Project Battle Royale: A Gamelit Survival Book

by L. S. Halloway

  I jogged down the half-paved road, past the highway sign riddled with bullet holes. To the left, a series of rock plateaus rose into the clear sky. To the right lay nothing but miles of desert. The road between our Spot #2 and Picante always ended up being one of the safer walks in the game. There were no weapons to pick up anywhere but the city or the place we landed at, which meant the chances of ambush stayed low. It was always nice to know the only threat lingered out in front rather than from behind a nearby boulder.

  The domed wrestling basketball gym stood just beyond the city limits. Anybody upstairs there would have no angle on me. I turned around when I arrived at the first grouping of houses within the boundary of the city, mostly to see what else Goemon had looted. Only my partner in crime was nowhere to be found. The only friend there was the lonesome and dusty road.

  “Hey, where are you?” I called into the voice chat.

  “What do you mean? I’m in here. Where are you?” Goemon asked.

  “I’m at Picante, at the houses.”

  “Oh no.”

  “I thought we were running over here!”

  “There were still two more houses to loot. I found a scope. And an extended mag. And a shotgun.”

  “Yeah but speed!”

  “OK, OK, I’ll come over there.”

  The doors of every house near me had been left open. That meant the places had all been cleaned out. It also meant that some unknown number of enemy players could occupy the very same dwellings. I crouched with my back against the red stone slope. Keep the threat in front of me, I figured.

  The warzone raged all around me. It rattled like a sound check for a melodic death metal band. The double bass drum sounds fine, you guys can take it easy now, I thought. Still, at least there was some distance between myself and that noise. I just needed Goemon to get to me.

  “Five seconds,” he said.

  “Five seconds until you get here? I don’t see you.” There was nothing on that highway but empty promises.

  “Oh sorry. Five seconds until I leave. Just don’t die.”

  As he finished his sentiment, a face appeared in the window of the two story adobe house nearest me. Five seconds on the biggest map in the game proved far too long a time to wait. I was on my own, nothing more than a cutout paper target in a western shooting gallery. We should have stayed together.

  The face belonged to the reaper, or maybe el diablo. Either way they had come for my soul. He knew exactly where I was, either from my chattering or my footsteps. I aimed the Vector SMG from the hip and fired. The glass shattered. I think the shot was good, but their shot was too and they must have hit me with something bigger. My helmet flew off and I hit the ground before it did. I swear I hit the shot. I swear I did not miss. But the other guy just stared at me through the broken window, holding my fate in his hands, able to finish it with one more pull of the trigger.

  “I’m down,” I said, dejected. Goemon could never reach me in time. Besides, I had no hole to crawl into. The only reason I was even still breathing was so the enemy player might get a chance to find out where my partner was hanging out.

  “Ah man you gotta be kidding me,” Goemon said.

  “I shot him in the face. I know I did. I’m positive.”

  “I’m coming over there.”

  It was too late and he probably knew it, too, but there was no backup plan and nowhere else to go. I was stuck between a literal rock wall and a high powered firearm hammer. I was embarrassed and ashamed, crawling around like a wounded rat. As for Goemon, it was a march to his own execution. Sure, there was the slimmest chance of successful revenge. This alone motivated him forward. I mean, it was either that or give up and disconnect and we never disconnected.

  I never caught sight of the second member of the duo. Goemon smashed through a bottom floor window. The sound of the footsteps switched from boot on tile to boot on wood. He was headed upstairs, brazen, unhinged, gun blazing. If he had stopped to pick me up we both would have died in a much more humiliating fashion.

  It was over in about a second. The other duo knew he was up there and they were waiting for him. Maybe it was just the one guy, I never even found out. But el diablo got the drop on him and that’s all it took. All of that time looting, the weapon mods, the parachuting, the optimism, the anticipation, all just a dirt devil that kicked up for a moment before dying back to the silent desert earth.

