They were in there, all right. And whether they were shooting at shadows or just spraying and praying in hopes of hitting someone, at least they were moving in the wrong direction. I didn't like that they'd gotten through our defenses, but tonight wasn’t about killing every single Survivor that crossed my path.
She and I just had to make it through to midnight. That was all…
I was a couple of hundred feet away from the hospital now, and I saw that, inevitably, my next problem was going to be actually getting there. I didn’t have much choice other than to hunker down in the darkest part of an abandoned convenience store on the corner and wait for my chance.
After I watched the chaos down there, I didn't know if I was to get one. There were so many vehicles on fire now that the street was lit up like Christmas. If I wanted to get to the hospital sight unseen, I was going to have to use a different entrance, and doing that might take longer than Sasha had.
Of course, judging by the amount of lead that had just been thrown through those two upper story windows, not everyone was focusing on ground targets. If I was going to get to the other side of the building quickly, it was now or never.
There were Zombies around me and not just the six that I’d come here with. I could sense them in the surrounding night, and I gathered those I could reach around me. Once they arrived, I stepped out into the street. I sprinted for the corner of the hospital’s bulk, sending the Zombies out ahead of me in a flying wedge, rushing across that open space and hoping that I didn’t get torn to shreds when somebody glanced to their left and saw us.
There was an overturned pickup to our left, and when I ducked behind it to use the vehicle as cover, I discovered that a few Survivors had set up a triage unit here. The majority of opposition in front of me were medics, doing their best to patch people up and get them back into the fight.
The time for hesitation was long gone. We shredded them. Every injured became a victim, every personal unfairness or tragedy became another Zombie. I'd had almost thirty Zombies with me now, and I sent half them racing toward the emergency entrance. Better them than me, and the guns over there needed to find targets instead of seeking them out.
Even so, I tried not to watch as their mad rush was met with a vicious crossfire that tore them down to their component pieces. The thump of a grenade added insult to industry, misting the lot of them.
Shit. Those guys were ready and willing to do some damage, that was for sure. But the distraction had served its purpose. I crossed the street and rounded the corner, expecting with every step to catch a bullet between the eyes.
It didn’t happen.
I pressed myself flat against the building now. The Survivors could have spotted us. They could be giving chase right now, but I couldn’t think about that. I needed to get in, and now that I saw exactly where I was the only thing I could do was make my good hand into a fist and bang it into the metal door beside me.
It was the one that we found when we first cased the hospital. It had been locked then and, yep, it was still locked now.
It was getting more and more dangerous out here with each passing second. Even if a random Survivor didn’t find me, this chaos wouldn’t last forever. The best guilds would eventually get control of the rest, and they'd force their numbers down our throat.
I needed to get inside. I had a sinking feeling that, if they took me out, all of my Zombies would slump to the ground like as if their puppet strings had been cut.
But I was on the wrong side of this door to be of any use to her now, and I found myself wishing for the first time that I was back in her head, somehow. At least then I’d been able to push into her thoughts now and then, and, since there wasn’t any reason not to, I closed my eyes as tightly as I could and mentally reached out to her.
I surprised myself by how strong my desire to save her was. Was it loyalty, fueling this? Dedication? Sheer stubbornness? Whatever power she had over me, whatever reason I was still in this game drove me onward as I attempted to make contact.
Was it working? It had to be because there was a buzzing in my head and it felt like something was happening. None of those other things could account for the strength of this, for the fact that I really shouldn't be here. It wasn't my fight. It had never been. Sasha had been right when she’d said that to me point blank. I was in over my head, and the only reason that I was stupid enough to be in this elaborate torture palace was because I loved the woman who I may yet be able to save.
Click.
I tried the door, and it swung open.
She’d heard me. She'd opened it.
A shot split the air at the same time that a crushing pain in my hip spun me around, throwing me through the doorway. The weight of the metal slammed it shut behind me as I heard it click closed again. I looked down at the broken whiteness of my shattered pelvis. It would certainly slow me down, but it wasn’t going to kill me.
You can't bleed a Zombie out, at least not one as strong as I was.
I was in a hallway I hadn't been in before, a place my previous exploration hadn't extended to. It seemed like an employee area as well though, since my experience with hospitals had taught me that they were made up of two things, hallways or waiting areas. This one was neither. I saw a radiation symbol on a few of the doors which meant that I was probably back in the labs. I could only imagine the things that Headshot would let Survivors craft in this place. Med packs, antivirus, possibly even the chance to work up to some limited inoculation.
Imagine that? I didn't put it past Deep Dive’s twisted sense of game balance to let the hardest-working guilds buy their way into some type of immunity from my faction’s bite. That would've been the last straw if this game was meant to be something other than a bridge into our brains.
I got to my feet as best I could and made my way down the hall, catching myself against the wall whenever my leg gave out, or I slipped in my own leaking ichor. I didn’t let it bother me. I'd heal, but I had to find somebody to eat first.
