Two in the Gut

by Siege, Matthew

  And that’s when the real trouble would begin. I had planned to bleed them out over every inch of ground we could hold, but that’s pretty fucking impossible when they could ride a motorcycle straight into the reception area and impose their will. Whatever booby-traps Sasha had made might very well take out the first wave, but if the long line of Survivors pouring past me right now were anything to go by, we were going to drown in their numbers.

  On top of that, their recklessness stemmed from the fact that they didn’t fear death. I was sure that Deep Dive would have gotten rid of whatever respawn timers or other penalties there were for throwing your life away on Survivor Sunday. They wanted an army, and they’d summoned one that would keep right on keeping on, no matter the consequences.

  Unless we can bite them. Then they’re mine.

  Even so, the realization that it was the faction that could rise from the dead that still faced the issues of a finite resource gave me a sinking feeling in my gut. Sasha’s tricks would slow them down, but I was up against Survivors who could run at us as many times as they needed to over the course of the next hour. If my Zombies didn’t get them, they’d return. Whatever Sasha did to them, fire, explosions, gunshots or the rest, it would matter only to extend her life for the next few minutes.

  The Survivors were the real Zombies now, for the next hour able to endlessly return from the dead to hunt us once again. Except now, not even a headshot would put them down for long.

  With a snarl, I pushed all of that shit out of my brain. It didn’t matter. No matter what I’d told Sasha, I’d never really thought that this was a fight we had a chance of winning. Winning didn’t matter. She had to escape before a Diver traced her back to the source. Hopefully, they wouldn’t find out who she was, but even if she did the only real chance she had was to stay far enough ahead of them that her coding skills could both cloak her access to the game and allow her to deconstruct it from within.

  What that would do to Blake Redhook’s mind was an entirely different matter, of course.

  I was dead. That was a foregone conclusion. Once the Survivors took me out, I’d probably finally be back in the real world, strapped into a rig that I’d most likely dismantle. If this was going to be my last fight in Headshot, I was going to do it right.

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  Hold, I thought to my Zombie brethren, pushing the thought out with such strength that I was gritting my teeth. Hold.

  Exposing themselves to the vehicles that screamed up the street would only ruin our ambush. We still had the element of surprise, and as much as I wanted to fling a few of my allies out in front of those rushing vehicles and slow some of them down, I knew that what we would lose by showing our hand would be far, far more than what we gained.

  I just had to hope that—

  Kaboom! Kaboom! Twin explosions rocked the area in front of the hospital, and the entire row of lead vehicles cartwheeled backward. The lighter ones flipped several times, end over end, and even the heavier trucks stood up on their asses, and then toppled over, crushing the cars behind them.

  The chaos was instant and complete. I strained my eyes to see the carnage and was rewarded with the gruesome shine of blood-soaked pavement reflecting a dozen different fires. What had once been the vanguard was now a mess of twisted metal, mangled limbs, and ruptured fuel tanks.

  And one right after the other, frantic drivers stomped on their brakes and plowed into the vehicles in front of them, smashing into the cars that had managed to avoid the wreckage and enveloping the street in the worst gridlock I’d ever seen.

  And I lived in LA…

  Sometimes, that girl really finds a way to make me smile, I thought to myself, before turning my attention to what I should really be doing; making the stunned victims of the explosion into the newest members of my militia.

  “Feast on them,” I ordered, the thought so fresh and nasty in my mind that I said the words as I broadcast them. “Swell our ranks. Do your worst to their best.”

  I gave myself a moment to be grateful that it was so dark. If Deep Dive had pulled this raid nonsense at noon, we wouldn’t have had a chance. The night was my friend, and as the occasional explosion ripped through the already damaged line of cars and trucks and bikes and vans, the Survivors shielded their eyes against the glare.

  They couldn’t see the Zombies until it was far too late. The injured were the first to feel their bite, but up and down the street shadows peeled away from buildings and found flesh to strip from the bone. The moment we revealed our true numbers was always going to be a risk, but if ever there was a moment to fan the flames of panic into the fire of pandemonium, it was right now.

  I couldn’t help but look on in fascination as the streets below me became a free for all. There was no organization, no central drive. Old habits died hard, and these Guilds were far too used to being at odds then they were to working together. They tossed grenades and spat bullets across the face of buildings, desperate to hit the creatures coming for them before they were dragged down and devoured.

  The alleys and side streets that fed into the main one held the majority of my soldiers. They poured out into the perfect kill zone the traffic jam had created, and the streets ran with blood and gasoline.

  The fight was far from decided, though. I looked up the street to where the Survivors had originally assembled and saw that the rest of them were already working it out. Unable to drive down the main road, their caravans and road trains from this stalled attack and began to pick their way toward the hospital via less obvious routes. They could hit us from any direction, which meant I had to adjust our defenses to counter.

  “Unless there’s meat in your mouth, break off the attack,” I told the Zombies. “Tighten our circle around the hospital and don’t engage groups smaller than five.” We needed to take out the ones that were capable of organizing and hope that the stragglers got taken care of by the Survivors we’d just turned.

