And they were. At least they would be, if hadn’t pulled their Humvee straight into the open garage of a spacious mansion before the three of them hopped out, dragged the garage door down manually behind them and went into the mansion through an internal door.
But they did, and so they weren’t.
I was left in darkness, listening to the tick tick tick of their engine cooling and their footsteps as they climbed a set of stairs in the house.
Congratulations! Your recent actions have qualified you as a Schemer. Your stats will remain unchanged, but you may now access exclusive skills. Turns out that brains are not just for eating, so start using yours…
Chapter 28
Even though I was inside, I waited. I didn’t hear them moving around anymore, but that didn’t mean anything. These mansions would surely have been built to a much higher standard than I was used to, so I could hardly rely on my hearing to track their progress.
I counted to a thousand. Then I counted to a thousand again. It was hard to keep count right, since I didn't breathe and I didn't have a pulse. The silence that fell down hard around me combined with the darkness to rob me of any sense of the passage of time.
So, look at the clock, you idiot, I yelled at myself, feeling like a fool. It was getting way too easy to forget that I was in a game. I had a User Interface with a bunch of information at my disposal, and here I was counting the seconds off in my head like an idiot…
I waited for six minutes. Seven. Eight. I watched my hit points slip from 5 to 4, and that made me force myself to act. If the Hunger kicked in now, I’d just go rampaging through the mansion like a damn fool, and I doubted that I’d be successful in eating enough to regain control before one of the Survivors finished me off.
Hopefully the Survivors were at the very least busy with things that would keep them from coming back into the garage for a while. I let myself gently slip to the concrete floor of the garage. I was expecting my muscles to be stiff, but they weren’t. The game clearly treated my undead body differently than my actual one, and I couldn’t have been happier that I didn’t have to deal with the soreness and pain caused hanging from the Humvee.
I climbed out from underneath the vehicle and looked around. There wasn’t enough light for my Low Light Vision to be any help, but I felt my way around to the door I’d heard them enter and accidentally whacked my stump against the knob reaching for it. I was going to have to remember that I was missing the damn thing, or I’d reach for someone important and miss.
I put my other hand on the doorknob and mentally said a little prayer. This was it. This was the moment. If the door was locked, I wouldn’t be able to gain access without alerting whoever was inside.
I gripped the doorknob tightly and slowly, ever so slowly turned it, surprising myself when it turned out to be unlocked.
Congratulations! You have learned the skill (Doorknob)!
The door opened, and I stepped inside quietness of the mansion. I stood there for a few minutes, getting a feel for the place. Finally, I was certain that it was devoid of anything but me. I didn’t know if that was good or bad. I needed to eat, but I also wanted to see what I could learn about the Survivors by poking through their things.
I took a careful step inside, and then another. At least there was moonlight streaming in from the huge bay windows that made up just about every wall. I saw a grand staircase to the left, the centerpiece of a marble-floored, gilded room that was clearly the main entryway and so I headed in that direction.
And then I whacked my head into the door.
What the fuck? I was back in the garage somehow, with my hand on the doorknob. Okay… I turned the knob again.
Congratulations! You have learned the skill (Doorknob)!
I went back inside. Everything looked the same as it had a second ago. The moonlight was still glistening on the Pacific Ocean, the stairs were still off to the left.
And then I was back in the garage again, my fucking hand still on the fucking doorknob.
ATTENTION PLAYERS! Headshot is coming down for emergency maintenance! Please find a safe place. We sincerely apologize, and will ensure that all active players are given a half hour notice before the World Server comes back up. We thank you for your patience. (Bear with us guys, we’re doing our damndest over here! We know this sucks for everybody and we’ll be making sure that nobody dies because of this!)
Chapter 29
All of the details of the garage were fading out one by one. I tried to focus on them, but anything I wasn’t actively staring at flickered in my peripheral vision for an instant and then evaporated. It didn't matter how hard I tried to grab onto the game with my mind; Headshot dumped me out unceremoniously and I didn’t have a choice in the matter.
And then, for whatever reason, when I realized my consciousness was already back in my room, my eyes were already opened. Closing them actually hurt, and I pinched the bridge of my nose with my fingers to try and stave off the migraine I felt roaring up from the depths to claim me.
Worse than that, the spider web of cracks I’d apparently been staring at on my drab wall had managed to burn themselves into my vision. I squeezed my eyes shut tight, rubbing at them with my thumbs until my eyeballs felt like they’d burst. I was still seeing those cracks, like a screen that’d been shattered but was still doing its best to show you an image.
I shivered. Getting booted like that was a shock to the system. Logging out voluntarily is one thing, I guess because you're mentally prepared for the transition. But this… This was different. It was worse than I’d felt before when something had gone wrong. I had that ache in my stomach like when you get kicked in the balls, and it was rising up into my throat.
Too late, I realized that I was going to puke. I threw myself off the mattress and landed on all fours, only remembering that I was still wearing a helmet when the cords attached to the heavy base station yanked it off my head.
