by Wyatt Savage
“Pretty shocking,” Agent Pei said.
I was surprised at this. “What?”
“The sheer number of dead.”
“How did you know what we were talking about?” I asked.
“I paid for a SecondSight upgrade. I can message you and read most of what’s on your HUD.”
“Most of the country is gone,” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
“There are still a good number of participants, Logan,” Agent Pei replied. “Warriors from every country. Every one of them fighting to win the Melee.”
More images popped up on my HUD. Real-time footage that Agent Pei said he’d messaged to me. There were shots taken in rural areas and in cities. I recognized the skyline of Chicago in one of them and what Agent Pei said was Mexico City in another. Teams of men and women were visible. They weren’t the wide-eyed amateurs I’d seen or run into before. No, these participants were bigger, faster, and stronger. Some were protected by futuristic armor and others rode in machines on the ground and in the air. They were fighting each other and the alien monsters, gaining points, leveling up, trying to make it to the center of the world before anyone else. They were battling on the ground, in the air, and up through black towers and what looked like futuristic dungeons.
“That’s our competition. I’m sure this won’t come as a shock, but the Noctem are busy working to pit us against each other.”
“How do you know?”
“Because one of the aliens is following us.”
He turned and pointed and I caught sight of a ghostly form hovering in the distance, out over the trees.
“How long?”
“It’s been tracking us since we left D.C. Our assumption is that they physically track high scorers, but we don’t really know why it’s following us.”
“Too bad we can’t take it out,” I mused.
“Maybe we can,” Agent Pei whispered in response.
I was about to ask what he meant, when my attention was diverted by something ahead of us, visible on either side of the road.
People and monsters.
Men, women, teenagers, and things that looked like orcs with horn-studded skulls.
Frozen in place.
Not the kind of freezing that comes naturally by the way. Oh no, these guys were still standing, still pointing, but their bodies were encased in blocks of ice. As if someone had used a freeze ray on them.
Up ahead was an overturned vehicle similarly covered in a sheen of ice.
I recognize it almost immediately.
It was Ronimal’s RV.
The one that I’d last seen Justin Best driving out of the neighborhood.
33
I ran forward to inspect the RV, which was tipped over on its side. Portions of the armored exterior had been breached, but the eeriest thing was that there were no scorch marks. In fact, the telltale marks left by teeth and claws made it look as if the machine had been pried open like a tin can.
Flamethrower at the ready, I checked the RV using my HUD, but there was nothing inside or around it. No blood trails or body parts, no footprints. I wondered whether Justin had found a way out or had simply been eaten whole by whatever had overturned the RV. Or perhaps he was still out there somewhere, fighting for his life along with Bryson.
“We need to keep moving,” Sylvester said. “We’ve got echoes up ahead.”
“What?”
“Black hats. Bad guys.”
“Participants,” Isabella added, thumping her machine gun/grenade launcher combo against the RV’s bumper.
We circumvented the RV and saw more of them in the middle of the road. People frozen in place, literally encased in irregular-shaped blocks of ice.
I stopped on a dime because I recognized two of the frozen people.
It was Steven and Elise Bruciak from my old neighborhood.
Elise’s eyes were closed and her face was streaked with blood. She appeared to have been bracing for impact when frozen as her arms and legs were tucked in tight against her chest.
Steven’s pain-wracked face was purpled by bruises, his left knee was still badly wounded, and he was missing an eye. His other eye was open, as was his mouth, and he appeared to have been warning his wife to look out when he too was flash-frozen.
“Anyone you know?” Sylvester asked.
I nodded and he tapped on the ice. “The aliens got a point about the game to a certain extent. It is the great equalizer. Whatever you were back in the world, rich, poor, powerful, weak, none of it matters anymore. You’re just a fucking popsicle now,” Sylvester said with a hollow chuckle.
My eyes roamed to the right, near what had once been a gravel verge, where several alien monsters lay in a big heap. A mini-dragon with a spiked tail and a centipede the size of an anaconda with a long yellow tongue were visible, both frozen.
“What did this?” Dwayne asked.
“Probably an upper-level Ice Warrior,” Sylvester said. “We saw something similar near the Anacostia River.”
Dwayne moved over and placed a finger on the block of ice formed around a young woman. Her eyes were whiter than fresh winter frost.
“Thought it was her for a sec,” Dwayne said, turning back to me. “Lish.”
“What happens if we run into her?”
“I’m gonna have a word or two with her.”
“Why do you think she did it?” I asked.
“When you’ve got as many demons as she does, Logan, it tends to affect your judgment.”
“You’re making excuses?”
He shook his head. “Just answering your question as best I can.”
“Can’t believe she did it.”
“Right, you can’t believe that someone wouldn’t trust their life to an ex-athlete with a brain injury and a dude whose main goals in life were managing a dollar store and trying to find out what happened to the other two percent of the people in Fortnite.”
“What are you saying?”
“That if I was her, maybe I’d have ditched us too.”
