2d6 (Caverns and Creatures)

by Robert Bevan

  “I guess you get what you pay for,” said the man. “The name’s Chester. Come on up an’ set down a spell. Can I get you boys a drink?”

  “That would be lovely,” said Julian, leading his friends up the front steps.

  “Gertie!” Chester shouted into the house. “Fetch us a pitcher of lemonade.”

  “Do you have anything stronger?” asked Cooper, ignoring his friends’ glares. “I’m sorry. I’m just fighting a big fucking hangover.”

  Chester nodded, then shouted back into the house. “Throw a squirt of corn piss in it!”

  Julian stopped before reaching the top step. His friends did likewise. Not visible from ground level, the section of porch in front of the door was covered by a great blue rug with a silver floral pattern. It looked very expensive.

  Chester sat down on the rug and invited them to do the same. “Don’t be shy now. Just take your shoes off first.”

  Julian and Dave, the only two of them who actually wore shoes, removed them, and they all sat down on the rug.

  A moment later, a tall, thin woman emerged from the doorway with a tray. She might have been attractive back in her day, but that day was long past. Likewise, the faded pink dress she wore was likely at one time a tasteful and elegant showcase for the beautiful young woman inside it, conservatively cut below the knee, but revealing well-toned arms in their entirety. Now it was ragged, dirty, and threadbare, and the arms it revealed were flabby, the hands and forearms red and chapped.

  “Dammit, Gertie!” said Chester. “This ain’t no occasion to be usin’ our fine glassware!”

  “But your guests.”

  Chester gestured at Julian and the others. “These are hired mercenaries, not foreign dignitaries. Ain’t a one of ‘em even human.” He turned to Julian. “No offense.”

  “Um…” said Julian. “None taken?”

  “I’ll go an’ fetch the wooden cups.”

  “Aw hell,” said Chester. “Y’already done wasted enough time. Just set the tray down an’ get back inside. Y’oughtta be shamed of yourself lookin’ the way you do.”

  “Yes, Pappa,” said Gertie, setting down the tray in the middle of the group.

  Chester called out after her as she retreated into the house. “Any these glasses get broken, it’s comin’ outta your ass, hear?”

  No response came from within the house.

  Julian, Tim, Dave, and Cooper stared at each other uncomfortably as Chester poured the drinks and passed the glasses around.

  “The hell’s wrong with your arm, boy?” asked Chester, staring at the leopard fur band around Dave’s forearm. “That some kinda gang affiliation?”

  “No,” said Dave. “It’s… I don’t like to talk about it.”

  “Well let’s talk business then,” said Chester, raising his own glass.

  Cooper swallowed his entire glass at once. Dave downed his in a quick series of gulps. Tim only got half as far on his first go. Julian took a careful sip. Gertie had obviously thrown in more than a ‘squirt’ of cornpiss. The drink tasted like lemon-flavored rubbing alcohol.

  “We understand you have some kind of problem in your cornfield?” said Julian.

  “Ankhegs,” said Chester.

  “Gesundheit,” said Cooper. Chester narrowed his eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Chester,” said Julian. “I’m not familiar with the term.”

  “Ankhegs?”

  “Gesundheit,” Cooper said again.

  Chester stood up and brandished his crossbow. “You makin’ fun of me, boy? I got a mind to put a hole in that big ugly head of yours.”

  “Please, sir!” said Julian, scrambling for a Diplomacy check. “That won’t be necessary.” He looked at Cooper. “You say another goddamned word, and I’ll shoot you myself.”

  Cooper pouted.

  Chester sat down with a wide grin. “Well there you go, son! That’s how you deal with the lower races.”

  “The lower races?” The question escaped Julian’s lips before he had time to think better of asking it.

  “Sure,” said Chester. “There’s a natural order to life. We humans is at the top, with you elves just below us. And then come…” He looked at Tim, Cooper, and Dave. “… well, the rest of them.”

  Tim swallowed down the rest of his drink, presumably to give his mouth something to do other than respond to Chester’s proposed natural order to life. Dave refilled his own glass, then Cooper’s and Tim’s.

