I couldn’t hear those thoughts anymore. One more instant and they’d own me. I’d happily lose myself in them, becoming something more and something else and something other and something…
Stop it, I screamed inside the insane echo chamber of my own head, dropping to my knees amongst the gore as my five newest disciples looked on. Please! There’s more at stake here than just you! But it didn’t matter. I was crawling on all fours like a child, veering toward where I instinctively knew the largest pile of corpses would be gathered.
Welcome, Survivor #[P@rsing err0r – {Administrative Override INITIATED}]. Please enter your unique Core Password to bypass Identity Modules.
The message blasted through me like a slash of sunlight, burning the Zombie fog away and giving me a long moment of clarity. I didn’t waste it, opening my mouth to drool the blood of half a dozen victims and whisper, “The man who has experienced shipwreck shudders even at a calm sea.”
Those words hadn’t meant anything to me when Sasha had first used them during the character creation process, but now I clung to them. They were a warning and a promise all at once. Even if I made it through this, nothing would ever be the same again.
Core Password [ACCEPTED]. Incoming System Request - Would you like to grant User Blake.Redhook permission to reset your intrinsic parameters?
“Yes.”
Hunger_Drive reset to 0%
Craze reset to 0%
System_Assist reset to 0%
Warning. You have been experiencing initiatives and behavioral protocols well in excess of safe levels. Please log out immediately and contact a Deep Dive Administrator offline without delay.
I blinked, suddenly back in command of my actions. The driving force that had wrestled with me was gone, and I knew that Redhook had just saved me. That crap about contacting Deep Dive wasn’t meant for me, and there was no way I was logging out. He’d risked coming out of the code for one reason, and one reason only.
I needed to save his daughter.
FORTY
Everything back in the direction of the main fight was a world of fire and ash, crash, and cadaver. I had to get back to the hospital as quickly as I could, and I rushed out of the alley I was in and made a beeline for it.
I didn’t run into any Survivors on the way, though whether that was down to Redhook’s interference, my own good luck or if the sight of me and a cadre of snarling Zombies had made them flee I doubted I’d ever know.
As I got close enough to the hospital to stare down the street and look at it, I wasn’t exactly sure what I was seeing. Someone must be inside, and not just Sasha. I could distinctly see two of the upper rooms of the hospital, one on either side of the building, lighting up with muzzle flashes. It looked like whoever was up there was firing out, so I doubted that they were Survivors. There was a chance that a few brave souls had turned around and started picking off Zombies in the street, but I doubted it. That would take far more situational awareness than any of them had shown up until now, but I’d be an idiot to ignore it as a possibility.
But when a few dozen different Survivors from up and down the block returned fire, I figured we had an ally up there. Bullets ripped along the cement of the wall. Not all of the glass had been destroyed in the initial explosions, but hundreds of rounds pounded everything up there into sand.
Whoever it was, I hoped it wasn’t Sasha. She should be smart enough to stay near the generators, and since she couldn’t be in two places at once or dumb enough to expose herself like that, it had to be a trick. Something remotely operated, meant to draw the survivors up into the higher floors as she’d planned all along.
It seemed to be working. I could see that some of the enemy had made it to the hospital itself in spite of the valiant attempts of my Zombies. As I ran closer, mindful to keep to the shadows, I found that some of the main walls were cracked enough to see what might’ve been a flash bang go off on the second floor, followed by a long line of gunfire on the third.
They were in there, all right. And whether they were shooting at shadows or just spraying and praying in hopes of hitting someone, at least they were moving in the wrong direction. I didn’t like that they’d gotten through our defenses, but tonight wasn’t about killing every single Survivor that crossed my path.
She and I just had to make it through to midnight. That was all…
I was a couple of hundred feet away from the hospital now, and I saw that, inevitably, my next problem was going to be actually getting there. I didn’t have much choice other than to hunker down in the darkest part of an abandoned convenience store on the corner and wait for my chance.
After I watched the chaos down there, I didn’t know if I was to get one. There were so many vehicles on fire now that the street was lit up like Christmas. If I wanted to get to the hospital sight unseen, I was going to have to use a different entrance, and doing that might take longer than Sasha had.
Of course, judging by the amount of lead that had just been thrown through those two upper story windows, not everyone was focusing on ground targets. If I was going to get to the other side of the building quickly, it was now or never.
There were Zombies around me and not just the five that I’d come here with. I could sense them in the surrounding night, and I gathered those I could reach around me. Once they arrived, I stepped out into the street. I sprinted for the corner of the hospital’s bulk, sending the Zombies out ahead of me in a flying wedge, rushing across that open space and hoping that I didn’t get torn to shreds when somebody glanced to their left and saw us.
There was an overturned pickup to our left, and when I ducked behind it to use the vehicle as cover, I discovered that a few Survivors had set up a triage unit here. The majority of opposition in front of me were medics, doing their best to patch people up and get them back into the fight.
