Dungeon Crawler Carl Christmas Special 2020! (Patreon)

"The Ballad of Gravy Boat." 

Note: You do not need to be caught up to understand what's going on in this story, but I recommend not reading until after you've read book two. That's through chapter 73. Most of you guys are well past that point.  

“We all want happy endings,” Sadir said to the creature in the cage. It looked back at him sullenly. He knew the animal couldn’t understand him. “But sometimes, my little friend, we don’t get what we want. Sometimes our mutual desires are incompatible with one another. For example, I wish to be warm and dry right now. You want freedom. I fear neither of us are getting what we want this evening.”

Freezing rain pelted down on them. It was just past ab-solar, what the locals called “midnight.” Heavy clouds covered the sky, making it especially dark out here. He couldn’t even see the lights of the thousands of ships and probes in low atmosphere. For a moment, it felt like the three of them were the only living things on this world. Him, his partner, and their quarry.

He stuck a long, gray finger into the cage. The fuzzy monster hissed and scratched at him, lightning quick. The tiny, sharp claws caught on his flesh, tearing at his skin before he could pull away.

“Fuck. By his left tit, that hurt!”

The beast—a “cat”—issued a low, deep growl. Its ears were pinned to the back of its head.

Sadir pulled his finger to his mouth and sucked at it while Gennrik chuckled. Gooey, blue-tinged blood oozed out of the wound and into his mouth. He pulled up his self-diagnostics to see if he needed an antibiotic, and then he cursed again after he remembered his implants were offline. The planet was off-limits to non-natives, and they had to shut their systems down to avoid detection.

“It’s not him,” Gennrik said after a moment. The tentacle-faced saccathian put the hand computer down and stowed it on his belt.

Sadir growled with frustration. This was the sixth cat they’d found in the area. He cursed the Syndicate rule that all non-crawler survivors have their implants scrambled. This would be so much easier if that weren’t the case. But then again, he thought. They wouldn’t need us if it were that simple. This is what we do.

Sadir pulled the hotsheet from his belt and looked at it and back to the cat.

“Are you certain?” he asked. “It looks like him.”

“Yes. The markings are similar, but not exact. This one contains a human microchip, and the database pegs its owner as a man who was in the initial collection. Plus, this is a female. Her name is Contessa Purrington. Let her go.”

“I’m going to shoot her,” Sadir said. “She attacked me. She drew blood.”

Contessa Purrington hissed louder and batted furiously at the electric walls of the bounty cube. Sadir took a step back.

“You are not. She scratched you because you stuck your hand where it shouldn’t be.”

Gennrik reached up and pressed a finger against the top of the cube. The device disappeared, turning into a metal square. The cat bolted, vanishing into the darkness.

Sadir pulled his bio-scan unit and wiped the rain off the screen. He grumbled, once again cursing the Syndicate’s stupid rules. He pulled the camo netting over his head and turned the scanner on, making sure to keep the device close to the ground so its presence was even further shielded from the scanners. He already had two strikes against him. If he was caught trespassing again, his warrant would be lowered to three figures. He’d be snatched right up for sure this time, especially with war brewing. Multiple wars brewing.

As a Null, he already had a hard enough time making a living. Whole systems refused entry to his kind, despite the practice being illegal. The Syndicate didn’t care. They turned their backs on the rights of the non-council member races. Especially the null. They only cared about corporations, the rich and royal families, and the gilded homeworlds of the free citizens.

So when the season’s Walk-On List was released, he marched himself right to the closest port, found a bounty crew who hired null, and he signed right on. This was the sort of crew where his two strikes was an asset, not a hindrance.

The Syndicate knew about the Walk-On List. Of course they knew. There was even a holo drama about it a few seasons back. Rights organizations crowed about it. They wrote bills in subcommittees demanding the practice be officially condemned. Nothing ever happened. Syndicate security still patrolled the planets. They still hunted down and captured, and sometimes killed, trespassers.

But the corporations, who were the real culprits? There was no accountability. None.

Bastards, all of them, Sadir thought bitterly. Some of these worlds had guaranteed income just for being lucky enough to be born on the planet. And here he was, literally risking his life and freedom to make a living.

Risking his life to track down a godsdamned cat named Gravy Boat.

“There’s only one other cat on the scan, but it’s in the camp,” Sadir said.

