It let us out on top of a miniature mountain from which we could see much of the Nightlands spread out below us. The place was pieces of every horror movie ever made, all mixed together. A crazy quilt of haunted houses, graveyards, a few square blocks of a modern city depopulated by some apocalypse, and even an Egyptian pyramid with archaeologists camped outside.
I switched off my goggles for a second and was relieved to see the area wasn’t quite as huge as it looked in VR. Still, the various attractions took up a lot more room than the rides in an old-school theme park. They had to. Otherwise, you would have had adventuring parties stumbling across one another at every turn, and even though the rules allowed for them to interact when they did meet, that would have detracted from the fun.
“Where should we start?” Tommy asked. The swashbuckling Crimson Hawk was now Dr. Combs, a twitchy scientist in a bloodstained lab coat with a high-tech tranquilizer gun cradled in his arms. I gathered, though, that in the context of the game, his bandoliers of glowing green test tubes represented something weirder and more lethal than an ordinary sedative.
With no good answer for his question, I started to pick an attraction at random. But then Madame Hemlock—our friend the witch—said, “Perhaps the infernal spirits will aid us. May I see the daguerreotype again?”
I gave her a blank look until Eclipsia elbowed me in the ribs. “Jason’s photo,” she said.
“Right.” I dug it out and handed it over.
Madame Hemlock raised it to the heavens and wailed an incantation, then passed it over her left forearm, where our coveralls had a built-in scanner. Mine wasn’t active. Hers evidently was, to simulate a witch’s powers of divination.
She no doubt looked at what her goggles told her, then swept out her arm to point to the left. “The youth is in that direction.”
So that was the way we went, passing through one encounter area after another, looking for Jason and fending off the vampires, zombies, and deformed, chainsaw-swinging hillbillies who tried to kill us. Some were actors, some, animatronics, and some existed only in VR. Most of the time I couldn’t tell the difference.
But whatever they were, they didn’t kill any of us or even chip away much of our Health. That was because my teammates knew how the park architects and game designers thought, and therefore could predict where the monsters would pop out next. They also used their abilities without needing to stop and think about it, and that was a big advantage, too.
Unfortunately, I was sure the griefers were just as savvy, and after a while, I had a feeling they were close. But then again, the whole atmosphere of the Nightlands was supposed to set your nerves on edge, so I wasn’t sure. I moved closer to Eclipsia and she murmured, “Your intuition speaks sooth, mortal. Our foes are pacing us. They’re moving through the safe zones while we search the adventure paths.”
“I thought so,” I said, “but I don’t understand why they don’t just come at us nonstop. It wouldn’t matter who won the fights. Every one would delay us and hold us back from finding Jason.”
“Griefers have to walk a line. The rules allow one party to attack another. But if the same people fight over and over again in too short a time, the game system flags it as harassment. They’ve hit you twice already, so they’re waiting until they think they need to screw with you again.”
A pinhead armed with a sickle jumped from behind an outhouse. He was fast, but not fast enough to keep Eclipsia from netting him with conjured webbing. I put a few virtual rounds in him, and then, smirking, Dr. Combs collected a sample of his spattered gore and stowed the slide away inside his coat.
It went on like that for a few more minutes. Then the backwoods turf of the inbred cannibals gave way to what I took to be the foggy streets of Victorian London. The mist diffused the glow of the streetlights and turned figures into murky silhouettes. Somewhere, a horse’s hooves clop-clop-clopped on the cobblestones.
And off to the right, something howled.
“Werewolf,” said Dr. Combs.
Eclipsia pointed. “There! Wolf!”
The kids started to laugh, but a second howl, this one from the right, shut them up. Because there were at least two werewolves, and it seemed likely they were calling to one another because they had us caught between them.
Madame Hemlock pointed to the mouth of an alley that seemed to offer a way out of the box. “We can set up down there and nail them when they come in after us.”
