by Nick Ryder
Hero’s Dungeon
A Superhero Dungeon Core Novel
Nick Ryder
Contents
Prologue
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Chapter 5
Chapter 6
Chapter 7
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Chapter 22
Epilogue
Do You Want More Hero’s Dungeon?
Prologue
On the Tuesday afternoon that marked the first of many cataclysms, it was insurance salesman Darryl Jenkins who would become the first to experience the end of life as he knew it.
It started with a tingling sensation in the back of his throat. A place too far to reach with any implement, and impossible to scratch from the outside, and so the itch expanded.
He had a sudden and significant floating feeling. When he stood up from the desk at his cubicle inside the Greater Delta Insurance Company, Darryl drifted away from the chair. In a panic, he snatched at the padded gray partition, but the section of fake wall that separated him from the love of his life, Sally Plimpton, didn’t have a handhold. When Sally looked up in surprise, to see Darryl free-floating from the next-door cubicle, she dropped the phone and knocked over the coffee mug on her desk.
The coffee splashed over the computer keyboard and shorted out the desktop tower near her thigh. While Darryl’s mouth stretched, torn between a grin and a scream, a fire started under her desk.
Sally had stashed a bottle of 90 proof vodka behind the computer tower. It was her only vice, the only way to cope with the dead-end job, and ultimately her downfall.
The explosion at Sally's workstation forced the now pinwheeling Darryl away as the bright ball of fire that had been the beautiful Sally Plimpton began to roll through the corridor near the executive offices. As Darryl tried leveling himself above the rest of the office workers, bouncing along the ceiling, he began to wonder why he was the only person floating.
Instinctively he knew the gravity of the Earth was still active. Everyone else was still below him, gravitationally-inclined and running from the fire spreading along the hallway. The vice president of operations opened his door just as the fireball crashed into it. Darryl felt a sliver of satisfaction the moment he saw the vice president’s demise. He had been passed over for that position. Had he got the promotion, Darryl surmised he’d be dead too, instead of rising high above the rest of the office workers.
He watched, transfixed, as Brent Simms stopped running and abruptly burst like a popped balloon. Gelatinous red goo washed over the rest of the scrambling insurance adjusters. Prissy Brenda literally melted before strange-smelling old Henry could snatch her hand to lead her away from the chaos.
Other people around the office pool began to have similarly bizarre experiences. Mattie Yarnell appeared to be turning into something that resembled a large blue fish with green fins. Her eyeballs bulged from their sockets and drooped out of her head. Greg Hayes’s arm fell off, then his leg, and finally his head. Rick Tennor grew extra limbs, too many to control, pink naked slimy legs of different sizes flapping for space on his ever-shrinking body mass. They tripped up several people escaping to the elevator.
But the lift wasn’t there. Someone had pried the doors open, leaving a gaping hole where more and more office workers plummeted to their deaths like lemmings. Darryl watched with awe and confusion as he counted the survivors. The fire simmered. People ran for the exits. Most were still human, but many were mutating. No one else exhibited the ability of flight. He had maintained his mental state, unlike Bridget Lewis who had begun screaming and digging into her ear with a pen from her desk.
Darryl began to feel something powerful growing inside him. The itch transformed into something that gave him a sense of purpose. He knew he could save his colleagues—knew it was his responsibility—but hadn’t yet gathered how to control the ability to fly, or float, or defy gravity—whatever the hell he was doing.
When his face bounced off a window, Darryl looked out at the street, five stories below. It was pandemonium. People ran from figures that had likely once been human. He saw a creature with the head of a man and the body of a hairy bear, just as a fire truck that careened out of control slammed into it and extinguished its life.
When Darryl’s foot tapped against the wall, he pushed off with his toe. He sailed over the scrambling bodies still left in the maze of cubicles. The elevator door stood open, leading to the gaping dark tunnel inside. But just as someone let out a high-pitched shriek nearby, an electrical fire erupted, taking out the majority of the break room. The human resources director, Jenny Filmore, swelled, cracking like dry rock, and exploded, dousing the entire area with red molten lava.
Darryl rolled and used the slotted steel girders in the ceiling to direct his weightless form to the elevator. The seductively pretty intern Vickie Parnel suddenly doubled over near the group of leftover workers. She farted, emitting an intense purple gas that blasted through her stretch jeans and took out anyone close enough to breathe the toxic soup. They melted on contact.
At the edge of the ceiling over the elevator, Darryl tucked and pushed off, hooking his fingers on the open door.
“Take me with you!” Tim Sanders shouted, and reached for Darryl. But Tim tripped over one of the leftover pink limbs from Greg and fell to his death down the elevator shaft, with an echoing splat.
Darryl pushed his body into the lift passage and went up. At the top of the shaft, the emergency access door came open easily. He smelled fresh air pumping in through the aluminum louvers near the air-conditioning unit. Darryl kicked at the cover until it finally broke free.
