Brewing Bad Ch. 6-10

Alright, this last set of chapters is for my devoted readers and Brewing Bad patrons. 

Ch. 6 - Change of Plans

The four of them skulked from shadow to shadow as they made their way across the castle’s inner courtyard when they didn’t think anyone was looking. It was sometime before one, which was pretty much the dead of night.

The guards probably thought this was exactly the right time to slack off. That probably meant that they had a couple of hours, but as far as Lucas was concerned, they were all on borrowed time.

The paranoid part of his mind that had been sharpened by years of sketchy late-night deals and even more years of drug abuse was screaming that something terrible was going to happen if they didn’t get the hell out of there. For now, he ignored it and got them to the stables as fast as they could, hoping to find another guard in there who was slacking off.

The walls or the keep would have been a surer thing, of course, but the former was so damn exposed that someone was bound to see, and the latter - well, that really would be like doing a half gainer out of the frying pan and into the flames.

Sadly, they struck out in the stables. There were a dozen horses, a few mules, and some vitriolic earth, but no one they could kill and no armor they could steal. That was just as well. He was unlikely to do too well with such a heavy weapon and much preferred his knives. Plus, when he noticed their half-orc getting paler, he decided everyone needed a break.

Vitriolic Earth (unrefined): Poison 1, air aligned, strong catalyst (alters the alignment of the highest attribute in the current mixture.)

“Alright, change of plans,” Lucas said, looking around at his motley team. “I’m going to go up the stairs, disarm the first guard I can find with my charming personality, and then once I’ve done that, I want Mr. fancy pants here to come up behind him and take him down with one clean stab.”

“But I don’t have a weapon,” Lord Parin said, obviously looking for an excuse not to get his hands dirty. “Why not—”

“Because if you haven’t noticed, every guard in this place is human, Kar’gandin is a little short for a stormtrooper, and Hurag’gh needs a little break. So, you’re going to take his knife and stab the other guy right in the ear, okay? The spine would be okay too, but there’s less blood if—”

“I can fight!” Hurag’gh said, but there was no strength in his voice.

“I know you can, buddy, but those strength potions can take a lot out of you,” Lucas lied, “so you just chill out here, catch your breath, and save your breath for when the fighting starts, alright?”

Boosting potions did have harsh comedowns when they faded, but there was no way the big guy’s strength was falling yet. That meant that as tough as he was, the poison was chewing on the man pretty hard.

Lucas hadn’t meant to kill the guy. He’d thought the poison was low enough in a foul potion that the dude would be able to take it. He probably would have if the big lug had only taken one dose rather than two, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that now.

He wasn’t going to lose any sleep over one more dead stranger in his path, he decided halfheartedly as he walked out into the night. This time, he wasn’t skulking or sneaking. He was trying his hardest to look like a man on patrol. He even picked up a torch out of a bracket before he climbed the stairs, just to make absolutely sure that no one would miss him.

He couldn’t see the Viscount following him, but he could hear the man’s footsteps as he tried not to fall too far behind. Hopefully, that rich asshole doesn’t do anything stupid, Lucas thought to himself as he stepped off on the covered parapet that lined the top of the four-story wall and looked out over the city.

He doubted the man would, though. He’d had the balls to stand up to his Lord over his sister, so he had to be a stand-up guy on some level. Most of the rich dudes that Lucas knew up until this point would sell their own mother for another eight-ball, so, by that standard, Lord Parin was a real saint.

When Lucas finally saw someone ahead on the walk, he approached him casually like he didn’t have a care in the world and held the torch in the way to blind the man.

“Quiet night, huh?” Lucas said in a deeper voice, doing his best imitation of the guard that had tossed him down the stairs earlier.

“Every night’s a quiet night on castle duty, ”the other man said absently. “You want action; you get yourself on the city watch. Plenty of heads to smash, but that’s a young man’s game.”

The guard had more than a little gray in his beard, and his breath smelled of booze, which made him pretty much the perfect candidate for what came next as far as Lucas was concerned. As the man looked out over the city through one of the large loopholes. They were meant to shelter a man with a crossbow in a siege, but right now, they served to do a good job of framing the medieval city that was stretched out before them.

Lucas hadn’t been into nerd shit since he discovered girls and weed in junior high, but he’d lost plenty of afternoons getting high and watching movies with wizards, and elves duke it out while he got blazed out of his mind. Out of all the vistas he’d seen, though, this was hardly the nicest.

Up here, in the moonlight, it looked pretty enough, but he’d walked the muddy streets, and he knew that it was only height and distance that hid the smell. Being in a magical world was cool, and all until you remembered they hadn’t exactly invented indoor plumbing yet.

Still, while he listened to the older guard offering unasked advice, he realized that he was going to miss the place, however shitty it was. Down there on the streets of Lordanin, there were fifty thousand people trying to make their way in life and maybe scrape together a couple golden crowns in the process. He’d be sad to toss away all those opportunities when he skipped town.

Lucas nodded along, asking inane questions and pretending he gave a shit as he watched Lord fancy pants sneak ever closer with his knife. The man had gotten just behind him and was working up the courage to strike the killing blow when a roar split the night.

Everything changed in that moment. One second, they were about to assassinate this asshole and the next, everything was thrown into chaos.

The drunk guard whirled around, freezing both Lord Parin and his victim in shock for different reasons. The guard flinched and was about to beg for his life until he realized that his assailant lacked the nerve to commit murder while looking into the eyes of another man. Instead, he drew his sword, but Lucas was faster.

