by Rick Scott
“Holy hell…” one of the young men, Felix, said, lifting his tech visor. “Was that what I think it was?”
“What?” Novak demanded, sounding more terrified than anything else. “What the hell was that thing?”
“It looked like a slime,” Felix said.
“A what?” Bruce asked.
“A low-level dungeon monster from one of the fantasy shards,” Felix explained. “But how’d it get outside the game?”
That thought terrified Bruce more than the creature itself. He looked to Gina. “Is this possible?”
Gina coughed as her chest heaved, still recovering from the encounter, but he could see her mind at work, eyes shifting back and forth as she hacked into her hand. Finally she nodded. “It looked like a simple organism. Single cell. The rigged scrubber units could have produced that, same as the gun parts. But they must have done something extra too. A processor could produce the body, but for it to move like that it had to have created a nervous system too. A nano-processor can’t do that. It can’t create living things.”
No, a normal nano-processor couldn’t, but the equipment they used to beam the scout teams to the surface could. Dear God…did someone manage to replicate that technology somehow?
“There could be more of them,” Flores said. “We need to stay sharp.”
“What did you find up ahead?” Bruce asked.
She shook her head. “Nothing. Just an empty room.”
Gina’s eyes flashed with incredulity. “That’s impossible. That’s where everything led.”
“You want to see for yourself?” Novak said, jerking his thumb. “It was empty.”
Could this have been some kind of elaborate trap? Or a diversion? “Let me see.”
Bruce took the lead now, flare gun in hand, adrenaline surging through his veins. Mass-produced guns were one thing, but a creature like that placed the threat on a whole new level. He scanned the floor and ceiling as the light shone from ahead. It dead-ended right into a barren twenty-by-twenty room, just like Flores had said. The only thing within it was a light fixture embedded in the ceiling that filled the space with a warm yellow light.
Gina ran to his side, glancing at her comm device. “This can’t be. It should be right here!”
Novak stepped into the room behind them, scanning and inhaling the air. “It stinks in here, that’s for sure….”
Bruce smelled it too: the scent of unwashed bodies. And whoever it was had to have been here not too long ago. It made no sense. This was an empty room and he didn’t see anyone come running past them.
Which means they’re still here…
Bruce scoured the floor and walls looking for some kind of clue or trace. He spotted a grease stain on the side of the entranceway and examined it closer. The faint outline of a seam came into view, forming a rectangle within the wall. He pushed and prodded at it until it flipped up on a hinge, revealing a control panel inside.
Bingo!
“Look at this,” Bruce said and Flores came running.
“Dang, way to go, Bruce!”
It was a simple open and close button, but to what he didn’t know. “Be ready for anything,” he said and pushed the open button.
With a pneumatic hiss the entire back wall recessed a half foot and then slid open at the center into two halves. Lightning flashed with the pop of gunfire, the sound deafening in the small confines of the room.
Bruce’s heart hit his throat and he instinctively dove for the ground.
“Get down!” Flores screamed, dropping to one knee as she shouldered her rifle and retuned fire. The air exploded into violence—muzzle flashes and whizzing bullets that impacted the hard concrete with puffs of debris.
Bruce spotted Gina still standing in the center of the room, frozen in fear. “Gina!”
She looked at him, a second before something huge hit her and knocked her off her feet. No! It took Bruce another second to realize it was Novak. The big man cried out as a bullet grazed him across his massive shoulder and he arched backwards to return fire blindly with his pistol.
The chaos went on for a few more seconds and then abruptly it stopped and all fell silent.
“Drop the guns and get on the ground!” Flores shouted.
Bruce looked back to the hidden room that had opened and saw four people inside. Two of them were already on the floor, dead it looked like. The other two were holding their arms in the air, guns still in hand.
They were both young men, barely out of their teens. Their heads were cleanly shaven and the dirty boiler suits they wore looked to have gone unwashed for weeks—no doubt the source of the aroma Bruce had smelled. Behind them, within the hidden room itself, was what looked like a knock-off version of the stasis chamber. Racks of half-constructed pods hung next to the guts of air scrubber units—the same that produced the piles of pistols that now lay on the floor. Bruce counted 20 easily, with perhaps twice that number still in parts. Old binary terminals made up the rest of the junk inside, all pieced together with masses of wires strung haphazardly about like a spider web. The room was deep and went back for perhaps thirty feet, but clearly had no second means of egress—else the men would have surely used it instead of risking their lives in a bid to shoot their way out.
“Don’t fear them, brother,” one of them said. “Fear what awaits them when we depart.”
“Jerry?”
Bruce glanced up at Novak as he slowly stepped from behind him towards one of the young men.
“You know him?” Bruce said.
Novak clutched his shoulder, his hand dripping blood. “Since he was a baby.”
“Drop the guns!” Flores shouted again.
Novak shook his head at the kid. “Jerry, what are you doing here? Who is this guy you’re with?”
The kid’s eyes softened and darted with uncertainty under the gang leader’s stare. He looked to his companion. “Brother Cedric?”
“Remember your faith, Jerry,” the man, Cedric said, his blue eyes fixed and piercing. “They’re coming…and we need to be ready.”
