Headshot: One in the Gut (Book 1 of a Zombie litRPG Trilogy)

by Matthew Siege

  If I had to guess, she’d only been here to scavenge. That meant that the Survivors were still trying to pull in every available resource they could. I liked the idea of them having to perform menial tasks for a change, and I was even more pleased that this particular job would be the end of her.

  She was in such a panic that she didn't see even me, and I realized once more that possibly my best camouflage was simply to remain motionless. It was probably hard for my enemy to get used to having to scan for that. Humans are drawn to movement, and the unnatural stillness that I could summon up when I had to may very well go a long way to helping me remain undetected.

  I grabbed for her, but she was fast. She beat my arm back with the butt of a rifle, hardly breaking stride. She was even smart enough not to scream, and as my other hand swatted at her and closed on nothing but empty air I realized that she was pretty agile, too.

  There was a moment when I thought she may turn around, plant her feet and try and take me out. I figured she already would’ve done it if there any bullets left in that gun, but I could see a hammer hanging from her belt. That would do it, probably.

  But when she reached for something, it wasn’t for a weapon. It was for radio. I was almost too surprised to lunge at her. I wasn’t expecting tech like that, so maybe I should have been. After all, it wouldn’t make any sense if the survivors didn't have archetypes as well. I didn't know what they were, but I suppose it didn't matter.

  I needed to stop her from using that, or she’d call in reinforcements. If I let that happen, a lot of things could go wrong at once. Not only would our little attack to be thwarted, but maybe the Zombie horde on the freeway would get diverted as well.

  The fact that a Runner didn't come tearing out of the diner after her told me that this Survivor had already won one fight. I imagine that gave her a nice little bonus of experience. Maybe she’d even leveled up.

  Maybe she had an ability I didn't know about.

  Actually, I didn’t know anything about any of their abilities, so that was pretty much a guarantee…

  She was fast enough that she probably could outrun the tanks, since they were just about as slow as I was. So why had she stopped? She didn’t seem like an inexperienced player, so why was she pawing for that radio instead of getting away? She must see that without the runner, we had nothing to chase her down with, and since none of us had any ranged weapons, all she had to do was flee and she could fight another day.

  And if the radio could call for backup, wouldn’t she have used it already? Why wait until things were this bad?

  She was too far away from me to stop her, but I tried. I lunged forward and she nimbly danced away, even as she brought the radio to her mouth, held down the button, and said something.

  I grabbed for her again and missed, and with my next attack I did the only thing I could do to slow her down. She may have been dodging me, but she had made the mistake of letting me close the distance and so I threw myself at her legs, grabbing at least one of her ankles in a grip that she got to kill me to make me release.

  I was an anchor. I looked up at her, and she looked down at me.

  And then the light pole hit her so hard in the chest at the impact of it sent both of us flying in the same direction. I landed beside her in a tangle of limbs, so uncertain of what it just happened that I didn’t even attack her.

  It didn’t matter. The tank that had hit her was still holding the light pole, only now he pointed out past the parking lot, towards Los Angeles. It was like a Zombie Babe Ruth, calling his next shot. The other Tank didn’t bother to celebrate. He was marching in this direction, and instead of taking a bite of her I respected the pecking order and moved away from her corpse.

  The other Zombies that had survived the attack tried to force their way to the body. I may have been willing to step away so that the tanks could eat first, but these other guys didn’t deserve to push ahead in line. None of them would be eating if it wasn't for me. I'd stopped her. I'd been the one that had figured out that she would run, and when she did it had been me that slowed her down enough for the Tank to make the kill shot.

  But in this horde, everybody was in it for themselves. I was slow, and that meant that I was in the back of the pack. It wasn't as if the Zombies were queuing up, either. When they got close they tried to dart in and have a bite, but that was when I watched the first Tank, wiping Gore from his chin and burping, wag his finger at them and then push them away.

  Nobody argued. I was sure that the players were raging in their own heads, trying to figure out a way to get to the meat, but they didn’t dare force the issue.

  Instead, they backed off and waited. I didn't exactly know if there could be player on player death on the Zombie side, but either there was and these guys were afraid to engage in it, or they simply decided it wasn’t worth a fight.

  There hadn’t been PVP in the Beta, but that didn’t mean anything now. I didn’t exactly want to find out that there was, at least not like making a Tank pick me up and twist me in half. Even if we couldn’t kill each other, they could obviously just use their bulk to keep me away, and if I waited around for their scraps I’d probably just be wasting time. Bodies that big could eat a dumpster load of food.

  As I turned to go, I felt a big, heavy hand on my back. Before I realized what was happening come one of the tanks had turned me back around as gently as he could and was escorting me back to what was left of the body.

  The second tank stood up as I approached, and though there wasn't much left, I was appreciative. I ate the rest, and I watched my hit points increase. I hadn’t been down very much, but their show of respect touched me deeply. Maybe we weren’t all animals.