I’ve found in life that the things that annoy you the most often contain a good measure of truth. That’s what makes them so goddamned annoying. Dwayne was right. We were a couple of misfits that were basically shooting zeroes and maybe Lish got a little anxious and wanted to strike out on her own. I was still angry—hurt might be a better word—but was beginning to understand what might’ve caused her to leave us behind.
“Maybe you’re right,” I said to Dwayne. “Maybe we are a couple of losers.”
Dwayne chewed on his lips. “Maybe we were. You had your accident and were taking all those meds and I had my foot and now it’s not like that anymore. Maybe, as strange as it sounds, we’ve got a chance to start fresh. And maybe since we faced all of that hardship we’re better equipped to handle the Melee. Bottom line is, she might have had a valid reason to ditch us, but she’s gonna regret it.”
I held my fist out and Dwayne bumped it.
“Any day, lovebirds!” Sylvester shouted. “We’re only trying to defeat an invading alien force and save the fucking world here!”
We spun and hustled after the others as Sylvester waited for us.
“You guys tired and sore?” the big man asked.
“Yessir,” I replied.
He smiled. “Good. Pain is weakness leaving the body.”
We jogged after him, slipping between the frozen figures only to find Doctor Throgmorton standing in front of a frozen woman with icy blue eyes. He was leaning over his braces, tapping a finger on the ice.
“You okay?” I asked.
He nodded. “She reminds me of someone I knew…”
“A patient?”
He looked back. “I wasn’t that kind of doctor. I spent the vast majority of my time researching.”
“Researching what?” Dwayne asked.
“The causes of ovarian cancer generally and amongst a large group of terminally ill patients specifically. I spent a good deal of time focusing on the “pelvic conta
mination” theory which proposed that environmental carcinogens possibly ascend through the genital tract and act upon the surface of the ovary.”
“What kind of carcinogens?” I wondered.
“Any kind of particulate really. Talc for instance.”
“Why ovarian cancer?”
“Because it’s the most lethal gynecologic cancer there is. Twenty thousand deaths a year and it took someone away that I loved very much.”
He glanced back at the woman in the ice and there was recognition on the doctor’s face, as if he were peering in at a ghost.
Shuffling forward, we climbed over a berm of ice to see an immense form off to our left.
“Dark spire,” Dwayne gasped.
It was one of the black towers I’d seen earlier, the ones that were sprouting up outside many of the major cities across the globe.
Agent Pei and the others were standing in front of the strange dark edifice, everyone stony-faced, their eyes cast up the sides of the spire that stretched into the clouds.
We moved slowly toward it and I felt a low hum, a series of vibrations emanating from the spire.
“What is it?” I asked.
Agent Pei silenced me with an expression and we just stood there. A curtain of stale air swept past us, carrying the reek of death.
The others moved closer and so did I. Mentally, I calculated the circumference of the tower at one hundred feet or so, and it was completely unmarked, forged from some black metal. Around the perimeter of the tower were mounds of white and red goo. A closer inspection revealed corpses. Dozens, maybe hundreds of bodies. Men, women, and things that were not from our world.
“Highly fragmented bodies,” Doctor Throgmorton said.
Espinosa’s brows arched. “That supposed to mean something?”
Noora looked over. “The terminal velocity of a falling body is 120 miles per hour. It takes fifteen hundred feet to reach that speed.”
“Which means?”
“These bodies had to have fallen from at least that distance,” Noora added.
Doctor Throgmorton cocked a thumb in Noora’s direction. “What she said.”
I looked up the side of the tower. A shiver tickled the back of my neck. How tall was the tower? Two thousand feet? Three thousand?
The sisters stared at the mounds of flesh, looking on with a mix of curiosity and dread. Sarah picked up a wallet from the pile of gore. There was a photo of a woman stuck to the wallet. The doctor swatted the wallet and photo out of Sarah’s hand.
“Best to focus on the pieces and not the lives lost. That way you don’t make a connection. You don’t lose focus.” He pointed to the bodies. “You have to be dispassionate about everything. They’re just tissue now.”
I moved through a path that cut past the bodies and touched a finger to the exterior of the tower, which was as hard and cold as granite.
“I’d advise against touching it again,” Doctor Throgmorton said. “It’s a trap for the unwary.”
“Probably another quest,” Dwayne said.
“You go into that fucking thing, you ain’t never coming out,” Espinosa said.
I closed my eyes and heard clanging sounds, screams, and a row of explosions echoing from somewhere deep inside the tower.
“Should we destroy it?” I asked.
The doctor looked at me as if this was the most ludicrous thing he’d ever heard in his life. He ignored my question and instead intoned, “I wonder how many worlds have seen this thing. How many times since the dawn of the universe has this spire appeared while the game is being played?”
“And what’s the purpose?” Sarah asked.
“Who says there has to be one?” the doctor remarked.
“There always has to be a reason for why things happen,” Isabella replied. “Right?”
The doctor considered this. “Perhaps. Or maybe that’s just something we humans tell each other so that we can sleep better at night.”