His strength had increased, but Darryl’s adrenaline was still too high to question all these changes too much. Just to safety, and then he’d lose his mind. He bent the rest of the steel frame away from the mouth of the air duct. He made his way inside and pushed on the outer cover. It popped off without any effort.
He’d become something else, something more than human. Darryl waited momentarily before he exited the air shaft. Confidence grew in him. Certainty that he’d never felt before. He was something more important than a claims adjuster. He was someone who had the ability to change the world.
Darryl moved out of the shaft and glided over the flat roof of the high-rise building. He saw the ground several stories below and had no fear of heights. He was finally going to do some good in the world, change the course of events that had taken over Trenton, New Jersey.
Peering out over the vast distance of the city, high above everyone else with his hands on his hips, torn shirt billowing in the breeze, Darryl failed to look up.
When the helicopter slammed into Darryl, crushing him and taking out the edge of the building, his glimmer of hope and resolve was snuffed out, and he was dead in less than a second.
Chapter One
When things started falling out of the sky, I knew it was going to be a shitty day.
Vaguely I was aware of the 747 that tumbled from the clouds a few miles away. The fiery metallic debris that descended on the countryside some distance from my troops. But that was secondary to my main focus: following orders and keeping my men alive. Tunnel vision was imperative if I wasn’t going to panic.
But tunnel vision when t
he world had turned into a comic book wasn’t the easiest thing to keep. Humans had turned into monsters, humans that looked normal but possessed powers no person should. The surrounding area had gone to shit. I could only hope this wasn’t a worldwide epidemic.
It was a monster we were concerned with right now. A big purple one. It looked like a man, vaguely. All the right proportions, and in its naked state, all the right appendages. The only problem was the lilac hue.
And the fact it was at least ten times the size it should have been.
“What was that, Master Sergeant?” Pearson shouted over the distant explosion. A bulky metallic panel, dislodged by the purple hulk of muscle, flipped end over end and tumbled past, several yards from our current position.
We were scared. No one questioned the fear that coursed through each of us. But owning that fear was how we adapted and overcame the impossible odds. Pearson was what the psych evaluator labeled a T.A.L.K.E.R. In extreme circumstances, Pearson was mouthy. He expressed his feelings by projecting them onto things of little importance, like planes falling from the sky. But he was still assigned to me, and until one of those shiny metal pieces dropped out of the air and made a crater where he now stood, I didn’t need his distractions to poison my already troubled troops.
“Zip it!” I shouted at Pearson. “You’ve got one thing to worry about.” I hoped the rest of my unit huddling near the rock face heard and understood. I didn’t have to finish the observation because we had a vantage point that held the valley in full view.
The creature picked up a tank and used it as a badminton racket. It was impossible not to just stop and stare at the mutant for a moment. Its status had upgraded from human to humanoid.
“What’s the word?” I asked my radio tech. She had her head down, helmet scraping the dirt, hand over her ear so she could hear the chatter through the communications channels.
“Someone said something about a Kessler Effect—”
“What do birds have to do with this?” Angry Henderson asked.
A1C Henderson was a natural pain in the ass. He had anger management issues. He had intelligence, too, which meant he knew just enough to get him into trouble whenever he opened his mouth. He looked at the bewildered faces, including my own. “What?”
“That’s kestrel you dipshit, she said Kessler!” Loud Lyn shouted from several feet away. Lynwood had been in pretty close proximity to an IED some months back. Somehow, she had selective hearing loss from it.
I elbowed my radio technician for a more elaborate update. She lifted her head and looked at me, eyes wide enough to show the full circles of her brown irises.
“There’s a lot of chatter about something exploded in the upper atmosphere. We’re losing everything. Satellites are dropping out of orbit.” There was a tremor in her voice. I didn’t need to know any more.
Carefully, without drawing a lot of attention, I looked up overhead. It was a situation the Air Force planned for but had never fully considered. The cascading collision of Low Earth Objects knocked from their synchronized orbit and sent spiraling into other LEOs. The syndrome was global.
“We lost communication with troops in China and Russia.” She focused on the ground, cupping her ear. “There is a lot of talk about what to do if we lose satellite relay.” She gave me a fearful look. “I think there’s an Earth-wide event, Sergeant.”
For the sake of her conscience, I gave her a nudge. “Cut the radio,” I ordered.
“But...” she pleaded.
“We can’t help China or Russia if we can’t help ourselves first, Tech Sergeant.”
“What’s the plan, Sarg’?” someone called.
We lay against the craggy outcropping of the dry mountainside. Our original orders were to deploy and secure the town, which was currently under attack by the giant lilac-colored humanoid. It had started out its week just like the rest of us, as a person, which made this all the more dismal.
I was glad I didn’t know anything about the person it had been before it mutated. I didn’t want to know if it had a family, or why it’d decided to start flattening its town.
