by Gavin Brown
“Yeah,” Tommy agreed, his face twitching slightly. “Each going our separate ways with no backup sounds like a great idea.”
“Yup,” Karim added, trying not to grin. “That absolutely will speed things up and not end up with all three of us getting picked off one by one.”
Without further discussion, they headed to the left together. Karim smiled. They all knew better than that. Spike’s listicle “Ten Ways Not to Be Another Dead Adventurer” last year had been a big hit on social media. This was a clear case of number six.
They went room by room with their flashlights, checking for signs of the drake. Tommy’s light pointed in front of them, Spike’s shone behind, and Karim’s played across the rooms, searching for hints. He’d always been the best at finding clues.
“There are burn marks on those boxes,” he said in the third room that they checked. “And claw marks on that wood crate.”
They searched the room for anything else, but that was all there was.
After a few steps back in the hallway, Tommy turned with a sour face, and his flashlight fell to the ground.
“Ew!” he said, wiping his feet on the ground. “Um, what kind of poop do fire drakes leave? Are these them?”
“Um. Yep,” Karim said. It was good that he had the app version of Mortimer’s Monsterpedia, since there didn’t seem to be much service down here. That also meant that their live stream had stopped and they would have to upload the video when they made it back topside. “They look like badly burned sausages.” He looked down at the ground, his stomach turning as he compared it to the image on his phone. “That looks about right.”
“Yum,” said Spike, wrinkling her nose. “But … don’t they seem a bit big?”
Karim compared the phone with the evidence on the floor again. “Well, they’re exactly the right shape and, er, consistency,” he answered. “It doesn’t say how big they are. They must just be big, I guess.”
“I hope we brought enough water.” Spike eyed the jug that Tommy was carrying.
“It doesn’t take much,” Karim answered, recalling the reading that he’d done in Mortimer’s. “You just have to put out the source flame at the back of their throat. Toss the water in when it opens its mouth, and you’re good.”
“There’s fire in its mouth?” Spike asked.
“Sounds pretty dangerous until you get it soaked!” Tommy said, looking around a bit apprehensively.
Karim shrugged. “There’s a reason they’re low-level. They’re small, and the flame isn’t very hot. They mostly eat grasses and, in cities, wood and cardboard. The flame is really to scare predators away.”
They walked the rest of the floor in silence. Karim pointed out several more flame marks and claw marks as they went, but they didn’t look fresh. And the droppings that Tommy found were all hard.
Twice Spike halted them. “I thought I saw something back there,” she said, frowning. “But with just the flashlight it’s so hard to tell.”
“Rule number eight,” Karim said. “If you think you see or hear something suspicious, stop and make sure it’s not going to kill or maim you.” It seemed like a pretty solid rule.
They doubled back and searched the area, but couldn’t find anything.
Spike ran her flashlight over the floor. “There are footprints in the dust, but they look like ours.”
“Yeah, I don’t see any clawed feet,” Tommy said, looking down. “Looks like it was nothing.”
“Or else … it was flying?” Karim suggested. “They can fly.” It was an odd image, and he wasn’t sure fire drakes could fly in such a small space, at least not continuously. He thought they were more like chickens in that regard.
“It would have to be pretty smart to know how to do that,” Spike said. “How intelligent are fire drakes?”
Karim knew the answer but still felt the need to double-check. “Monsterpedia says they’re a lot dumber than real dragons and don’t really have a language,” he said.
Spike shrugged. “It’s possible that one was flying, but it seems unlikely it would know not to ever land. If it could even do that.”
Karim sighed. At least Monsterpedia made it sound like fire drakes weren’t all that dangerous. If the biggest prey it hunted were rats and pigeons, he figured that three of them could probably take one down.
“There’s nothing here,” Tommy said, eyeing the staircase up ahead. “Let’s keep moving.”
Karim found his pulse beating faster as they tromped down into lower and lower levels of the basement. Each level was more of the same. A few marks here and there, but nothing recent.
Four more times they stopped because one of them saw something in the distance, but each time they found nothing but empty hallways and their own sneaker prints on the dusty floor. How must they look, through the eyes of a predator? If he was the drake, what would he do? Attack them, run from them, or lure them into a trap?
Was the drake toying with them, or was Karim’s imagination just running wild in the depths of this building?
Tommy grinned.
Not only was this going to be awesome, it was going to be awesome … LIVE ON STREAM.
“The note said it would most likely be here,” Spike said as they reached the bottom level of the stairs and a found sign that said SUBBASEMENT C in large block letters.
“Maybe we should have just checked here first, then, huh?” Tommy was starting to get frustrated. They’d been down here for hours now, with no signs of finding the fire drake.
“We do things step by step,” Spike shot back, appearing to be a bit snippy herself. “That way we don’t die.”
Tommy shrugged. He was still annoyed, but it was too late to do anything. They started to work their way down the first hallway of Subbasement C, with the same efficiency they’d been using so far.
He glanced down at his phone. Well, maybe not so much live on stream. This deep underground his phone had lost signal.
