Apocalypse 2020: A Wasteland LitRPG

by James T. Witherspoon

  “How are things going Bran?” Scarlett asked. She rarely called him by his real name like this. He still had no idea what her real name even was.

  “Oh pretty good,” he replied. “How about you?”

  “Ugh,” she groaned. “Work has been garbage. You know I told you I’m an office administrator, right? Well my boss just got fired for embezzling or something, and they’re looking into all of my stuff now to see if I was involved. So not only do I have to deal with getting investigated by auditors, I also now have a new boss who is kind of a pain in the ass.”

  “Sounds awful,” Boothe said. “You weren’t involved with the embezzling, were you?”

  “No!” Scarlett said. “God, if I had taken that much money, I wouldn’t be working at that place anymore.”

  “That sucks,” Boothe said. “Sorry.”

  After a few moments, Scarlett asked “So you’re eighteen?”

  “Seventeen,” he replied. “For a couple more months anyways. Birthday is on June 10th, just four days after graduation.”

  “Oh nice,” she said. “So you’ll be cleaning up, right? Graduation gifts and birthday gifts.”

  “Yeah, if I graduate.”

  “You having a hard time? I might could help, I’m good with math.”

  “Maybe,” Boothe said. “I’ll probably be okay, but I should be studying more.”

  “Me too. I had mid-terms last week and got a couple of B’s in easy classes that I should have definitely aced.”

  “Oh no! Not a B!”

  “Hey shut up,” Scarlett said, laughing. “Grade point average is important to me.”

  “What college do you go to?” Boothe asked.

  Scarlett hesitated. “Telling you that would tell you where I live. I don’t know if I want to do that right now.”

  “Oh,” Bran said “Okay.”

  “I’m sorry,” she said.

  “No it’s okay.”

  We stopped in Perry to fill up the tank - Rob happily pumped the gas for us, and Caden told us “Good luck. Be careful.” Then it was on to Richardson. Even in the game, where everything was at one-fourth scale, the trip would take over an hour.

  After a few minutes, Scarlett asked “So what does Bran like, besides video games?”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “Come on man,” she said. “This is going to be a long trip. Might as well chat some.”

  “Well, okay…”

  So Bran told her all about his art. How he filled sketchbooks nearly every week and had even sold some drawings to his friends. She immediately became excited to see his work, but he didn’t have a scanner to send anything to her. “Maybe one day,” she said.

  Then the conversation moved on to family - he told her about his mom dying from cancer, and how he now lived with his dad in a small house. She told him that her parents were nice, but overprotective and controlling. They talked about school - she said that college was so much different that high school. You take classes when you want, and nobody is riding your ass all the time about studying. She didn’t have very many friends there though - all her friends had moved off after gradutation, but she went to the local college, which was mostly filled with non-locals.

  They both liked video games. They grew up with the same stuff - Mario, Mega Man, Castlevania, and Ninja Gaiden. Wizardry and Might & Magic, Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior. Bran preferred the difficult platformers and action games, while Scarlett liked the stat-heavy RPGs.

  Neither noticed how much time had passed when they crossed the Red River (which was now just a dry red ditch), and drove into Texas.

  For thirty more minutes, they chatted about their favorite things.

  Drinks – His: Mt. Dew, Hers: Cherry Coke.

  Candy – His: Snickers, Hers: Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups.

  Movies – His: Raiders of the Lost Ark, Hers: The Breakfast Club.

  Bands – His: Led Zeppelin, Hers: Pink Floyd.

  Finally, they saw the first signs for Richardson. Mariko guided them onto the remains of a different highway heading east now. Buildings around them - tall skyscrapers, sprawling shopping centers, clustered homes - all were decimated. Most were reduced to rubble, but others still partially stood with broken walls and roofs. When they had driven on this new highway for about ten minutes, they saw the tower rising in the distance. Boothe slowed down a bit and the rest of the group pulled their vehicles in closer. Then they headed into the city.

