. The door didn’t have to be trapped; the door was the trap. As soon as I opened it, I was stuck. I had to either fight whatever was in the room or leave an open door full of monsters at my back while I hunted for Amy.
Monsters, Magic, & Mayhem: Bubba the Monster Hunter Season 4 Page 35