While the two of them were trying to figure out who was going to kill who and what the right and wrong of the situation was, Lucas was already drawing his sword. However, instead of plunging it into the assailant’s heart, he shoved it through the guard’s throat before pushing him over the wall, sword and all.

He no longer cared about the guard or getting a disguise. The half-orc had ruined all that by roaring into the night and waking up half the castle. Lucas looked down and saw a shape that was almost certainly Hurag’gh charging across the courtyard at the nearest guard. By the time he reached the man and began pummeling him with manic fury, he already had two arrows in him, but that didn’t seem to be slowing him down any.

“Mother fucker’s gone berserk,” he said to himself before turning to the noble, who was still standing there holding the knife like he was about to stab the guard that was now floating in the moat far below them. ”We gotta get the hell out of here.”

“But the gate… the guards…” Lord Parin sputtered as Lucas took away the man’s weapon before he hurt himself with it. “There’s no way we can sneak out now.”

“That ship has sailed,” Lucas agreed, unbuckling the straps of his armor as the bell in the gatehouse started to ring in alarm. “We’re going to have to jump and then swim for it now.”

“Jump?” the noble asked, paling at the very idea. “How could you possibly—”

He was cut off as a crossbow bolt buried itself in a wooden post between the two of them. “There’s more of them up there!” one of the guards yelled.

The whole castle was coming alive like an angry hornet’s nest. Torches were being lit, men were beginning to run here and there, and the battle in the courtyard between their berserk half-orc and literally anyone he could find to fight was only growing.

“Fuck arguing, we gotta go!” Lucas yelled as he pushed the noble to the same loophole he’d just thrown the guard out of a minute before. “You’re either flying or dying, man; the choice is yours!”

Lord Parin looked at him like he was crazy, but he still got up on the stone sill and prepared to jump. The man wasn’t fast enough, though, so Lucas helped him with another push and waited to make sure that the noble hit the water before he climbed up on the wall to follow.

Then, he gave the courtyard one last look and saw that Hurag’gh was still standing even though he was being swarmed by the guards and muttered, “Give ‘em hell, man,” before he jumped into the night.

Lucas had just enough time to feel how crazy this was and suppress his need to yell out, “Holy shit!” before he hit the water, stunning him briefly as he began to sink toward the bottom of the murky water. For a few seconds after that, he tried to swim, but he realized that was going to be pretty much impossible until he got this armor off.

He pulled out the dwarf’s fine stiletto as he sank to the silty bottom of the watery ditch, he started cutting away at the straps of his anchor. The skirt came off immediately, but the heavy ass coat tied in the back, which meant he was left to try to squirm out of it after he cut away at the collar enough to get his head out.

It was a race against time, and he was no Houdini. So, all he could do was fight back against his rising panic. For a moment, he thought for sure he was screwed and that he should just try walking out of there along the bottom as best he could.

Lucas knew that there was no way he was walking up that muddy slope, though. Instead, he struggled harder, and moment by moment, heartbeat by heartbeat, he eventually worked himself free of his leaden straight jacket.

You can do this, man, he thought, trying to psych himself up as he pushed off the ground and toward the surface.

Lucas didn’t really believe it, though. All he believed was that there was no way he was going back to that DMV excuse for heaven so fucking soon. All he wanted right now was to breathe one last deep breath, even though he knew that decision would be fatal. Even if it was water that filled his lungs, that would still be enough to stop the terrible burning that had started there.

He resisted that terrible urge and kicked hard toward the surface. The water cleared as he rose, but with each stroke, he weakened. He went from fighting for feet to fighting for inches. Finally, only a few feet beneath the surface, he ran out of strength and while the trail of bubbles from his mouth continued on toward the surface, Lucas began to slowly sink back into the darkness.

Ch. 7 - There’s Been a Mistake

Lucas wasn’t sure how he’d ended up in that chair, but he was surprised that his hand wasn’t handcuffed to the armrest. He was even more surprised to find out that he was uninjured; he didn’t even seem to be in a hospital. Instead, he was in a sort of waiting room surrounded by other people in chairs that he didn’t know.

He had no idea what it was he was waiting for exactly, though. As he looked around the room, he took in the drab gray paint and the dull taupe carpet in an instant. It was obvious that the arrangement had been designed by a committee to be as unremarkable and cost-conscious as possible. He could have been in any government  office of any city he’d even lived in.

Processing the other people he saw, that took longer. There were other people like him wearing normal clothes. Well, clothes I would normally wear, Lucas thought as he saw that he was still in the hazmat suit he’d been wearing before his little lab had gone up in flames.

He shook his head, wondering why he was still wearing this shit. If he’d been arrested, then they should have stripped him, and if he’d escaped, then he should have ditched it.

Neither of those mattered, compared to the fact that some of the other people in the room were wearing everything from actual armor to silk dresses and rags. That, more than anything, made him think this was a dream because the only other options were comic con and central casting.

As he watched, workers in white came and got people at almost random intervals, and by the time Lucas watched them lead off the stranger, he turned back around to find that, invariably, their empty seat had been filled by a new face. None of it made much sense, but that worked for him because his brain was still feeling awfully fuzzy.

Even though he shouldn’t have been, Lucas was still surprised when one of those women in white approached him and said, “Mr. Sharpe, your caseworker will see you now.”

“My who?” he said, taking her offered hand. “Miss - I don’t know who you are or where I am exactly, so I don’t know if I should be talking to you or this caseworker without an attorney, you know what I’m saying?” He didn’t want to be rude to the woman because she seemed so pretty and nice, but at the same time, he was more than a little skeptical of following anyone with no idea where he was.

