by Isaac Stone
I pulled out the pocket watch and pressed the stem. Once again, Rhonda’s face appeared in the screen.
“Have a good night’s sleep?” she asked me. “Anything to report?” She seemed calm.
“How is it that I can sleep while my body is already asleep in that chamber?” I wanted to know.
“When you go to sleep,” she began. “You enter the same stasis that your body is in. When the game progresses to a point where you should be awake, your mind returns to the VR scenario.”
“Okay, wasn’t clear about that one. Chamita is right in front of me. Impressive job with her.”
“Glad you like her. She was the brainchild of a programmer. I guess he was big Sheena nerd.”
“I never would’ve figured that one out. I’ll sign off.” I pressed the stem and the screen went blank.
By now, everyone else was awake and starring at the wolf girl in the middle of the room. Bonnie seemed fascinated by her, Lester repulsed, and Howard couldn’t figure her out.
“Chamita tells me there is some kind of cave below the asylum,” I informed them. “She claims it would be safer to go down there.” I could see the perturbed reaction in their faces.
“We’ll be trapped in the basement if that’s where it leads,” Howard mentioned. “These caves aren’t very deep.” He was obviously opposed to the idea.
“Don’t know if that’s such a good idea,” Bonnie agreed.
“So now we’re letting the feeble-minded tell us what to do?” Lester snipped.
I was about to say something when three sounds came from the outside. The first was a man’s yell, who then fired a shot. The third was the growl of a wolf. The next moment, Lobo was through the window and by Chamita’s side. I ran to the window to see what happened.
In the distance, I could see one of the gat men. He was running into the protective cover of the tree line. Lobo had scared one of their men before he could enter the building.
“That was one of the bootleggers,” I informed my companions. I think we should take Chamita’s advice and head downstairs.” Everyone agreed after what happened.
We made our way down the dusty and shattered stairs. They were in good shape for some reason; I guess a game can’t be too real. Chamita crept in front with Lobo behind her. When we reached the basement, I turned to Lester.
“You still have that candle?” I asked him. He nodded, struck a match on the wall, and lit it.
The basement was a mess of animal bones and refuse. We were forced to walk through it. The moist air made me want to vomit. Suddenly I saw an old trunk to one side. This had to be the cache indicated in the logbook. I walked over to it and pulled on the lid.
The lid opened without any resistance. This one wasn’t locked, thank God. I looked inside and found five wooden sticks wrapped with something. I picked one up and held it in the air. It was soaked in some kind of black resin that made a ball on one end. It took me three seconds to figure out what I was holding.
“What did you find, Vince?” Bonnie called to me. She craned her head to have a look at it.
“I’ll show you,” I told her while and brought the stick over to them. I leaned it down and touched the end to Lester’s candle.
The stick blazed and lit up the entire basement. Now we could see how bad it looked in the flames. The light from the basement windows wasn’t enough to show much of what was in the basement. Now we could see all of it.
“A torch," I told her. “There are enough torches in the old trunk for us all. Lester won’t need the candle.” Everyone went to the trunk and lit a torch. The one exception was Chamita, who seemed to have an uncanny way of moving around in the dark.
She led us to an opening in the side of the basement. It was in a corner covered by old steam equipment and hospital beds. We moved the junk out of the way to reveal a large door in the wall.
“So does this lead to the cave?” I asked her.
Her answer came in the form of a key she produced from behind one of the wall stones. It was a large skeleton key, as I expected. Chamita inserted it into the lock and turned.
The door swung open.
Beyond was a cavern that stretched down in to the darkness. I stuck my torch inside to let it brighten what lay beyond. I could feel the cold air coming up from the inner earth, but I could only see to the range of the light thrown by the torch. It appeared to be a large cave. I couldn’t tell how far it went. In the darkness, I heard the sound of running water.
“Please come,” Chamita said as she went inside. Lobo followed her, as his feet made soft pads on the cavern floor.
I followed with the rest of my group behind. There was nothing about a cave in the logbook; perhaps it would appear when I opened it again. I put it back in my jacket and continued to lead the way down into the cave.
Lucky for us, someone had carved steps into the cave. This made it much easier to descend. I placed one hand on the wall next to me while I held the torch up in the air. It gave me some light to see into the passage. I had no idea how long the torch would burn, but hoped we had a backup in the candle Lester still carried on him if something went wrong.
The cave passageway opened up into a cavern.
I walked out of the passage and stopped to look up in to the air. For a minute, I thought we were outside the tunnel back on the surface. You have no sense of directions in a cave and there are enough twists and turns to make anyone confused.
Above me, I saw stars. Then I looked again and saw the stars around me on the walls and floor of the cavern. I walked over to one and kneeled down to have a look. It was a fungus that illuminated the underground world. I scraped at one of the growths with one hand and it dimmed. But the moment I withdrew my hand the light returned. The entire cavern was illuminated by this bioluminescent fungus!
“You think we should douse the torches?” Bonnie asked me. “They might go out soon.” She pointed at the water sound we’d heard on the way down. There was an underground river right in front of us.
