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

by Matthew Siege

  The website was still on the screen, though when I tried to click on the forums button all I got was the same damn message about the game being down. Well, not exactly the same. This time they'd added the word “forums” to the line they were trying to feed us, but there was nowhere to click to get past it.

  I didn't believe for a second that whatever had happened to their actual servers had affected the forums as well. No way and no how. If they were experiencing an outage severe enough to take the forums out too, I doubted that I could have gotten on to the website in the first place. It was far more likely that what was actually going on was that they’d dragged the forums down themselves, lest they suffer the Public Relations nightmare of having however many million players that still gave a damn logging in and complaining online for the whole world to see.

  As it was, this was going to give Deep Dive studios a major black eye. Lots of games had trouble launching and still went on to become a success, but what they were going through now was really going to put them behind the eight ball.

  I looked at the helmet on the mattress again and thought about logging in, even though I knew it wouldn't work. It was almost sick how badly I want to get back in there, and I gritted my teeth and forced myself to go into my bedroom, lay down, and close my eyes.

  Sleep didn't come right away. After I tossed and turned for almost an hour I had to mentally give up on counting sheep and trying to meditate. Instead, I imagined that I was putting on the helmet and entering a world where all the crap that I usually had to put up with was gone. My boss and her boss and his boss and his boss were nothing but obstacles, ones I could overcome with skill and with cunning.

  Lori didn’t matter. My parents didn’t matter. Finally, when I convinced myself that I didn’t matter either, I managed to drift away.

  Chapter 30

  It wasn’t until I woke up that I realized how relieved I was that I hadn’t had any dreams. At least, if I did then I didn’t remember them.

  Headshot was the first thing I thought about when I the sun slanted across my face, though. I hurried into the game room and refreshed the website, practically stabbing at the keyboard until the homepage popped up again. Nothing new. The same message greeted me, and the forums were still down too.

  Since I'd already showered and the clothes I was planning on wearing to work were laying on the top of the laundry beside the desk, I got dressed as quickly as I could and then plunked my ass down in the chair, intent on searching the Internet to see if I could find any more information.

  The news was everywhere. That is to say, the speculation, crazed hypotheses, and rampant conspiracy theories were everywhere.

  Deep Dive studios had yet to give anyone an official comment, except to say that they knew what was wrong and were working feverishly to fix it. That hadn't stopped every news organization, VR blog, or self-righteous gamer from jumping into the fray with both feet. People were pissed, I had to give them that. I knew that Headshot was a big deal, but here I was looking at page after page of ferocious, almost maniacal entries responding to that single message Deep Dive had given last night. Apparently, everyone had been dumped at the same time as me, and if I was going to believe what I was reading online it seemed like a lot of people had experienced the same type of VR sickness that I had.

  Every link I clicked told a different part of the same story. “The game should be pulled.” “It wasn't ready for launch.” “People's money should be refunded, and an apology should be made.” “Deep Dive studios should disband.” “They should be thrown in jail, or hung from the neck until dead.” “Their bodies should be burnt and the ashes scattered to the four winds so that they could never, ever do this to us again!”

  That sort of shit.

  It was an epic failure by any measure. I couldn't remember anybody dog piling on a game like this, but I also couldn't remember a game that had gotten so many begging to play it as Headshot did.

  I wondered if they’d go bankrupt. It was impossible to know, since nobody had any way of knowing what sort of funds they had. They'd always kept their subscriber numbers close to their chest, but if the paying players were already asking for refunds, then I couldn't imagine that the coffers that kept the studio open would last very long.

  If they wanted to turn this around, they were going to have to act fast. Deep Dive would already be losing a lot of goodwill just by refusing to update their statement, and I could practically hear the baying of the Internet hellhounds, enraged at being ignored for… what? Three or four hours?

  I shook my head. I didn't want Headshot to die. I wanted to play the damn game, but that didn't mean that I wanted to let them off the hook, either.

  I shut the computer down and went to work. There was nothing I could do here and besides, I’d finally managed to burn just about every moment of extra time I had before I was a certainty to be late for the train. Staying home wouldn’t earn me anything other than stress at work.

  As I trudged to the station, I realized that a whole bunch of people had probably had the same idea I had. The platform was overcrowded again, and the trains were packed to the gills. I'd enjoyed a good seat next to the window once or twice, but those days were over.

  At least for now. Maybe next week would be different, if Headshot managed to patch the issues and quiet the player base.

  I didn’t know how many people were still active in the current week of the game, but I could probably do a rough head count in here of the people that look like they had the world’s worst hangover. If I added them together with the ones who were clearly angry, irritable bastards for no apparent reason, most likely taking out their frustrations on the world around them instead of in Headshot It looked like something close to twenty percent of the occupants of this train were ready to storm up to Deep Dive studios in Silicon Valley and burn the building to the fucking ground.

