by Ian Woodhead
“I wonder who did their decorating?” This corridor wall was covered in dark wooden horizontal planks, each one about six inches wide. The one inch gap between each plank gave this place the appearance of some abandoned animal stockade. He shook away the imagery which accompanied that stray thought. Christ knows what they’d do if a herd of stampeding zombie cows appeared from nowhere.
Jordan placed his hand against one of the planks. The slight vibration he felt told Jordan that something lay beyond these walls, heavy machinery perhaps? Yeah, why not. There was a giant automated machine on the other side, spitting out an endless supply of running things and they were going to jump on them once they reached the end of this damn corridor.
“Or maybe not,” he whispered. The corridor abruptly widened. This made him feel a little better. If anything did come at them now, at least he’d be able to protect Matt and himself. As long as they weren’t zombie cows, that is.
Matt tapped him on the shoulder a couple of times.
“Look at that over there, Jordan. What do you think that is?”
He followed Matt’s gaze and frowned at the sight of the corner of some old brick building sticking through the wooden wall. Jordan shrugged. “You got me there. Looks familiar though.” It did remind him of somewhere. As he neared, it clicked. Jordan grinned. Now he knew it. This was the corner of Amir’s Spice Hut. He’d leaned against that wall on many occasions while he ate his donner kebab, or spicy chilli burger. What it was doing here was a mystery but since when did anything make sense in here?
It wasn’t quite the same though. Unlike the real one, this brick corner had a single poster advertising the circus stuck to the wall. He leaned closer. Christ, must be some sort of freakshow circus. The clowns had spider bodies. The gymnasts performing on the high-wire had tentacles for arms and there appeared to be a bunch of severed heads running about on spider legs in the background.
That is seriously fucked up. Jordan grabbed the corner of the poster and ripped it off the wall. What lay behind it made him want to whoop with joy. “Oh yeah, that’s more like it!” Matt rushed over.
“What is it, what have you found?”
Jordan stood back and pointed. “Just what the doctor ordered,” he replied, pointing at the hole in the wall and at the shotgun lying on the bricks. Sure, there were several thick black metal bars in front of it but Jordan reckoned it wouldn’t take that much digging out. He tapped the tip of the sword’s blade. The mortar looked old and crumbly. It wouldn’t take that long to pull out a couple of bricks.
He got down on his knees at set to work. As expected the stuff came out easily enough. Mortar dust gathered in piles by his knees as his sword made short work of it. The shotgun was as good as his. Would there be enough shells? Jordan pushed that troubling thought to one side. If they were going to make the gun so hard to get then they were bound to supply it with enough ammunition to keep him going for a while. It made sense.
Matt tapped him on the shoulder again.
“Not now. Can’t you see that I’m busy?”
That tapping continued, getting more urgent.
“For crying out loud!” he snapped. Jordan pulled the blade out of the hole and turned his head, intending to give Matt a right proper bollocking. His anger turned to confusion and then to fear when he saw them. “Oh shit! It’s the things from the poster!” Jordan looked at his whimpering companion then back at the several heads, racing towards them. He growled. “Fuck you.”
He lifted the sword, jumped forward and swung it in a low arc. The blade sliced through the first head in two and cut through its pal’s legs, causing it to squeal like a piglet while pivoting on its remaining three legs. Jordan thrust the sword through another one’s eye socket then looked over his shoulder. “Come on, man, help me out here. Use that damn thing!”
Did it make any difference to his ferocity that each attacking head wore his sister's face? Jordan cleaved another one in half. Bits of shredded brain stubbornly clung to the metal when he brought the sword up, ready to kill the next thing. If anything, it made him fight even harder. How he would have reacted if they wore his mum's face or Jenny made him inwardly cringe. Christ, he'd probably find a corner to cower in.
Jordan killed another two and took relief in watching Matt thrusting his bladed mop handle into the mouth of another. “It looks like we've won this battle!” he said, while wiping the sweat from his forehead. “Look, Matt. The remaining three are scuttling off.”