“Wait,” I said. If we were facing a challenge created by the park, her tactics would probably work, because no matter how bad things looked, the game system generally gave you a reasonable chance of winning. But what if the griefers were the werewolves? They could be, just as Eclipsia was playing a kind of monster, and if they were, they’d use smarter tactics than non-player characters. Specifically, they might try to herd us into a confined area where some of them were lying in wait.
I switched off my VR. The street was still dark and foggy, but not as foggy. I spotted a couple figures stalking toward us, keeping low and slinking from one bit of cover—often imaginary cover—to the next. They wore the distinctive coveralls of players.
I turned my goggles back on. Which seemed like a stupid move, since it made the griefers disappear from view. But the only way to keep from getting killed in the game was to see what was happening there.
“I’ve got a hunch the alley’s a trap,” I said. “We should go on up the street.”
“But we know there’s at least one monster there,” said another of my teammates, a Catholic priest with a shotgun in his hands, a six-gun holstered on one hip, and a cavalry saber hanging on the other.
“Trust me,” I said. And evidently he did, because when I moved out, he followed, and so did the rest of the team.
Even though I knew no one could really get hurt, my mouth was dry as we crept through the billowing mist. By now, the werewolves had to be close, but I still couldn’t see them. It was unlikely the griefers were actually this good at hiding, but their characters were, and so the VR helped them out.
I could cheat and switch it off again, but while it was off, my toy rifle wouldn’t shoot, so was that a good idea? I was still trying to decide when the red dot appeared. A shaggy figure in a tattered tuxedo and opera cape snarled and lunged out of the fog.
I fired and backpedaled at the same time, and it was a good thing I did, because my shots didn’t stop the werewolf. But my retreat gave Eclipsia enough time to wave her hands and hypnotize it. “Lycanthrope!” she cried. “Claw away your throat!” And the monster did.
That was the good news. The bad was that a second werewolf rushed the priest, and when he shot it, his bullets didn’t work, either. The beast-man pounced on him and ripped. Dr. Combs shot it in the back, and his green formula rotted its flesh like high-speed leprosy, but not quickly enough to save our teammate’s life.
Other howls sounded behind us. Too many. Somehow, the werewolves had my team outnumbered, and to make matters worse, some of us couldn’t even hurt the players on the other side.
“Run!” yelled Madame Hemlock, and we did, except for the gun-toting priest. In the real world, obviously, he wasn’t a mangled corpse sprawled in a pool of gore. The griefer likely hadn’t even touched him, just waved a hand close enough to activate the sensors in his coverall. But he wasn’t allowed to move until his character came back to life.
“It sounds like there are too many of them!” I said as we raced down the street. “I thought they could only have eight players.”
“They defined themselves as more than one party,” Eclipsia said, already huffing and puffing. “Then moved to attack us at the same time. The system authorized both actions.”
“It’s a glitch,” said a big-game hunter in pith helmet, safari jacket, and jodhpurs.
“No shit.” I grabbed Eclipsia by the forearm—one of the real ones—and half dragged her along.
Not that it was really going to help. Some of my other teammates were lagging, too. The werewolves were ga
ining on us.
But there had to be a solution, didn’t there? True, the park hadn’t set up this fight, the griefers had. Still, the game system was monitoring the action just like it kept track of everything else, and I hoped it wouldn’t allow a confrontation in which we had no chance at all.
If the park had provided a way for us to save ourselves, I had a guess what form it would take. I peered through the dark and the fog. Up ahead was a storefront with CHANEY & HULL, SILVERSMITHS painted on the window.
The door was locked, but flew open when I kicked it. I rushed inside and my teammates followed.
In the back of the shop were the boxes of silver ammunition Chaney and Hull manufactured for sale to monster hunters. I waved my rifle over them, and my goggles told me I was Loaded with Silver.
Those of my teammates who used conventional guns hurriedly did the same. Then we all oriented on the front of the shop.
The first wave of werewolves leaped and smashed through the window, which I had to admit was more monster-y than just coming through the door. We met them with a barrage of gunfire, deafening in that enclosed space.
