by Wyatt Savage
Bolts of energy leaped from the man’s fingers as he angled his hands heavenward. Whatever powers were inside him gathered in the smoky haze over his head. Blood poured from his nose and little rivulets rolled down from his eyes as he summoned and crafted a cloud of yellow light.
“Who is that?” I whispered.
“Doctor Jonathan Throgmorton,” Agent Pei replied.
“What kind of doctor is he?” Dwayne asked.
Nobody responded, and I watched in awe as Throgmorton’s hands moved like an orchestra conductor as he shaped the yellow light into a barrier. He grabbed the outer edges of the light, stretching and pulling and punching it into the shape of a dome.
The orange light exploded, turning into a steel-grey rain that smoked as it fell to the ground in heavy sheets.
“ACID RAIN!” one of the warriors shouted.
I lay on the ground, covered by the dome, watching the rain strike the ground. Everything touched by the acid rain, including vegetation and the things given life by the Animus, began to pop, sizzle, and dissolve.
“Somebody’s afraid of it,” Agent Pei said. “The rain. Getting burned or melted alive.”
“How do you know?”
“Because they always choose something that somebody fears. They can hack into our minds and they use those against us.”
In seconds, the field had been reduced to a steaming, ashen-colored soup mottled with hunks of what looked like wet newspaper.
As quickly as it began, the acid rain stopped.
Then the sky began to melt.
Literally melt.
The landscape vanished, as if someone had shut the cosmic lights off.
We were huddled in the middle of a profound blackness and whether it was the shock of this or the day’s events, I collapsed, slipping into and out of consciousness, watching a new world seemingly unfold in front of me. There was a blizzard, then the greenery of spring, then the rust colors of fall, and finally I couldn’t take any more. It felt as if I was losing my goddamn mind, the moment of death was at hand, or maybe both. I blacked out.
32
I woke to find myself lying on a cold, concrete floor.
Jerking my eyes up, I saw that I was back inside the military installation, the one that housed the secret vault.
“How you feeling?” a man asked.
Glancing back, I spotted Agent Pei, who was seated on a desk in one of the installation’s interior rooms. He approached and handed me a bottle of water.
“Been better,” I said.
“Given the circumstances it could’ve been a whole lot worse.”
I nodded at the truth of this and stared at the bottle, disoriented, a ringing in my ears.
“It’s safe,” Agent Pei said, reading my look as I studied the bottle for any hint of poison.
“You sure?”
“Positive. You’re only worth 25 points anyway, Logan.”
“You’ve got bigger fish to fry?”
He grinned. “The biggest.”
His powerful fingers wrapped around my wrist and he pulled me up to my feet. I saw Dwayne and the other six warriors, including Noora and Doctor Throgmorton, through an open door. In fact, the entire side of the installation was gone, the walls partially liquified, the ceiling full of holes as was the flooring, all thanks to the acid rain, I imagined.
“I’m guessing you have questions,” Agent Pei said.
“More than you can imagine.”
“The aliens called a ‘Warp’ on us.”
“Audible,” I said.
“What?”
“They changed things at the line of scrimmage,” I muttered. “It’s an audible.”
“Call it what you like, but there are some things we need to discuss.”
I wasn’t listening. I was too busy looking at Dwayne and Noora. Shuffling forward, I crossed the room and slipped through the open door.
“How?” I asked, staring at Noora. “How did your guy do that before?”
Noora glanced at Doctor Throgmorton, who was leaning on his braces. He appeared to be in his late fifties, had thinning hair with a salt-and-pepper beard, and looked absolutely spent. As if creating the barrier before had sucked every ounce of energy from his wiry body.
“He’s in a different class,” Noora said.
“He was a doctor, a physician,” Agent Pei said.
“Now he’s more like a sculptor,” Noora offered. “He can construct things, but it takes a lot of health points to perform.”
I took her aside. “What about you? I’m so glad you made it.”
