by Gard Skinner
To Mi I said, “Use his daisy cutter to make a hole in the gate.”
She chambered a shotgun shell and went to work.
Then I yanked the helmet off the guy.
“Holy mother of . . .” York belted. Even he recognized the commando right off.
“Jevo,” I muttered.
It was him. It was definitely him. From the bald head to the vacant eyes to the oversized noggin. Gone all this time, since the ghost town. No one knew where.
But how? The clincher was his port. It was nailed in there by his right eye, just like the rest of ours. The big, round cable fitting. Glowing. Covered. Almost as if it had been filled with a plug to keep out bacteria and dust. It fit perfectly over the gap.
Even out here, Jevo was a monster. Muscular. The combat gear made him bigger, and he clearly dwarfed all of us, but not like some comic character. More like he’d been well fed. And worked out. His chest and arms were just a whole lot bigger. Perhaps, in real life, he’d always been that way. Or maybe he’d been pumped full of whatever vitamins or growth hormones they had lying around.
So that’s how they were going to hunt us? By using our own? By finding combatants who knew our strategy and likely hidey-holes as well as we knew them ourselves?
“How’d you find us?” I demanded.
“This dirtbag jungle only has one water hole,” he sneered. “Sooner or later I knew you’d show up there.”
Water hole? For a human? A-freakin’-ha. Supplies . . . XMart. Pretty bright for that dim-bulb Jevo. So he’d staked that out, and then we’d been followed? It still didn’t add up, but Jevo did know my moves.
And he’d made a nice one blocking this hall.
I had more questions. A lot more. But time wasn’t on our side. They would never hunt five of us with just one of them. They’d send a scout, then send teams.
York pushed the stolen assault rifle against the big man’s port hole. It looked so much cleaner than ours. Mine was red and pulsing. Mi’s had streaks of purple etching out.
Another theory—maybe, just maybe, he’d been woken up from the tank the right way. Jimmy and Charlotte weren’t exactly BlackStar physicians. If Max Kode had decided to bring Jevo around to hunt us, he’d have made sure his investment got all the best meds, exercise, and a top-quality diet.
York was still tapping the port with the hot barrel of the rifle. “Jevo, you traitor, why shouldn’t I cap you right now?”
“Hold it, hold it.” Jevo was squirming. “Not so fast.”
I could seen a sheen of sweat starting to form.
York kept at it. “You still serve them, even after they had you sucking blue spit in a tank?”
“All part of the job,” the big dolt argued. “Anyway, I’ve had worse. We all have.”
“True.” It was my turn again. “What’d they promise you to bring us back in?”
“Oh, so you know I had to grab you up alive? Huh. Yeah. These stupid stun batons. That’s a bad rule. ‘Shoot on sight’ would have been easier. But hey, that was the mission. Glad I got to carve up Reno, though. That douche always annoyed me.”
“Kiss my . . .” Reno was gasping.
Jevo blurted, “I liked making cheese out of your leg! Bet it hurts, too!”
Another smile. It pissed me off, so I hammered him in the teeth with my hilt.
“Ease up, Phoenix. Next time around, I’ll electrify the gate. That might even the odds a bit. One-on-one, I was always better than you, Phoenix. One-on-one, I come out on top.”
Mi shot a dotted line around the edge of the gate and quickly finished blasting our escape route.
“Answer me.” I asked my last question. “What’d they promise? Freedom? A big mansion? Being a big cheese at BlackStar . . . ?”
“Like I said.” Jevo shifted. “You still don’t get it.”
“Get what?”
Another snort, like before; I remembered him doing that back when we were in-game all the time. Out here, it really annoyed me.
“Get what?” I howled.
“We’re out of time,” Dakota decided, and I watched yellow fingers tighten on a pistol grip. “I’m taking an interrogation shortcut.”
She pulled the trigger, and Jevo’s crotch exploded in crimson goo, just like Reno’s leg had three times.
