Death by Cliché (8 page)

Damico picked up the pouch and opened it. Inside, he found eleven tiny plastic laser guns, the kind that came with
Star Wars
action figures. And a white sock. Just one.

“Strange,” he said.

“Let’s blow this place,” Omar said.

They divvied up the treasure, which didn’t take nearly as long as it should have, and didn’t seem heavy once it was in their backpacks. Damico lifted his light load of heavy platinum and gold and trudged back the way they’d come.

Evidently Carl wasn’t clever enough to have the dungeon open back up due to some trigger, it just opened up when they had generally finished the adventure. So they climbed out onto a green veldt of grass running down from the dungeon to what appeared to be a village. The village had square fields and a cluster of houses like something out of Tudor England, with heavy beam frames and stucco walls.

Children played in the street, and a dog chased the sheep in an undeveloped field. Men trudged, but they didn’t toil. They just appeared… unmotivated. Not tired.

“Let’s find a tavern,” Gorthander said.

“You think a village this size has a real tavern?” Damico asked. Gorthander shot him a look, and he shrugged. “Never mind.”

Damico was outside at last.

He was out of the dungeon, but he was still in the world. In a world he didn’t want. In a time he didn’t understand. In a place that made no sense, where ambition and ability met, and where one man could make a difference.

Have Movie-Trailer Man read that, and it might sound pretty cool.

But this was much worse. Here he was, trapped in this place while his body ebbed away in the real world. He sat here under Carl’s yoke while that bastard chatted away, or however he acted while running a game… as if nothing had happened. Chatted while Damico died in his trunk.

This wasn’t supposed to happen. This wasn’t even possible. He was mad or in Hell or locked away in some deranged coma, maybe forever.

But if this was a coma, maybe this was his mind’s way of presenting the truth to him. Maybe he was delusional with a purpose. Maybe, just maybe, if he found a way out, that was the way out of the coma as well. Maybe.

It was the only hope he had.

They marched down into the village and along the main street. The peasants were all dirty but artfully so, the soot smudged here and there in ways that highlighted their appearance rather than muddying it. They all had a vacant, hollow expression in their eyes, like a cheerleader in physics class.

Gorthander walked straight to the tavern, a large building with glass windows that would cost more than this entire village made in a year. Damico examined the storefronts as he passed but couldn’t find a glassmaker’s shop.

They stepped inside, around cozy tables and across squeaky floorboards. They selected a table in the corner because that’s what one did when entering a bar during an adventure. Damico gestured for Lotianna to sit in the actual corner because that was proper manners (Encyclopedia Brown had taught him that, and nothing good could come from doubting Encyclopedia Brown). He sat with his back to the room. He could only assume he had a lot of ranks in Hear Noise.

The barmaid bounced over and smiled down at their table. She
did
resemble a cheerleader, although Damico couldn’t put his finger on exactly how. Was it the single pig tail? The anachronistic chewing gum? He somehow knew this poor woman was based on some real-world person at Carl’s high school and that she’d sleep with any person at this table,
especially
Lotianna, at the slightest pass. Damico felt bad about his earlier cheerleader thoughts. It was one thing to be insulting to a stereotype, it was another to be confronted by an actual person.

She wore a tan dress and a white apron, and her breast size was somewhere between outlandish and outright impossible. She must have worn an antigravity bra.

Her eyes were hollow like the windows of a condemned house. This wasn’t just the absence of a mind. There was no
soul
.

She was a Non-Player Character, a bit player in the world, run by the game master. He’d never seen such a clear indication.

“May I take your order?” she said in a voice that was seductive. That voice, coming from under those eyes was creepy. Creepy like a little boy that never smiles, uses perfect grammar, and calls his parents “Paul” and “Mary” when those aren’t their names.

“I’ll have an ale,” Damico said.

Gorthander and Omar ordered the same. Lotianna ordered a wine which they inexplicably kept in stock. Omar didn’t hit on her. Evidently role-playing a seduction with Carl was the creepiest thing of all.

She started to walk away, but just then, her eyes lit up. They came alive like the eyes at the end of the movie version of
The Pit and the Pendulum
. With horror.

Yet that horror didn’t touch the rest of her face. She flirted for several more moments, and no one else seemed to notice. Then she turned away, her eyes pleading, and went for drinks.

And why
hadn’t
anyone else noticed? This was Carl’s character, after all. This wouldn’t have happened if Carl didn’t want it to happen. Maybe he’d been the only one to make their Spot skill check.

Still, this seemed awfully subtle for Carl.

As they sat there, a new person approached their table—Damico
did
have ranks in Hear Noise, obviously. A man approached, dressed in brown leggings and a green Robin Hood tunic. He wore no hat but carried a sword and a strung bow, because in the world of role-playing, bows never lost their spring from being strung too long.

“May I sit with you?”

His face was open, friendly, and mildly attractive. He had salt and pepper hair. He was clean shaven in a way that usually required an entire industrial base, but Damico didn’t worry about shaving creams and manufactured razors; he was more interested in this new person who acted like a Player Character.

“By all means,” Damico said, wondering how Carl had tricked someone else to his table.

“My name is Jurkand,” the man said.

“Your dad lose a bet?” Damico asked.

“He lost a great many bets,” Jurkand said, “and I had the misfortune of looking like him when I was born.”

