by Matt Ruff
The plane levels out. The cabin lights flicker back on and the TV transmission resumes. The chyron now reads: BREAKING NEWS! “. . . reports of violence from Pyongyang as well,” the announcer is saying. “It appears the terrorist group Red Wolf has launched a coordinated assault on both capitals.”
Mr. Jones looks up at the TV screen before turning to me. “Red Wolf?”
“A radical separatist group opposed to unification,” I say, quoting from the official game wiki.
“And our goal is to crush them?”
“One goal, yeah.” There’s also the matter of the Zed referenced in the game’s title, but I opt not to spoil that for him.
“We must get on the ground as quickly as possible,” he says.
“I wouldn’t worry about it,” I say. Though in fact, the plane is no longer descending.
The pilot comes back on the loudspeaker: “Attention, passengers. Owing to the state of emergency in Pyongyang, we must abort our landing and return to Beijing.”
“No!” Mr. Jones says, starting towards the cockpit. “I forbid—”
Lightning hits the plane, or maybe it’s some sort of energy weapon. There’s a blinding flash. The cabin lights go out for good this time, and the TV goes black. The plane’s nose dips sharply and a female NPC starts screaming.
Mr. Jones steadies himself in the aisle and faces me, his expression only visible because of the flames streaming from the left-side engine.
“Like I said.” I shout to be heard above the screams. “Don’t worry about it.”
RIGHT BEFORE THE CRASH, I GET AN INSTANT MESSAGE from Smith: YOU ARE LOGGED IN FROM A NEW IP ADDRESS. WHERE ARE YOU?
The game has seized control of my POV and plastered my face to the window. As lightning illuminates the ground rushing up towards the plane, the sound of my character’s panicked breathing fills my ears.
HOUSE-SITTING FOR A FRIEND, I reply. As I hit send, it occurs to me that Smith may not know what “house-sitting” is.
I hear the pilot’s voice, echoing as if down a long tunnel: “Brace! Brace! Brace!” The plane’s left wing clips a power pylon. The wing shears off and the plane shudders and starts to roll. Everything goes black.
Out of the darkness, Smith messages: WHERE?
SAN BRUNO. NEAR THE AIRPORT.
WHAT STREET ADDRESS?
On the way to the motel, I had the cab detour through a nearby residential neighborhood, and picked out a house with a spiked fence and a Great Dane guarding the front yard. I type in the address, adding, BE CAREFUL OF SCOOBY IF YOU COME BY.
SCOOBY? Smith responds.
The darkness is lifting. GAME IS ON. GOT TO GO.
I am standing in a field strewn with burning wreckage. The rain has stopped, but lightning continues to flicker in the sky. My motion control comes back slowly: At first all I can do is stagger drunkenly, while my vision goes in and out of focus. Then things sharpen up and I’m able to look around.
The plane’s fuselage broke into three pieces on impact. The front end of the passenger cabin, where we were sitting, stayed mostly intact, but the tail and the rows behind us completely disintegrated—so much for grabbing one of the soldiers’ rifles. The detached nose of the plane continued onward, plowing through the perimeter fence of the Kim Jong-il International Airport. It looks like we almost made it to the runway.
Jolene, Ray, and Anja stumble towards me out of the gloom. Mr. Jones appears, leading a pair of shaken-up NPCs. He waves his satellite phone triumphantly. “I have made contact with another UN team,” he says. “They say they can transport us to the city center. We are to rendezvous with them in the main terminal.” He turns and looks back past the flames at the Pyongyang skyline, and I can tell there’s a part of him that would like to just start walking. But the burning jet fuel and fragments of the tail section have formed an impassible barrier.
We go through the hole in the fence and sprint towards the terminal. Nothing else is moving on the airport tarmac, and as we pass a darkened hangar, the female NPC—the same one who was screaming on the plane, I think—starts whimpering with fear. “Be quiet, woman!” Mr. Jones says. Jolene, beside me, mimes sticking a finger down her throat.
As we near the terminal building we hear the sound of automatic weapons fire and see muzzle flashes behind some of the windows. Mr. Jones breaks out his satellite phone again, but before he can call the UN team for an update, there is a loud crack! of a rifle shot and the female NPC goes down. “Sniper!” the other NPC shouts helpfully.