They’d been up to two hundred viewers before it cut out. Though he knew from experience that an adventure caster disappearing into a dungeon with no signal was sometimes the best thing that could happen to a caster. Viewers loved to speculate about how dead the adventurers were—as long as they weren’t kept waiting for too long.
Tommy had been taking video of occasional moments in the dungeon crawl so that they could post them later, but he’d mostly kept the camera off. This was getting boring, and he didn’t want to bore his viewers too much on their first adventure.
“How long do we look before we give up?” Tommy said. He was almost looking forward to admitting that they weren’t finding the darn monster tonight. If they left now, he would still have time to do a workout and slam down some Brotein (“Pain is just weakness leaving the body and leaving behind totally jacked biceps”) shakes before he went to bed.
“I guess we could come up with a better way to find it and come back,” Karim admitted. “Maybe we could use some sort of bait, like a package of ground beef or something?”
“We still have an entire floor to search,” Spike said. “No defeatist talk until we’re at least done with the whole search, okay? Or are you guys so eager to give up?”
“Hold up!” Karim whispered. “I think I hear something.”
Tommy froze, but inside he was fuming. Karim had stopped them several times now, and each time it had been for nothing. Adventuring was supposed to be about charging in!
The guy’s imagination was going crazy. Tommy supposed he could understand it. If he were a scrawny little guy like Karim and not a fearless mountain of strength, he would probably be scared all the time too.
They stood perfectly still. Tommy tried to focus over the sound of his friend’s breathing. And there was something there. They all turned slowly. Quiet scuffing noises came from the stairwell.
“Maybe the drake circled behind us,” Karim whispered.
“Get set,” Spike said.
Tommy held the water jug at the ready while Karim drew Sidesplitter
and took up a defensive stance. Spike pulled back and held her phone up, preparing to record the action.
They were poised to strike. Tommy was five feet, eight inches of monster-crushing machine. And he supposed that Karim was competent enough.
They waited a few long seconds as more faint scuffing sounds came from the hallway. Suddenly, the door slammed shut and Tommy jumped back, then charged forward. Before he could reach the door, he heard the sound of a magnetic lock clicking. He tested the door anyway, ramming his weight against it. It was solid metal, probably some sort of reinforced fire safety door.
There was a small window, also glass reinforced with wiry lines of metal. A face appeared behind it, framed by a very distinctive outfit—a hoodie sweatshirt over a crisp white collar and tie: Mike Tuckerville.
The tech magnate grinned with a wicked joy, then disappeared as the sound of footsteps running up the staircase rang through the basement.
Tommy pushed at the door, then slammed himself against it several more times. It didn’t give, not even a tiny bit. If only Tommy had doubled his Brotein (“When brute strength just isn’t enough … more Brotein!”) intake for the past month, he surely would have had the oomph to bust through it. But it just wasn’t giving. Tommy rammed into the door again.
“Tommy—Tommy, stop,” Karim said quietly.
“Look,” Spike said, pointing the opposite way, down the hall. It was long, probably running the whole length of the basement. At the other end, a massive shape was stalking around the corner, its eyes glowing in the dim light.
Tommy squinted. It looked a lot like the fire drake from Mortimer’s Monsterpedia … but about five times larger. It was easily eight feet long, a miniature dragon with glistening green scales and a spiked tail.
“Th-that’s not a fire drake,” Karim stammered. “That’s a real dragon! What the heck is it doing in Burbank?”
Tommy couldn’t believe it. He looked down at his phone. There had to be an explanation for this. He blinked. There was no service now, but at some point on the way downstairs it must have gotten enough signal to update. Uh-oh.
“Now all of a sudden it says the quest is to catch a dragon!” Tommy said. “A Saskatchewan razorback!”
“That’s a Level Seven monster!” Karim’s eyes were wide. “Crap, crap, crap,” he repeated over and over under his breath. Razorbacks were the smallest breed of dragons, but they were still dragons, and definitely bigger than fire drakes.
“They’re covering their tracks,” Spike said darkly, glancing around. “It looks like we agreed to this, so it won’t be their fault when we don’t survive. We agreed to the danger when we signed up.”
“Just a few more adventurers who couldn’t take the heat,” Karim said grimly.
There was a ringing in the air. The kind of ring that Tommy had only heard in his grandma’s house. An old-school phone. A landline. It was coming from an open doorway behind them.
“Guys, get that door,” Spike said, striding to the phone. “Block it with something.”
Behind her, she heard the sound of the door slamming shut, then locking. As she picked up the phone, she glanced back and saw Karim sliding filing cabinets toward the door.
“Hello?” Spike answered.
“Oh my god, Colleen, it’s you,” the voice on the other side said. “Are you hurt? Are your friends okay?”
The blood that had been pounding in her veins suddenly turned to granite. It was the last voice she expected to hear—the last voice she ever wanted to hear.
“The name is Spike,” she said quietly. Behind her, the razorback scratched at the door. She spun around and saw that the door was holding, defended by more and more filing cabinets. “But better yet, don’t call me anything at all. I need to go get killed in the trap that your new employer set for us, Luis.”
It was that useless waste of the planet’s resources that was supposedly one of her parents. Why was her father calling her down here? How had he even known to? Wanting to know the answer to that question was the only thing that kept her from just hanging up on him immediately.
