Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 2
Page 74
While Bautista and I had spent those two hours playing the telephone game trying to figure out the three lines that would work for our plan, Donut, Katia, and I started the process of moving the train carts out of the way to make way for the rapid-response carts, which were shoved in the back of the parking area. The small carts we simply pushed onto the main track in front of our Vermillion engine. Then we drove the auxiliary carts out of the way. Most of them had just enough battery power to drive. Once they were safely out of the way, I pulled all the batteries. We also started the process of taking apart one of the engines and putting all the pieces into my inventory. Katia led this process. She had a wealth of knowledge about engines thanks to her earth hobby potion. She’d received the “Gear Head” knowledge base, and it was mightily useful here. She was certain we’d be able to reconstruct the engine and put it on something else.
The rapid-response carts wouldn’t budge until they were turned on. I climbed the stairs of the first one now. I pulled one of Growler Gary’s arms from inventory and placed it on the hand-shaped key console. “Here goes nothing,” I said to Donut. I held my breath.
The console glowed green. I relaxed. I had to put a rock on top of the hand to keep it in place while I moved to the second key console on the other side of the small cockpit. It was only about eight feet away, but it was just far enough that a single gnoll couldn’t activate both at once.
I placed Growler Gary’s second hand on the key.
Warning: You must use your left hand to activate the key.
“Fuck,” I said.
“Mongo,” Donut called. “Come on, we’re going back to the bar.”
~
Growler Gary was sober when we returned. Apparently, the act of resurrection did that, which was unfortunate for everybody involved. He was desperately searching through his stash for another bottle when we arrived. He wouldn’t find one. We’d taken the rest.
“You’re back,” he said. “Sorry, dinner isn’t ready. Growler Gary seems to be low on supplies. Someone drank them all.”
He didn’t know we’d killed him, but he did remember us. I sighed.
“Hey Gary,” I said. “I’m really sorry about this.”
He looked up at us, wiping his hands on his fur. “Sorry about what?”
Mongo leaped across the tavern, landed on the counter, and chomped him right on the head. It sounded like a walnut being crunched.
Five minutes later, we had the first of the portal carts turned on. We started the engine and positioned it in front of the third portal. Number 17 on the list was the Sinopia Line. The DungeonWerx portal selector was nothing more than a pair of handles with numbers. I put the first to one and the second to seven. The little selector changed to 17 on the dust-covered screen.
We turned a switch, turning on the front portal. The blade in front of the cart hummed, and a large, tunnel-shaped portal appeared, throbbing. It looked a little different than the static-television-channel style of most open portals. This was like a frosted mirror, allowing us to see through it. Sort of.
“Hopefully the act of pushing a portal through a portal isn’t like dividing by zero or anything,” I muttered as I moved to the front of the train to investigate the magical doorway. I had a horrifying thought of it blowing up. There was a section on portals in my book, but I’d only skimmed it and hadn’t seen anything like that. I did remember something about arrows with small portals at the end of them. If they didn’t cause an issue with being added to inventory or passing through doorways, hopefully this would be okay too. Hopefully.
Ultima Corp DungeonWerx Subspace Heavy-Duty, self-adjusting Clean-up Portal.
Type: One-way, selectable portal.
Can you pass this portal? Yes.
Environment on other side of portal: Warning. Drill down for more information.
Visual Analysis? Yes/No.
The portal was switched onto the abyss, and I pulled up the screenshot. It looked as if it just jumped things in the middle of the air over the pit. So anything that got caught up in the portal would fall a good half of a mile before it hit the ground. I clicked on the environmental warning, and a new page of numbers appeared. Elevation above solid ground was highlighted, confirming that was the issue. I went back to the cab and switched the selector to the trainyard instead of the abyss, and the environmental warning went away.
I put the portal back to the abyss, and I went to remove the hands so I could start the next train.
The moment I pulled one of the hands away, the train shut off. I’d been hoping once the train started, it no longer needed the hand keys.
“Fuck,” I said. “Fuck, fuck, fuck.”
“Mongo,” Donut said. “Back to the bar.”
~
In the end, we had to collect a total of 14 left hands from Growler Gary. We could have stopped at 12, but I wanted to have an extra pair, in case we needed to drive that seventh cart.
Gary only fought back the first few times. We were too strong for him. He hid in the back of the bar each time, huddled into the corner, holding onto his spear. He whimpered like an injured dog, and the sound hurt my heart.
“I’m sorry,” I said when we came for the fifth hand. He jabbed at Mongo, who screeched gleefully as we approached.
“If you’re sorry, then why are you doing it?” he said. “Get back! Get the fuck away from me!”
The floor of the back room was slick with blood. Upon regeneration, every body part remaining in the tavern disappeared except items we placed into our inventory. But the blood remained, and it was everywhere.
“Everyone stop,” I said. “Mongo, wait.” The dinosaur looked to Donut, who waved him down. He squawked with disappointment.
