Chapter 29: A Stern Looting

With the fight over, the room looked worse and worse. Except for the altar, the furniture was gone. Bones, shredded clothing, dried stains and more piled in the central part, filth along the sides and corners. It smelled like rotting meat mixed with gasoline, ignorable while fighting but hitting with a vengeance now. These things had eaten not a few people and just never left, I suppose. Or perhaps we’d find more such rooms in the hotel, demonstrating a migration pattern.

“You’re sure you don’t need a pot?” Marci was at my side, the silver cloth of her armor glinting as if it was just cleaned, but whose eyes were worried, “You’re limping.”

Now that the adrenaline was wearing off, walking was painful. Those creatures had dug their nails into my flesh. The ones on the shoulder had bled a little, but stopped, but the ankles were still bleeding slightly. “I’m trying to ignore the pain. We don’t have a lot of pots left.”

“You should at least clean those wounds. Not a chance in hell that thing’s nails were clean. Look around this sewer of a room. And if it could inject poison or paralysis or whatever into you, bacteria and fungi are certainly in there, too.” Somehow, strangely, her armor remained clean, metal cloth cascading silver ripples as she moved. “River, they look sore.” Reaching up, she tapped my shoulders.

“Ah!” I flinched, they were tender. Looking around, we were in the dirtiest, most disgusting room we’d seen in this hotel. Maybe in my life. “Yeah, you might be right.”

Marci opened her little elven hands, “The thing is, I have a theory.”

“A theory?”

“If you drink a pot, it heals you as fully as it can. If your wounds are small enough, you’ll be fully healed. Concurrently, you won’t be infected.”

“You think it deals with infection, too?”

She tapped her temple, “It has to. If it didn’t, we’d all be dying from infection, a few days after appearing fully healed. From sepsis. Or at least we’d be running fevers.”

“Huh. And if I treat these myself?”

“Then you clean them as best you can. But you’ve definitely got some kind of bacteria in your wounds. You’d be safer drinking a potion.”

“We don’t have a lot left.”

Smile on her face, eyes wide, he waved her arms around, “Well, that brings me to the second part of my theory.”

“Second part?”

“Yeah. I want you,” Marci tapped against my chest, “to drink half that pot. That’ll tell us how the potions work.”

“If I drink half, and that heals my minor wounds, then we know the liquid in these vials aren’t all or nothing. Is that what you’re testing?”

“Got it in one!” She gave me a quick wink.

“But, Marci, if it is all or nothing, we’ll be wasting this potion. Two if I really need one to, uh, disinfect these scratches.”

She pushed up my leather sleeves, revealing five dark red bumps where the thing had dug its nails into my shoulders, “They’re a little deeper than scratches.”

“I’m worried about what happens if one of us gets hurt worse. If we run out.”

“You said if we ran low on potions, we’d leave. Drink the pot. If we’re low, we leave. Half, I mean, half the pot. Besides, if my guess is right, we’ll be saving the other half.”

“Marci, sometimes I think you’re the boss of me.”

“Oh, I am. I am. Here,” she passed me one of her vials.

I took it, stared at the little glass bottle, looking so much like something that would pour soy sauce in an elegant restaurant, sincerely worried that I was wasting it, but my ankles were screaming at me and getting worse. Sighed, sipped the sweet liquid until half remained. Stuck the cork back in.

“I can’t believe you sighed.”

“I sighed. I did.” I pointed my finger at her, “That’s on you.”

Crossing her arms, Marci narrowed her eyes at me. “I didn’t know you were a sigher.”

“I am. A dirty, good for nothing sigher.”

Breathing in deeply, Marci rolled her eyes, “Vile, just vile,” then took another look at my arms, giving me a full and warm smile. “Hey, they’re going away! It works! How do you feel?”

“Unreal. Nice hypothesis there, Marci, you just saved us half a pot.”

“And future half pots.”

I nodded, “And future half pots. Alright, what do we do next? Fred and Dylan are still down. I’d guess more zombies will come down – or up, too – the main staircase and make their way here. We can’t stay in this room.” Looking at the filth all over the place, I said, “We definitely do not want to stay in this room.”

Bentley appeared by my side, “Loot.”

“What?”

He waved his arm around the room, the loose sleeve of his robe bouncing up and down, “This is a lair. There’s loot. That’s how these games work. Like downstairs, when you found the elf’s body, and got your sword and armor.”

“You seriously want to dig through this . . . morass?” Looking at the sludge, I couldn’t imagine rifling through it without gloves and a shovel. And a face mask, or perhaps a full on hazmat suit.

“I’ll check behind the altar first,” he turned away to walk off.

“Wait,” I took him by the arm, “how’s Dylan?”

Bent brushed his hand through his thick black hair, “He’s sitting up. Wanted some time alone.”

I looked over. Dylan had his knees up and was staring off into nowhere. Introspecting, maybe. He’d come close to death, after all. Only Fred had come closer. I tried not to think about Takao.