  Richardson was just as destroyed as the rest of the area, but the Palisades Tower still stood, with very little damage. Some of the windows were broken, and the ones that remained were covered in dirt, giving it an ugly brown tint, but the place looked downright new compared to its surroundings. Boothe wondered how it could have possibly survived the destruction that had caused all the rest of this damage.

  They drove off the highway towards the building. The remains of a college campus that Boothe recognized as The University of Texas stretched off to their right. For a moment, this sight took Bran out of the game. He actually lived just a couple of minutes away from this place. He was seeing buildings and streets that he recognized, places that saw undamaged in real life all the time. He wondered if his real-life house had been created in the game, and whether it had been demolished, or still stood, abandoned and empty.

  “How do we get in?” Scarlett asked.

  They drove across an empty dirt field to get closer to the building. The roads here had been broken and overtaken by the earth until only patches of cement showed through. They stopped their vehicles, and Boothe zoomed in with his goggles.

  Two robot guards stood by pillars at the entrance. In front of them was a circle drive with two broken-down cars still parked on the side, their tires flat and doors ripped off. A driveway descended underground to the left of the building, leading to what must be a parking garage. Maybe that would be an easier place to infiltrate. Getting to it without being spotted by the guards at the door might be difficult though.

  “Maybe we could make a distraction,” Braddock suggested. “Get the guards attention away from the garage.”

  “I can do that,” Caustic said.

  “You’re not going to be bait,” Boothe said.

  “No, of course not. That’d be dumb. I’m going to make something explode.”

  They circled wide around the building and parked their vehicles some distance away. On foot, they stayed low and crept as close as they could to the parking garage entrance. Then Caustic aimed high and launched a grenade through the air. It arced and then fell, landing precisely onto one of the cars parked in the circle in front of the building and exploding into a fiery cloud that lifted the vehicle three feet off the ground.

  “Nice shot,” Boothe said.

  Caustic gave him a wink in reply.

  Immediately, the robot guards stomped out towards the burning hulk of metal, their machinegun arms spinning.

  “Let’s go,” Braddock whispered and they ran down the driveway into the underground garage.

  Group Stealth (70%) - SUCCESS!

  Boothe had never seen a group skill check before. It seemed like it had averaged each member of the group’s skills together - Mariko and Scarlett’s high scores balancing out the rest of their generally low scores. They waited a moment out of sight inside the tunnel to see if they had been spotted by anybody, but the guards didn’t come after them. They were safe. For the moment, at least.

  Together they headed into the dark underground.

  3

  They stayed close to the walls as they descended into the parking garage. Boothe’s night-vision goggles changed every color into monochromatic shades of green. Braddock lit the way for the rest of the team with the flashlight mounted on the side of his head. Boothe worried about the light making Braddock an easy target, but the team needed to see, so they had to risk it.

  The tunnel opened into a wide parking lot with cement pillars spaced every twenty-five yards. A few cars were parked around; some of them ev
en looked undamaged. A stairway to the right, next to an elevator led up into the building.

  Boothe barely noticed the robot guard standing at the bottom of the stairway in time to hiss “Stop.”

  Group Stealth (70%) - SUCCESS!

  The robot hadn’t seen them. They stayed hidden around the corner. Boothe motioned for Braddock to stand back, so his light didn’t catch the robot’s attention, then he sent his drone in to attempt to hack the robot. Marty approached the unsuspecting guard and when he was right behind it, he jabbed his probe into the back of the robot’s neck.

  Hacking (80%) - SUCCESS!

  The guard’s arms dropped, its head tilted forward, and the light behind its eyes dimmed to black.

  “Nice job,” Scarlett said.

  “Feels good,” Boothe said. “Haven’t gotten to do that in a while.”

  With the guard disabled, they approached the stairwell. The elevators to the right were inactive, their lights off and doors shut tight. So they passed them by and headed up the stairs into the main building.