“I’ll tell you,” I said. “You deserve to know why we have to do this.” And I explained it to him. I told him exactly what we were doing and why we were doing it. He stared up at me, wide-eyed and afraid as I told him we’d have to kill him ten more times.
“So you need Growler Gary,” he finally said, looking down at his own hand. “Gary never realized that was the problem with those carts. Jumping Jen-Jen and the other drivers were always complaining, but he… I didn’t understand. That was why they never went out. The hobgoblins took their own carts instead, but they couldn’t clear the crashed trains without the portals. Gary’s not a driver. Hadn’t realized it worked that way.” He looked up at me. “Ten more times?”
“Ten more times,” I said.
“And this is to get the people who killed my friends?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have any alcohol on you?”
“I do,” I said.
“Will you give me some when it is done?”
“Absolutely.”
He put the spear down and walked back to the bar. He cracked his neck. He looked over at Mongo and said, “Do your best to make sure it doesn’t hurt.”
A note from DoctorHepa
I am once again posting this chapter from the distant past. This time I will actually be out of town when this posts, so if I really screwed up the formatting or pissed you guys off like I did with the carl-puts-on-the-ring chapter, I won't know about it for a day or two. Have a great weekend! I appreciate all of ya'll.
Chapter 100
“He ended up being really brave,” Donut said as we lashed the last hand to the pedestal. “Especially for a dog. It’s kind of sad.”
“Kind of?” I said. “Everything about this sucks. God, we really need duct tape for this.” We had to use rope to keep the hands in place. If one of them fell off then all of this would be for nothing.
Katia, who hadn’t participated in any of this, had returned to her human shape. She was beating herself up over her inability to get the carts started on her own, though in the end it hadn’t mattered. Our plan to hit the crawlers stuck at the abyss with portals required six trains to work, and no matter how she looked at it, we would’ve had to collect several of those hands no matter what.
Bautista had f
ought his way up to the correct station, though he’d lost almost fifty guys during the battle. A few of the crawlers could fly short distances, but apparently there was some sort of black hole effect on the pit the closer you got to the middle. They’d flown off the walkway to fire arrows and spells at the lizards—called Wall Monitors—and gotten themselves sucked in. Several more died when one of the gangways collapsed.
Now that we had a portal straight to the abyss, we’d been brainstorming alternate plans in case this didn’t work, but so far everything that seemed viable at first kept fizzling out. None of our plans were feasible, especially since there were so many people trapped there. We couldn’t use a flyer to go through the portal and bring hats. We tried a rope attached to a weight, too, with thoughts maybe we could dangle a bag over the massive hole and Bautista’s crew could try something to get to it. But the moment we started to feed the test rope into the portal, the rope went tight for about a half of a second and then started to tingle. Surprised, I dropped it, and the whole thing disappeared. I was lucky I hadn’t gotten dragged in with it. We decided to stop experimenting after that.
I announced I needed to use the rest room and went to the personal space and pulled up the chapter on portals in the cookbook.
I added a note about the different brands of portals, but I didn’t have time for writing. I’d add more later. I’d been adding quite a bit lately to the scratchpad, mostly when we were on a train or sitting down to eat. I didn’t know if any of it made sense. I wasn’t a writer, and whenever I started to mentally type my feelings onto the pad, I couldn’t tell if it was coherent or just bullshit. I assumed some future crawler would find my chapter and just think I was being a whiny bitch.
We had everything lined up and ready to go. If all went as planned, we guesstimated it would take about 8-10 hours for the first three trains to reach the end of the line, but we weren’t sure. The system said these things went five times faster than the normal trains. I really hoped this worked.
Also, it turned out while every single one of the portals on the rapid-response carts was a two-way switch where one could select the abyss or a trainyard, the trainyards themselves were different on each one. The trainyard number was helpfully painted on the edge of each cart, likely so the workers would know which cart to use when an interdiction was required. I supposed in the end it didn’t really matter which cart we used, though the three separate groups at the end of the line would all be sent off to different instances of the trainyard. We picked three where we knew people were already holed up at the local version of station 36.
Only one of the carts had a portal that was tuned to trainyard E, the same yard where we had come in earlier, and the same one where we could easily return to the Nightmare if we needed. We’d keep that cart here with us in case we needed it.
Meanwhile, Imani and Li Jun and everybody else from station 101 were in the process of fortifying station 36. They’d disabled the Vermillion train on the track, blocking any monster coming down the line. I was afraid that’d mean the blister ghouls coming from station 72 would simply turn around and head back toward us at 75, but it appeared they were congregating in front of the train. Not that it mattered much. There were literally dozens of lines that fed into that station, and they were in a constant state of battle, pushing the invaders back. I hoped they’d be able to hold out.
“Okay, everybody cover your ears,” I said as I finished placing the final trap onto the sixth cart. “I’m putting a delay on all of them, but I’m going to set this one off just to make sure it works like we want.”
“How am I supposed to cover my ears, Carl?” Donut asked.
