Pocket Dungeon 2, page 16
“A warehouse?” I asked. “What sort of warehouse?”
“I’m getting to that,” Monty said. “Well, the guys with the guns take me back to another room in this giant warehouse, and they finally take the blindfold off. I was in another office, and it looked almost identical to the one from before in the building downtown, and just like before, Harper’s here.”
“What happened then?” Yasha chimed in.
“His goons sit me in this chair and then leave, and then Harper starts talking to me about some pretty crazy shit,” he said. “He’s telling me about crystals and dungeons and what I have to do for him, and all of this stuff that didn’t make any sense at the time. I was really confused, and eventually I sort of pieced everything together. If I just… went into a crystal dungeon or whatever like Harper asked, he would pay me and would make my career.”
“That sounds like a trap,” I said.
“You would be right,” Monty agreed. “But I didn’t know. I was so spooked, but I mean, I still thought he was a good guy. A weird guy, but like, as ethically good as a billionaire can be.”
“I do not know what a billionaire is,” Yasha said, and this was directed at me.
“You’re probably better off not knowing,” I told her. “So, what then? Did you go into the crystal?”
Monty nodded and looked down at the beer clutched between his hands. The new angle on his face made the bruise on his eye stand out in even more gruesome relief.
“Yeah,” he said. “I did. I went into the crystal and nearly fucking died. He had me do it in some weird room inside the warehouse, and they blindfolded me as we were walking around. I popped out into a different room than the one the crystal was initially in, and when I did, I thought I was going to have a fucking panic attack.”
“Was Harper there?” I asked.
“Yeah, he was.” He sighed. “I asked him if now that I’d done it, and given him all the gold I’d brought back out with me, if it meant he’d actually get my career started. I thought things were done with.”
“But that wasn’t the case, was it?” I asked, even though I knew the answer from the look on his face and the way we had found him tonight alone.
“Not even,” Monty confirmed. “He told me that actually, he needed me to do a bit more for him before he could help me out, and that if I backed out of our arrangement, he would have his people hurt my family. That he could have them killed.”
My eyes widened. “Jesus fuck!”
“I didn’t think he was telling me the truth, or at least, I wasn’t sure if that was the case, but then he pulled out this file and there were pictures of my family in it.” Monty’s voice was thin. “My parents and brother. My parents are old, man, they can’t protect themselves! They just retired, for crying out loud. I have no idea how he got the information or when he did it, but I guess when you have infinite money, you can be fucking evil at the drop of a hat.”
I didn’t say it out loud, because I had a feeling it would be like kicking a dog while it was already down, but I imagined that the moment Harper received Monty’s demo and realized he was a good target, he sent out his feelers for the things he could get to use against him. This was a whole new level of evil, even from what I’d already known about the man.
“What did you do then?” I asked softly.
“Started freaking the fuck out,” Monty said. “What else was I supposed to do? I mean, one minute, I think I’m about to have my big break, that I’m finally gonna make it and get famous and be able to do all the things I’ve always wanted to do, and then I’m fighting slime monsters in a dungeon and getting told by the goddamn love child of Dr. Evil and a white Berry Gordy that, actually, I have to keep fighting slime monsters or he’ll kill my family! Oh, and he lied about making my career!”
Monty’s chest rose and fell in frantic, angered breaths, and he looked as if he was going to start screaming at any second. I couldn’t blame him. He had clearly been through a shit time of things, and it made sense that he wouldn’t be handling it with the utmost tact. I could only imagine what I would be doing if I were in his situation.
Once again my mind drifted to Iris and all that she had been through.
“I’m so sorry,” I said. “That sounds… I can’t even imagine.”
“One of his guys came back in, blindfolded me again, and then took me out to the car and dropped me off here,” he sighed. “Which meant he already knew where I lived, too. I was given strict orders to show up at the record label each day at the same time, and then we would repeat the process of someone picking me up, taking me to the warehouse, and having me go into a crystal.”
Monty leaned back in the chair like even telling me all this had drained the life from him. He looked even worse off than he had before, and maybe even worse than he had in the alley.
My eyes flicked back down to the stain on his shirt, and I worried about the wound on his stomach. It looked like it hadn’t been too deep, despite how disgusting it had looked, and that was the only solace I felt.
I had been turned off from the idea of going to the hospital for my own dungeon-induced injuries, and I imagined Monty was in the same situation. Only unlike me, Monty probably didn’t get to make that choice on his own.
“So you’ve been going in every day?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Almost every day, but not quite. I’m ready for my ninth dungeon now.”
“What does the inside of the building look like now?” Yasha asked. “The record label we found you at today?”
Monty turned his focus over to the fox-woman. “It’s finished on the inside now, so it looks less weird at least. I mean, it’s still not the cool, vibey place I thought it would be, but it looks more like an actual record label now. The thing is, I’ve never actually seen anyone recording in there. I don’t know what’s going on, but it’s always busy.”
“I also wanted to know what was going on with that,” I said. “Do you know why all the people are there?”