“I can understand your confusion,” she said, casually helping him to his feet with far more strength than he would have expected from her pale, slender limbs. “That’s very common in your situation.”

When she didn’t keep going, he sighed, “But my caseworker will tell me all about that, right?”

“Exactly,” she said with a smile before turning and walking out of the room, obviously exacting him to follow. “Right this way.”

Lucas did so grudgingly. At first, he dragged his feet, trying to see if he was about to make a mistake or not, but as soon as they’d left the room and gotten into the hallway, he stopped that. He had a bigger concern now, losing track of her.

The hallways they walked through were labyrinthine and crowded, and the further they went, the worse that got. It felt like everyone in the world had come down for a killer Black Friday sale, but it was already sold out. So, he struggled to keep up with the only person in this whole place who seemed to know his name and, sometimes, his language.

“What the heck is this,” he said mostly to himself. “Someone has to get this under control!”

“We cannot control the flow, sadly,” his guide said, just loud enough that he could make her out over the din. “All we can do is endure, I’m afraid. Endure and adjudicate you quickly and efficiently.”

“Adjudicate?” Lucas balked, pausing for a moment before she came back and tanked his hand to drag him on. “I told you, we aren’t doing any of that shit without a lawyer. I know my rights.”

“You do,” she agreed, “and your caseworker will go over those with you, but—”

“But nothing,” he answered. He could feel himself being railroaded here, and he wasn’t having it. Before he could lay out a blistering case and make a complete ass out of himself that would probably get a bailiff called on him, though, they were there.

Even as he was opening his mouth again, she was opening the door, and with a smile on his face, she waved him inside. “Good luck, Lucas. I pray it will be a long time before we see you again.”

Then, the door was closed, and like magic, it was gone. It literally vanished into the walk like a magic trick. “Are you seeing this?” he asked the pleasant-looking man behind the desk. “Where did the damn door go.”

“Please have a seat, Mr. Sharpe,” the bureaucrat said. “The door has just been put away to make room for other doors in the hallway. Some of these appointments can take quite a long time, and there are always more people to see. Rest assured, it will reappear when you need it.”

“When we need it?” Lucas repeated, looking at the dude like he was crazy.

“Exactly,” the man said, gesturing to the seat opposite him at the desk. “I’m Darius, and I’ll be your—”

“Yeah, caseworker, I know,” Lucas said, choosing to remain standing. “Just what case are we working, anyway, because if this is about the bust, I want a lawyer, a coffee, and some privacy.”

“Why, Mr. Sharpe, we’re here to discuss your whole life, not just the circumstances with how it ended,” Darius told him.

“Oh, so you’re a social worker you want to… Wait, my, what? Ended?” For a moment, Lucas felt a wave of anxiety go through him, and he tried to wave it off. “I’m not—”

Even as he started to speak, fragments of memory went through his mind. The door being knocked down, the explosion, and the burning all assaulted him for an instant, and under that barrage of pain, he endured. For a moment, he felt faint, but then suddenly, as quickly as the barrage started, it stopped, and he felt whole once more.

It was only after he saw the way his supposed caseworker was looking at him that Lucas suspected that he’d in some way inflicted those memories on him. That’s crazy, though, he told himself, before momentarily adding, but not as crazy as fucking door disappearing.

“Yes, the way that your life ended was unfortunate,” the caseworker agreed, flipping the pages of the file that had appeared in front of him. “but what we need to talk about today isn’t so much how your life ended as the choices you made. While you were in the waiting room, I had the chance to look at your life, and honestly, it was right on track through your early twenties, but when you developed your addiction, it—”

“Don’t talk like you know anything about me,” Lucas said, suddenly defensive. “Because you don’t know shit about what happened.” At that moment, he felt the need to stand again and try to find some way out of this insane office, but before he could, he was suddenly battered with memories.

They were old ones. Things he hadn’t thought about in a long time. His mom’s OD, his time living with his grandmother when he started filching her pain meds, his first girlfriend and her crazy mood swings, the first time he stole a car, and his first night in Juvvie, along with his first real beat down all hit him one after another like a rising tide.

Individually, each one of those was an awful memory, but together, they were like the road to hell. His wasn’t paved with good intentions, though. Instead, his life was paved with individual moments of human weakness and the need to escape a bad situation that inevitably lead to a worse one. It was horrifying, and by the time he came up for air, there were tears in his eyes.

Lucas blinked them away and then fixed a gaze of pure anger at the man across the table. “Just what the hell do you think you’re doing poking around in my head, man!” he growled.

“I’m just trying to remind you how you ended up where you are now so we can properly discuss what you were supposed to do with your last life and figure out what you need to do with the next one,” Darius said with an apologetic smile.

“Man, the shit that comes out of your mouth… Do you even hear yourself? Do you hear how crazy you sound?” Lucas asked as he pointed at his own head in a mocking gesture. “I lived my life on my terms. I made my choices, and that’s fucking that, okay?”

“Indeed,” the caseworker nodded. “But did you know you were supposed to become a chemist? You weren’t even supposed to die until congestive heart failure in your seventies. You were going to have three kids and—”

“Enough, alright!” Lucas raged, standing as his caseworker tilted the folder forward so that Lucas could see the pictures of three hypothetical children he was apparently supposed to have. “You say one more screwed up thing like that, and I’ll—” He lifted the chair to smash it on the desk, but with a gesture, Darius made it stick back to the ground again, stopping him.