The time for hesitation was long gone. We shredded them. Every injured became a victim, every personal unfairness or tragedy became another Zombie. I’d had almost thirty Zombies with me now, and I sent half them racing toward the emergency entrance. Better them than me, and the guns over there needed to find targets instead of seeking them out.
Even so, I tried not to watch as their mad rush was met with a vicious crossfire that tore them down to their component pieces. The thump of a grenade added insult to injury, misting the lot of them.
Shit. Those guys were ready and willing to do some damage, that was for sure. But the distraction had served its purpose. I crossed the street and rounded the corner, expecting with every step to catch a bullet between the eyes.
It didn’t happen.
I pressed myself flat against the building now. The Survivors could have spotted us. They could be giving chase right now, but I couldn’t think about that. I needed to get in, and now that I saw exactly where I was the only thing I could do was make my good hand into a fist and bang it into the metal door beside me.
It was the one that we found when we first cased the hospital. It had been locked then and, yep, it was still locked now.
It was getting more and more dangerous out here with each passing second. Even if a random Survivor didn’t find me, this chaos wouldn’t last forever. The best guilds would eventually get control of the rest, and they’d force their numbers down our throat.
I needed to get inside. I had a sinking feeling that, if they took me out, all of my Zombies would slump to the ground like as if their puppet strings had been cut.
But I was on the wrong side of this door to be of any use to her now, and I found myself wishing for the first time that I was back in her head, somehow. At least then I’d been able to push into her thoughts now and then, and, since there wasn’t any reason not to, I closed my eyes as tightly as I could and mentally reached out to her.
I surprised myself by how strong my desire to save her was. Was it loyalty, fueling this? Dedication? Sheer stubbornness? Whatever power she had over me, whatever reason I was still in this game drove me onward as I attempted to make co
ntact.
Was it working? It had to be because there was a buzzing in my head and it felt like something was happening. None of those other things could account for the strength of this, for the fact that I really shouldn’t be here. It wasn’t my fight. It had never been. Sasha had been right when she’d said that to me point blank. I was in over my head, and the only reason that I was stupid enough to be in this elaborate torture palace was because I loved the woman who I may yet be able to save.
Click.
I tried the door, and it swung open.
She’d heard me. She’d opened it.
A shot split the air at the same time that a crushing pain in my hip spun me around, throwing me through the doorway. The weight of the metal slammed it shut behind me as I heard it click closed again. I looked down at the broken whiteness of my shattered pelvis. It would certainly slow me down, but it wasn’t going to kill me.
You can’t bleed a Zombie out, at least not one as strong as I was.
I was in a hallway I hadn’t been in before, a place my previous exploration hadn’t extended to. It seemed like an employee area as well though, since my experience with hospitals had taught me that they were made up of two things, hallways or waiting areas. This one was neither. I saw a radiation symbol on a few of the doors which meant that I was probably back in the labs. I could only imagine the things that Headshot would let Survivors craft in this place. Med packs, antivirus, possibly even the chance to work up to some limited inoculation.
Imagine that? I didn’t put it past Deep Dive’s twisted sense of game balance to let the hardest-working guilds buy their way into some type of immunity from my faction’s bite. That would’ve been the last straw if this game was meant to be something other than a bridge into our brains.
I got to my feet as best I could and made my way down the hall, catching myself against the wall whenever my leg gave out, or I slipped in my own leaking ichor. I didn’t let it bother me. I’d heal, but I had to find somebody to eat first.
And there were Survivors in here with me, somewhere. I didn’t want there to be, but at least if the humans had their ways of healing I already had my own, an efficient, optimized adaptation that would put them at my mercy and get me get back up to full hit points so that I had a chance to do some real damage.
At the end of the hallway there was another door, and as I got closer, I could hear running and shots on the other side. There wasn’t another way to progress, and I figured that there were enough distractions in the next room that a slowly parting door wouldn’t draw much attention.
I did just that, cracking it open just wide enough to peer out. At least I was looking into the emergency room where Sasha had spent her time rigging explosives. It was dark, and I didn’t see anyone inside. I could hear movement in the upper levels, but it was shadowy enough in here that they hadn’t realized that they’d stumbled past a room set to blow.
From where I was I could look straight through the room and out the emergency entrance’s double doors, which meant that I could see exactly what was coming…
There were about twenty of them. They looked like they knew what they were doing, moving through the shadows, double-tapping Zombies before they got within twenty feet, covering each other and moving with professional hand signals that made them look like the main characters in some action movie.
They didn’t pause. They didn’t waver. Each of them knew their respective roles, and they enacted them perfectly, crossing the street and cutting down a dozen Zombies without breaking stride or a sweat.
It was the cameras. I’d forgotten that Sasha had kept mentioning them, but the grind of their movement on either side of the door filled the room an instant before a controlled burst of twin high-powered rounds zeroed in on them and perforated everything in their path with a roar of belt-fed fury.