“Tits,” Gennrik replied. He thought for a moment. “Switch the scan to human. How many are there?”

“Too many,” Sadir said a moment later. “There are 74 humans in the camp. Only six are juveniles. One of which is a sub-yearling.”

Gennrik let out an annoyed trumpet noise. “Fuck it. Let’s go for it. If we find the thing, it’ll be the first A-tier target captured, and we’ll get the bonus.”

Sadir hesitated, but only for a moment. The Walk-on list was shorter than usual this year, meaning the competition was fierce. Bringing human attention to themselves would be a big risk, but if this was their target, the potential rewards were astronomical.

Sadir’s team wasn’t even bothering with the woman in the tropical zone, despite the unusually high value placed on her capture. It was a lost cause. The area had been flattened with a tsunami after Borant parked their executive headquarters not too far from there. The entire area had been washed clean. Nobody was alive.

Still, dozens of hunters who’d infiltrated the planet were in the tropical zone searching for the prize. An equal number were in the southern hemisphere seeking that little girl’s father. That prize was lower, but he was much more likely to be found. Nobody had found shit yet. They were all likely dead, Sadir knew. They had to be, or they would’ve been found by now. That happened. Sometimes a season’s Walk-on list would have 5,000 names, and only one or two would be found.

And this time it was even harder than usual. Normally they had access to the planet’s snapshot as captured during the exact moment of the collection. But Borant had pulled their underhanded orcshit by starting the crawl early. Sadir was sick of the extra protections given to these governments. Individuals couldn’t suddenly stave off a collection because they had some project brewing. How was it fair? And because Borant started early, throwing everything into disarray, the probes had last done a backup two days earlier, meaning all the records, including the location data and the native internet backup, was stale by the time everything went offline.

But they weren’t without hope. When a planetwide collection occurred, all citizens and sustainable fauna were placed into three categories: Collected, Crawlers, and Natives. The Collected were, of course, those unlucky enough to get caught up in the collapse of the societal infrastructure. In most cases, and especially in this one, this group comprised of the largest percentage of people. The Crawlers were those who chose to enter the game. The Natives were everybody else.

As the game progressed and certain crawlers rocketed to the forefront, the season’s producers oftentimes pulled from their library of collected citizens to add drama. Who could forget that Valtay season when Crawler Hoon piloted his mech to the elevator leading to the 12th floor, only to find his own children—repurposed as sentinel hunter killers—guarding the exit? All five of them, even the yearling. Hoon had chosen to eat his own gun. It was one of the few times the cruelty of the game had been too much, even for the free citizens. Sadir felt a shiver come over him, remembering that moment. They’d banned the use of collected children after that.

Fucking Valtay, Sadir thought. They were the cruelest of them all.

But what happened when the producers wanted to use a specific native, and that person couldn’t be found? If they weren’t collected, and they weren’t a crawler, that meant they’d survived the initial collapse and they chose not to enter the dungeon. Most of those people were dead. The attrition rate of natives oftentimes mirrored that of the crawl, though on a slower scale.

The producers wanted to find and utilize the missing Natives. They wanted to bring certain individuals into the dungeon. But there was a problem. The rules were clear. They were untouchable.

And then came the Walk-On list.

The practice of hiring trackers to sneak onto the planet and hunt down and kidnap desired survivors was not even remotely legal. It wasn’t something any corporation could justify in court. But they were never called out on it. Very few people outside a few fringe groups cared. If the viewers could justify the subjugation of an entire planet, an extra crime or two was hardly worth a second thought. The practice was as old as the crawl itself.

Finding someone should be easy. Even on the frontier planets with trash-tier sniffer zones, tracking individual natives was as easy as initiating a handshake with the planet’s AI controller. Earth had a perfectly fine controller system, better than most planets. Thanks to the Indigenous Species Protection Act, however, once the crawl started, all natives had their implants scrambled, despite being born with the damn things. They were “free.” Once the crawl was done, and this entire circus moved on to another system, the planet would be locked down for multiple generations. Sadir couldn’t remember exactly how long, but it was a while.

“This is a waste of time,” he muttered as they trudged toward the settlement. It was located on a flat area a kilometer from the last known location of the cat. He glanced up at his partner as thick, almost-frozen rain dripped off his camo netting. “We should be searching for that man in the southern hemisphere. Or that other creature. The goat.”