“I took your words to heart, Logan. I didn’t give up.”
I nodded as Dwayne walked over. I introduced them and Dwayne asked, “Are we in deep shit?”
“Pretty sure we’d already be dead if they wanted to kill us,” I replied.
I looked around to see that the installation was partially destroyed and the landscape on the outside resembled a kind of perpetual November: soggy, gray, lifeless, everything blanketed in that cottony white substance I’d seen back at my brother’s house. More of the stuff was falling from the skies like flurries.
“How long was I out?” I asked.
“The equivalent of three days,” Agent Pei remarked.
I froze. “But the game,” I gasped. “The timer, the wall…”
“Relax,” the agent said, handing me two white pills.
“Some kind of high-tech alien drug?”
“Nope, just aspirin.”
I swallowed the pills dry and mentally tried to raise my SecondSight HUD, but the system was frozen in place and I couldn’t unlock it.
“Sue, what’s the SITREP?” I asked via Mindspeak.
No response from her.
“Everything’s been placed in a kind of suspended animation,” Agent Pei said.
“Explain.”
“I will, but first you need to meet the others,” Agent Pei said, pointing to Noora, Doctor Throgmorton, and the remaining warriors, two men and two women. “The six of us have come together to form a team.”
The first warrior, a large-boned black man with a tough-guy goatee who was missing his left ear. He held a shotgun wrapped with electrical tape that he lowered upon meeting my look. “I’d like to introduce one of the finest sonsofbitches ever birthed by the United States Marine Corps,” Agent Pei said. “This is Mister Sylvester Hennessey.”
Sylvester bowed his head.
“Thank God there’s another brother,” Dwayne whispered to me. “You know how it is in horror movies and life-and-death situations. Black dude’s always the first one to go.”
“What about Keith David in ‘The Thing?’”
“Him and Russell were outside in a blizzard on a friggin’ glacier at the end of the movie. They were both goners so it doesn’t count.”
I shushed him and Sylvester pointed to the rest of the fighters.
“My brothers and sisters in arms,” Sylvester said, waving a mitt-like hand at his charges. He pointed to the man next to him, deeply tanned, his head shaved save for a black mop up on top that gave him the appearance of a Mexican samurai. The man was holding a cutting device that appeared to have two blades welded together that he deposited in an ankle-sheath.
“Mister Rigoberto Espinosa,” Sylvester said.
Sylvester pointed to the two attractive women next to Espinosa, who stood like misshapen bookends. They bore a faint resemblance to each other, though one was tall and sported a ponytail and the other was shorter with a powerlifter’s build. Both were flinty-eyed, had their faces painted black, and bore raggedly inked Bible verses on their necks.
“The Lorenzan sisters, Sarah and Isabella.”
The sisters, who carried combination machine-guns/grenade launchers, set their weapons down and mimed tipping imaginary top hats.
“What’s with the blackface?” Dwayne asked.
“The Indians used to do it back in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries,” Sarah said.
“Black was used on t
hose marked by death,” Isabella added.
“Yeah, that’s lovely,” Dwayne said under his breath.
I took in the looks of everyone and smacked my hands together. “Guess you guys didn’t get the news.”
“What news?” Isabella asked.
“You’re supposed to be killing each other, not working together.”
They snickered at this.
“The aliens coordinate efforts,” Espinosa said with a thick accent, looking up. “Why shouldn’t we?”
“Makes sense to me,” I replied. “Now how ‘bout somebody tells me how the hell I’ve been asleep for three days.”
“They’ve stopped the game for some,” Doctor Throgmorton said with a voice that sounded like he’d gargled with sandpaper. Leaning heavily on his braces, he looked to me. I was immediately taken in by his eyes, wide and somehow wise. The eyes of Solomon, as my mother used to say. “They’ve paused the game for certain participants, but allowed it to go forward for the others.”
“That doesn’t make any sense.”
