d6 (Caverns and Creatures)

by Robert Bevan

  The crewmen looked at one another and laughed.

  “Yous gonna just give it up freely then?” said Softy. “Where’s the fun in that?” The men laughed harder.

  “A bold strategy,” said Cooper. “But what’s with the bottles?”

  “Come on, guys!” said Dave. “This is where we get off!” He hefted himself over the wall with his elbows and let himself fall off the side of the ship.

  “Hey!” said Cooper, gripping the wall with his left hand and holding up Dave with his right. “What the fuck are you thinking?”

  The pain in Dave’s wrist was excruciating as he dangled at Cooper’s side, but he dared not let go of the bottle in his hand.

  “Come on,” Dave cried. “Trust me!”

  “Fuck no,” said Cooper, struggling to keep his balance as Dave tried to swing himself out to sea. “Quit squirming. You’re heavy as fuck.”

  Dave couldn’t take the pain much longer. He concentrated on thoughts of not getting ass-raped until an idea came to him. He let the neck of the bottle in his right hand slide down all the way to the end. With the extra reach that afforded him, he jabbed at Cooper’s swollen face with the bulbous end.

  “Ow!” shouted Cooper. “That fucking hur—whoa!” He let go of the wall to cover his face and slipped on Julian’s vomit. He fell off the side of the ship, taking Julian and Tim with him.

  The water was warm up top, but cooled steadily as they sank. The two bottles of air Dave held desperately onto slowed the rate at which they descended, and Dave prayed that Tim’s clever mind and nimble fingers would be quick enough to act before they cracked under the ever increasing water pressure.

  Dave looked up. Cooper let loose a barrage of bubbles from his mouth, which Dave had no doubt was him shouting “Fuck!”

  Beyond that, he saw what he’d hoped to see. Tim was climbing past Julian, then across Cooper, and finally to him.

  Tim immediately got to work on the buckles on Dave’s armor as Dave began to feel the pressure building in his head. He looked up at the bottles. They were made of thick, sturdy glass, but how much could they take?

  The breastplate loosened from the backplate on Dave’s left side. If he let go of one bottle, he might be able to wiggle out of the other side. No. That would have to be a last resort. His cheeks were bursting, and a few bubbles forced their way out between his tightly clenched lips. His head felt like an elephant was clenching its asshole around it. Come on, Tim!

  Tim got to work on the other side. A few excruciating seconds later, it was done. The breast and back plates dropped away from each other and continued to fall into the dark depths of the sea, while Dave shot upward like a cork, away from Tim.

  Dave let some air out of his mouth as he flew upward toward the light like a stocky, bearded Superman, dragging his three friends behind him.

  When he finally popped up from the surface, he sucked in what felt like enough air to fill a zeppelin.

  Cooper took in a nice big breath of air as well, but didn’t look like he needed it as desperately as Dave had. Tim broke the surface of the water hacking and choking, but awake and alive. Julian, however, merely floated up, not even raising his head out of the water.

  “Shit!” cried Dave. “He’s drowning! Cooper, help him!”

  Ravenus hovered above them, cawing and screeching. It wasn’t even words. It was just blind bird panic.

  Cooper grabbed Julian by the arms and shook him.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” asked Dave. “He’s drowning, not sleeping! Do some CPR shit or something!”

  “Do I look like a fucking lifeguard to you?”

  “Hold these,” Dave told Tim. Tim, still hacking and coughing, accepted the bottles. Dave discovered that he was not a strong swimmer. The padding he wore beneath his armor was soaked through, and made movement awkward. He started to sink, but hugged Julian around the waist. “Breathe air into his mouth!”

  While Cooper sucked on Julian’s face, Dave attempted the Heimlich maneuver, which was, to his limited knowledge, just a matter of hugging someone from behind really hard. Miraculously, their combined efforts worked, and Julian vomited purple-tinted seawater into Cooper’s mouth. Cooper made a show of spitting it out, but Dave was pretty sure he swallowed some of it, not wanting to let go of any trace of booze that Julian may have not yet metabolized.

  As Julian and Tim hacked and coughed, Dave kept a close eye on the Seventh Serpent, which was pretty far along now and still moving away from them. That was good.

  “Good (cough) thinking,” said Julian, when he was able to get the words out. “Now what do we do?”

  “There’s an island over there,” said Dave. “We swim.”

  It was a hard swim. Cooper was the only one of them who could swim worth a damn, and he was hindered by having other people chained to him. Julian’s robes and serape dragged through the water like two extra people. Poor Tim was jerked back and forth with every stroke of Cooper’s left arm, and Dave severely limited the movement of his right. It was slow going, and that distant little island never seemed to get any closer.

  “I wish I could be more help,” said Dave, hugging his empty overturned bottle.

  “You could heal my face.”

  “I’m so sorry!” said Dave. “I was going to do that earlier, but I thought I should save it for after we were raped.”

  Cooper nodded as he swam. “That’s good thinking.”