Three werewolves dropped. Others, who’d been about to follow them through the shattered window, wheeled and scrambled away from it instead.
Eclipsia smiled at me. “I think you’re starting to get the hang of gaming.”
“Maybe,” I said, “but the werewolves are still out there, and if we go back into the fog, they can sneak up on us. Silver bullets won’t save us if they jump us from behind.”
“But if we stay holed up in here,” she said, “we won’t find Jason.”
“You’re right. The one thing we have going for us is that he must be nearby. You said the griefers wouldn’t attack again until they thought it was necessary.” I turned to Madame Hemlock. “Can you cast another locating spell?”
The witch frowned. “There’s a penalty if I use it again so soon. It’ll drain my power, and then I won’t be able to protect myself from the werewolves.”
“But I’ll catch up with Jason and our team will win.”
“But Madame Hemlock’s not a good-aligned character. I just don’t think that she’d take that big a risk.”
Eclipsia took her hand. “Cathy, please. I told you, yes, this is a game, but we’re playing for something real. And if that doesn’t matter to you, them remember, hand-maiden of Hecate, you owe Duchess Eclipsia a boon for succoring you in the Vault of the Laughing Skull.”
“Oh, all right. If you put it that way.”
I gave Madame Hemlock the photo. She performed the same mumbo jumbo as before, then pointed. “Jason’s that way, and you were right, he’s close. Probably inside Whitechapel, the same as us.”
I thought for a moment, then told the team what I wanted them to do. A couple of them objected that my idea was cheating, but it wasn’t too hard to win them over. Probably because the griefers had already borderline-cheated against us.
It only took a minute to get ready. Then the kids headed back out into the night, and the fog swallowed them up. After a while, the shooting, snarling, and screaming began. I left the silversmiths’ shop and trotted in the opposite direction from the noise. And toward Jason.
My idea was actually pretty simple. The griefers’ job was to mess with me, and they’d already determined that I was using the soldier persona. So Madame Hemlock and I traded coveralls. Since it was our outfits’ programming that told the game system what masks to paint on top of us, that meant we’d swapped appearances as well. Our opponents would see through the trick if they switched off their VR, but gamers rarely did.
After I’d jogged half a block without a werewolf jumping me, I decided the plan had worked. But now I was wandering through horrorland alone in the guise of a character who’d exhausted all her special powers. And while park-operated monsters generally stayed away while players fought each other, now that I’d gotten clear of the griefers, I could expect them to start menacing me again.
Some, I could avoid. A sweet but eerie soprano voice sang from a darkened music hall with CLOSED UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE painted across the ticket booth. I looked through the door. I didn’t see Jason inside, so I didn’t go in, either, and the singing spook didn’t come out after me.
Others did. I heard a growl, spun around, and found Frankenstein’s monster reaching to strangle me. I didn’t see how the hulking, lurching thing was supposed to have done such a good job of sneaking up on me, but then again, I guessed that was how it worked in the movies.
I dodged around him, but my Health dropped almost to zero as I did. The monster had evidently gotten hold of me and mauled me before I broke free. Fortunately, that didn’t keep me from running. In the game, you were pretty much fully functional until dead.
When I judged I’d left the monster well behind, I stopped to catch my breath and get my bearings, and then, ahead of me, the fog thinned. Farther up the street in a circle of lamplight, a grab bag of horror characters clustered around a woman’s body lying on the ground. Dressed in an Inverness cape, Jason had gotten down on one knee to study it through a magnifying glass.
I started forward, and a werewolf lunged out of the dark. The griefers hadn’t all been shadowing me. At least one of them had stuck close to Jason.
The attack caught me by surprise, and I couldn’t get out of the way. A single rake of the werewolf’s claws—or a tap of the griefer’s hand, depending on your frame of reference—knocked out the rest of my Health. My goggles told me I was Dead.
“Sorry, man,” the werewolf said in a snide adolescent voice.