“If we don’t find the mark,” Gennrik replied, “we will move on. The captain is going to send us to the jungle on the planet’s other side. To find that dead crawler’s twin.” He held up a hand as the shuttle flashed by in the dark sky. They both relaxed. It was not Syndicate security.

Sadir grunted. “As long as the weather is more suitable.”

“I like the weather here,” Gennrik said. They crouched and ran along the cracked rock of a human street. This was a wide road, make of black rocks, rough to the touch. Occasionally, rectangle-shaped holes in the roadway appeared, indicating places where the human vehicles had been pulled down during the collapse.

Sadir gave Gennrik a withering look. It was supposedly the last weeks of winter in this hemisphere. This was not pleasant weather, no matter what world you came from. This metropolis, once called “Seattle,” supposedly had a dense population. He had trouble believing it. Even humans weren’t stupid enough to subject themselves to this climate when this planet’s equatorial region was a paradise.

The glow of multiple fires appeared in the distance. They’d positioned the camp against the side of what had once been a roadway, placing tents where the freezing winds off the salt-water sound couldn’t reach them as easily. Fires burned in controlled circles, despite the driving rain. There were over thirty tents. The bones of wood-built structures rose nearby. It appeared as if they’d just started rebuilding.

Remnants of the society they’d lost dotted the encampment. Sadir noted multiple gasoline-powered machines, mostly two and four-wheeled, open-top, single passenger vehicles. An electric light shone over one large tent, and music played from another. There was movement about. Despite the late hour, the camp was not asleep.

“Check your weapon,” Gennrik said.

Sadir examined his air-powered, flechette gun on his hip. He’d had it set to knock out a cat. He ticked up the dosage by three, which would render most humans unconscious in moments. He much preferred the reliability and simplicity of a regular stun pistol, but the signature of the weapon would alert every security probe in the solar system.

The two hunters lowered to the ground and pulled the camouflage netting over themselves. They settled in to observe. Sadir pulled out his scanner and zoomed in on the cat’s location. Now that they were closer, he could see the exact tent the cat was in. It was the third tent, pushed back against the side of the hill. He cycled through the scan, looking for other life forms. There were also two humans in the shelter. He set in, mapping out the location of all the life forms in the camp. He pulled a sheet of ready paper and started drawing out a diagram.

He had a thought, and he recalibrated the scanner. The Syndicate generally didn’t place security in native camps, but he did a sweep of all known syndicate security protocols. He really should’ve done this first. He caught something odd at the top of the hill overlooking the camp, but it disappeared a moment later. He zoomed in with his scope. There was nothing. Whatever it was, it wasn’t Syndicate security. They didn’t do subtle. He risked a deep scan of the area, and the anomaly was gone.

“Tell me something,” Gennrik said as Sadir worked. “Why do you do this? I heard you the other day, talking via tunnel to your mate. You lied and claimed you were working on an elemental barge. I heard what you said. How much you hate Borant. How much you hate the crawl. Yet here you are, risking your life to make the production more entertaining.”

Sadir bristled. Both at the invasion of privacy and the fact the sac had called him out on his own hypocrisy.

“I have multiple children,” Sadir said after a moment. The very first tent had four dogs inside of it, but it appeared they were very small. Not dangerous. Just loud. He wrote that down. “They live in the Null commune in the Filt system. The orcs have raised resident alien tax rates once again. If they want to stay, I need to earn a wage. I suppose I am just like the crawlers you see on the show. They are hurting others for their own survival.”

“But there have got to be less dangerous ways to make money,” Gennrik said. “My family does this because we like doing it. And to earn money for the Prism’s buy-in bid. You don’t need this risk, not if you dislike it. It’s a big galaxy. You can do anything.”

Sadir grunted. “That’s easy for a sac to say. The null have never had it easy. Even these humans knew what we looked like. They sold novelties with our likeness on them. That is how deep the hatred of my kind is rooted.”

Gennrik made a honking noise. “They knew your likeness because your people were illegally poking around the system before the crawl. Besides, in the inner system, all are free. It doesn’t matter what you are.”

