by Alden Odessa
“I don’t know, anywhere,” I responded to her.
“But I’m his?”
“What?”
“I’m his property.”
I was confused. What was she talking about? “Nobody is anybody’s property,” I said.
“I kinda am,” she said as I felt a sledgehammer slam into my gut. The wind blew out of me, and I fell to my knees. I had never been hit with anything like that in my life. The man had punched me right in the belly, and it hurt like hell, but nothing was broken. I remembered the body I had chosen. Only a twelve strength. There was no way I was going to be able to beat this guy fair and square. I would have to find another way.
I looked up at the man; he was unphased by my earlier assault. He looked familiar somewhat, but I couldn’t place from where. There is a possibility that I had seen him on the street when I first spawned.
“This is my bitch, and she ain’t earnin’.”
This was starting to make sense. She was a prostitute, and he was her pimp. Her outfit explained itself now.
“If a whore don’t earn she needs to be retired,” he said.
I regained my breath and tried to stand up, but then fell back to one knee, that punch had really done me in. Had of he hit me in the face I bet I would be taking a pretty long nap. There was no way to get physical with this guy; there was no point in trying. Brains. I was going to have to use my brains to work my way out of this one.
He lifted her up off of the ground. Her arm was tiny in his massive hands. She was pale, weak, emaciated almost. If he was her pimp, he wasn’t taking care of her. He took his other hand and put it around her neck. He looked back at me, wanting me to watch.
“I wasn’t going to kill her, but now that she has a hero to watch, I will.”
“Stop!” I said, reaching out my hand. “I’ll pay you.”
He stopped choking her but still kept his hand around her neck. “How much?”
“How much does she charge?”
“I can’t even get fifty bucks for a blow job from this bitch.”
“Two hundred, I will give you two hundred dollars for a blow job,” I wasn’t really in the mood right now. I needed to get out of here and get to the checkpoint. Not to mention the thought of getting a sad, forced blow job from a bloodied hooker was not something that turned me on. I was just looking to save the woman’s life.
He thought about it for a second and then began to laugh at me. “And then what?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“I get your two hundred bucks for a five-minute blow job, if she can even get you off, and then what? I still have to feed and house her scrawny ass until I can con someone into getting another one.”
“Three hundred,” I said, upping the offer.
He shook his head and looked back at her. “Say goodnight.”
“I’ll buy her!” What the fuck was I saying!
“Come again?”
“How much? I’ll buy her.”
This caused him to have another one of those belly laughs as he had before. “You want to buy her? Seriously?”
“Yes.”
“And what the fuck are you going to do with a shitty-ass whore?”
He had a point. I didn’t know what I was going to do with her. How did I let myself get wrapped up in this? It’s a game, this doesn’t matter, none of this is real. Meanwhile, I’m sure my wife will be home soon and castrate me for having my dick plugged into a virtual world where I just had sex with a two-thousand dollar a night whore.
But on the lighter side of things, I could breathe again, and stand up straight. So there’s that.
“Ten thousand,” he proclaimed
Shit, I almost lost my breath again! “What?!”
“You heard me.”
“You just said she wasn’t worth anything.”
“Not to me. I want to see how much her life was worth to you.”
Fuck, he had me. I looked at the girl. He was right; she wasn’t worth much from my experience so far in the game. I thought back to the screen that the first pimp had shown me. The tablet. The cheapest one he had was $400, and that girl had been better looking than this one. That wasn’t fair, this girl here was bloodied up, battered, bruised. Cleaned up maybe she would be worth a few hundred bucks for a back-alley quickie.
Was I really going to pay ten grand to save this girls life?
“A thousand,” I said, hoping he wouldn’t laugh at my ridiculously low counter offer.
I was wrong.
He laughed hysterically. “If you aren’t going to take this seriously we’re done talking.”
“I don’t have the money!” I said, not bluffing, I only had twenty-four hundred and change.
“How much you got?” he asked.
“I have two grand.”
He looked me over, thinking about it. I knew this was only the storyline mode, so at the end of the day, I wasn’t that worried about it. Right now, the most pressing thing on my mind was getting to that checkpoint and logging out before my wife discovered me at home.
“Tell you what,” he started, “You give me two grand now, and then you owe me another ten.”
“What! That’s two thousand more than you just asked for!”
“That’s before I knew you needed credit.”
“That’s ridiculous,” I said, knowing full well I was going to pay it in the end, or at least agree to it. I didn’t have that much intention of actually playing the storyline mode if I could get around it.
“Take it or leave it. You take it, she’s yours; you leave it, she dies.”
I don’t know why I care, but I do. Storyline mode or not, she may be just a bunch of code, but in the back of my mind, I would know that this character died because of me. I certainly didn’t need that on my conscience; I already had the whole spent-over-a-thousand-dollars-to-fuck-virtual-prostitute weight on my soul.
