My Life is Horrific Chapter 26 — Fine we’ll go on an adventure (Patreon)

I woke up with a satisfying yawn that cracked my jaw and stretched every muscle in my back. My eyes opened slowly and blinked the sleepiness out of them only for me to discover Wednesday Addams was standing six inches from my face.

"JESUS FUCKING CHRIST—"

I threw myself backward so hard I rolled off the opposite side of the bed and hit the floor with a thud that knocked the wind out of me, scrambling up onto my hands and knees while my heart tried to jackhammer its way out through my sternum. Wednesday stood on the other side of the mattress, perfectly still, her hands clasped behind her back, watching my panic with the mild interest of someone observing a nature documentary.

She was wearing a black silk nightdress that fell to just above her knees, with thin straps over her pale shoulders and a neckline that dipped low enough to show the lines of her collarbones, the whole thing was clearly just regular sleepwear rather than any deliberate attempt at seduction, but the effect of Wednesday standing in my bedroom wearing something that actually showed the shape of her body rather than hiding it inside her usual funeral wear was very distracting.

"Wednesday," I said from the floor, my voice still cracking from the adrenaline spike. "You can't keep doing this."

This had been happening every single morning for a week.

Every goddamn morning. I would wake up and she would be there, standing over me like a damn sleep paralysis demon, waiting for me to open my eyes so she could immediately begin her campaign of demanding stimulation. 

Which I usually wouldn't mind a girl doing...

But Wednesday clearly had no interest in what I had in mind. 

The first morning I had screamed so loud Beverly came running in with a kitchen knife. The second morning I had thrown a pillow at her, which she caught without blinking. By the fourth morning I had started sleeping with one eye open, which didn't help because she always arrived at whatever hour I finally let my guard down.

"You are being an exceptionally poor host," Wednesday said blankly. "I have been residing in your home for seven days, during which time you have done nothing of interest. You have watched television. You have consumed beer. You have spoken on the telephone to Claire. You promised me monsters, James. You promised me a town teeming with supernatural threats and mortal peril. Instead you have delivered an endless loop of situational comedies and leftover pizza."

"I promised you those things under duress," I said, hauling myself off the floor. "You were sitting on my lap in a moving vehicle. That doesn't count."

"A promise made under duress is still a promise."

I sighed from somewhere deep in my soul and shuffled past her into the bathroom, rubbing the sleep out of my eyes with both palms. "I've been relaxing, Wednesday. Taking time to recover. It's this thing normal people do after they've been nearly killed multiple times in the span of a few weeks. They sit down. They rest. They don't immediately go looking for the next thing that wants to eat them."

"That sounds profoundly tedious," Wednesday said from behind me. 

"If you're bored why not go to school... you know... the place you've been bunking off for a week," I said. 

"Going to school wouldn't fix anything," she replied. "It would just trade one boring place for another."

I straightened up from the sink, water dripping from my chin, turned around, and Wednesday was standing in the bathroom doorway approximately eighteen inches from me, having followed me in.

I flinched hard enough to bang my elbow on the towel rack. "Can I please have some privacy? I'm going to take a shower."

Wednesday regarded me for a moment and I got the distinct impression she was deciding whether privacy was a concept she felt obligated to respect or merely a suggestion she could choose to disregard. Eventually, after a pause that lasted long enough to make me uncomfortable, she turned and walked out without a word.

I shut the bathroom door, locked it, and leaned against it with a sigh.

Apart from my house guest things had actually been pretty relaxing this past week, all things considered. After the witch and the Hyde, the system had thrown me another notification the following morning that had been a welcome addition to the growing list of abilities I was accumulating.

_____________________________________

[Day 66 Survived]

[Achievements:]

[Achievement Unlocked: Beast Slayer Round 2]

You encountered the Hyde for the second time and this time you actually managed to fight back instead of getting torn apart like wet tissue paper. Progress. The bar was underground and you cleared it by an inch.

[Rewards:]

[Mastered: Engineering]

_____________________________________

Mastered Engineering. Combined with the Mastered Mechanics skill I already had meant I now possessed the comprehensive knowledge base of someone who could design, build, and optimize virtually any mechanical or electrical system from scratch. Cars, planes, boats, weapons systems, industrial equipment, power generators, if it had moving parts and and was a machine of some kind, I could build it or fix it or improve it. The two skills together were absurdly complementary, mechanics giving me the hands-on intuition of how things worked in practice while engineering gave me the theoretical framework to push beyond existing designs and create something new.

I hadn't done anything with it yet because I had been too busy lying on my couch drinking beer and watching reruns, which was a criminal waste of two mastered skills but also exactly what my battered psyche needed after the month I'd had.

I finished my shower, dried off, threw on a pair of sweatpants and a t-shirt, and headed downstairs. It was well past noon, Beverly had already left for school hours ago, which meant the house was just me and my own personal stalker.

I grabbed a beer from the fridge, cracked it open, and settled into my usual spot on the couch with the remote in hand, already scrolling through channels for something mindless enough to fill the next six hours. I found a rerun of Cheers and leaned back into the cushions with a contented sigh, propping my feet on the coffee table.

Three minutes passed.

Wednesday appeared in the doorway.

"You cannot possibly intend to spend another entire day in that exact position," she said.

"Watch me."

She crossed the room and stood directly between me and the television, which given her height meant she blocked approximately sixty percent of the screen, which was more than enough to ruin the viewing experience. "This is unacceptable. You are wasting capabilities that most people would consider extraordinary on recreational alcoholism and a television program that was written for people who have subnormal IQ."

"Cheers is a classic and I won't have it disrespected in my own home."

"The acting alone is grounds for cancellation."

"Your face is grounds for cancellation."

Wednesday narrowed her eyes. 

"Get out of the way, Wednesday."

She did not get out of the way. She stood there, arms crossed, until I gave up and switched the TV off with an irritated grunt.

"Fine. You win. I'll go somewhere else."

I took my beer and relocated to the garage, where I settled into the chair by the mixing board and put my feet up on an amp. Peace. Quiet. No gothic teenagers staring at me with judgmental—

Wednesday appeared in the garage doorway.

"I literally just sat down."

I got up and relocated to the backyard. Wednesday followed. I tried the upstairs bathroom with the door locked. She picked the lock, which I didn't even know she could do, and stood in the doorway while I sat on the closed toilet lid holding a beer.

"This is a bathroom, Wednesday. I am sitting in a bathroom to get away from you. Do you not see how this reflects on both of us?"

"I see a man hiding in a bathroom because he lacks the conviction to fulfill a promise."

I tried the roof. I climbed out my bedroom window, scaled the drainpipe, and sat on the peak of my own house like a gargoyle, drinking my beer and staring out over the Derry rooftops with my enhanced vision, feeling like maybe, just maybe, she wouldn't follow me up here.

A dark braid appeared over the edge of the roof.

"FINE!" I screamed, loud enough that a woman walking her dog on the sidewalk below looked up in alarm. "FINE! WE'LL GO ON A GODDAMN ADVENTURE! ARE YOU HAPPY? IS THIS WHAT YOU WANTED?"

Wednesday pulled herself up onto the roof beside me, her black nightdress fluttering in the breeze, and the ghost of a smirk on her face. It was there and gone in less than a second, the emotional equivalent of a shooting star.

"Get dressed," she said. "I will be ready in five minutes."

...

I found myself in the garage ten minutes later with Wednesday standing behind my left shoulder like a shadow, holding the Key to the Unknown in my hand and staring at the door that led into the main house.

I turned to face her.

"Okay, listen. Before we do this, I have conditions."

"State them," Wednesday said.

"Whatever we see on the other side of this door, you don't ask me how I know what I know. You don't ask me where we are. You don't ask me why things are the way they are. And you don't ask me about anything that happens while we're there. You follow my lead, you do what I say when I say it, and if I tell you to run, you run. No arguments. Deal?"

Wednesday's eyes narrowed. The conditions clearly chafed against every fiber of her investigative nature.

"Agreed," she said finally.