What was he talking about?
“Who’s coming, son?” Bruce said. “Drop that gun and we can talk all about it.”
“Heed him not!” Cedric shouted. “The feast is all that matters! We must do what we must. What we swore!”
Jerry looked back to Novak. “I’m sorry, Mr. Novak, but this world is a lie. I’ve seen the truth now and I can’t let it go!”
The two young men shared a quick glance and then snapped their guns to their heads.
“No!” Bruce shouted. “Don’t let them—!”
Several gunshots went off simultaneously, including one from Flores. The pistol in Cedric’s hand went flying backwards in a flurry of sparks, but Jerry’s body fell to the ground in a heap.
“Jerry!” Novak cried.
The man, Cedric, fell to his knees, clutching his hand with a scream. He immediately reached for another pistol, but Flores moved in swiftly, kicking the pistol away and manhandled him to the ground with the aid of Felix and Arnold. Within seconds they had him restrained and secured in zip cuffs about the wrists and ankles.
Bruce was still breathing hard as he took it all in. Everything happened in just a few seconds, but the rational side of his brain was finally catching up enough to process that three young men now lay dead and bleeding on the floor. He immediately looked for Gina and saw her being helped off the ground by Shelly.
“Are you okay, Gina?”
She gave him a nod, her eyes transfixed on the bodies in horror. “Dear lord…are they…?”
Bruce looked back to the bodies. It wasn’t the first time he’d seen men killed, but it was the first time they’d been killed by his command. Part of him felt ill about it, but he was relieved it wasn’t anyone under his direct charge.
“You did good, Flores,” he said, standing. “Are you all right?”
The young woman smiled back at him and seemed less fazed by her handiwork than he would have expected. Perh
aps all those games and simulations had desensitized her to such a degree that none of this seemed out of place.
Even that monster they had just killed.
“Sorry, Bruce,” she said. “The other guy was too fast for me.” She then turned her ire to the man, Cedric, who now lay on his side with his hands bound behind his back. “What kind of psycho gang you running here, huh?”
Cedric appeared to be the one in charge, at least. He’d have the answers Bruce needed to ensure this disaster went no further—especially with what they saw in that tunnel.
“I want to know about that monster you created,” Bruce said. “How did you do it? And are there more of them? Tell me!”
Cedric grinned, ignoring Bruce’s rapid stream of questions. “How did you find us? Was it that fool, Corey?”
Corey? The name didn’t mean anything to Bruce. But then he put the pieces together. He had to be referring to the kid they found originally: the one who had the gun.
“His faith was far too weak!” Cedric continued in a vile and accusatory tone. “His sin has brought this upon us! He’ll pay when the feast comes!”
“Shut up!” Novak bellowed and kicked Cedric in the stomach, before aiming his pistol at his chest. “You crazy little—!”
“Novak!” Bruce slammed himself into the gang leader, pushing his gun arm aside. A shot went off, but it ineffectually hit the ground.
“You idiot!” Bruce seethed at him. “We need him alive!”
“Yeah, but not uninjured!” Novak spat. “Now I’ve got to tell that boy’s mother why he’s dead. And why I was here to see it!”
Bruce could feel the rage coming from him, but he met the gang leader’s gaze and after several tense seconds Novak eventually backed down. The giant of a man turned and stood next to Jerry’s body, but he continued to glare at Cedric, no doubt wanting to lay into him with another bullet or kick.
And it was probably well-deserved.
“You’re all such fools,” Cedric said with a laugh. “The Great Ones will devour the world with no end. Only we, shall they spare! We will inherit the new paradise they will create from the essence of your wicked souls.”
Bruce studied him. Devour and create? If that wasn’t the description of Builders he didn’t know what was. His heartbeat quickened. Perhaps Dennis was connected to this, after all. How else could this lunatic have constructed something that replicated the beaming technology and printed that monster? But he needed to confirm it.
Bruce stooped down to look the man in his wild blue eyes. “These Great Ones…do they speak to you? Can you hear them?”
He nodded feverously. “Oh yes! But only the chosen can hear! Only those who have ventured into death far and deep enough can comprehend the language of the ancients. I was dead for nearly an hour, you know? It felt like just a few seconds, but—”
“How?” Bruce shook him, to keep him focused. “How do they speak to you? What do they sound like?”
The man grinned.
“To you, heathen,” he said. “They would sound only as screams.”
* * *
“I think I found what they were planning,” Gina said from within the small antechamber as she connected to the various devices and read the information off her comm unit. “Looks like they were recruiting people into their cult to take over the stasis chamber by force. Some real scary stuff here, Bruce.”
“Just make sure to copy everything,” Bruce said, his mind only half focused on what Gina was saying and instead transfixed by Cedric’s admission and the possibilities it represented. “I’ll have it all analyzed later. Any more on that creature?”
Gina tapped a few more keys. “From the history, looks like they only created the one. It was a test, I think. There’s some more crazy stuff in here, other game-world characters. I think that was their first plan. They seem to have switched to using the guns when they realized they couldn’t make anything more complex than that slime thing we encountered.”
“Well thank God for that,” Bruce said with a sigh.
