by Wyatt Savage
“What’s the downside to questing?” I asked.
Agent Pei looked back at me. “Activate the participant app on your HUD.”
I scanned the SecondSight and found the right box and mentally tapped it. A digital map unfurled, which showed the ground ahead and everything that was waiting for us. There were three hundred and two human participants and three monsters. The tower wasn’t looking so bad, I thought.
I held up a hand. “Last question. Why is it called the ‘Necro Zone’?”
“’Cause everything here is already dead,” Isabella said, slapping a full magazine of ammunition into her rifle.
“Okay, I’m down,” I said, my teeth sawing together. “Let’s do this.”
The others agreed and we accepted the quest on our HUDs and advanced across the fields that were blanketed in ash that came up to my ankles. The fields flowed to a valley. On one side of the valley were the remains of a ruinous cluster of low-slung buildings. On the other side was a dry riverbed that spooled through a forest of black trees.
A rumble from up ahead drew our attention. I looked up and the sky, still a sickly orange color, opened up and it began to rain. Only these raindrops were enormous and black and then one struck me in the head and began crawling down my goddamn face.
“SPIDERS!” Dwayne screamed. “IT’S RAINING SPIDERS!”
34
My SecondSight crapped out as one of the spiders landed near my boot and I looked down at it. Like I said it was bigger than a mousepad, as big as a bird and had a pulsating white sac on its ass that was filled with a yellowish liquid.
I knew then that the Noctem had read Dwayne’s mind. He was terrified of spiders and so, to fuck with us, they made it rain tarantula-sized arachnids.
I smacked the side of my head and my SecondSight flickered back online. My vision swam with boxes, icons, and stats pertaining to the spiders, along with a targeting reticle that I panned left to right, up and down and a still, small alien voice, the one that tried to corrupt you, whispered:
“Soon you shall know the peace of the great void, Logan James. True virtue lies in the shedding of blood. The engine of the universe is lubricated with the souls of warriors.”
“Fuck off,” I said, firing up my flamethrower as Agent Pei urged everyone to fight and run.
Dodging the bodies on the ground, I ran after the others, spraying the air with my flamethrower, torching the spiders, which squealed as I roasted them. I was annoyed to see, once again, that I wasn’t obtaining any XP or kills from cutting down the spiders.
“What’s up with the spiders, Sue? How come I’m not getting any XP or kills?”
“The Noctem reserve the right to limit points and kills for what they deem…peripheral creatures.”
“Peripheral or not, I’m assuming they can still hurt us.”
“Your assumption is correct,” Sue replied.
Agent Pei was out front with Noora, Isabella and Sarah to his left and right.
Sylvester and Espinosa were guiding Doctor Throgmorton and Dwayne and I were bringing up the rear.
With a sharp cry, Agent Pei and the ladies led the charge forward.
We dashed across the fields, swatting or firing at the spiders. One of the bastards landed on Espinosa and bit his cheek, opening up a nasty wound before he squashed the thing like an overripe peach.
Espinosa swung his blade, slicing and dicing the spiders while Isabella and Sarah laid down a wall of lead with their miniguns, clearing the air out in front of us.
I heard Dwayne yelp and turned around to see that he’d tripped and fallen. He lay on his elbows as a small herd of spiders crept up his long, thin legs.
“Don’t move!” I shouted.
“Wasn’t planning to,” he mumbled.
My HUD highlighted each of the spiders as I used the white-hot end of my flamethrower to char them. I worked my way up his legs as the last one leaped into the air. Dwayne threw up his hands in a defensive gesture as the spider landed on his head. The thing’s fangs appeared and I fired a burst of flames that singed Dwayne’s head, but burned the spider to a crisp.
Dwayne breathed a sigh of relief and then fired his rifle at me.
The bullet whizzed by my ear and eviscerated a spider that had tiptoed up my back.
“Don’t these things ever give up?” I asked.
