“You’re going to regret that,” he shouted at the top of his lungs. “Not for long, but for as long as you have left!”
He sounded supremely pissed off, and I guess I couldn’t blame him. With forty percent of his strike force already erased from the equation, this encounter had gone so far south that he’d be even dumber than I thought he was if a quick and dirty retreat wasn’t on the cards.
Sasha grit her teeth and dropped another battery down the barrel. She’d been more than willing to verbally spar with him before, but there wasn’t any point now. There was a time for talking and a time for doing, and right now we’d gone way past any hope of negotiating a cease-fire.
I thought they were going to try and breach the front door, but Reezer and his boys either had prior knowledge of how difficult that would be to use as an entryway, or they wanted to make sure that their friends were toast. Whatever the reason, I watched them move cautiously out of our view and down the side of the building, towards the back.
Before any of them could get around there and dig in, Sasha ran back to the keypadded door and cautiously stuck her head and the rifle around the corner in the direction of the remaining Nuggets of Death. They were pissed off, using only a minimum of cover and opting for speed instead of a tactical advance. It wasn’t a wise decision. There were enough dumpsters, abandoned cars, and urban detritus in the laneway for them to have made it hard for her to zero in on any of them. If they were smart, they could’ve kept her guessing long enough that at least some of them would successfully advance.
Five on one had been a cakewalk, at least in their heads. The odds had slipped considerably in the last minute or so, and their thirst for vengeance was making them sloppy.
I stepped out past Sasha. There was no point in me taking cover. Even if I couldn’t do anything to these guys, but at the very least I could try and keep my eyes open. If they were trying something more technically advanced than smashing their heads into a wall over and over, I wanted to be able to see it way before it happened. Maybe then I’d work out a way to warn her before the trap was sprung.
It didn’t look like they were bluffing, though. They were halfway down the laneway and coming fast. I doubted that they would know that Sasha couldn’t go out the front door, and the fact that they hadn’t left someone behind to guard it was yet another clue that they were powered by bravado and not brains.
It was just dumb luck that she was trapped with only the rear exit to use as an escape. Otherwise, she could be ducking out the front right now. By the time they realized they were on a wild goose chase you could have been long gone.
The three enemies had not revealed their names. They were out for blood, but Sasha recognized Reezer anyway. He was hard to miss, since he was out in front and still wearing that soldier outfit. She lined up her shot. He didn’t have any protection. He was out in the open, and even though he was in a hurry, there was no way that he was close enough to spoil her aim.
“Now’s your chance. Take him out!” I tried to tell her. It was all well and good to wait for the perfect shot, but even if she did drop their leader with the reload time on that rifle, the other two could well make it to her before she had time to put a round into each of them. On top of that, although I trusted the rifle at longer ranges, I had yet to see it perform close up on a moving target.
It may well be if they got close, they’d have the upper hand.
I was looking right at him, and that meant that anything happening down the street, near the front of Reboot, was in focus as well. That’s the only thing that let me see it. Dumb luck.
But even the fact that I was physically watching it occur didn’t mean that I possessed the words to convince myself of exactly what was happening. A bunch of them ran together, a tossed salad of thoughts as I felt my consciousness shudder and churn.
portal
void
shimmer
vomit
wobble
burst
tendril
umbral
splash
It was another fucking Diver. One second he wasn’t there, and then the air went black and folded in on itself, and he strode through the oily sheen of a bubble with a ripping sound, breaking the slick surface tension that left him momentarily covered with a strange cobweb of something the game was powerless to simulate.
He strode down the middle of the street like an avenging god. The Nuggets of Death, idiots though they may well be, had just enough survival instinct to realize that the tearing in the air behind them meant trouble.
Reezer turned and looked back over his shoulder, his eyes wide with terror. Sasha’s improvised bullet caught him in the temple before he even had a chance to know what he should have been running from.
I don’t know if the battery overloaded or Headshot decided that the hit had been a critical. Blood and smoke fought their way through every orifice of his face in a mad rush to be free of his dead skull. His legs never got the message to stop sprinting, and so he careened into a parked car and slid to the ground.
I was still staring at the Diver. That eerie helmet, with the black-tinted portholes on multiple sides, felt like it was drinking in the gray light that had only just begun to filter through the ever-present clouds. Even the world behind him was darker than it should be, and I knew that if Sasha didn’t take a shot at him now, she was going to miss her opportunity.
Instead of the distinctively sharp hiss of the compressed air forcing the battery out the muzzle at a high rate of speed, all I heard was a much lighter pop pop pop.
Shit. That was the little backup pistol she’d taken from Reezer the first time around. Sasha had obviously decided her targets were too close for the rifle, so she was squeezing off a few rounds at the Nuggets while they sprinted past. Bullets whined and ricocheted around them as they fled up the street, but if Sasha was still taking potshots at them, it meant that she hadn’t seen the Diver arrive.
