Death by Cliché (3 page)

“Bob Damico.”

A figure stepped into the light. He was at least six foot nine and wore chainmail on his arms and legs, a breastplate, and a helm with a T-slit like Boba Fett’s. In one hand, he held a large ax. On his back, he carried a beaten leather pack, a bow, a quiver of loose arrows, and a sword. A polished mace and a morningstar hung from his belt. Daggers lined a bandolier across his chest. A five-foot-tall tower shield hung from one arm, battered and splintering around the edges. He didn’t seem to notice the weight as he approached.

“What do you want?” he asked, holding up the ax to strike.

Damico threw up his hands. “I’m friendly. Don’t attack!”

The man’s expression fell with disappointment. He sulked off into the darkness. Damico called out after him, but he didn’t respond.

Strange.

Damico stared after the man for a while then took a step after him. A new person materialized into the light.

This one wore a pirate shirt and green tights. He carried a rapier on one hip and a mandolin over his shoulder. On his head perched a folded cap, like Errol Flynn.

“Um, hi,” Damico said.

“Prithee, good my lord! What brings thee to this dungeon of peril and dread?”

And suddenly he had it. LARPers.

Live Action Role-Playing, basically grown men playing dress up. Some would call them the pimple on the ass of the gaming world. Damico didn’t mind them much, except at conventions where they spread like a virus, annoyed like crotch rot, and generally brought the entire industry a bad name. They were drunken, obnoxious, and horny. Convention LARPers made Damico wish he could call in an airstrike on his own position.

“I don’t know why I’m here,” Damico said. The guy seemed nice enough, despite the getup. “I think I’m lost.”

“Where did you come from?”

“The hospital, I think.”

“Ah, a temple of healing, the cool soothing touch of the gentle menstruations of the clerical arts—”

“I think you mean ministrations.”

“What is thy injury, sirrah?”

Damico blinked a few times, and the little man in his head gave up completely and decided to kick back in the back row, knock down a little popcorn, and wait for the realization to hit.

“I was shot in the face,” Damico said.

“Ah,” the bard—he must have been a bard—said. “A grievous wound. Seems healed, though.”

The last didn’t sound like Elizabethan English. The guy couldn’t keep character.

“I got better?” Damico ventured.

It was a test, and the man burst out laughing, slapping his knee and stroking his Van Dyke. So, he
was
a gamer. Or a Renaissance nut. Someone who watched a lot of Monty Python, regardless.

“Good sirrah, of course you did! So, are you here for adventure?”

“I’m trying to find my way out,” Damico said.

“Alas, there is but one door out. It seals behind, and it was guarded by a deadly slime.”

Damico glanced back toward the charred spot down the hall. “I think someone torched the slime,” he said.

“That would be us, good my lord!” the bard said. “We are a group of prowess and might, of bitter blades and boastful songs, of—”

“Give me the Cliff Notes, Bardykins,” Damico said.

“We kick ass.”

“I see,” Damico said. “Why are you all lurking there in the dark?”

“It isn’t dark!” a voice said from the darkness.

“No, it isn’t.” Another voice.

“I have a torch right here.” Fourth voice. How many people were there?

“Where?”

“It’s written on my character sheet.”

“No it isn’t.”

“Well
I
have a lantern.”

“Where?”

“On my sheet.”

“Well you don’t have it out.”

“Yes I do!”

“No you
don’t
.”

“I distinctly said I pulled it out!”

A light flared now, not thirty feet down the passage. It came from a lantern grasped in the hand of the big lug of a fighter. Next to him stood a woman in a long navy dress with some sort of gold and red embroidered surcoat down the front and back. Her hair was long, straight, and brown, her eyes pretty and penetrating. Actually, she looked a lot like a JAG-era Zoe McClellan.

Next to her stood a… dwarf. Odd. Damico’s brain kind of skirted over the image because it wasn’t a “little person” dwarf. It was a Tolkien dwarf, complete with a long red beard and a helm and four axes and a hauberk of chain armor. Damico blinked at the creature.

“Let me introduce everyone,” the bard said, “I am lord Arithian the Noble of the house Damocles, a bard and rascal of the highest caliber.”

“How can you be a rascal of the highest—”

“My hulking friend here is Omar, half-elven, warrior of might and terrible power.”

“He doesn’t look at all half—”

“The Lady is Lotianna, a mage of wisdom and subtlety.”

“She clearly isn’t old enough to—”

“And the dwarf is Gorthander the Delving, mighty in ax, reverent in faith, wise in the ways of the underworld.”