“Fine,” I finally said. Just like that, I saw a flash of red numbers as two thousand dollars evaporated from my account. I spent that to fuck Ronette; I guess this wasn’t that big of a deal. Besides the fact I now owed this guy, who was willing to just kill his own employee, ten grand. I wasn’t going to worry about that right now though. Right now, I saved this girls life, and I needed to get to that checkpoint and get the hell out of here.
Still holding the girl by the throat, he threw her my way, she stumbled and fell just a few feet in front of me.
“There ya go, pal. She’s your problem now.”
“What the hell am I supposed to do with her?”
“You’re call, bub. Fuck her, shoot her, whore her out, doesn’t matter to me.” I looked down at her, she looked up at me with blood in her eyes and smiled a nervous smile. Looking at it from her perspective, she didn’t know if she was any better off with me than she was with this thug.
The man turned to walk away, but then stopped and looked back towards me. “Hey, numbnuts?” he said, drawing my attention. “I would have taken just two grand if you offered it in the first place.”
“Take a mulligan?” I asked.
“Go fuck yourself,” he responded and walked away.
I looked back to my new tag along that I guess I was stuck with. She was wiping blood out of her eyes. She looked up to me but was not yet able to pull herself up off the ground.
“Thank you, mister.”
“Buster,” I said. “Buster Rockknocker.” Suddenly it wasn’t as funny. “What’s your name?”
She looked at me through the blood in her eyes. “Betty.”
No shit.
13
Checkpoint
“Do you want a blow job?” she said, looking up at me from the ground, blood starting to dry on her head and the corners of her mouth. She had wiped the blood from her eyes, and the result caused her to look a little bit like a very bizarre reverse raccoon. The two black eyes that were forming were going to fill in those clear spots on her skin soon enough, however.
It was a kind offer, but her c
urrent look was not exactly a turn on, especially after the last girl and the sudden guilt I was starting to feel about it.
“Uh, no, but thank you for the offer,” I said.
“Hand job?”
“No. I’m okay.”
“Fuck?”
That was the most pathetic request for sex I’ve ever had in my life. I didn’t know how to tell her this, but I really had no interest in her. “No, seriously. I’m good.”
She hung her head, dejected. “I am worthless.”
Great, I somehow bought a depressed prostitute. “No, you’re not worthless, I’m sure you’re lovely, but I have to be somewhere.”
Her eyes perked up, but she still seemed like she couldn’t move, so I leaned over and put my arm under hers and lifted her up. She instantly grabbed onto me, putting her arms around my waist. “Thank you,” she said.
The gratitude was palpable. This poor woman had the shit beat out of her, the least I could do was share a little compassion. I had been so caught up in the transaction details that I lost track of the fact that this woman was seconds from death.
“Are you okay?” I asked.
“I’m better now.”
“But are you physically hurt?”
“I think—I think I will be okay. Do you need me to work?”
“What?” I asked. Was she asking me what I thought she was asking me? Was she expecting me to ask her to turn tricks?
“Do you need me to work?” she asked again.
“No, you don't need to work. You’re free,” I said, but I didn’t think she was understanding.
“But you bought me. I’m yours now. That’s how this works.”
“What in the hell am I going to do with you,” I said, and she looked up at me. As I thought, she was small, a little over five feet and very thin. I couldn’t tell if she was malnourished or if she was just naturally small. She was older than I initially thought. She was close to my age, mid-thirties. She had dirty blond hair and pale-tan skin. She just wasn’t anything special. That’s the best way I could describe her, in a world of perfect beauties, she was just plain. Not her fault, someone designed her this way.
I wonder if she had been doing this for a while, did people age in this game, was she once young? Did she have a childhood? Why did I care?
Oh yeah, I owned her now.
“Look, you don’t owe me anything,” I said.
“My life,” she countered and had a point.
“Look I have someplace to be.”
“I’ll come with you,” she said, clinging on to me as I tried to pull away. “Please don’t leave me. I have no place to be.”
Fuck me this was getting annoying. I didn’t know what to do to get away from her, so I just told her to come along. I looked at her and realized I couldn’t just walk out into the street with a woman, bloodied and bruised. Or maybe I could, I hadn’t seen a policeman yet and who knew what the court of public opinion was like in this place. In the end, however, I opted against it.
I looked around to see what I could use to clean her up; there wasn’t much. I took off my jacket and used the black sleeve to clear the blood off of her face. All I did was smear it; if I continued this way I would only succeed in making her face pink. Continuing to check my environment for aid I had an idea that I didn’t like, but it was an idea I could use.
“Hold on,” I told her and took my jacket over to the side of the building in the alley. The gutter was dripping water, even though it hadn’t rained since I had been here. Again, all part of the game’s ambiance.
I let the water drip from the gutter and onto the clean sleeve of my jacket until it was saturated with water. I came back over and began to wipe her off.
“We’ll get you cleaned up better, but for right now, this will have to work,” I said. She didn’t say anything, she just closed her eyes and let me clean her off. What the hell was I going to do with a prostitute? After I saved my progress, would she now be in my inventory? Is that how this worked? That would be pretty annoying if every time I logged in I had to have this woman with me at all times.
