Ghouls'n Guns

by Jared Mandani

  Table of Contents

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  GHOULS’N GUNS

  -Apocalypse Online: book 1-

  A LitRPG Adventure Series

  By Jared Mandani

  Ghouls’n Guns is © 2019 by Jared Mandani

  This book is a work of fiction, and any similarity to persons, institutions, or places living, dead, or otherwise still shambling is entirely coincidental.

  Thank you for purchasing this book and helping out the author! Have a good reading :)

  Chapter One

  They were met on a cold, dark street. A chill wind whipped along beside them, bearing with it the charnel reek of the newly dead, of rot, burning corpses and flesh exposed to the world. Another smell played along beneath the first, natural and putrid odor. It was a smell which appeared to Davie to be almost alien. It smelled of ozone and something rather alchemical. He suspected foul magics at work. The hair stood up at the nape of his neck and along his arms.

  It is something unnatural, in the worst possible sense, Davie thought to himself as a fresh gust of wind buffeted him, washing him in the stench. He shuddered, his whole body tense and repulsed. It was a surprise to feel that way—he was so very seldom this creeped out, not anymore. Usually his stomach was iron hard and his nerves just the same.

  This world was different, however.

  Abandoned houses and shops lined the street. Graffiti was writ large on their fronts in lurid, giant brushstrokes. Words and pictures shouted out, displaying the angst at work in this place. Every window had been smashed in by rioters or looters in months gone past.

  Every so often, as they walked along, they crossed a burned out husk of a building, just beams and smoldering ash glowing ruddy in the night’s darkness. Davie squinted ahead as they walked, trying to work out where they were; what kind of world had they stepped into? Beside him, Ezekiel walked along, his eyes wide and full of wonder and, for the first time in several years: fear.

  It had been so long since either of them had been afraid that Davie had almost forgotten how it felt. But yes, he felt it too, nestled deep in his stomach. A cold knot, a creeping unease. Well, he thought, what do you know?

  The two friends passed by a corpse. It was lying in the gutter at their feet, its legs splayed out into the road. It was a woman once, though her humanity was almost unrecognizable. Her face was battered, her arms were missing and her stomach had been ripped open, spilling foul smelling entrails across the asphalt on which she lay. Tooth marks lined the stumps of her arms, her legs and her throat. Whatever manner of beast had killed her had stuck around long enough to eat a good portion of her.

  They were met after a short walk down the deserted street. A shape limped along towards them, a person covered in a long overcoat, with a hood pulled up to hide their features.

  As Davie and Ezekiel came close, they noticed that she too was a woman… or, at least, she may once have been one. They did not know what she was anymore.

  “Hello?” Ezekiel called out, trying and failing to sound confidant. He spoke in loud, bold tones, but Davie could hear his vocal chords drawing tight; he could hear the quivering in his old friend’s breath. The atmosphere in this place was cloying, the sight of the corpse so early on was unsettling, and something else, lingering just out of sight, was playing on them both.

  “Hello,” the figure replied in a sibilant hiss. There were a couple of streetlights that still flickered away, crackling inconsistent flashes of electric light, and the figure waited in the faint pool of one of them.

  The two drew close, still glaring through the darkness, their collars pulled up high in a vain bid to keep away the chill night wind. “Hello,” the figure repeated itself. “And greetings to this world,” she said. “I am glad that you could come. Now, you are to follow me.”

  “What are you?” Ezekiel asked, and the figure began to chuckle. The laughter was a hollow sound, devoid of any real amusement. If anything, it made the figure even scarier.

  She stepped forwards and lowered her hood. Davie and Ezekiel both gasped and took an involuntary step backwards. The woman had only one eye. The other was a hollow, gaping hole. The skin around the empty socket was inflamed with infection. It wept a thick, yellow goo and looked like it might slough off entirely with the lightest of touches. Her skin was shrunken tight against her skull… She is a mere wraith, Davie thought.

  There was no flesh to her at all, so that her one remaining eye stood out, bulbous. Her teeth were what disturbed Davie the most, however. They were long and sharp, each one seemingly filed to a thin point, and her long tongue flickered over them every couple of seconds as though she was awaiting the taste of her next, unsavory meal. Like a snake tasting the air.

  But she was strong and fast. Neither Davie nor Ezekiel doubted that. She looked like she could tear them apart with ease, with a preternatural strength belied by her frail frame. “You’re a ghoul,” Davie said. It was not a question; he knew it without quite knowing how, as if by instinct. She was a ghoul: a creature warped by devouring unclean flesh. A cannibal turned to animal by the magics at work in this city. The unnaturalness of this strange woman spoke to something deep within him, letting him know that she was not of his reality.

  She nodded, smiling and revealing those filed teeth with a grimace. “I am a ghoul, and I am your guide,” the woman said. “I am here to welcome you to this world.” She gestured around her, and then down the street, turning her back. “Come, walk with me…” she whispered over her shoulder.

  They followed , watching her in stunned amazement. Her back was bowed so that she walked more like an animal stalking its prey than like the human being she once must have been. She breathed deeply, sniffing into every corner as they tagged along. “What is this place?” Ezekiel asked.