“None of this makes sense,” the doctor answered. “The first lie they told us was that there were no rules, and the second one they told us was that there were rules. There are certain core strictures, hard and fast ones, and others that are more…flexible.”
“Think of it like a five-year-old playing a game that he’s losing,” Agent Pei said. “What does he do?”
“He either wipes the board clean or he just makes shit up,” Noora said.
I massaged my stubbled face. “I’m sorry, but I’m not following.”
Dwayne laid a hand on my shoulder. “We’ve performed better than anticipated so they stopped the game for us.”
“But that’s cheating,” I said.
“It ain’t cheating if you own the board,” Isabella replied.
“What does it all mean?”
Doctor Throgmorton pointed a long, withered hand at the outside world. I noticed that his face was yellow, jaundiced I believe it’s called. He looked very ill. “It means that our timer has started again. We have three hours to get to the wall, but it’s going to be more dangerous now.”
“Why?”
“Because there’s been a winnowing—”
“A culling,” Sylvester added. “They used the acid rain and other things to wipe out the weak. Only the strongest fighters and monsters are left.”
“We’re in the upper twelve percent of participants,” Sarah said with a faint smile.
“So what then?” I asked. “We fight our way through as a team?”
“Goddamn right,” Agent Pei said.
“And when we get to the wall?”
“We let the doc take over,” Espinosa said. “He’s got some proposed ways to make it over. And then we move on to Level 2.”
“Just like that, huh?”
A siren sounded somewhere outside that reminded me of the one that echoed when the Melee first started.
“That’s it,” Doctor Throgmorton said. “Time to head out. We’ve got three hours to make it to the wall, ladies and gents.”
We gathered up our weapons and gear and I admired a small flamethrower backpack that Agent Pei was kind enough to offer to me. The flamethrower was instantly included as chattel under my stats. Dwayne was given two enormous pistols with extra-long magazines of ammunition.
“Fire is more effective than grenades in our experience,” Agent Pei said, helping me strap into the contraption.
The others offered food and water, which Dwayne and I were happy to share.
Stepping outside, I noticed that the air was much colder than I’d remembered it. My breath was visible and the HUD, which finally came back online, showed the timer at 2:52:00, and the outside temperature at twenty-one degrees. Dwayne and I followed the others, walking next to Agent Pei and Noora.
“Take these,” Agent Pei said, tossing us heavy coats and gloves. “Consider it a Christmas present.”
“It’s December twenty-fifth?”
“Close enough,” Agent Pei said. “Merry fucking X-mas.”
We shrugged on the coats and gloves. “What do we owe you?” I asked.
“Nothing yet,” Agent Pei said with a sly smile.
I found the cold enervating as we walked single-file across the field to the one-lane road. Sylvester and Espinosa assisted Doctor Throgmorton, standing at either side as he moved slowly on his braces. It was clear that the doctor was in considerable pain and occasionally his breath caught as he stopped to stare at the sky.
“Why doesn’t he just buy one of those Rejuvs,” I said to Agent Pei.
“From what we can tell, they don’t work on congenital issues,” the agent answered. “At least we haven’t found one that has.”
“He’s got enough points to move into another class,” Noora added. “But he can’t resolve his handicap.”
“How does a guy who can barely walk have enough points to buy an upgrade?”
Noora and Agent Pei traded looks, but didn’t directly respond. Instead the agent summoned a huge smile. “You probably want to know how we found you.”
I nodded.
“We were fighting our way out of D.C. and tracking high-performers. I saw ‘DC Slayer’ on the bracket and figured it had to be you. I told them all about you and it just came together. Sylvester also had enough points to buy a tracker and we were able to zero in on you guys. Only thing is there was supposed to be one more.”
“There was.”
“What happened?”
“Lish bailed on us,” Dwayne said. “She was the third wheel.”
“Yeah, well, if she turned her back on you guys she did it at precisely the wrong time.”
Agent Pei pointed and I looked up to see that the road and countryside ahead were carpeted with snow and bodies.