“Okay, go to the other side of the station then. Remember last time? It’s loud as shit.”
The regular subway cars were big and heavy and thundered through the tunnels. These carts didn’t appear to make hardly any noise at all. As Katia pointed out earlier, that’d be a problem for those waiting at the other end of the line. Therefore we needed one last touch so the crawlers could hear the portal coming.
I reached down and set the one-minute delay on the last of the traps. I had one on all six of the carts. This one would go first. The others all had a 30-minute delay, but I wanted to make double sure that the delay function worked as intended before I sent it through the portal. I engaged the engine, double-checked to make sure the portal was set to the abyss and that the car was dialed to the correct portal. Everything was a go.
“What do you think it’s going to be?” I called over to Katia, who stood by the side of the tracks, covering her ears.
“It’ll be ‘Wonderwall!’ I just know it,” Donut shouted from the far side of the platform. “It’s the greatest song of all time!”
“Wonderwall?” Katia said, turning and laughing. “You mean the song by Oasis?”
Peaking at Number 1 on Nov 16, 1981, it’s “Physical!”
The alarm trap activated, and the Olivia Newton-John song started playing, so loud I took a small amount of damage. I pushed the throttle of the train and jumped down. I watched as it shot down the track, hit the portal, and disappear.
I rushed forward to get a screenshot so I could see if the train had actually made it, but I could hear it. It was distant, barely audible, and it sounded as if it was far below us, but it was there. The line it had transferred to was physically nearby. I took the screenshot, and I could see the end of the train, already far way. The scoop portal was still intact.
Holy shit, it worked.
Carl: Bautista. Sinopia line is on its way.
Bautista: What was the song?
Carl: “Physical” by Olivia Newton-John.
Bautista: Damn. I had one gold on “Eye of the Tiger.” I don’t think anybody picked that one.
Carl: There’s no way people are going to guess the song. The trap uses any song that ever charted on the Billboard hot 100. There’s gotta be a million choices. I’m going to send the Grullo and Mindaro trains now. Then in fifteen minutes we’ll send the second trains tuned to the yards. Your team will end up at yard Q. There’s already about 400 people guarding station 36 at that one. Remember to take the employee line. It should be clear.
Bautista: Okay, buddy. Thanks.
“Monsters! Monsters!” Donut cried, running up just as I saw the wave of red dots on the Vermillion track. There had to be about thirty of them. They were moving fast.
“Shit,” I said. “Okay, let’s get ready.”
“Carl, they’re really, really big. I think they’re those stage-3 DT monsters. I don’t think we can handle them!”
We only had about thirty seconds to decide what to do. If we hid, they’d probably stream around the subway engine car we had parked here and continue down the line, where they’d eventually come to the disabled train on the track right before station 36, mixing in with the blister ghouls. That’d be fine if they stayed put. But I remembered how big those fuckers were, and if they managed to break into the car and open a path down to station 36, it’d be another weight on the shoulder of Imani and Li Jun. Though I strongly suspected they’d be dealing with these guys whether we liked it or not.
Still, we couldn’t just let that happen. I had an idea.
“Hide,” I said. I turned toward the Downward Dog and started jogging. “Come on, guys, let them pass. But as soon as they do, we gotta move.”
*
* *
Katia and Donut sent the last three rapid-response carts through the portals while I attached the explosives to the back of the vermillion train. I needed to get this done quick. I was placing them on the short shelf in front of the door that’d turn into the between-train gangway when it was properly attached to another train. I had to tie everything together with a rope and then use the door to keep it in place.
“You know,” I said up to the ceiling while I worked, “If any of you guys want to send me duct tape, it’ll make this sort of thing a lot easier. Rope sucks for this stuff, and pus is too expensive to waste. I’d be able to make bigger bombs. Just saying.”
Even though the battered vermillion engine faced the wrong direction, it did have that half-assed, standard-issue cowcatcher device in the back, which really doubled as the connector mechanism. Still, I was afraid this wasn’t going to work. Either way, it would be spectacular. I warned Li Jun and Imani what I was doing, and they agreed to it.
Yes, I knew I could probably use one of the interdiction carts, and that’d clear the line much more easily. But I wanted to see if I’d get experience if I did it this way. Plus I really wanted to see if this would work. Other than the landmines I’d used to derail that first train, I hadn’t gotten the opportunity to use much explosives on this floor, so I jumped at the opportunity to sandwich a bunch of ghouls and monsters between two trains.
Nobody was on the tracks on this line, so the worst that could happen was it went off prematurely. Or it didn’t go off at all. Or I caved in the line. Or I killed myself.
The plan was to reunite this engine with the rest of its old train.
Elle: Hey Carl. She’s not here. I did as you asked and went through every single person. No four-armed cobra lady. There are some pretty weird ones, though. There’s a guy here who is a mushroom. Why would you turn yourself into a mushroom? He looks like a penis. Like one of those weird ones that’s really wide and short. My boyfriend before my Barry had a dick like that. It smelled like mushrooms, too.