Two in the Gut

by Siege, Matthew

  Sasha turned to me for long enough to roll her eyes before looking back at the screens. “You know, you take a long time to notice stuff, Ryan. Do people often tell you that?”

  I didn’t answer. Mainly, because I didn’t have an answer. Why was the game letting me communicate with her? I had a feeling that it was her dad’s doing, but I could hardly be held accountable for Headshot’s numerous idiosyncrasies.

  I also realized that she had yet to answer my original question. “Sasha?”

  She waved me away. “Not sure. You know my thoughts on the matter, though. My dad gave me this hospital for a reason.”

  I stabbed my finger at the screen, leaving a smear comprised of at least a dozen other people’s blood. “Those Zombies out there, the ones wreaking havoc are the reason. This place held them, and he gave them to us. They are the only reason that we’re not on the bottom of someone’s shoe right now, so stop looking that gift horse in the mouth and let’s get out of here while we still have a chance.”

  “I am staying.”

  Not this again… “Sasha, your dad isn’t dead.”

  I saw her left hand, the one on the joystick, tremble at my words.

  “Face facts,” I told her. “You’re right about him being in this hospital. In the real world, he’s in a bed upstairs. Maybe he’s hooked up to all those computers, and maybe he isn’t, but neither you nor I can say for certain that we’re helping him out by being in here. This isn’t some sacred place, damn it. It’s not like that. You won’t be disgracing him by leaving. This game is a prison if anything. Blake Redhook doesn’t want us to be here, and I can’t for an instant imagine that this is where he wants you to…”

  I didn’t want to say the word die, and so I didn’t.

  She went back to shooting Survivors with the guns she had left, steadily splashing them across the street, forcing them to respawn elsewhere and return to wherever it was that Deep Dive was no doubt pumping in even more reinforcements.

  “Ryan, if it makes you feel any better, I’ve got an endgame. Okay?”

  This was news to me. “Yeah?”

  She nodded slowly and tapped a button next to her. The only thing that made it different from the others was the scrap of paper she’d written End Game on and stuck above it.

  “What does it do?”

  “It ends the game.”

  Everything went dark. The monitors. The lights. All around silence fell, and both of us turned to each other in the darkness. The background thrum of the generators was gone, and the only sound in this small space for a moment was her heartbeat and her breath.

  “Shit,” I said. “I put as much biofuel in that damn thing as we had. I thought it would last for hours. How much juice are you using, anyway?”

  Sasha didn’t answer, choosing instead to get up, push past me and head out of this room and into the next one. It was so quiet that I heard her body hit the floor, followed by the distinctive, hollow voice of a Diver say, “Primary target down. Secondary target acquired.”

  FORTY-ONE

  She isn’t dead. They can’t run a trace on her this fast. There’s still time, so don’t just stand here.

  I was sure they wouldn’t have killed her since it was such a pointless endeavor in a game like this. They needed to know who she was if they didn’t already. I had no idea what that last patch they’d pushed had done. Maybe they’d already seen enough to know her identity, but if they hadn’t, it wouldn’t be long before they fired up that trace program and worked out where her rig was.

  That was the worst part of all this. Now we really were in their game, playing by their rules. And while we were fighting our hearts out in here, they’d be scouring their servers for some way to work out where we were out there.

  And who would stop them? A company as powerful as Deep Dive Studios would have any myriad of reasons to scoop us up. They could call it an arrest. They could label her a cyber-terrorist. They could make up whatever story they wanted, most likely dummy up any evidence they required. And if that didn’t work, if someone did get in the way of their plans, they could probably find a way to blackmail just about everyone around that person.

  They didn’t run everything, but they ran enough. And now that Sasha was down, they were coming for me.

  And they weren’t stupid. They’d know where I was since they would have heard me talking. I only had a couple of seconds before they left the generator room, and when they did, they’d find me.

  I couldn’t let that happen.