"Okay." I let out a long breath, turned back to the door, and slid the Key into the lock. The metal shifted and reshaped itself and I turned it and heard the bolt disengage.

"Whatever happens," I muttered, mostly to myself, "it can't be worse than Castle Dimitrescu."

I pulled the door open.

Through the doorway, where my living room should have been, stretched an avenue of cracked asphalt lined with the burned-out husks of cars, some still smoldering with thin wisps of grey smoke that curled up into a sky the color of dirty concrete. Buildings rose on either side, their lower floors gutted by fire and their upper stories pockmarked with bullet holes and blast damage.

I knew this place.

I've definitely seen it before. 

"Fuck," I said as retaliation hit me. 

Gotham City. 

During the events of The Dark Knight Rises. 

Gotham was usually a shithole but right now the city was sealed off from the outside world, the bridges blown, the police trapped underground, and a nuclear bomb ticking somewhere in the belly of this beast.

Of all the places the Key could have sent me it sent me to a place where a goddamn nuclear fucking bomb was going to blow up. 

Shit... at least Batman was going to stop it. 

_____________________________________

Key to the Unknown

_____________________________________

Main Objective:

• Batman has fallen. He died in the Pit, and no one is coming to save Gotham. Bane controls the city and a nuclear bomb is set to detonate. Save Gotham before it's too late.

_____________________________________

"Ah, shit," I said, reading it twice to make sure I hadn't hallucinated the part about Batman being dead.

In the film, Bruce Wayne had survived the Pit, climbed out, come back to Gotham, and saved the day in the nick of time. But this wasn't the film it seems. The system had just told me in very clear terms that Bruce Wayne had died down there, which meant there was no Dark Knight coming back for a triumphant third act. No Bat. No backup. Just me, Wednesday, and a city full of heavily armed mercenaries with a ticking nuclear bomb.

"This place bears a passing resemblance to New York City," Wednesday said from beside me, stepping through the doorway and surveying the devastation with the clinical interest of someone visiting an art gallery. "Though considerably filthier, and with a much more interesting aesthetic."

"Yeah basically is," I said, still processing. "Now let's go home, we've seen enough here!" I said going to turn around just for the door to immediately shut as soon as she walked through.

I sighed. 

A car exploded three blocks away, the fireball mushrooming up above the rooftops and raining debris down onto the intersection ahead, and from somewhere deeper in the city came the distant pop of automatic gunfire.

"So," Wednesday said, turning to me. "What is interesting about this place."

"Nothing apart from the fact this city is going to blow up in an indeterminate amount of time."

"That... very good...."

"Of course you'd like it...."

We started moving down the avenue, keeping close to the buildings, stepping over debris and around the carcasses of burned-out cars. The streets were mostly empty, the civilian population clearly having learned to stay indoors during daylight hours, but here and there I could see signs of life, a curtain twitching in an upper window, a shadow ducking behind a dumpster, the faint sound of a radio playing behind a boarded-up door.

We had made it maybe four blocks when the trouble found us.

A group of men emerged from a cross street ahead, eight of them, armed with a mix of baseball bats, pipes, and a couple of handguns, wearing the ragged mismatched clothing of Gotham's newly liberated criminal class. 

Bane had emptied Blackgate Prison early in his occupation, flooding the streets with every murderer, rapist, and psychopath the city had spent decades locking away, and these were the result, packs of predators roaming the broken grid looking for anyone stupid or unlucky enough to be caught outside.

The biggest one, a thick-necked guy with a shaved head and a crowbar, spotted us first and grinned.

"Well, well," he said, stepping forward while the others fanned out behind him. "Look what we got here. A couple of kids out for a stroll. Don't you know there's a toll here, sweetheart?"

He was talking to Wednesday.

At least I hope he was. 

Wednesday looked at him the way she might look at a stain on a wall.

"Hey!" One of the others, a wiry guy with a pistol tucked in his waistband, pointed at me. "Empty your pockets, kid. Wallet, watch, whatever you got. Don't make this hard."