I cleaned her off best I could. She was not an unattractive woman, but again, just plain. There was nothing special about her, and that was a problem in a game populated with the most beautiful women I had ever seen. I took my coat and told her to put it on. I wanted to draw as little attention to us as possible, which may be a problem, those black eyes and cuts on her face were now more prominent than before after wiping away the blood. I was screwed here, no other way to put it.
I had no more options. I had to get to the checkpoint; I wasn’t even sure how much time I had spent with this whole endeavor. She opened her eyes, and I saw some green numbers flash up out of the corner of my eye. I had increased in some of my stats somehow. I also heard a jingle, and I saw a flash in front of me: OBJECTIVE COMPLETE +1 BR +1 STR +6 T +3 DOM
Not a lot of increase in my stats for completing the first objective, although that +6 in trust was nothing to sneeze at, but I didn’t know how that would help me.
I checked my menu.
H: 59 $: 685 BR: 44 T: 38 DOM: 55 PRW: 70 STR: 13
The two most concerning things here were the health and money. I was about out of cash, and I guess I took quite a bit of a beating at this dude’s hands. I was probably also a little tired. I knew I was, I could feel it. I was tired inside of the game, and it felt just like being tired in real life.
I’ll worry about that later. I looked at Betty; she looked scared. “Come on; we have to go.”
She reached over and grabbed my hand. She was afraid and looking to me for comfort; it was sweet, but not my main thought. I took her hand and led her out of the alley.
I had done my best not to be suspicious, walking down the street with a beaten hooker at my side. I don’t know if I did an exceptionally good job of this, or if a smacked around prostitute was just nothing out of the ordinary. Either way, nobody seemed to notice us, or at least not care.
I walked into the building labeled simply: CHECKPOINT and looked around for a save location. It looked like a normal small business. There was a counter, where people were in line, and there were two people, a man, and a woman, working behind the counter.
Betty and I got in line behind two other people in front of us. I looked at Betty, noticing that these florescent lights in this brightly lit office did her no favors. She looked like what she was, a cheap hooker. She had bags under her eyes, dried blood on her face that I had failed to get all of, and it looked like she had a few small scars on her face that had never been treated properly.
She looked tired and downtrodden, and she probably was.
“How long has it been since you slept?” I asked her.
“I’m not sure. I think, maybe a day, Bruce had me working, trying to get him some money.”
“Bruce, that was your last guy's name?”
“Yes,” she said with a sad expression. I couldn’t tell if she missed him, maybe a little Stockholm Syndrome, or if the name itself was what caused her sadness.
“Well, you don’t have to worry about him anymore,” I said, not sure if it was a good thing or a bad thing.
“Don’t you owe him money?”
“Well, yeah,” I said, realizing that maybe she did have to still worry about him. “I’ll get the money, don’t worry.”
“Is that why we’re here?”
“No, not really,” I said. It dawned on me that I didn’t know what would happen to her once I was gone. I didn’t know how the game mechanics worked. Did she cease to exist once I logged out? I didn’t think so. Something told me that she was here long before me and that she would be here long after me. What happened to my “property” when I was logged out?
Always. Read. The. Instructions.
I was suddenly filled with worry for the poor woman; she didn’t appear to have anyone here but me. Who would look after her?
Once again, I was getting sidetracked from the matter at hand. I had to get home. I still wasn
’t sure how long I had been here, but I had been going by the worst-case-scenario, and that put me at about five in the evening, my time. Real world time. I had to get home and get ready for my wife to get home or I might as well have to sell all the new shit I bought to put a down payment on a good divorce attorney.
“Look,” I said to Betty. “I’m going to be gone for a little while; I’m going to give you whatever money I have left. I want you to get a hotel room and a decent meal. I want you to take a shower and clean yourself up.”
“Where are you going?” she asked with a tremble in her voice.
“I’ll just be gone for a little while, but I will come back for you.” I wasn’t one-hundred-percent sure that I was telling the truth here, but in theory, I was honest.
“But what will happen to me if you don't come back?”
“I will.”
Then from a distance, I heard a woman’s voice, “Next!”
I looked over and saw a rather attractive woman, in fact very attractive. All the women appeared to be good looking, except for the one I was stuck with. I walked up to the woman at the counter, who was trying her best to smile, but you could tell that she hated her job. There was a certain air about her that let you know; she wanted to be anywhere but here.
“Welcome to Checkpoint, how may I help you?”
I realized that I hadn’t planned what I was going to say, or what the procedure was. There were three things that had been weighing on my mind: I had to get here, to save. Trying to look inconspicuous with a bloody hooker, and I was sore as hell from the gut punch I got earlier. I was also tired as referenced from my health meter.
All of that, and I still had no idea what to say to get out of the game and leave all this behind me. “Uh,” I began without knowing where to go with the sentence. “I need to save.”
“Save what?”
“The game.”