But man, a wound right there? Now, that was twice as bad as leg holes.
He screamed. Man, did he scream.
Through it all, he could still speak, and when Dakota kept ramming the weapon into his shredded pelvis, he was ready to talk.
“I’ll get you for that you bit—”
“Answer her.”
Jevo spat, “I can’t believe you haven’t caught on. This isn’t real, Phoenix. You’re still in the game. All of you. I was loaded in to bring you back home.”
We all stared at him. Blankly. His face was busted, and judging by the shards of bone sticking out from below his waist, he’d never walk right again. There were other things he’d never do again either. Not out here.
“You’re full of it.” Dakota smiled. “Nice try.”
Quickly, I saw what was going on. But Jevo . . . This was great. No, it was brilliant what Max Kode had done.
What a way to twist Jevo in the wind.
I mean, I knew this was all too detailed to be faked, but Jevo? That idiot? I bet he did still think he was on-mission in a game. In fact, I was convinced that’s exactly what he’d been told.
Max Kode had played my own goon against me. Revived him, worked him for info, and then played him. Freakin’ genius. That guy. Who would he send next? Deke, Rio, Lima? For sure. What a pack of hunters. The top guys from each of the teams sent to hunt my crew.
No wonder Kode was BlackStar’s top guy. He was a player’s player.
But he didn’t matter now. Jevo was through. No surgeon could ever put that dumpty back together again. At least, not all the key pieces.
“We move.” I was already up, dishing orders. “Outside. Split up. Remote checkpoint four. Meet in six hours. Make sure you aren’t followed.”
“I’ll help Reno,” York volunteered, hoisting his buddy. York had wound tourniquets around the three pairs of holes.
“Good. Thanks.”
But before I left that hall, once everyone else was on their way, a hand came up and snagged my sleeve.
Jevo again.
I didn’t have anything to say to him. He’d gotten what he deserved, especially after shooting Reno up like that. Heck, Reno might not even live through the night, but I was pretty sure Jevo would have huge numbers of medics at his side in just a few minutes.
Blood was everywhere. The floor was so slick. And the smell. Something you just never get in a game. It was metallic. Like if you left a pan on the stove with no food in it. So sharp and strong.
Jevo whispered, his voice scratchy, “Tell you one thing, Phoenix.”
“What’s that, traitor?”
“If this is a game, I’ll just respawn bigger and badder, and you sure haven’t seen the last of me.”
Then I broke his nose. It was the least I could do for Reno.
Level 32
“We gotta find shelter.” Mi grabbed my arm. “Reno’s gotta make it.” She was right, but what move did we have?
Still, facing off with Jevo hadn’t been a completely worthless encounter. Mi now packed a submachine gun. She’d also stripped him of his sighting goggles. That gave us an effective sniper.
I had a pair of stun batons. Dakota had three concussion grenades and one of the sidearms. York had claimed the other, along with the shotgun.
We were armed. Just like that, everything had changed. Give a small group of citizens some firepower and they can be a big problem. Now give the same firepower to highly trained combatants. BlackStar might have made a huge error.
Games are not like real life. I know most players wish they were, so they’d have usable job skills, but it just doesn’t work that way. If any army makes an assault in a game, they go for the biggest castle or
lair. But you can’t play that way on a real battlefield. That was painfully clear to me.
What did I have, really? A few popguns. Ammo that would last maybe five minutes in a fight. Four able bodies and one that needed help walking.
Our food was limited. Our mobility was zero. I suspected BlackStar might be tracking our heat signatures through satellites—because unless I had a mole, how had Jevo found and trapped us?
So what could I do? Make a bum rush on the towers of BlackStar itself? Or try to grab a security van and see what the desert held? We weren’t going to blend in, that was for sure. Dakota’s skin was not the same color as when we escaped. I had issues with fluid seepage around my port, and every few minutes, Mi was coughing and trying to hide it from the rest of us.