We ran after the others, who were charging down into the valley toward the dry riverbed that led past the forest of black trees.
My HUD flashed; there was movement in the trees. Lots of movement. The others evidently saw this as well, because they stopped. We all took cover behind a pile of boulders.
Out in front of us, a hundred and twenty yards according to my HUD, the twisted trees rose like crooked fingers in front of a faraway field of tawny grass that stretched, chest high, to an obscured ridgeline. Out on the periphery small fires smoldered, embers kicking up bursts of spectral fire.
Doctor Throgmorton gestured to the grass where dark shapes were barely visible and fanning out, taking up positions. The bad guys had been anticipating and awaiting our arrival. I examined my HUD, but didn’t get any read on them.
“Nothing’s coming up. What are they?”
“Vanquished participants,” Doctor Throgmorton said, breathing deeply as he leaned on his braces. “Raised from the dead by the Noctem.”
“Zombies?”
“More like the Night King resurrected all those people he massacred at Hardhome,” Dwayne said.
Sylvester made a face. “What?”
“Game of Thrones,” Dwayne said.
“Never heard of it,” Sylvester said, shaking his head.
“What’s the good word?” I asked.
Doctor Throgmorton moved slowly between all of us. “If you’re familiar with the philosopher Kierkegaard then you’re probably aware of his work, Fear and Trembling. It’s about a man who goes through life and reaches a point where, in order to move forward, he has to make a leap of faith. The aliens have come and they’ve destroyed most if not all that we knew and held dear. Not only am I ready to make a leap of faith and try to finish this quest, but I’m going to keep fighting until I have no more blood left to be spilled. Who’s with me?”
We traded looks and then one by one we raised our hands. If we were gonna get crossed over, we’d do so on our own terms.
“Let’s hit these bastards head-on,” Sylvester said, cracking his neck, readying his weapon.
Agent Pei and Sylvester led the way and the rest of us followed as my stats flashed to reflect:
Species: Homo Sapiens (James, Logan)
Chattel:Hellfire Flamethrower
Health:10/10
Level 1:1
Class:Fighter
Kills:32
Vitals:BP – 124/80; T – 98.00f; RR – 15bpm
XP:867
Out ahead of us, dozens of wiry figures ducked behind the dead trees. Some of them appeared recently deceased, their torsos matted red. Others were missing limbs, and still more were blackened husks, evidently dying as a result of fires or explosions. They weren’t men and women anymore; they were just things, things that carried the weapons they died with: axes, knives, guns, and whatever they acquired during the Melee. I don’t think it’d be too much of a stretch to say everyone knew we were in for one hell of a fight.
In addition, I noticed that the Noctem were keeping watch on us. I could tell because I spotted a ghostly form hovering out on the periphery of my line of sight. What looked like the same kind of thing I’d seen on the first day the aliens arrived.
I took aim at the alien, but didn’t pull the trigger on my flamethrower, which gave me a small measure of satisfaction.
The Lorenzan sisters didn’t give a damn about the alien, however. They’d already opened fire and were busy unleashing grenades from their weapons. They followed this up with machine-gun fire and Dwayne added some expertly placed shots from his pistol. They dropped the first dozen attackers, but where one of them fell, another took its pl
ace.
I swung out to the right, nearing a stone wall and unleashed hellfire with my flamethrower. With a continuous roar, a thick rope of orange flames shot out over the wall and splashed eight of the resurrected monsters. The flames blossomed and the monsters began running around, on fire, like ambulatory torches.
More of the things appeared and opened fire with their own weapons.
Sylvester and Agent Pei appeared alongside me. Pei crouched while Sylvester stood as bullets snapped off the stone wall. Sylvester’s voice, calm and measured, seemed to drain away some of the confusion and panic. He shouted and pointed, directing our fire, shooting down three of the attackers with his shotgun.
A bullet clipped his cheek and he barely reacted; rather, he mounted the wall and urged us to follow and we did. In seconds everyone was shooting, working their weapons, slapping fresh magazines of ammo in as fast as they could.