  On the first floor, two automatic turrets hung from the ceiling in the center of the room. One faced towards the stairwell, while the other faced the front door. They could both swivel slightly, but could not turn 180 degrees. Boothe’s goggles automatically detected their line of sight and displayed it as a green arc.

  “Woah,” Boothe said out loud. “Never seen that before.”

  “What?” Scarlett asked.

  “Just, I can see where the turrets are looking.”

  “Oh, cool,” she said. “So kill them.”

  “‘Kay.”

  Boothe sent Marty to hack them. If they could avoid destroying these completely, maybe they could reuse them when they took over the building. The drone hacked one successfully, then moved over to the other. In half a minute, both turrets were deactivated, their guns hanging limp.

  “Okay, so now the guards at the door,” Scarlett said, then turned to Mariko. “Want to give me a hand with this.”

  Mariko gave her a sharp nod and the two moved silently through the lobby towards the front door. A few moments later, with some crashing metal from Scarlett’s axe and the near silent PFFFT of Mariko’s suppressed rifle, XP notifications popped up, signaling their success.

  The second floor went much the same. There were a few guards in the hallway that opened to various office suites. Boothe hacked a couple, while Mariko took one out with her rifle, then Scarlett cleaned up with her axe. They still had not set off any alarms.

  Braddock turned to Caustic and said, “We might not be necessary on this mission.”

  Caustic shrugged. “I ain’t mad.”

  “Things aren’t going to keep quiet like this for long,” Boothe said.

  “They might have,” Scarlett said, “But now you’ve jinxed it, you dummy.”

  “We’ll be ready when things go loud,” Caustic said.

  They moved up through the floors. There were sixteen total. They made it to six before the alarms began squealing. A high-pitched klaxon that was hard to block out. They had to yell in order to hear each other.

  “Can you do something about that?” Scarlett yelled to Boothe.

  He found the speakers that the sound was coming from, and by pressing a button on his goggles, he followed the wires from it through the walls to a panel down the hallway. He sent Marty to jab his probe into it to disable the noise, giving them a moment of quiet.

  “Well, they know we’re here now,” Scarlett said. She put her axe away and pulled out her shotgun. “Let’s keep heading up.”

  On the next floor, the robot guards were ready for them. They had arranged themselves slightly down the hall in front of the stairwell. As soon as Boothe and the others arrived at the top of the stairs, bullets tore towards them. The robot’s miniguns punched holes in the walls all around and shattered the glass of the small window in the steel door.

  “Let me make an opening,” Caustic said. The others stepped back to allow him to move close to the door. He jammed the barrel of his grenade launcher through the broken window, adjusted a little bit, and launched a grenade into the hallway. The explosion was big enough that it shook the floor. The sound of plaster and ceiling tiles falling to the ground followed, along with the mechanical whirring of the robot’s systems shutting down.

  Four XP notifications popped up, telling him that the robots were destroyed. Then another message appeared.

  WARNING! Building has taken structural damage (5%).

  “Structural damage?” Caustic said. “Well, dang. I guess I can’t shoot grenades in here.”

  “Not if we want to use it as a base,” Braddock said.

  “What’s the point of being an explodey guy if I can’t explode?” Caustic whined. “Maybe I should have been a healer or something.”

  Mariko reached up to pat him on his shoulder, and Caustic looked down and smiled at her with his huge pointed teeth.

  Scarlett kicked the stairwell door open and looked out into the hallway. The robots lay in pieces on the ground. One had its legs blown off, but still crawled towards her. She lowered her shotgun and blew off its metal head.

  “Here,” she said. She nudged the robot’s minigun towards Caustic with her foot. The metal was hot from the explosion, and the robot’s severed arm was still attached, its fingers wrapped tight around the handle.

  Caustic picked up the weapon, unfazed by the heat. He ripped the robot’s arm free and tossed it to the ground. “This’ll work, I guess,” he said, slipping the grenade launcher into its sling on his back.