“Alright, go check behind the altar. I’ll be with you in just a moment.” Taking a look at Fred, his hands were clenching, unclenching, and he was grimacing. Avery rested him on her lap, was stroking his chest.

“Hey,” I said to Marci in a low voice, “don’t you think it’s strange that Bent left Dylan alone?”

Eyes widened, eyebrows raised, she nodded. “Yup. I’ll go, ah, join Bent in looking for loot. You want to maybe check on Dylan?”

“Yeah. And then we need to do a potion count. Go see if you can find anything of value. Maybe he’s right about this place.”

Marci tilted her head a bit, “Lair, it’s a lair.”

“I’m seriously going to sigh again.”

She wagged a finger at me, “No, you don’t! Off you go! Off I go!” She headed after Bent in a brisk pace, despite that it was only a few meters.

After reaching our fighter, I squatted down beside him, “Hey, you doing ok?”

His arms resting on his knees, hands tense, he didn’t look at me. “Yeah. That was not fun. I couldn’t do anything. Couldn’t even move. And they were eating Fred? Good Christ! If you guys hadn’t killed them, we’d all have been eaten alive.”

I patted his back. “Yeah. But you weren’t. You’re still alive. Because we fought as a group.”

“You guys did. Fred and I . . . I saw him fall. So I stupidly tried to rescue him, and they took me down just as quickly. It’s against everything they taught us at military academy. Be safe first, but I didn’t even hesitate.”

“You mean you didn’t hesitate to save a friend. You did good, Dylan, and we didn’t lose Fred. If you hadn’t run at them, who knows what condition he’d be in.” While looking across the room in the same direction, I listened to the hallway, and was happy to hear nothing. “Marci thinks the paralysis hits you guys harder.”

“Us guys?”

I felt foolish saying this, but I said it anyways, “Warrior-types. Fighting based builds. I, uh, also got paralyzed.”

He looked at me now but said nothing.

So, I continued. “Yeah. It’s not fun. It’s just that, somehow, I recovered faster than you two. I think these things targeted you because of this, because you’re warriors.”

“Oh.”

I decided to switch topics, take his mind off the ordeal. “Has the pain passed?”

“A few moments ago.”

“Here, drink this.” I passed him the half potion. “It’ll make sure that you’re not infected. And heal the scratches, small bites.”

He looked at it. “Is this enough?”

“Yeah. We just tested it. A half bottle heals smaller wounds just fine.”

“Down it goes, then.” He tossed it back. “God, I hope we don’t run into any more of those.”

“Me too. Can you stand? We should really move away from the open doorway. Just in case. And Bent and Marci are searching this place. This, uh, lair.”

“This place? For what, dead rats?”

“Uh, loot. Yup, loot. But probably dead rats is all they’ll find.”

***

Fred was sitting up by the time we got there, rubbing his legs. “Man, I do not want to think about them biting pieces of me off again!”

“It looked awful.”

“I say we go back to the bar on level two and get right drunk.”

I said, “That’s going to be a problem. The stairwell we entered from is full of zombies. The elevator is blocked at level 8. I think the only way to go is up. Besides, we’ve destroyed two of the altars. Whoever set them up must be pretty angry with us. I think if we relax, they’re going to send everything they’ve got at us.”

“I can handle more zombies. Just not,” Fred looked at the bodies of the creatures, “more of those things.” He stood up, walked over to the creature that bit chunks out of him and kicked it hard, saying, “You’re dead! And I’m still here!” He gave it the boot a couple more times.

“Hey!” Marci stood up from behind the former altar’s base, which was high enough that only her chest and head were visible, “Ave, check this out!” She held up a dirty stick with a skull on one side.

“What is it?” Avery got up, moved over to Marci and took it from her, “Oh! Oh!” She bent down out of sight. “Oh my god!”

I looked at Marci and mouthed, “What is it?”

She just smiled in return.

Bentley popped up near Marci, “Hey, Dylan, there’s a body here wearing a suit of armor. I think it must be a fighter. Come help me get it off the body.”

“A body?”

“Yeah. But it looks like better armor than you have right now. It’s full plate! Like, all steel. You can get out of that cheap and smelly leather garbage.”

Dylan looked at me, I patted him again on the back, saying, “It really works for Marci. Uh, try to think of this as well-earned.”

The fighter nodded. “Well-earned indeed.” Pushing himself off the floor, he went over to the wrecked shrine, looking down, but I couldn’t see it from my angle.

Refocusing, I asked loudly enough for everyone to hear, “Find any more potions? We really need more potions. Guys, when you’re done, we’re taking count of how many we have left.”

No one said anything. Marci ducked down to help Ave with whatever she was doing, Bent and Dylan were hefting a corpse wearing darkened, dirty metallic armor to a debris-free spot on the floor, and Fred was making sure he kicked each and every one of those vicious, terrible monsters in the head at least three times each.

I sighed. No one heard me. Then decided and raised my voice so everyone would hear, “Guys! Take your stuff, let’s move to a different room. This one is disgusting.”