by Alan Ryker
But something else was pressing in, and from the opposite side. It also seemed familiar, but different this time. Then she realized that blended in equal proportions to the envy was pity.
That was an emotion Elizabeth usually only felt for herself or the dogs in those terrible Humane Society commercials. But she felt it now, imagining that prim creature practicing her small talk for hour after hour in front of the mirror or working out on the ExerFlexer for an entire day, ignoring hunger until another fitness point was achieved.
The woman was miserable. Okay, not as miserable as Betty, walled into a closet in which she lived an endless undeath, but still, very unhappy. Never satisfied. It was the dissatisfaction that had helped her reach this level of perfection. She’d been normal once. Once she’d rebelled when Elizabeth had tried to force her to study all day, had wanted to go talk to neighbors or play her banjo (which was replaced with a grand piano as soon as the household budget afforded it). But eventually, those lessons in etiquette and self-help paid off, and Elizabeth didn’t have to watch every move the Ward made. She would turn the game on and discover that she’d already been studying for hours while Dave was away working his long days. Soon, Beth never watched TV, only spoke to the neighbors to increase reputation points, only played the piano when her skill dropped a level.
That had all made Elizabeth so happy. A perfect Wards household would be so much easier to achieve with Beth working towards that same goal, with every step not being a fight against her independent personality. But seeing the woman… Yeah, that was definitely pity.
What would Beth think to know that she was being pitied by a woman who, far from practicing elocution and planning the most elegant parties, spent her days playing a computer game and delaying changing from her robe into real clothes. At the very least, she doubted Beth would see her as an ally against the trashy neighbors.
With a long chain made of the toughest clothing in the closet all tied end to end, Elizabeth went to the window and opened it. Looking down while preparing herself to climb out, the drop seemed a bit further than it had before. It could have also been an effect of the sun having suddenly disappeared, hiding the ground in such darkness that Elizabeth felt she was staring into a pit if she looked away from the square patches of light laid out by the windows far too perfectly, crosshatched by little panes in surreal clarity.
The loss of light had been surreal, too. The sun had shone brightly through the window when Elizabeth stepped into the closet. When she stepped out, it was gone. Had it set, or just blinked out, the moon—big, round and featureless—simply clicking on like a bare cellar bulb.
Elizabeth pulled herself back into motion. She couldn’t let herself get caught up in the strangely vibrant yet dead world. Perhaps she’d spent too many hundreds of hours observing it and now it was her default mode, but if she hoped to make it home, she had to move. Quickly.
Tying the makeshift rope to the leg of the computer desk, she resolved to move quickly until something horrific caught her eye. An eye. A huge eye, staring out of the cartoonish computer monitor, watching her.
It was the god they talked about, but it wasn’t her. Then who was the god of this world now? She felt a surprising acid burn of anger before once again shaking herself back to awareness and opening the window.
The Eye watched as she dropped the rope out and peered down to be sure she’d made it long enough. She had, but only because she’d tied in a couple of extra pair of jeans just to be on the safe side.
Elizabeth yanked on the rope a few times. It seemed secure enough, as long as the knots held. There was really only one way to tell.
Getting out of the window and started down was awkward, and she almost fell as she transitioned her hands from the sill to the rope. Once hanging there, it was easier to hold on that she’d thought, because the knots provided her something to grip with both her hands and between her boots. But moving from knot to knot was difficult, requiring all her strength. Above her the blank moon shone brightly, yet provided surprisingly little light.
She passed from the first knot to the next, then paused, wondering if she could make it all the way to the ground without an accident when suddenly she became weightless. Gripping the taut pair of jeans like the lifeline it literally was, she gasped as for a moment she weighed nothing and then jerked to a stop, feeling lucky that her instinct had been to grip the rope tightly or it would have been ripped from her hands.
She looked up and saw the edge of the desk. It had been on the perpendicular wall, and must have slid from her weight the several feet to the window, making a loud honking sound as it was pulled over the hardwood floor, and then a thump as it hit the wall.
Elizabeth hung frozen. It took several seconds to convince herself that she was no longer falling, especially because she could still barely see the ground. Her grip held, the rope held, and the worst that happened was that she was smacked against the outside of the house once, then swayed slightly back and forth. As she swayed she listened. The desk had made a lot of noise.
Above her, the dressing room door opened, and Beth said, “I don’t hear small talk. You’re supposed to be…”
Beth’s prim voice was replaced by the sound of her pounding feet headed Elizabeth’s way. Adrenaline filled Elizabeth and tightened her hands, which were still white-knuckled from the fall, but she forced them to work and began lowering herself again.
Beth’s head jutted out the window right over her, once again freezing her descent.
“This is not how civilized people behave,” she said. She growled the absurd phrase like an animal, like it was the transition between discussion and more primitive ways of making your wishes understood. Her arms appeared, her hands gripped the rope and she began tugging.
Nothing happened. For a moment Elizabeth was worried that the furious woman with all of her ExerFlexer muscle was strong enough to reel her back up, but she couldn’t even noticeably jostle the rope with the weight of a grown woman hanging from the other end.
