by Justin Coke
“The cops are on the way,” Terry shouted.
“The average response time is eleven minutes,” a voice replied. “I still have plenty of time to kill your ass, whoever you are. Is the boy here?”[260]“No,” Terry said.
“You aren’t a good liar.”
“Your buddy’s brains are all over the stairs,” Terry said.[261]Silence.
The street lights created a strange effect, Terry was noticing, where dim shapes were visible in the window. Faint, but movement inside the house was surprisingly visible. Which is how he knew the voice was just about to see that Terry hadn’t been lying.
He was gesturing; the woman, Terry assumed, or whoever had been responsible for the back door, he guessed.
The gestures were vague in the reflected light, but there was a lot of pointing up.
Occultists love ambush. They love surprise.
The floor they were standing on was a frame of boards, some plywood, and a quarter inch of laminate flooring. McMansion engineering. A minor barrier to a bullet.
They were going to shoot through the floor, make them walk right into his gun. Or at least distract them long enough for the hand talker to make his move.
Terry stalked forward, quiet as a mouse, watching that shape in the window. He was having a hard time conveying the concept in sign language, whatever it was. Just as he was furiously pumping, Terry popped around the corner and shot him in the face before he had time to do anything but widen his eyes.
Shots from down the stairs went through the wall and hit him in the thigh, and he felt other bullets whiz past as he fell. He scrambled, one legged, away.
Getting shot hurt like hell.
“Get on top of the bed,” Terry whispered, as he pulled himself up and steadied his shaky gun hand with his knees. He tossed one gun and a magazine back to Hayes.
“Cover the door,” he said.
They waited like that for eons. The police arrived eight minutes later, right on time.[262] They found Terry, half dead from blood loss, and five terrified nerds crammed into a twin bed. “Just take a minute,” Terry said with a laugh, as paramedics lifted him onto a stretcher.
Chapter Sixty-Five
They all sat in the hospital cafeteria, Tick Tock, Mad Hatter, Hayes, Kid Twist, and Braylen. Terry lay upstairs, sick of their fawning attention.[263]“So,” Kid Twist said. “How’s the therapy going?”
“Pretty well,” Mad Hatter said. “She’s been having me write the whole story down. Keeps telling me I’m not alone. Stuff like that.”
“You aren’t alone,” Tick Tock said. “I’m still having nightmares every night and I didn’t even ... ”
“Shoot someone?” Mad Hatter said.
“Yeah, sorry.”
“It’s okay. It’s a lot different than I’d imagined, but it helps that I was defending my friends against a gang of violent pedophiles who were trying to murder us. Also, and I feel like an asshole, but technically Terry killed the guy. I just grievously wounded him. Not a tremendous amount of second guessing what I could have done.”
“And you?” Kid Twist said to Braylen.
“Don’t want to talk about it,” Braylen said.[264] “I still want that staff back.”
“It’s not yours,” Hayes said.
“It’s not yours either.”
“So let’s give it back to Brocksamson.”
“Let’s not go crazy here. You stole it, I won it fair and square in a duel. Where you got it is between you and God. And Brocksamson. Not me.”
“We all almost got murdered for you,” Hayes said.
Braylen grunted.
“Touché,” he said. “Fine, keep the staff.”
“You guys really want to play Mundis again?” Tick Tock said. “I think I’m off of that game. I tried last night, just made me feel incredibly bored and panicky at the same time. It’s all been too much.”
“I have no desire to play,” Kid Twist said.
“Me either,” Mad Hatter said.
“Me too,” Braylen said.
“Why do you want the staff then?” Hayes asked.
“Cause it’s mine,” Braylen said. “And I enjoy that vein that starts throbbing in your temple when I start trolling you.”
“Jesus,” Hayes said. “You know I threw that duel on purpose, right?”
“No,” Braylen said, laughing. “You didn’t.”
Hayes pursed his lips together and fought down a response.
And that was that, really.
Life went on, of course. It always does, until it doesn’t.
Terry recovered fully and went back to NPC. He was a bit less jaded and cynical, having seen what he’d seen. While he was under no illusions about how dark people could be, that group of whiny nerds going out on a limb for an enemy proved that there were people worth protecting.[265] Emily went to Marquette with Hayes and Daniel in tow. Tick Tock loved college, and her thirst for knowledge combined with an instinct for knowing what the authorities wanted to hear made her a spectacular student. Hayes struggled, but with Emily’s help survived, while Daniel found the whole idea of professors deciding whether you were right or wrong to be repulsive and ended up starting a food truck.[266]Braylen went with them, under a new name. Officer Davis, with two dead perps and a impenetrable maze of dead drops and bitcoin transfers and Darknet P2P protocols that left the investigation spinnings its wheels, was willing to let Braylen disappear into Kid Twist’s custody, on one condition: that Braylen give up the woman that had attacked Emily and everyone assumed had been the one to shoot Terry.
With the promise of a fake identity and a wealthy guardian, Braylen sang like the fat lady, and she got picked up in an Alabama truck stop when a clerk recognized her mugshot from a TMZ article.[267] Her trial was very short and her sentence was extremely lengthy.