  Maybe we had a chance to be more than that.

  My experience points crawled up as well, but now that I was getting to be a higher level I wasn't leveling anywhere near as fast. That was to be expected, and I wasn't too disappointed.

  Now that everything worth eating was gone, one of the Tanks gave me a thumbs up before the two of them high-fived and turned around, going back up the ramp and rejoining the horde. A couple of the other Zombies had decided to pick through the diner and see if there is anything worth eating in there, but the rest returned to the road as well.

  I was about to head back to the freeway too, until I accidentally kicked something with my foot that skittered across the pavement. It was her radio. I picked it up on a whim.

  Congratulations!

  I blinked. That was it. The game didn’t give me any other info. There was no ability progression, no options, no hint at all as to what I was being congratulated for. There was no way that I was going to let this thing go without investigating it further, and when I realized that I didn’t want to be holding in my hand the whole time, I went back and tore a long red strip off her shirt.

  The game wouldn’t let me tie a knot, but I wound it around my bicep and the radio enough times that I didn’t think it would fall off. I needed time to think, and when the last of the Zombies abandoned the diner, I took that as an opportunity to head inside.

  Chapter 23

  Just as I was turning away to head inside, I had another idea.

  It was a bit of a mess, but since there wasn’t really anything left over it was easy to get the backpack. I picked it up, and took it into the diner with me. The radio was too strange for me to ignore any other items that might be associated with.

  Especially after that weird congratulations the game had just given me…

  As I approached the building that had so recently held the Survivor, the last of the Zombies to leave turned around and made a signal at me that I was pretty sure was meant to communicate in there was nothing worth eating in the diner. I nodded and went inside anyway.

  Sure enough, the place was completely deserted. Which meant it was perfect for my needs. As always, I suppose there was a chance that I’d get ambushed or that the Survivor really had been calling for backup, but with that ca
ravan of death in the form of a long line of zombies just up there on the freeway, I didn't think that they’d bother to risk their lives when the battle was clearly already over.

  I went back inside the rear door that she'd burst out of a couple of minutes before and found a booth where I could sit down. The last of the dark was still with me, but there was a slice of moonlight splashed across the table. I unwound the strip of cloth from the radio and laid it in the light before fumbling with the zipper on the backpack.

  It took a lot of concentration, but I finally managed to get my index finger and my thumb to work together with enough coordination that I could pinch the zipper between them. Then I dragged, and after a moment, the bag opened. I dumped its contents in a pile and then begin to sift through them.

  It all seemed fairly innocuous to me. Pens. Pencils. A couple of rulers and some graph paper. The first few sheets of paper I looked at were filled with a long series of handwritten notes and formulas. Still couldn’t read the words, and the numbers didn’t make sense either. Of course, numbers had really never made sense to me anyway.

  The game didn’t have to get in the way of my understanding for that all look like gibberish. I’d done that to myself by ignoring too many lessons and skipping too many classes.

  The last couple of pages were different. They look like blueprints, and even though the device didn’t look fully assembled on the paper, it was clear that they were drawings of the radio that sat on the table in front of me.

  I stared at them for a while, holding up the paper in the light and seeing if there was an angle where I could trick the game had to letting me understand it. No luck. It was the strangest thing, since I knew they were written in English. I could even recognize individual letters but when I focused on them, they changed.

  Something was happening with them as well. At first I thought they were simply a code, something that maybe I could solve if I had enough time to wait time and used enough ingenuity. But after a couple of minutes I realize that the game was far smarter than that. I put my finger down next to one of the words you counted how many letters it was composed of. Six.

  Then I looked away, glancing out the shattered window for a moment at the freeway and the horde that kept moving inexorably towards Los Angeles. I counted to three, and then looked back at the word next to my finger. There were nine letters now in that word, and none of them made sense together.

  Obviously, the game was standing in my way, and instead of getting going with the flow like I had before, I felt myself getting more and more frustrated. This wasn’t just some street sign. It was important. It had to be! If none of this served a purpose, why had Headshot sent me a congratulations message?

  I suppose it could be a bug, but I didn’t want to believe that. There had to be more to it. I was sure that I was missing something I studied the papers one more time. If there was some secret here, I wasn’t seeing it.

  Up until now, I’d been fine with the game hiding things from me. That was part of the fun, seeing this relatively familiar world through completely different eyes in a situation I hoped to never truly experience when my actual life was on the line.

  But this was pissing me off. I didn't like being teased or made to feel stupid. I was starting to feel a lot like I had when Lori and I had been near to breaking up. I was willing to expend the effort, but if there was no reward at the end, no pot of gold or chest of loot at the end, then why was I even bothering?

  I didn’t want to give up, though. My brain wouldn’t let me just set this aside, and so I reached for the radio instead. It looked like it was built around the frame of something I’d seen a million times, but there were a ton of custom buttons and I had no idea what their purpose was. They were each labeled, but that didn’t really do me any good.