Monty shook his head. “I don’t know. I thought maybe they were other people getting sent into the crystals like me, but I don’t know for certain. All I know is there are always people moving in and out, and they’ve always got guns and stuff. I’ve seen a few businessmen, I guess, so that seems more normal, but it’s all… weird. This entire situation is fucked.”
“Wait,” I said. “Before, you said they dropped you off at your apartment, but tonight, we obviously saw you leaving the building. What happened?”
Monty pressed his lips into a thin line, and a shadow passed over his face. “Yeah. Harper called me in for a meeting. Usually, I wouldn’t be there this late, but he asked me to come at ten o’clock, so I showed up and was let inside.”
I mentally did some quick math. “We didn’t see you until what, nearly four in the morning? So what were you doing in there for six hours, you can’t have been in a dungeon that long.”
“I wasn’t in a dungeon tonight,” Monty said grimly. “I walked in for a meeting, and I got jumped by two of his guards. They took me into a back conference room I’ve never been in before and proceeded to beat the shit out of me.”
“What?” I felt like my eyes were about to bug out of my head. “Why?”
“Harper apparently was getting suspicious of me,” Monty said. “I don’t know what made him suspicious specifically, and he wasn’t even there. It was just his guards. They beat me up and told me Harper expected my loyalty, or my family was going to suffer, and did I want them to suffer?”
“Oh,” I said with realization coloring my tone. “That was what you were talking about in the alley, then. That’s why you thought we were somehow affiliated with Harper.”
He nodded. “I wasn’t sure if it was part of the shakedown still, to see if I would talk about what was happening inside his business. I still don’t know what it was that I did that made him freak out in the first place, because I haven’t told anyone about what’s going on. Well, I hadn’t. But now I’ve told you guys.”
“You were on your phone when we approached you,” I said as I remembered another detail of the scene from earlier.
“I was trying to call an Uber,” he admitted sheepishly. “Not tell someone about what was going on. When they were wailing on me, they opened up an injury from my last dungeon. I’d put off stitching it up in the hopes that it would heal on its own, but I don’t think that’s the case.”
I looked at the dental floss waiting on the table with a new sense of horror dawning on me. But before I could tell him that maybe stitching up a wound that looked infected wasn’t actually the smartest plan in the world, Monty sighed.
“I don’t think I’m going to be around much longer,” Monty said. His voice had taken on a new, almost thoughtful tone.
I frowned and looked over at him in confusion. “What do you mean?”
He hesitated for a second. “I’m pretty sure Harper is going to try and kill me.”
I felt as if he had pulled the pin on a grenade and tossed it right into the middle of the room. It took me a few seconds before I was able to come up with anything to say to that.
“Why?” I managed. The shock was clear on my face, and I didn’t even have to see my own reflection to know it.
“I’m not good at the dungeons,” Monty admitted. “I’ve nearly died every single time I’ve gone in. I think that rather than keep wasting his resources on me and tailing my family, he’s going to kill me after I leave the next dungeon. He wouldn’t want me to die while I was inside, though, because then he wouldn’t get the profit from it.”
It was so coldly analytical that it made my stomach churn, but he said it with such understanding and authority that I had a hard time finding any faults with his statement. Obviously, it was fucked, but clearly Monty had put quite a lot of thought into it.
“I thought she was going to kill me in the alley,” he said it like it was a joke. “Like maybe I had predicted how I was going to go out wrong after all, and honestly, that was almost better than dying from a bullet to the face.”
I was at a temporary loss for words as I tried to figure out what I could even say to make the situation seem less grim. And then it hit me.
The things Harper had put Monty through weren’t all that unlike what he had done to Iris, but now it was clear he had refined his system over the last fifty years. Now instead of going into a crystal with someone and leaving them there to die, he was outsourcing his labor.
He had used it to build an empire.
And now we had a man on the inside.
“I think I can help you,” I said.
Monty looked at me like he didn’t quite believe what I was saying, but he also didn’t make any moves to stop me from elaborating further, so I continued.
“I have my own reasons for hating Harper that I won’t go into right now, but I think we can help each other,” I said.
“How?” Monty finally asked. “How can you possibly help me? This guy is fucking untouchable.”
“In case it isn’t clear, I have access to a crystal of my own,” I explained. “And you said you’re pretty sure Harper is going to try and kill you after your next dungeon. I could meet you in your dungeon and then leave with you. We could take on Harper together.”
“I would be there as well,” Yasha added.
Monty looked between the two of us like we were nuts. “You can do what? How could you possibly do any of that? I don’t understand.”
“I know, it sounds insane,” I said. “But I have a way of meeting up with people inside crystals.”
“I’m sorry, you can what?” Monty looked stunned.
“I have a friend I met inside one of the dungeons–” I began, and Monty cut me off to point at Yasha with a questioning raise of his eyebrow.
“No,” Yasha said. “He is not speaking of me, though we did meet in a dungeon as well. He is talking about Trog’thukaz the Academic. He is a large demon man made of molten rocks.”
Monty blinked a few times and then slowly looked back at me, like maybe I would refute the insane thing Yasha had just said, but all I did was shake my head. She was right, after all.