Sadir didn’t even bother answering. They had a job to do. “We can pass behind the first two tents and breach along the fabric wall of the third here,” he said, pointing his long finger onto the sheet of ready paper, tracing their route. “The humans are asleep in the first two tents. One is awake in our target tent. We must be as quiet as possible as the dogs in the first tent might sense our presence. Luckily we have the loudness of the rain.”

Gennrik nodded his assent to the plan. They didn’t waste any more time. Both pulled their weapons free and rushed up the hill toward the camp, sticking to the pools of darkness.

Sadir thought of his children as they started their raid. He prayed they would grow and have a peaceful life, one where they’d never have to do something like this just to survive.

~

Brad couldn’t sleep. He looked over at the woman on the inflatable mattress, curled up with the large, orange cat. She’d cried herself to sleep again. The others were getting pretty annoyed with her. Everyone had to work. That was the rule. If you wanted to live in New Queen Anne, you had to work. Everyone was afraid and overwhelmed. But they still worked. That meant fishing, foraging, tilling, or building.

Bea did none of those.

Ostensibly she was a nurse, and she would “work” if someone needed healing. But that was a joke. They had four doctors already in their group. Actually, all of them were dentists. They’d been on the same flight as Bea and Brad, all coming back from the Bahamas. They’d all been stranded together at the Atlanta airport for hours because of the snowstorm, and they’d arrived home in Seattle ten hours late. All of them had been standing in the parking garage just before it happened, waiting for their Ubers to take them home. That crazy man had started setting cars on fire, causing them all to flee outside into the cold.

It’d happened so fast. The police had the man in handcuffs, and he’d been fighting them. He’d been screaming at the cops in a weird language. Brad was filming the whole thing on his phone. It was the most entertaining shit that’d happened to him since he’d talked a drunk Bea into posting that picture on her Instagram.

But then the world ended, leaving just him and Bea and the four dentists standing there surrounded by rubble. The cops and crazy homeless guy had gotten caught up by the edge of the parking garage. There’d been an entrance to the dungeon or whatever it was called pretty close nearby, but Bea had been screaming. He stayed with her.

He regretted it. He used to make so much fun of her cuck boyfriend. She walked all over the dude, and he didn’t do shit. Brad had been moderately impressed when the guy had grown some balls and finally dumped her after she posted the picture. But then Bea flipped the fuck out and demanded they leave the resort early. They’d been paid up for another four days, but she wouldn’t stop crying. Her bitch friends pretty much pushed the two of them out of the suite.

So they went home.

I should’ve stayed, he thought. If he was going to be stuck in an alien invasion apocalypse, it would’ve at least been in better weather.

But that wasn’t his real regret. Oh no.

I should’ve gone into that dungeon.

When he couldn’t sleep, which was never now, he thought of that giant, welcoming hole into the ground. He’d wanted to go in so bad. He didn’t know what was in there, but it had to be better than this. He hated that he missed his chance at glory.

I am a king, he thought. I am a king.

A guy that worked on the tarmac had found them. Tarik. He’d been driving an electric cart thing with a bed, and they’d all piled on, routing through people’s suitcases for warm clothing. They’d spent that first night huddled in a pile of clothes watching all the lights descending like falling stars onto the planet. And then… nothing. They were ignored by the invaders. Spacecraft came and went all day every day. They even saw them, sometimes, walking about in groups on the surface. There were different kinds and sizes.

But the aliens simply didn’t acknowledge the presence of the humans. They were dismissed as irrelevant. A thing to be avoided, like a pile of dogshit in the road.

After a week of camping at the remnants of the airport, hiding and afraid, the small group decided to seek out other people and supplies. They trekked their way to the city where they found the burgeoning community of New Queen Anne. Now, over a month later, they remained. The invaders continued to leave them alone. What Brad had assumed was going to be a temporary camp was shaping up to be their new permanent home. They were constructing wood buildings. Once the weather improved, they’d plant crops.

Bea whimpered in her sleep. The large cat was wrapped around her head. The thing had already shredded their first inflatable mattress. Brad didn’t care what Bea said, if the damn thing ruined anything else in the tent, he was out of here. And if she complained about it, she was gone, too. He was getting sick of just doing everything she wanted. It was embarrassing.

His eyes focused on the cat. It wasn’t even Bea’s cat, but some stray.