  “How many times do you have to shoot somebody in this game?” my teammate yelled. I watched from the third person perspective as my lifeless course slumped over with no fanfare. My point of view spiraled into oblivion. He was dead and so was I and the round was over.

  “We should have stayed together,” I said.

  11

  Road Trippin

  The first guy ended up with quite the haul after his loot of the place combined with all the players that went down before him. How nice of him to gather it all for us. There were enough bandages, first aid kits, and cans of mystery soda to keep us healed up for the next couple of engagements at least. We split it all down the middle, even scoring a bottle of painkillers each for that sweet, sweet full health bar.

  The scene in the apartment was reminiscent of my brother’s college dorm room. A bomb had very clearly gone off. Though the walls remained intact I could not say the same for the rest of the place. PBR’s janky game engine and lack of destructive environments (read: indestructible buildings) did have the benefit of often keeping you safe from collateral explosive damage.

  KKKatFish, or at least what was left of him, had been blown out the door and into the stairwell. His loot remained in the room and we proceeded to rifle through the rest of it after healing up.

  “You want the extended mag?” Goemon asked.

  “You don’t want it?” I said.

  “The Kar is my main, seems like a waste to put it on the AK. Until we find another one at least.”

  “Yeah sure, I’ll take it.”

  Even though the Mini was semi-automatic I had a knack for dumping the ammo faster than my last girlfriend dumped me. That’s unfair, though, because to tell the truth Samantha and me never actually made it that far in the first place. I just needed to ask her out first. If only I had the same confidence IRL as I did in game.

  The player’s loot box contained a healthy stash of ammo. The 556 went to me and the 775 went to Goemon. He could use the bigger bullet type in both of his guns which was convenient. No shotgun rounds to be had, but that was fine, I didn’t need many. I pocketed enough boxes of bullets that I could be liberal with the trigger, especially now that I had an extended mag to roll with, too.

  To top it all off, I found a nice cheek pad which fit over the butt of the Mini. I’m not sure exactly what it did but I did know that I needed it, bad. I aimed out the window, just to try it out. It was much more comfortable than the wood grain. Maybe it would give me the edge I needed to hit the accurate shots, maybe it would reduce recoil so I could enter rapid fire assault mode, maybe it would just make it a bit more comfortable.

  The important thing was the upgraded stock put the rifle close to fully kitted. In fact, it would have been if I insisted on taking the Flash Hider. Goemon deserved it for the AK, though, he had to put something on there. It slipped over the barrel, destined to help a little bit with reigning in the bucking bronco recoil of the machine gun. Whether the weapon mod actually made a difference in hiding muzzle flash was unclear. There was never enough of a controlled environment to test out the claim.

  Being fully healed and fully loaded felt incredible, but the break could not last. The cat and mouse game of the last engagement chewed up so much time off the clock that the Blue Wall of Death had initiated its hungry march across the map. To top it off, the Safety Circle was far again. It really seemed like the first placement dictated the rest of the match. If the Circle started far it would only get further. That trend continued here.

  “Ah man, I don’t want to run all the way down there,” I groaned.

&n
bsp; “It’s not even that far,” Goemon replied.

  “If we run, by the time we get there it will just have moved again.”

  “So? We will make it without getting hurt. Then we just run to the new Circle.”

  “I hate the chase game.”

  “You want to get a car, is what you’re saying.”

  “Oh baby. Great idea,” I said.

  “It was yours.”

  “You said it. And I think we should find The Drop, we’ve got time with a car. And I agree, and if it goes wrong, it’s your fault and I want you to remember that.”

  “Alright, whatever you say, let’s just check the other guy’s stash first.”

  Big City had to contain one car, or at the very least a motorcycle. Motorcycles were so much worse because the physics of the game made it a near guarantee that getting up to speed would result in hitting a molehill, getting launched off the bike, and flying into a tree at some ungodly and nonconvertible speed in kilometers per hour. But boy, were they fun, whether they had a sidecar attached or not. There were many cars in the game, some slow, some fast, some armored, all effective so long as they had an engine and gas, and all a bit on the safer side.

