by Nick Cole
Her wings sound like leather flapping in the wind.
Two others, one blond, the other brunette, similar and yet each stunningly different beauties in spite of their claws and crow feather wings, follow her out of their nest and circle the darkness around me. They make close passes, their leathery wings beating, flaunting their bodies and whispering.
“You’re going the wrong way,” says one, which one I can’t tell. The other two echo, “Yes, the wrong way.” They hover out over the darkness, their wings beating, beaconing.
I wonder if I am going the wrong way.
Then they begin to sing.
A lullaby.
It’s haunting . . . it’s beautiful.
In New York it’s past four o’clock in the morning.
For a moment my avatar’s POV suddenly blinks. Like the Samurai is getting sleepy. Which is weird, because I really am tired, and I’m starting to feel it. I think about another scotch.
The Harpies are drifting closer.
“Harpies,” it occurs to me, seems right. I didn’t even think about it, but that’s what they’re called. Except why the song? That’s like Sirens. The two are different. But both . . . both had bad intentions for heroes. In stories.
The Samurai’s eyes close again and when they open, the Harpies are closer. Singing their lullaby. Beautiful . . . and drifting closer. Their skin glows softly under the mysterious light, making them erotic visions of sweat and myth. Their voices, deep and husky, blend in a trancelike harmony, and even though their words are somehow lost, or unimportant, I know it’s a lullaby they’re singing.
I think about opening my apartment window for some cold, fresh air, but if I do, I’ll never get the apartment warm again. I think I’m even out of the masking tape I’d need to reseal the windows around the frame.
I’m not focusing on the screen and when I force myself to, they’re even closer.
Do something.
What?
I tap the keys, getting the chain going using momentum and direction.
The Samurai’s eyes close again.
This time, in the darkness behind my avatar’s closed-eye POV, my screen reveals a scarlet and velvet vision of one of the Harpies, the blonde. She’s languishing on a bed of crushed velvet, surrounded by rich cabalistic tapestries. Her flesh is nubile. Her lips full and pouting. She blows me a kiss . . .
. . . and then the eyes of the Samurai are open and I realize that I’ve almost actually fallen asleep in the real world. I felt, for a moment, like I was there with her. In that bedroom.
The chain swings out and away from them. I aim for another chain to leap onto and it’s a bad aim, but I make it. Barely.
Get away from them, is all I can think. Get away from their song. I use the momentum of the next swing and launch out toward another chain farther away from their nest.
They follow, their song slithering softly through my speakers. Their voices pleasantly scratchy and warm . . .
. . . and my eyes close.
No, the Samurai’s eyes closed. I’m still looking at the screen. I shake my head and blink to make sure.
On-screen all three of the Harpies are writhing and revealed. Each different. Each stunning.
The Samurai’s eyes open, and I catch the oncoming chain at the last second. I can hear the leathery slap of their wings, beating as they get closer and closer to me.
I tap the other direction keys and get the chain moving in a wide spinning circle, coming back on the three relentless Harpies, and faster than I can focus, I land the blade beneath my avatar’s feet right in the belly of the brunette.
Her eyes widen in terror at that last onrushing instant before I connect.
The other two scream and circle frantically.
I leap away from the spinning, Harpy-impaled chain, flying off into another cluster of chains.
Risky.
The other two follow.
I miss with the next pass, but on the try after that, I stick another blade right through the chest of the blonde. I pan my POV down, seeing her head cast back, blond hair flying out in the wake of our flight, drooling a thin trickle of blood as we swing through the darkness.
The last one, the redhead, is tricky. She keeps dodging my attempts to run the swinging chain’s blade into her. But at least their song has stopped. They all must’ve needed to be alive for that kind of attack. But now she’s making close passes with wicked curved little daggers in each of her claw hands. I dodge her attacks and almost lose my grip.
