James A. Hunter
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Wasteland Warlords Episode 2 - 8 Fun and Games
🕑 Added 2022-10-04 17:00:05 +0000 UTCClay took aim and led the tangled knot of cords that seemed to be the lead cobra. With his new level of dex, he probably could’ve made the shot, but it was hauling ass toward Alex. He let the M4 hang on its sling and ran for his wife, pulling his K-Bar.
A thick coil whipped around Clay’s legs, tangling him up and ripping his feet out from under him. He hit the dirt, slamming all the air out of his lungs. Through the pain and desperate struggle to breathe again, he hacked at the cord.
Alex easily dodged the oncoming cord and swung her Mossberg like a solo escrima stick. The wallop sent the cord cobra reeling sideways, but another one looped over her shoulders from behind, cinching her arms tight before jerking her off her feet, too.
The Doppler effect sound of a shout shot past Clay and Alex as Joe was dragged between them. A split-second later, Clay’s cord jerked. The grass and dirt tore at his hands and whipped his face as he was yanked backward. He stabbed the Kbar into the ground, trying to grab some purchase, but it scraped across the hardpacked desert dirt without penetrating. He was barely able to keep the knife from being ripped out of his hand.
Then suddenly he stopped moving. The cord went slack around his ankles, and before he could jump up, a pair of cords snaked under Clay, shoved him to his feet, and spun him around.
He was back at the milk can tent.
Joe stood next to him, looking bewildered. A second later, Alex was shoved to her feet by the cords on Joe’s opposite side.
“What the hell?” She sank into a wide, defensive stance, pulling free her kusarigama.
The cord cobras hissed at the weapon and slithered around, crissing and crossing over one another, but for some reason, they didn’t attack.
“Guys,” Joe said, his voice hushed with fear and awe. “I think they want us to play this game.”
“Oh sure,” Alex said. “And then they want us to get a slushy and a funnel cake and ride some rides.”
“Think about it. Why else would they have dragged us back here?”
“He does make an excellent point,” Bacon Bits said. Sometime during the snake-fight, the teacup pig had climbed up onto the wooden table in front of the milk bottle toss with Chonk. She pointed down at the painted sandwich board sitting outside the tent. “‘Must play,’” she read. “In my line of work, such things are often meant to be taken literally.”
Clay looked around the midway again, this time really taking things in. There were two other MUST PLAY signs sitting out, one in front of a shooting gallery lined with glittering green superhero capes, and the last in front of the Ring the Bell game surrounded by winnable pink inflatable hammers.
Blue pandas, green capes, pink hammers. Blue, pink, green, like the first three dots in the incorrect ellipsis. So where was the black and white prize? The closest thing he could find was the picture of an Oreo on the side of the deep-fried confections truck.
“Let me try something.” Clay slowly stuck his knife back in its sheath and raised his hands, showing the hissing cords that they were empty.
The hissing and agitated slithering calmed. They silently swayed and bobbed—all except the electrical cord snakes closest to Alex.
“Stow the kusarigama,” Clay said softly.
“Over my dead body.”
“Just try it, babe.”
“Yeah, babe,” Joe said, “have a little faith.”
Alex pointed the flail end of the chain at him. “You don’t ever call me that.”
“I double pinkie promise I won’t if you just put your ninja chopper away. Come on, short stack, ol’ Smilerfax would’ve wanted us to win a prize! Do it for him.”
“What he would’ve wanted was for us to die playing his rigged games,” she said.
“He never expected the Monster of the Midway, a.k.a one Joseph Jaeger, to step right up and win them all.” Joe swirled his finger to indicate the row of tents. “I know the trick to every one of these puppies.”
“Come on, Alex,” Clay coaxed, “you know if anybody really does know the tricks to these, it’s Joe.”
Alex sighed.
“Fine.” She stood up and shoved the chain sickle back in her belt. “But if we die, I’m going to kill you both.”
The second she took her hand off the weapon, the cords sank into neat coils with only their heads raised. It was almost like they wanted to see Joe back up his claims.
Joe picked up one of the baseballs and started tossing it to himself.
“Now, I’ve run a milk bottle throw or two in my life. It may look harmless, but the bottles are all insanely heavy. Not to mention, see how that bottom one is set up a little in front of the rest? As the CIC or ‘carnie in charge’ of the game, you’re supposed to arrange it that way so it absorbs most of the impact from balls thrown directly at the center.” He eyed the stack. “Three bottles on bottom, two in the middle, one on top. Three throws to knock ’em all down. You’d be tempted to start hucking at the center of the stack or take out the top half, then work on the bottom, but you’ll never get all six that way. What you need to do—”
He reared back and let the first ball fly. It slammed into the bottom right milk bottle.
The whole stack of cans collapsed. A giant blue panda dropped off the tent. Immediately, Chonk leapt onto its head, wrasslin’ the stuffed bear around like a coked-up pro wrestler.
Clay whistled. “Nice shot.”