“Ah,” Damico said. “You want to join us on our next adventure?”

“Nothing like that,” Jurkand said. “I just wanted to meet the man who made the barmaid’s eyes light up like that.”

“Is this some kind of a sick joke?” Damico asked. The other people at the table looked confused.

“Not at all,” Jurkand said. Despite the invitation, he hadn’t sat down. “I think I’ll be on my way.”

He gave Damico a special wink, the kind of wink shared with a close friend, a brother, just a little to the left of one you’d give a man you were picking up at a bar. Then he walked away.

“Let’s get out of here,” Damico said.

“We haven’t had our drinks yet,” Omar whined.

“Yeah,” Gorthander said. “Why leave so soon? You know Carl’s giving us a job in
this
bar.”

“Because
that
,” Damico said, “was creepy.”

Chapter
Twelve

“If you can read this, you’re too close.”

—Bob Defendi

he tavern smelled like a urine-soaked gym sock after
it had passed through the digestive tract of a water buffalo. Damico hadn’t noticed it at first; it sort of snuck up on you like a squad of Navy SEALS, or worse, normal seals, the kind carrying clubs and out to prove Humans aren’t the only creatures on the planet that like to wear a coat once in a while.

Lotianna, on the other hand, smelled like lilacs.

The tavern rented bedrooms, conveniently enough. Omar had refused to leave and went to sleep first. Then Gorthander gave Damico and Lotianna a knowing glance and followed. For about five minutes Damico and Lotianna sat in silence, sipping their drinks.

And he felt comfortable. Normally silences like this between a man and a woman became awkward, but Damico felt nothing like that. He enjoyed sitting with her. He enjoyed the smell of her, the way she regularly tucked an errant hair behind one ear. The presence of her filled the table with a sweet, easy feeling, and he found himself wishing he was wounded again so he’d have to put his arm around her.

The patrons had mostly cleared out. Only a couple of drunks remained. The owner stood behind the bar, staring vacantly into space, and Barmaid Barbie flounced about, bending over again and again to pick up imaginary pieces of litter.

Damico rolled his eyes and took another drink.

“Not your type?” Lotianna asked.

He glanced at her, catching her sly expression, then over at Barmaid Barbie. At first, he could only see the horror in that poor woman’s eyes, then he shook it off and tried to make the movement into a shudder.

“That would be too much like masturbation.” And rape, but he didn’t say that.

Lotianna smiled and sipped her wine. He’d passed some kind of a test. He made it a strict rule never to allow women to play games (except for the fun kind). In fact, he always made certain he failed tests and made sure the woman knew it was on purpose, but Lotianna had caught him off guard with that one.

And this wasn’t time to be on his game, no pun intended.

“What’s your back story?” she asked after a time.

Damico almost rerouted his drink through his nose. After swallowing, he chuckled.

“I don’t know,” he said.

“Ah,” she said sagely. “You’re the one.” Her eyes held deeper meaning.

“Excuse me?” Damico asked, not sure if he’d heard correctly.

She appraised him, and he felt a delicious tension draw out in the silence. “Mysterious parentage. You’re the man with no past.”

Damico was about to tell her he had a past, but it had been snuffed out by the actions of a madman, but he didn’t. He
was
the man with mysterious parentage. Carl had obviously designed the NPC he now inhabited, either as a mockery or as a homage to Damico’s real self. But whatever backstory Carl had invented for Damico’s in-game character, Damico didn’t know it, and so he could only play coy. That made him the heart of the cliché, and he wondered if that had been Carl’s plan all along or if things spiraled out of control for all of them.

“You?” he asked.

“Oh, the usual sordid details,” she said. “Good home, mage school at ten…”

“Hogwarts?” he asked.

She smiled. “Of course.”

“And then you decided to become an adventurer?”

“Oh, you don’t find adventure,” she said. “Adventure finds you.” She had a wry smile. She was playing to the old, hackneyed lines on purpose.

“But how could adventure possibly find you?” he asked. “You don’t seem the type to hang out in a tavern.”

“I might surprise you.”

“I doubt it.” He said casually. “I have you figured out.”

“Oh, do you?”

“I can read you like a game manual.”

“And what do I say?”

“Handle with care.”

She laughed and groaned, then got back into character. “Then why aren’t you?”

“I don’t like being told what to do.” He found the bad movie dialogue delicious. Up until that last line, she might have been giving Carl a hard time, playing him for a laugh. But that last line… Damico couldn’t be charming enough for it to show with
Carl
as a conduit, could he?

She stared into his eyes, and he was just considering whether to transition into a more teasing mode when she rose to her feet. He met her gaze casually, a smile creeping across his lips.

“I’m going to bed,” she said.

“I have that effect on women.”

She leaned over to kiss him on the cheek, and he turned into it, meeting soft lips. It was amazing
how
soft. She lingered. When she pulled back, her eyes smiled down on him.

“Good night,” she said.

“I know it is.”

She squinted at him, as if trying to figure him out, then she walked away. He watched her leave, but didn’t follow.

When she was gone, he collapsed onto the table. He took a deep breath and groaned.

He stood and headed toward his own room, but he stopped to look at Barmaid Barbie. She stared at him, her smile vacuous, her head tilted to one side, her eyes searching in horror.