“I still don’t understand how it was alive,” Gina said. “But there are a lot of modifications here. Whoever that kid is, he’s a damn genius.”
Or just a puppet, Bruce thought and tried to connect the pieces back to Dennis.
“To see that monster for real though,” Gina said, blowing out a laugh. “That’s something Ryan would be telling me about.”
She paused then, looking melancholy, perhaps remembering her son.
Bruce chuckled to share her burden. “Gilly too, I’m sure.”
* * *
An hour passed as they went about the messy process of cleaning up the scene. Flores and her team prepped the bodies and the prisoner for transport, while Gina accounted for the weapons via the production history within the scrubbers. It was painstaking work, but Gina verified the numbers and even reverse-engineered one of the processor units, turning it into a disposal.
“That’s it,” Gina said, as Flores dropped the final pistol parts into the jury-rigged contraption, converting them to nano-dust. “All except one.”
Bruce looked to Novak. “Let’s have it, chief.”
The gang leader huffed. “You can’t be serious. After what we just went through? No way I’m handing this over. Besides, we made a deal—”
“Flores,” Bruce said, cutting him off.
Flores raised her rifle to her shoulder and aimed it at Novak. “Sorry, big bro. But orders are orders.”
Novak glared at him. “And here I thought you were a man of your word, Bruce.”
Bruce shrugged. “Person with the biggest stick, rules and all that, right? Wasn’t that what you told me? Come on, hand it over.”
“You’re a lying sack of crap, Bruce.” He withdrew the pistol and dropped it in Flores’ outstretched hand. “Everyone’s gonna know about what went down here.”
Gina disposed of the weapon in the processor and it vanished into dust.
“All accounted for now,” Flores said with a grin.
“Not all,” Bruce said and then looked down at her rifle. “Let’s have it.”
“What?” she said her eyes, widening. “But what if we run into—”
“I promised Novak that by the end of this he’d be as heavily armed as you are.” He then looked back at Novak with a smile. “And I keep my promises.”
Novak smirked and shook his head. “Go on. Probably better this way. I’m sure I could take you all in a brawl anyhow.”
“And that’s the way I want to keep it,” Bruce said.
After disposing of the weapons and prepping for the journey back, Bruce set his mind to considering how he would handle this new discovery. Covering it up and keeping Cedric a secret from Dennis would be impossible. There were far too many people involved for that. The opposite would have to work. He needed to put Cedric in a glass case in everyone’s view. To let Dennis know he couldn’t touch him.
“Flores,” he called and waited for her to join him. He then waited a moment more for everyone else to be out of earshot before he continued. “Take that guy Cedric to Dr. Evelyn Munroe directly for an immediate psych eval. He’s clearly out of his mind. Then place him in virtual confinement with a 24-hour feed. I want to present him to the board as part of my report as soon as possible.”
“Will do,” Flores said. “What about that slime monster?”
Bruce paused. “What about it?”
“You think that crazy guy really figured out a way how to bring game monsters to life in the real world?”
He’d never thought about it put like that before. Monsters in the real world.
“Who knows,” he said and thought about Dennis again. “Maybe those monsters have been with us all along.”
Chapter 44: Countdown
Congratulations! You have qualified for the Thunder Ball Rally!
Your assigned vehicle number is: 18
Registered Racer: Reece
Registered Passenger/Navigator: Rembrandt
Track Di
fficulty: S+
Speed threshold 1: 120 MPH 500 XP per second
Speed threshold 2: 180 MPH 1500 XP per second
Speed threshold 3: 220 MPH 3000 XP per second
1st Place 200000 XP
2nd Place 150000 XP
3rd Place 100000 XP
[Warning: This is a Death Race track. All actions are legal. Precaution is advised.]
[Start time: 5:00]
A huge countdown clock appears in a hologram overhead and the crowd explodes into thunderous cheers. My heart races with adrenaline as I stare out at the mass of people pressed against the barricades surrounding the start-finish line.
When I practiced here before, the place was a ghost town, but now it’s a carnival. Half the population of New London must be packed into the eight or nine city blocks that make up the track. Most of them are on the street corners and sidewalks, set behind protective barriers which outline the zig-zag circuit running through the dilapidated buildings of Mid-town.
My adrenaline surges as I balance Gilly’s Gift between my legs, waiting with equal measures of dread and anticipation for the race to start. The three-deep grid of vehicles behind me start their engines and the air explodes with a horrendous din of popping exhausts and rumbling motors. I join them and roar Gilly’s Gift to life with a twist of the throttle.
“Holy geez!” Gilly shouts, standing next to me, and quickly covers her ears. “I guess this is it!”
I give her a nod as I access my HUD to check my skill slots, ensuring I have the tools to survive…no…win this race.
You have earned 25/25 Veteran Points.
You have 0 Veteran Points to allocate.
You have reached your Veteran Point limit and will not gain further Veteran Points or experience until you increase in rank.
New Rank Quest Available: Rank 3
Defeat 2 Legendary Monsters
Rewards: Veteran Rank 3: +5 VP Point Max, +1 Cross-Class Ability Slot Max +1 Non-Class Ability Slot Max
Veteran Awards: