When the Fly came back, Elgin took a look at the scan on the display that was getting projected from her wrist console. With her other hand, she rotated it and took a closer look at a few spots of the building.
The building had two wings, one to the west and one to the east. Each one was shaped like a sideways T, and it connected to the central section. From a top-down view, it looked kind of like a TIE fighter. Anyway, the only way to get from one wing to another was to go down to the ground floor and walk through the central section. The back of the central section was where all the offices were, and the front was basically just an entrance.
Elgin wanted to enter the building from the top. She considered getting inside and riding the elevator all the way to the top, but she wasn’t sure how much noise the elevator would make and how sensitive the burners were to that sound.
I scanned the building with my eyes, looking up and down the exterior. I noticed that there were plenty of fire escapes, so I offered a suggestion.
“What if I could get up on a fire escape and drop the ladder down? Then we could just walk our way up to the roof.”
Elgin questioned me with an eyebrow.
“You can get up on one?”
“Yeah, for sure.”
So we made our way to the exterior of the building. I looked for fire escapes that were either low enough for me to wall jump onto or had some other foothold that I could use to get scramble up onto. Finally, we found a wall where the brick on the ground floor extruded a little forward from the sheer wall that started up on the second story. Running ahead, I followed it until I got to a fire escape.
Standing back, I traced a path up to the fire escape in my mind’s eye. I could climb up the wall and grab a hold of the ledge, then pull myself up. Then I could get my legs up and over and put my feet on the top of the ledge before jumping up and grabbing the last rung on the fire escape ladder.
And that’s what I did. Well, on the first try, it didn’t really work out. I didn’t get enough traction under my shoes to gain any height on the wall. The second try though, I got up onto the fire escape.
From up there, I gave the team a thumbs up.
We got into the building through the roof. Up on the top floor, Elgin checked her map before she decided on a route. The plan was to clear each apartment, one by one, starting with the apartments in the northeast corner of the wing and going counter-clockwise. Halstead would be rear security and keep the hallway secure. We were to kill any burners we found and extract people who weren’t. The rendezvous point was the fire stairs in the middle of the building.
Warner complained that they’d typically have a full fireteam and more logistical support, but Elgin pointed out that in a dire situation, they might have to make do. He shot back, saying, “We’re not special operators. Let the SEALs do this shit.”
It reminded me a little of the way I might’ve sounded a while back. There was a time when I was working overtime on a project that was outside my job description as a system admin. I was complaining that I wasn’t being paid enough to do what they were asking. Nyla told me that it was a chance to shine, to show them what I was capable of. That it was a chance to move on up. Rise to the occasion. That’s what Nyla would say to Warner if she was in charge.
But Elgin didn’t have time to argue, and Warner was supposed to be a disciplined soldier who follows orders. She glared at him and he shut himself up.
Quietly, we made our way to the corner of the building and started our sweep.
Elgin formed up her team in front of the first apartment.
“Stack up,” she told them. Then she showed everyone the layout of the room.
Warner was on the right side of the door. He tried the doorknob, but he shook his head.
Elgin cursed. “We’re gonna make a lot of noise breaching this door,” she said.
Then she motioned at Halstead to breach the door.
Halstead unslung the breaching shotgun off his back and racked it. When I heard that metal click-clack, adrenaline started surging through me. He pressed the muzzle up against the knob, raising the handle high so that it was aimed down at the floor.
Elgin counted down silently with her fingers.
BANG.
Halstead’s shotgun popped off and he immediately threw the door open. I was surprised again at how percussive the shot sounded. I was also surprised that the door didn’t fly open like it did in action movies.
With expertly controlled movement, the team entered the apartment, funneling in one after the other through the door. Warner went in first with his carbine, then Addie. Tong came in third with his sidearm—it didn’t make any sense for him to be using the machine gun in close quarters. Elgin was the last one in, and Halstead stayed outside with me.
