by Scott Meyer
Get a grip, he thought. You’re taking off your pants. As long as you end up not wearing pants, you can’t be doing it wrong.
Despite his internal pep talk, the surveillance had him so unnerved that he did end up tugging at his pants as they pooled flaccidly around his ankles before realizing that in order to fully remove them he would have to lift at least one foot off the ground.
Gary got down to his underwear. They were the style commonly called “tighty-whities,” though after having been worn for so long and while covering so much distance, they were no longer either white or tight. He knew they were not flattering, but he couldn’t quite force himself to remove them.
He turned to gauge the blond Gwen’s reaction to the sight of him mostly undressed. She did not scream and flee, which he took as a positive sign. She also did not disrobe herself, which he found less encouraging.
Okay. Fun is fun, Gary thought, but I can’t let this go any further.
Gary slowly approached her. She did not retreat or look away.
I mean it, he told himself, I can’t let this go too much further.
Soon he was kissing her, and she was kissing him back. He carefully started untying the laces of her peasant blouse. She made no move to stop him.
Gary thought, Seriously, I can never let anyone know how far I’m letting this go.
Gary stopped thinking. He felt her in his arms. He heard her breathing, heavy in his ear. He felt her fingernails digging into his back, her movements becoming jerky and uncoordinated. The sound of her breath took on a wet, panting quality.
In a deep, husky growl she said, “I’ll gnaw the meat from your ribcage.”
Gary said, “If that’s what you’re into, baby.” He continued kissing her, moving down to the base of her neck when she started swinging her head a bit more violently than he would have liked. He was becoming dimly aware that she no longer seemed to be actively engaged in the project. He opened his eyes and looked at the shoulder he was kissing, and thought, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t mint green before.
Gary drew back from the woman, holding her at arm’s length to get a good look. Her flesh was green and wet. The centers of her eyes were white and her teeth were black, the opposite of how Gary usually liked it. Her cloud of blond hair had become slick, slimy, and matted.
I can make this work, he thought. He tried kissing her again, but his heart wasn’t really in it. It was over.
She croaked, “You will suffer a thousand torments before this night is through.”
Gary sighed. “Don’t. Just . . . don’t.” He let go of her and looked around the room. The walls were decrepit and covered with mold. The inviting tub full of hot, clear water was now filthy and full of green slime.
Zombie Gwen stood where he left her, hissing and sputtering, but she made no move to attack.
He turned and took two steps to get back to his clothes, which still sat in a heap where he’d left them on the floor. He became aware of zombie Gwen closing in on him very rapidly. He stopped, whipping around to defend himself. She stopped just short of him, snarling threateningly but not making any move to actually harm him.
“You will beg me for mercy,” she said. “Mercy you will not get.”
Gary mumbled, “Yeah, I wish.” Then, playing a hunch, he took one large step backward. She lurched forward exactly as far as he had, but no farther.
It’s just like the bridge, and the river rocks, he thought. Keep us moving, but don’t actually kill us.
Zombie Gwen slathered and snapped crazily at Gary, but she did not move any closer to him. He glared back at her while he slowly pulled his clothes back on.
When he was fully dressed, he walked back down the stairs with zombie Gwen following right behind, closely enough that he could hear her wet breathing and feel the wind from her repeated attempts to grab him but not close enough to actually make physical contact.
“Hey, guys,” he said. “We were right. It’s a trap.”
As his head dipped below the ceiling of the first floor, he saw that the seductive decor of the room had been replaced with splintered rotten wood and moldering filth. Tyler and Jimmy were standing ankle deep in a pit of muck that had been the conversation pit. Standing next to them were two identical copies of the zombified Gwen that pursued Gary. The only difference was that instead of a matted slick of sickly blond hair, they had wet mops of red and brown hair falling limply from their scalps. They hissed and cursed and slobbered, but they remained roughly arm’s length from Tyler and Jimmy and seemed rooted in place.