  Diplomacy had taped the wing back onto the burning airplane. Now it was time to hit the eject button. “So, what’s an ankheg?”

  “Ain’t none of you boys been out the city in your whole lives?” said Chester. “I’m gonna have to have a word with Skip.”

  “Ankhegs are large predatory arthropods,” said Tim. He hiccupped. “They burrow under the ground. We’ve fought them before… back home.”

  “Well there you go!” said Chester. “At least one of you’s got half a brain rattlin’ round in his head.”

  “It was my understanding,” Tim continued, “that ankhegs *hiccup* were good for farmland. Don’t they aerate the soil or something?”

  Julian gave Tim a thankful smile. He knew Tim had a temper, and that rednecks were one of his biggest triggers. He was probably making continuous Concentration checks to avoid punching this asshole in the face.

  “So they’re like dire worms?” asked Julian.

  Chester frowned at him. “What?”

  “Arthropods, stupid!” said Tim. “Like lobsters and spiders and shit.”

  “How the hell am I supposed to know what an arthropod is?”

  “You get the Discovery Channel, don’t you?”

  “All they ever play is fucking Amish Mafia!”

  “I may have to rethink the natural order of life,” said Chester. “Can one of you tell me what in the Abyss these two are arguin’ about?”

  Cooper made a show of how tightly his lips were sealed and shrugged.

  “We were talking about ankhegs,” said Dave. “And how they aerate the soil.”

  “Now that’s right,” said Chester. “You have one or two ankhegs in your field, and that’s a blessing from the gods. Not only do they aerate the soil, but they keep rodent populations in check. And that’s just fine.”

  Julian listened intently. Even racist assholes were interesting to listen to when they were talking about a subject they genuinely knew something about.

  “But sometimes,” Chester continued. “Sometimes the balance is tipped. Ankhegs themselves don’t have a lot of natural predators, but they’s too stupid to watch over their eggs after the mating season. Those eggs is fair game for whatever other critters is crawlin’ around underground, and so most of them never even get to hatch. But on occasion, a whole nest will get through the winter unmolested, and then you got problems.”

  “What sorts of problems?” asked Julian.

  “Well it’s one thing to aerate the soil,” said Chester. “But you get too much aeration, and it undermines the structural integrity of the land. I got sinkholes formin’.”

  “I guess that’s pretty bad,” said Julian.

  “Oh that ain’t the worst of it,” Chester went on. “What do you think happens when all the rabbits and rats is gone? All those crawly basterds gotta eat somethin’. They’ve started attacking my field hands!”

  “Do you use zombies?”

  Chester glared at Julian. “What kind of sick question is that?”

  “I’m sorry,” said Julian. “It’s just that I know a guy up the road who –“

  “Simon Peppercorn.”

  “Yeah, that’s him.”

  “You boys best steer clear of folks like that,” said Chester. “He’s a practitioner of the Dark Arts.”

  “Who the fuck is Simon Pep—“

  Julian knocked Cooper on the forehead with his quarterstaff. “I warned you.”

  “We’s a good gods-fearin’ family,” said Chester, raising his chin and puffing out his chest. “We use slaves.”
<
br />   Dave facepalmed himself. Tim swigged back an entire glass of ‘lemonade’. Cooper farted.

  “Gods have mercy, boy!” said Chester, waving his hand violently in front of his face. “You practice some Dark Arts yourself, don’t you!”

  “Excuse me,” said Cooper.

  “I say it’s about time we went and had a look at the cornfield.”

  “Good idea,” said Julian, springing up to his feet.

  “Set your skinny ass back down, son,” said Chester. “You ain’t gonna see nothin’ from ground level. Anyways, the ankhegs can sense the slightest tremor in the ground. It’s how they hunt.”

  Julian started to sit back down. “Then how are we going to –“

  “Giddap!” said Chester.

  Julian’s ass met the rug a good half-second before it was supposed to. It took him a moment to make sense of that, but he soon discovered it was because the rug had risen off the porch.

  “A flying carpet!” said Tim.

  “Awesome!” said Dave.

  “Fuck yes!” said Cooper.