  “I have an idea,” Boothe said. “We still have nine floors left, and the enemies are probably going to be waiting for us like this on every floor. Why don’t we split up, and get them in a pincer attack?”

  “There’s only one stairwell Boothe,” Braddock said.

  “I can use my grapple glove to take one person up the elevator shaft with me,” Boothe said. “One of the girls anyways, no offense. You and Caustic are too heavy.”

  “Thanks a lot,” Caustic said, with a fake pout on his face.

  “Okay, so you take Scarlett up the elevator shaft,” Braddock said. “The rest of us will head up the stairwell and let you know when we’re in position. Everybody good with that?”

  The group agreed, then Braddock, Caustic, and Mariko headed towards the stairwell.

  Scarlett smiled. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think that you just wanted to get me alone.”

  “Mariko would have been fine too,” Boothe said with a grin.

  She gave him a little punch, then used her axe to pry the elevator door open. Boothe wrapped one arm around her waist and shot his grappling hook to pull them up to the next floor, where Scarlett pried that door open as well.

  She peeked out and saw that the robots were ten yards down the hall, all facing away from them, towards the stairwell.

  “Ready,” Braddock whispered from their earpieces.

  “We’ll draw their attention,” Scarlett replied. “I’ll let you know when to attack.”

  Boothe sent in Marty to disable one, while Scarlett snuck across the hall and took a position behind a doorway. She must have failed her Stealth check however, as one of the robots caught sight of her movement and they all turned at once to fire.

  “Now! Now!” Scarlett yelled.

  Caustic kicked the stairway door open and the robots began taking fire from both directions. Boothe wasn’t sure if you could accidentally shoot a teammate or not in this game, but he tried to stay out of the crossfire, just in case. Since it was too late to try to disable one of the robots, he sent Marty up as close to the ceiling as he could and commanded him to fire his laser.

  The red line shot out and melted a hole through one of the robot’s chest. By the time that Marty had recharged his laser, the other robots had been reduced to heaps of flaming metal by the barrage of gunfire from the rest of the group.

  The next few floors went the same. The enemies would be set up for an ambush, but Booth
e and Scarlett would surprise them, then the rest of the team jumped in to destroy the robots with little effort. Boothe sent Marty in where he could, to disable a robot or just blast them with his laser, which never missed. He didn’t bother using his assault rifle at all, instead staying out of harm’s way and having Marty do most of the fighting. They’d gain their XP, reload their weapons, and move up the stairs to do it again. By the sixteenth floor, it was all getting a little repetitive.

  Then they made it to the roof. There was no alternate path to this area - only a single stairwell that opened to the cool night air outside. A group of five robots waited for them there, and opened fire with their miniguns as soon as they reached the doorway. Bullets pounded into the brick and cement, threatening to tear completely through the wall.

  Braddock stretched his metal arms around to fire a few shots from his pistols, but soon had to pull back, his arms torn and sparking from bullet wounds.

  “How the hell are we going to get a shot at these guys?” Scarlett asked.

  WARNING! Building has taken structural damage (7%).

  “Whatever we do, we need to do it fast,” Braddock said.

  “Blow them up,” Boothe said to Caustic.

  “You sure?” Caustic asked.

  “Yeah, do it. We’re taking structural damage anyways. Might as well take them out with it.”

  “You don’t have to tell me twice.”

  “I did tell you twice,” Boothe said.

  “Yeah, well… you know what I mean.”

  WARNING! Building has taken structural damage (9%).

  “Just shoot them if you’re going to shoot them!” Scarlett said.

  Boothe turned his goggles to ultraviolet so he could see the heat from the robot’s circuits through the wall in front of him.

  “They’re all clustered together. Here.”

  Caustic aimed his grenade launcher out the door, and Boothe reached over to adjust it, moving the barrel to where the grenade would have the most effect.

  “Okay, fire!”