A shitload of bodies.
Human and non-human.
The boxes on my HUD blinked to reveal four hundred and eighty-three human bodies within a quarter-mile radius, along with the carcasses of eighty-five monsters.
There must have been one hell of a firefight.
Shell casings littered the ground, which had been gouged by so many blasts that it looked as if a meteor shower had recently struck.
There were men and women on their backs, sides, and chests, faces dirty with grime and streaked with blood. Some had been shot down, others burned or stabbed, or partially devoured by the monsters that lay nearby.
Doctor Throgmorton moved haltingly between the bodies. “They died in different stages, in different ways.”
“How do you know?” Dwayne asked.
The doctor pointed to a stack of bodies with outstretched hands. It looked like there were gloves on the hands.
“The telltale sign of initial-stage decay is a process called autolysis,” the doctor said. “See those fingers? Recent death releases the liquid from cells that gets between the layers of skin. It results in sloughage, skin slip. Degloving. Soon entire sheets of skin will begin peeling from them and then the flies will move in…”
“Thanks for the info, doc,” Sylvester said, turning up his nose.
The doctor moved to the cluster of burned bodies. There was no discernable anatomy in any of them, just a mighty lump of what looked like burned chocolate streaked with a few ropes of white and bands of twisted, yellow muscle.
“Now these unlucky few did not die pleasantly. At normal temperatures, fire will expose parts of the skeleton,” the doctor said. “The abdominal contents burn slowly, but they still should be visible, and the brain…even when the vault of the skull has broken apart, the brain still retains its general shape. But not here.”
“What are you saying?” Espinosa asked.
“That the heat involved here must have been incredible. Something beyond our comprehension.”
“Least they went out guns blazing,” Espinosa said, huffing, picking through the bodies, removing a long knife in the hands of one of the dead men. “Just like my brother.”
He caught me loo
king at him and glared. “What about you, ace?”
“What about me?”
“You have a family?” he asked, wiping blood from the knife.
“I did.”
“What happened to ‘em?”
“What happens to everyone...”
“They go down swinging?”
I shook my head. “They never had a chance.”
Espinosa held the five-inch knife up. “When the fuckers took my little girl from me I made a vow.”
“What was it?”
“That if I was going down, I’d be sure to take five more people with me.”
He handed the knife to me and it was added to my chattel. “Keep that for yourself.”
I pocketed the knife as we stepped around huge winged beasts the size of school buses, insectile creatures that resembled oversized praying mantises, and fat-bellied, troll-like things, some with horns and hair down to their asses, and others that were bald and cleanshaven.
It was a real horrorshow.
And beside this were a string of military machines: troop transports, armored Jeeps, and even a tank that had been knocked over and ripped apart. It was clear that the soldiers had given hell, killing the monsters before they were themselves killed.
The ground crunched as we marched through little pockets of ice and frozen blood that lay in wide pools.
“Maybe there’s nothing else left,” I said. “Maybe all the other participants are dead.”
“Check your HUD,” Noora said.
“You awake, Sue?”
“Yes,” Sue replied.
“What’s the SITREP?”
“The F&D has ended.”
“What’s ‘F&D’?”
“What you call an audible, the Noctem call an F&D. A Frolic and Detour,” Sue replied.
“What’s the score of the game look like?”
“I do not follow.”
“What’s our situation looking like?”
“There have been approximately three hundred and sixty-five thousand participants killed in a thirteen-mile radius.”
“How many in the rest of the country?”
“Over two hundred million.”
Images flashed in several small boxes on my HUD. Shots of violent scenes from various cities across the country, a flashstorm of horrible shit that made the scenes in one of those The Purge movies look like Winnie the Pooh. There were scenes of New York City on fire, Miami flooded and full of monsters, bodies hanging from the Hollywood sign near Los Angeles, the streets of Houston running red with blood. I mentally exited out of the boxes, too overwhelmed by what I’d experienced to witness any more violence.