I can’t get her lined up for an attack with the chain blade, and in the end I juggle the inventory window, hot key my whip, and just as I get the momentum going to the maximum peak of the chain’s arc, I let go of the chain, hot key the whip, and grapple her around the neck with its secondary attack. In midair, with just seconds before I fly past a cluster of chains, I sling the whip and the strangling Harpy into a hanging chain, aiming for the blade. I don’t even have time to see what happens as I slew my POV back to watch the Samurai’s hand just get hold of another chain.
When I look back, searching for the Harpy, I see she’s missed the chain and blade. Alone in the darkness, she’s fluttering around wildly, clutching at the whip wrapped around her slender neck. I hear her gagging as her wings cease to beat. Then she drops, spinning off into the darkness below.
Deleted.
I’m hanging there in the darkness.
I can see the nest, and I think about searching it. There should be some kind of loot drop. But there could be more trouble.
I don’t have the health or the alertness to do much else tonight. It’s going on 4:30. I’m actually hoping the game will shut down for the night when a small message appears at the top of my screen.
Shut down in five minutes.
I look around.
Where’s the exit? Where is . . . anything besides these chains? I don’t know.
I see a line of chains leading off into the darkness. The intervals between chains are wide. Each will be an extremely hard jump.
That feels like something worth investigating.
I make a few jumps and land on the first chain. Now that I’ve got the hang of it, the jumps aren’t all that hard, but they take longer and longer to get the momentum up to reach the next chain. When I’m at the extent of my highest possible arc and momentum, I leap and barely catch the last chain I can see in the distant darkness. Holding on, it careens off into nothingness with my Samurai clutching the last possible link I could have caught. I begin to swing the chain again, gaining momentum, looking for the next chain. But it isn’t there.
“I won’t tell you the last part”: that’s what the Vampire had said. Without it, I wouldn’t make it.
I look back along the way of chains. I can barely tell if I’m lined up along their path off into nothing. I can see the vague outline of the last one I’d jumped from.
The Vampire said I’d never make it out if I didn’t know the last part.
What’s the last part?
One minute to shut down for the night.
4:30 A.M. New York time.
The storm has stopped outside my window.
I get the chain going as fast as I can. The momentum brings me up a tall mountain suddenly going vertical, then down into a valley and then rising again, climbing the arc to the next mountain. At the top of the next arc, as high as I can imagine the swing will possibly go, with as much momentum as I can possibly extract, I let go and fly off into . . .
What other choice did I have? If there’s something out there to grab on to, then . . .
There is nothing.
My Samurai flies forward into a nothing-colored darkness.
Then I take 10 percent more damage as I tumble forward, my POV rolling end over end across the screen.
Thirty seconds to shutdown.
I’m standing. But on what I can’t tell. Everything is pitch-black.
I take a few steps forward.
Stars begin to swirl at my feet.
; I take a few more.
The stars swirl and coalesce and then I’m sucked down into their whirlpool.
Ten seconds.
Blinding white light.
Five seconds.
I see a desert.
Chapter 11
Whistling winter wind is slipping through a crack in the tape that surrounds my windows, windows that look out onto an empty snow-covered Thirty-Third Street. I don’t need to look out and know that Thirty-Third Street is blanketed in snow, empty, and quiet out there. Instead, I lie here on my couch and just know that it is. I fell asleep here in the last moments of night. I woke up here this morning.
The morning sky is bright, too bright, and my eyes ache. Reaching up to shield them from the glare, I discover I’m still holding a tumbler of scotch. Nearby, a series of mostly unsmoked cigarettes litter our old coffee table. The few that I’d managed to ignite sometime in the night have turned into long ashy fingers.
I’d gotten pretty drunk.
After the game went down, the power went out as the storm slammed into the city. The world outside my windows turned gray tweed, like a grainy black-and-white photograph Sancerré once showed me when we were first getting to know each other. Later, thunder rolled through the long canyons of the desolate city in the moments after sudden flashes of lightning. The storm was directly over the city and it mixed well with my Sancerré-infused melancholy and the frustration of a thousand dollars disappearing into a dark abyss called the Black.