Beth’s face turned bright red from the effort, and a growl of frustration grew in her throat like an approaching train whistle. “You ruined my clothes! Do you know what this will do to my reputation?”
The thought seemed to scare her, and she began turning her head this way and that, squinting her eyes to penetrate the darkness, apparently checking to see if any neighbors were watching the drama.
Then she was gone, back through the window, her feet pounding on the hardwood, her footsteps receding, and with another jolt of adrenaline, Elizabeth realized that the insane woman was almost certainly racing outside to meet her from below.
PART 10
Elizabeth began lowering herself much more quickly. In doing so, she kicked the rope several times after releasing a knot with her feet. Unable to grip it again, she attempted to lower herself with only her hands, and upon letting go with one immediately fell straight down.
She gasped, but, before she could even finish, her feet hit solid earth and she fell to her butt in the grass. She’d only been a few feet from the ground. Getting to her feet, she did a very quick check of her limbs, making sure she hadn’t hurt anything from her short fall, but even that quick check was cut short by the sound of the front door slamming open and feet pounding across the porch at high speed.
A male voice said, “Dear, maybe we should just let her go.”
Elizabeth didn’t wait to hear the response, doubting that it was agreement. She raced across the dark yard, avoiding the picnic bench, fire pit and huge flower planters by memory, the perfectly level ground beneath her feet giving her the confidence to totally cut loose even in the dark.
She was approaching the back fence when a black shape blocked a section of the blue-black sky directly before her. It was too late to stop, probably too late to even change direction without falling, so in the fraction of a second she had before impact, she unconsciously decided that it would be better to hit the person than fall on her own face and turned her shoulders to pl
ant one directly into whomever blocked her path.
The way the shadow woofed when her shoulder sank into it, she knew that it was a man, a tall man, and that she’d hit him in the belly at full speed. Even connecting her bony part with his softness jarred her more than she expected. She’d never experienced physical violence like she had since waking up in the wrong world. The things action stars did in movies that didn’t give them a moment of pause hurt and stunned, sapping the breath and energy from her. But there was no time to think of consequences.
The shadow man folded in half, his upper body curling over her as her momentum carried her deeper into him until she over ran her feet and they were both flying. They hit the ground, her shoulder still imbedded in his stomach, and she felt him collapse and heard even more air whoosh out of his mouth.
She lost her breath as well, even with his body to spare her most of the impact, but she recovered quickly and began to disentangle herself from the long limbs she was wrapped in.
In an instant, the dark, confusing world was lit. She lay on Albatross, his eyes wide open but staring up into the black sky, his mouth open even wider, though he could only gasp tiny sips of air like his throat was a pinched straw.
Being able to see helped Elizabeth free herself and roll away. She glanced back to see a small circle of light bobbing, coming closer.
“Stop! You’re not going to ruin my clothing and embarrass my household and just leave,” Beth shouted, invisible in the utter darkness behind the bright flashlight she held.
Elizabeth thought that sounded like exactly what she was about to do. She looked down at Albatross one more time to ensure he wasn’t an immediate danger.
Without her pressed into his stomach anymore, he’d curled his long limbs up like a crushed spider. His eyes were pinched shut and he was still gasping for air in audible whistles. Then a glint caught Elizabeth’s eye. Stainless steel. A butcher knife, in the grass.
Her heart thudded and she fought the adrenaline that would turn her knees weak and her feet clumsy. She picked up the knife. This was a good thing, not something to lose her composure over. She was armed now.
Elizabeth ran for the back fence, pulling herself up and clambering over it with ease that surprised her. She had gym muscle, she’d just never used it to do anything but move a machine, pull a cable or shift a dumbbell.
Before she dropped, framed like an escaping prisoner in a spotlight, the light faltered and rolled across the ground, filtering through the well-manicured grass.
Beth apparently hadn’t seen Albatross, dressed in black and sprawled on the ground, even when Elizabeth was tangled with him. Without intending to, Elizabeth lured Beth into a trap by running in a straight line away from both her and Albatross, putting Beth’s path of pursuit right over the collapsed man as she stared into the distance after her quarry. Elizabeth couldn’t see the chaos she’d caused, as Beth’s flashlight had rolled away and wasn’t pointed in the right direction, but the woman had been moving just as fast as she had, but without the luxury of breaking her fall with Albatross’s stomach. Elizabeth imagined she was pretty banged up, and was pretty happy at the thought. Then the shouting started, fake words, kiddy cursing—nothing that would decrease her Charisma or Reputation stats.
Feeling less panicked, Elizabeth steadied herself with several deep breaths, then dropped to the other side of the fence.
* * *
Elizabeth ran through lots, some empty, some filled with pre-made Wards families she let care for themselves. Through their windows she saw them speaking in that strangely animated and jerky Wards way, and she wondered what they were saying. She’d always wondered what they were saying, though, since their conversations were composed of nonsense noises and speech bubbles filled with pictures.
She stuck to the shadows, trying to decide the best way to loop back around to the torture house. She didn’t know what she’d do after getting there, but she didn’t have any other ideas.
