You must be this old to enter the Dungeon

56) When the bodies hit the floor

It looked like a doctor’s office.

There was a cheap dirty rug was stretched on the cracked and chipped linolium tiles.

On the left were some coat hooks on the wall with a white lab coat hanging from one. The coat was nearly covered in cobwebs. In front of the desk were two chairs with split open pea green upholstery, complete with sand colored foam sticking out. The metal desk had a typewriter on top in between the files loosely stacked up until they were nearly spilling off the desk.

A dead plant in a pot sat in a corner, and a wire trash basket was filled with empty pill bottles, glass vials, used syringes, and yellow rubber turning.

As well as blood stained rags.

A window frame behind the desk held only the same peeling green paint covered wall at the rest of the room but still had a rusting metal grate bolted over it.

The room was a normal ten feet wide but with the same towering ceiling.

But it was also stretched out, nearly thirty feet deep with everything but the coat hooks and the rug on the far end of the room, and the carpet was stretched out all the way to and under the desk.

As well as being damp on the far end for some reason.

Before I could reach over to snag the doorknob and pull the door shut, Hiram pushed past me. “Dungeon stuff. People are paying real money for anything with writing on it. Those files are as good as gold-”

Three things happened pretty quickly.

Blue, following on the Grinning man's heels, turned her head and growled over at the coat on the hooks to the left of the door.

Wylina snarled and began to back into my legs as Chubby yipped.

And the white coat lifted up to either side like the set of wings they actually were.

My mind reeled, too much was happening at once.

The devil bat things, I thought they were supposed to be black or something… the coyotes see something behind me… Hirams still looking over to the other end of the room… warn him… no time.

I took two steps into the room and shoved the Grinning man forward with an elbow between his shoulder blades… maybe a little harder than I needed to.

Let me have that.

Turning as I stepped into the spot he had been standing in, I looked into the gaping white toothed jaws of the huge white bat like thing flying into me.

Its eyes were solid black, as were the flesh parts inside its wide open mouth.

They are supposed to lash at you with two sharp tails as they fly past you, not bite…

It hit the front of the barrel of the shotgun I had raised up in my hands, nearly pushing it aside out of my left hand, I pulled the trigger as I tried to get the stock over onto my right hip…

Something wet hit me in the face as the gun went off, my left eye felt something burning and I couldn’t see anything out of it...

Goggles. Goggles would have been a good idea.

Someone punched me in the gut, and I was going over backwards, but I could see with my good eye that the bat was flying the other way, its chest all black and wet.

Oh, are those its ribs, and what all that spilling out of it?

I hit the floor, backwards, and my head thumps against the floor with a crack.

My vision narrows and all I can see is the ceiling. It hurts, it all hurts. Everywhere...

I can see up Hiram’s nose as he stands above me, shooting his gun at something. He pumps the shotgun and shoots.

Once, twice, something dark flies above him and his face suddenly splits open and goes bloody. Wylina flies through the air above me and drops down with something dark in her jaws.

Rolling onto my side, I try to inhale and clutch at the back of my aching head with both hands, but my left arm doesn’t want to go up that high. It hurts too much.

Instead, I drag it along the ground to where Hiram is kneeling and holding one hand up against his face. The blood is squirming out between his fingers. He still twisted and twitched his head back and forth as he looked up and around, then behind him before he grunted and smiled in satisfaction. “Good Girl!”

I can’t lift my hand. “Hiram... put my hand on your face. Heal.”

He gave me a surprised look before he looked around one more time and the shotgun vanished before he reached down and grabbed my wrist to lift my hand up to his face. As I grimaced from the pain of him lifting my arm enough to move my shoulder, he leaned forward to meet my hand halfway.

With a wet sound, he moves his hand away from his face and slaps mine on top of it.

Briefly, I see that his closed eye seems untouched. I pushed warmth into his face.

I wish I knew what the hell I was doing. The last thing I want to do is heal up what my kick to his nose did to him.

I huffed out a laugh, and Hirams laughed as well before he starts talking about how we kicked ass, and I focus on pushing warmth enough that I can ignore him.

After some time, the warmth seems to be spreading out and away from his face, and I pull my now sticky hand away from him, revealing an angry red line running down from the middle of his forehead, down along the side of his nose, and all the way down to halfway between his chin and the corner of his jaw.

“Sorry. It left a scar.”

He grinned. “Chicks dig scars. How bad are you Harry?”

I start to try to tell the difference between everywhere that hurts, but… “The Coyotes?”

He glanced around and shook his head. “They're fine. The bats didn’t want to go low enough to lash at them. And they seem to have a good appetite. The little ones ripped up the smaller black one and gobbled down their Stones. Now they’re chowing down on what’s left like their no tomorrow.”

Hirams looked over to the side and with a confused look. “They aren’t touching the while one, and I can see the Stone’s still inside… but it’s bigger. Like twice the size of all the other ones I’ve seen.”

He looked me in the eye and grinned. “Looks like we found something new.”

I glared at him. “...new is painful. Close the door and keep an eye out.”

First up. My hip.

My shoulder hurts the most, then the hip, then my head, and then everywhere in general. But the hip might mean something got messed up inside me. Like internal bleeding.

Pressing my hand up against the spot just inside the bony part of my hip on my stomach, I felt a dull pain just from the pressure, which was better than the sharp pain I was getting there every time I breathed in too deeply.

I also checked the dampness that was left on my lips by dragging my finger along them and then looking at them. Clear, no blood.

Yeah, good news at last.

My stomach growled, and I began pulling junk food from my magic storage and trying to open them one handed as I pushed warmth into my hip with my other hand.

“No Chubby this isn’t yours. Get away! Don’t sniff at me with black goo all over your face! Wylina get your brat away from me. No Wylina, chocolate is poisenous for Coyotes.”

I think. That and garlic and a bunch of other stuff people, human people, love. Not that I think the cheap brand of knockoff snack cakes are real chocolate. Probably Chocolate adjacent flavoring or some other ‘Na na, you can’t sue us’ wording.

After a bit, my stomach stops complaining and my hip feels like I’ve fixed it up as best as I can, then I move on to my head since I’m feeling light headed.

My stomach growls again. Oh, blood sugar. Hermit needs food badly.

I fish out something that claims to be an apple pie from my storage.

This might be a while.