“Honey,” he said, apparently choosing not to call her either Spike or Colleen, “I had no idea they were doing this. I would never put you in danger. They only just told me. I’m so sorry.”
“No need for apologies, Luis,” she responded. “I don’t care what you do.”
“Just hear me out,” he answered with a sigh. “AppVenture has a rescue team on standby. All you need to do is give them the passwords to your online accounts so that they can post online admitting you made up the stories you’ve been spreading about us. About them, I mean. You can get out of this without getting hurt.”
In the background, Spike vaguely noticed Karim and Tommy yelling something about fire. Spike hit mute on the phone and relayed the offer to her friends.
“They want us to give up our accounts?!” Tommy said. “If they have the password, that’s permanent!”
Karim took a deep breath. “This dragon is way out of our league.” He closed his eyes, squirreling his face up in that way he always did when he was running scenarios. “I want to get out of here. But if they have our accounts, we have no leverage anymore. They can make it look like this was all our fault. We get eaten by the dragon and they get away unscathed.”
Spike nodded. She picked up the phone again.
“Wow, Luis,” she said. “Just … wow. Now you’re helping them threaten and extort me? The people who just released a Level Seven monster on three seventh graders!”
“I’m not on their side, honey!” His desperation was coming through the phone. “I just don’t want you to get hurt! Please, take the deal. Look, we just flew in from San Francisco. I’ll be there soon—I can be there in an hour. After you get out, I’ll pick you up and take you all home. Just take the deal, and this can all be over safely.”
Spike paused for a moment, looking around the room.
Outside there were scraping sounds as the razorback stalked along the hallway. Then came a loud whoosh, and a light flickered under the doorway. Even on this side, she could feel the temperature rising slightly. That thing was a heck of a lot more powerful than a little fire drake. Mike Tuckerville didn’t just want to scare them; he wanted to see them roasted alive.
Tommy was hefting his jug of water. Suddenly, it didn’t seem like that much.
“The door is starting to char,” Karim said, pulling another filing cabinet from a far corner to add to the pile blocking the door. “Another one like that and it will start to burn!”
“Maybe it’s like a shark,” Tommy said as he dragged the last cabinet into place. “If I just punch it in the nose hard enough, it will back off.”
“Or we could just hold its mouth shut, like an alligator,” Karim suggested.
Spike took in the whole scene. Her friends were working bravely, but she could see the panic in their eyes.
Mike Tuckerville had them in a tight spot—trapped in a room with only one way in or out, with a deadly magical predator steadily burning its way in to eat them alive. Tuckerville was so sure he could make them do whatever he wanted. He probably thought he had already won.
But Mike Tuckerville was not going to win. Not today. Not if Spike had anything to say about it.
“Luis, you disgust me,” Spike finally said. “Oh, and tell your pal Mike Tuckerville that his hoodie looks dumb and his haircut is cheesy. The monsters they’re rereleasing are dangerous. If we don’t get this story out, more people will probably get hurt—or worse. No deal.”
“Colleen—” Luis Hernandez started, but Spike slammed down the phone.
The whooshing sound came again from the other room. The temperature rose a few more degrees, and she could see tiny flames licking around the edges of the door.
Tommy and Karim stared at her, but to their credit neither of them was dumb enough to tell her that she should have taken the deal.
“Okay,” Spike said. “Karim, we need one of your crazy ideas. How do we survive thi
s?”
Karim stood in the center of the room. He tried to take it all in, to consider every resource available to him. Every situation had a set of rules. Every set of rules could be exploited.
This room had one door, one way in or out. It contained nothing other than old filing cabinets, some rolling chairs, and a telephone. Four walls—one gray concrete, three painted a faded white. Outside the door was a giant fire-breathing lizard that was about to blast its way in and eat them within minutes.
Karim looked at the telephone, but Spike picked it up and shook her head. “It’s been disconnected,” she said. “Tuckerville is not doing this halfway, is he?”
Karim focused. Okay. That was the situation. What else did they know? He pulled out his phone, bringing up Mortimer’s Monsterpedia. Luckily it had an offline mode so adventurers could get info on monsters even in the deepest dungeons or wildest woods.
The smallest of the true dragons, Saskatchewan razorbacks make up for their relatively small size in ferocity and fiery breath.
The Saskatchewan razorback is found only on the Canadian Shield plateau, in the Saskatchewan province. They have a strong sense of pride and their own honor and importance, and cannot be tamed or ridden by humans.
When they are hungry, these dragons will eat almost anything that moves. When they sense prey, razorbacks ignite the flame sacs in their throats that produce their fire breath. Once the flames are lit, the flame drives them into a hunting frenzy. These dragons will pursue their prey until they are victorious or their flames go out. When this happens, they will usually return to their lairs to rest.
If the flames can be put out, the razorback becomes less aggressive. But it’s still a giant armored dragon with claws and wings, capable of ripping a person to pieces if offended.
All I have to say about these guys is that they are extremely dangerous and extremely rude! The last one I met took the pinky toe on my left foot and really, really hurt my feelings.