She just rolled her eyes at me. “Whatever. And before you ask, Headshot doesn’t require any talent points to cook up biofuel. That’s why I figured it’d be perfect for you.”
“Thanks…”
“Don’t mention it. While you’re doing that, I’m going to go outside and see if I can make these cameras into something a little more fun. Get started, and I’ll be back as soon as I can.”
“Your wish is my command,” I answered, trying to show her that I was going to be good-natured about the whole thing. If she could use her engineering abilities to help us hold the hospital, then that’s exactly how she should be spending her time.
And that was still what I was telling myself more than an hour later as I stirred the biofuel and hoped against hope that this would actually work. Nothing she was doing outside of the cameras or anywhere else would really matter if I couldn’t get enough fuel to power the generators.
Thankfully, we probably wouldn’t need me to make that much. The generators only needed to run for an hour, and that was being hugely, unrealistically optimistic. They could probably last until we were full of lead and shrapnel on a couple of spoonfuls.
But I got the burner going with the lighter she’d scrounged up in the library and poured a few buckets of grease into the barrel. After that, I was on autopilot, mixing and cooling and filtering out the junk that floated to the top before draining off of the fuel. By the time I had four buckets of it at a consistency that I thought was acceptable, Sasha was back to check on me.
“That looks pretty good,” she said as she looked over my shoulder. I froze, the nearness of her making me all too aware of the fact that I was, basically, obsessing over a girl while in her dad’s head. Best case scenario, that was going to make things awkward, one day.
Even though I didn’t want the moment to end, I realized I had no idea what time it was. Before I could stop myself, I’d already checked my watch. The moment was over. Sasha stood up.
It was 10:35. Some things fly when you’re having fun and all of that…
Sasha knelt down and placed her hand on the side of one of the buckets of biofuel. “We’ll let this stuff cool for another few minutes before pouring it into the generators. If they fire up, we’re doing better than I dared to hope.”
“And if they don’t?”
Sasha shrugged. “Then we’re pretty much shit out of luck, I guess. No pressure…”
THIRTY-FOUR
She sloshed some fuel into one of the generators, and I splashed the rest into the other. After that, it was as simple and anticlimactic as mashing a big red button.
They kicked on immediately, and the overhead lights flared into life. After sulking through the gloom for so long, I had to shield my eyes until they got used to how bright everything was.
“Before you worry about it,” Sasha told me, blinking fast as her eyes adjusted, “I’ve already been to the fuse box. The lights down here work, but the ones in the stairwell are shut off. They won’t find us that way. I left a few lights on in the top floors to give them even more reason to head in the wrong direction.”
I nodded. It was hard for me to be getting too enthusiastic about this. I knew that they’d get us, it was just a matter of how and when.
Sasha knew me too well already. She read my expression and said, “You can go, if you want.”
I made a not-this-again face. “I said I’ll stay, and I’m staying. I won’t pretend that the thought hadn’t crossed my mind, but I’m not going anywhere. And it’s not just because you’ve got way more of a chance with the two of us working together than you do on your own.” I sighed and then pointed at the gun in the holster on her hip. “You know, if you want to fuck with them, just take that thing and shoot yourself now. Don’t respawn. Log out. Just vanish, for a while. Stay off the radar and hit them in a few weeks, maybe a couple of months.”
Sasha smiled wistfully. “You make it sound so easy; you know that?”
There was something different in her tone, and I looked over to see if I could pierce her mask the same way she’d just done to me. “You tried it already, didn’t you?”
“Is it that obvious?”
I shrugged. “Deep Dive won’t let you shoot yourself, huh?”
Before I could react, the gun was in her hand, and the barrel was against my temple. “Sorry, babe.”
Click.
Nothing…
I shoved the gun aside, even though it didn’t pose me any danger. “And what would you have done if that worked?”
“Probably felt a lot less guilty. Did you get a system message when I pulled the trigger?”
“No.”
She sighed. “I did. Deep Dive’s system shot me a friendly little reminder me that I was Guildless. It’s too late on Survivor Sunday for me to respawn elsewhere since I spent too much time here over the last few hours. In short, I’m stuck and so are you.”
I was used to getting the same messages she did, but I must have been out of range for that one. Either that or my separation from Sasha was becoming more permanent.
“Anyway, now that you’ve got the generators going, it’ll be worth my while to modify the cameras. It shouldn’t take me too long since it turns out that I’m a fairly badass engineer now.”
“What do you want me to do while you’re out there?”
“I checked out the upper levels just now, but I’d only recently found the generator and this second security booth when you pulled up with the truck. So, poke around a bit, I guess. If you wanted to stumble upon a thermonuclear hand grenade, be my guest. Anything you can find, we can use.” And just like that, she patted one of the growling generators lovingly and headed out to make mischief.
Right. I was sure that Sasha had already explored the area far more thoroughly than she was letting on, and now she was just giving me a simple, mundane task so that I didn’t mess up something more important.