I heard some yelling from inside the apartment. It was the sound of Warner’s voice, followed by two gunshots popping off. Then I heard the hollow thud of a body crumpling on the wooden floor.
“Burner down!”
“Clear!”
They spent a few more moments in there, clearing the apartment. Meanwhile, I checked the console.
WarnerT25101 killed BERN_1108 with XM242CQB
WarnerT25101 +20 XP
Then I checked his user stats.
USER WarnerT25101
LEVEL 4
TOTAL XP 1920
STAT PTS 4 == TRAITS ==
STRENGTH 5
DEXTERITY 6
INTELLIGENCE 7
CONSTITUTION 4
FITNESS 6
The stat points were there. My system was working.
I put all his stat points into Constitution, which made it so that he only felt 84% of the pain. Or put another way, his pain resistance was at 16%.
When the team finished clearing the apartment everyone came out. I told Warner what I’d done and he thanked me.
Suddenly, we heard a dull thudding sound in the apartment right across the one they’d just cleared.
“Guess we’re stirring things up,” Tong said.
I was a little worried. “You think they can break through the doors?”
Tong thought about it. “It’ll probably take a while,” he said. “They don’t feel pain, so in theory they can ram into that door for as long as their bones still hold up. They’re about as strong as they were before they turned, so…”
Elgin eyed the team and motioned for them to stack up on the door.
“If you can hear me, step away from the door!” she yelled.
The thudding continued.
“I’m going to give you three seconds to get back!”
She glanced at her team to see if they were ready. They nodded.
“Three…two…one!”
Halstead breached the door and the team rushed in.
I looked inside. From where I was standing, I could see that there was a room with the door closed. That’s where the sound was coming from. The team stacked up on it, and Halstead threw the door open.
A burner came stumbling out. Reacting quickly, Tong took down the burner, firing two rapid shots to the body, then one to the head.
> TongY38100 attacked BERN_0915 with MSAP19 for 5 HP
> TongY38100 attacked BERN_0915 with MSAP19 for 5 HP
> BERN_0915 has 60 HP
> TongY38100 attacked BERN_0915 with MSAP19 for 120 HP
> TongY38100 killed BERN_0915
> TongY38100 +20 XP
There was still more thudding coming from another room, so they cleared that one too. More gunshots cracked through the air. My console burst to life with the live log.
> AdeyemiB12104 attacked BERN_0914 with XM242CQB for 10 HP
> ElginV36176 attacked BERN_0916 with XM242CQB for 11 HP
> ElginV36176 attacked BERN_0916 with XM242CQB for 12 HP
> AdeyemiB12104 attacked BERN_0914 with XM242CQB for 10 HP
> BERN_0914 has 50 HP
> BERN_0916 has 47 HP
> ElginV36176 attacked BERN_0916 with XM242CQB for 190 HP
> AdeyemiB12104 attacked BERN_0914 with XM242CQB for 205 HP
> ElginV36176 killed BERN_0916
> AdeyemiB12104 killed BERN_0914
> AdeyemiB12104 +20 XP
> ElginV36176 +20 XP
When everyone came out and gave me the all-clear, I assigned everyone their unused stat points. Everyone was the same level as Warner except for Elgin, who was three levels above. After spending her stat points, she was at 32% pain resistance. We had a long way to go from 99%.
We cleared a few more apartments, and then we got to one that had everyone nervous. This one had a lot of banging inside, much more than the other apartments we’d been clearing. We didn’t know exactly how many were in there, but it sounded like a lot. Elgin tried using the Fly, but it couldn’t get a clear read on the room from out there. It detected a lot of bodies in there, but we couldn’t tell how many.
Either way, we definitely weren’t expecting a large group. I wasn’t sure if the simulation had taken the nationwide lockdown into effect, but large gatherings of more than four people was illegal. The governor had issued an executive order and mayors had their police officers enforcing it pretty strictly with fines and sternly worded warnings. Most people obeyed—not out of respect for law and order, but out of self-preservation.