“No,” I told her. “They provide more light than the fungal growths. Not a bad idea using this fungus as a source of light. I wonder if someone grew it here on purpose.”
The cavern was magnificent. Stalagmites and stalagmites were everywhere. I walked around and looked at it for a few minutes before returning to the group. It was cool and damp inside the cavern, but the place was beautiful beyond description. I looked at the buildup of limestone around a fountain and wondered how many centuries it would take to accomplish it in real time. I had to remind myself this was all part of the game. Yet, they had accomplished so much with this design.
I watched the subtle form of Chamita and her wolf walk a bit and stop. She found a rock that had some interest to her and picked it up. She looked it over and returned it to the pile from where it came. I wanted to know her backstory. She was an important piece of this game and might hold the key to its solution.
I decided to check the logbook again. As I expected, there was a detailed map of the cave system under the plans of the old asylum. I looked it over and noticed several caches nearby. One of them was right next to us.
“Howard,” I called out to him. “There is a canister of some kind next to your head in a niche. I think it has something in it we need. Be careful, we have no way of knowing what’s inside it.”
‘I’ll be careful,” he told me while he walked over to the cache. It wasn’t that big, not much larger than one-gallon paint can, but it matched what the logbook told me.
Howard strolled over to it and looked at the cache. He picked it up and shook it a few times.
This was the wrong thing to do.
“Looks safe, Vince,” he said to me. “I don’t think there is anything to worry about this one. Hey, it’s attached to some string.” He pulled a little harder this time.
“Howard!” I yelled. “That cache was attached to the string for a reason! Get over here with us; you don’t know what will happen or what it triggered!” Howard tossed the cache t
o the ground and turned to run.
We found out a moment later what the string was attached to when we heard a rumble further down the cavern. I held my torch higher, but couldn’t see far enough to find out what caused the noise. In the darkness of the cave, the fungus provided some light, but not enough to see very far. Beyond the light sent out by the torch were starlight sent out by the fungus, but it was impossible to tell much.
Howard was next to us right after I heard the rumble. “I think we need to get back up into that basement,” I told him. “I thought this would be a safe place for us, but I don’t like that sound.”
“This place is creepy,” Bonnie agreed. “If anything is coming for us, it’s not bringing roses.”
We still had our torches, but I needed to see Chamita and her pet wolf. I looked down the riverbank and saw her washing one foot into the stream. She held a classic pose and stared in the direction of the rumble. She seemed to know something and place her raised foot on the bank. Lobo sat next to her, but his ears were up after the noise started.
“What you do?” she said to me. “Not safe here anymore. Need to go back.” She gestured in the direction of the corridor, which led back to the basement of the abandoned asylum.
The one good thing we had was our weapons. Lester held his Tommy gun with both hands and I had out my automatic. Even Bonnie carried her small caliber pistol. Howard made certain he got his hand on my shotgun before we went into the tunnel. The logbook character stats showed the weapons we carried, and I was confident we could handle whatever was about to happen.
The next rumble was much louder than the first. An entire ten-foot section of the cavern wall collapsed. We could see the rock dust soar into the air as it covered the cavern near the exit door. We had to get on the other side before it was too late.
“What just happened?” Lester asked. “There is no way that one string could cause so much damage unless it was attached to a bomb. I didn’t hear an explosion.” He looked confused.
“It was rigged to collapse,” I told him. “What we heard down the cavern was something that had to happen to get that section to collapse. It’s some kind of geological chain reaction. We have to get out of here before anything else collapses.
I began to lead them across the cavern floor and around the rubble. It was my thought we could avoid the larger rocks, which were dislodged by whatever caused the collapse. We needed to get to the tunnel to the basement before something else fell apart. I had no way to no way to know what else that string pull triggered.
The first rock fallen was in front of me. I stepped over it intending to reach the large ones and push them aside to the rest of my team could get past me.
Suddenly, I felt Chamita’s hand on my shoulder. I turned to see her look in my eyes with her doe eyes and stopped. She noticed something and I needed to pay attention to what she saw.
“What did you see?” I asked her.
“No go, Vince,” she told me as she shook her head. At least she’d learned English, broken as it might be in her form.
I started to ask her for more information, but stopped after what happened next. A loud buzzing noise began to flow out of the opening formed by the collapse of the wall. The falling rock left behind a large hole to another cavern. This new entrance right next to us. I held my torch up to see what was the source of the buzz as became louder.
Then the source became visible as it walked out of the opening.
It was a scorpion. But this scorpion was larger than any I’d ever seen. It was ten feet long and stood a foot off the floor. If someone had found way to turn an alligator into an arachnid, this might’ve been the result. The buzzing sound came from the mandibles on the monstrosity as they snapped back and forth. I watched it raise its tail into a firing position.
I tried to pull out my logbook and see how many hit points it took to kill this thing. I was certain we had plenty because of the guns, but I needed to make sure there weren’t any special ways it had to defend itself. Right now, I needed to back up and get out of the way. Those pinchers looked like they could cut a man in half.