  But every decision has repercussions, and the one I’d just made didn’t take long to play out below me. With fewer and fewer new Zombies rushing at them from the darkness, the enemies that had been fighting them off were now able to consolidate their attack. Their gunfire was concentrated in the direction of the initial explosions now, and when I risked pressing my face to the glass so that I could see all the way down the street I could see that their target was the obvious…

  The churning mass of Zombies and Survivors that were still locked in combat outside the crater that had once been flat pavement.

  I just had to hope that their aim was bad, since there wasn’t anything else I could do. Even if we lost every single Zombie who had been a part of that attack, it was worth it. This assault had ground to a halt, and it would burn up valuable time for them to make their way to the hospital on foot. They’d be wary now, but caution would slow them down as much as it kept them safe. I doubted they had the balls or the stupidity to risk another full-on frontal assault like that again, at least not for a little while.

  That was what I told myself, primarily because I had to. The alternative was to admit that all I’d done was try in vain to empty a lake with a teaspoon. With them all lined up like this, it was a damn shame that we didn’t have anything set up to take advantage of -

  As usual, no matter how hard I tried not to, I kept second-guessing Sasha’s abilities and assuming that I’d outthought her. She proved me wrong yet again as the staccato, elongated BRRRRRRRRP of high-velocity rounds tore into the mass of vehicles below me. I saw plumes of sparks, shrapnel, bone, and blood spit up more than 10 feet in the air in long lines as she raked the Survivors from stem to stern. Whatever she was using, she had enough control of it to strafe up one line of cars and down the next, cutting through the crowd that had gotten out of their cramped vehicles and begun to pick our allies off.

  And again, the inability of the Survivors to assess the situation and recognize how much danger they were in worked against them. They were far too close together to fight effectively,
and as those rounds tore gas tanks, engine blocks, and wild-eyed Survivors alike to ribbons I saw that they had only one option.

  The Survivors would break rank. They’d take cover in the buildings that lined the street, and I’d have company in a few seconds if I didn’t bug out and double back to the hospital.

  I pushed away from the wall and hurried through the open plan office, running for my life as I heard the pounding of boots on the stairs as my enemy rushed up them to get away from what was happening to them on the street. I made it to the window and leaped out, turning in the air to see the first guy reach the top floor and see me, his mouth a sneer, an Uzi in his hand as he tried to draw a bead on me.

  There was too much gasoline in the street. Too many fires. Too many sparks and spilled Molotovs and scattered military grade explosives and terror. Something set something else off, and as I turned in the air to see if I’d catch a burst of automatic fire before I hit the next rooftop, the whole damn powder keg went off like every Fourth of July there had ever been.

  Too late, I thought at him as the blast wave that splashed him across the real estate office sent me careening wildly through the air.

  Maybe not too late for all the bastards, but certainly for Mr. Uzi and the guys on the stairs at his back and a whole bunch more caught up in the fireball that crested the buildings.

  THIRTY-NINE

  I skidded to a halt just before I took a tumble off the rooftop behind the office. My body was banged up, flesh hanging from my limbs in sheets. My ears were ringing, and when I reached out to steady myself, I almost went head over heels anyway, because I’d forgotten about my missing limb and tried to catch myself with nothing but a stump.

  Groggy, it took me a couple of seconds to work out that my best bet was to stay up here. I worked at a ninety-degree angle to the combat, taking a looping dogleg back to the hospital. I was heading west, and for some reason that made my rattled brains spit “Go west, young man,” out of my mouth.

  The words made me stop in my tracks. There was war behind me, but now all of a sudden there was one in my head as well. The voice had been too human for the liking of the lizard, Zombie brain that was now in the driver’s seat. I reached up and tried to swat my own face in an irritated, useless attempt to knock the sentence I’d spoken aside.

  The me that I knew, the one that had signed up for Headshot and been eager for all of these months to play was nothing more than a passenger, again. I was shoved aside by an alien, one-track mind that was determined not to be derailed by petty, meaningless, human thoughts. A very thin slice of my sentience knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that I should be working my way back toward the hospital, but the idea was fading quickly as the all-consuming need to eat, to consume, to gorge drove everything else before it in a stampede.

  I cocked my head. Footsteps. Below. A meal on the roof, and me hovering on the rooftop above. I screamed at the creature I’d become to head back toward the hospital. Putting myself at risk just to feast on a few Survivors was the absolute last thing I needed to be doing right now, but their presence was too much for the Zombie part of me to ignore.

  I was famished. Starving. It felt like it had been forever since I’d eaten, and I could practically feel the dead juices in my stomach lapping at my spine as my stomach growled and grumbled. I needed food. Meat, red and raw and ripe off the bone.

  There were six Survivors below me, hurrying up the alley away from the inferno at their backs. One of them, the girl in the rear, was falling behind as she struggled to reload the rifle she was carrying.

  I was too weak to resist the urge to attack, so I threw my effort into at least playing the role of Schemer, feeding this monstrous body and its insistent desires a steady stream of the idea that at least had a chance of getting us out of the encounter alive. It wanted to land amongst them the same way I had with the Eternals in the Computer Science Museum, but there were too many of these guys, and they were moving too fast. If I didn’t act soon, very soon, they’d be out of range of everything I had. So instead of falling amongst them I dug the claws of my good hand into the brick of the building below me and let gravity yank me down, trusting in my strength to slow my descent.