We take cover behind a stalled baggage trailer. The trailer’s driver was shot, but survived; we find him sitting with his back against one of the trailer carts, fighting to draw breath. His sucking chest wound serves as a tutorial for Ray’s medic skills. Once he’s been patched up and can speak, he tells us where the nearest entrance to the terminal is. It’s close, but we’re going to have to cross an open stretch of tarmac to reach it.
“You,” Mr. Jones says, turning to our other NPC. “You go first.” The NPC balks, but Mr. Jones pulls rank, tapping his envoy badge for emphasis.
The NPC makes a dash for it. He’s barely out of cover when the sniper blows his head off.
“Running will not work,” Mr. Jones observes. “What shall we try next?”
I nod at the trailer carts. “Maybe there’s something in here we can use.”
There is. The center cart contains several tall metal cases on wheels bearing the name and logo of a K-pop band. Anja uses her engineering skills and some scrounged bungee cords to string the cases together into a rolling ballistic shield. We crouch behind it and duck-walk across the tarmac. The sniper fires half a dozen bullets at us, but the shield holds until we are out of his line of sight.
We reach the door into the terminal. The lock is controlled by an electronic keypad; the baggage car driver gave us the code in exchange for a promise to send back help. But when we punch in the number, the keypad emits an angry buzz and a robotic voice informs us that the airport is on emergency lockdown.
Jolene goes to work hacking the mechanism. The door unlocks and Mr. Jones hauls it open. “Wait,” I say, and remind him that of all the characters, I’m the only one who hasn’t gotten to use my special ability yet.
“Good point,” Mr. Jones says. “Lead the way.”
I step through the door into a broad stairwell. Sprawled at my feet is the body of another baggage handler; it looks like he broke his neck falling down the stairs. Looking up, I glimpse another corpse on the half-landing above me, with a uniformed figure hunched over it. I hear grunting noises and the sound of tearing flesh.
“What is that?” Mr. Jones says, entering the stairwell behind me. The figure in uniform looks up at the sound and turns towards us. Its face is covered in gore, and in its eagerness to feed, it has bitten its own lips off, leaving its teeth horribly exposed.
“It’s Zed,” I say. The uniformed zombie growls at us.
I draw my pistol and aim for the head.
WE FIND MORE BODIES INSIDE THE TERMINAL. THE STAIRWELL exits into a passenger waiting area that’s been hit by a bomb blast; corpses and severed limbs are draped over the shattered seats. Slumped against the far wall is a flight attendant who is missing the top of his skull; his brain matter is spattered across a floor-to-ceiling poster that shows a grinning Kim Jong-un arm-in-arm with his old pal Dennis Rodman. There’s a lot going on here, visually, but the detail that jumps out at me is that Rodman, who broke his back in a skydiving accident while I was still in grade school, is shown standing on two good legs. Like Kim’s, his image has been artificially aged—at ninety-one, he looks like a mummy with facial piercings—but he’s upright. This could be a nod to political realism on the part of the game designers: Physical handicaps are taboo in the DPRK, and it’s unlikely that a friend of the dictator would be portrayed in a wheelchair. On the other hand, this is the future, so maybe the idea is that the medical establishment has finally gotten spinal cord regeneration to work. I notice Anja is staring at the po
ster too; when she sees me looking at her, she shrugs a shoulder as if to say, It’d be nice if they did figure it out.
Mr. Jones finishes talking on his sat phone. “This way,” he tells us, pointing. “The UN team is in a restaurant across from boarding gate twenty-three. They have just beaten back an assault by the Red Wolves.”
The gate is at the other end of the terminal. Along the way we pass more scenes of carnage, all exquisitely rendered; the Red Wolves, and GSoft’s art department, have clearly put in a lot of work. “Jesus,” I hear Ray say, as he averts his eyes from a particularly gruesome death scene.
Near gate fifteen we find the bodies of several DPRK soldiers. They’ve been stripped of their weapons, but one of them is carrying a couple spare clips of pistol ammo.
“Tell me about the Zed,” Mr. Jones says, as I search the other corpses.
