No more screwing around. I had to get out of here. My hand already ached from where I managed to get burnt along the way. The singe had cost me a hit point, knocking me down to 2. Thanks to the injury, I had no allusions that I’d immune to fire damage.
I stumbled over to the garage door and bent at the waist, wedging my fingers underneath the edge of it. It'd taken two of the Survivors to close it, but either some of my old adrenaline glands were still shoving that drug into my system or I was just stronger than they were, but I managed to force it up enough that I could slip underneath.
I heard a noise behind me.
I should've kept going. I shouldn't have turned to look, but some part of me was so proud of the plan that I just enacted that I had to watch its final moments play out.
Instead of hurrying down the driveway and trying to make good on my escape, I looked back over my shoulder as the Survivor kicked open the door. He had a cloth pressed over his mouth with one hand, as the fumes inside were probably enough to choke him by now. If he was smart, he’d have gone out the back of the mansion and escaped. If he was smarter still, he be careful about firing that big pistol in his hand.
But, if he was smartest of all, he would've open that door in the first place. Now that he had, he’d exposed all of the explosive fumes behind him to the fire raging at his feet
It seemed to happen in slow motion. Suddenly, the air all around him was made of flame. There was a concussive force that threw me across the driveway, sending me in a tangle into the very same shrubs designed to keep the occupants of this mansion safe from the outside world’s sightlines. I felt everything shake in one big shockwave. I heard what sounded like a hundred windows smash all at once.
Everything was burning. My vision went dark for a second and I reached up to clear it. Of course, at first I tried to use the hand I didn’t have anymore. My good hand helped me in the end, and I found a scrap of flesh hanging in my eyes. I didn’t know if it was my skin or his, but I ate it anyway.
I watched my experience bar while I tried to stay hidden in the shrubs. It had definitely gone up, but instead of granting me access to the next level it simply stopped. The bar was full, which meant that either I’d come up just shy of the next level when the Survivor and the dog had bit the dust or…
Or I was at the level cap.
I was still watching flames engulf the upper floor of the mansion when I saw two blue flashes in a pair of the upper windows. I didn’t think it could mean anything other than the return of the other two Survivors that called this place home.
Out of nowhere the mansion shook with a secondary explosion, this one far bigger as the flames found the source of the stove’s gas. The mansion buckled, looking more like a flaming pile of rubble than the glorious structure it had been a couple of minutes ago. The fires lit the night as yet another explosion rained shrapnel down in every direction.
The shrubs came down all around me. The explosion blasted some of them flat, and the flying pieces of metal sliced the branches from the rest, piling them around me. It made it even harder to crawl free of the wreckage.
Flat on my belly, I started to try and drag myself away in the direction of the street. If one of those big pieces of concrete hit me or a chunk of the Humvee landed on my head, I’d be dead. Hell, with two hit points left, I’d be a goner if a pillow fell across me…
Something caught me. I kicked out at it instinctively, certain that the dog was back. When my foot didn’t connect with anything I looked back and saw through the fallen trees draped across me that that a dark loop of my intestine had slipped from a slice in my stomach and gotten looped around a sprinkler head. I felt a sick sense of dread as my once-internal flesh tugged at an anchor point inside of me.
And, of course, it did some damage. My hit points dropped to 1 and:
Warning! You are now Very Hungry! Your situation is getting dire and instincts are taking over. Your speed will increase by (2) when in the presence of suitable prey, but you will find it extremely difficult not to pursue it. Beware, for at this level of hunger your actions and intent are not always your own. Eat and return yourself to a state of health!
As a Schemer, you are able to suppress these effects by entering a hibernative state. You will be unable to take action until prey approaches, at which time you will have a brief window to use your wits to gain a full stomach before the Hunger makes you a passenger in your own body. Should you survive, you will not be the same. Would you like to hibernate now?
Should you survive, you will not be the same? What the fuck does that mean? I didn’t know, and I didn’t make my decision right away. I knew I didn’t have much of a choice, at least not if I wanted to keep playing. With only one hit point, I’d croak if a fly landed on me too heavily.
Even if I did choose to hibernate, I’d more than likely just be putting off the inevitable, since I doubted that I’d be able to find something to eat that wouldn’t be able to take me out before I could so much as swallow the first bite of flesh. I was riddled with damage, and even though nothing had gotten the quintessential headshot on me, my bones felt like they’d let me down if I tried to stand. The explosion had done a number on me.
I was sure I’d heal if I could eat, but without a helpless source of food I didn’t see how I could make it more than a couple of minutes.
Still, I wasn’t going to quit, so I thought YES! at the game and immediately sunk into an inescapable darkness that swallowed up every aspect of the game. I was aware that I was still playing, in one sense of the word, but mostly I was drifting through a blackness that had no end and no beginning and was only the middle of an indescribable stretch of time that would never run its course.
Chapter 35
I couldn’t log out. I tried, but the game wouldn’t let me. Maybe that was a prerequisite of the hibernate thing, that you had to be locked in and punished for the use of the ability.