I put one hand around Chamita’s waist and pulled her back out of the way of the giant scorpion. I tried to remember basic biology and if such a creature was possible or not. This scenario wasn’t for some giant ant 50’s monster movie and it had to obey basic rules of nature. A scorpion of such a size wasn’t supposed to be able to live, as its bio-system couldn’t handle the increased load. If it obeyed natural laws, it should be slow moving.
“Let me have a shot at it,” Howard said as he leveled his carbine at the creature. It buzzed louder, which made me think it was ready to strike.
Lester ran out in front of us and fired off a round with his Tommy gun at it. The noise almost deafened us in the small space, but the giant scorpion wasn’t even affected. The round from the gun’s drums bounced off its armor plate without much to show for it. He swore and stepped closer to it and set off another round.
This wasn’t the brightest thing to do.
I yelled a warning, but the tail of the beast came down fast. Faster than I thought it could do, given the size of it. Had it found its target, Lester would’ve been skewered by the six-inch stinger. I managed to leap out and grab him just as the tail struck down. He was hit by a blow on the side of the tail that knocked him down to the ground. He was out cold and I pulled him back to the group.
By now, Chamita was on one side the walking nightmare and Lobo the other. She began to yell at it and point at a path through the rock piles and to the tunnel back to the basement. Lobo began to bark at it from the other side to attract its attention. I could see the scorpion move in slow motion from her to the wolf. Apparently, it did obey the laws of physics, even in a VR game. It didn’t move across the floor very fast.
“Let me try!” Howard yelled and stepped out in front of the scorpion. He looked down across his gunsight and tried to find something to aim at. Not the easiest thing to do in the faint light. He’d placed his torch in the rocks and Lester’s was on the ground.
“The eyes!” I yelled. “Shoot at the eyes! Every other part of its body is armored!” I tried to get out my logbook and find its stats, but I was too busy trying to get out of the way.
Lester nodded at me and squeezed the trigger on the shotgun. The first cloud of buckshot hit the beast in its face and it stopped for a second. It took him a few more hits to strike something vital, but the giant scorpion emitted a sound so hideous it turned my stomach. It waved its pinchers in the air and fell to the ground in one loud thud. Fluid flowed out of its face. Howard managed to hit something that killed it.
“Good shot, Howard,” I yelled. I turned to Bonnie. “Can you grab Lester? He’s still coming around, but he’ll need some help to walk.” Bonnie ran to him and helped Lester up on his feet as he moaned. At least his head wasn’t bloody, but concussions could still be deadly.
We were almost to the tunnels that lead to the surface, when I heard noises in it. Once again, they were louder as the seconds passed. I stopped and turned to Chamita who was beside me with Lobo. The wolf lowered its ears and growled a warning.
Then I recognized the voices. It was the bootleggers, they’d found the door in the basement.
“Follow,” Chamita said as she pulled me back. The rest of the group, save Lester, still had their torches.
We ran after her and the wolf in the darkness. The bootleggers and dead scorpion were left behind.
9
I swore.
“What’s the matter?” Bonnie asked me. She’d followed me close as we went deeper in to the cavern.
“Lost my logbook,” I explained to her. I must’ve dropped it in the run from the bootleggers.
“Is it that important?”
I looked at her and tried to find the words. How could I tell Bonnie the logbook was my only map to this VR world? Without it, I was lost. I remembered when I first started as a gamer and the huge volumes you had to buy every other year just to keep
up with the characters and rules. Not to mention the small fortune you needed to drop on the armies that had to be painted and made ready at the local game shop. I remembered guys who would toss their figures in anger across the room, no matter what they’d paid for them. For them, this was a serious business.
Bonnie was part of the whole VR system. She might have some autonomy, but she was a program or a collection of ghosts in the Sandstone Gems machine. If I told her why that book was crucial, it would violate the prime directive of the game and it might end. I needed the money and experience this VR game could give me. So I simply shook my head and tried to ignore her.
However, she persisted in her interest in me. “We can always go back and look,” Bonnie said to me. She was in my personal space and it started to bother me.
After we took off with the bootleggers in purist, Chamita led us to a spot in the cavern that appeared to be safe. It was a small rise over the underground river. I didn’t think we had much to worry about, as the bootleggers would be reluctant to follow us into the cavern. We’d past some things that moved in the dark. I didn’t want to think about them. The giant scorpion wasn’t the only predator down here. It explained the tunnel and the missing staff from the old asylum. Someone had disposed bodies down here years ago. The calcium deposits covered some of the human skeletons we past, which let me know how long they’d been there.
“Could you go check on Lester?” I asked her. I didn’t want to hurt Bonnie’s feelings, but she was annoying and Lester didn’t look too good. He sat next to Howard on a rock and held his head.
She sniffed and walked over to him. Chamita and Lobo stood watch on the edge of the rise where we rested. She still held the spear in one hand and stroked Lobo with the other. I admired her slender build; she was a thing of savage beauty. She looked back at me, smiled, and then returned her attention to the riverbank and the direction we’d come.