  Julian just sat where he was, exhilarated and a little terrified, even though they were only about a foot off the ground.

  “Heh heh,” Chester laughed. “You boys is easily entertained.” He brushed his hand along the carpet’s surface. The carpet responded by moving in that direction, hovering out past the front steps out over the open ground.

  They were now about ten feet off the ground. Falling from that height probably wouldn’t even do any damage, but Julian scooted back away from the edge just the same.

  “Get this baby moving!” said Tim, hopping up to his feet. “I’ve got to take a leak!” He stumbled past Dave to the back edge of the carpet, looking as though he was certainly going to fall off. He caught his balance just in time.

  “Hold on!” said Chester. The carpet accelerated out of Cooper’s fart cloud at a surprisingly smooth rate.

  Tim let a stream of urine spray behind them as they circled around the big house. “Woooooo!”

  “Sit down before you kill yourself!” said Julian. He took another small swig of cornpiss lemonade to intoxicate the butterflies in his stomach.

  When Tim was finished, he returned to the group, tying the rope that held his pants up. “I’ve always wanted to do that.”

  “What?” said Julian. “How would the idea even occur to –“

  “It’s true,” said Dave. “He’s mentioned it a few times before.”

  “Ain’t no feelin’ in the world quite like that, is there?” said Chester. He steered the flying rug past the house and out over the sea of corn.

  Julian’s long ears sliced through the air as the carpet picked up speed. The view from above opened his eyes as to just how vast this cornfield was; it stretched for miles in every direction. It also made plain imperfections in the otherwise homogenous pattern of stalks.

  Chester slowed the carpet until they were hovering over one of these imperfections, a roughly circular hole in the ground, about five feet in diameter, leading downward at a sharp angle.

  “Ankheg burrow,” said Chester.

  “Cornhole,” said Cooper.

  Dave and Tim laughed. Pissing off the back of a magic carpet must have done wonders for Tim. The rare sight of him laughing all but forced Julian to chuckle along.

  “This ain’t no pleasure cruise,” said Chester, who had obviously not found Cooper’s comment quite so funny as the rest of them had. “The observations you make out here might very well save your worthless lives. So you might want to –“

  “Bwwaaarrrrrggggghh!” roared something from about fifty feet away. It was a terrible sound, like a bobcat choking on a squirrel which hadn’t yet given up the fight. Julian looked toward the noise. Sure enough, a section of cornstalks was shaking violently, some of them tipping over, others sinking straight down.

  “Well here you go,” said Chester. “The perfect opportunity for you boys to educate yourselves on what you’re up against.”

  The carpet meandered above the stalks until it reached the fight-in-progress. Julian recognized the goblin immediately for what it was. The creature it was desperately hacking at with a sharpened piece of wood, he could only assume was an ankheg. It was only partially exposed. It’s head looked like that of a brown grasshopper, but with enormous mandibles. The two exposed legs reminded Julian of steel fence posts, but with hooked claws at the end. The back end of a crossbow bolt appeared in its thorax, right below its leg. Julian looked to his right. Tim had fired the shot.

  The creature hissed as it released its hold on the goblin’s leg and turned its attention toward them.

  Chester, strangely enough, had not yet even raised his own crossbow. He must be wanting to assess their ability. Still, that was some pretty cold shit when one of his own workers’ life was on the line.

  “Magic Missile!” said Julian. He was too spooked by the ankheg’s appearance to focus on a form for the spell, so it just came out as a white glowing blob of magic. It did its job though, exploding into the side of the thing’s face, shattering the exoskeletal cheek and part of its right eye. Unfortunately, the parts that did the biting seemed to still be fully functional.

  Dave stood at the edge of the carpet, mace ready, waiting for the ankheg to come within striking range.

  “Don’t be a pussy,” said Cooper, kicking Dave in the back.

  “Shiiiii-“ said Dave on the way down. The end of his scream was drowned out by the crashing of corn stalks.

  When the ankheg bent down to bite Dave, Cooper leapt off the carpet onto its back. “Fuck you, you husky bitch!”