“I think you’ll find that you have no power here, Mr. Sharpe,” Darius said with a shake of his head. “The odds of you overpowering an angel in purgatory are quite slim. We need to focus on the positive here and find a solution that will get you back where you’re supposed to be.”

“Supposed to be, huh? Where’s that?” Lucas demanded, not bothering to hide his anger. “Where does a fuck-up like me fit in your supposed plan?”

He didn’t know who this dude was supposed to be and if he was really a divine servant or just some nutter, but he went a long way toward believing when the mine dimmed the lights and turned on some kind of holographic display with a wave of his hand.

A semi-transparent wall of light arose on the desk between the two of them. At first, it just seemed to be a sheet of pure white, but as it started to zoom in and his eyes adjusted, Lucas could see that it was actually a very complicated pattern with tiny multicolored threads weaving in and out.

“This is the skein of fate,” Darius announced, “For your world at least. Everyone has a place in it, and it’s important that all of you do your part for the warp and weft so that things align just so. It’s for the good of everyone, don’t you see?”

“Like, I have any idea what the hell it is I’m looking at,” Lucas scoffed while his mind spun, and he tried to get a handle on all of this.

“Do you see this here? This snarl?” his caseworker asked.

Lucas didn’t, but as the angel spoke, he made a gesture, and the entire image changed. Almost all the threads faded out, leaving them with a slender blue thread that presumably belonged to Lucas and a couple of hundred threads he interacted with. Now, he could definitely see the knot that Darius was talking about.

It was an ugly thing, and it pulled a number of other surrounding threads out of their course and even seemed to end a few of them that went into the knot but never came out again.

“What’s this one,” Lucas asked, reaching out to touch the red one that vanished into the snarl. He regretted it instantly.

Ch. 8 - Defying the Heavens

He only touched the other thread where it intersected his for a moment, but as a result, he spent what felt like weeks reliving that wonderfully terrible time with Maria. From that awful first date where they’d ended up back at her place despite all the odds and the manic courtship that had followed to the overdose that had taken her from him after only a month.

This was the first moment he’d had to gaze into her soft, dark eyes in almost a decade or see how infectious her crooked smile was, and it took his breath away. All he wanted to do was stop time at that perfect first moment and relive it with her forever, but instead, he was forced to take the express train straight to her grave.

Doing it for the second time somehow made everything worse. This time, he knew exactly what came next, but there was nothing he could do to stop it as each bad thing happened to them like a series of dominos.

To him, it never mattered that she was the one that had gotten him hooked, instead of the other way around, like everyone had thought when they blamed him for her death. Before Lucas had met her, he’d been a beer and weed guy, but that still hadn’t been enough to stop him from shooting up with her.

That night had ruined his whole life, but he still didn’t care. Hell, back then he hadn’t become a complete burnout yet. He’d still been in honors classes, even if he wasn’t doing any of the homework. As his teachers at the time liked to tell him, he was “squandering his potential.”

Now that he was caught in this awful memory, he could practically hear their recriminations pounding into his brain like verbal spikes.

“You need to take this more seriously!” Mr. Barker chastised.

“You can’t just expect to coast through life forever, Mr. Sharpe!” Ms. Morales said in that horribly disappointed tone that broke his heart.

It didn’t matter, though. In the grand scheme of things, if he had to choose between pulling himself up by his own bootstraps and following Maria all the way down, he was always going to choose her.

Even after she died, he couldn’t turn away. Every part of him screamed that he should, of course, but by then, he was locked in. First, he was just using, but then, after that, he turned that big, underutilized brain to its true undiscovered talent: making drugs. After that…

As suddenly as that horrible vision started. It stopped, and he was back in that office. The only difference was that his heart was broken all over again.

“Why the fuck did you make me do that,” Lucas said coldly, in a voice brimming with violence.

“I do not control your behavior, Lucas. No one but you does that,” Darius chastised him. “You chose to grasp the thread, and now you have a keener understanding of what we must do here. You and I have to explore these pivotal moments to—”

“I ain’t exploring shit with you,” Lucas swore. “You understand? Nada. Zip.”

“Well, we can’t properly cleanse your soul and get you ready for your next life until you understand everything,” the caseworker insisted.

“Cleansing me? You mean like brainwashing? Like the river Lethe and all that crap?” Lucas asked as he tried to figure out what this weirdo was getting at.

“Just so,” Darius agreed. “Though these days, it's more like a sauna. You simply relax for a few hours, let your cares melt away, and then we send you back to Earth to try again.”

“Nah, man, I ain’t doing that,” Lucas said. “I ain't letting you erase me until you get your perfect little bootlicker. So how about you just send me to heaven or hell or wherever you send the rejects, and we declare this mission accomplished?”

This time, he waved away the skein of fate they’d been studying, but he didn’t turn the lights on. Instead, a glowing scale sprang into existence, and even though it looked to be another glowing illusion when his caseworker set Lucas’s file on one side, it actually floated there in midair on one side of the balance.

“Lots of people feel that way, Mr. Sharpe,” Darius nodded. “Letting go of that sense of self can be very frightening, but no matter who you end up becoming in your next life, it will be fundamentally the same person you are now. That’s why we need to focus on your mistakes so we can—”

“I made mistakes because I was a fuck-up, okay?!” Lucas shouted, exasperated. “Case closed!”

“You aren’t a bad person, Lucas,” his caseworker said, trying and failing to offer a sympathetic expression to him. “You are much farther from hell than you are from heaven. Unfortunately, your performance leaves a good deal to be desired. We know you can do better.”

The scale seemed to agree with Darius’s assessment, for better or worse. It was just about balanced and was leaning very slightly toward the positive side.