Which meant we were probably well and truly fucked…
“Sasha!” I shouted. Maybe I could pull off that radio trick again. If I could get his gear to rebel against him the way I had before, at least I could-
No such luck. The Diver didn’t exactly stare right at me, but he sure as shit looked in my direction. I thought I heard something start to spit static, but his left hand dropped to a lever on his armor. He flicked it, and the noise cut short.
His right hand was what worried me, though. That was the one clutching a light, intricately-geared weapon that appeared to be a cross between a crossbow and a spear gun. He was already bringing it up to aim at Sasha, and before I could do anything to try and stop him, he’d pulled the trigger.
I’d been headed toward the Diver when he’d taken a shot. Even before I heard Sasha scream, I knew that it had hit, because when it didn’t something happened to me as well.
Something cut my strings, and I was on the ground. I shouldn’t be, but that didn’t seem to change the fact that I was. I got my bearings and crawled in Sasha’s direction as quickly as I could. The barbed tip of the spear had impaled her femur. I heard it grind away at her when her leg gave way as she tumbled against the wall, dragging at the shaft of the bolt.
The excruciating pain opened up her mind to me. I was in her thoughts. I could hear them, could practically taste them if I wanted to. It was almost exactly how it had been during the character creation phase and, just like back then, I could tell what she wanted to do before she did it.
The Diver’s spear wasn’t just about damage. It was pumping code into her avatar, and my link with her made me vulnerable to it as well.
I was almost to her, but I could already see that the invasive virus, if that’s what it was, was making her body slack and her muscles difficult to control. The Diver was standing over her now, and I crawled right past him to get to her. I knew that her trigger finger still worked, but it was beyond her to heft the weight of the rifle to aim it at him.
That was okay. I grit my teeth, said a prayer
and reached out to her. She was more solid to me now, and I was able to grab her arm and aim the rifle up at the Diver standing above his prey. Sasha pulled the trigger.
The battery struck him center mass, and even though it poured a metric fuck-ton worth of energy into him, his custom armor was good enough to save him from the brunt of it. The helmet hid his face from me, but I imagined his features jumping around and a smear of drool coating the inside of his helmet’s porthole as he fought the effects of the electricity.
He managed to catch himself before he crashed to the ground. I heard him grunt, and he sounded more angry than hurt. That wasn’t good. Sasha was fading fast, and if she blacked out, I was pretty damn certain that I’d vanish as well. Maybe I’d get sucked back inside her head somehow, but there was always the possibility that I’d simply be dumped from Headshot at last, logged out for good despite the loophole I’d exploited by climbing into the guild Vault before the server reset.
Sasha's vision was failing. She was having trouble controlling her limbs, and when she tried to use this chance to reload the rifle, the battery slipped from her grasp and rolled across the sidewalk until it lay alongside his thick combat boot. I was hoping he’d step on it and set it off, but instead, the Diver plucked it from the ground and tossed it into the shadows. A blinking red light stuttered to life amongst the gear above his heart.
He was struggling to regain control of himself, but whatever the rifle had done to him wasn’t enough to knock him out of commission.
Sasha was sinking into unconsciousness. She tried to use the rifle as a crutch, but the Diver reached out and knocked it out from under her. “Don’t move,” he tried to bark, though the words sounded strangled.
She ignored him.
I didn’t have any answers. I’d been going on the theory that I was here because of a combination of my loophole, the presence of Blake Redhook’s brick, and Headshot’s intrusive code. Whatever the reason, the strange, perhaps parasitic relationship I shared with her suddenly flared up.
The Diver reached for the light on his chest. It was blinking brighter now, faster and faster. He missed it once, twice, but the third time he managed to latch his fingers on the dial and start to crank it around. It made a clicking sound, like he was winding an egg timer past its limits. "You're in for it now," he slurred, managing to glare at her as he fought for control. "I've got a little surprise to show you. It’s our game, remember? Whatever you do to me, I can undo."
My mind was racing, and I realized how long it had been since I’d demanded any of the cunning and quick-witted schemes of myself that had gotten me so far in Headshot on the Zombie side. I needed to think, and that meant looking away from the drama playing out before me, if only for a moment.
The rifle was useless. It wasn’t loaded, and it was too cumbersome now that he was wary of it. I thought back to the number of shots she’d taken with the pistol and figured it was probably empty. The batteries? Maybe I could pick one of them up and slam it against him?
Hmm. Even if I could break through the barrier that had been set up around me and lift the fucking thing, the damn Diver had already proven that he could withstand enough of their power to keep on kicking.
What the hell else did she have? My mind raced. Backpack, Chapstick, keychain flashlight…
And then it hit me.
Please, I thought, sending my thoughts out in a desperate torrent to her dad. If there was any of his essence, any of the original programming that looked out for her, I needed it to hear me. Please cut me some slack and let this work!
Sasha was almost out. She was a fighter, but whatever the Diver’s weapon was doing to her was far too insidious for her to hold out against it for much longer. And when she went, so did I.