  I tore the wall up. A shower of brick dust and stone shards rained down on me as I hit the ground, but the deafening madness behind us meant that they didn’t hear me. They were shouting at each other as they ran, trying to formulate some sort of plan. Another string of explosions put an end to that though, as they ducked their heads. A few panes of glass above us exploded outward, showering the seven of us with jagged projectiles.

  Last week, I could remember watching Survivors and wondering what they thought just before my teeth made them into bite-size pieces. Were they only thinking about how they could do better next week, or did they feel the pain of it? Was the game merciful, or did their rig pump a few malicious lines of code into their brains and let them live long enough to watch their insides disappear down my gullet?

  I didn’t care about that now. What happened next wasn’t anyone’s fault. I was simply better designed for doing what needed to be done. They were nothing more than prey, and no one has ever argued that the lamb should’ve done something when the wolf closes his jaws upon its throat.

  The last of them was only ten feet away, just standing up and brushing the glass from her shoulders. Her friends were moving on. So was she, though not in the way she intended. My Lunge took her high in the back. I jammed my stump around her throat to hang on as she tried to buck me off, though once I rammed my claws into her with three quick plunges the fight left her along with her air. At least one of her lungs was punctured, and I allowed myself a few quick bites, just enough to get me going.

  Just enough to relish the taste of her.

  Maybe the next guy managed to hear something. Perhaps he sensed that death was near. He was wearing a lab coat, and when he turned and saw what had just happened to the straggler, he reached for something inside his pocket.

  Whatever he had in there, he should’ve kept running. The moment he planted his feet and held his ground he’d signed his death certificate, and I painted his pristinely white coat with her blood and his as I grabbed his arm with my hand, bit through his bicep with my teeth and yanked my head back to snap the muscle from the bone. I let go of his limp arm as he looked into my eyes.

  I raked his out with my claws before moving on.

  The third and fourth Survivors were next to each other, and they hadn’t heard anything. The guy on the left was some type of soldier; assault rifle, combat boots, the same old boring shit. The one to his right was something else, something I hadn’t seen before. But he didn’t have any armor, and he didn’t have anything in his hand.

  He could wait.

  The ones that were left slowed down as I came to the next intersection because that’s the smart thing to do. Usually… In theory, you should take a moment, assess the situation, watch your corners and scout ahead and then quickly and methodically dart across while the rest of the team provided cover fire, if needed.

  The soldier knew what he was doing, sort of. He even had decent trigger control, which in this case meant that his finger was straight instead of curled around the trigger. He was also pretty good about not pointing the rifle at any of his buddies, but that didn’t help them much when I stepped behind him, levered the barrel up with my stump and jammed the trigger down with one of my fingers.

  A dozen or so rounds threw the guy without armor at the wall, and I pushed forward and rotated the assault weapon, walking his involuntary fire across the backs of the two in the front. They screamed and went down, clawing at the wounds and struggling to look back to see why the friendly fire rules had been so grievously violated.

  I let them look on as I released the trigger, kicked out the soldier’s legs and rammed my fist into the back of his skull, making a puppet out of him. If I had another hand, I would have grabbed the soldier’s slack wrist and forced him to wave at them, but this would have to suffi
ce.

  Now that the fight was over as fast as it had begun, all I could do was stand there. I was so. Fucking. Hungry. The logical side of me knew that a meal here was a waste of precious members of my dwindling army, but I wasn’t in control enough to say no.

  Instead, I let myself pick the one that looked like he had the most meat on him and ate until he was nothing but bone. The three that I hadn’t bitten were still crawling, desperately trying to move shattered limbs towards fallen weapons. Now that I was fed I was finally able to talk the Zombie brain into ending them with my teeth, and I waited in that little alley for all five of them to stagger back up to their feet.

  The food had made everything more clear, and I was back in control. Even my Low Light Vision was piercing the shadows in ways it hadn’t before. If I concentrated harder, I could almost see out of my minions’ eyes. Not quite, but I was definitely able to get a feeling for where the pressure was worst, where the Survivors were winning, and where they were losing ground.

  Better yet, my range of control appeared to have increased. I’d had roughly a block and a half of control before, but now that swelled to include the majority of my fighters. I used my newfound boon to plug a few holes and set a few more ambushes, shifting even more resources down streets that the Survivors had already abandoned so that I could hit the newcomers in the flanks without them realizing it.

  It was a shit show, a running, brawling nightmare that was equal parts the worst sort of urban assault and the deadliest game of tag that had ever been played. Around any corner, beneath any car or on top of any roof there may well wait a perfectly still, lifeless, remorseless killer with eyes only for your jugular.

  All that meat. All that flesh and blood. I could feel Zombies eating, and the rush of jealousy overwhelmed whatever restraint I had thought I had.

  How dare they. How fucking dare they? They’re eating more than ME. I’M the ONLY one who should be swallowing gobs of gristle, mouthfuls of muscle, bites of beef and swallows of sinew and sips of sanguine and…