They vanished around the corner. Jordan ran after them, not wanting any of those vile things to continue existing. He screamed out in part relief and part joy. At last, for the first time since this damn game had started, something had gone his way. Hell, he didn't need the shotgun anyway.
He skidded to an abrupt halt after he'd turned the corner and his eyes bulged. “Oh, sweet mercy!” There were hundreds of them, all stationery, all glaring at him, all wearing his sister's face.
“What are we going to do now?” cried Matt. “They are behind us as well. I think we're trapped.”
Jordan moved closer, he gripped the handle as tight as he could. The mass of heads inched forward. “ It’s simple. We fight,” he growled “There's nothing else we can do.”
The heads then screamed in unison. It was a terrible noise which caused Jordan's bones to vibrate. He screamed back at them then ran into the middle, cutting and slashing. Blood, legs and bits of skull flew in all directions. He kept cutting them down, only for more of them to appear.
Two heads leapt onto their comrades then jumped straight at his face. He dodged to the left and his left foot slipped in the gore. Jordan fell backwards and the sword dropped from his wet palm and disappeared under the moving carpet of monsters. The two that caused him to slip reached his boots and cambered up his legs, their sharp claws digging into his tender flesh.
He managed to get to his feet and leaned down to try remove one of the things from his leg. Jordan narrowly missed losing two of his fingers before he was able to grab two of its legs. He flung it behind him, leaving just one still on his body.
Three more attempted to jump on his legs but Jordan kicked back. His boot heel caught one of them in the face. The other two scuttled out of the way. “Matt. Don't just stand there gawping. Come here and help me out. Get this thing off me, for crying out loud.”
His companion rushed over to him, thrusting his knife blade into any head stupid enough to get in their way. Matt booted the remaining head off Jordan's legs then pushed him closer to the wall, stamping on two more heads which tried to scale Matt's ankles.
“What are you playing at, Matt?”
“There's another door over there. Can you not see it?”
He could now. A white panelled door set into the wood. Thing is, Jordan could swear that it wasn't there a moment ago. Not that he intended to bitch about it. A single head jumped onto his boot and refused to budge no matter what he did. “Kill the fucking thing!” he yelled. Jordan then clenched his fist and punched it over and over. “Get off my foot'” His knuckles were covered in blood. He didn’t know if it was his blood or the head thing. Nor did he care. Jordan hit it again. This time, he felt it loosen its grip. With a last roar, Jordan snatched two of its legs pulled it off and smashed the head into the wall.
“Come on, Jordan! We need to go now before they attack us again.” Matt reached the door, turned the handle then grabbed the back of Jordan's collar. He pulled him backwards and through the the open doorway.
Matt kept a firm hold of Jordan's wrists. Which probably saved him from doing anything he might regret. He blinked rapidly while wondering if reality had just kicked him in the face yet again. He saw no blood, no wet gore, no pieces of skull bone lodged in Matt's hair. All that remained from the terror they'd just encountered was the adrenalin surging through his system and even that had began to diminish.
They both wore clean clothes, sporting new haircuts and expensive trainers. Now that Matt wasn't imitating the country bumpkin look, the lad l
ooked pretty normal. Jordan figured that would change as soon as he opened his gob.
That door had brought them into a games store. Jordan didn’t even bother questioning the reason behind this unexpected turn of events. There wasn't much point. It's not like the game was going to spoon-feed him the answers, not after the last time.
This scene they'd stumbled into wasn't in the same time frame as the outbreak. There were people behind the counter chatting to a couple of customers on this side of the counter. He scanned the rest of the shop, gazing past the retro cartridges, the game media accessories and a rotating poster display and spotted several more people browsing through the secondhand games at the back of the shop.
Was this the before time? Or another bullshit scenario like before? Like he even knew the answer to that. Jordan figured that if Matt suddenly decided to turn into a fucking werewolf then he’d have his answer.