  As we exited the building and went around back, the bad news came first. It arrived in the form of a missing loot box. There was no sign of the body of BassMan, the other member of the conquered duo, and nothing to grab as a result. With the Blue encroaching, there was no more time to spend searching for the crate. What a waste it was to take down another enemy and not reap the benefits- just like that spring break I spent annotating Anna Karina only to find out the assignment got canceled via email the day after class got out.

  Whether it was limitations of the game engine or accuracy in geographical architecture, eventually the buildings in PBR repeated themselves. Certain types got cloned a bit more often than others. For instance, the same guard tower showed up around the map. Items varied inside, but the layout and look always stayed identical.

  The more pertinent example was the garage. Two types of them existed in Big City. One was what I imagined to be a Soviet 7-11, with a couple of sparse aisles inside of an efficient space. There was never anything good in them, usually just some shotgun shells or something behind the counter. It featured a corrugated metal roll-up door as an entrance, just like the second version of the building. A garage or auto mechanic’s shop hid behind the door of version 2.0. Often, but not always, a car would be parked there.

  “One more time, where did you last see him?” Goemon asked.

  “Right around this corner. He’s gone, man. Gone.”

  “Dang.”

  “It’s ok, because I think I see our ticket to happiness behind door number one here.”

  The door shook and screeched as I pulled the chain to roll it up. The sound did not bother me, now that I knew we were the last duo standing in Big City’s radius. The only thing that bothered me was the shade of grandma beige adorning the car inside the garage.

  “Hey a Dosha, look at that,” Goemon said.

  “Wish it was the red one. I would have settled for grey sky blue,” I said.

  “Well now you get to settle for white. You want me to drive?”

  “I think you know the answer.”

  “Probably a good call.”

  Goemon might have done most of the driving IRL- he owned the wheels, even if they were attached to the family minivan- but I handled hauling duties in game. Somehow, when he got behind the steering wheel all of his caution and patience went out the window. Often literally, as we were frequently ejected out any of the six windows of the vehicle depending on what cliff he drove off of or what tree we rammed into.

  I hopped into the driver seat while my teammate got comfortable on the passenger’s side. He switched to the AK and rested the barrel outside the window.

  “If you were cool you’d just use the Kar for a drive by,” I said.

  “Stop it. Let’s do this,” Goemon replied.

  The clown car horn sounded at the insistence of my fist. Honking that funny little horn was half the fun of driving the car, even if it always ruined the stealth approach. The build quality of the Dosha matched the duckling honk, from the miniscule ultra-subcompact frame to the one and a half cylinder engine under the hood. Still, it got great gas mileage even with four doors, and at a half a tank we could drive all over First Island. Maybe we would, so long as we avoided any big hills. Any of those would require Goemon to get out and push.

  I backed the car out of the garage at full throttle and rammed into the apartment building across the alley. No serious damage, just a very small, maybe five percent hit to our health. Goemon hassled me but without good reason. It was impossible to navigate those tiny alleyways with the behemoth Dosha. Besides, we were fine and out on the open road.

  The outer limits of Big City contained few notable landmarks or places worth stopping. Terrain consisted of mostly rolling grassy hills, some steep off road inclines that needed to be avoided in the Dosha, and swathes of boulders and trees just off the main path. The webbed network of roads, both paved and otherwise, connected just a few minutes’ drive to the south in the same direction as the Safety Circle. The Dosha handled the gentle curves of the road just fine. After all, I was at the helm.

  “You hear that?” Goemon asked.

  “Oh yeah. That’s the sound of the Dosha, buddy. This engine purrs like an angry lawnmower,” I said.

  “Man, my sound is all messed up.”

  “Your sound is always messed up.”

  “I know, I know.”

  “I swear I hear something. Something not the Dosha.”