I sighed. I was so tired of this. In every world, there seemed to always guys like this. Guys who thought being bigger or meaner or holding a weapon made them dangerous. Guys who had never in their lives encountered something that was actually dangerous and didn't know what it looked like when it was standing right in front of them.

The big one swung the crowbar at my head.

I caught it mid-swing with my left hand and drove a palm strike into his sternum with my right that folded him in half and sent him staggering back into two of his friends. Before any of them could process what had just happened I was already moving, stepping into the next closest one and delivering an elbow to his jaw that dropped him straight to the asphalt, then pivoting to catch the wiry guy's wrist as he went for his gun, twisting it until the weapon clattered to the ground, and finishing him with a knee to the midsection that bent him double followed by a downward elbow to the back of his skull that put him face-first on the pavement.

Three down in under four seconds.

Wednesday handled the rest.

The first one swung a bat at her and she ducked under it, catching his arm on the follow-through and using his own momentum to send him face-first into a lamppost with a clang that I felt in my teeth. The second came at her from behind and she sidestepped without looking, tripping him with an extended foot and then stomping on the back of his knee as he fell. 

The third tried to grab her and she drove two stiff fingers into his throat, watched him crumple, and stepped over his gasping body to meet the fourth one with a spinning kick that connected with his temple and sent him pinwheeling into a pile of garbage bags.

The whole thing took maybe fifteen seconds, and when it was over eight men lay scattered across the street in various states of consciousness while Wednesday and I stood in the middle of it breathing normally and without a scratch between us.

"That was mildly satisfying," Wednesday observed, straightening her collar.

"Don't celebrate yet," I said as I suddenly felt a bad feeling creep up my spine.

The rumble started growl that vibrated up through the soles of my shoes, I turned toward the sound just in time to see a massive armored vehicle round the corner at the end of the block. It was one of the Tumblers, the military-grade Batmobiles that Wayne Enterprises had developed and that Bane had seized along with the rest of the city's arsenal, effectively tank on wheels with a turret mounted on top that was already swiveling toward us.

"Fuck," I said.

The turret locked on.

"RUN!"

We bolted, both of us sprinting hard down the avenue away from the Tumbler as the first burst of heavy-caliber rounds chewed up the asphalt behind us, sending chunks of concrete and sparks spraying in every direction. 

I grabbed Wednesday's arm and hauled her sideways into an alley just as the next burst stitched a line of craters across the exact spot we had been running through, we crashed through a chain-link fence at the end and into a narrow service corridor between two buildings, the Tumbler too wide to follow.

But it didn't need to follow. I could hear it reversing, circling around to cut us off at the next intersection.

"This way!" I shouted, pulling Wednesday toward a side door that looked like it might lead into one of the buildings, and I was reaching for the handle when a hand shot out from the shadows inside and grabbed my jacket.

I was yanked forward with a strength that surprised me, pulled bodily through the doorway and into the dark interior of what turned out to be an abandoned office building, stumbling over debris as the hand released me and I caught my balance against a desk. Wednesday was pulled through a second later by a different hand, though she landed considerably more gracefully than I did.

The door slammed shut behind us and I heard a bolt slide into place.

"Stay quiet," a voice said from the darkness. "Both of you. Don't move, don't speak, and for God's sake stay away from the windows."

The Tumbler roared past outside, its engine shaking the walls, and then the sound faded as it continued down the street. After a long, tense minute, the rumble died away entirely.

A flashlight clicked on, the beam cutting through the dusty air, and I found myself looking at a man in his late fifties or early sixties with greyish brown hair, a thick mustache and a heavy overcoat.

I knew that face. 

I knew that mustache.

James Gordon. 

Commissioner of the Gotham City Police Department.

He looked at us, then at the door, then back at us, and his expression settled into something between relief and suspicion.

"You're just kids," he said. "What the hell are you doing out there?"

(AN: And the Key to the Unknown drops James and Wednesday into the worst possible version of Gotham City, one where Batman is actually dead and Bane's nuclear clock is ticking. but the real question is how James is going to save an entire city without the Dark Knight. Anyway Hope you enjoyed.)