The resurrected participants and monsters pressed their attack. They ran headlong at us and one of them squared up on me, its face gaining definition. It was an arrow-faced woman, or what had once been a woman. Her lower jaw was missing and an unholy yellow light flashed in her eyes.
She was gibbering, holding what looked like a grenade, which she pitched at me.
“GRENADE!” I screamed. The others ducked and I ran sideways. The explosion tossed me sideways like a pair of dice in a gambler’s cup.
I lost two health points, my muscles singing with pain as I hit the ground, covered in debris.
The funk of cordite and burned flesh filled the air as I forced myself over.
The woman who’d tossed the grenade drew herself up and jumped at me.
I rewarded her efforts by rising to jam the end of my flamethrower into her gaping maw and filling it with fire.
She melted from the inside out and then I turned my fury on the others, savagely torching them.
A raggedy man in a parka came at me with a machete and I buried the end of my flamethrower between his eyes and fried his brains.
Two more leaped out from an inky pool of shadows and took aim at me with rifles before being cut down by shots fired by Noora.
I took cover in a ditch alongside her, feeling the effects of losing two points.
Noora removed the spent magazine from her pistol and slotted a new one in.
“You did that like a pro,” I said.
“The game makes you grow up fast,” she replied, glancing into the woods, which were deathly silent.
Several seconds of silence fell between us.
“I knew you’d make it,” she said.
“I fell in with the right people and we got lucky…”
“That’s not what I meant, Logan.”
“Oh, you mean what you said before? What was it? The neurobionics stuff?”
She nodded. “I had a feeling your implant might give you an edge.”
“I don’t know about an edge, but I am different.”
“Good or bad?”
“Neither. I don’t think the way I did before the accident, but my reflexes are better. I can sometimes sense things before they happen, y’know?”
“That’s a valuable skill these days,”
“Maybe you were right, Noora. Maybe I am a little enhanced.”
She smiled grimly and pulled the slide back on her gun.
“What about you?” I asked. “How did you make it?”
“They saved me. Agent Pei and the others.”
“How?”
“I found this,” she said, holding the pistol up. “Took it off a dead body. I didn’t even really know how to use it when they came for me.”
“Who?”
“Some men and women, other participants, horrible people…”
“Jesus.”
“They were driving these huge armored dump trucks, killing everyone on Route 97, just burning and shooting anything that moved and I was watching. I was hiding on the shoulder and I was too scared to help, Logan.”
“You couldn’t have done anything,” I said, reassuring her.
“And then when they were done they spotted me. One of them, a man with a machine-gun, approached and I just started operating on instinct, y’know? Somehow, I don’t even remember how I did it, but I lifted the gun and closed my eyes and pulled the trigger,” she said, wagging the gun in a quivering hand.
“What happened?”
“I killed him. I shot the man with a machine gun through the eye.”
“You did what you had to do.”
“And then the others saw what had happened and they came for me and I shot some of them too. It was all bullshit, pure luck, and then I started running, trying to find a place to hide and that’s when the agent and the others found me. I didn’t know if they were friendly or not and I was out of bullets anyway so it didn’t matter.”
She was sobbing gently and I gave her a hug. “They saved me,” she said, looking up. “They’re good people.”
I registered this and then spotted movement peripherally.
Agent Pei and the others were visible. They’d stopped on the other side of the stone wall, maybe seventy feet away.
They were pointing into the air and when I looked up, an awful screech sounded as a shadowy form flapped its wings and sliced through the air, nearly taking my head off.
It was a silver-skinned flying lizard the size of a small plane.
Fantastic.
The aliens had brought a dragon to a gun fight.
35
“What the hell is that thing?!” I shouted, scanning my HUD which revealed:
Species: Draconis Argentum
Level:1
Class:Monster
Health:10/10
Attributes:Interior storage sacs filled with methane, hydrogen, and liquified Argentum enable the monster to fire streams of molten silver; strength lies in the inactivity of Argentum; weakness lies in the reaction between Argentum and sulfur.