“Oh,” Gary said. “You know.”
“Yeah,” Tyler said. “We kinda figured it out for ourselves.”
“The first hint was when a piece of cantaloupe turned into maggots in my mouth,” Jimmy said. “A thing like that tends to get your attention.”
Phillip said, “At least you got some protein.” He was standing in front of the long-dormant fireplace, on a rotted, moldy rug, next to a black-haired deadite who seemed to want to tear out his jugular with her teeth but could not quite bring herself to do it.
Tyler said, “Man, you don’t have to act so happy about this.”
Phillip said, “No, I don’t have to, but I choose to. Really, guys, you didn’t think this was going to have a happy ending, did you? With you settling down with your Gwen-shaped pleasure replicants and having kids?”
Gary ambled down the stairs, followed by his evil Gwen. “No,” he said. “I didn’t picture that, but I was hoping for a happy ending.”
Tyler looked at the hellish effigy of Gwen nearest him. “You will beg me to let you die,” she said.
“You’re all talk,” Tyler said. After a moment’s thought, He continued, to the whole group, “Everything here is. I’m beginning to think that since Todd killed Jeff, the only real danger we’ve faced has been the danger we’ve put ourselves in. Walking on narrow ledges and playing with pointy weapons. I don’t think the wolves would even kill us if we let them. They’d probably just chew on us without breaking the skin.”
Gary said, “That still sounds irritating.”
“Yeah,” Tyler said, “but not deadly. That’s Todd’s game. He wants to keep us moving, but he also wants to keep us alive. I bet we could still spend the night in this house, no problem. We’d just have to trap the Gwens here in another room, hopefully one outside of hearing range.”
Phillip surveyed the room and said, “I don’t know. I mean, I think you’re right, but this doesn’t seem like a very pleasant place to spend the night.”
“Yeah,” Gary said. “It would have been before. I think things went sour when I tried to get my freak on.”
“Not the first time that’s happened,” Phillip said. “Perhaps the fact that you call it ‘getting your freak on’ is part of the problem.”
Tyler considered the red-haired zombie Gwen. “They’re not really people. They’re artificial characters, just like the miners and the wolves. I wonder, if we killed them, would two more pop up in their place, and would they be like these, or would the new ones revert to the way they were before?”
Jimmy said, “I have a better idea. They follow us, right? Why not hitch them up to the sledge? Then we could walk out in front, and they’d pull all the weight.”
Without warning, a rectangle of light appeared on the wall and quickly resolved itself into a program window, showing the feed from Todd’s webcam. The kitchen visible over his left shoulder was untidy. The living space to his right was no better. He looked tired, unshaven, and angry.
Todd said, “I figured you’d be scared when the ladies all putrefied. I honestly thought you had higher standards than this.”
Gary said, “Glad to disappoint you.”
Todd took a long sip from the straw of a large carbonated beverage, then said, “I hate you. All of you. I go to all this trouble to create a quest, and you jerks just can’t
wait to screw it up.”
Gary said, “Todd, we didn’t screw it up. You did. You made a death trap that won’t actually kill us. Who does that?”
“It won’t kill you yet, Gary,” Todd said. “It will kill you. Make no mistake. I killed Jeff, and I will kill you too, just not yet. Right now I’m just prolonging the suffering.”
“Well, that’s more reason for us to not cooperate,” Tyler said, folding his arms.
Todd looked down at the four of them and let out a long breath.
“Look,” he said. “You’re right. A lot of the stuff I’ve thrown at you so far has been designed to keep you moving without actually killing you. I saw that you were on to it on day one.”
“When I told you that I was on to you,” Tyler suggested.
Todd ignored him. “The wolves seemed to work okay, so I figured you’d forgotten, but the river rocks showed that you hadn’t. I’ve been calibrating the later challenges to be more dangerous. I just hadn’t gotten to the temptresses yet. Don’t worry, from here on out, the dangers you face will be real. Actually, I guess you should worry.”