And there were Survivors in here with me, somewhere. I didn’t want there to be, but at least if the humans had their ways of healing I already had my own, an efficient, optimized adaptation that would put them at my mercy and get me get back up to full hit points so that I had a chance to do some real damage.
At the end of the hallway there was another door, and as I got closer, I could hear running and shots on the other side. There wasn’t another way to progress, and I figured that there were enough distractions in the next room that a slowly parting door wouldn't draw much attention.
I did just that, cracking it open just wide enough to peer out. At least I was looking into the emergency room where Sasha had spent her time rigging explosives. It was dark, and I didn't see anyone inside. I could hear movement in the upper levels, but it was shadowy enough in here that they hadn't realized that they'd stumbled past a room set to blow.
From where I was I could look straight through the room and out the emergency entrance’s double doors, which meant that I could see exactly what was coming…
There were about twenty of them. They looked like they knew what they were doing, moving through the shadows, double-tapping Zombies before they got within twenty feet, covering each other and moving with professional hand signals that made them look like the main characters in some action movie.
They didn't pause. They didn't waver. Each of them knew their respective roles, and they enacted them perfectly, crossing the street and cutting down a dozen Zombies without breaking stride or a sweat.
It was the cameras. I’d forgotten that Sasha had kept mentioning them, but the grind of their movement on either side of the door filled the room an instant before a controlled burst of twin high-powered rounds zeroed in on them and perforated everything in their path with a roar of belt-fed fury.
Just like that, half of the Survivors were gone. One of them had been hit so hard and so many times that he’d been literally knocked out of his boots. The rest didn't freak out thoug
h, they just dropped into firing positions and returned fire.
A lot of it. I realized that they were aiming in my direction just as the first of hundreds of rounds perforated the door and forced me to throw myself to ground. Bullets were everywhere. I felt something tug on my shoulder and another round struck me in the knee. I crouched into a fetal position and rolled over, exposing my spine while I tried to protect my head. I heard the big guns mounted to the building slash lead into the night again, the Survivor’s gunfire died away.
I couldn’t get up off of the ground. My right hip was practically gone, and my left knee wasn't much better. At least the bullets had shredded the door. I crawled out of the hallway and headed toward the door that would take me down to Sasha’s stronghold.
I was almost there when I heard someone sprint into the building.
I froze. Were they staring at me? I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t want to risk turning my head to find out. If I had breath, I would've held it, but instead, I did the thing my body was built for. I played dead. I was a nothing. A nobody, a body amongst a world of bodies, an empty vessel of a man who wasn’t even sure anymore if he’d make it out of this alive.
Then I heard his boots crunch through the glass as he headed deeper into the building, calling out for one of his buddies to wait up because he wanted in on the raid.
The hail of bullets had torn our once-hidden door into a mockery, and I crawled through its frame and propped myself up with the railing. By some miracle, I got my feet underneath me for a few flights, but then I lost my balance and fell down the stairs in a tangle of limbs and torn flesh, practically skidding to a halt in front of the security room that Sasha occupied. She was hunched over the cameras, peering through the monitors like they were all that mattered in the world.
I could see her as she was in real life, away from all of this shit. She was a programmer at heart, a coder through and through just like her dad.
"Did you…" I didn't know exactly how to ask it, but it seemed like it was important that I know. "Did you hear me? In here?" I said, tapping my temple with my finger as I wrestled myself up to a standing position once again, letting the doorframe of the security room bear most of my weight.
Sasha didn't look over, so she missed the fact that I was pointing at my head. Instead, she went right on controlling the cameras she’d mounted the guns to as well as any old-school gamer I'd ever seen. "Did I hear you? No. I don't think these things are wired for sound. At least, they didn't appear to be when I was fiddling with them."
“Huh?” Why wasn’t she making sense? I hung on to the wall and got closer to her so that I could at least look over his shoulder. Maybe that would give me a clue.
The monitors were streaming images of the outside, and she reached out without a word and tapped one of them. It was pointing down at the outside door I’d used, complete with a splash of my blood dripping down the wall. Right. I hadn’t connected with her at all. She’d seen me pushing my face to the door like an idiot and buzzed me in…
Sasha was working furiously, and I didn’t want to distract her. Some of the cameras were obviously down because their monitor only showed static. Others wouldn’t move, or were hanging lifelessly and stared straight down.
She risked a glance at me and smiled. "This is why we needed the generator so badly. You brought back so many guns; I figured it’d be worth the effort to make our cameras into turrets. A little bit of rewiring, a lot of welding, and we were in business."
But even as we watched, two of the monitors flared up and then went to static. Half a second later we felt the impact as something explosive went off up there.
"How many have you got left?" I asked
She shrugged. "Just what you see here. Five or six, but I've got other surprises."
"No kidding," I agreed. "What was it that stopped those vehicles in their tracks, at the beginning of all this?"
"Anti-vehicle mines.”
“Shit. Did I bring those back?”
She shook her head. “Not really. You did steal a bunch of Claymores though, so I modified them."
