Dungeon 42

The Dao of Dug

Chapter 1

Yep, he was still in the back seat.

Unlike an innocuous hitchhiker ghost, this fucker didn't intend to leave before we reached his destination. Looking in my rearview for the fifteenth time didn't make him any less creepy. I tried to play it off like I was checking traffic.

Goths, punk rockers, construction workers, I drove anyone who summoned me through the app. I wasn't put off by rough people and rarely felt even a single butterfly in my stomach. I wasn’t easily spooked.

The guy in my back seat was something else. Cold sweat dampened my back every time I glanced back at him.

His clothes didn’t bother me. Overall he had a clean-cut kind of look. Real middle-American nobody in jeans and a hoodie. I hadn’t looked twice when he first got in my car.

A couple of minutes in though I’d started to feel uneasy. He hadn’t played along when I tried to make small talk and just sat quietly in the middle. That was weird on its own; people normally sat next to one of the doors. Then I noticed a smell.

It wasn't the usual “pothead thinks he covered it up with cologne” scent. My nose was dead to that. This was a note of ammonia over vinegar and decay. Like old sweat and something sinister.

Instinctive alarm bells went off and I looked in the rearview for the first time. That was when I got a good look at his face. It wasn’t special, a bland kind of almost handsome with a touch of baby fat.

The problem was his eyes. Hard but vacant and a touch too close together. The kind that got you a permanent creeper label in high school.

I wanted to abort the ride immediately. I could live with losing out on twelve fifty after taxes and fees and a bad rating.

The problem was we were in a residential area. The street lighting was shit and nobody was walking around. I had a small tire iron beside my seat for emergencies but fighting wasn’t ideal. Not in a place like this.

I needed to kick him out somewhere with witnesses in case it got ugly. I glanced at his destination; it was in the city center. I steeled my resolve and kept driving. Things didn’t get better.

The smell intensified as he started smiling and occasionally snickering. My stomach lurched when he slipped a hand in his hoodie pouch and started fondling something. He was either touching himself or had a knife.

Neither thing would have been good. The fact that I wanted it to be the former instead of the latter was a clear indicator of how fucking awful my decision to pick him up had been. A decision I had made because I thought I was smarter than Dug.

Dug of the Grateful Dead T-shirt. The veteran driver who made sure that I wouldn't veer into oncoming traffic or creep out passengers. He had spent a whole half hour with me before signing off on my employment after only driving three blocks. Dug had seemed like a stoner with a shit work ethic.

I wish I had listened to Dug. Dug knew what was up.

"Hey, listen!" Dug had giggled at his joke. I sat staring at him, hoping he'd get out of my car already. He hadn't noticed my "vibe" and stared into the middle distance over my shoulder when he continued.

"Don't pick-up clean-cut dudes after midnight," he’d said. When I didn’t respond he nodded in agreement with himself.

"Why?" I'd asked. The idea confused me so much I forgot that I wanted him to leave, not impart baked wisdom. Instead, I was racking my brain, trying to figure out what reference he was mangling.

"Because like, only serial killers and evangers are out that late. Them and alchies. Alchies are cool if they tip," Dug said sagely. I’d nodded, only half-listening.

"Groovy," I’d said. Dug nodded and finally got out of my car. I watched him walk back toward his own but felt like something was amiss. That the world was a little less complete when he got in instead of unfolding a razor scooter with a practiced snap.

Rideshare driving wasn’t easy. You got a wide cross-section of humanity in the back seat of your car every day. One that didn’t have a car or a friend to drive them and usually wasn’t happy about paying you to do it.

I’d have gladly traded the guy in my backseat for the angriest of my normal passengers. Even the one who’d shattered my windshield because I’d said ‘no problem’ after he said ‘thank you’ as he exited my car.

I looked back again and caught a metallic glint. He definitely wasn't touching himself. My mind scrambled for some way to not end up stabbed to death. I wasn't fond of math. Ending up a statistic would be adding insult to injury. Insult to murder?

It didn't matter, but panic insisted that tangents needed my attention resources too. If I'd had the brain cells to spare, this could have become the moment I found religion. Instead, I was scanning the streets as we approached the busier bar-laden section of the city.

There was no way to know but my money was on him trying to slit my throat when I parked. I wasn’t going to give him the opportunity. Once I saw a crowd I was going to pull over and bail immediately.

As I made up my mind a warning message popped up on my heads-up display. The heads-up display I didn't have because those weren't real outside of movies.

[Kill one person to qualify!]

That was all it said. Staring at it, I heard a delighted cackle from the backseat but didn't register it as essential. I only had eyes for the impossible sign on my windshield.

Something about the incongruity of it had my heart hammering in my chest. An animal part of my brain was screaming in fear. This was worse than the guy in my back seat. A lot worse. He was a piece of shit, but a human one.

What I was looking at wasn't right on a fundamental level. It did not belong.

Somehow, I managed to tear my eyes away. Routine or some sixth sense reminding me I'd had my eyes off the road too long. I looked through the message to the street ahead and my heart seized. I was heading for a busy pedestrian crossing.

My panic and fear seemed to evaporate as my thoughts crystallized. There wasn’t enough room to brake. Everyone I was looking at was mid-bar-crawl and too slow to realize I was barreling toward them.

It was my fault they were in danger—mine, not the freak in the back seat.

I took a deep breath and whipped the wheel hard to the right. There was a weightless moment as I exhaled and my car hopped the curb.

Gravity returned as my car slammed into the telephone pole I’d been aiming for. I was flung violently to the end of my seatbelt’s slack, colliding with the steering wheel. The crash overloaded my senses, from the squealing agony of crushed metal and glass to the scent of burning engine fluids.

Everything about it was etched into my mind. Even the soft brush of skin and fabric as something flew by me. A falsetto scream whipped past as my passenger flew through where the windshield had been a moment earlier.

Time moved slowly, stretching his shallow arc out across an eternity as I watched his confusion blossom into wide-eyed terror. He struck my hood with a dull boom that didn’t halt his flight. He slid off it with a screech of friction to ragdoll across the sidewalk.

His limbs were twisted into unnatural angles when he finally stopped, slamming into a storefront.

The creepy fuck hadn’t had his seatbelt on.

The world felt like it was spinning and my body was a single leaden mass of pain. My vision was blurred and my thoughts jumbled but I could still see the message clearly. It had changed.

[Congratulations!]

[Kills: 1]

It said in its impersonal red letters. It looked like a shitty sans-serif font. The sort I'd have gotten a dirty look from my professor for using in a project. Ah, the art degree. The financial black hole I'd been busting my ass to pay for.

The number one in the message wasn't stable. It shimmered before settling on two. That didn't last long. It started flickering again as I began to lose consciousness. It was hard just to keep my eyes open, but I forced myself to.

Despite everything, I put my last few ounces of energy into focusing. I looked past the message and to the sidewalk in front of my car. Bathed in sodium orange street light my passenger was lying in an unnatural pile on the ground. His eyes stared unblinking forward at nothing.

I smiled, satisfied even as I tasted blood.

Fuck him.