“So you say,” Jimmy said. “But why shouldn’t we just assume that you’re just saying that to scare us, and that you’ll go right back to prolonging our agony?”
Todd leaned into the camera so that his face filled the entire window. “Because you idiots are getting on my nerves now, and I’m not really interested in prolonging my own agony. I plan to take a more active role in things from now on. I’m really looking forward to watching you die, one at a time, for my amusement. I’m getting impatient.”
“Well, fine,” Jimmy said. “We’ll just get a good night’s sleep in this house you’ve provided for us; then tomorrow we’ll hitch your sisters here up to our sledge and we can all get on with it.”
Todd smiled. “You’re welcome to spend the night. In fact, let me make it a little cozier for you.”
At the bottom of the window, the tops of Todd’s hands moved a bit. The familiar sound of a computer keyboard filtered up. Fire flared from the corners of the room and raced along the edge of the floor as if following a trail of gasoline. The flames consumed the corners of the floor, leaving an ever-decreasing area in which the wizards could stand. The walls of the building began to creak and groan. The ceiling bowed downward alarmingly.
Phillip joined Tyler, Gary, and Jimmy in the middle of the room. The Gwens receded into the inferno and were engulfed. Waves of unbearable heat lashed the wizards. Tyler pointed toward the door and shouted, “Typical!”
The others saw that there was a narrow, flame-free path leading to the front door, which was open, offering a clear view of the cold night air outside.
“Gosh, Todd, I get the feeling you might want us to go outside,” Tyler shouted at Todd, whose image was still leering at them from the wall.
Todd said, “You picked up on that, eh? Well, you’d better get to it. I can force you to move on with fire, or I could just fill the building with wolves. Ooh! Or, how’s this idea grab you? Fire wolves! I’ll have to work on that. In the meantime . . .”
As Todd’s voice trailed off, the heat intensified. The flames leapt higher into the air and started to work their way up the walls. The wizards could feel their skin crisping, and they instinctively ran for the door.
Because of where he’d been standing when the flames appeared, Phillip was the last one in line as they dashed for the exit. Even as his feet were fleeing the heat, some part of Phillip’s brain realized that he was also fleeing into the cold and that he didn’t have his fur cloak or even his three robes to protect him from the chill. He noticed again that there were coat hooks on the wall next to the door. There were still garments hanging from the hooks. Since the cabin had transformed, they were now dusty and covered with cobwebs and mildew. A few of them were on fire, but the others seemed serviceable. He didn’t have time to make a careful selection, so he snatched the two largest and least flaming objects as he fled through the door and out into the chill night air.
They stood a safe distance from the blazing cabin, panting and feeling grateful to be safe until Gary pointed toward the inferno and yelled, “The rock!” The heavy lump of dull gray dailuaine ore was where they’d left it, less than five feet from the porch, which meant that now it, and the very flammable wooden sledge that made it easier to transport, were less than five feet from the fire. As they watched, they could see smoke rising from the raw timbers of the sledge.
They ran back toward the fire. They pushed and heaved and attempted to smother the flames with curse words. Finally they got the sledge back to where they’d been, a safe distance from the fire, and panted from their exertion, grateful to be alive.
“Well,” Jimmy heaved between breaths, “at least we won’t have trouble keeping warm tonight.”
The flaming cabin extinguished as suddenly as if someone had flipped a switch, because that’s essentially what had happened.
Jimmy glanced at the sky and said, “Good one.”
Phillip stumbled over to the two garments he’d rescued from the fire. He’d thrown them on the ground when they dashed back to save the sledge. Now he had time to shake the dirt out of them and see exactly what he had.
