Two in the Gut

by Siege, Matthew

  Your Spot Hidden ability has increased. Your adversaries:

  Outnumbered you (+3% skill increase)

  Possessed a higher counter skill [Stealth] than you (+2% skill increase)

  Had the advantage regarding position and placement (+2% skill increase)

  Your Spot Hidden ability is now 32%.

  Wow! That was pretty good, actually. I was impressed that the AI worked out all the factors that had played against her and rewarded her accordingly. Despite my impatience and temporary misgivings, I couldn’t help but admit that Sasha definitely knew what she was doing. I liked to think of myself as a patient gamer, but even I would’ve crossed the street by now.

  If the situations had been reversed and I had been the one playing the game and calling the shots, I’d have gotten taken out just now. It was a sobering realization, and it went a long way to showing me how little I knew about the Survivor side of the game.

  I was man enough to admit when I was wrong, but it was still a little embarrassing to face up to the fact that only a couple of seconds ago I was lamenting being stuck with Sasha. I’d given up on her being able to teach me anything, but I sure felt different about that now.

  She and I watched the two would-be attackers go up the street and deeper into the Orange Zone. Now that they weren’t bothering to hide, I could see that one of them was holding a pistol in his hand. The other had a baseball bat. Not exactly the most high-tech or powerful weapons in the game, of course, but Sasha had nothing but a hammer.

  They’d have made quick work of her, grinning all the while.

  I knew guys like that. Every game had them. The moment play started they rushed off to find a chokepoint where weaker, more inexperienced players could be waylaid at their leisure. It didn’t matter that the people they were attacking had nothing they wanted, they killed them anyway. And worse, they didn’t feel bad about it. They were the worst sort of griefers, ones who existed purely to ruin your game.

  I didn’t trust them, and neither did Sasha. She didn’t move from her spot other than to slowly track their progress with her head. If I had to guess, they were already concentrating on finding another place to bushwhack players that had no chance of giving them any semblance of a fair fight.

  When at last they were out of sight, Sasha stood up and headed in the opposite direction. It was a decision I approved of, not that she needed my consent. It was usually better to let players like that alone, at least at first. Once you got a bit of firepower, I was all for smashing that sort of asshole into the ground, but even if we could take them out right now, we wouldn’t gain much more than the weapons we’d already seen.

  And, judging by the way Sasha was angling across the street and blending in with the shadows again in the Orange Zone, she had a destination in mind.

  SEVEN

  She kept thinking about the Eternals. It was an obsession. Twice in the next ten minutes, she stopped for no other reason than to scroll through the menu list again and see if any of them had come online. Sasha didn’t like what she was finding, each time she was unsuccessful her frown deepened. She even shook her head in frustration, uncertain of what their absence meant.

  Judging by what I’d heard of her thoughts when I was trapped in her head and the way she was acting now, the fact that nobody in her Guild had bothered to login yet was completely out of the ordinary. And, probably because it was so much in the forefront of her mind, I couldn’t stop thinking about them either.

  What was going to happen when we met up? I had to be careful not to let myself forget that the last time I’d met Eternals, three of them had killed my only companion Riode in a vicious betrayal. The rest of them hadn’t liked the idea, but they’d been too gutless to share it with Sasha.

  I’d killed them before I got into the Vault. Which probably meant, due to the timing of everything, that she had no idea about the way the Eternals had tried to change her plans for me.

  Or that I’d made it to the Vault…

  Whatever had allowed her to sense the danger back at that corner was keeping quiet now. Sasha was so careful, but there was a renewed sense of urgency to the way she stopped in the shadows. I’d been trying to stay ahead of her, if only so that I could pretend I had a chance of seeing something before she did, but now I had to settle for walking beside her.

  After all, I had no idea where we were going.

  A couple of minutes later that became clear. The surrounding buildings weren’t quite as tall, in the city had built a little park and reflecting pool around a library. Moonlight gleamed in the pool near the entrance.

  Sasha was too excited by the fact that it didn’t look like it’d been looted to reflexively shield her thoughts from me, so I knew how pleased she was with the find. Usually places like this, repositories of knowledge, drew players like flies to honey. Those ambushers back there must’ve been making life difficult for anyone who headed in this direction.

  They’d helped us. If there was anything good inside, that is…

  But Sasha was sure that there would be. She hurried across the street in the direction of the library, and I followed. She hadn’t been lying when she made her character; her ambition was high. For a girl that had waited for what I felt was three times as long as necessary back there, only to be right about the danger ahead, to be rushing off now…

  Well, I suppose I already knew that she was impulsive. Dragging down the servers of a developer with more resources than most small countries was hardly pragmatic, after all.

  Libraries were a strange thing in Headshot. In a world with so much to do, with so many tasks that required doing and relatively few people to get them done, the books inside had the power to improve your existing skills and, better yet, teach new ones. Sure, I couldn’t imagine that anyone would be scouring the shelves for a step-by-step guide to flower arranging or a bit of light reading about how to craft the perfect haiku, but the best stuff, the essential stuff…

  Well, judging by the fact that Sasha was moving at least twice as fast as she had on the way here, the stuff inside was worth the risk.