Anyway, the fireteam stacked up and breached the door.
Then all hell broke loose.
A burner stumbled out of the kitchen on the left, and we heard a kid crying in the closet to the right. Then someone opened a door to the bedroom on the right. Another door opened straight ahead, and a figure appeared in the doorway.
In the hallway with me, Halstead yells out to the team.
“Contact rear!”
Someone had come out of their apartment and into the hallway. And it wasn’t a burner.
It was a big man. He was thick with muscle, and his head was shaved.
“Get the fuck outta my building, pendejo!”
With his arms bowed out, his chest forward and his chin high, it was clear that he meant trouble.
Then, in long aggressive strides, he started towards Halstead.
Halstead brought his carbine up and yelled.
“We’re here to evacuate the building! Back up!”
The man wasn’t complying.
Then, a door opened up behind my left shoulder. I’d completely forgotten about it.
“Help!”
It was a woman’s voice.
“I need help!” she screamed, looking right into my eyes. She’d poked her head out into the hallway. “My husband just turned!”
I panicked. I didn’t have a weapon, and I didn’t know what to do.
I had no chance to help her, though. The next moment, a blood-curdling screech tore out of her throat. A male burner grabbed her and tore into her neck with his teeth. My eyes bugged out—blood started gushing down her neck and spraying on the wall in spurts.
The burner must’ve been a greedy guy, because he saw me, dropped his wife, and burst towards me.
I backed up as fast as I could. My back slammed into the wall behind me and knocked the breath out of me. The burner, with his outstretched arms, grabbed me by the shoulders and tried to bite my cheek.
“Fuck, get off me!”
With all of my might, I tried my hardest to push the burner off of me. It made some space between him and I, but it wasn’t any use. He stumbled back just a little bit, bending backward at the waist. Then, following his momentum when he leaned forward to balance himself, he ran into me headfirst, slamming his head into my chest.
It caught me by surprise. I fell to the floor.
The burner was on top of me, gnashing its teeth right next to my left ear.
I squirmed my ear away, so he tried to bite my nose. I whipped my head around and kept pushing my hands up into his body. I needed to survive.
As I held him off, wriggling my body away from his teeth with his every attempt to consume me, I could smell the sharp smell of fresh blood in my nose. To this day, I still remember the disgusting waft of rancid sweat that I smelled, and the strange feeling of this half-dead man’s cold rough skin rubbing on mine as he wildly attacked me.
Through the wet, raspy breathing of the burner on top of me, I heard a lot of gunshots in the apartment, and a lot of screaming. Next thing you know, someone grabbed the burner off of me and someone else shot it through the head.
When I looked over, I saw that it was Halstead with his sidearm who’d saved me.
Behind Halstead, there was another body on the floor. The big burly man was dead too.
Halstead picked me up and looked me over.
“You good to go?”
I was dazed, shocked, scared as hell. But I managed to nod my head.
He snapped his fingers in front of my eyes, and I made eye contact with him.
“Here,” he said. “Take this, you’re gonna need it.”
Halstead showed me his handgun.
“This is the MSAP19—Modular Semiautomatic Pistol. It’s a nine-millimeter handgun, which means that the bullets probably aren’t going to be going through the burners. You got seventeen rounds in here.”
I started reaching my hand forward, but he shook his head.
“There are just a few basic rules about shooting a handgun.”
He looked me in the eyes to make sure he had my attention before he started explaining.
“First, don’t aim it at anything you’re not willing to destroy. Second, keep your finger off the trigger until you’re ready to shoot. Third, squeeze the trigger, don’t jerk it. But most importantly—don’t aim it at anything. You don’t have the training, and I don’t want you killing any of us with friendly fire. Treat this thing like a knife. The only time you should fire is when the muzzle of this gun is less than a foot away, got it?”
I nodded.