We needed good supplies. We needed reliable food. And we really needed some place we could call home base without the security forces fry-cooking us with their electron x-ray beam.
“I’m sick of playing catch-up.” York glared at me. It was the first thing he said when we met back up.
I agreed.
But in the real world, how did you take what you needed if they wouldn’t let you work for it?
You can call it our genetics, or our training, or even our programming if you want to be cruel. The fact was, no matter how human Dakota wanted to be, we were products of war. Maybe even products for war, if you looked at our real value to this world.
So there it was. Our core code. Our resting state. The top level in our central directory. Our systems, and this system, would just not let us stay at peace.
So to answer the question what do you do, in this real world, to get what you need?
You take away what the enemy needs. You cut off their supply lines. You disrupt productivity. Starve them out. Make them panic. You find a defensible position and, through superior tactics and strategy, you make them come to you.
Level 33
In any military society, there’s a stone-cold pecking order for combat personnel. Everyone is ranked—their size, strength, speed, intelligence, weaponry. Everyone has stats. Over time they get sorted. The best bubble up and the rest become rent-a-thugs.
Near the top, I was sure, were BlackStar’s troopers. Above that, once we’d been revived, had to be Jevo and our generation, but I couldn’t worry about Jevo and his pals. Not yet. If we ran into those elite BlackStar forces now, we’d lose.
Plus, we had to make a move before Deke, Rio, Syd, and the rest were called up. We’d gotten lucky with Jevo. It wouldn’t go that way again.
So we had to go after mall cops. The bottom level and the least prepared. It was a good gamble that they’d react most predictably when it came to an ambush.
Across Redwood, the manhunt was on. Corner video screens ran a constant ticker about the missing five. Posters with sketches of our likely appearance caked the sides of buildings. Truthfully, those images looked closer to our online selves than to our real faces.
The reports claimed that one elite BlackStar soldier had been injured in our “firefight” with their forces. That was Jevo. They also reported that we had killed several support troopers in cold blood.
BlackStar controlled the information, but they still couldn’t find us.
I believed they thought we were about to run. Extra troops guarded all unfinished areas of the wall. Patrols in the swankier neighborhoods went on full alert. Search teams were increasing in number and size, scanning all abandoned buildings twice a day.
Homes were invaded. Families were questioned. For the first time, we actually saw a helicopter overhead, spraying the poor areas of the city with clear fluid. It was impossible not to breathe the fog. But after the chopper was gone, everyone went back to work. Maybe it was some kind of chemical marker. A dye that would react only to those who had certain preservatives or solutions in their system.
Mi and I watched trucks roll and big men abuse terrified citizens. There was nothing we could do except keep moving. Stay in the shadows. Always have an escape route. Plan ahead. Just not get caught.
So, and it was probably about time, I chose our next objective. We had weapons, but not a lot of them. Even with a perfect plan, we had only two fully functional people for each exit.
Stretched thin. But it should work. Even Reno could play a role. I gave him the rusty, unloaded, useless pistol I’d taken from Screw.
That would be diversion one. I was pretty sure how the response might go.
Level 34
As the sun came up, packing all the chits we’d saved, we strolled into XMart to shop for the supplies we’d need to attack XMart.
We browsed in housewares. We stocked up in hardware. The kitchen department was full of choice chemicals. You’re probably aware of what someone can make with ammonia and fertilizer.
The big thing we did, however, was to keep our eyes and ears wide open. Three hundred Spartans once killed twenty thousand Persians because they understood how to use a choke point. I knew we’d be outnumbered, but I also knew those big stores only had two unlocked entrances.
We had five guns. Only four worked. Our bladed weapons were a joke. They all had to stay outside for the beginning of the op because of the metal detectors and hand searches.
We had no air or ground support, no vehicles at all, but we were able to buy radios. They might provide the advantage we needed.