The larger and warmer-looking of the two items turned out to be a fur coat, a slinky, full-length silver-and-gray-striped ladies’ fur that instantly tore at the shoulder seams when he put it on and would not close around his middle. On the plus side, the fur was thick, warm, and soft, with a high collar that would help keep his neck and ears from getting cold, and large cuffs that would help protect his hands. The others watched him test his range of motion, each gyration of his torso accompanied by a small tearing sound from the shoulder seams.
Tyler looked at the second item lying on the ground and asked, “What else did you get?”
Phillip lifted the garment and held it up in the moonlight. It was a tank top, made of shiny black plastic. It had surprising cutouts in obvious places.
Phillip said, “I don’t believe it would fit.”
Tyler said, “Thanks for not trying.”
16.
Fighting their way through the reconstituted soldier corps had really taken a toll. Brit, Gwen, Roy, and Martin put what they thought was a safe distance between themselves and the spot where eventually twice as many soldiers would appear, then unanimously agreed to rest for the night. They took turns keeping watch and ended up sleeping well into the next day.
They still did not make great time, now being overtired from too much sleep. They covered about half the distance back to the mine, camped for the night again, and finally returned to the Mines of Mortlach late on the next day.
The miners fell into an awed silence as they entered the mine, Gwen in the lead, carrying the ornate birdcage holding the frozen mechanical bird. At first, they worried that the miners would see that something was wrong with Oban, but those fears died when they reached Blandoch, the head of the mining guild. He stood along the back wall, next to an identical birdcage in which an identical mechanical bird was whistling and fluttering joyfully.
Blandoch looked like a child on Christmas morning as he took the second cage from Gwen. He peered at the frozen bird inside. The other bird, in the cage that sat on the plinth, chirped happily, and Blandoch, never removing his eyes from the frozen canary, giggled with delight.
Blandoch placed the cage in his hands on the plinth, knocking the other birdcage on the ground in the process as if he did not see it. When the new cage was sitting on the plinth for which it was clearly designed, the Oban in the cage that had just clattered to the floor flew a neat loop-the-loop in its cage and landed back on his perch, which was impressive, as the cage was on its side and the perch was perpendicular to the ground.
The miners cheered. Blandoch stared delightedly at the frozen bird while the nonfrozen copy’s tweets and chirps rose from the floor.
Bl
andoch turned to Gwen and the others and said, “You’ve lived up to your part of the bargain. You’ve returned our beloved friend Oban to his rightful home.” Blandoch faced his fellow miners, spreading his arms wide and raising his voice. “And now that he is back, we miners can mine again!”
The miners cheered.
Blandoch turned back and in a quieter voice said, “Now it is time for us to fulfill our half of the bargain. You came looking for dailuaine, did you not?”
Martin said, “Yeah, I guess.”
“And you will have it,” Blandoch said. He leaned down and picked up his golden pickaxe, which was partially covered by Oban’s cage. Lifting the axe sent the cage and its twittering occupant rolling across the floor. He grabbed a lantern that was hanging from a spike on the wall.
“Now that Oban is back,” he said, “I can go mine it for you.”
Blandoch walked toward the mine entrance at the rear of the chamber.
Roy said, “You forgot your bird.”
Blandoch did not seem to hear him.
Roy continued. “Miners need canaries to tell them when there’s too much CO2.”
“Yeah,” Brit agreed.
“Then why isn’t he taking the bird with him?”
Brit said, “Maybe because it’s not a real bird.”
“Or a real mine,” Gwen added.
“Or a real miner,” Martin said.
Blandoch got to the mine entrance, paused, then took a single step into the shaft. He looked at the ceiling and walls of the mine, then focused on a seemingly empty patch of ground.
Blandoch put down the lantern and swung the pickaxe downward. It stopped abruptly and rung as if it had struck something solid, although it had stopped in midair. He put down the pick, then mimed as if he were lifting something heavy and round with both hands. He carried the invisible sphere back and presented it to Gwen, saying, “Gentlemen, you have done us a great service this day, and it is our honor to present you with this dailuaine.”