I guess I didn’t blame her. It was a pain in the ass being in Headshot without any skills, and I hated the fact that everything I’d been good at last week I couldn’t do now. As a Zombie, I hadn’t exactly ‘won’, but I’d lived a long time. I’d used my cunning and outthought opponents that had either gotten the jump on me, outnumbered me, or been luckier than I was.
I had done the hardest thing a free player could do in the game. I had survived.
Screw these guys; I thought to myself as I went into the security room and grabbed a flashlight off the shelf. The lights were working, but I reached over and turned them off. Sasha was right about nobody being able to see the light from up there since we were pretty much encased in concrete, but it was a bad habit to get into. I wanted to stay used to working in the darkness.
The players coming for our hides called themselves Survivors, but I was the survivor. They’d bought their way into the game, but I’d earned the title. I’d been hunted since day one, and it was only towards the end that I could turn the tables on them even a little bit.
And even then, all it had taken was a few Survivors knowing where and when I was going to be to almost end me.
There were more stairs down, and I took them. I should have been in a rush I guess, but we still had time before the assault began. Sasha needed me; she could work out where I was.
There wasn’t much more on this level than the security room and the generators, but I’d noticed that the stairs had kept going down when Sasha brought me here. With nowhere else to go, I pushed open the door to the stairwell.
I could just make out Sasha as the door swung shut behind her on the ground level. She had a job, and so did I. I just didn’t know what it was.
There were certainly more flights of stairs leading down, and down I went. I was expecting another door, another hallway. It didn’t happen, at least not until I went down three more flights. This was far, far deeper than the construction needed to go. What was down here?
When I finally reached the end of the stairs, I found not one door, but two. The one on the left was one o
f those big doublewide elevators, the type that they have in hospitals that let the whole bed and its accompanying equipment and nurses get in all at once. It was for whisking people around when they were in dire straits, and I felt a flicker in my gut when I realized that I hadn’t passed another elevator at all during the entire time I’d descended the stairs.
There was a single button with an up arrow mounted beside it.
Why was it here and nowhere else? The shaft must’ve run right past us in the security room, just on the other side of the cinderblocks. The sign on the other door told me why it hadn’t stopped anywhere else.
Morgue.
I surprised myself by not shuddering. If the game was trying to scare me, it wasn’t working. Under normal circumstances, I would’ve been more than a little creeped out just standing in front of it, but these circumstances weren’t normal, and I wasn’t that guy anymore.
I reached out and turned the handle. It wasn’t locked, and the door swung open on silent hinges. The only light that I had to go by was the flashlight in my hand, and instead of playing it around and uncovering the horror movies sight of cadavers on slabs, I was careful to calmly survey my surroundings.
The slabs were empty. The room itself was sterile and professional, lined with small doors that almost certainly held those sliding beds that corpses lay on, toes tagged, and bodies zipped neatly into body bags. I didn’t know what to call the doors, so I just mentally tagged them as filing cabinets.
Human filing cabinets. It was just cold storage. Nothing to see here.
Except I knew that wasn’t right. I didn’t know anything about real-world mortality rates, but bodies weren’t stored here permanently. They couldn’t possibly need more than forty or fifty of those slots to store bodies, and even that number seemed huge when I thought about it.
And it wasn’t just mortality rates that I had no idea of. The entire process was a mystery to me, but the filing cabinets stretched off into the darkness. There must be hundreds. Why?
I pushed farther into the room, keeping a rough tally as I went. When I’d guessed that there were hundreds I hadn’t been off by much, and when I finally reached the end of the room I knew that I wouldn’t be doing my job as errant wanderer and professional rock-turner-over if I didn’t slide open some of the cabinets and see what was inside.
Now that it was coming right down to it, the fear that I’d been surprised not to feel was finding its way back home again. What would I find inside all of these dark, cramped, secret places?
Will you cut it out? They’re not even bodies, idiot. They’re not real. If there’s anything in there, it’ll just be lifeless props.
Right?
It was far more difficult to convince myself of the truth of that than it should have been. I didn’t believe myself because, as I’d seen time and time again, just about anything could happen in here.
The only thing I knew for certain was that, in this game, death was anything but permanent. Hell, the entire Zombie Apocalypse was predicated on that very fact, and now it finally struck me how insane that was. Not Zombies. They were near and dear to my heart. But, for a game that revolved around the dead rising, every time a player died they were out of the game for the rest of the week.
Or longer, if the login issues didn’t resolve themselves in a little more than an hour. That would be a whole new kettle of fish. Dare I hope that a sizeable slice of the Survivor population was locked out of the game permanently?
Damn right I dared.
There was no point stalling any longer than I already had, so I went over to one of the cabinets, grabbed the handle and yanked it open. It swung toward me easily, and the metal slab in there sprung forward and revealed a body.
It was fully clothed. It didn’t move. It wasn’t breathing. It was dead, though I didn’t quite have the nerve to reach out and check it for a pulse. Instead, I leaned a little closer and pushed it with the flat of my hand.