He gave me his two spare magazines and taught me how to reload the pistol. After he attached a holosight and showed me how to toggle it on and off, he went into the apartment to check on the team.
As I waited outside in the hallway, I looked at the gun in my hand. It was a lot heftier than I expected, and I have to be honest. The thought of doing bodily harm to something, even if it was supposedly already dead, tied my stomach up in knots. I kept my finger off the trigger and mimed out an imagined attack on a burner, putting the gun right up under its chin and pulling the trigger. I counted up the ammo I had. Fifty-one rounds. If I managed to kill one zombie with each bullet, I’d earn 1020 XP. That’d put me in Level 3, with three stat points to use—it was one point per level up to Level 5.
Anyway, the team was alright. They gathered themselves and had a brief discussion about the tactics they needed to use and how they needed to adapt.
Addie shook his head.
“Sarge, the stuff we learned in MOUT training aren’t really cutting it. We’ve never fought an enemy like this.”
“That’s the point,” Elgin replied. “We’re part of the effort to develop new tactics to fight a new enemy in a tough environment that’s mixed with noncombatants, some of who’re going to be hostile.”
Everyone nodded. Then Tong jerked his thumb at the apartment.
“Sarge, what’re we gonna do with the kid?” he asked.
Elgin motioned at me. “Wayne, take the kid and bring him to the evac zone. Use the stairwell we came up from. Be careful. Don’t get yourself in any trouble.”
I did as I was told. Elgin waved the kid out from the apartment and I knelt down to talk to him at his level.
“Hey bud,” I said. “I’m gonna get you outta here safe and sound, alright?”
The kid was too shook up to talk to me. But he blinked his eyes, wet with tears, and nodded his head ever so slightly.
I got up and turned towards where I needed to go. Looking over my shoulder, stretched my hand out behind me so the kid could grab a hold of me. He didn’t though. His little hands were stuck grabbing the collar of his T-shirt, pulling it up over his mouth.
&
nbsp; With the kid trailing behind, I brought him to the stairwell and took him down the stairs all the way to the ground floor.
When we got to the hallway leading up to the lobby, there was trouble.
Up ahead were a group of burners. I got the feeling that they were—or rather, used to be—thugs, maybe a part of a gang. They were dressed in yellow construction boots, khaki work pants, and red shirts. I didn’t know how coordinated they were, but from what I’d just seen upstairs, it wasn’t a crazy idea to be cautious. It seemed like burners still had some of their old selves in them somehow.
The kid was hiding behind me, hugging my leg. I patted him on the head.
“Hey lil’ buddy, let’s find you a safe spot to hide, alright?”
He nodded.
Lowering my stance to a crouch, I walked back into this junction where there was an open space where stairwells opened off of. I brought the kid up to the landing between floors and told him to stay there no matter what happened.
“I’ll come back and get you so we can make you safe, okay?”
He nodded and sat down.
I went back to the hallway leading to the lobby. The gang of burners had shuffled their way just a little closer in my direction.
I had to think of a plan. I could’ve tried to bring the kid back up to the team, but something in me just didn’t want to. It didn’t feel right. Maybe it was this feeling that I was running back as a coward. Here was a problem, and I had a chance to solve it.
Nyla’s voice murmured in my head.
Rise to the occasion. Show them what you’re made of.
Killing burners was nasty, dangerous work. I could die. But I needed to level up.
I thought things through one step at a time. One advantage I had was distance. I know that Halstead said not to aim the pistol, to just use it like a knife. And I knew I didn’t have any proper training with shooting guns. All I knew was what I saw in games and movies. But I had to try. I had to try to kill the first one at a good distance away from me. Then the second one. For the remaining three, I thought I’d kill one at arm’s length, and another at close range. If I maneuvered so that they didn’t surround me, if I could kite them so that they were coming at me in a straight line, then I could manage the threat so that I was only fighting one of them at a time.
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