“Okay, that’s insane,” he said, but he didn’t tell me to stop talking.
“It is, I know, but I promise you it’s real,” I said. “If you tell me when you’re supposed to go into the crystal next, we can meet you there, and we can come out fighting on the other side.”
Monty pressed his lips into a line and looked from me to Yasha like he couldn’t quite believe what he was hearing, but finally he nodded.
“Right, yeah, okay…” he said. “I’m scheduled to go back into a dungeon in four days. They gave me some time off to heal from my injuries and stuff, otherwise it would be sooner.”
“And you’re in a level nine dungeon, you said?” I clarified.
“That’s the next one I’ll go in, yeah,” he confirmed.
“We’re at a level eight now, so once we finish that one, we’ll be at a nine and can meet you inside the crystal,” I explained.
“This is crazy,” Monty mumbled. “We’re going to need to come up with a plan, like a real plan, because Harper isn’t somebody to mess around with…”
“And we will,” I said. “I know this all sounds like a lot, but I promise, we have four days to get this shit figured out. But right now, Yasha and I should go. We have someone else at home, and I don’t want her to wake up and not know where we are.”
I pulled my phone out of my pocket and passed it to Monty with the contacts app pulled up. He took it from my hand, and without questioning me, he typed in his contact information and sent off a quick text to himself so he would have my number as well.
“We can meet up soon to flesh things out further and come up with a real plan, but for now, be on high alert,” I said. “I don’t want Harper to get suspicious that you’re talking to anyone or scheming against him.”
“Believe me,” Monty said. “You and I both don’t want that.”
Yasha pushed herself up to her feet, and I set my emptied can on the edge of the table.
“Expect a message later today to set something up, okay?” I told him. “And don’t forget to lock up after we leave.”
Monty’s eyes were trained on the container of floss waiting for him on the table with a gleam of regret in his eyes that I definitely couldn’t fault him for. I wouldn’t want to stitch myself up with dental floss, either.
He nodded his head in acknowledgement to what I had said, and then, without further ado, I whisked Yasha from Monty’s Music and Records and back out into the early dawn light of the city.
The walk back to my motorcycle was brisk, and the two of us didn’t speak the entire time. We were both too wrapped up in our own thoughts. I couldn’t stop the near spiral of plans and ideas in my mind as we pulled out our helmets and mounted the bike.
Everything Monty had told me had filled me with a simultaneous sense of dread, as well as an eagerness I couldn’t fight. It was awful what Harper was doing to people, but it also meant we had a chance to take him down before he could do it to anyone else.
This was a man who had spent the last fifty years hurting people, and now I could finally make good on my promise to Iris that we would make him pay for what he had done.
We made it back to the parking garage attached to my apartment building without any incidents, and Yasha and I made our way back inside in a similarly quiet state.
The fox-woman’s mind was just as preoccupied as my own, and I wondered if it was with the same sorts of thoughts I was sorting through in mine.
I slipped the key into the lock and quietly pushed the door open. I held my breath, as if that would somehow keep any and all sound from emerging from the motion, but it was no use.
When the door swung open and the two of us stepped inside, Iris was already awake, and she was waiting for us.
“What happened?” were the first words out of her mouth. She didn’t seem upset we had left without her, and if anything, she seemed curious as to what had transpired while we were gone.
I was immediately relieved that she wasn’t upset with us, but that relief was quickly overtaken with the knowledge that I was going to have to explain to her just what Harper had been up to while she had been trapped in the dungeon.
I sighed and moved over to drop my helmet off on the kitchen island before I leaned up against it and turned to face Iris. Before I did, however, I saw that the note I had left her had clearly been moved.
“Things aren’t good,” I admitted.
Iris frowned. “Not good how? I thought all of this wasn’t something we needed to worry about right now?”
“It wasn’t the guys with the guns,” I said. “They weren’t the problem today. Yasha and I actually caught someone as they were leaving the building at around three or four in the morning.”
Iris’ eyes widened, and in the dimness of the living room, the dark blue irises melted seamlessly into her pupils. It made her gaze look bottomless and all-knowing.
“You did? What was he doing? Was he working for Billy?” She leaned forward from her perch on the couch, and Yasha moved over to sit next to her.
The fox-woman placed a supportive hand on her back, as if to calm and steady the other woman.
“Yes and no,” I said. “It seems like Harper has been using the exact same tactic he used on you to get people to do his dirty work for the last fifty years, only now, he’s gotten better at it. He has an entire empire set up around getting people to go into the crystals for him so he doesn’t have to get his hands dirty at all.”
Iris pressed her lips into a line, and she looked as if that news made her feel sick.
“I’m sorry, Iris,” I said, though I wasn’t entirely sure why I was apologizing to her. It just felt like the right thing to do. Maybe it was because I wished I could protect her from everything to do with Harper, even the information that he had continued to be a bad person.
“It isn’t your fault, Wes,” she told me. “Please, what else did you find out?”
“The man we found is named Monty, and he doesn’t like Harper any more than you do,” I continued. “In fact, he wants him dead, and I offered our help.”