  It was hard to move fast. I didn’t exactly feel pain, not in the way I would have in my flesh and blood body, but that wasn’t as much of an advantage as I’d have thought. Pain is a valuable teacher, and without that type of biofeedback, it was difficult to work out how far I could push my bullet-damaged body. I couldn’t sprint, but I did my best to hurry down the hallway.

  They’d expect me to check on her, or to try and attack. Instead, I had to hope that the room Sasha hadn’t been able to access without me was a mystery to them as well. I went down the stairs.

  To the morgue.

  I didn’t bother to be quiet. I needed them to come with me.

  The Diver was in the doorway to the generator room. His voice rumbled through me. “You are surrounded. You’re done. This is your first and final chance. Log out. Don’t return. Never mention this to anyone.”

  Fuck it, I thought to myself, shredding the end of my stump with my broken teeth as I picked up speed. A Diver stepped out into the hallway to try and block my path, but I Lunged at him, sending him slamming back into the wall.

  I saw enough to paint a scene in my mind. There were three Divers. Sasha was in the corner. Lights on the end of their helmet, like the anglerfish that was their logo, lit up the darkness. That was all I got a chance to make out before I flailed my mangled stump at them, spraying dead blood across their facemasks.

  Two of them recoiled while the third calmly wiped his facemask clean. As they pursued, I threw myself down the stairs, desperate to make it to the morgue before they did.

  I could hear them warping behind me. The third one, the one I hadn’t been able to frighten, jumped ahead of me and beat me to the morgue. He would have, too, except when he got there he reached for the button to the elevator instead of the door to the morgue.

  That was when I knew that he didn’t see it. Like a flash, I got a lightning bolt of insight that exploded in my temporal lobe. The Diver didn’t see the room. It was meant for me, and the only way they’d get in there would be if I let them in. It was a place that Blake had set aside, and hopefully, inside that room, their powers wouldn’t work the same.

  It was my only chance. I needed to get them in there, where the playing field might be more level.

  The Diver in my way turned his back on me for a second when the elevator dinged. He wasn’t worried about me. He was stepping in to make sure that I hadn’t hidden any surprises inside. Once he was satisfied, he turned back to face me as I descended the last of the stairs. He thought he had me cornered, but my Lunge was ready again, and this time I triggered it at the door to the Morgue, smashing into it with my shattered knee and my broken pelvis as I burst through.

  There wasn’t enough left of the door for it to swing shut, and now that I was in here I tried hard not to stop moving. The beds had been reset, and my heart sang. We could win! Sasha and I had left the filing cabinets open, the slabs exposed. The fact that they were all put back into their original positions now meant that they’d been replenished with the Zombie avatars. All I needed to do was get a few of them out and…

  The first bed was empty. So was the second. The morgue was back to a zeroed out state, and nothing was here for me. The lights in the stairwell grew as the three Divers entered the room together. I saw that one of them was dragging Sasha by her belt harness, the poor girl’s hands and feet sliding across the polished linoleum.

  I hid. The slab in front of me was empty, so I got into it and leveraged it closed.

  It
felt the same way the Vault had when I’d climbed inside it and closed the door behind me. Only this time, I knew there was no way I was making it to midnight. This time, when I leaped out, I knew exactly what I’d be facing.

  My own end.

  FORTY-TWO

  Everything was dark. And then it wasn’t. I was sitting in a room, and in the background the TV was on. It was playing some old show, something I remember from my childhood. I was sitting in an overstuffed chair, but it felt like I could only turn my head and look at one detail. The clock on the wall.

  A glass of water.

  A canary in a cage.

  The man in the chair in front of the computer across from me. Blake Redhook, looking very much like he had in that picture when Sasha was eight.

  There was a security camera aimed at him, and one aimed at the door. I guess I’d never really questioned why he had that footage, but even this set up showed me how paranoid he was. That, or how much he knew about his own level of danger. Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that they’re not out to get you, after all.