Now or never, then…
I took a deep breath, reached into the front pocket of her coveralls, and smiled the darkest, wildest grin I think I’d ever let live on my face when I felt my fingers close on the set of faux-leopard fur handcuffs.
There was no way of knowing how long I’d be able to interact with them, so I didn’t waste any time. The Diver was reaching down to check her pulse, and I took the opportunity to yank the cuffs out, slap one of them securely around his wrist and attach the other to myself.
And then I triggered everything I had. Lunge, Bite, Grasp, the whole arsenal that had brought me to where I was now went off in his face as he suddenly found himself shackled to a whir of teeth and claws that penetrated his armor and chewed at his mind. He flailed and fell over backward, but I went right on ripping him to shreds. Sasha would have to escape if she could. I couldn’t do more than I was doing, and as I risked a glance to my right, I saw that she’d used the rifle to pry loose a manhole cover and was in the middle of climbing into the sewers.
She must have passed out because when she missed her footing and vanished from view, my mind snapped off like a light that was no longer required.
Chapter 19
I was back in that vast expanse of nothingness again. I had the sense that no time had passed since the moment she had blacked out and now. Touch, taste, sight, and smell; they were all gone as I drifted through whatever passed for cold data storage as I waited for Headshot to reconnect with my host.
With no inputs, my mind quickly devolved into the litany of questions I couldn’t answer and answers I couldn’t question. Eventually, a heaviness surrounded me and I felt like I was sinking back into place.
"Sasha? Are you okay?"
She didn't answer. I could hear my own voice, but it was as if it were coming up from the bottom of a well, dim with distance and weak from endless reverberation.
Something was still happening to her. The Diver’s spear hadn’t finished its job yet.
Whatever state of being I inhabited right now, it wasn’t flesh and blood. I had to keep reminding myself of that. My body was sitting in a cheap gaming rig. It was probably hungry and certainly slowly dehydrating. I’d be in Headshot until it finally worked out a way to kick me out, and nothing short of a blackout in my neighborhood was going to change that.
I had to stop thinking of myself as separate from the operating system, though. I was no less real than any of the other players in this game. Even if the damn thing had bugged out and not worked out a way to assign me a “body,” I was still as ephemeral and illusory as any of the legitimate players in the game. All of us were nothing more than a pile of zeros and ones and fluctuating quantum states stored in servers, pumped through wires and splashed across a sea of willingly participating frontal lobes.
But I had an advantage. I wasn’t custom code. There was nothing default or safe about me. The Redhook name was infamous in tech circles. The guy had been as close to a wizard as this world was ever going to see, and I was integrated with the program he’d written specifically to protect his daughter.
If Headshot had been his masterpiece, then I was pretty much her guardian angel. Which meant that I should stop with the delusions of grandeur and work out a way to silence the program that was coursing through her…
I could see it now. It was essentially a virus, and as it branched along her subroutines and snaked its way to the core defenses she had set up to protect herself from Deep Dive’s I could see it thinking. Whenever a counterattack slowed it, it evolved so that the next one didn’t. Each delay it faced was shorter than the last as adaptation overcame impediment.
The algorithm that made up Sasha Redhook was drowning in a sea of venomous malware. Whatever they were trying to do to her, it would be over soon.
Before they succeeded, I had to work out a way to stop it. To do that, I had to know what they were attempting…
Deep Dive had attacked her twice now in quick succession. The first time could’ve been a coincidence, but Sasha just now had been singled out amongst a number of potentials. In a target rich environment like that, the Diver had eyes only for her.
I couldn’t bring myself to believe that they knew exactly who they were dealing with. If they did, it
would be a relatively easy task to cut her off. So, what was this program trying to do? What was the single, simplest way to stop her from meddling?
ID her? No. Who cares who she was, if she’d just be able to find another way into the game?
Location. That was what mattered. If they could incapacitate her for a while, run a successful trace and then use the time they’d bought to kick down her door and throw her in a van, whatever cyber fuckery she was capable of would be useless.
That had to be it. They were narrowing down her coordinates and attempting to trace her back to the source. Now that she couldn’t fight back, it wouldn't take long. She’d spent her whole time in Headshot evading whatever they threw at her, but things were going downhill fast.
Since she was so used to getting the upper hand in this war, I tried to study the ways she was instinctively attempting to counter it. Her guidance would be invaluable, and I embraced it.
Deep Dive’s virus was swallowing every part of her. She was almost gone, and I had to push even harder, desperate to see what the remaining spark of her was trying to do to defend itself.
I concentrated on it, held it in my hands, tried to mentally breathe virtual life into it so that I could at the very least see what it was before it vanished in a torrent of malevolent bytes and bits. Redhook’s code was obviously better than the Diver’s though because it the spark immediately flared and gave me access.
Player ID -
Player ID -
Player ID -
Player ID -
Headshot: Two in the Head (Book 2 of a Zombie litRPG Trilogy) Page 14