  “It is a cursed land,” the ghoul replied. She stalked onwards, pulling up her hood as the cold wind blew once more. They passed a couple of blocks in this manner. Everywhere was deserted; everywhere reeked, smelling of that same, strange, unnatural alchemical ozone that they had been surrounded by since they arrived. “This land was once good. It was once a nice, welcoming place, belonging to the living,” the ghoul said. “So the stories go.”

  “What happened?” Davie asked.

  The ghoul shrugged. “Nobody knows the cause of all of this,” she replied, taking in everything she saw with that one, intense eye. She hardly blinked as she stared about herself. They picked their way from the sidewalk and over a street pitted with the scars of a recently fought battle. “But everyone knows that an evil power was discovered and unleashed. Bio-sorcery, some call it. It warps the world, it changed us. We don’t know the perpetrator; nobody knows what manner of man or beast can harness such power, but it transformed many of us.” She shrugged. “So it goes. And look,” she whispered, pointing to the other end of the street. “The dead grow restless in these dark days.”

  Indeed, as they followed her pointed finger with their eyes, they spotted a group of zombies staggering about. Davie and Ezekiel had had enough experience of such worlds: they had seen zombies in hundreds of different incarnations, in hundreds of different settings. But there was something about this group, in this world, that neither could quite put their finger on.

  Somehow, the two felt far more threatened, far more creeped out than any other platform had ever made them feel before.


  “Where are we?” Davie asked.

  “The city seems to have been called Mercy once upon a time. We’ve taken to calling it Apocalypse,” the ghoul said.

  ***

  Davie and Ezekiel, his best friend for the last decade, had always chased thrills: they had always been about the ultimate fear factor. It was part of the reason they first bonded at school. They had seen all the horror movies they could lay their hands on, from the earliest Hitchcock and Boris Karloff offerings right through to the most recent flicks, rejoicing in the thrill of each… or trying to, at least.

  Between them, they had a library of horror and thriller novels, each one more dog-eared than the last from being so frequently lent to one another, from being re-read so many times. Davie got hooked on Stephen King as a kid while Ezekiel grew up with an addiction to Lovecraft and Poe. When they met, they each stuck their noses into the other’s collection, devouring every word with unbridled glee.

  But all of this just left them hungrier for it than before. As they grew older, reaching their early teens, the two of them got more ambitious. There was an old, dilapidated house in their neighborhood which had been unoccupied for years—decades even, some people said. Rumors surrounded the plot, rumors of hauntings and visitations, of black magic and devilry… But where others would cross the street to avoid walking in front of it at night, Davie and Ezekiel would run right up to the front door, peering in through the gaps in its dusted, boarded up windows, listening out for signs of ghosts or demons.

  It was not enough, however. One night, when they were thirteen, each told their parents that they were sleeping over at the other’s house. With their alibis in place, they loaded up their rucksacks with sweets and bedding, sneaked into the back yard of the old house and crept up to the conservatory. Its ironwork was rusted through and the door was hanging off on its hinges.

  “Go on, go on,” they urged each other. They pushed through the battered door and, on tiptoes, feeling nervous, scared and thoroughly excited by it all, they went in. They explored everywhere; they covered every inch of the old house. Flashlights in hand, they went into every corner. Within an hour they were fully coated in dust and spiderwebs, happily reveling in the old stories attached to the place over the generations, repeating them all to each other all night long.

  That was just the first of it. As they grew older, reaching their late teens, they began to find more and more haunted places, all over the county, then eventually all over the state. But with each one, the thrill diminished. As excited as they tried to get, the boredom of repetition got to them. What would have caused nightmares in most people barely affected them at all.

  With time, they had grown less and less scared, like addicts growing immune to their poison of choice.

  Then, a year ago, news hit the internet about this game: Apocalypse Online. All the chat rooms were abuzz, every YouTuber they followed was talking about it, hyping it up as the months went by. They all said the same thing: Apocalypse Online was to be the scariest, most realistic RPG that Code Red Immersion Games had ever come out with. Code Red had always been Davie and Ezekiel’s favorite platform, and they counted the months slowly, waiting with bated breath for each piece of news.

  First, the concept art was ‘leaked’—the company put it out online to create a buzz. After that, the first couple of trailers came out. The teaser first, followed by a few more snippets, and then, finally, a full, three minute video. Then a whole series of cinematic shorts came out in quick succession that Davie and Ezekiel must have each watched a hundred times or more. Then the pre-release reviews came out and they saw to their delight that every critic had given it five stars, even the harshest ones they knew. It was legit.

  It is the real deal. If this doesn’t scare us, nothing will, Davie and Ezekiel both thought. They were amongst the first to pre-order, and then a good twenty minutes ago, when it opened for the first time, they jumped straight into their immersion suits and logged in.