  Dave took hold of Cooper’s wrist. Even bathed in seawater, it was slimy to the touch. “I heal thee.” Cooper stopped swimming as his broken face realigned itself. His snout popped out like a crushed plastic soda bottle getting re-inflated. Cooper winced, but after it was done, he let out a long relieved sigh. A train of bubbles rose to the surface, releasing his foul-smelling fart into the salty sea air.

  “Is there any way I might be of assistance?” asked Ravenus.

  Cooper grimaced. “Jesus. What does that fucking bird want now?”

  “He just wanted to know how he could help,” said Julian defensively.

  “He could start by getting off of my fucking head.”

  “Ravenus,” said Julian. “Why don’t you go wait for us on the island?”

  “Are you sure, sir?” asked Ravenus. “I don’t much like the idea of leaving you out here alone.”

  Cooper cringed at the sound of the bird’s voice. Dave remembered how it had sounded before he picked up the elven tongue, allowing him to understand the bird. Cooper, though he’d leveled up, stubbornly refused to spend any skill points to learn it. To him, the bird’s speech sounded like nothing more than screeching and cawing.

  “I’m sure,” said Julian. “We’re okay. We’ll catch up with you soon.”

  Cooper struggled on as the afternoon sun sank down to the empty western horizon, and then below it. Cooper paddled on through the night, and none of the rest of them could do anything but hope they were still swimming in the right direction and that they didn’t get eaten by sharks, or krakens, or whatever the hell else might be lurking beneath these waters.

  The next morning, by the time the sky grew light enough to see anything, they discovered that they had swum past the island, and were headed away from it. Fortunately, however, it was very close. Cooper changed course, and less than an hour later, found himself able to stand upright on the sandy sea floor. He stood upright and caught his breath.

  “You did it!” cried Tim.

  Ravenus greeted them with an excited caw as he flew in circles above them.

  Cooper looked like he wanted to smile, but didn’t have the energy. He and Julian walked the rest of the way, with Tim and Dave bobbing along beside them, hugging their bottles, until their feet could touch the ground as well.

  As soon as they reached the beach, Cooper collapsed face-first into the sand. Tim shifted the big guy’s head to the side so he could breathe, but other than that, nobody bothered to try and move him. Dave sprawled out on the sand and closed his eyes.

  

  Dav
e woke up to the sensation of water running across his face and someone kicking him through his soggy armor padding. Remembering that he was chained to Cooper, it occurred to him that it wasn’t completely impossible that the stupid asshole was pissing on his face. He quickly shut his mouth and opened his eyes. Just rain. He breathed out a sigh of relief.

  “Come on” said Julian, the source of the kicking.

  He kicked Cooper as well. “Wake up, guys! It’s raining!”

  “Knock it off, dude,” said Cooper. “We spent the night in the goddam ocean. You’re worried about getting wet?”

  “No,” said Juilan. “I’m worried about dying of dehydration.”

  “So shut up and stick your fucking tongue out. I’m tired.” Cooper tried to roll away from Julian, but Julian yanked on his chain.

  “We don’t know how long we’re going to be here, and we don’t know when it’s going to rain again. We need to fill these bottles up with fresh water while we can.”

  “That’s not a bad idea,” said Dave. He sat up.

  Cooper made an effort to get up and walk, but his legs were wobbly. Dave and Julian supported him on their shoulders, dragging a groggy Tim who stumbled along beside them.

  “I’ll try to make some funnels out of palm leaves,” said Julian.

  “You do that,” said Tim. “I’m going back to sleep.” He slipped his hand out of the manacle and sat back against a palm tree.

  Julian tugged at his own manacle, but it wasn’t going anywhere. “How did you do that?”

  Tim yawned. “Seven ranks in the Escape Artist skill.”

  “So you could have done that at any time,” said Julian. “Why wait until now?”

  “We were out in the middle of the ocean,” said Tim. “It was to my advantage to be chained to the rest of you.”

  Water turned out not to be a problem. It rained all morning, overflowing their two bottles. Tim used the bones of some long-dead animal to pick the locks of everyone’s manacles. Cooper kicked a palm tree until it rewarded him with some coconuts, as well as some nasty lumps and bruises. Cooper reciprocated by climbing up the tree as high as he could and swaying back and forth until the trunk snapped.

  Getting into the coconuts proved to be another challenge. The island didn’t have any rocks large enough to crack them against, and nobody had any weapons. Cooper soon solved this problem by smashing two of them together. While this proved effective, it only yielded about a third of the fruit available, the other two thirds of which exploded into a pulpy mess in the sand. But there was no shortage of coconut palms on this island, and Cooper only had to fell six more trees until everyone had had their fill. Dave, once again, spent his entire day’s allotment of healing spells on Cooper.

  Ravenus had no interest in coconuts. He decided to scout the island in search of proper carrion.

  “Don’t be gone too long,” Julian shouted after him as he flew off. “And be careful!”

  The four of them sat in silence throughout the afternoon, eating fragmented coconut bits and watching the sun begin to set.