Matt wasn’t in any fit state to help him out. A pretty teen beside the counter had caught his attention. “Christ, man. Don’t make it so obvious. Oh, and wipe your mouth. You’re drooling.” Jordan left the idiot to his fantasies and moved further into the shop. “Oh, we’re inside a shopping mall,” Jordan said to himself when he spotted another glass door which led out into the into the mall. There was a jewellery shop directly opposite and a bagel store next to that. A line of people in front of the shop suggested that was the place to go for yummy, cheap food.
He scanned the rest of the mall visible from the shop window, only stopping when his gaze caught the entrance to an older market hall. “Son of a bitch!” he exclaimed when the realisation finally dawned. He was inside the shuttered up games shop that he and Jenny passed.
A young man in a black hoodie and faded jeans walked past him and opened the door. Tuneless muzak drifted inside. I didn’t surprise Jordan to spot a Necrovoid box in his hand. The object of Matt’s ogling caught up with the young man and they both left together, hand in hand. Jordan watched them kiss before the pair joined the bagel queue.
Jordan looked around the shop and noticed Matt acting a little weird whilst standing next to a display stand advertising some Chinese made gaming tablet. When Matt noticed Jordan’s gaze, he coloured up and then ran over to him and started tugging at his sleeve.
“Can we go now, please? That pretty girl has gone now and everybody is looking at me funny. I don’t like crowds and I don’t like all these funny colours and pictures and I need something to eat too. I like cheese, you know. Yeah, cheese is good. Do you have any?”
Jordan put his hand over Matt’s mouth. “Will you shut that hole? We’re not going anywhere. At least, not yet.” Where could they go? He doubted that the door leading to the shopping mall was their answer. “Do you promise to keep it down?” He waited for the slight nod before pulling his hand away.
That girl was pretty though,” he whispered.
“Yeah, she was pretty,” Jordan conceded.
“Can we go now? I’d like to see more pretty girls and I’d like something to eat please as well as find some cheese…”
His voice got louder and louder. All conversation had stopped. “The map,” he muttered. “Shit, I’d forgotten about that.” Jordan pulled it out and slapped it into Matt’s hand. Immediately, he calmed down. He looked around and found only one person hadn’t looked away. A middle-aged man standing by the retro cartridges. “What? You have an issue or something? My brother’s autistic.”
The man shook his head and held up his hand. “Sorry,” he muttered before turning back to the game cartridges.
“Oh, you found it then, Jordan. Well done, that man.”
The confident and calm demeanour had returned and so had the spark behind those eyes. Like before, Jordan got the feeling that those eyes were windows to the game, to the vast intelligence behind Necrovoid. He also couldn’t shake the persuasive impression that it was laughing at him, or at least, having a bit of a jolly fun time at his expense. In fact, it was more than an impression. Those heads all wearing his sister’s face kinda confirmed that.
“Yeah, go me. I’ve found it.”
“Do I detect a bit of resigned sarcasm there? That’s an improvement, I guess, from our last rather brief discourse. I take it that you’ve forgiven me for orchestrating the NPC swap-out? Well, even if you haven’t I’m not all that bothered. But, if it does make any difference, You wouldn’t have reached this game-save with the Barry NPC, not without a lot of luck anyway.”
Jordan stayed silent, unsure of how to answer this entity.
“What, has the cat got your tongue?” It sighed, adding a bit of dramatic flow to the noise. “Fine. I’m not going to argue. After all, it is your hint sheet we’re using up here. Jordan. Well done. You have reached the important time-line event. Now, you have to find a way to correct the illegal subroutine that was kinda shoe-horned into the code.” The entity presented Jordan with a Matt grin. “Oh, I see the frown has returned. I thought it would. Got you all confused now. Well, here’s the kicker. If the code isn’t restored to how it should flow, you will be thrown back into a looped deep game, unable to escape until, that is, you die a true death in reality.”
“Yeah, thanks for that, you fucker. Why don’t you piss off back to where you came from?” Jordan tried to snatch the map out of his hand only for the entity to pull his hand away.