  I had to keep reminding myself about the time dilation. The Survivors already in the game had a lot more time to arm themselves than we had. Sasha knew this too, of course. But the possibility of the books inside giving her a leg up on the competition was too big to ignore.

  I understood. I did. She was the only one who was truly dedicated to this game. She’s altered her sleep patterns and sacrificed so much to make the world in here preferable to the one we were forced to live in. There was only so much patience she could muster, especially when the game was dangling a carrot this big right in front of her nose.

  The sound of gunfire filtered to us from a few blocks up, deeper into the Orange Zone. It didn’t die down, either. Instead, it swelled. I wouldn’t exactly say there was a massive firefight happening over there, but five or six people weren’t very happy with each other and didn’t mind letting everyone know it.

  I took it as a good sign. The noise of the shots would draw the Survivors looking for some PVP combat and drive off anyone who wasn’t interested in the same.

  Sasha had decided the same thing, and as she darted across the lawn to the wide, glass doors of the library, there were only two thoughts in her head. Would the good stuff still be in there? And If it isn’t, am I too late to hunt down whoever grabbed it and take it back?

  I winced as the footfalls of her heavy engineer’s boots rattled down the empty alleys and abandoned streets. Nobody could be quiet all the time, and she was right to get this over with as fast as possible.

  She didn’t know the answer to either one of the questions she’d asked herself. The doors looked secured, and she couldn’t see signs of a break-in anywhere else. That was as much proof as she was going to get that the library still had something worth looting inside. She wasn’t equipped to stop anybody from stealing any of the useful books if they had gotten here first.

  She really, really needed a weapon. I’d n
ever had to worry about finding one as a Zombie, since they were permanently attached to my hands and face. But a Survivor was only as good as the heat that they were packing, and her engineering tools weren’t going to cut it for long.

  Sasha glanced over her shoulder at the parking lot, and I let my gaze follow hers. There were only a couple of cars there, and they both looked abandoned. I got the impression that they were props. Maybe if someone wanted to get them going they could, but one looked like all four of its tires were flat, and the other had a shattered windshield and a puddle of something that looked vital seeping into the asphalt underneath it.

  Deep Dive had lovingly re-created a world that had been abandoned in a hurry. You could use everything, rebuild everything if you had the tools and the know-how. But if you wanted to get yourself a vehicle to cruise around in, you would have the best luck at a dealership.

  Even then, you better have some gas ready. And some friends, since a vehicle was a highly sought-after prize.

  She turned away from the cars. I didn’t think that she was suspicious of another ambush, at least not from that direction, but she was nothing if not careful. I could feel my respect for her growing. She knew what she was doing, and if she was this cautious, there must be some heavy hitters out stalking the Survivor side on Sundays.

  Which meant, of course, that she didn’t want to be stuck outside in the open for any longer than she had to. The library didn’t stand out, at least not anymore. Sure, it was big and well-appointed, but so were most of the other government buildings that made up this little district set in the middle of the rest of the city. There had been a time when these buildings had been stately and grand, but so much had happened since their inception that they were now just little brothers to the larger, far more impressive architecture in every direction.

  I was perfectly happy to admire the scenery, but then again, I wasn’t at a risk of getting a bullet to the back of the head. Unsurprisingly, Sasha was straight down to business. She’d grown up in Silicon Valley, which meant that she knew the streets like the back of her hand. The farthest I’d been from my house in the last decade was in the game last week, but for someone a bit more worldly like her, the only thing that mattered right now was waiting for us in the library.

  There was a long list of places that people liked to hit first, ideally within a half hour or so of logging in. Libraries were certainly on it, but they were nowhere near the top. The priorities were gun shops, food warehouses, Amazon Distribution Centers, car dealerships and gas stations and military installations. The bigger guilds would already have a stranglehold on those places, though.

  The library was different. There were people who made their game all about information, and a place like this…

  Sasha knew that it should have been ransacked. The only way to be sure that it wasn’t was to risk going inside, but all of her alarm bells were going off.

  I wondered if she’d listen to them. I wasn’t experienced enough at this side of the game to know if the prizes inside would be worth the inherent risk in getting them, but the fact that Sasha was so wary and yet still interested in busting in had me ready for anything.

  At least there was room in Headshot for more than just bloodshed. Survivors were notoriously closemouthed about life on their side of the game. I knew from a combination of release interviews from Deep Dive and a quick skim of Sasha’s surface thoughts that there were entire guilds who crafted items, sold maps, ferried soldiers to the front lines or healed them in the back of the battle.

  I got the feeling that if you wanted to, you could happily spend most of your week perfecting an incredible set of knots to facilitate your bugout bag and round out your post-apocalyptic fantasy. You might not make a lot of friends, but you didn’t have to throw yourself into the PVP on Sunday or the faction fight with the Zombies.