If any of the gamers up ahead even noticed the wolf-man and me, they didn’t let on. They were busy playing through their own scenario, and our characters weren’t a part of it. Evidently deciding they’d learned all they could from the murder victim’s body, they began to walk away.
It had taken me hours to get this close to Jason. If I let him disappear into the fog, there was no telling how long I’d need to catch up to him again. I killed my VR and started after him.
“Hey!” yelped my killer. Stripped of the werewolf mask, he had acne and the wispy beginnings of a mustache. “You can’t do that! Dead guys can’t do anything!”
“Tough. Jason! Jason Baxter! Please, wait up!”
The griefer grabbed me by the shoulder. I almost slugged him, but he was just a kid with a snarky attitude, and all he’d really done was play a game against me. So I tripped him and laid more than threw him down, with just enough of a bump to discourage him from touching me again.
Still, it was too much roughhousing for the park to tolerate, and I figured that even if Security wasn’t already on the way to counsel me for ignoring my death, the scuffle would bring them on the double.
Sure enough, a pair of uniformed guards with goggles, headsets, and tasers holstered on their belts came out of the shadows almost immediately. “Sir!” said one. “Sir, please, stop. We need to speak with you.”
I ran, and they chased me. I thought I heard the juice humming in their stun guns, but that was probably just my imagination.
“Jason!” I yelled, and at last he turned in my direction. “I work for August Clarke! Your grandfather’s very sick!”
Hands gripped me from behind. The guards started wrestling me to the ground.
“Wait!” Jason said.
Jason handed me the phone. “Mr. Clarke wants to talk to you again.”
I put it to my ear. “I heard Jason’s end of that. It sounded like it went all right.”
“Yeah,” Augie said. “I knew the old man would feel differently if they could only talk.”
Once I made contact with Jason, everything else had gone relatively smoothly. Together, we managed to convince Security to back off, then rushed out of the park. As soon as we got out from under the domes, my phone worked, and when we called Chicago, it turned out that Baxter was still alive and coherent.
“But I still want him to come home,” Augie continued. “Otherwise, Donna could change Wallace�
�s mind again.”
“No problem. He wants to be with his grandfather. Can you meet his flight?”
“Aren’t you coming with him?”
I thought of Eclipsia and her friends. “No. I’ve got some people to thank, although I’m not sure how to do it. I guess if nothing else, I can help them slay a dragon.”
MISSION FROM HEL
Bill Fawcett
Gorag the Defender had just returned from Hel. The massively muscled warrior slammed the jewel-encrusted, two-handed sword Demondoom onto the thick oak table in one corner of the Mutant Unicorn Inn. Silver and gold sparks flew, filling the large room with light. His three companions sat unmoving through the display. Gorag tended to hit things a lot, and they were used to Demondoom’s pyrotechnic displays.
“So?” Erica Dreamweaver asked when the air cleared. “Anything important?” She emphasized the question with a flip of her gold-and-red waist-length hair. The diamonds woven into it glittered.
Gorag frowned at the lithe elf dressed in green leather and carrying at least a dozen visible daggers. Then he shrugged. The memory was already fading.
“Smelly, loud, cold, dried rations, and no crisis. Routine stuff . . . I think . . . getting close,” the massive swordsman related in flat tones. The memory of his battle with the Lich Lords of Delos now seemed much more real than his recent sojourn in Hel. “Niflheim,” he swore as the rest of the memory escaped him. The deep baritone emanating from the seven-foot-tall, gigantically proportioned hero echoed off the small inn’s plastered walls. This attracted the attention of the other patrons of the inn, who just as quickly turned away when the fighter snarled.
Maig the Mage—engineers were never good at names—met the armor-covered warrior’s eyes when he looked back at the table and nodded. Hel would take care of itself for a while yet he was sure; he had helped build it after all. Given the way things were going, he was strangely sure that all four of the them would be in Hel soon, but hadn’t thought about why he was so sure. For now they had a much more pressing problem. With just a slight bit of over-the-top dramatic license, the short conjurer gestured with both arms for Arturus the Paladin to speak.
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