BLU broke up halfway through the South America tour, though they kept it secret until the last show. Three of his four bandmates had solo record deals and were itching to leave behind all these other losers who were holding them back and stealing their limelight. All the albums tanked, as sure as the tides. Jason could have told them that none of them had any musical talent and they only worked as a unit, but they wouldn’t have listened. Relieved that it was all over, he moved to Milwaukee, grew a beard, dressed like a schlub, and let anonymity roll over him like a soothing wave.
As damaged as they all were, as alone as they all were, when they were together all that faded away. It took a long time, but Hayes even came around to Braylen, a little bit, and Braylen did the same with Hayes.
They studied, they worked, they loved, they gamed, and all was as right with them as could be expected, under the circumstances.
Read on for a free sample of EverRealm: Level Dead Book 1
One
The end of the world arrived one night and nobody knew it. They slept, partied, worked overtime, called boyfriends, girlfriends, parents. On the other side of the planet, it was day, yet no one on that hemisphere knew the world was over either.
The human race died due to being completely clueless.
Which is how we all thought we’d go out anyway, right?
But this isn’t a story about the end of the world. Not this world, at least. I could go into detail on how the dead rose and got a little hungry, so they decided they’d hunt down anything living and devour it. And when I say the dead rose, I mean all of the dead. Not just humans.
Nope.
Dogs, cats, birds, potbelly pigs. All of the animal kingdom decided that death wasn’t their thing, so they’d just get up and start gnawing on anything they could catch.
And they weren’t slow.
Nothing special like super speed, no. They moved at the speed of their species. Hence the world ending in one night. No overweight housewife or fat businessman is going to outrun an undead German Shepherd with a sudden hankering for people meat. And the wino on the corner sure isn’t going to outrun the recently shot gangbanger that has just acquired a taste for flesh that has been mari
nating for years in fortified wine.
Twenty-four hours and it was over.
You would have thought that the civilization of the 23rd century would have had a better clue on how to handle an undead apocalypse. Centuries of film and television and other media laid everything out there. But people are sheep, and when no one stepped up to take charge, not that there was much time for that, the sheep simply fell over and let the undead wolves rip their bellies open and feast on their hot, steaming guts.
I mean that figuratively and literally.
So, how did I survive? That’s a different story. One I have zero interest in going into too much detail about. There was a lot of blood, a good amount of betrayal, and quite possibly the biggest pile of luck any man could step in.
No, this story is about a whole other world. In a way.
It’s complicated.
EverRealm is available from Amazon here.
* * *
[1] There’s going to be a lot of footnotes because, well, there’s a lot of interesting stuff that’s not strictly necessary to the story but was worth talking about anyway. If you want to skip them, skip them. If not, don’t. But you probably shouldn’t.
[2] Sorathi Crystals being the primary difference between Master Craftsman and Legendary Craftsman schematics, these crystals were good for about 100 more damage per second, and about +25 more on the semi-random stats given to the item at the time of creation. Per piece. Over the 11 equipment slots, that added up to a huge advantage. They had an ultra-low drop rate in PVE dungeons, and really only came from drops inside the later stages of the never-ending yet rarely-occurring Imperium Rex event. Hayes didn’t really understand what any of that meant yet, but that’s the gist of what the MundisWiki FAQ said on the topic of Sorathi Crystals.
[3] The Mundis sysadmins operated like a jaded police officer. As long as you put your booze in a paper bag, they’d ignore you. Take it out of the bag, they knock your teeth in to let everybody else know they need to show respect. They seemed more invested in looking like they cared than actually caring.
[4] Hayes didn’t actually read this. He’d quickly picked up the nearly universal habit of skipping the quest text altogether. Hayes found the writing set his teeth on edge, and deep down the corny, faux-congratulatory text made him feel like he was LARPing in public, which is to say that he felt the judging eyes of strangers too much to enjoy himself, and then hated the fact that he let fictional strangers dictate his fun. It also took time away from doing something useful, like collecting all ten gore tusk livers.
[5] While the standard gore tusk liver collection quests were always the same for everyone, the major class or faction quests were randomized. Because each server had its own long and complicated geopolitical history, each variation had been or would be the easiest or the hardest variation eventually. At this time, on his server, Swann’s Way, he’d pulled a real shit biscuit.
[6] The triad of factions was one the cornerstones of Mundis; that way if one faction somehow managed to draw all the crap players (a real problem in early days when everyone picked the sexy twinkling Shadow People, and the flabby green pancake Squalid’s got the real sexual deviants), the second crappiest faction would help defend the crappiest for fear of the day the best faction would turn around and crush them. In the life of the game, only three factions had won the game, and one time was reversed due to glitching. In that instance someone discovered that the Shadow People’s racial pet, a rabbit that had an unavoidable one hit point attack, could be duplicated exponentially under the right conditions. AttackRabbit descended first on the Palladium Fraternity with a legion of three million rabbits, then the Squalids were driven before her leporidaic horde. Billions of rabbits died, but exponential growth wins every time (as long as the servers could keep up, which they did. Barely.) The world burning, she entered the Imperium Rex and defeated Kirosh the Omega, taking his legendary staff for her own before Typhoon turned off the server, patched it, and reverted to the last saved stated, wiping out almost a week of playtime. AttackRabbit was the Leeroy Jenkins of Mundis, which is to say she was the Chuck Norris of Mundis, which is to say she was God. In short, Mundis operated on the crabs-in-the-buckets theory of politics, and hoped that the two loser factions would team up to pull the winning faction back into the bucket.