  “Any ideas on how we’re going to get out of here?” asked Tim.

  “I don’t know,” said Cooper. “It’s not so bad here. I could think of worse places to spend the rest of my years.”

  “I’ll forgive your shortsightedness because you’re stupid,” said Tim.

  “That’s mighty big of you.”

  “You’re not thinking this through. How much longer are you going to be content living off coconuts? How long is that even going to be an option if you keep ripping the fucking trees down? Julian has already observed that we could run out of drinking water with any prolonged stretch of sunny weather. And unless any of you know how to distill rum, you can forget about booze. Hell, the closest thing we have to a woman here is Julian.”

  “Hey,” Julian objected, and quickly stopped combing his fingers through his hair. “Keep it together, man. We’ve only been on this island one day.”

  “Your points are well made,” said Cooper. “I have no ideas.”

  “That comes as no surprise,” said Tim.

  “We could build a raft,” Dave suggested.

  “I don’t know,” said Tim. “Sure, we’ve got more than enough tree trunks, and we could rummage up some vines or something to lash them together, but that’s open sea out there. Would you really trust anything the four of us built to be seaworthy?”

  “Of course not,” said Dave. “But I can’t think of any other – YEOW!” Dave felt like he had just been stabbed in the ankle with a red-hot poker. He looked at his ankle and saw the biggest reasonably-sized ant he’d ever seen, about the size of one of his fat, dwarf fingers. It was light beige, the same color as the sand. He quickly swatted it away, but a closer inspection of the area revealed that it wasn’t alone. The place was crawling with ants, greedily munching away on discarded coconut fragments.

  “ANTS!” Dave shouted, jumping to his feet. He ran as fast as he could to toward the water, and his friends quickly followed suit. He hadn’t made it halfway there when he had the tactile and olfactory sense of being hit by a garbage truck. He and Cooper rolled on the sand.

  “What the hell?” said Dave.

  “They’re all over you, man!” said Cooper.

  Dave looked at his armor padding. Sure enough, he was crawling with ants. He must have dribbled a lot of coconut juice on himself.

  “Yaaaah!” Dave screamed. “Get them off! Get them off." He ripped his clothes off as fast as he could and jumped naked into the sea, splashing around like a man on fire.

  Cooper picked the ants, which had transferred from Dave to him during their tumble, one by one off of his body and ate them. “They’re not as bad as you’d think.”

  Dave’s arms and legs were covered in painful welts. It only took three 0-level Heal spells to clear them away, but if they got swarmed during the night while they were sleeping or something, those little bastards might bite them to death. “Okay. Raft it is. We need to get out of here, like pronto.”

  “Don’t be such a pussy,” said Cooper, ant guts dribbling down the side of his mouth. “Look, they aren’t even biting me.”

  “They’d probably prefer to starve to death,” said Tim. “I can assure you that if it comes to us having to eat one another to survive, you’ll be the last man standing.”

  Cooper farted, and four ants fell off of his back and lay motionless in the sand. “You guys should really get some protein in you.”

  “I’ll gnaw my own hands off, thanks,” said Tim.

  “Screw you guys,” said Cooper, collecting the dead ants and popping them into his mouth. “Go ahead and starve to death. I’m Bear Gryllin this shit.”

  “Hey!” said Julian, looking up at their ruined picnic site. “How’s that for protein?”

  Where they had been sitting only a moment ago, two fat, blue peacocks had emerged from the palm trees. They were feasting away on ants.

  “If we could bag us one of those,” said Tim, “we’d last a lot longer before we inevitably die at sea. Cooper, do you think you could catch one?”

  “I don’t know. How fast is a peacock? I wouldn’t want to lose it in the trees.”

  “Wait,” said Julian. “I can get one, but I want to run it by Ravenus first.”

  “What the fuck for?” asked Cooper.

  “I want to make sure he’s cool with us killing and eating a bird.”

  “If you think I’m going to go hungry to spare the feelings of your fucking crow –”

  “He’s a raven, and I’m not going to ask his permission. I just want to give him a heads up, so he’s not shocked when he comes back.”

  “I’ll give you five minutes,” said Cooper. “Then I’m chasing those fat fuckers down.”

  “How can I get his attention without scaring the peacocks away?”

  “Don’t you have like a mind-link to him or something?” asked Tim.

  “Yeah, but it’s not like telepathy or anything. I can’t just will him to go g
et me a beer or something. It’s more like we can feel one another’s strong emotions. For example, he’d know if I was in danger.”

  “I could try to kill you,” said Cooper.

  “That wouldn’t work,” said Julian. “I wouldn’t really believe it, so I wouldn’t be genuinely afraid.”

  Cooper gave Julian a quick jab in the face, which sent him flying backward to land flat on his back in the sand.

  “Jesus, Cooper!” said Tim, trying to keep his exclamation to an excited whisper.

  Cooper scanned the sky over the island. It was bereft of big black birds. He shrugged. “It was worth a try.” He reached down to help Julian up.