“They’re infected with a genetically engineered virus,” I tell him. “Later in the game, you find out that the Red Wolves recently infiltrated a bioweapons lab, looking for anthrax. They were caught and killed, but the Zed virus got loose, and one of the members of the tactical response team was infected before the lab could be sterilized. He brought the virus back to Pyongyang and it’s been spreading ever since. Tonight’s the night the zombie plague reached critical mass, just in time for the Red Wolves’ big assault . . .”
The lights in the terminal go out. I stand up slowly in the darkness, and since there are no NPCs around to state the obvious, I say: “The Red Wolves must have hit the local power station.”
The emergency lighting kicks in. The backup lights are dim and strategically positioned to leave large portions of the terminal in shadow.
“Gate twenty-three,” Mr. Jones says, sounding more annoyed than frightened. “Let’s go.”
The ambush happens at gate twenty. A man in civilian clothes steps out of the darkness in front of us; he has a black bandanna with a red wolf’s head tied mask-like over his mouth and nose, and he is carrying a submachine gun. I drop to a crouch and raise my pistol, but before I can get off a shot, a zombie emerges from the shadows as well. The Red Wolf screams as the zombie bites him on the shoulder. As the two of them grapple, a gunfight erupts in the near distance behind them, more black-clad figures opening fire on a barricaded restaurant.
“Give me your weapon,” Mr. Jones says.
“Remember our ammo is limited,” I say, handing him the pistol.
“I know what I am doing,” Mr. Jones says. He strikes a gunslinger pose, one eye shut and arm extended. He spends a long moment shifting his aim back and forth. Then he pulls the trigger, twice. The zombie’s skull explodes, while the Red Wolf’s head snaps sideways. As their bodies hit the floor, the nearby firefight culminates in a massive explosion that rattles the terminal and sends a wall of smoke billowing towards us.
Silence descends. We wait. The smoke has just begun to dissipate when we hear coughing and approaching footsteps. A figure stumbles into view with its arms in the air.
“Halt!” Mr. Jones commands. “Identify yourself!”
“Corporal Chen Li-jun of the United Nations peacekeeping force! Don’t shoot, I am unarmed!”
Mr. Jones lowers the pistol and taps his envoy badge. “Report, Corporal Chen.”
“The rest of my team is dead, sir! One of the Red Wolves set off a satchel charge.”
“Did you say you are unarmed?”
“Yes sir! I am a mechanic, sir, not a fighter.”
“What about your security people? Can we use their guns?”
“Their weapons were all destroyed in the explosion, sir. And the terrorists’ weapons.”
“How inconvenient,” Mr. Jones says dryly. He hands me back my pistol and takes the submachine gun from the Red Wolf he killed. It looks like it’s in working order; there’s only one forty-round clip, but it’s full. “This will do for now,” he says. “Corporal Chen, I was told you could arrange transport to the city center.”
“Yes sir.” Corporal Chen explains that there is—or rather, was—a monorail line linking the airport to the central station at the Ryugyong Hotel. The Red Wolves have knocked out a section of the rail near the airport perimeter, but three kilometers to the south there is another station that is still connected, and soldiers and police are reported to be rallying there. “We must find a vehicle and drive there. Then you can take the monorail into the city center.”
“No,” Mr. Jones says. “I wish to get to the city center as quickly as possible. We will drive there directly.”
Corporal Chen blinks and looks momentarily confused. Then he repeats his previous statement word for word, with the exact same intonation.
Mr. Jones sighs in exasperation. “We can try driving straight to the city,” I say. “But if we’re supposed to take the monorail, a car trip may not be possible.”
“Ridiculous,” Mr. Jones mutters. Then he says, “Very well. Corporal Chen, get us out of here and find us a vehicle.”
“Yes sir! Sir, I must also inform you that there is a Red Wolf sniper on the roof of the terminal . . .”
“Yes, we know.”
“Before we leave, you may wish to go up to the roof and deal with him. It will safeguard our departure, and his weapon could be useful.”
“I have no interest in acquiring a sniper rifle,” Mr. Jones says. “I am impatient to get to the city. Find us a vehicle.” He waits, frowning, to see if the corporal will repeat himself again.
“Yes sir!” Chen says. “This way, sir.” He turns and starts moving. Mr. Jones, Jolene, Ray, and I all follow him, but I turn back when I notice Anja isn’t with us.