He supposed that made sense. Even if he’d been a complete fuck-up, he’d mostly tried to help people. He hadn’t killed anyone or started shit with anyone that hadn’t started it first.

The only life he’d really ruined was his own. Well, his and many of the men and women he’d sold his crystal to on a regular basis. Even if the idea of losing himself in whatever cosmic kumbaya shit this guy was talking about didn’t repulse him, though, the last thing that Lucas was in the mood for was reopening every wound in his whole miserable life to find some sort of Catharsis.

They went back and forth about this for days, and argued about it until Lucas completely lost track of time. They argued about it until he tried to force open a door that wasn’t there, tear down the bookshelves in the room, and flip over the desk. He had no luck with any of that, though. He was trapped like a rat.

Since time seemed infinite, and he couldn’t do anything else, eventually, after hours of resistance, Lucas started to explain and even engage. This was just another ploy on his part, though.

No matter how sincerely he might seem to be dragging his feet as he slowly came around, he had no intentions of doing any such thing. His caseworker, or angel, or whatever it was that this dude was, seemed to know when Lucas lied, but not if Lucas merely said something that was only kind of true.

So he started saying things the man wanted to hear, but only in ways that were mostly true. “Yeah, you’re right, I shouldn’t have done that,” Lucas agreed when the man asked him about the time he’d double-crossed Jamie and stolen his stash. Lucas didn’t regret it, though. That dude was a prick, and his shit had been weak.

That didn’t matter, though. What mattered was that he really did believe he shouldn’t have done that. There were so many better things he could have done with his time than that, like spending the night with Diana.

Regardless, it didn’t matter. This wasn’t his first shrink. He’d said what the man wanted to hear to get probation in the past, and he’d do it again if that’s what it took. He’d rather be free than proud, and right now, in this damn box, it was the only possible solution.

It would be impossible to say how long that conversation lasted. The lights never changed. He never got tired or hungry. All they did was talk and review memories.

Honestly, Lucas would rather be back in prison. Being shivved would be less uncomfortable than watching the moment the 12-year-old version of him managed to call 911 when he found his mother cyanotic on the couch that day he got home from school.

Darius could force him to relive each of these terrible points over and over. This went on quite literally forever, but little by little, Lucas’s explosions of outrage and frustration began to subside in the face of his caseworker’s infinite patience.

It was somewhere in the second or third month of talking that he understood the angel was wearing him down. Part of him even wanted to try again, but the greater part of him was never going to let that happen.

Still, he let that hope blossom until it showed through. That was when the man finally relented and decided it was time to move on to the next stage of his death.

“That’s why we need to work through what led you here and try to find a life that can suit you,” Darius said with a smile that gave Lucas the creeps. “We only want what’s best for you and all mankind.”

After that, they talked vaguely about what he wanted to do with his life, and Lucas said that he wanted to go somewhere exotic and maybe work outside for once as the angel scribbled away, but all he really wanted was to be let out of this damn box.

Eventually, that happened too, and the angel turned his file into a key and handed it to him.

“What am I supposed to do with this,” Lucas asked.

“Go wherever it leads you,” Darius smiled, giving Lucas a firm, almost fatherly handshake to go with yet another uncanny smile. “The process is pretty simple. I’m sure a smart man like you can figure it out, Mr. Sharpe.”

Lucas smiled blankly, willing his growing hatred of the man to stay down a little longer. He let that slide off his face into the scowl that reflected what he was really feeling when he turned around and saw that the door had indeed returned. He left without another word and was in such a hurry that he didn’t even realize that the hallways were very different from the one he'd entered through until he was two steps into it.

“Screw it,” Lucas said, noticing the clean white tile, along with the fact that there were many fewer doors and people than there had been before. Even the people that were here were mostly wearing robes or towels instead of proper clothes. It was just about from a brainwashing summer camp.

He could feel the key tugging him in one direction, and for a while, he started walking that way. Even as he smelled the damp, though, and felt the warmth, he knew that was the room he didn’t want to be in. That was where they’d melt him down and cast him to be another cog in the machine instead of the defect that he’d become.

Fuck that, right? He thought to himself as kept a carefully neutral expression.

Instead, he kept his eyes out for a way out, and half a minute later, he decided that he had found the guy who was going to help him, whether he wanted to or not. He was walking toward Lucas, wearing nothing but a sauna towel and the same blissed-out expression that every other zombie in that outfit wore.

That was sad because the guy was young. He was like 20, which was even more tragic than Lucas, and judging from the marks on his face, he must have died from smallpox or something.

This wasn’t the first guy that he’d seen dressed like that, but he was easily the most confused, and most importantly, he seemed to be trying to unlock a door not so far ahead. So Lucas, being the helpful guy he was, ran up to help the man out.

“Hey man, let me get that for you…” he said, push the kid back.

“Thanks,” the stranger mumbled, genuinely grateful.

That made Lucas feel a little bad because what he was about to do was probably going to fuck the poor guy over. “Here, hold this for me,” Lucas told him, handing the other man his key.

As far as he was concerned, he was welcome to whatever fate Darius had decided was best for him. He didn’t want that wingless fuck anywhere near the rest of his life.

Lucas was able to get the key in the lock, but he wasn’t able to turn it. “Here, you try,” he said to the kid, figuring it could only be turned by the bearer.

He was right, of course, and the thing turned, along with the knob, to reveal… The void of space… For a moment, Lucas was startled, and it was only when he saw the kid walking forward toward it and the planet far below them that he said, “Hey, time out…” and pushed him away.