Last Tuesday we had reports of people changing. Things were getting very weird, and we called a high alert. We had several squads by Tuesday night. Then some of those airmen had changed.
I’d shot three NCOs and two airmen. Following orders, of course, but it didn’t stop me having to vomit after the first two. What was worst was that people were changing at different times. After the first wave, I’d looked at my comrades and assumed that they wouldn’t transform. They would stay human, be safe.
But they didn’t.
A second wave came, and more people changed. They turned into monsters or got powers that made them dangerous to those around them.
We had our orders. We killed them on sight. Anyone who changed had to die.
Sometimes it was human faces that I put bullets in.
After Wednesday, too many people were dead to keep an accurate count. The base had a corner where we stacked dead troops in rows.
Everyone was watching each other, searching for signs of change.
The classifications we’d come up with for new developments weren’t very optimistic, either. FUBB and FUBAR.
The people changing were Fucked Up Beyond Belief. At least we could put bullets in them, at least we had a way to fight them.
The satellites falling from the sky, though, they were definitely Fucked Up Beyond All Repair.
But we still had a job to do. The satellites were going to have to wait, despite the worried faces looking at me, begging me to give them some advice or consolation. Our focus had to be on the big purple monster currently swinging tanks in the valley like they were plastic toys.
“I got nothing,” Tech Sergeant Reagan said and pulled the microphone from her helmet. “It’s all gone.”
“Boys and girls!” I shouted to make sure I had most of their attention. “We’re in the shit now. And we’re going to roll that big ball of shit in chocolate, put some whip cream on the top, maybe even a cherry, and we’re going to take a great big bite of that shit ball. In other words: we’re going to show this Thanos-looking motherfucker he’s messing with the wrong zip code.”
“Can I have my chocolate-covered shit ball with sprinkles, Sarg’?” someone called from far off.
“I want mine with peanuts!” another said.
“I’ll have mine with corn in it!”
I forced a grin. Morale needed to stay as high as it could.
The rumble of A-10 Warthogs came like a firestorm behind us. The formation blasted over the mountainside where my troops held to cover, and the military aircraft engaged the purple people crusher.
The Warthogs opened the 30 mm GAU-8/A cannons, sending fiery pellets at 3,900 rounds per minute. The satisfying brrrttt was music to all of our ears. Once the first batch got the creature’s attention, another group swooped and delivered API rounds. The Depleted Uranium HEI rounds were designed to obliterate light skinned vehicles. They bounced off the back of the humanoid without damaging the hide.
Nothing had a lasting effect on the creature. It lumbered closer to town, heaving M1A1/2 Abrams battle tanks at the aircraft that attempted to disarm and destroy the beast.
There was a pulse that rippled through the valley. The humanoid was shifting. Its distinctly male naked form grew agitated at the shower of aircraft bullets, like gnats that pricked its head, neck, and back. When it stretched enormous arms out and curled its body, crouching, a pulse rippled from its core, like a neutron explosion. The Warthogs fell apart, dropping from the sky. A pilot ejected near the creature before the plane slammed into the ground at its bare feet. The clawed hand of the monster closed around the pilot’s chair dangling at the end of a parachute, and the fist squeezed shut.
The creature looked into its palm then wiped the bloody smear on its naked thigh.
“We need some payback,” somebody called from down the line.
“Let’s get some!” I shouted
. It was blind and brutal and suicidal, but I didn’t sign up to hang out on the sidelines while others got to play with their toys. The satellites were probably going to kill us anyway. Might as well go out in a blaze of glory while morale was high.
I was up, over the cliff face and sliding down the steep hillside into the ravine before giving it a second thought. The rest of my troops were spilling over the side with me.
We hit the ground running. Some of us made it to natural cover. I slammed against one of the overturned tanks. I banged on the outer shell hoping to hear someone pounding back from inside. It was a dead turtle on its back.
“What do we shoot at?” my tech sergeant asked as the creature’s skin shook off heavy rounds from the Warthogs.
I peered around the edge of the broken tank track. It stood over twenty feet high by my guess and had the muscle structure of a TV wrestler doused in steroids.
“Sarg’!” a voice called from behind me. I felt the tech sergeant pull on my tactical to look back.
Corporal Drake lay near a twisted heap of scorched rubble that had once been a humvee. I broke away from the tank and ran across the open area to slide near him. I didn’t look back to see if the humanoid saw me.
Corporal Drake took my glove in his hand. What I thought was near the twisted metal was actually underneath it. His whole lower body was crushed. Only his arms and head moved, and barely. There was red foam dripping down his chin.
“You need to fall back.” Drake looked pale; the color of his skin matched the tracer light from the failed Warthog rain. “Take your troops and fall back.”
“Drake,” I said. I leaned close, so he would know he wasn’t alone. “I have to move forward.”