“Okay, I’m impressed,” Alex admitted.
Joe stood there dumbfounded.
“That wasn’t supposed to happen,” he said, a frown creasing his brow. “You’re supposed to take out the bottom cans one at a time. That’s the trick.” He glanced down at his arm in a mixture of wonder and speculation.
Clay wasn’t entirely surprised. Although Joe wasn’t an Incant by any stretch yet, he was also something a little more than human thanks to the permanent stat potions they’d lifted off Gearhead. At 16, Joe’s Dexterity wasn’t anything to write home about, but his Strength Stat was sitting at 20 including the bonuses from his gear. A base stat of ten was considered standard for the average adult human, while twenty was gold-medal, Olympic-caliber athlete. Joe was probably putting a fair-amount of extra heat on that ball, whether he knew it or not.
“It must be more about figuring out the pattern,” Clay said, nodding at the other Must-Play games so they could see what he’d noticed. “Blue prize first, green prize second, pink third. Every game takes us a little closer to the funhouse.”
Joe shook his head. “But that’s not very hard.”
“Maybe the next game is.” Clay clapped his brother on the shoulder.
“Maybe.” Joe picked up the panda with Chonk still clinging to its head. “Let’s go, Chonk.”
Clay got why his brother was disappointed. He was feeling kind of let down himself. When they’d played video games as a kid, Clay had been the one who could never quite believe a puzzle or riddle was as simple as it looked. He’d always been sure there was something beyond the obvious solution, something more convoluted, more cunning. That was what Joe had expected, and not finding it had thrown him off.
Clay had been wrong a lot of times with those puzzle games, too. More often than not, the solution was as easy as ‘match the colored wire to the same-colored plug’ or ‘light up all the circuits in order’. There hadn’t been a trick, and that kind of sucked. But every now and then there had been an outlier of a game where all the pieces came together to form a more elaborate solution, something nobody could ever have seen coming and yet still made perfect sense if you took the time to think about it.
Alex put a hand on her hip and cocked her body at their serpentine captors. “Are we even allowed to go to the next game?”
But the herd of electrical snakes made no effort to stop them as they moved toward the shooting gallery. Instead, they slithered alongside, pacing them like overzealous referees.
The superhero capes fluttered in the breeze, the tent’s bare yellow bulb sending sickly green sparks glinting off the sequins. Beat-up pellet guns had been secured to the tabletop with steel cable. The targets were already in motion—weird misshapen little animals whirring across the gallery with a mechanical grinding noise.
“Go ahead, Clay,” Alex said, nudging him forward. “You’re the marksman of the family. This game was made for you.”
Clay looked at Joe. “What’s the catch? If there is one.”
“Oh, there’s always a catch. Carnies, don’t play fair. Ain’t no money to be made in fairness. Either the barrels are slightly bent or the sights are off,” Joe said. “They amount to the same thing—you can’t trust your gun.”
Clay nodded, then picked up the closest pellet gun and peered down the side of the barrel. It appeared to be straight, but the front sight was almost unnoticeably off-center. He pulled the butt to his shoulder and eyed the weird unknown creature targets. Blue on the middle rung, green on top, and pink on bottom.
Once again, no black with a white stripe. Either he was expecting too much from a random wasteland dungeon lord or they were in for a nasty surprise later on. He sincerely hoped it was the former.
Clay took a deep breath, eased it out, then repeated, this time stopping at a comfortable point in his exhale. Plink, plink, plink, he shot them down, blue, green, then pink.
He let the last of that breath out in a whoosh as a superhero cape fluttered to the ground. All around them, the cord cobras seemed to be bobbing in approval.
“This is suspiciously easy,” Joe said, snatching up the cape. “I don’t like it.”
He set the panda down long enough to fasten the glittering cape around Chonk’s neck.
“But you’ll keep the prize?” Alex said, cocking an eyebrow at him.
Joe glared at her. “It perfectly complements his hedge trimmer. What am I supposed to do, leave it?”
“Come on,” Clay said, looking down the midway to the last must-play game before the FUN HOUSE. “Let’s go ring the bell and get this over with.”
When they got to the strength game, Alex picked up the sledgehammer and looked at their resident carnival game expert. Even though she was the smallest of the three by a significant margin, strength was her strong suit. This game was made for her, just as much as the shooting arcade had been designed for Clay.
Joe heaved a sigh. “Hit it exactly in the middle.”
“Hard as I can?” she asked.
“I don’t even have the heart to say ‘that’s what he said.’” Joe waved a despondent hand at the game. “Looks are deceptive, short stack. They make you think its about strength, but really this is a game of precision. Just hit it on that dot at the center and the bell rings, whoop-ti-shit.”
She took a couple practice swings at the dot, then pulled back the oversized sledge and slammed it down. It struck a little off-center.
“Crap,” she muttered.
But the ringer shot up through the blue section of the high striker, through the green, and dinged the bell at the top of the pink section.
With a squeak, one of the inflatable pink hammers dropped at her feet.