“Not yet, I want to witness this. I haven’t had a laugh in ages.” He wandered over to the counter, climbed on a bar stool and gave a mock salute to the young guy on the other side. Moments later, the guy passed the entity a box of cinema popcorn.
“You have got to be kidding me,” he muttered. Jordan approached the counter, ignoring the entity noisily munching through the box. He wasn’t going to let the game get under his skin. Not in here. This was his territory. Jordan normally felt at ease and comfortable in gaming shops, so why should this one be any different? Okay, so maybe it was a digital version but that shouldn’t change anything. The place looked authentic to his eyes. The game had gotten everything down to pat. From the sarcastic notices banging on about game exchanges to the standard crowd of customers shuffling about inside.
How was he supposed to fix this illegal subroutine when he didn’t even know what it was? Jordan gazed around the shop interior, looking for anything that might give him a clue. “What am I looking for?” he said to himself. It looked like every other game shop he’d been inside. The only real stand out clue he saw were the game posters. They all were for the Necrovoid game. Was that the clue? How could that be the sodding clue? He was inside the Necrovoid game, for crying out loud. Of course it was going to display its own game.
The entity finished the box of popcorn and placed it on the counter. He leaned forward. “Tick tock. God, Jordan. It’s as obvious as anything. Maybe you need a bit more of an incentive? That’s cool. The shit was about to hit the fan an about an hour anyway. I’ll just bring it forward. Tick tock.”
The atmosphere totally changed at the sound of a distant scream. Another one followed and hot on the heels of that agonising noise, there were another two. All the customers rushed to the front window. Jordan hadn't moved from the counter. He didn’t need to gawk as he already knew what was happening out there. Several people rushed past the shop door, which prompted the rest of the customers to rush out, leaving only him, the entity and the two employees and from their startled expressions it wouldn't be long before they scarpered too.
“If you're trapped in here without completing the task then it is game over. There’ll be no more second chances. You’ll have to start again with the difficulty level on a higher setting.” The entity clicked his fingers.
The first employees jumped over the counter and ran over to the window. His companion stood up. “What the hell is going on out there, Barry?”
“I don’t have a clue.”
“Well, what can you see?”
“Just, just lots of people running around and generally looking like they're about to shit themselves.”
This B
arry looked a little older than Jordan. Probably closer in age to Matt. He guessed the game shop worker was in his late twenties. The employee took off his black company baseball cap, screwed it up and stuffed it into his pocket. Barry then proceeded to pull out his hair tie. “Bollocks to this. I reckon we ought to get out of here.”
“Do you think it could be a bomb or something? Hang on, let me check online.”
“Give over, Steve. It's not a bomb. It’s not a fire either. This feels really weird. Come on, man.” Barry put his hand on the door. “Are you coming or what?”
“Yeah. Okay, let me just lock up.”
The entity clicked his fingers and the scene froze. He jumped off the bar stool and sidled up to Jordan. “Does it not grind you down being so thick? Come on, the answer is practically staring you in the face.” He clicked his fingers again. The scene continued playing out. Barry opened the door and left the shop. Steve grabbed his coat, picked up a set of keys and pressed a green button on a black pack key fob. The shutters began rolling down.
“You're fast running out of time!”
Jordan so wanted to punch the entity. It was getting to be as annoying as his sister. He stopped dead. His sister! Christ. Of course. That's the answer. The damn side quest! Jordan leaned over the grabbed Steve's arm. “I need a copy of Necrovoid.”
“What the hell are you still doing in here? Get out, man!”
“Not without the game.”
“You’re crazy! Look, forget the game. I can’t anyway. We sold the last one to that couple a few moments ago.” The employee pulled his arm away then jumped over the top of the counter.
“Wait a minute!” he yelled. “Come on. I only need a sensenet. You must have a spare or something.”
“What? No, of course we don't have a spare.” Steve glanced over to the door. “Look, man. I think you have to leave. Seriously.” He tried to pull away but Jordan hung on for dear life. “Will you leave me the fuck alone?”