  Riding piggyback on an enormous insect proved more challenging than Cooper had apparently accounted for, and he dropped his axe in order to hang on. The ankheg swayed back and forth, trying to shake him off, but Cooper had his left arm firmly locked in a chokehold around the creature’s neck. He punched into the cavity Julian’s Magic Missile had opened up, and then pulled out a fistful of brown and red goop that must have been the mashed remnants of its brain.

  The creature stopped writhing and slumped forward over Dave, taking Cooper with it, head first into the ground.

  “Ow,” said Cooper.

  “Impressive work,” said Chester. “If not a tad unconventional.”

  “It might not have killed you to jump in on the action,” said Tim. The kettle was beginning to boil.

  Chester shrugged off the comment. “Bolts cost money.” He looked down at the goblin. The pitiful thing’s left leg was torn up pretty bad, but he remained standing. His white burlap shirt had been ripped wide open, revealing skin underneath that appeared to be worse off than the skin unshielded from the sun. It was pink and blistered, like second degree burns. “What you got in your hand, son?”

  The goblin looked up like he’d been caught fucking Gertie. “Oh this? Ain’t nothin’, sir. Just a little chunk of wood is all.”

  “You know goblin’s ain’t s’posed to carry no weapons out here,” said Chester, fingering the stone that hung from his neck. “Leave it to these here professionals to take care of the ankhegs. You just mind the corn.”

  “If y’all ain’t happened by just when you done, these professionals wouldn’t have done me a whole lot of good.”

  Chester scowled at the goblin with fiery hate in his eyes. For a second, Julian thought he might have to intervene. But the moment passed. Chester’s face relaxed, and so did Julian.

  “How’s that leg of yours?”

  “Oh, it ain’t too bad,” said the goblin. “I might need one or two days to recuperate, but I should be back to work in no time.”

  “One or two days, huh?” Chester flashed a broad smile. “Why not make it a week?”

  “That’s mighty generous of you, sir, but I reckon I’ll only be –“ THWACK A bolt in the forehead dropped the goblin to the dirt.

  “What the fuck!” Tim cried, jumping off of the carpet.

  “Give a gobber an inch, and he’ll take a mile.”

  It took
Julian a second to realize Chester was talking to him, being the only one left up there on the carpet. His mind reeling, he had no idea how to respond. Was he still even trying to be diplomatic at this point? “Excuse me,” he said. He hopped backwards off the carpet, catching the edge briefly with his fingers, hanging on just long enough to halt the momentum of his fall.

  “Y’all ain’t had to worry ‘bout that ankheg,” said Chester. “Gobber woulda finished him off.”

  “He didn’t stand a fucking chance, and you know it!” said Tim, plucking the bolt out of the goblin’s forehead. Bright red blood poured out of the wound and ran down the creature’s dusty face. Tim dragged the body behind the ankheg corpse, which Dave was still struggling to get out from under.

  “Ha!” said Chester. “He didn’t need to.” He raised his eyebrows and tapped his temple. “It’s brainpower what makes us the higher race. I have Gertie soak all the gobbers’ laundry in a special batch of poison ‘fore she hang it out to dry, just for this sort of eventuality.”

  That explained the chemical burns.

  “You sadistic son of a whore!” said Cooper.

  Julian whacked him on the head with his quarterstaff. “My apologies,” he said to Chester. “My acquaintance has more heart than brain.”

  “Hey fuck you, dude,” said Cooper. “Did you see what –“ Julian gave him a look like he was going to hit him again.

  “Well that’s real sweet,” said Chester. “You know I once saw a sick dog suck milk from a sow titty.”

  “Is that right?” said Julian.

  “I shit you not!” said Chester. “Funniest thing in the world, I tell you…”

  Julian’s eyes remained focused on Chester, to give the appearance that he was still paying attention. But the bulk of his concentration was on Dave and Tim.

  “I heal thee,” whispered Dave. It was barely loud enough for Julian’s hyper-sensitive elf ears to pick up. There’s no way Chester’s Master Race human ears would have heard, particularly not over the sound of his own blathering. When he heard the sound of muffled groaning, he sighed and turned his attention back to Chester.

  “… but that don’t matter none on account of we don’t have room in the house for another nephew anyway.”