She was pondering this when an intersection forced her out of backyards and into the open. She crouched beside a fence, preparing herself to sprint across the lane, when she saw something in the distance that made her breath catch in her chest.
A tower, huge and strange, blacker than the night sky it stood against. Nothing around it was more than three stories tall, and Elizabeth couldn’t even tell when the tower ended as its heights blurred into the dark night sky.
What was that monstrosity? It wasn’t a skyscraper, because it didn’t stand in the downtown area. But more than that, it wasn’t some monolith sunken into the earth as if it had fallen from space, designed to fight gravity to the end, but organic like Jack’s beanstalk, twirling, tapering up until it disappeared beyond view. Lit windows speckled its sides, house windows with little square panes that looked ridiculous hundreds of feet up in the air.
How could such a thing exist? It was nonsensical. It was…
The cheat house.
Elizabeth had been so focused on the torture house that she’d forgotten about the cheat house. Months ago, she’d spent all her time there, building, trying to create paradise, the place where she could finally be happy.
She’d grown frustrated with her other creations, wanted to take things further, and had found a hack in the forums that promised to open the world’s potential to match her imagination. Most people wouldn’t install things like that for fear of corrupting their games or inviting in a virus that would force them to wipe their hard drives and along with it their hard work, but Elizabeth couldn’t resist.
And it had worked. Once installed, there were many fewer limits on what she could buy or how much she could build. A portal opened, and from it she could pull any item she wanted, though limited to a rate of ten items a day, many that she’d never seen in The Wards or any of the many expansion packs. She’d assumed they were from private designers, that the hack somehow tapped their databases and she was getting their personally designed objects for free.
Now she wondered. Had that been the start? Had that led to this?
It had been thrilling, absolutely thrilling, to be able to build and acquire to her heart’s content. At first. Then it became too easy. Having everything given to her, it changed the game entirely, and all that she built and collected felt meaningless. She made entire floors she couldn’t remember, filled with things she didn’t know why she’d even wanted. Months ago she’d grown so bored that she just walked away. Her torture house and first house were more interesting.
The hack portal, could it be more than it had seemed? Could it be connected to… The idea was crazy, or it would have been before she’d woken up in the world of her computer game. But at that moment it seemed like a chance. And it was a chance that didn’t require her to go back to the torture house.
Elizabeth sprinted across the intersection in the direction of the tower. The brief rest in the shadows had allowed her to catch her breath, and she felt much better, but as she jogged down dark streets, she noticed that they were no longer so dark. Porch lights were on, and Wards she recognized from parties and trips downtown stood staring into the street as if waiting for something. They watched her, and she heard them murmuring to each other, and even more disturbingly, into phones.
She tried to avoid their eyes, but even when she cut across a block of back yards, they saw her, made their way out back, speaking their nonsense chatter to each other which had once seemed cute, and now seemed so strange Elizabeth felt she could lose her mind.
The only result of the detour was to slow her progress.
“Beth?” said a voice from the darkness of a back door.
Elizabeth veered and nearly ran face-first into a tree, but managed to catch herself against it. She spun, saw a short, cute little woman, barely larger than a child. She needed to catch her breath, and this Ward didn’t look dangerous. Elizabeth stood silently for a moment, just staring with her butcher knife gripped tightly in her hand, and then she had a thought. If this Ward confused her for her doppelganger, t
hen she could find out what was going on, what had brought the Wards out of their houses in the middle of the night.
“Yes?” she said.
“I haven’t seen The Eyes yet. I’ve been calling my neighbors, trying to find out if anyone else has, but they tell me to stop tying up their lines.” She giggled, her mouth covered with her hands, her shoulders shaking, ensuring that the player knew she was laughing.
“Oh?” Elizabeth remembered this Ward, but hadn’t made her. She came standard. Elizabeth had always found her strange. Her Friendliness stat was extremely high and she giggled a lot.
The Eyes. Their God. She’d thought that Beth and Albatross colliding had been good luck, but apparently Albatross had convinced Beth of her true identity. “Has anyone seen The Eyes?”
“I think some have. I think she was coming this way.”
“What will you do if you see The Eyes?”
“Don’t worry about me, Beth. I’ll do just what you said. I won’t try to catch her. I’ll follow her and she won’t even know.”
Follow her?
Beth looked over her shoulder, and though she’d caught her breath, her heart suddenly slammed into her ribs like it was trying to break them from the inside. In the yard she’d just come through, dozens of Wards stood perfectly still, perfectly silent. Not the stillness of lurking predators, with that motionless tension created by muscle working against opposing muscle. No, perfectly still, like a single frame taken from a movie, like you wouldn’t believe they had the ability to move until they started moving again.
They stared back at her unabashedly.
“Do you think—”
Elizabeth ran.
PART 11
When she dared a look back over her shoulder, she saw them coming after her. Those who’d spent the necessary hours on their ExerFlexers kept pace, though they stayed thirty yards back. The rest trailed through the night, a swarm with a hundred minds but one goal: to follow their god made flesh. The timeline was accelerated, because she’d only just been immaculately conceived into their world, and she could already sense a crucifixion on the horizon if she didn’t escape it soon.