I’d tucked the character disk I’d gotten from Iain back into my trench, inside a secret compartment I’d cut and sewn myself. Then I drank and watched the storm. Sancerré didn’t call, and the storm passed.
The morning felt bright and clear and the opposite of everything in life. To the east I could see chromatic blue sky. The streets below were empty now that city services had moved up onto monolithic arches of the Grand Concourse of Upper New York spanning the old city below. It was quiet down here and I sat watching the snow-covered street, waiting for the coffee to brew.
I’ve been drinking too much lately.
I had to find Iain this morning and find out when the game was going back up. Hopefully not tonight. Tonight I had a fight in Eastern Highlands for ColaCorp’s few remaining sponsorship venues. A loss tonight might mean the end of my career as a professional.
If it came down to it, I’d probably have to write off the thousand bucks I’d spent on the Black.
I turned on my computer and got an e-mail from RiotGuurl.
“Hey,” she wrote. “We’re gonna kick butt tonight! Meet you in loadout at five thirty. I won’t let you down this time.—RiotGuurl”
She was taking her first defeat hard.
I felt responsible, but I didn’t know why I should.
Maybe she was one of the few innocent people left in my life. That seemed like something valuable to me right now, like it was something worth holding on to or even protecting. I’d never met her, I didn’t even know her real name, but somehow I knew she was good. Call it a hunch.
I had to find Iain and quick.
I hit the streets twenty minutes later, still nursing my thermos of coffee. I always carry a thermos of coffee, scotch plaid. I stuff the smokes inside the trench to get me through the hangover, and as I catch one of the last, and very few, old subway trains for Grand Central, I try to phone Sancerré.
“Hello,” she answers sleepily.
At that moment, I know it’s over. I’d suspected it for a long time. Now, I knew it. She’d slept somewhere else, with someone else. The fact that I was having to call my own live-in partner and act like I was some nimrod coworker calling in because she was late for work made me feel lame. And wounded.
I’m over it.
I hang up.
I take a slug from my thermos, which I squeeze back into one of the trench’s deep pockets, pull out the rumpled soft pack of smokes, and light up. You’re not supposed to smoke on the subway, but since they’re free to ride, the transit authority doesn’t patrol them anymore. I light the cigarette, sit down in one of the few remaining orange plastic seats, and blow a big cloud of smoke at the completely empty car.
I wonder what the subway was like back when they used to be crowded.
At Grand Central I find the old hippy couple’s kiosk.
There’s no sign of Iain. Either he’ll show to reschedule all his contacts and let us know when the game’s going to resume, or he’ll take our money and run. I stand around for a moment. The massive hall is quiet as late-morning winter light throws long dusty shafts across the high walls, leaving the side tunnels in darkness. Sancerré once told me that there was a lot more to Grand Central than people knew. Levels, apartments, hidden corridors. She said she’d once attended a party at Grand Central around a swimming pool filled with alligators.
Now it’s empty and quiet.
I imagine someone’s making her breakfast right now. Or maybe they’re both getting dressed. Guilty, ashamed, Sancerré is probably dreading facing me. Why do I care if she feels guilty? Or maybe they’re happy, giggling, excited about what they’ve done and what it means. A secret I’m not part of.
A small Asian boy who’d been sitting on nearby steps at one end of the main hall gets up and walks purposefully toward me. I know he’s going to hit me up for something.
But he doesn’t.
“You Wu?” he asks.
“What?” I say after a confused pause in which I try to blend game reality with real reality while wearing a hangover. I fail. “What?” I say again.
“I said, are you Wu?”
I look around. Too weird.