  My phone buzzed again. It had been doing it all morning, and I’d stopped even looking at it. Lori was still trying to get me to answer, and that wasn’t going to happen. Other than her nipping at my heels, the news alerts that were draining my battery and making my pocket into a vibrating nuisance all mentioned Headshot There were a lot of people that were saying “I told you so”, people that had predicted that the subscription model would never last. Who would want to play that game, they'd always asked, but they didn't get it.

  It wasn't for just anyone. It was for those of us who needed an escape from the shit we had to put up with each and every day. We were the ones that were willing to put up with whatever sharp edges the game still had once it launched.

  Well, at least I thought we were willing to overlook the issues… Maybe I'd been wrong, looking at the whole thing through rose-colored glasses all this time instead of through the sharp lens of logic.

  I absently scrolled through the headlines, for once desperate to find something that didn't mention the game. It was strange, after months of living and breathing these updates, desperately trolling through the Internet for any hint of what might be coming down the pipeline. Now all I wanted to do was to get away from it. I'd be back in the game tonight, and if that wasn't good enough for the craving I felt itching away at the back of my brain then there was nothing that I could do to placate myself.

  Besides, I thought to myself as I got off the train with so many others and headed to work, if they really were going to be proactive and fix this, maybe they’d offer some useful carrot in the game instead of hitting us over the head with sticks.

  As I went into the Bingham building, I remembered to turn the vibration on my phone off. Usually I didn't bother. Nobody really cared if it occasionally buzzed on the desk beside my keyboard, and I was enough of an introvert that whatever texts I got were usually sparse enough that no one seemed to notice.

  I sighed as I realized that even now, on the way in to work, I was still scrolling through my updates. Nobody had any new news, of course. That wasn't how the news worked, anymore. They just
talk and write and blog and squawk about things that happened hours ago, and this was no different. I knew that when the headlines started sourcing other people's blogs that I’d read last night that it was well and truly time to put the damn phone away.

  The people reporting on the downtime were at least as lost as I was. Probably more. At least I'd played the game. I imagined that most of the news readers and reporters had taken one look at the game and decided it wasn't for them. They were probably right. But, now that they had predicted its failure and saw that maybe, just maybe they’d guessed correctly, they were the zombie horde. They were out for blood, and I sure as shit wouldn't want to be the person in charge of Deep Dive’s PR right now.

  Once I got out of the elevator Janice nodded at me, though I could tell by the look of frustration in her eyes that she was well aware of what had happened. I gave her a shrug, as if to say, “I know, it sucks." That was the most camaraderie I'd shared with anyone I worked with since I’d started this job, but I wasn't particularly happy about the moment arriving due to the possible death of the game I’d been so eagerly anticipating.

  Even once I’d gotten to my cubicle and booted up my computer, I couldn't help but overhear the people that were working around me. They weren't happy, either. Most of them were using the time that they were allocated for “personal business” to chat amongst themselves or even call other people, and always the conversations circled the same thing. Was Headshot dead? What could they possibly do to come back from this?

  I didn't know the answer to those questions. It sure didn’t sound like people were willing to be very loyal to a game that had dumped them back into their own bodies, often shaking and puking. Every minute you couldn't go online and play the game that some people had paid so much to be a part of felt like an eternity, and even though I hadn't even spent a cent on it, I could already feel the desire to get in there weighing on me. It was an ever-present irritation, like an itch on a phantom limb that I couldn't scratch.

  It put me on edge. Shit, it put everybody on edge. I actually heard a scuffle break out in the break room, though the by the time me and a few others had hurried over there to see what was going on, one of the upper managers had already broken it up. There were still a few drops of blood on the floor, and one guy pushed past us clutching his hand to his mouth.

  "Did he just…?" I asked the girl next to me, though I was letting my voice trail off because I couldn't bring myself to ask the question. It was crazy, right?

  It had to be, because the way she looked at me was the same way you’d look at somebody if they'd recently escaped from an asylum. She was pretty, much her sneer made her into far less than that. "Oh my God Ryan, are you really about to ask me if he turned into a zombie? What the hell is it with you idiots and that game? Wake up. Mark just got punched in the mouth. That's it."

  I nodded sagely, as if that was exactly what I’d been thinking. I don't think that I’ve ever been so relieved that somebody had been hit before, but the alternative was horrifying. I admit, I was so primed to react in that Zombie world that the sight of blood on someone's lips out here had made me assume that someone had decided to take a bite out of someone else.

  I need to get a grip.

  "You need to get a grip," she said to me.

  I nodded forcefully. "Totally."

  But even as I looked at her, her gaze softened and her voice was almost pleading. "It'll work tonight though, right? I really want to get back in there," she admitted. I felt like a priest in the middle of confession, all of a sudden. She said it like it was this dirty little secret, and the people that overheard us had one of two reactions. Some of them glanced at her out of the corner of their eyes, shooting her a vicious look meant to cut her to the bone. And some of them, myself included, gave her an almost wistful smile that told her that we completely understood, and we hoped we could get back in as well.