Normally I’d have been furious at the chance of damaging it, but I didn’t have room in my brain to worry about that now. The cracks were still in my vision, only now they were projecting themselves across my dingy carpet.
I was going to be sick. There was an empty plate on top of the desk, and I pawed for it blindly until my fingers finally brushed across it. It wasn't much, but it was better than puking straight into the shag.
I heaved. There wasn't much in my stomach, but it burned all the way up. The smell of the hot splash of liquid immediately set me off again, and it was all I could do not to collapse face-first into it as my muscles seized and then released. I managed to slump to the side, twitching for a moment and then lying still as I gasped for air.
I knew what was happening. It didn’t make it any easier to push through, but at least I didn’t have to worry about a brain tumor or something.
The effects were well documented. I'd read about it, heard people talk about the way it used to be, when these new realities first started pushing our own out of the way with such frequency. It wasn’t supposed to happen anymore, but it was the sort of thing the news and the idiots who always saw the worst in everything tried to use to scare us out of games like Headshot
Until five minutes ago, I would have sworn up and down that VR sickness was a thing of the distant past, technologically thinking. Now that I was in the throes of it, I did my best to ride it out.
My stomach had emptied. When I could finally catch my breath and push myself up to a sitting position, I sat there for a minute or two before wiping at my mouth with the back of my hand. The taste in my mouth was awful, a thing mixture of stomach acid, bile and sour saliva. I dragged in another shuddery breath and, when I thought I was done with the worst of it, reached up to the desk for the pack of mints I kept there.
The smell of the peppermint almost set me off again, but once I swallowed the taste of it down I could feel my stomach start to settle. My fingers were still having trouble holding on to things, and the pack slipped out of my ha
nd. It landed with a sickening plop in the middle of the mess on the plate, and I leaned back against the wall and closed my eyes.
At least the illusory cracks in my vision were gone.
I sat there like that for a couple minutes. My mind wanted to race, but I wouldn’t let it. I needed to ground myself. If I couldn’t force my mind to accept where I was and not go running off to somewhere else, I was in for a few days of this shit…
When I opened my eyes again I didn't know how long I'd been sitting there, and I scared myself by trying to direct my attention down to the lower part of my vision to check the time.
The line between the two worlds was becoming blurred. I'd already known that, but I’d pushed those thoughts aside when I’d first had them. Maybe this was why the other games were set in worlds that were clearly fantastical or based in a darker, far-flung future. They were clearly different to the world we lived in every day, so your brain got a million little hints to tell you which reality you were in.
Making everything so realistic, right down to walking the same streets I did in my actual life, was giving my imagination a foothold in reality that I don’t think it rightly deserved.
I surprised myself by not being too sick to be pissed off about the game crashing. That probably should have been an alarm bell, too. I was still weak and shaking, but my thoughts were returning to Headshot instead of food or a shower or crawling into bed.
Had I managed to crash the game? Had Deep Dive dragged the servers down because I’d pushed into some sort of safe zone or fluked access into an area I wasn’t supposed to be?
I wasn’t sure. I know that just because you're paranoid doesn't mean that they aren’t out to get you and all, but I hadn't done anything that groundbreaking. I couldn't imagine for an instant that I was the first player to ever try and bust into the security of a Survivor’s home. Hell, I’d been in Lori’s, and the game had seemed fine with that.
I knew for a fact that people had tried all sorts of crazy shit in the Beta. Back then, it had sort of been our mission to crash the game, looking for bugs and exploits and reporting back to the developers with our findings. There were rumors that the top debuggers were going to be given access to special perks, but I wasn’t one of the lucky ones that had discovered anything truly game breaking.
Even though the launch of the game had altered so many moving pieces and created a chance for new bugs to occur, I didn't believe that that was had happened. I couldn’t imagine that Deep Dive studios hadn’t anticipated a Zombie sneaking into places the Survivors didn’t expect. There was no way I was the first. Someone, somewhere would have at the very least would have already tried to Santa Clause their way down a chimney, at the very least.
I mean, why bother to make a Schemer archetype at all, if they weren’t going to let us scheme?
It was probably coincidence that I'd been in the mansion at the time the game had crashed, and if not… Well, if not I imagined I'd be getting an email from the developers any second politely explaining why I was kicked out of the game. Or maybe they wouldn't even give me that, and the next time I tried to login I'd find that my access had been either severely restricted or removed completely.
I picked up the helmet from where it had fallen on the floor beside me and checked the connections. They looked like they were all still secure. I’d been lucky not to knock anything loose when I'd accidentally yanked it off my head. On a whim, I put it back on and, even though I was still sitting on my ass in the most uncomfortable position known to man, tried to log in to the game again.
We regret to inform you that Headshot is currently down for emergency maintenance. Please check the forums for more information. We assure you that everything is being done to bring the game back up. Attach your phone number to your account so that we can send you an alert as soon as Headshot is ready for your arrival.