Time went by. It had to, but I couldn’t feel it. Every moment was exactly the same as the one before it and the one that followed. Darkness was everywhere, but I had no eyes to open or shut, no mouth with which to break the silence. It was maddening, and that was when I started to wonder if I was being literal.
I could see a thing like this cracking some people. There was no way this was safe… I could only assume that if the game sensed that my brain was about to plunge off the deep end that Headshot would dump me back into the real world, but I didn’t trust that.
Not anymore.
I tried to be patient. I hummed, at least in my head. I counted, though there was no way to do it out loud. I thought about the game, how far I’d come and how far I had yet to go. I thought about the redhead and Lori and the cute girl at work who I’d spoken to when Mark had gotten punched in the mouth.
I thought about everything, until there was nothing else to think about. When my brain had nothing to focus on, it chased itself in circles, reliving pains, fears, joys and whatever other little random moments it wanted to. Now that I didn’t have the strength to wrench it away from one topic and aim it at another, it did what it wanted.
Was this what the game had meant when it had said that I wouldn’t be the same at the other end of this?
Everything spun. I couldn’t see it, but I could feel it, and I threw up. I didn’t do it in this big, black, empty street but I knew deep down that back in my game room I’d just coughed up lunch all down the front of myself.
ATTENTION PLAYERS! Headshot is coming down for emergency maintenance! This will be a brief one. Five minutes and we’ll have you back in. We know the source of the disturbance. Players are reminded that the Terms of Service EXPLICITLY FORBID altering the code of Headshot Further disruptions will result in legal action!
But I didn’t get kicked. I didn’t go anywhere. I was stuck, and I just drifted in a sea of nothing with neither up nor down, right nor wrong to hold me back from an abyss that yawned around me with the unhinged jaws of a python.
Chap
ter 36
Finally, a lifetime later, there was a voice in the void. It came from everywhere, and even though all it said were numbers that meant nothing it was the single sweetest thing I’d ever had the privilege of hearing.
“Three. Five. Six. Six. Six. Seven.” Pause. “Three. Five. Six. Six. Six. Seven.”
“Hello?” I said, surprised at the sound of my own voice. I’d never heard it in Headshot, even though I’d played it for countless hours, now and through the Beta.
“Zombie three five six six six seven?”
“I guess so. At least, I think that’s what it called me on the forums… Ryan’s probably easier, though.”
She laughed, and it made my heart swell. “Well Ryan, the real question is, did you pick up something I dropped, yesterday? A little-“
“Brick?” I said, finishing her sentence. “I did. I’m… I’m sorry, but it looked important and in your condition, you weren’t going to use it anymore.”
“You aren’t wrong about that. But I’m back in the game now, thanks to the server reset. I need the brick back.”
I looked around, even though there was nothing to see and no body to turn as I did so. “Where are you?”
“Silicon Valley.” It sounded like an honest answer, even if it wasn’t what I’d meant. “And you?”
I was normally careful about keeping my online identity private, but something about her broke that wall down so fast it was like it had never been there in the first place. “I’m in Garden Grove. South of Los Angeles,” I added, since nobody ever knew where it was on a map. “Though I think I’m also lying face down somewhere else, too, if that makes sense.”
I hadn’t wanted to tell her where. She was a Survivor, after all. “In Beverly Hills,” she said.
“Right…” I guess we each knew something about the other. “And you’re Sasha,” I told her, just to prove a point.
That got her. I could tell by the catch in her voice when she answered that she hadn’t been expecting that. “I am, but how’d you know that? Wait. Let me guess. The guild chat. One of those idiots let slip who’d lost a brick.”
It wasn’t a question, but I answered it anyway. “Yep.”
“I’m sorry about all of this. The only way we could get in touch with you without them knowing was to drag the servers down again.”
I nodded to myself, even though I was only a pile of swirling thoughts without a head to nod. “Your guild did this?”
“We did. And the last time too. But Deep Dive know the exploit, now. They won’t let it happen again. If we were smart, we would have waited a while to run the malware. Two attacks, so close together… Well, it’s not an ideal way to stay under the radar.”
“So, why’d you do it?” I asked.
“Like I said, when the servers are down, they can’t log your interactions.”
“Right. I thought maybe you’d pushed into the hibernation thing, somehow.”
I could picture her face, and the way she was talking I could even imagine her wrinkling her freckled nose at me. “What hibernation thing?”
Maybe she didn’t know what life was like on the Zombie side. I mean, why would she? “I got hurt bad. The game let me hibernate so that the Hunger didn’t drive me berserk, but when I accepted the prompt I fell into something else. I was drifting through a whole hell of a lot of nothing, until you showed up.”
“Wait, so you’re still in the game?”
“Yeah.” I didn’t like the way her voice had just climbed an octave. “Aren’t you?”
“No! Nobody is, Ryan. I told you we brought Headshot down. I thought we were talking through the chat default built into the helmet, but if we’re not…”
I waited for her to finish her sentence, but when she didn’t I didn’t let her off the hook. “Sasha?”