Before he could decide what to do exactly, he heard a familiar voice ringing from down the hall. “Mr. Sharpe, you should know that trying to interfere intentionally in the lives of others is strictly forbidden. That man’s door doesn’t even lead to your world!”

“Yeah, well… Eat me,” Lucas said giving Darius the finger, as he turned and took a flying leap through the door into the darkness. Better to die out there than endure whatever had happened to this dude in here.

Ch. 9 - No Going Back

If his mind hadn’t been so occupied by the feeling of panic as he fell from somewhere in orbit toward a world that didn’t look much like the globe he remembered from school, Lucas would have wondered why there were doors that led to nowhere in a strip mall version of purgatory.

Instead, he just arched his back and spread his arms and legs to stop his tumbling, the same way he’d learned when he used to go skydiving. This didn’t make any sense, but it didn’t have to make sense to be a wild ride.

Lucas didn’t know why he wasn’t suffocating in the vacuum of space or burning up in orbit or whatever it was he was supposed to be doing up here. Neither one was happening, though. Instead, he was listening to the sound of his hazmat suit ripple in the breeze and enjoying what might have been the single dumbest thing he’d ever done.

That was when he heard the wings flapping behind him. Lucas didn’t have to turn to know that Darius was going to be there flying after him, but he did anyway, just to see what the dude’s wings looked like.

What he saw made him laugh. Darius was definitely an angel, and the man’s wings were definitely impressive, but the whole effect was spoiled by the way the man’s now untucked shirt and his rumpled suit flapped in the breeze.

Lucas wanted to make a joke about the guy’s dry cleaning bill, but he knew he’d never be heard over the roar of the wind. He didn’t want to be caught, either. So, instead, he tucked his arms and legs back into a more aerodynamic profile, determined to race this guy to the ground.

The faster I hit, the less it’s going to hurt, he told himself as he noticed just how fast the world below him was starting to come up. It was getting real now.

Still, he didn’t flinch, even though the planet had gone from the size of a dinner plate to a sphere so large that he couldn’t take it all in without turning his head. He wasn’t concerned with the whole thing, though. He was just concerned with where it was he was going to land.

And that patch of earth was coming closer, in ever-increasing detail. He could make out two snow-capped mountain ranges, a couple of rivers, and a perfectly picturesque forest. As the scenery rushed up to meet him, Lucas even saw what he thought was a city of some type.

Before he could examine that too closely, though, Darius shouted, “Mr. Sharpe! It’s not too late for you to change your mind. You are making a serious mistake here! If you don’t come back with me right this instant, it’s going to go on your permanent record!”

“Hah!” Lucas laughed out loud. “That’s the threat? My permanent record? I haven’t cared about that shit since junior high!”

Still, even as he blew the guy off, he watched cagily from the corner of his watering eyes, waiting to see if the man would try to follow his words with action, and it turned out he did. After another few seconds of waiting for his charge to see reason, the angel made a grab for Lucas’s ankle, but he was ready for it.

Lucas pulled his leg forward far enough that it was just out of reach, and when the angel made to grab for it, he kicked hard into the man’s face. Lucas was under no illusions that he could actually hurt the bastard; he’d played enough video games to know that you probably needed a flaming sword or some shit to do that.

He also knew just enough about extreme sports to know just how wildly the two of them would diverge after that kind of motion. His kick sent Lucas tumbling in one direction and Darius in another, and though the angel had managed to grab him at the last minute, he’d only succeeded in stealing one of Lucas’s rubber boots he wore when he was cooking.

Lucas actually stabilized before the angel, but only because those big wings of his had to be untangled carefully. By the time Darius was ready to start flapping and give chase again, Lucas was already diving hard directly away from him as fast as the air resistance would allow.

At this point, it didn’t really matter where they landed. Even if he aimed for the lake, he could see the water would still be like concrete by the time he hit it. He was dead no matter what.

So he didn’t focus on that. He just focused on trying to stay ahead of this angel prick by picking up as much speed as possible and steering as far away from him as possible.

“This is your last chance!” Darius shouted. “After this, there will be no going back!”

He extended his hand to Lucas again, but Lucas flipped him the man the bird again and yelled, “That’s the whole point! I’m never going back there!”

Then, with a sad look in his eyes, the angel opened his wings wide and went straight up. In seconds, Lucas had to crane his neck to see the man. That really drove home just how fast Lucas was falling, though. The angel hadn’t even started going up yet. He’d just stopped going down.

Lucas, on the other hand, was going to see if he bounced or left a crater, given the speed he was moving. He swallowed hard as the fear started to flow through him then. It was one thing to be on the run from an angelic asshole, but it was quite another to be 20 seconds from your death and falling fast.

Still, he kept his shit together. He watched the trees grow and farm fields resolve. It was only when he had seconds to go that he realized the rural town he was falling toward had a tiny graveyard on the north side and adjusted his aim slightly.

Wouldn’t that be funny, he thought to himself. Bodies fall from the sky, but at least they have the decency to do it in the graveyard so no one has to clean it up.

He would have laughed at his own joke, but it was too late for laughter. The ground was dangerously close now, and three seconds later, he impacted it like a fly on a windshield.

After that, all was darkness, but it was only when he thought to himself, That was one hell of an exit, that he realized he wasn’t dead yet.

What in the hell… he cursed as he groped around and found himself in a less than well-built box of some kind. It only took a few seconds for a smart guy like him to work out that it was a coffin.

“Did someone’s corpse break my damn fall?” he asked, suddenly creeped out.