I took the helmet off again and crawled up to sit on the mattress. That figured. At least I knew that my phone number was already tied to my account, since the Danger Sense ability had been pushed through it earlier.
The game could be down for hours. I had no idea how many millions of people had been playing at the peak of Headshot this week, but it was a miracle in itself that the servers hadn’t already melted under the load. Deep Dive must have a server farm to rival the NSA underneath their Silicon Valley headquarters in order to keep up with the strain.
Who knows when it was going to come back online? I needed to sleep. If I was going to go to work, I needed more than that, actually. I needed rest. Real time in my own head, away from the game. I couldn't ditch Bingham Data Entry Systems two days in a row, even with Janice covering for me. I knew my boss would eventually notice my absence, and that would lead to an uncomfortable conversation about my future in the company.
Maybe some players could afford to be skipping days, but not I certainly wasn’t one of them. There was a reason that I was down to hoping to be able pay the electricity bill and only eating ramen and canned spaghetti, and it wasn't because I was some monk that had decided to live a life of mundane misery.
I got up. I stretched. And then, just like I knew I would, instead of doing the sensible thing and going to bed or heading into the bathroom so that I could at least rinse the vile taste from my mouth, I sat down at my desk and logged in to the Headshot website.
It had changed a lot since the last time I'd been on there. I guess that made sense. The biggest game in the world isn’t going to keep the same junk on their site right after they go live to the world. They had a million different review splashed across the front page, all of them singing the praises of the newest gaming phenomenon.
Some of the negative ones were even up there as a joke, in big comic sans font so that you were supposed to be sure that only an idiot would believe them. They’d been written by doctors and a few of the more level-headed reviewers, but Deep Dive had their tongue planted firmly in their cheek when they displayed them.
“More dangerous than we have the capacity to understand.” ~Psychology Today
“There’s every chance that players will find themselves… preferring that world to this one.” ~Dr. Sheneal Torqua
“Deep Dive makes an unsustainable game model and seems to think it would be considered the best game in the world.” ~Noted Gaming Guru MRWIGGLES77
“Troubling. I would stay away from all of this if I were you. Why is this allowed? Is there no regulation of this industry, anymore?” ~Blake Redhook, Former lead developer of Headshot
I frowned at all of that. It had been years since anyone had worried about VR like that, but instead of giggling at the naysayers and their pointless worries I found myself wondering if there really was something concrete in their concerns.
At the top of the page, above the review and the Deep Dive logo of an impressive angler fish frantically trying to eat its own lure, there was a message in bold, red text that reminded me of blood glinting in the moonlight.
Our techs are working to address the fact that the servers are down. Because of the nature of Headshot, we need to take every precaution as we attempt to restart the servers. This means that we’ll need a few hours to check on all aspects of the game. The server will be back online at 6pm. Until then, please accept our heartfelt apologies and get some rest!
Please check back here and we will provide more details as we receive them.
If the time for the server restart is blank, that’s because you haven’t registered your time zone with your profile. Please do so.
On the one hand, I was glad that this would finally giving me the motivation not to stay up all night, continually trying to re-login every five minutes. I was sure that, despite their message, their servers were getting swamped by players who hadn’t seen the message trying to get back into the game as quickly as possible.
And yet, on the other hand, 6 PM was a long way off. I know they said that there’d be other details to follow, but they’d already acknowledged that they wer
e robbing us of a whole day. Headshot only ran for six, with Sunday being mandatory maintenance on the servers. The fifteen hours or so until the servers came back up was going to really kick the game’s image in the nuts.
But there was nothing I could do about that now. Sure, I could bitch and moan. No doubt I would at some time during the day, but it wasn't going to change anything. The game had decided to shit itself, and I was sure that right now they were an awful lot of Deep Dive employees running around like their hair was on fire, cursing servers and screaming at each other at the top of their lungs.
As much as I didn’t want to admit it, sleep was a necessary evil.
Not that I wanted to admit it. Instead, I got up from my desk and took a shower instead. At least that way, I'd be ready to go to work in the morning. I stood underneath the water and opened my mouth, gargling and then spitting a few times to get the taste of the puke out of there. I scrubbed at my face and washed my hair, and once the hot water finally went to cold I realized that I was just stalling. I hadn't wanted to acknowledge the truth, but it was right there staring at me every time I closed my eyes.
I was scared of having that nightmare again, terrified that I’d see the redhead again. She’d look at me, and I’d have to fight to look away. There hadn’t been fear in her eyes, at least not at the very end. I couldn’t work out why. All I knew was that she’d accepted her fate, and that somehow made it worse.
And she'd said something into that device. Whatever its purpose was, her last words were to it.
That made it important.
I should check the forums and see if I can work out what that damn this is…
I got out of the cold water and toweled off, putting on new clothes and going back into the game room to check the computer one more time. I felt a little guilty as I went the past the bedroom, but that feeling started to fade away as I moved down the hallway.
Headshot: One in the Gut (Book 1 of a Zombie litRPG Trilogy) Page 15