“Hi,” Damico said.

“Back atcha,” said the dwarf.

Damico nodded, vaguely wondering if these LARPers were dangerous. They were obviously crazy—they were LARPers after all—but were they the harmless cat-lady kind of crazy or the don’t-look-in-the-trunk kind of crazy?

“I’m Bob Damico.”

“Damico,” the dwarf said. “Funny.”

“Why is that funny?” Damico asked.

“You are obviously an adventurer of the highest caliber,” the bard said. Again with the calibers. “Shall we travel this day together?”

“Uh, sure,” Damico said. “I really just want out.”

“Before we leave, we must beard the master of this dungeon in his lair,” the bard said.

“You don’t say.”

“Join us, and I will weave a tale of heroism and noble deeds.”

Damico stared at them a while. “Fine.”

“We backtracked this way to determine if the door was indeed closed,” Arithian said. “Perhaps we should continue along.”

“You just said it was definitely closed,” Damico said.

“It is,” Arithian said with a sideways glance at Gorthander, “but some of us need to be sure.”

“It’s a
stupid
adventure,” Gorthander said. “I want out.”

They all walked down past the charred deadly slime and past where Damico must have appeared. They marched until they came to a blank wall of unrelieved stone.

“Dammit!” the dwarf said.

“Aren’t you supposed to be able to check for moving walls and the like?” Arithian asked.

“Oh,” Gorthander said. “That’s right, I’m a dwarf.”

He didn’t say it sarcastically. He said it as if he’d genuinely forgotten.

“So, Mikey, we go back?”

Mikey must have been the dwarf’s real name, because after examining the wall he nodded and led them back down the hall. They trudged through the dead slime silhouette to the end. There they found a gnarled and swollen door. The thing should have taken all of them to open it, but Lotianna walked up by herself. With the touch of one gloved hand, the door opened for her.

Light shone through from the other side, casting a yellow, flickering glow across them all. One by one, the other four walked through. Damico stepped forward and froze.

He’d entered a room lit by flaming brassieres.

Chapter Three

“
Having a character from our world go to a fantasy world was old when C.S. Lewis did it.”

—Bob Defendi

here are many kinds of nightmares.

There’s the nightmare where your teeth fall out but you just can’t stop chewing, can’t stop poking and pulling at them. You know the consequences, but you just love the
pain
.

There’s the dream where you show up at work, and for some inexplicable reason, you take your clothes off. Then you have to dart back and forth in front of your coworkers naked, but you still don’t put your clothes back on. You
want
to be embarrassed.

There’s the dream where you’re in a fight, but no matter how hard you try to hit the other person, you keep pulling your punches. It’s as if you’re fighting underwater. You
make
yourself powerless.

Dreams are not something that happen to us. Nightmares do not make us victims. These are things we bring on ourselves, things we
know
we deserve. We say the harsh word that will end the friendship. We commit the careless transgression that will destroy the love affair and push that last button that will alienate the family member. We take the wrong turn that will lead us into the bad neighborhood. We place that one
last
charge on the credit card. We do it to
ourselves
.

Which is why that moment hits so hard. Why those final words hurt so badly. Why that closing door sounds so final.

Because no matter how much we deny it, we know it was our fault.

Damico stared at the flaming brassieres, and he finally accepted it. He knew where he was. He knew he’d gone mad. He knew this was a final fate, or Hell itself, or a living delirium.

He was
in
Carl’s game.

Forced to live in the worst game ever. Forced to stand here and live out every terrible moment, to know the truth.

This couldn’t possibly be real. He’d gone mad. He’d slipped the surly bonds of sanity and touched the face of clod.

And because it couldn’t be real, he knew he had done it to himself. This is the way the world ends; this is the way the world ends; this is the way the world ends. Not with a bang, but with a gibber.

Insane.

To Sartre, Hell was other people. To the game designer, Hell was
the game
.

He had to find his way out. He had to
claw
his way out. He had to scream and fight and
hack
his way out. If necessary, he had to
beg
his way out. He had to, no matter what it would take. He had to get out if it was the last thing he did.

Because he lay somewhere bleeding and alone at the mercy of the man who’d shot him. Carl had used a silencer, and that meant no one was coming. He’d have had time to hide the body in that Texas-sized trunk and wash the blood into the gutters. No one would know. No one would help. He had to get out.

And there was nothing funny about that.

Chapter Four

“Inventing a clever quote for each chapter is difficult. I’m not going to do it anymore.”

—Bob Defendi