Fortunately, that did not seem to be the case. He felt all around and found nothing inside it but him. That raised other questions, though, like how he’d gotten in here without blowing a big ass hole in the top of the thing.

“Fuck this!” Lucas shouted, angrily punching at the roof of his prison as he raged. “You think this is hilarious, don’t you, Darius, but this is horse shit. I’m fine with being pavement pizza, but suffocating in a damn box? No way!”

Neither his struggles nor his words did anything, but when he found a loose board, he was able to wiggle it back and forth until it broke. Then it felt like half the earth above this grave caved in on him right there. Lucas realized that he’d gone from suffocating in a few hours to suffocating in a minute or two as he felt the moist earth fill the casket.

Still, even though that made him miserable and filthy, it reduced the weight on the boards that remained, and he was able to move a second one out of the way and force himself through the narrow gap of the two missing boards deep into the earth like some kind of groundhog.

For a moment, he wondered what would happen if he came to the surface and saw his shadow. Is that like six more weeks of winter or six more lives of bullshit, or what, he wondered to himself.

He’d never get an answer, though, because by the time he got to the surface, it was night, and the moon was hanging high in the sky. That made no sense, of course, because it had very clearly been daytime when he was falling, but before he could do too much more thinking about that, a scream shattered the night.

Lucas joined in, screaming in shock, as he looked for the source. He quickly found a man with a shovel sitting on the pile of dirt that was probably eventually meant for this hole, as white as a sheet. The guy had obviously been on break enjoying his jug of hootch, but when he ran off screaming into the night, he was kind enough to leave it behind.

“Zombiesss!” he slurred. “The dead have risen! Run furrr yur lives!”

“Yeah, man, I’ll drink to that,” Lucas said, reaching for the jug.

It was only then, as Lucas reached for the jug, that a little pop-up window appeared, and he stopped.

Rotgut (tainted): +1 Poison, - Int. Purifying agent. Remove 25% of the negative effects of a single reagent.

“What in the hell is this bullshit?” he said, examining the window and wondering why he should care about the alchemical properties of the rotgut he was about to drink.

“Booze is fuckin’ booze, alright?” he sighed, completely exasperated with how the day was going. It was only after he felt the burn that he wondered why he’d even hallucinate a window like that in the first place.

Ch. 10 - A Helping Hand

Lucas only remembered that he was drowning as a hand grabbed him and dragged him to the surface. Until that moment, he’d forgotten that what he’d seen was just his screwed-up life flashing before his eyes.

Now, though, he remembered. In rapid succession, it all came back to him: the castle, the breakout, the moat, and most urgently, the water in his lungs.

As Lucas was yanked up on shore, he spent the next twenty seconds coughing up so much fetid pond water that he was sure he’d have pneumonia by this time tomorrow. Still, it wasn’t something he could spend too much time worrying about, not when the gates were opening and what sounded like a whole herd of horses was thundering across the drawbridge.

“Stop them! They’re getting away,” someone shouted from the wall, but Lucas ignored them for now.

Instead, he grabbed Lord Perin’s arm and yanked him back down into the reeds by it. “Not yet,” Lucas hissed. “First, they ride, then we run.”

The King’s castle stood on a tall hill overlooking the rest of Lordanin, so the area around the moat was almost like a park sloping down to the rest of the city, but once they got to the streets, it wouldn’t be so hard for the two of them to lose themselves. At least, that was what he thought.

The easy run to that first row of shops and the alleys and stables beyond. At least, that was true until the guards caught sight of the pair and started firing their crossbows at them.

“Almost there!” Lucas yelled, pulling Lord Parin forward.

Everything was going fine until it wasn’t. As they ran across the final stretch of grass between them and the cobblestones, Lucas thought that the two of them were home-free. That was when he heard the nobleman cry out in pain and fall to his knees.

Lucas didn’t check to see where he was hit or how bad. That would just slow them down. Instead, he just helped the man up and hurried both of them across the main street and into the alley beyond it as quickly as he could.

Speed was the only thing that saved them. Even as they moved to safety, he heard another rain of bolts clatter and ricochet off the stone walls and tile roofs of the buildings they sheltered behind. That was when Lucas finally had a chance to see how bad his fellow convict was hit, and the result was not good.

Honestly, it was pretty terrible, and he winced as he examined just how bloodstained the man’s fine clothing already was. Getting wounded anywhere in this backward medieval world was pretty bad, but one of those guards had managed to shoot the Viscount right in his left kidney.

As far as he was concerned, that was pretty much a death sentence without some potions or magic. So, the last thing that Lucas was going to do was try to remove the bolt.

“How bad is it?” Lord Perin asked in a worried tone.

“Pretty bad, man, pretty bad,” Lucas said. “Like nothing, a healing potion wouldn’t fix, but I'm fresh out, and I don't got the herbs to do what we need back in my lab.”

“So what do we do?” The Viscount asked.

“Well, what I should do is cut bait and run while I can, but…” Lucas started, trying to find a good excuse to bail. He would have, too, except that the man who was dying had saved Lucas’s life not five minutes ago. That kind of put it all into perspective.

“Do you think your family would have something like that lying around?” he asked impulsively.

He didn’t know where exactly the Viscount laid his head before he’d been arrested, but he was fairly certain that the man was rich as hell. There was no reason that a noble family like that wouldn’t have some of the good shit lying around.

“I… yes, of course,” the noble answered, “but our estate is miles outside the east gate. We’ll never get there without a horse and—”

“Wait here,” Lucas said, running off down the alley, looking for a way to do what he needed to do next.