“Okay, so we won all the must-plays,” she said, trading the huge sledge for the inflatable hammer and looking to Clay. “Now what?”
Clay turned to the looming demonic clown in front of Smilerfax’s FUN HOUSE. The sign didn’t suddenly reveal any hidden funereal messages, and for the moment, the metal facades of the massive structure showed only the happy circus scenes. No melting faces or magician’s assistants bleeding to death.
There were, however, three cut-outs shaped like a giant panda, a superhero cape, and an inflatable hammer next to the entrance. The answer to this riddle seemed obvious enough.
Hefting their prizes, they headed for the clown mouth.
A cord cobra slithered like greased lightning in front of them and wrapped itself across the opening just before they could walk through. One of its buddies hissed, then jabbed its plug-head at an outstretched clown hand coming off the side of the demonic mouth.
Must be THIS tall to ride!
The ‘THIS’ was marked with a reddish-brown line that had run in long dribbles down the sign.
Clay raised an eyebrow. The height requirement was barely five feet.
“They probably think Alex is too short,” Joe said.
She glared at him.
Joe shrugged. “Prove you’re not.”
She shoved the inflatable hammer at Clay, then stomped over to the clown’s hand. With her back against the metal, the top of her head was right on the line.
She threw up her arms. “Well?”
Joe cupped his chin and hemmed. “I’m going to need a second opinion on this one.”
“Seriously?”
“You’re just tall enough,” Clay said.
“Barely,” Joe said. “And yet my time-honed carnie instincts make me think you cheated somehow.”
She slapped his arm.
The electrical snakes didn’t let them through. The pointer jabbed its head at Clay and Joe, then at the height requirements.
“You’re kidding me,” Clay said.
“Look here, danger noodles.” Joe butted up to the clown hand to show them he was well over the requirement, and pointed at the line over his shoulder. “I’m at least a foot taller than—”
A click sounded, followed by a groan like a rusty door. A spring-loaded axe blade swung around the side of the giant hand.
Clay dove, tackling Joe to the ground. They landed in a heap of arms and legs as the axe blade thudded into the reddish-brown line where Joe’s neck had been a split-second before.
“I get it!” Bacon Bits squealed with glee. “Must be this tall to ride—and no taller! It is a joke!” Her whole tiny body wiggled from snout to tail. “Oh, I do like this Smilerfax!”
“Yeah, he’s a riot.” Clay helped Joe to his feet.
Now that Smilerfax’s axe-joke had been triggered, the cord cobras slithered aside.
Warily, Clay, Joe, and Alex crept through the demonic clown’s mouth. At the entrance, they stopped and stuffed their carnival prizes one at a time through the appropriately shaped cutouts.
The FUN HOUSE door sprung open, and a maniacal laugh rolled out of the blackness inside.
In a heartbeat, Clay had the M4 in his hands. Beside him, Alex swung her Mossberg toward the door. Bacon Bits ducked behind Alex, and Chonk bolted up Joe’s leg, chittering wildly.
“Easy, guys.” Joe swallowed, his Adam’s apple bobbing. “It’s an automatic thing, like those electronic chimes over store entrances.” In spite of his reassurances, he didn’t sound convinced himself. He scratched behind Chonk’s ears, not taking his gaze from the depths of shadow inside. “Most funhouses have them. Nothing out of the ordinary.”
“Powered by a fyeula rune,” Clay guessed.
“Sure.” Joe hefted Bertha. “That or evil scary ghost magic from the souls of the damned who dared to enter.” He shrugged. “That’s what I always figured was powering the one at the county fair.”
With a jerk on the starter cord, he brought Bertha to life, then stepped through the FUN HOUSE entrance. The darkness swallowed him whole.
“Once we’re done with this place, we need to have a serious talk about you guys letting me go first into potential combat situations,” Clay told Alex. “Rifles and wands of inferno are useless when you’ve got family right in your line of fire.”
“You dorks should both let me go first,” Alex said. “I’m the one with rapid health-regen and a dungeon lord-sized pool of hit points. I could soak up damage while you two attacked from the sides.”
Clay hadn’t seen it at first—he’d been too distracted by the jump scare—but there was a little heart-shaped cutout on the door right about his chest-height. He frowned at it.
“I’m not sure I can deal with letting you take a beating for me,” he said.
“Aw, babe.” Alex relaxed her aim long enough to stretch up on her toes and peck him on the cheek.
“Is this what is referred to as a public display of affection?” Bacon Bits asked. “Because I want it to stop immediately. It makes me wish to heave my stomach contents onto the funhouse platform.”
Alex chuckled and picked up the teacup pig, stuffing her into the biggest pouch on her vest.
“All right, knight in dingy scale armor,” she said, waving her Mossberg at the door. “You go first, and I’ll come in at the last second and save your life.”
Clay smirked. “Last I checked, the score stood at two saves to one, with you losing.”
Before she could reply, he stepped into the black void of the funhouse.
