Two in the Gut

by Siege, Matthew

  Better yet, it meant that rare books, like the one that had all those hard-core patents inside, were extremely valuable.

  I took a moment and peeked at her stats.

  Unassigned Percentages Earned - 76%

  Chemical Engineering - 31%

  Civil Engineering - 20%

  Electrical Engineering - 56%

  Mechanical Engineering - 69%

  There was a timer there too, and it was counting down.

  Twenty-three minutes and thirty-six seconds before hostilities can begin.

  Twenty-three minutes and thirty-five seconds before hostilities can begin.

  Twenty-three minutes and thirty-four seconds before hostilities can begin.

  Right… Most of the grace period the game had provided was already gone. If she was going to actually start making something useful out of all these raw materials, then Sasha had better get cracking. She knew that too, but before she began, she couldn’t help but go to the front windows and peer outside into the darkness.

  I went with her, at least as curious as she was. I didn’t see a lot of movement out there, and I was ready to give up a long time before Sasha was. She stayed with her nose pressed to the glass, and I followed her lead and remained. A minute or two later I felt her catch her breath and made a point of looking at the same place she was.

  Sure enough, I discovered that if I stared hard enough for long enough, I could finally make out the indistinct profiles of skulking Survivors across the street.

  I thought she’d been doing a pretty damn good job of hiding, but I must’ve been wrong because as soon as she spotted them a couple of the interlopers changed their status somehow, which let their names appear above their heads. They were trying to be sneaky, though. There were five of them in total, and chief amongst them was a guy exactly the right shape and build to be Reezer. Now that we could pick them out, it was plain to see that his name wasn’t one of the ones they’d chosen to reveal.

  The only names we could see were Grimothy and Stokerbadly. Those two made a big show of peeling away from the shadows and sauntering across the street. They were damn sure they had the upper hand, and when they casually glanced in her direction she shrank away from the window.

  Those two scumbags were headed to the back, and that meant trouble.

  I felt like there was a storm coming, but it was Sasha that had the foresight to understand that it wasn’t here yet. She had the presence of mind to think about battening down the hatches. She slid behind the counter and went straight to that big book of patents. There had to be something in there that would keep them out.

  Truth be told, any of the devices in there were probably capable of turning the tables, considering how outnumbered she was. That was what I was hoping, at least…

  As she opened the book, I saw it emit a faint orange glow for a moment. Now that she had enough ability in the engineering skills to understand some of it, the game revealed that the tome was more rare than rare and more epic than epic.

  It was unique, and I refused to believe that it was a coincidence that she’d stumbled upon. This had all the hallmarks of the ghost of her father finding a way to look after her from the grave.

  Sasha’s eyes went wide as the book revealed a few of its secrets to her. She sucked in a big lungful of air and let it out slowly, her fingers tingling with anticipation as she scanned the table of contents in the front, only to have her heart sink in frustration.

  “Seriously?”

  There was clearly a catch. There was always a catch. The people who designed these games never made anything easy for you in these games, and she’d always appreciated that about them. Even Headshot, for all of the flaws that the basic game carried with it, tried to do a fairly good job of marrying risk to reward. Clearly, Deep Dive had bastardized what her dad had wanted to make and ruined his life because of it. Not to mention the fact that there was something truly nefarious going on behind all those lines of code that I was only just beginning to grasp, but there was no denying that Headshot itself had gotten a lot of things right.

  Like right now. Even though I had my suspicions as to how the book got there in the first place, the game wasn’t just going to hand that sort of knowledge to her. I hopped up and hurried over, shoulder to shoulder with her as I read the book’s first page.

  You have found a Repository of Knowledge. The information contained within this book is powerful, and once your character has time to study it, some of the schematics contained within will remain with you PERMANENTLY. It will take two days of game time to work your way through the intense diagrams, blueprints, and drawings for you to have an understanding that will allow reproduction. This study time can be interrupted, but no benefits from the Repository of Knowledge will be transferred to your character until the study time is complete.

  As an additional bonus, simply possessing this item will give you a 10% bonus to your engineering skills. Enjoy!

  Well, this was certainly a mixed bag. On the one hand, the book was an incredible find. I got the feeling that even Sasha had never heard of any type of bonus or stat carrying over from one week to the next. It also meant that even once you drank its knowledge dry the book was important, and an item like that was something that entire guilds might very well band together to try to take from her.

  It made me even more curious about what the book would let her craft. Even though the things inside this book probably wouldn’t break the game, they would sure as hell make someone’s life easy and a whole lot of someone else’s lives more difficult, if they were on the opposite end of whatever had been constructed.

  But right now, it was just about useless. She had twenty minutes left before the Nuggets of Death would be smashing away at the windows, desperate to get in and make an example of her.

  Which meant that yet again she was faced with two choices; cut and run or dig her heels in and fight back.

  I knew which one she would select before she did, and she didn’t let me down.