[7] Hayes had no way of knowing this, but Rockchalk had started as a high level Kansas University fan’s trash bin for the lesser alts of a guild that hit the roster cap. Due to some political intrigue involving multiple (accurate) accusations of infidelity, those people had left ages ago, and they’d turned it over to a ten-year-old from Pittsburgh who wanted to save the five gold guild registration fee. He’d actually made it into a pretty fun leveling guild, but eventually those players either quit the game or moved on to better guilds, and Rockchalk turned into a listless collection of players who treated each other like strangers on a subway but who didn’t want to be alone. Two players who still remembered the good old days would advertise for new members in the faint hope that one day the guild would stop sucking. Enter Hayes.
[8] The rule in Mundis is that when you died, anyone could steal all your gear. This got the hardcore PVP crowd excited (loud but small), but was anathema to the PVE crowd (the timid, despised cash cow of the MMO industry). Graverobber’s Curse is a potion that lasts for six hours of playtime that prevents the looting of items and 80% of the deceased’s cash. In a bone thrown to the PVP crowd, it has a 30-second cool down between uses, which means that even the most diligent player can still get his ass robbed. The Curse potion is not allowed in the Imperium Rex raids, which leads to some of the most raw, desperate, and deeply, deeply cowardly gameplay in the world. This hodgepodge of conflicting philosophies has led to a game that everyone loves to bitch about but no one ever quits.
[9] A word on Mundis politics—unlike the real world, where authority is derived from the consent of the people and/or the end of a gun, political authority derives from Border Stones, an item that, when plunked down and activated, gives a faction (specifically, the guild that placed the stone) the power to tax all economic activity and enforce all faction laws in a five-mile radius. Within two miles, it wasn’t even possible to cheat on those taxes. To take a city meant destroying the Border Stone and replacing it with your own. Freeport had had many Border Stones, but pissed-off traders had kept destroying them, because 1) fuck taxes and 2) fuck the police. So Freeport was not just some collection of goblin NPCs and the art files found in /art/buildings/thirdworld, it was a legitimate anarchocapitalist utopia. With Goblins.
[10] A very real thing, in the game. The goal of debtor’s prison was to shake down the player to make sure they weren’t holding the cash on an alt.
[11] Merciless and pointless torturing of people too weak to fight back in a game; great fun, especially when you provoked the victim into getting on their main character, and the whole thing turns into a three hour long mini-war that was as pointless as it was entertaining. There was something genuinely fun about petty feuding.
[12] Players of MMOS may be confused by this; typical MMOS don’t allow for this level of physical interaction. Mundis, however, played more like, say, Grand Theft Auto, than a typical MMO. As a result, even the most egg-headed caster class played with a level of athleticism and grace unheard of in the MMOS that had previously ruled the genre. As a result of the advanced physics model, you could get run over by a horse and die.
[13] Voice communication was an option, but it was a bit like a video phone. It sounded cool until you realize it mean you had to wear pants and makeup at all times. Many Mundis players had an interest in keeping their voices private (women, prepubescent boys, introverts, and people with creepy voices mostly, so basically 80% of the player base), so text remained the default means of communication.
[14] The slaves in Mundis were nominally free workers, but the only way they ever stopped working for you was if they died, you starved them until they rioted, or you sold their contract, so everyone ca
lled them slaves. Permanently indentured servants just didn’t have the same ring to it.
[15] The gist of the list is that they like to trick marks.
[16] I.e., killing someone during a Graverobber’s Curse cool down and stealing all their stuff.
[17] Now, this is a bit tricky. They’re totally ok with the money laundering that occurs all the time as a matter of course in Mundis. In this context they meant laundering real money to further drug transactions and the like.
[18] Child Porn. Many hyperventilating articles had been written about how the total free-for-all of Mundis could be used by criminals as a forum for all kinds of unpleasant things. The cops usually being about 5 years behind the curve, technologically, using an MMO instead of your phone to set up a drug deal actually made a lot of sense for those too lazy to observe proper spy craft. So far, no arrests had been made for criminal activity on Mundis. If Hayes hadn’t been so fixated on revenge, he might have asked himself why a bunch highly experienced players felt the need to forcefully disclaim interest in something most players claimed wasn’t happening.
[19] The leading source for Mundis Gold, the website employed every dirty trick in the book to hack accounts, clean them out, and disguise the proceeds. Hayes knew this, and he felt bad about it in the same way he felt bad about slave labor being used to make his iPhone. Which is to say, not bad enough to not buy it anyway.