Bea had insisted on returning to her old apartment, trying to look for that fucking weird cat of hers that always howled and scratched at him. Never mind the thing had its own damn room in the apartment. Never mind it never left that cat tree by the window. It was dead along with everybody else in the world. Brad knew exactly what they were going to find, but he’d taken her anyway just to shut her up. It was only a few blocks from the encampment.

The apartment was a hole in the ground just like every other building in the area. Some of the items remained. The trees. Most of the light poles and signs. A few random vehicles. There was a scooter they could possibly use, but it had a parking enforcement boot on it.

The first thing they’d noticed was the decomposed and rancid human head just sitting there on the ground. Bea had vomited and started crying all over again.

They were about to leave, but then Brad noticed the cat sitting in the tree. No fucking way, he thought, but only for a moment. This was a different cat than the one Bea was looking for. The thing was skin and bones, and for a moment Brad thought it was literally frozen on the tree branch. But then it let out a loud, deep meow, and it jumped to the ground and started rubbing against their legs.

Bea, already crying, scooped the thing right up and started sobbing even louder. “Ferdinand! You asshole. You stupid little asshole!” She clutched onto the cat and sobbed and refused to let go.

“You know this cat?” Brad asked. “How?”

She didn’t answer right away. She just hummed to herself while she rocked back and forth. She’d been doing that a lot lately. It was fucking weird. She was cracking up. Finally, she said, “He’s my neighbor’s cat. His name is Gravy Boat, but he used to come to the window and try to get in when Princess was in heat.” She stuck her face dangerously close to the cat’s “You wanted to fuck my girl, didn’t you? You wanted to get in and ruin her.” The cat, who’d been purring, suddenly hissed and scratched her face. She didn’t even seem to notice. “I called him Ferdinand before I found out his real name. I would say, ‘Go away, Ferdinand,’ and he’d yowl and scratch at the window. Princess would hiss and spit at him. She knew he was no good.” Bea looked Brad straight in the eye. She had blood running down her face. “She was a lot smarter than me. I tried to get animal control to get him, but they could never find him.”

“Well he seems to be doing okay out here on his own. We better get back…”

The angry look from Bea shut that down right away.

So the thing came back with them. The cat was half feral, and it did not like being brushed or petted too much. But every night when the rations were distributed it was back in the tent sitting next to Bea while she dropped a little bit of her fish onto the floor for it to eat.

At night, she’d sit there in the dark and hug the cat until it yowled and scratched at her to let it go. She had cuts all up her arms and face from the monster. It’d eventually settle on the mattress next to her. She would stroke its yellow and orange fur and sing softly to the cat in that weird voice.

“Good boy, good boy, you’re a good boy, Ferdinand. You’re no Gravy Boat. Oh no, oh no. I’d take it all back and let you in. I’d do it all over again. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry, Ferdinand. I should have let you in.”

She’d sing some variant of that bizarre song until she fell asleep. Brad envied her ability to sleep. He sat now in their lone plastic chair, chewing on a scavenged candy bar. He fantasized about the mysterious dungeon. I am a king.

Riiiiip!

He stared at the knife, uncomprehending as it pierced through the tarp wall of the tent and started to cut downward.

“Hey!” he called. “Who’s there? That’s my goddamned tent!”

He jumped to his feet. He grabbed the crowbar he kept by the real tent flap. His heart started to thrash as the two figures appeared through the hole in the wall, both of them holding strange, nerf-like guns.

It was a tall, octopus-faced dude and a gray alien wearing a fur coat. This second one looked like one of those Roswell aliens with the head shaped like a guitar pick and the black, bug-like eyes.

The octopus pointed the weapon directly at Brad and was about to fire when its chest exploded, filling the tent with green gore. The tall, menacing alien slumped over. Gravy Bolt jumped from the bed, and Bea sat up, confused. Brad dropped the crowbar. Everyone stopped, including the gray alien. All eyes were on the octopus alien with the hole in its chest.

Bea started to scream. Gravy Boat bolted, running between the alien’s legs and disappearing out into the night. Two tents over, those four little dogs started barking their heads off. Outside, people started shouting.

The alien guy stopped, holding his hands up in the air in the now-confirmed-to-be-universal gesture of “I surrender.” It started babbling in that strange, alien language Brad and everybody else had been able to understand at first, before the knowledge just went away.