“Sorry. I’m just trying to work out what the fuck to do next. Look, the game will come back up in a minute. The Eternals are in Silicon Valley. We use the Computer History Museum as our base. Get here, okay?”
“That’s in Silicon Valley, right?”
“Yeah.”
I did my best to control my frustration, but I’m sure she heard it in my voice. “That’s three hundred and fifty miles away! If you want your brick back so bad, why can’t you come and get it? You’re the ones that can drive, remember?”
“We can’t. I mean, we could, but the brick needs to be in the Museum with the other ones before the game ends on Saturday night. There’s no way we could there and back, not the way the roads are. The Zombies that are left are vicious, and they get stronger by the hour.”
I sighed. “That doesn’t change the fact that I’ll never get there in time. It would take days to walk there, and that’s time I don’t.” Not to mention that I’m not your errand boy. She seemed nice enough, but she was just assuming that I wanted to be her mule and bring her the brick.
I didn’t. Not before I knew why the damn thing was so important, at least. “What does the brick do?” I asked.
“You saw the guild chat already. It lets us stay in contact with each other.”
Bullshit. There were a million other ways to make that happen. This thing was special enough that they’d brought Headshot to its knees to get it back, risking their sizeable investment and the wrath of both the developers and probably law enforcement. But, if she wasn’t going to tell me the truth, there was no point in letting her know that I was on to her lies.
“Listen,” Sasha said, “build an army. That’ll get you here. Bring the brick to the Computer History Museum at fourteen oh one North Shoreline boulevard in Mountain View, okay? We’ll make it worth your while.”
“Yeah?”
“I promise. I’ve just put ten grand in your Headshot account. You’ll get the other half when the brick is in our possession. That’s more than fair, right? You can be a Survivor from now on if you’re willing to sacrifice your game time and help us out.”
I wasn’t prepared for that. Ten thousand dollars was a lot of amount of money, especially to me. “Just tell me why you brought the servers down.”
“I told you, so that I could contact you without the developers knowing.”
“No. Not just now. The first time they crashed.”
She didn’t answer. There was time for her to respond, but Sasha let the silence grow and grow until the darkness snapped back and the game returned. I was still logged in. Still on the ground beneath the fallen branches and shredded shrubbery. I looked to my right, expecting to see the flames still burning in the night.
Instead, my Low Light Vision showed me the ruins of the mansion. They weren’t burning anymore, but the fire had consumed it completely.
My hearing sharpened and I heard the sound that had brought me out of whatever state I was in. Footsteps. Boot steps, actually. They were walking in this direction, and I could hear them making their way up the long driveway.
Beverly Hills isn't exactly built for a life without power, and unless you were driving a car it must be a real pain in the ass to get from one place to another. Whoever this was wasn’t even hurrying, which told me that they were either unprepared, foolish, or completely ensconced in the imagined safety of their new world.
It was probably the last one, which was probably a healthy mix of the first and second one, I supposed.
It didn’t matter. I needed to eat. I looked down to see if the hibernation state had somehow healed me, if only a little.
I couldn’t tell. My hit point bar was gone. So was the clock and the experience counter. I could only think of one thing, running over and over and over again in my mind.
Should you survive, you will not be the same.
Chapter 37
I doubted that a Zombie had ever made into Beverly Hills. When I’d been beneath the Humvee sneaking in here, I hadn’t heard a shot in at least the last ten miles of the journey. These were by far the nicest houses, and the higher-ranking players would certainly pick them for them
selves. That meant that they’d have people protecting them, patrols on the perimeter, people paid in whatever passed as game currency, be it actual money or simply prestige, to keep them safe.
But here I was, a shattered remnant of what I once was. Almost a goner, but behind enemy lines.
And apparently, they still didn’t know. Had the Survivor that had finally opened the garage door not seen me? If he had, he’d surely have jumped on the forums or called his guild in to hunt me down. If he hadn’t, well…
Could the Survivors kill each other? If they shot one of their “allies” in the head, would the game let the gun fire? And if not, would trolling one another by burning down spawn points be one of the ways they griefed each other?
I had no way of knowing. I didn’t have any facts, though I had to admit that the mansion looked like it had burned itself out, and that hadn’t happened in the five minutes the server had been down and I’d been talking to Sasha.
It didn’t matter. Not yet, at least. I needed to eat, and my prey was approaching. I tried to move, and when I found that I could crawl toward the driveway from beneath the branches, that was exactly what I did.
Sure enough, there was a girl with brown hair and a look of morbid curiosity on her face striding blithely up the driveway toward the wreckage of the mansion. Maybe she was here to look for some loot, but all that I cared about was that she wasn't even holding a gun. She had one holstered in those quickdraw shoulder holsters the cops wore, but her hands were in her pockets.
She didn’t see me in the shadows, and when she walked by me close enough for me to reach out and grab her, that was exactly what I did. She was caught completely by surprise, and before she could react I lashed out with my remaining hand and Grasped her ankle, wrenching her legs out from underneath her.
Headshot: One in the Gut (Book 1 of a Zombie litRPG Trilogy) Page 19