“We’ve got options!” Dakota hissed at me as I picked out the best radios I could find. These things would cost us most of our wealth, but so be it. Communications in tactical arenas are often more important than bullets.
Dakota was in a dark place. Her peaceful integration dreams had been quickly squashed.
She said, “This is not a war to win, Phoenix. It’s a puzzle we can solve.”
“They shot first, D. They shot Reno first.”
“So that’s all this will become? Just payback? How programmed of you.”
“No, it’s the only negotiation they understand. If we don’t get a few victories on our side, they’ll just keep whittling us down until we beg to go back in the tank.”
“I’m not going back,” she said flatly.
“They shot Reno,” I reminded her at the checkout. “They put holes in us first.”
“I wanted there to be a higher road I could take,” she said blankly.
“I know you wanted that.” My arm went around her shoulders, a loving squeeze. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting that.”
“I need answers,” she continued. “I need to know who I really am and where they snatched me from and how long ago they herded me off that big bus.”
“And I’m trying to get them for you. This is the right place to start.”
“I agree Jevo didn’t have to shoot Reno.”
That made us both go quiet. There was really nothing more to be said.
We had to act. Our combat capabilities were eroding quickly.
Mi’s chest had gotten worse. She was coughing every minute or so.
York was clutching his ribs for no apparent reason. And me, well, you know about the redness around my port. I tried to hide it from everyone. It was actually draining now, not blood but a clear fluid with little green specks. Kind of like a flesh rot, but from the inside. The smell was horrendous.
Dakota had taken to wearing full shooting gloves everywhere, and something just wasn’t right in her head. Always sweating too. Reno, you know how Reno was. He’d lost a lot of blood. Time for us to go get some back.
That hospital inside the XMart . . . I looked forward to raiding that almost as much as opening up XMart’s gun lockers.
Level 35
We were ready. Reno was out front. Mi was in her spot across from Dakota. York would be handling the secondary door over by the automotive entrance and I was the only one inside. I had a cart full of . . . treats.
On command, Reno raised his empty pistol and pointed it at the front door security guard. That got his attention. Civilians never had weapons. Possession was instant banishment witho
ut trial. The screens reminded people of that at least once an hour.
The goon spoke into his radio. “We’ve got a situation here.”
But that’s all it really was. A situation. The gun was useless without the right bullets, and as rusted as the thing was, I’d have hated to fire it. You could lose a hand and both your eyes.
But the big barrel, that looked scary, and scary was what Reno was going for. He had a bunch of bad facial hair, wild eyes, pale skin, and the gleam of desperation you just don’t see in men who have jobs.
Plus, the limp. The holes in his leg. I bet that guard knew immediately that he was face-to-face with one of the BlackStar escapees.
“Give me your weapon!” Reno barked. But the bigger man just kept pressing the emergency button on his utility belt and trying to take things slow.
“Everyone get down!” Reno waved the pistol around, watching terrified shoppers drop in one smooth wave.
That order was mostly for their safety, but they didn’t know that. Gotta get the innocents out of the line of fire. Not only to protect them, but also so they don’t get in the way of a well-placed shot.
I was exactly in the right spot, in the clothing section, just a few dozen steps from the front of the store, so I boosted myself up on top of the changing room to get a better view.
It didn’t surprise me that XMart cameras were up here too. Pointing down into the closets. For this chain, there’d never been such a thing as privacy.
Anyway, from up here I could watch what I really wanted to see: their response tactics.
The alarm was chiming, and instantly, a half-dozen men dressed just like the door goon rushed toward that main entrance.
“Six total, plus the one in Reno’s sights,” I reported into our radios. I could just feel my team making those slight moves, the instinctive adjustments that would allow them to put the greatest number of XMart guards in the smallest usable targeting zone.
The big question we all had was this: Faced with a serious threat, how would their forces respond? Would they all head to the scene of the disturbance? Or were they smart enough to leave reserve troops, just in case the first action was misdirection?