  Just like I’d been thinking earlier, some people simply couldn’t understand. And those of us who did were… Well, I guess until six o'clock tonight, we were just a pack of losers.

  I went back to my desk and so did everyone else. We didn't see Mark for the next couple of hours, though when he finally came back in he had a busted lip and a dark, brooding look in his eyes that kept even the most dedicated office rumormonger from daring to approach him.

  I suppose it didn't matter what happened between Mark and the other guy. It could've been a fight over who had drunk somebody else's ice tea from the refrigerator, for all I knew. What mattered was that it had happened at all. People were on the edge of violence all of the time, and in a place like this where everybody basically mentally checked out on their way in, signs of aggression like that were basically unheard of.

  By the end of the day, I'd had to take twice the normal amount of caffeine pills just to stay awake. It was true that I hadn't gotten a lot of sleep, but that wasn't the issue.

  It was the work. It was just so fucking boring. I felt like my hands weren’t even my own as I rattled away at the keyboard and pushed useless data into a useless spreadsheet, so that some useless person in upper management could glance at it and feel that they were somehow more informed than they’d been a moment before.

  When five o'clock rolled around, I wasn't even eager to go home. Yeah, I wanted to play the game, but maybe the luster was wearing off. Maybe some of the things I enjoyed about it the most were the things that I was running away from in real life. It was easy to let Headshot distract me, but ever since I'd been kicked out of the game my brain had alternated between demanding that I get back in and yanking me away from it instinctively.

  I could hear the doubt it leaked into my consciousness. It was as if someone was whispering it to me, telling me that I was never going to progress in there. Nothing I did in the game mattered. Hell, I could beat the whole damn thing, personally take a bite out of every single Survivor if it somehow let me, and come Monday, I'd be right back at square one. Useless again, just like the data I shoveled for a ‘living’.

  No. Worse than useless.

  The train ride home was busy again. I stood next to people that didn't want to be there any more than I did, packed in as tightly as sardines. When the train hit a bump in the tracks there wasn’t even room to sway, though that didn’t stop a few people near the windows from turning away at the horror of whatever we may have hit.

  We got off at the stops that we always did, and I hung my head and went home, resigned to the fact, whether I wanted to or not, I was headed into the game.

  Chapter 31

  I went home and did the things I always did. I ate. I went to the bathroom. This time though, with about fifteen minutes to go before six o'clock it, I sat down and went to the website again.

  They'd updated it. It looked like their PR team had been hard at work trying to get ahead of the damage the outage was surely causing. While I'd been wasting my life copying data from pieces of paper as old as a dinosaur into a spreadsheet as old as a mastodon, they’d no doubt been sitting in countless meetings, sweating over the issue of how to fix this monumental fuck up.

  And they sure as hell weren't being conservative about it, either. Right there at the top, red letters so big you couldn’t possibly miss them, it said:

  Headshot will be up in (14) minutes and (12) seconds. As an appreciation of your patience, Deep Dive studios is proud to announce that the TOP 100 Zombies in every state at the end of this week will be awarded permanent Survivor status. ALL Survivors will be allowed to respawn in their homes, headquarters or homesteads regardless of their current game status. In addition, Survivors can choose to either accept a refund of $500 to their account or a credit of $1,500 with which to purchase in-game items.

  Wow. That would have to cost them a small fortune, but whatever they lost would be nothing compared to the bath they’d take if the game went under.

  I had a couple of minutes before Headshot came back up, so I tried to get into the forums. I wasn’t expecting the
m to work, but I was wrong. They did. I hurriedly clicked around, looking for a leaderboard. I wanted to know where I sat on the list of Zombies. I thought I'd done a pretty good job so far, at least so far.

  I didn’t want to pat myself on the back too hard, though. On day one I’d seen that strange Zombie on the roof and he’d already had Howl, so there were obviously players way ahead of me in terms of progression. If he’d been a Schemer already, he certainly outranked me. If he was still alive…

  It would be far too coincidental for the only person that high to have been near me, so I had to imagine that there were other either fortunate or extremely skilled players scattered everywhere. I didn't know what he'd done to get that much experience that fast, but if he'd done it, others would have too.

  I suppose it didn't matter though, because I couldn't find a ranking system anywhere. Instead, I gave up looking and went in to the Zombie forums. There were Survivor forums too, but my login wouldn’t let me in to them.

  I skimmed the posts from the Zombie players. Judging by the timestamps, the forums had opened back up at 5:30, a little less than twenty minutes ago. And, if the comments were anything to go by, the bones that the Promotional Department was throwing us weren't going to be enough.

  People seemed out of their minds with rage. I saw it all, right there on the first page. Rants. Death threats. Calls to boycott Deep Dive studios, which made no sense. We weren’t paying to play, and they weren’t responsible for any games other than Headshot...

  Why can’t dese fucking fucks get anything right? – Greasegun2040

  My kid’s in diapers and she could run these servers with a touch more skill. Hire her! - Mommysysop