“Maybe they’re recruiting people,” I blurted out.
Espinosa laughed. “Come again?”
“Maybe they’re trying to find fighters for another battle somewhere else.”
Dwayne snapped his fingers. “Yeah, maybe the Noctem are fighting their own war somewhere and they need the baddest of the bad, warriors from all over the galaxy to help them.”
“If that’s the case you’re outta luck, friend,” Espinosa said with a chuckle.
“Maybe they got themselves the universe’s biggest gladiatorial ring somewhere out there,” Sylvester said, gesturing to the sky.
“And maybe they’re just a bunch of evil aliens that like to fuck with people and destroy worlds,” Agent Pei said, bringing us all back to reality. “How ‘bout we save the philosophy and speculation for another day and move out.”
Suddenly, there was a thumping sound on the other side of the tower. A section of the black metal opened and out came a man, or what I assumed had once been a man. I couldn’t tell, you see, because it had been turned inside out.
Internal organs dangled from yellow and white flesh, pulsating with life as the man moaned and waved a sword.
He fell in stages, landing on his knees before punching a hole in the flap of flesh that covered his mouth. The sound of the air sucking through the hole in his face turned my stomach.
He fell to his side. “…im,” he gasped. “…o…to…im…ho…ests…pire.”
Reaching out a hand, he clawed at the ground, dragging himself forward a few feet. “Woe to him who quests inside the black spire.”
I crouched near him. “What happened?”
The man slumped to the side, flashing a look at the tennis-ball-sized hole that had been winnowed into his face. I think I could see his vocal cords moving as he strained to speak.
“W…tr…water,” he moaned.
Sylvester grabbed a bottle of water and handed it to me. I uncapped the bottle and gently poured some water in the hole. This seemed to bring some comfort to the man who wheezed and sighed.
“Ack…ire…black spire,” the man wheezed.
“What about it?”
“It’s a shortcut,” the man said. “The black spire is a shortcut.”
“To what?” Dwayne asked.
The man craned his head and I could see his eyes, blank as milk, on the other side of his skin. “There are different sub-levels inside the spire. Each sub-level has its own terrain, its own…particularities, its own…inhabitants…”
“What are on the levels?”
“Terrible things,” he said, blood oozing out of the hole. “But if you find your way up through the damned thing, you might find the shortcut.”
“To what?” I asked.
I waited for the man to answer, but then I realized no answer would be coming. He wasn’t moving. His organs had stopped expanding and contracting. He’d expired.
A sound drew my attention. My gaze hopped from the man to the still-open door on the spire. A ghostly lady stood in the doorway. An achingly beautiful woman with platinum hair. She had a long finger out and was beckoning me to join her. For a moment, I had the strongest desire to follow her into the spire.
Agent Pei fired his weapon at the woman and she vanished. “Do not be led astray by that woman.”
“She’s not real,” the doctor said. “An alien illusion.”
“Is that woman real, Sue?”
“She’s as real as you want her to be.”
“Is the spire a shortcut?” I asked.
“Everything can potentially be a shortcut in the Melee.”
“Why are you talking in riddles?”
“Because your questions lack specificity. Besides, none of the participants I have worked with have ever ventured into a spire.”
Before I could ask anything else, someone whistled as we spotted Isabella. She was down at the end of the road gesturing for us to hurry.
“What about him?” I asked, pointing to the dead man on the ground.
“What about him?” Agent Pei re
plied.
“You heard what he said. There’s a shortcut through the spire, the tower, whatever it is.”
“I’ll take my chances on the road,” Sylvester said.
Espinosa nodded. “Me too.”
“They’ve got a point,” Dwayne said. “I’d rather go forward than side quest into the tower of terror.”
I stole a final glance at the black spire and then flanked Dwayne, the two of us assisting the doctor as the others hustled ahead, slipping through what looked like a translucent barrier hanging in the air.
“What is that?” Dwayne asked.
“A caul,” the doctor said. We hesitated, then moved through the barrier as the temperature radically changed. The air on the other side was dry and hot, like the desert, and a sickly orange light shone down on a vast sweep of desiccated fields that were cluttered with smoking machines, corpses, and what appeared to be barricades made of metal, wood, and concrete.
Agent Pei held up a balled fist and we stopped. “Check your HUDs, guys and gals,” he said. “An offer’s been made to us.”
I checked my HUD and a message popped up that read:
Congratulations, you have been offered an opportunity to quest in the Necro Zone A
side quest.
Objective: Cross a one-mile gauntlet to reach the wall.
Reward: 800 XP
Accept: Y/N
“Everyone seeing the message?” Agent Pei asked.
“Yes,” I replied as the others sounded off.
“We either accept the quest and cross the fields in front of us, or we go the long way.”
“How long’s the long way?” Dwayne asked as I scanned my HUD for an answer that wasn’t forthcoming.
“Might take us an hour to cross the fields,” Sylvester said. “Other way might take two or three hours.”
“What’s the downside to questing?” I asked.