I had never heard anyone say the word Claymore with such nonchalance, and I had to break into a little bit of a chuckle. "We are giving them hell," I admitted.
"You bet your ass we are," she said. I watched her pick off a few targets with a precision that went beyond anything I’d seen before, which made me think that the cameras were helping her aim. Once her targets were cut down, she swapped to a different camera and sprayed the street wildly to keep their heads down.
She was amazing, but the Survivors were learning. This time we watched as another guy set up a missile launcher. She was trying to get him, but he had good enough cover to remain safe until he popped up from behind the cement barrier and fired his weapon. She tagged him in a dozen different places, but he still managed to trigger the missile. One of the images on the monitors slanted to the left and wouldn’t respond to her keyboard commands while another filled with smoke.
I mentally opened my menu to see if I had any new skills that might help or old ones that I could repurpose, but that just gave me a chance to glance at the clock.
11:12…
We’d only made it through twelve minutes of this hell. There was no way were going to make it through forty-eight more.
I didn’t want to be a downer, but I had to ask. "Do you still think we should dig in here and hang tight?" I said, my voice the only thing above the rattle of keys and the grumble of the generator in the other room.
She started to answer, but I interrupted her. "Holy Shit. I shouldn’t be able to talk. Zombies can't talk."
Sasha turned to me for long enough to roll her eyes before looking back at the screens. "You know, you take a long time to notice stuff, Ryan. Do people often tell you that?”
I didn't answer. Mainly, because I didn't have an answer. Why was the game letting me communicate with her? I had a feeling that it was her dad’s doing, but I could hardly be held accountable for Headshot’s numerous idiosyncrasies.
I also realized that she had yet to answer my original question. "Sasha?"
She waved me away. "Not sure. You know my thoughts on the matter, though. My dad gave me this hospital for a reason."
I stabbed my finger at the screen, leaving a smear comprised of at least a dozen other people's blood. "Those Zombies out there, the ones wreaking havoc are the reason. This place held them, and he gave them to us. They are the only reason that we’re not on the bottom of someone's shoe right now, so stop looking that gift horse in the mouth and let’s get out of here while we still have a chance."
"I am staying.”
Not this again… “Sasha, your dad isn’t dead."
I saw her left hand, the one on the joystick, tremble at my words.
"Face facts,” I told her. “You’re right about him being in this hospital. In the real world, he’s in a bed upstairs. Maybe he’s hooked up to all those computers, and maybe he isn’t, but neither you nor I can say for certain that we’re helping him out by being in here. This isn't some sacred place, damn it. It's not like that. You won't be disgracing him by leaving. This game is a prison if anything. Blake Redhook doesn't want us to be here, and I can't for an instant imagine that this is where he wants you to…"
I didn't want to say the word die, and so I didn't.
She went back to shooting Survivors with the guns she had left, steadily splashing them across the street, forcing them to respawn elsewhere and return to wherever it was that Deep Dive was no doubt pumping in even more reinforcements.
"Ryan, if it makes you feel any better, I've got an endgame. Okay?"
This was news to me. "Yeah?"
She nodded slowly and tapped a button next to her. The only thing that made it different from the others was the scrap of paper she’d written End Game on and stuck above it.
"What does is it do?"
"It ends the game."
Everything went dark. The monitors. The lights. All around silence
fell, and both of us turned to each other in the darkness. The background thrum of the generators was gone, and the only sound in this small space for a moment was her heartbeat and her breath.
"Shit," I said. "I put as much biofuel in that damn thing as we had. I thought it would last for hours. How much juice are you using, anyway?"
Sasha didn't answer, choosing instead to get up, push past me and her out of this room and into the next one. It was so quiet that I heard her body hit the floor, followed by the distinctive, hollow voice of a Diver say, "Primary target down. Secondary target acquired."
Chapter 41
She isn’t dead. They can’t run a trace on her this fast. There’s still time, so don’t just stand here.
I was sure they wouldn't have killed her since it was such a pointless endeavor in a game like this. They needed to know who she was if they didn't already. I had no idea what that last patch they’d pushed had done. Maybe they'd already seen enough to know her identity, but if they hadn't, it wouldn't be long before they fired up that trace program and worked out where her rig was.
That was the worst part of all this. Now we really were in their game, playing by their rules. And while we were fighting our hearts out in here, they’d be scouring their servers for some way to work out where we were out there.
And who would stop them? A company as powerful as Deep Dive Studios would have any myriad of reasons to scoop us up. They could call it an arrest. They could label her a cyber-terrorist. They could make up whatever story they wanted, most likely dummy up any evidence they required. And if that didn't work, if someone did get in the way of their plans, they could probably find a way to blackmail just about everyone around that person.
They didn't run everything, but they ran enough. And now that Sasha was down, they were coming for me.
And they weren't stupid. They’d know where I was since they would have heard me talking. I only had a couple of seconds before they left the generator room, and when they did, they'd find me.
Headshot: Two in the Head (Book 2 of a Zombie litRPG Trilogy) Page 28