  Without bothering to wonder if it was a good idea or no, I pushed the one that looked like it might power the device on. There was a little backlit screen set into it, and it lit up obediently.

  Okay. So far, so good. I tapped a few of the other buttons, expecting to get a bit more information about what they did by the way the device reacted. Nope. The illegible words changed on the screen, but that was it.

  I growled deep in the back of my throat and turned it off before shoving the radio and the papers back into the backpack. If there was a way to work out what this thing was supposed to do, I was determined to find it. Maybe it was just a radio, but I was beginning to doubt it. She hadn’t used it to call for help and I’d never seen one with that many buttons on it.

  Even though I hadn’t solved this puzzle yet, I couldn’t help but smile. The whole world was starting to open up for me in here, and just thinking about how good things were going for me inside Headshot Reminded me how crappy it was outside of the game. For instance, judging by the clock, if I didn’t call in sick to my job in the next few minutes it would be too late. I was fine with lying to them. Coming up with a reasonable, bullshit excuse wasn’t the issue. I just needed them to be okay with it, because if they suspected that I was playing a game instead of punching keys, I’d be out on my ass.

  I needed the money way too much to get fired, and so I had to make doing finding a safe place to log out in order to call in sick my first priority. I didn’t know how far I was from the river, but when I remembered how safe and secure I had felt without throng of zombies on the freeway I decided to do what some of them had done; find the shell of a car or a sizable bit of rubble to hide underneath and hope that that flood of undead players would keep me safe until I came back to the game.

  I only needed a few minutes… Just enough time to make that phone call and then grab something to eat and maybe go to the bathroom before I logged back in.

  I looked through the window at the freeway, shading my eyes against the sun. For a moment I didn’t see anyone up there, and that was when I really started to panic. If they’d already moved on without me, I was screwed. I don’t think I’d quite be behind enemy territories, but it was clear that the front lines were constantly shifting and it would be easy to get caught on the wrong side of them.

  If I could’ve breathed, I would’ve breathed a sigh of relief just then. It wasn’t that there was nobody up there. In fact, there were so many zombies heading north now that they looked like one massive, flowing wall of flesh. From this distance, it was hard to make out individuals, though if I tried I could see the bulk of the Tanks and, now and then, see the flicker of a Runner as they sprinted past the rest.

  Why weren’t these players at work? Were they kids? I like to believe that parents would never let children into a game like this, but I knew from my own upbringing that as long as the child was quiet there were parents that would let it do just about anything they wanted. I’d ditched enough school to know that it was an easy thing to do, and there were probably quite a few people with regular jobs that were doing the same thing I’d be doing today and calling in sick.

  I shrugged the backpack on over my shoulders. I thought I would feel more foolish wearing it than I did. Maybe part of what let me ignore that was the anonymity of Headshot If I couldn’t get singled out, the ridicule wouldn’t sting as badly.

  But there was more to it than just that. I had a secret in this bag. I didn’t know what it did and I didn’t know if I’d ever discover the real meaning behind it, but it let me feel special. I knew something they didn’t know, even if the mystery wasn’t fully explained.

  I got out of the booth and left the diner. Now that I decided on a course of action I’d be a fool if I remained. The backpack made me feel like I was on my way to something new, but it was a heavy burden to bear. Now I did have something to lose. I started over next week, it would be gone. I had until Sunday to work out what the radio did or why it was so special.

  If I even made it to Sunday, that is…

  I hurried back up the ramp and joined the rest of my allies, and immediately a message indicator blinked in my lower right. I concentrated on it for moment, and wa
s rewarded with a message.

  You have been invited to join the Horde. There are sufficient numbers now for the Tireless March effect to carry with them. You can travel at twice the speed of those in the Horde, though you will go where they go. You can cancel this effect anytime and if you wish, you may even log out and allow the Vanguard to guide you to their selected destination.

  Do you accept?

  For the first time in a very, very long while I felt like the game was actively helping me. Yes, the Survivors had almost every advantage. But this was not only cool, it’s what made sense. It was like a kind of autopilot. How else could large groups of Zombies travel the sometimes-vast distances between major cities to carry on their attack? If the game only went for a week, without a mechanic like this it would be far too simple for the survivors to put her head down and hope they get overlooked if they went to a remote region of the globe.

  I tried to will myself out of the game, and it let me.

  Once I was back in the real world, took me a second to drag air into my lungs and wipe at my tired eyes with my knuckles. My eyes had been closed the whole time, but they were dry and no doubt bloodshot. In one way, I was completely mentally exhausted but in another my brain was so alive with what had just happened, with the implications of that rogue congratulations that had flashed across my vision that I didn't know if I'd ever be able to sleep again.

  If everything was going well, my zombie body was traveling with the horde. It went where whoever was in charge wanted it to, and I was fine with that. Soon I’d logged back in and take back control, but for now at least I wouldn’t be cowering under trash just waiting to be discovered.