Noora and I ran, literally falling to the ground behind the stone wall next to Dwayne.
“Argentum!” I shouted. “What the hell is Argentum!”
“Silver,” Dwayne said, readying his pistols as the dragon swooped down toward us like a plane on a bombing run.
Isabella shot up to her feet and ran toward the dragon.
Her sister cried out, waving her arms, shouting for her to stop.
Isabella opened fire on the dragon with everything she had. She laid down a wall of lead and paced two grenades that struck the dragon but bounced off its shimmering scales.
She pivoted, mouth open, looking like she was trying to call out to her sister. The words crumbled in her mouth as the dragon locked in on her. She made a motion to run and was fast, but the dragon was faster.
The beast’s mouth unhinged and a torrent of silver fire filled the air.
The silver struck the ground and washed over Isabella, turning her into a silver statue, her mouth still crooked in a silent scream. A portion of the silver fire also struck Sylvester in the right shoulder as he dropped his shotgun and fell to the ground, his flesh singed by the molten metal.
Then the dragon beat its powerful wings and the downdraft caused Isabella to explode into a thousand tiny pieces of silver.
Sarah screamed and fired on the dragon, which rocketed up into the sky, looping around to attack again.
“Back! Get back!” Agent Pei said.
“Get back where?!” I yelled.
Dwayne grabbed my arm and pointed and that’s when I saw that Doctor Throgmorton was standing in the middle of the field. His braces were at his feet and his hands were upthrust as if in prayer.
We reeled back toward him when he brought his hands together, creating a flash of white light that burned my eyes.
Spokes of light danced at the end of Doctor Throgmorton’s hands. I could tell from my HUD that he was using his powers as a builder, a sculptor, to construct something.
He gathered up the spokes of light into a ball that he held in his hands as if he were shielding a mat
ch in a strong wind so that it didn’t blow out. He shaped and formed the ball with quick, deliberate gestures, until it was four feet long and flexible like a whip.
“I hate to be that guy, but the dragon’s coming,” Dwayne said.
Doctor Throgmorton didn’t respond; he was too busy gesticulating, prying loose the stones from the wall that hovered in the air. These he stacked around us in a circle and then he ripped a good number of the dead trees from the forest and slammed these down on top of the stones, slotting them in place. Using what looked like a laser, the doctor carved at the stones and wood, hacking and slashing them at certain angles until they fit perfectly together. Lastly, he expanded the rope of light and created a kind of translucent shield that covered us under the dwelling of wood and stone.
The dragon flew by again, spraying silver fire on top of our structure. I could see the smears of silver on top of the translucent dome as Doctor Throgmorton kept his hands out, holding the dome in place. The melting silver caused the dome to bend and it looked as if it might implode at any moment, but it held.
“How long can that thing hold?!” I asked of the dome.
“Three minutes, maybe less,” the doctor said, blinking away beads of sweat from his lashes. Agent Pei and Espinosa were holding the doctor, preventing him from falling while Sarah tended to Sylvester’s bad shoulder, which was smoking.
“How do we kill that thing?” Espinosa asked.
I expected the doctor to answer that, but before he could, Dwayne piped up. “Sulfur,” he said.
“What?”
Doctor Throgmorton nodded. “Inflammation by its nature produces toxic oxidants meant to kill pathogens. These oxidants cause direct damage to DNA.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It means one of the few substances that silver reacts with is sulfur. Place a sufficient amount down the throat of that monster and good things will happen.”
“How the hell do we do that?”
Sylvester grimaced and fumbled in his pocket, plucking out two oversized shotgun shells. He tossed these to the ground and then Doctor Throgmorton released his grip on the dome and snatched the shells up. With flick of his wrist, he opened the shells, combining the contents into one which he mixed with other ingredients.