Just like that, half of the Survivors were gone. One of them had been hit so hard and so many times that he’d been literally knocked out of his boots. The rest didn’t freak out though, they just dropped into firing positions and returned fire.
A lot of it. I realized that they were aiming in my direction just as the first of hundreds of rounds perforated the door and forced me to throw myself to the ground. Bullets were everywhere. I felt something tug on my shoulder and another round struck me in the knee. I crouched into a fetal position and rolled over, exposing my spine while I tried to protect my head. I heard the big guns mounted to the building slash lead into the night again, and the Survivors’ gunfire died away.
I couldn’t get up off of the ground. My right hip was practically gone, and my left knee wasn’t much better. At least the bullets had shredded the door. I crawled out of the hallway and headed toward the door that would take me down to Sasha’s stronghold.
I was almost there when I heard someone sprint into the building.
I froze. Were they staring at me? I couldn’t tell, and I didn’t want to risk turning my head to find out. If I had breath, I would’ve held it, but instead, I did the thing my body was built for. I played dead. I was a nothing. A nobody, a body amongst a world of bodies, an empty vessel of a man who wasn’t even sure anymore if he’d make it out of this alive.
Then I heard his boots crunch through the glass as he headed deeper into the building, calling out for one of his buddies to wait up because he wanted in on the raid.
The hail of bullets had torn our once-hidden door into a mockery, and I crawled through its frame and propped myself up with the railing. By some miracle, I got my feet underneath me for a few flights, but then I lost my balance and fell down the stairs in a tangle of limbs and torn flesh, practically skidding to a halt in front of the security room that Sasha occupied. She was hunched over the cameras, peering through the monitors like they were all that mattered in the world.
I could see her as she was in real life, away from all of this shit. She was a programmer at heart, a coder through and through just like her dad.
“Did you…” I didn’t know exactly how to ask it, but it seemed like it was important that I know. “Did you hear me? In here?” I said, tapping my temple with my finger as I wrestled myself up to a standing position once again, letting the doorframe of the security room bear most of my weight.
Sasha didn’t look over, so she missed the fact that I was pointing at my head. Instead, she went right on controlling the cameras she’d mounted the guns to as well as any old-school gamer I’d ever seen. “Did I hear you? No. I don’t think these things are wired for sound. At least, they didn’t appear to be when I was fiddling with them.”
“Huh?” Why wasn’t she making sense? I hung on to the wall and got closer to her so that I could at least look over his shoulder. Maybe that would give me a clue.
The monitors were streaming images of the outside, and she reached out without a word and tapped one of them. It was pointing down at the outside door I’d used, complete with a splash of my blood dripping down the wall. Right. I hadn’t connected with her at all. She’d seen me pushing my face to the door like an idiot and buzzed me in…
Sasha was working furiously, and I didn’t want to distract her. Some of the cameras were obviously down because their monitor only showed static. Others wouldn’t move, or were hanging lifelessly and stared straight down.
She risked a glance at me and smiled. “This is why we needed the generator so badly. You brought back so many guns; I figured it’d be worth the effort to make our cameras into turrets. A little bit of rewiring, a lot of welding, and we were in business.”
But even as we watched, two of the monitors flared up and then went to static. Half a second later we felt the impact as something explosive went off up there.
“How many have you got left?” I asked
She shrugged. “Just what you see here. Five or six, but I’ve got other surprises.”
“No kidding,” I agreed. “What was it that stopped those vehicles in their tracks, at the beginning of all this?”
“Anti-vehicle mines.”
>
“Shit. Did I bring those back?”
She shook her head. “Not really. You did steal a bunch of Claymores though, so I modified them.”
I had never heard anyone say the word Claymore with such nonchalance, and I had to break into a little bit of a chuckle. “We are giving them hell,” I admitted.
“You bet your ass we are,” she said. I watched her pick off a few targets with a precision that went beyond anything I’d seen before, which made me think that the cameras were helping her aim. Once her targets were cut down, she swapped to a different camera and sprayed the street wildly to keep their heads down.
She was amazing, but the Survivors were learning. This time we watched as another guy set up a missile launcher. She was trying to get him, but he had good enough cover to remain safe until he popped up from behind the cement barrier and fired his weapon. She tagged him in a dozen different places, but he still managed to trigger the missile. One of the images on the monitors slanted to the left and wouldn’t respond to her keyboard commands while another filled with smoke.
I mentally opened my menu to see if I had any new skills that might help or old ones that I could repurpose, but that just gave me a chance to glance at the clock.
11:12…
We’d only made it through twelve minutes of this hell. There was no way were going to make it through forty-eight more.
I didn’t want to be a downer, but I had to ask. “Do you still think we should dig in here and hang tight?” I said, my voice the only thing above the rattle of keys and the grumble of the generator in the other room.
She started to answer, but I interrupted her. “Holy shit. I shouldn’t be able to talk. Zombies can’t talk.”
Two in the Gut Page 28