  I reached down and touched the chair that I was sitting on. It was as real as anything. I didn’t know how to separate one simulated reality from another anymore since your brain is in charge of telling you these things and it turns out that it’s fairly easy to fool.

  I’d spent so much of today not being able to be seen or spoken to that when Redhook turned around and looked straight at me; I had to fight the urge to glance back over my shoulder to see what he was focusing on.

  “You haven’t run,” Blake said. It wasn’t a question, though he sounded surprised enough for it to be leaning in that direction.

  I shook my head. “I can’t.

  Blake didn’t like that. I saw my words make him twitch a little bit. “You need to be specific. You ‘can’t’ because you don’t know how, or you ‘can’t’ because you won’t let yourself? If you need to know how to log out Ryan, that’s something that is still within my power to fix.”

  I made my hands into fists, but I kept them on my thighs. There was no point in losing my temper since I was living in this guy’s head at the moment… “I guess I can’t because I don’t know how, but not the way you mean. I don’t have it in me to ditch her. She’s trying so hard, and she’s been right about everything so far. What they did to you.” I looked around. We were obviously in the past, and even though this was no doubt just a projection of Blake Redhook’s comatose mind it still was playing havoc with my tense. “What they will do to you, I guess? Or what they are doing to you right now…? Whatever, it’s not right.”

  It was a simple enough fact. It was also true. I felt the power of it, and I never really said it out loud before. It wasn’t right. He deserved better than this.

  We all did.

  But what was a throwaway comment to me changed him categorically. The room around me faded, stuttering and flickering and then going through fifteen or twenty different styles in the space of an instant. Some of them were old, furniture or wallpaper or architectural features on the wall that my mother or father might have been more familiar with, but I certainly wasn’t. And some of them were way modern, like five years ago. It was like I was watching the man in front of me have a personality conflict like he was arguing with himself about where and when and how and-

  Oh my God. He doesn’t know. Correction. He didn’t know, until you just told him…

  His next words confirmed it. “What do you mean, what they’re doing to me?”

  I didn’t know what to say. If I answered him honestly, would it be such a shock to his system that it ended the world? And if it did, would that solve everything or would they simply bring him back around with whatever backups they had and that would be that? Could they reboot him the same way they did everything else?

  This was far, far out of my pay grade and I didn’t want to risk his sanity, and so all I said was, “Sasha’s trying to help you. So am I.”

  He nodded and pushed his glasses a little farther up his nose. “She’s always been a good girl. And I don’t know you, but somehow I do, don’t I? I’ve never met you, but if you wanted me to I could tell you where you lived, who your first girlfriend was, or your third grade teacher, or that time you tried to smoke and got caught by a stranger who laughed at you, or the first time you felt lust or the first time you dropped an ice cream cone, and it wasn’t immediately replaced by a caring mother or a frustrated father.”

  With every scenario, an image swam in the air between us, and that last when he stepped through, when I was six and the chocolate ripple landed on my shoe and both my parents turned away instead of dealing with the tantrum.

  “Mr. Redhook,” I said. “We still need your help.”

  He pointed at the keyboard. “I’m trying.”

  “You need to try harder,” I told him. When he didn’t sit down and immediately go back to whatever he’d been doing I hit him with something to light a fire under his ass. “Sasha needs you to try harder.”

  But then everything was dark again.

  And just when I thought it would stay that way, it didn’t. I heard the squeal of the metal handle, the grind of the runners of the bed as they yanked it open. I was blinded by their lights as all three Divers stood over me from different directions. The ones on each side of the bed restrained my limbs while the third looked down at me through his tinted faceplates.

  “Hello, Ryan.”

  That hurt. It was a knife, but I lobbed one back hoping it would land. “Hi, Desmond. That is you in there, isn’t it?”

  The third guy, the one that had thought he was calling the shots took a surprised step back, and I heard a little puff of exhalation hiss out of his rebreather vents.