“You’re not Wu,” he pauses, his hard look turning to one of disappointment. “Guess not; sorry, chump.” I stand there watching him walk back to his spot on the steps. Maybe a quicker guy, like some avatar built for the entertainments, would’ve realized sooner that a contact attempt just went down. But I’m not some hard-boiled gumshoe or a high-flying financier of international intrigue. I’m hungover, and the innate gothic gloom of the old station and the blueness of an all-night storm binge leave me feeling slow and numb. Before I can walk over to the kid, Iain, in designer combat boots, expensive jeans, and that butterscotch leather coat he always wears, walks around the side of the kiosk. The hippy couple, who I thought had been awake, begin to snore in unison behind their mirrored blue faux SoftEyes. The kid remains sitting on the nearby steps.
“Yo, there you are,” says a smiling Iain, revealing an Iain I’ve never met before. Friendly Iain. “You know, I don’t even know your name.” Yesterday he couldn’t have cared if I’d been mugged and beaten ten steps from him, now he wants to be my new best friend?
“It’s Meatball McGillacutty, what the hell do you care?” I don’t feel like playing games right now. I’m out a thousand bucks, soon to be homeless, and my girlfriend’s sleeping with someone else—ex-girlfriend, that is. My regular job, which I love, is going over the hill and into history just like Custer’s Seventh. So I’m not telling some scumbag Black dealer my real name. He can go straight to hell.
Which is exactly what he doesn’t do. Instead he pulls out a very real-looking Glock subcompact ten mil—I’ve seen them in various games I’ve played—and sticks it right under my chin.
“You don’t wanna tell me your name, fine,” whispers Iain close and coldly. That’s the Iain I’m familiar with. “But politeness goes a long way in business and you . . . you ain’t being polite.”
His eyelids hang at half-mast like some prehistoric predator lizard. He’s been here before, and I’m pretty sure he’s been on both sides of the outcome. The side where he doesn’t pull the trigger, and the side where he does.
I glance over at the Asian kid still sitting on the steps.
“John Saxon,” I lie. I don’t know why I lie. I got that one from the Asian kid. He reminds me of Bruce Lee, and I’m a big fan of Enter the Dragon. It’s stupid of me to lie. But like I said, I’d had enough for one day.
Iain ti
lts his pistol away from my chin, almost pointing it at his own face.
“Laissez les bons temps rouler, Chumpchange; that’s more like it.” He tucks his pistol behind his back under his coat like some two-bit entertainment thug and looks at me all combed-straight-back blond hair and bright one-chipped-tooth smile. Except that his eyes are still souless, incapable of any real warmth or affection.
“I’m really, really, sorry, John,” he begins in a sincere tone that again doesn’t match the eyes. “I’m really sorry about your game going down an hour in. Listen, man, no one saw it coming, it just happened. And sorry about the gun; it’s just that I’ve had to run around pacifying all you angry game geeks and a few others. Listen, I’m gonna do you a solid; let me give you a brand-new character disk. I got a new stack last night, new characters and everything. The game’s going to reset after midnight tonight and then everyone’s logging back in. Cool?”
No, it isn’t cool. Why does he want my character disk? I kinda like the Samurai. I wasn’t married to the idea of running him and maybe I can get a better start, but the truth is I didn’t want to give it to Iain.
I’ve had enough of having things taken from me.
“You know,” I say, like it’s all a big hassle and I’m slightly afraid of offending him, which I am, “I’m not going home till late and, truth is . . . I like the Samurai; I’ll just keep him. Thanks anyway.”
For a moment his eyes flash intense superheated anger, and then an invisible hand seems to restrain him, correct him. Like he’s remembering something from his court-ordered anger management classes, which I’m sure have played a big part in his rehabilitation from the various crimes he’s been convicted of. Or someone just sent him a text on one of his SoftEyes. Or whispered in his ear.
“Okay, that’s cool, my brother. We’re all cool.” His hands were suddenly up as he backs off a few steps.
But it isn’t cool. Alarms are going off. Time to get out. I glance over my shoulder at the Asian kid, who is still sitting, still looking at his shoes. When I turn back to Iain, I swear I catch him looking over my shoulder, off to the left and into the shadows of a tunnel that leads down to the empty rattling trains.