She is standing over the Red Wolf and the zombie Mr. Jones shot. It looks like she’s staring at something, but this time there’s no poster in her line of vision, and as I get closer I see that her avatar is not just still but completely motionless.
“Anja?” I say, reaching out. My hand doesn’t just pass through her, it erases the portion of her avatar that it touches. I wave my arm back and forth, and her entire upper torso disappears, leaving her head hanging frozen in midair. Creepy.
“John Chu!” Mr. Jones calls back to me. “What is the problem?”
“Anja’s glitched,” I tell him. “She must have disconnected.”
“Can she rejoin the game?”
“I don’t know.”
“We will proceed without her,” he says. “If she logs back in, she will have to catch up to us. Now come on!”
As we make our way through the terminal, I send Anja an instant message, asking her what happened. I get no answer. But I do get a message from Ms. Pang. LOOK FOR AN OPPORTUNITY TO ISOLATE MR. JONES, it says.
WHAT DO YOU MEAN, “ISOLATE”? I write back.
LOSE THE OTHER MEMBERS OF YOUR PARTY. KILL THEM IF YOU HAVE TO, BUT TRY TO BE SUBTLE. ONCE YOU AND JONES ARE ALONE, KEEP YOUR EYES OPEN. WHEN YOU SEE ME COMING, DISTRACT HIM.
I HAVE QUESTIONS, I write.
YOU HAVE YOUR MONEY, she replies. NOW DO AS YOU ARE TOLD.
In baggage claim a pitched battle is underway between a Red Wolf, a squad of North Korean soldiers, and a big pack of zombies. The Red Wolf tries to make a fighting retreat along a stalled conveyor belt; he gets grabbed from behind and dragged out of sight, along with his weapon. The zombies swarm the soldiers’ position. The squad leader screams something patriotic and sets off a belt of grenades; the blast brings down a big chunk of the ceiling, burying the squad and most of the Zed. While Mr. Jones and I shoot the few zombies that are left, Jolene spies a golf bag among the scattered luggage and arms herself with a nine iron.
Outside, the passenger pickup area is another scene of carnage. In addition to the bodies, there are enough cars to constitute a traffic jam by DPRK standards, but none of them are drivable: They are all shot or smashed up, or on fire. Off to our right, though, in the clear and conspicuously undamaged, is an idling passenger bus. “There is our ride,” Corporal Chen says.
“I will drive,” says Mr. Jones, but Corporal Chen sprints ahe
ad, and by the time we board he is already behind the wheel. No amount of envoy badge-tapping will convince the corporal to move, so Mr. Jones takes a seat across from him and glares instead.
Jolene, Ray, and I move towards the back of the bus. A zombie pops up and I shoot it in the head. We sit.
“What’s up with Anja?” Jolene asks me.
“I don’t know. I messaged her, but she’s not answering. Maybe her internet is out.”
“Lucky girl,” Ray says.
“What’s your problem?” says Jolene.
“My problem is I don’t like seeing people with their faces chewed off. I mean, if it’s cartoon gore, OK, but this shit . . .” He gestures at the downed Zed, whose left eye has come out of its socket and now dangles from a stalk, jiggling with the motion of the bus.
We’ve cleared the terminal. The road curves to merge with a broader thruway. As Corporal Chen makes the turn, we hear a familiar crack! and the side window behind Mr. Jones shatters. The bullet hits the corporal in the head and his brains spray across the front windshield. “Great,” Ray says. As the bus swerves out of control, Mr. Jones tries to grab the wheel. But the crash that follows is scripted—our penalty for declining the sniper side quest.
The bus plows through a guard rail and plunges down a steep embankment. Our characters don’t black out this time, but the simulated whiplash as we hit bottom is enough to make even a veteran VR player queasy.
We stumble out of the wreck and regroup by the light of the one surviving headlamp. We’ve come down onto a two-lane road that runs beneath the thruway. To our left the road is blocked by a jackknifed tractor trailer. To our right is a dark tunnel; a blinking pair of hazard lights is visible at the far end. Our next ride, probably, if we can get to it.
“I’m sure there aren’t a million Zed hiding in there,” Jolene deadpans. She glances towards the embankment, but without even trying she knows it’s impossible to climb back up. We have to go through the tunnel.