  SEVENTEEN

  Twenty minutes isn’t a lot of time to work with, but Sasha found ways to make it into a whirlwind of activity. She had a stack of skills to play with, a burning desire to prove a point, and best of all an inventiveness that meant that whoever was on the other side of combat with her better watch out.

  I hadn’t seen her take an inventory of what there was to work with, so I stepped away and started running my gaze over the shelves that lined the wall. Motherboards, protective shells, a whole bunch of glass suitable for replacing a cracked touchscreen, some heavy gauge metal tubing that I assumed was supposed to be installed somewhere in the shop later.

  Underneath it were a few computer cases, a couple of oversized canisters of compressed air, and a whole bunch of rechargeable battery packs.

  Personally, I had my eye on the last items. As hard as it would be to generate power in this post-apocalyptic hellscape, it’d be worth it. There were probably a huge number of devices she could drag back into service, if she had a way to charge them up. I wished that I had a way to point that out to her, but when Sasha brushed past me and saw that she had an entirely different plan in her head.

  The metal tubing and the compressed air was the genesis of her inspiration. I dipped into her head a little bit and was rewarded with a voyeur show of Headshot’s UI combining her engineering ability with a few whispered words of suggestion. She needed a decent gun, and after a couple of minutes of tooling around, she discovered that quite a few of the disposable batteries were approximately the size and shape of a bullet.

  She compiled an inventory of Reboot’s interior, and the game spat back the best thing her engineering would allow her to, well, engineer… After that, all she had to do was follow instructions and gather the items from the list it gave her.

  Duffel Bag

  Heavy Wires

  Powerful Magnet

  Metal Detector

  Bike Pump

  Office Chair

  Electrical Solder

&n
bsp; Metal Tubing

  I watched in awe as Sasha used what juice remained in the car battery to solder the connections of a few heavily modified components, and in the end, she had something that very much approximated the look of a hunting rifle.

  I let out a low whistle, and she surprised me by cutting her head to the side and seeming to listen. “Sasha?” I asked, not daring to hope.

  She was holding her breath. I didn’t get an answer, but her eyes were focused on the middle distance, and it definitely felt like she was waiting for the other shoe to drop.

  I tried whistling again, mimicking the same tone I’d just used as best I could. Even though I felt like I got a pretty good result out of the sound, I could tell that she didn’t catch it. Maybe I’d been wrong, and she hadn’t heard it the first time, either.

  I’d lost my chance, and her attention snapped back to the custom animation she was currently wiring up. The electrical rounds were obviously untested, but if they did end up working, they’d hit like a fucking truck. The kinetic energy of the dense battery slamming into the target coupled with the electrical discharge that would result when the whole damn thing dumped every drop of stored power all at once would probably be enough to drop a charging bull.

  It wouldn’t fire very fast, though. Her improvised rounds were far too oddly designed for Sasha to devise a way to breech load them. Besides, she didn’t have either the tools or the time to cut into the metal tube and then work out a way to keep it from blowing up once the air canister pressurized the barrel.

  It was going to be a muzzleloader, and that was all there was to it. Sasha took the next few minutes to build up a stockpile of ammunition before attempting to craft some armor for herself.

  There wasn’t a whole lot by way of raw material. I guess she could find some cord and use it to strap the stiff protectors designed to keep the wearables safe if someone got drunk and dropped them in the street.

  It was a dumb idea, and not at all worth how much it would slow her down. None of it had a chance of stopping a bullet anyway, so what was the point? She didn’t bother with that crap. Instead, she used some leather straps and a few metal buckles to craft the only uniform the Eternals seemed to have, the equipment harness she’d been wearing over her street clothes when I’d first run into her way back when.

  A week ago? More like a lifetime ago.

  Sasha loaded the harness up with some tools, just in case she had to leave this place behind. A hammer, a wrench, a multi-screwdriver and, last but not least, a larger metal loop that she slipped the ax’s handle through so that it could hang down parallel to her left leg. It was awkward but far better than trying to lug it around in her hand.

  The pistol she’d taken from Reezer stayed in her pocket, and the new electrical air rifle she’d hopefully perfected got a long strip of leather from the end of its barrel to just near the padded arm of the office chair she’d torn up to make the butt of it.

  She could sling it over her shoulder if she needed to, but that wasn’t the plan just yet.

  I checked out the timer again. Sasha would be fair game in less than three minutes.

  Not long now. There was a battle coming up, and I couldn’t see any way to be an asset. I’d learned that I could affect a Deep Diver, but regular players like the Nuggets of Death seemed to be immune to my machinations.

  It would take them quite a while to batter down the back door, and if they tried to bust in the front at least she’d get a few clear shots off at them. That didn’t mean that she was looking forward to them smashing up the only place that she was capable of calling home right now, which meant that if she wanted to head them off, she was going to have to be proactive. The best offense, and all of that…

  With an assault on the way, Reboot was already beginning to feel claustrophobic. She made sure the tome and the other books were in the backpack before shrugging it on. The textbooks were useless now, but they didn’t know that. There was always the chance that she could use them as bait. And there was no way that she was going to let that incredible tome out of her sight again. If she had to run, Sasha was determined to come out of this ahead and not leave anything worthwhile behind for these assholes.