  A lot of the game was made up of purists like Sasha. It cost so much to play that they weren’t going to quit just because their particular style was no longer the flavor of the month. She got along with just about everyone, willing and able to bail out a stranger and then divvy up whatever loot they’d found together. Maybe they’d even high-five each other, secure in the knowledge that there were other hardcore nerds who were more impressed with the simulation aspect than the combat one.

  I stepped forward and peered through the front windows of the library. Sasha did the same thing a second later.

  The shelves that I could see looked full. There wasn’t so much as a book out of place. If it was a trap, standing out here wasn’t going to make it any less of one. It was already 12:25, and it sure looked to me like the library was hers if she wanted it.

  Sasha, despite the earlier patience I’d seen her display, was getting antsy. Sunday’s time dilation meant she could get a lot done, but not if she sat on her hands and was so willing to overanalyze every move to the point of paralysis.

  “Let’s do this,” she said under her breath. For whatever reason, a little electric charge ran across my shoulders, but it was gone before I had a chance to focus on it.

  Now that she was ready, I started assessing our options. To start with, the front door was going to be a massive problem. There was a sturdy security gate just inside the glass and, since she was pretty sure that she possessed neither the tools to open it nor the strength to lift it, Sasha stepped lithely away and slid around to the back of the building.

  She jogged the length of the library, and I followed. Once I caught up with Sasha, I found her inspecting a sturdy security door. It was locked too, of course. In fact, it didn’t even have a handle. I suppose that made its purpose clear; the only people intended to use it would be fleeing from the interior of the building, most likely after it was on fire.

  Sasha got a little closer and put her hands on the edge of the doorframe anyway, running her fingers along the seam to see if there was some way that she could coax it open. It was a desperate move that was never going to work, and when it didn’t, she shook her head at her stupidity. No one had forced her to make a belated dash for the library. She could have taken a detour at any stage and gathered some equipment. If the worst that happened was that she wasted a few minutes of game time casing the library and then gave the back door a rather tender massage, so be it.

  I turned back to look at the door again. Maybe I’d spot something about it that she didn’t. If I did though, I wouldn’t be able to let her know.

  The heavy thunk of a bullet impacted the brick less than an inch from Sasha’s head.

  I was impressed by her instincts. While I was still standing there like a moron with my mouth open, wondering what had just happened, she took off in a mad dash around the corner of the building. I raced to catch up, and only then did the sound of the gunshot wash over us.

  Pretty damn realistic, I thought to myself. She’d have been dead before she even heard the shot, just like real life.

  There wasn’t any time to admire the way the game modeled ballistics, though. Sasha wasn’t waiting around for the next shot to find her. The placement of the bullet and the angle that it had most likely come from would place the shooter squarely behind where she’d been standing when she’d been trying to get the door to the library open.

  I glanced over my shoulder as we sprinted along the wall. If I had to guess, and I did, I’d put the sniper over in that parking structure a half mile or so across the campus. That’s where I’d have been, at least. It was a good spot to set up camp; easy to get into and out of in a hurry, possessing unrestricted views in every direction, so long as you were willing to move your gear a little if your target headed off to a different point of the compass.

  I knew that Sasha had spotted the structure before. She wasn’t new to any of this, and the fact that she hadn’t put very much credence in it as a threat told me something. Even though we were both running as fast as we could, I found that I could pry into her mind just enough to learn the reason she’d ignored the parking structure.

  Nobody should ha
ve a gun that could fire that far. Not yet. This Sunday was too new for anyone to have gotten a chance to find or make something that hardcore and get eyes on the rest of the city like that. The fact that someone had worried her a little, and it worried me a lot.

  Whatever link or connection I had managed to share with her was again shattered as another round screamed through the air, stripping branches and leaves from the trees before ringing off a light post that Sasha had happened to be running past. If it hadn’t been there, she’d have been splattered across the side of the library.

  It was, and she wasn’t, but it was too damn close for comfort. The crack of the gunshot rolled across us again, but at least we’d managed to make it around another corner now. The bulk of the library was between the bastard and us, and even though I couldn’t help but feel a little safer now, I didn’t get why Sasha was wearing a grim little smile across her pretty face.

  “Keep shooting, dickhead,” she muttered. “Won’t be long before someone takes that big, shiny gun away from you, now…”

  Of course! Whoever was trying to take us out was too eager to make it happen, and when the air was punctuated with a third shot that came nowhere near our hiding spot, I was even more sure that was true. All they were succeeding in doing now was to put a huge red flag over their head. Every crack of that rifle told the rest of the zone that someone over there was probably paying too much attention to something else to stop themselves from getting snuck up on.

  That, and the fact that they clearly had something worth stealing…

  The rest of Silicon Valley would know exactly where the shots were coming from, by now. If he stayed there, he’d be up to his eyeballs in scrubs trying to take him out and if he moved... Well, if he moved hopefully Sasha got in and out of the library before he was able to pick a new position.