  ***

  The ghoul walked them through the ghost town, talking them through the world. “Look, there,” she whispered, drawing close to them and pointing to a patch of greenish, sinister light emanating from a nearby alleyway. It shouldn’t look too scary; it was nothing but some glowing light, but it nevertheless gave Davie chills. The hairs on the nape of his neck prickled once more and a sick sensation grew in the pit of his stomach. Whatever it was, that light, every fiber of his being seemed to rebel against it.

  He glanced sidelong at Ezekiel. His friend looked as he always did, a perfect computer generated image of his real life self, an interface to use before they created their in-game profiles. He was a small man with a ratty face and wide eyes, and those eyes were filled with fear and wonder. Ezekiel looked sick, disgusted by what he was witnessing.

  “Nobody can quite explain it,” the ghoul said. Then she chuckled to herself. “That is, they cannot explain it until it’s too late. But everyone finds it vile.”

  “What is it?” Ezekiel asked, though Davie thought that he might know the answer. The smell of ozone, the alchemical taint to the air…

  “The bio-sorcery that made this land what it is,” the ghoul said. “Some call it chaotic energy, some call those patches of light rifts. They are rents in the fabric of reality and the energy that flows out of them warps the very laws of nature themselves. You will see such rifts often, if you survive long enough…” She smiled, baring her teeth and watching them hungrily with that one beady eye. “And you will always do well to avoid it. It corrupts, it warps…”

  “That is what happened to you?” Davie asked, and the ghoul laughed, nodding her head.

  “Yes, yes, in a manner of speaking. I got too close and it turned me into this thing,” she hissed. “It made me crave the flesh of those left untouched, and I killed, and I ate, like so many of my kind… But this is not all you need to know,” she said, turning her back on the sorcerous glow. She appraised them, leering. “These forms of yours are weak, much too weak. You look like pampered children. You will not survive long in this place if this is how you present yourselves.”

  So saying, she snapped two clawed fingers and screens appeared before both Davie and Ezekiel. “Enter into these and create characters who will find a place in this world, characters who will last longer than your… fragile forms.”

  She gestured for them to place their hands on the screens and, as they did so, she disappeared. A gentle wind blew, cold and evil, and she turned to mist before their very eyes. The mist glowed the same, sickly greenish yellow color as the light in the alleyway behind them. It was caught up in the breeze and it dissipated, drifting apart. Only her laughter remained, only her scorn.

  “Well then,” Ezekiel said. “Let’s get the party started.”

  “Meet you on the home screen in half an hour?” Davie asked, reaching out his hand towards the screen in front of him.

  “Sounds good,” Ezekiel said, doing the same.

  Davie pressed his palm to the screen and the world around him blinked out of existence. His body disappeared, leaving only the screen. It took up his whole field of vision, blotting out all else as he began the process of reinventing himself.

  ***

  A blank body rotated in a large, rectangular box which took up the whole left hand side of the screen. It was a generic form, neither large nor small, neither male nor female. It was entirely faceless and ageless. There was a drop down menu at its feet and there were more drop down menus in a panel on the right hand side of the screen.

  They were all labeled: Head, Body, Clothing, Gear, Skills…

  Before he could choose from these, however, Davie had to select from the menu at the body’s feet. He clicked on it, using the same neural interface which lay behind everything that Code Red made to control everything. The menu opened, showing him a list of character types: Soldier, Sniper, Engineer, Mercenary, Medic… the list went on and on.

  Davie had always preferred a very hands-on p
lay style, favoring warriors over wizards, close range fighters over snipers. He knew that Ezekiel would likely pick the most overpowered long-range fighter he could find, which was fine by him. They had always complemented each other like this.

  Davie looked over the list of classes once more and settled on the likeliest looking option for building a skilled melee fighter: a mercenary which he reckoned he would be able to make into a hand-to-hand combat specialist.

  He set the character to male and clicked on the mercenary option. The body changed immediately. Where before it was smooth with almost amorphous-looking skin, now it became well-muscled and lean. Its hips cut inwards and its shoulders broadened. Its limbs were wiry and taut, ready to learn whatever skills he decided to give the character.

  This option chosen, Davie went through the ascetic mods. On the Head setting, he picked a mock-up of his own features, always available to him from Code Red’s central server. His face was gaunt and heavy browed, without being intimidating or charismatic in any way in real life. However, this version of his face came through looking chiseled and gritty. He gave himself a short layer of stubble over his jaw and long, dark hair tied back in a ponytail. Then he clicked on the Body menu and set his height at 5’10’’—on the shorter side, nothing too obvious. Ezekiel would come out as a hulking monster, as usual, but Davie has always preferred to keep it more subdued. He set his weight at 180lbs, however, adding a great deal of muscle to the previously wiry frame.

  Next, he chose an outfit of loose fitting fatigues, camouflaged in grey tones to fit the dark world in which they would be fighting. He picked knee-high, tough boots and fingerless gloves with wrist supports, so that he would not hurt himself when he threw punches around. Then he picked an overcoat, non-military, the kind a private detective in a Raymond Chandler novel might wear, to keep himself warm and to hide his military background when he needed to.

  Next, he moved on to the skills section. There were several to choose from: Acrobatics, Dead Shot, Supreme Reflexes, Tough Guy, Medic, Fearless…