  Gotcha.

  The other two wrestled me up into a sitting position and turned me around, and I knew right away that they were far stronger than I was. Those maxed out stats were doing a lot for them, and if this room had robbed them of anything, it certainly wasn’t that. I watched as Desmond went to Sasha’s body, and even though she was unconscious, he put his metal diving boot on her spine and stepped on her body instead of bothering to walk around.

  I heard ribs break. I heard her scream. I heard Desmond laugh.

  “You know the great thing about this, don’t you?” he asked me. “None of it matters. I could tear her face off and show it to you, and when she eventually bled out, she’d respawn right at my feet. And they pay us for the privilege of doing it to them, and what passes for life in here goes on regardless. Unless we decide that we don’t want it to. Unless we turn off her ability to bleed to death. Unless we make it so that she can’t stop feeling. Unless we turn her pain up to ten, and every little injury is an endless agony until she speaks the words we want her to say.”

  Desmond wasn’t really talking to me. It sounded like he’d spoken this little soliloquy a dozen times before, used it to justify himself in boardrooms and before ethics committees. He wasn’t bothering to hide the bullshit now, though. He wasn’t making threats so much as he was bragging about his ability to play God.

  He was getting off on it, and so was the guy on my right. The one on my left, though? He didn’t know it yet, but he wasn’t hanging on as tightly as he had been.

  If I didn’t say anything he might keep right on hurting her, so I spoke up. “She’ll find you. Maybe Blake will too if he ever gets out of that bed. But I think you and I both know that he doesn’t have to to make you hurt. You might have him drugged now, but that leash is going to break eventually, you motherfucker. When it does, he’s going to shred your mind. You’re going to bite your own fucking tongue off when he breaks you, and when that happens, you’re going to wish you were dead.”

  I wasn’t expecting it, but the Diver on my left actually shook. I heard him whisper, “Des, is that what happened to Stringer? Did Blake get him?”

  Shit. I’d struck a little too close to home with that one, but I was pretty damn sure that it wasn’t Redhook that had done that to Ma
rk Stringer.

  It had been me.

  “Shut up,” Des snapped. Then he reached down, picked Sasha up by the hair, and slung her into the far wall with effortless grace. She crunched into it, but she wasn’t unconscious any longer. That must’ve been another thing they’d turned off because she was wide awake now.

  The pain was etched across her features. I wanted to say something to her to keep her going, but I didn’t know what they knew about us and the closer they thought we were the more they’d hurt her to get to me, not that they needed anything.

  This was all just torture. Now that we were their prisoners Desmond would have what he wanted, our individual locations.

  “Aren’t you worried I’ll tell?” I asked.

  “You won’t say anything,” Desmond grinned.

  Egging him on may not be the brightest idea I’d ever had, but I needed to keep him busy, and his eyes lit up when I challenged him. “That’s where you’re wrong. I’m going to fucking sing. When I get out of here, I’m going to put it everywhere. I’ll get it tattooed on my forehead. I’ll write it on every wall. I’ll make it my voicemail message. I’ll email every news joint I can think of. I’ll shout it in every form of social media. I’ll call anyone who will listen, and they can’t ignore me forever.”

  Desmond reached up and undid his helmet, a hiss of gas that was surely just for show escaping as he dropped it to his side. I thought he might have had some trick up his sleeve, but now it looked like he’d done that just so I could see that big, perfectly white grin on his dark face. “No, you won’t. You’ll try. But do you think that I only know your name, Ryan? She might have a cloaking program fending me off, and that might stop me from finding her right away, but it won’t last more than five more minutes. But you, my sweet child, I already know where you are. I have people on the way to you. Helicopters, black vans, whatever I need. And even if you do somehow log out and try all this bullshit before I have my people grab you, don’t think that I don’t know that you’re a nobody. There isn’t a reputable person on earth that would waste their time listening to you. You’re just some loser. And that’s it.”