  Five against one, and they had a grudge on top of that. Reezer had no doubt already filled their head with lies, happily feeding them some bullshit story about how he’d been minding his own business when she’d gotten the jump on him.

  But even that was naïve. Who was I kidding? He probably didn’t have to trick them into this. There were a whole lot of players that had decided that a game like Headshot was the best way to live out their fantasies of grinding everyone else into the dust. I didn’t know them at all, but I didn’t have any doubt that they weren’t going to go away unless she made them hurt.

  Heading out the front door wasn’t a realistic option, so Sasha headed to the back of the shop. There was less than a minute left in the PVP countdown, not long enough to formulate a plan but plenty of time for adrenaline to kick through her virtual veins. I was glad that sitting in here and waiting for them to pry the shop open didn’t appeal to her.

  Decision made, she reached out and cranked back the deadbolt. Just like that, the door was unlocked. There was no way that the two guys back there hadn’t heard it, and when she stepped up to the doorway with fifteen seconds in the armistice left to tick by, there was no way they could miss her.

  I could hear her thoughts in my head. If this is the way I go out, she told herself, hefting the weight of the makeshift rifle and getting ready for what was to come, at the very least let me take a few of these fuckers with me.

  She threw the door wide open so hard that it slammed against the brick wall. The countdown was now banging away in her head so loudly that each passing number rattled through her skull.

  Three.

  Grimothy and Stokerbadly stepped out from a dumpster 20 feet away. Both of them were wearing shit-eating grins, and Stoker actually had the balls to blow her a kiss. I watched with interest as they saw the rifle in her hands, but neither one of them had the sense to retreat.

  Come on, Sasha, I thought at her as hard as I could. Make these bastards regret it.

  Two.

  Both of them raised their weapons and aimed them at her. Grimothy held a big, shiny revolver that looked like it could put a hole through her big enough to crawl in and Stokerbadly wielded a sawed-off shotgun that could probably do even worse. Sasha lifted her rifle, sighted down the scope she’d knocked together from a couple of wearable cameras she’d cannibalized, and put her finger on the lever that would flood the back of the barrel with a rush of compressed air to launch the modified battery projectile into Stoker’s face.

  One.

  It was like high noon. Everything slowed down to a crawl, and I could actually see all of their fingers tighten on their respective triggers as the clock hit.

  Zero.

  EIGHTEEN

  Sasha may have been playing the part of the reckless desperado, but she wasn’t a fool.

  These guys were cocky as hell, and they were eager to show off for each other. The instant the clock finished its countdown a little warning ping zipped through our heads. Sasha faked them out, dropping to her knees and yanking the heavy rear door most of the way closed at the same time. Whoever ran this shop hadn’t decided to scrimp on the material they’d invested in its construction, and the two Nuggets were so surprised that their target had both partial cover and concealment that their first shots went high.

  If she’d still been standing, she’d have been a goner for sure.

  Now that she’d tricked them into standing out in the open like a couple of morons, it was relatively easy for her to acquire her target again and pump the trigger. A high cough of compressed air slammed into the battery in the barrel and propelled it straight into Stoker’s neck. I’d been hoping for a flash of electricity, something similar to what Reezer had experienced when Sasha had forced him to get intimate with the truck battery, but the placement of t
he round in the soft flesh of his throat just meant that he went into a spasming dance of rigidity as he fell backward.

  The air was marred with his blood.

  Grimothy, to his credit, didn’t fall to pieces when his compatriot took a dirt nap. He was panicked though, and that made his second shot strike the edge of the door and ricochet past Sasha, deeper into Reboot. His third round went wide, and by the time he had a chance to pull the trigger a fourth time Sasha had ducked back inside, tugging the rear door closed once more behind her.

  She was fast, and that meant that she was able to crank over the deadbolt twice, once in each direction. Unless he were paying close attention, the dude out there would think it was locked. But it wasn’t…

  Both of her attackers had been wearing various mismatched body armor, and she gave herself a moment to pat herself on the back, congratulating herself on a well-placed shot. The battery round to the neck had been as much fluke as design, but the rifle had worked better than either one of us had dared to dream.

  But that was the past. Reloading was always going to be the weakness of this thing, and I watched her try and steady her shaky fingers as she slid another battery into the barrel. Once that was in place all she had to do was gently swing the friction clamp back into place to hold the round at the rear of the rifle.

  I could hear Grimothy shouting for the rest of his guild to come around the back and join him. There was no telling if they’d listen to him or not, but the guy was arrogant enough to stand just outside the door and crack open the big revolver to reload. I heard the merry music of spent casings hitting the ground.

  Sasha could tell where he was. She kicked the door open again and snapped a shot off in his direction.