The alien started to turn to face the exit, but he cast one glance at Bea and stopped dead all over again. His gray skin flushed, suddenly turning a shade of purple. He dropped the alien weapon and slowly lowered his arms.

“B… B… Beatrice?” he asked in heavily accented speech. It sounded like a question.

Bea stopped screaming. They stared at each other, both of them with their mouths agape.

What the fuck was going on?

A new figure emerged. She stuck her head in the tent, looking about before stepping fully inside. It was a woman. A human. Sort of. She was Asian, but she looked odd. Anorexic with her eyes too close together. She wore a skintight, black bodysuit and held onto what looked like a pump-action shotgun, which she placed firmly against the alien dude’s back. He raised his hands back into the air.

Those dogs aren’t barking anymore, Brad thought. It’d gone completely silent out there. That wasn’t good.

The woman said something in the alien language, and the Roswell guy answered. Bea rushed over to Brad, who put an arm around her. He eyed the alien pistol that the dead octopus had dropped. I’m going to go for it. I am a king.

“Miss Beatrice,” the woman said. She still spoke in the alien language, but now a translation came out from a hidden speaker in her clothes. The words mixed in with the alien speak, making it a little hard to understand. “My name is Lexis. I apologize for the inconvenience, but Syndicate security is on its way. You are being hunted. I am here to take you to safety.”

Brad barely heard this. He was laser focused on the gun on the ground. I can do this. I’m going for it. I am the king.

I am the goddamned king.

~

“I got her,” Lexis said into the communicator. A floating image of her boss appeared over the screen. “Killed a sac pirate. Captured another. I suggest we make it look like he turned on his partner. Shot him right in the back. He’s a null, so they’ll buy it. Oh, I also had to shoot a human. Bea’s partner. He’s still alive. He tried to get to the pirate’s flechette. I’d call him brave, but he’s crying like a little girl. He’s going to bleed out in a few minutes if I don’t intervene.”

“What about the cat?” asked Odette.

“He’s knocked out with the rest of the settlement. The thing is fast. He almost got away. Security will arrive in three minutes. The first responders are on our payroll, but a supervisor will want to come down for this one. I’m guessing we have twenty minutes at most. Do you want me to bring the cat? Also, I can wipe the whole town if you want.”

Odette thought for a moment. “Any witnesses?”

“Just the ones I mentioned. The null, Beatrice, the human I shot, and the cat.”

“Okay. Here’s what we do. We’re not going to vaporize the town. Leave the null alive and plant the weapon like you suggested, but let the human expire. Put the cat in a bounty cube and leave him there. Shoot the null with the flechette gun, then drop it on the human. We’ll have our security guys clean the scene up so it looks like the whole fight was over the cat, and nothing else.”

“The null will talk,” Lexis said. “He’ll be facing multiple charges.”

“Don’t worry about that,” said Odette. “I’ll get a message to him after he’s arrested. We’ll buy out his warrant. That’ll guarantee his cooperation. I’ll have one of the security guys sneak the cat over to Borant. Let him collect the walk-on bounty. How’s Beatrice taking this?”

“I, uh, had to knock her out and then stick her in a cube. She’s a little freaked out about the whole thing. I don’t think she’s all there. She has scratches all over her face.”

Odette nodded. “If she wakes up, make sure you tell her that I can’t wait to meet her. And reassure her that we won’t be selling her to Borant. Tell her we have a much better use for her.”

Lexis laughed. Her scanner beeped, indicating a security shuttle was about to land. “So, I guess it worked out for everybody.” She looked down at the dead sac. She thought of the poor cat, and what they were going to do to him. She shuddered. “Well, almost everybody.”

Odette grunted. “We can’t all have happy endings. Now get to work.”

***

Merry Christmas everyone! This short story will not appear on Royal Road, though it *may* eventually appear as an epilogue to a book. I have not decided yet. All the information within will eventually come into play in the story down the road.

Don't worry about poor Gravy Boat/Ferdinand too much. His story is not yet done. He's a very smart cat, and he's a survivor. We'll resume our regularly scheduled chapters with the next update.

But while I have you, feel free to pick up a free copy of Carl's Doomsday Scenario for your kindle here.  Thanks again for sticking it through with me. I appreciate you all and hope you have a great holiday.