Nothing. It wasn’t even cold. It was just ones and zeroes, assembled in such a way as to trick my mind into ‘seeing’ it. All of this was an elaborate puppet show.
Even though I knew that in my head, my heart was telling me something very, very different. My earlier resolve was quickly crumbling, and as I went back in the direction I’d come, toward the door in the elevator and the stairs. It took all the resolve I had left in me to open a few more drawers at random. They all had occupants, and all of them were Survivors.
Well, dead Survivors.
On a whim, as I headed back toward the door and the stairs and the generators and anywhere other than here, I noticed that each of the cabinets had something stenciled across them in small, black letters. I slowed down to read a few.
Re_Re_Cario, Beverly Hills
Shinergamble, Beverly Hills player ID X, Silicon Valley
Fleurdapee, Bakersfield
23_and_metoo, Los Angeles
Lux_Fux, Garden Grove
Benndere1, Beverly Hills
MobileHostile, San Bernardino
Most of those places were familiar, but the player IDs were complete gibberish. As well they should have been since they were random names from a huge database of Survivors. I wasn’t expecting to feel any kinship with these bodies, was I? I couldn’t shake the feeling that there was more to this than I was seeing, and that made me go back to dragging out the slabs and inspecting the empty avatars as I went.
Ten bodies later, I slid out a bed and found myself staring straight into the face of one of the Eternals I’d butchered in the museum on my way to the Vault. I didn’t know which one he was, so I took a step back and read the door.
CodaChameleon, Silicon Valley
Which meant that it had to be Coda. Thank god for people who could only think of one name and had to plug it into everything.
I swallowed hard. This avatar was personal. This body tied back to me, and I left the bed pulled out and rushed to open as many other doors as I could. A few minutes later, I found another one of the Eternals.
Smashtheglobe, Silicon Valley
Smashfoot. And then a couple of minutes after I discovered him, I found two of the guys from the mansion right next to each other, either through coincidence or some sorting algorithm that I didn’t understand. What I did know was that I was sure of where I’d seen them, since I’d watched them for so long last week when I’d hitched a ride with them back into Beverly Hills in the first place.
This was too much. None of these bodies or shells or whatever the hell they were should have been here. Their presence wasn’t part of the normal operation of the game. Blake Redhook’s initial breakthrough had been to only throw the stuff at the brain that the brain was about to need, which meant that anything extra was a waste of resources.
They’d all died last week. I would have bet my life that none of them could log in right now, so why was the game putting them here?
Hopefully, Sasha would know. I got a tighter grip on my flashlight and finally got all the way to the end of the morgue. Once I was out of there, I couldn’t stop myself from breaking into a sprint as I raced up the stairs, and even though I told myself I was looking for my partner in crime, that was only part of it.
Two and a half flights of stairs later, I found her. She had a flashlight too, and the light it was throwing was the only thing that stopped me from crashing straight into her.
“Thanks a lot,” I panted. “Is that your idea of a joke?”
“Huh?”
I wasn’t really angry, but whatever it was I’d felt in that long, dark room was coming out as something forceful. “Very funny. ‘Ryan’s a moron, so let’s let him stumble around in there and see what happens.’”
“What in the hell are you talking about?” Sasha demanded, somehow able to sound both bored and annoyed at the same time. It must’ve been an ability that God gave to girls and let them put extra points into, because I don’t think I’d ever heard a guy be able to come even remotely close to pulling it off.
I leaned over
the railing and pointed down toward the bottom of the stairwell. “The morgue. All those fucking corpses? Don’t pretend that you found every flashlight in the whole joint but didn’t bother to head to the bottom of the stairs, because I won’t buy it for a second.”
“Stop talking and just show me,” she said.
Fine. If that was the way she wanted to play it, so be it. I shut my mouth and turned around as, side by side, we hurried down the stairs.
It didn’t take us long to retrace my steps, and a few seconds later we were standing in front of the door to the morgue, the elevator to our left. The circle of light she was splashing against the wall was trembling because Sasha’s hand was shaking so badly. “I don’t want to sound cliché about this,” she said, her eyes wide as she turned to look at me, “but this door wasn’t here before.”
THIRTY-FIVE
I took her at her word. If anything, I felt bad for accusing her of playing a joke on me. She wasn’t some child maniacally trying to squeeze something inconveniently funny out of every situation. She was battling for her father’s mind, not to mention his legacy. It wasn’t a vaudeville performance, and to pretend that humor was even on the long list of her priorities was insulting.
I’d assumed that all she wanted me to do was get out of the way, and if I happened to stumble upon a bunch of useless avatars stuffed into a morgue that was just as good as if I was twiddling my thumbs in the security office, watching nothing happen on the cameras.
But this was different. I looked at my watch again and saw that there only were eight minutes until the raid began. Shit. How long had I been in the morgue? I was starting to feel adrift, the same way I had when I’d floated in the void for what could well have been forever except for the fact that it ended when I connected with Sasha just before she created her character.
Two in the Gut Page 25