  “Actually, I think I hear it too.”

  Even with my steady, expert driving skills, the trip was not a pleasure cruise. It did not take long for the sound of another vehicle to come bouncing off the hills towards us. It was likely another duo fleeing the Blue on their way to the Circle just like we were. There was still plenty of room to plot a safe course away from them. But where was the fun in that? I jerked the wheel of the Dosha, banking towards the sound of the rival motor. The game was on.

  “What are you doing?” Goemon shouted from halfway out the window. My maneuver almost knocked him out of the Dosha altogether.

  “We’re gonna go get ‘em,” I replied.

  It’s possible the purr of the Dosha was inaudible next to the roar of the all-terrain SUV the other duo piloted. They did not appear to take any sort of evasive action as we crested a low hill, moving close enough to put the rugged Land Rover-knockoff in shooting rage. We cruised down the other side of the hill, where we lost a bit of an opportunity at a broadside by opting to dodge a boulder instead. Goemon fired a fully automatic burst anyways.

  It sounded like bullets on metal to me. The SUV swerved wildly away from us and off the road as if they had just become aware of our position. If we had any sort of surprise advantage, it was gone now. We still had the more nimble Dosha which was something, but the Land Rover had armor. A straight shootout spelled disaster if the other guy had a halfway decent rifle. At this point, he probably did.

  “Sounded like you hit him,” I said.

  “I did, like 10- how many times do you have to hit somebody in this-”

  “Did you hit them or just the car?”

  “I hit everything!”

  Both cars were deadlocked in a parallel off road drag race until a stalwart tree forced dual swerves. The SUV fired back at us- maybe an M4 from the sound of it- but the wild steering from both drivers sent the bullets everywhere else. It was better off that way. We never shined in a broadside battle.

  Instead, I eased off the gas for a moment before punching it. It was time to play tailgater. All I needed to do was follow the SUV’s moves, keep a distance, and Goemon and his AK could handle the rest.

  12

  Drive By

  The road was several kilometers back by now, which by my estimation was at least the length of multiple football fields. The terrain had flattened o
ut and shifted from rolling rocky hills to vast pastures of wheat or hay. It had been cut recently, so visibility sat at one hundred percent. Rolled up bales the size of sideways concrete freeway supports remained as the only obstructions in the farmland.

  “Think the Dosha could win against one of those?” I wondered aloud, pointing as we passed a giant wheat burrito.

  “Uh, no. It’s a miracle we’ve never hit one before.”

  It was no miracle. The flat field gave me more room to maneuver than a fighter pilot in outer space. The biggest threat out there sped just in front of us, and it came on four wheels. Twice the passenger stuck his body out the window, peppering bullets at us. The SUV drove so erratically that we sustained only minimal damage to the hood of the Dosha and so far no flesh wounds.

  “Think you can put the wheels out in this game?” I asked.

  “What, like shoot ‘em?” Goemon replied.

  “Yeah, does that work?”

  “Of course. Remember the bridge that one time?”

  Oh yeah, the bridge. I had almost forgotten about that and why we both now had a completely rational fear of driving over bodies of water. The details of how it happened were inconsequential, but the end result did matter. It was that one time sparks flew off the right rims of our SUV as they ground across the asphalt. The vehicle caught fire briefly, but went out when it careened off the bridge and into the rocky ocean below. Needless to say, we died.

  “Thanks for bringing that up. I do remember.”

  “The point is it’s possible to shoot them. But I don’t want to die,” Goemon said. We swerved around another hay bale. On the return to the straightaway, I punched the throttle. It was time to close the gap.

  “You’ll be alright,” I said.

  “Oh, ok.”

  Another volley of gunfire sprayed us from the passenger ahead. At this distance he was able to do some actual damage. About a half dozen holes appeared in the hood of the Dosha. The windshield took it even worse as it shattered into more jagged pieces than the bottom of a Doritos bag. The glass was just as dangerous.