You’re going to get yourself killed if you aren’t careful, he chided himself, but that still wasn’t enough to stop him from climbing to the roof with the nearest trellis he found.

Part of him, truthfully, most of him, told Lucas that he should run while the getting was good. The one small bit of decency that he’d clung to all these years told him that he needed to do the right thing and save the man who had saved him.

For some reason, he couldn’t shut it out. Not after all the other people he’d screwed over so far tonight.

Lucas’s plan was a simple one: ambush one of the men on horseback, steal their horse, ride away to safety, and get Lord Perin the help he needed before he bled out. It was a fine plan if he ignored the fact he and horses hadn’t gotten along too well since he’d come to this world. Still, while he debated how else he could possibly help the Viscount before the dude was a deadman as, Lucas worked his way into position.

Fortunately, they didn’t have to wait long. Less than a minute after Lucas got where he needed to be, a pair of guards came along the street on horseback. He’d hoped that the sight of the very visible Viscount would lure the men straight to him, but instead, they both dismounted and secured their mounts at the mouth of the alley and unsheathed their swords before heading toward the two of them.

“Oh, unfucking believable,” Lucas whispered to himself as he realized his plan was now completely unworkable.

He’d wanted one guy he could jump down on and ambush, and now he had two assholes that decided to do things the smart way instead.

So, instead, he went with plan B: make it up as you go along. He got up and skulked to the two horses, leaving the nobleman at the mercy of the guards unless he did this really quick. Lucas scampered across the roof as quietly as he could, worried that the crossbows might light up again at any moment.

“What do we got here?” he heard one of the guards ask the other. “Looks like we got ourselves an escapee, Ralph. He don’t look too good, neither.”

Lucas couldn’t make out what Lord Perin said. Instead, he ignored the whole exchange. There was nothing he could do from here. He needed a better weapon than guilt or sympathy.

Once he reached the front of the shop he was on top of, he hung from the roof’s edge and then dropped the last couple of feet to the cobblestone street below as quietly as he could. That part was easy.

Up until now, he’d merely risked getting shot and breaking his neck. Now, he was going to have to get on one of these big bastards.

“Easy boy,” he whispered, approaching them with more than a little fear, and he undid the loose knots in their reins that tied them to the wall.

The horses didn’t move much, and though the nearest one looked at him with one of its eyes, it didn’t move away, at least as Lucas tried to get his foot in the stirrup. After that, it still took a couple of tries before he was in the saddle. Once he was finally on top of the horse, though, and he could look down the alley, he saw that they still hadn’t noticed him.

That was almost enough to make Lucas laugh out loud. After all the noise he’d just made, fumbling and squirming to steal one of their horses, they were still entirely fixated on the man who was bleeding out.

I just hope that means they haven’t killed the poor bastard, Lucas thought to himself as he cleared his voice and shouted. “Hey, assholes! Maybe pay less attention to him and more attention to me!”

Both men whirled at once after that, but anything they might have shouted at him was lost in the noise as he swatted the ass of the horse he wasn’t riding. The reaction was instantaneous. The other horse reared up, whinnying loudly before it took off in one direction, even as he dug his heels into the ribs of this one, sending him rocketing in the other direction.

After that, it was a struggle for Lucas to hang on for dear life as his mount galloped hard down the street. He was worse and riding than he’d ever been at driving, and it was all he could do not to pull hard on the reigns to make the thing slow down or stop.

He couldn’t. Right now, he needed the speed.

Even as the guards chased him, they fell behind, and he rode down the street at a bone-jarring pace. He took his first right and, then, as soon as he could, his first right again. It was a frantic two minutes as he barely managed to stay on the giant beast, but once he was close, he slowed down and looked for the alley entrance that would lead him back to the Viscount.

Fortunately, it only took Lucas another ten seconds to find the man, and he rode the horse as close to him as he dared without stepping on the poor guy. “Come on, man, get up; we’ve got to bounce,” Lucas hissed, trying not to be too loud. “I mean, like, right now, man.”

“I'm not sure I can ride,” the Viscount moaned, rising unsteadily to his feet by leaning on the nearest brick wall. “But I definitely can’t get on that thing. It’s sixteen hands tall!”

“Listen, man, I don’t care if the thing has eight god-damned hands like Vishnu,” Lucas said as he grabbed the noble’s arm and started hauling him up as hard as he could. “You stay, you die, and I’m not putting that shit on my conscience, alright?”

“I can’t… I— God’s!!!” Lord Parin cried out in pain repeatedly as the two of them wrestled him over the top of the saddle like he was nothing more than a bag of leaky potatoes.

By the time they got him up there, Lucas could already hear the guards yelling as they homed in on the noble's cries of pain and came for them again, but Lucas wasn’t about to be trapped like that. He kicked his mount into gear and ran down the first guy to start down the alley toward them. Then, once they were in the street, he made a hard left and headed toward the east gate.

Lord Parin’s screams started immediately, but Lucas couldn’t afford to slow down and be gentle with the man. Instead, he simply waited for the noble to pass out. He didn’t know if it was pain or blood loss that ultimately silenced the man, but as they galloped through the lonely streets at night, Lucas did the unthinkable and offered a prayer to any of the mysterious Gods of this world that might be listening to take pity on the man.

“I already got everyone else killed,” he sighed. “And this guy might be a prick, but at least he was sticking up for his sister. That’s gotta count for something, right?”

There was no sign or divine intervention, though. Instead, there was just him, the hoofbeats of his stolen horse, and the distant sounds of alarm because of everything he’d done tonight.