Two in the Gut

by Siege, Matthew

  He was trying to get in my head. It wasn’t working. He was probably right that I couldn’t get to anyone right away. I was a nobody, At least had been before I started this game. Now though, I was somebody. I was a Zombie, and I was one more important thing that these assholes seemed to forget. That’s what happens when you build the game and never play it, when you steal it from somebody who lives and breathes it, and you just decide that it’s an end to a means.

  I was a Schemer, first and foremost.

  And they were arrogant and sloppy. They could adjust the game just about any way they wanted to, and that had made them lazy. The guy on my left, the one holding my blood-slick stump, his grip was so slack that I could slide out of it right out if I wanted to. But not yet. The one on my right was clutching even tighter, but he was scared too. He didn’t want to end up like Stringer. He didn’t believe that he could stop me, and he was fucking right about that.

  But Desmond was the worst of them. The most arrogant, the sloppiest and the laziest. I didn’t know anything about him but watching the way he grinned at me when he slammed a fist into Sasha’s stomach and made her bend over double and vomit a pile of red slop onto her boots, told me all I needed to know.

  He was the monster.

  And even better, he had so little respect for what we could do to him that he’d left Sasha’s revolver in its holster on her hip.

  She was in no condition to shoot it. Even if she could, I was sure it wouldn’t work on him. That gun was tied to the game, not to Blake. All the strangeness that had been happening had been down to a combination of me and the brick, and today the brick and I had become one. That was why the Zombies couldn’t log back in. That was why every Survivor that was being killed by them outside right now would be permanently removed from the player base.

  And that was why I would win. If only I could only work out how…

  I stretched out with my thoughts. I still had a few Zombies up there, but the Survivors were starting to storm the hospital. I thought about trying to get some of my allies down here, but I didn’t think they could find the morgue, with or without its door. Even if they could, they were just AI. If Blake Redhook could have hopped into one of them, he would’ve done it by now, and I did not at all trust the basic, rudimentary controls of the Artificial Intelligence to try and take on three Divers in wait.

  Restarting the generators was clearly too complicated a task for them, and that meant that the end game button wouldn’t work either. She’d rigged the explosive to be detonated remotely, but there were other ways to set these things off.

  So, I ordered every remaining Zombie to storm the emergency room, highlighting in my mind every tripwire I remembered seeing, every overturned gasoline can, every chokepoint that seemed ripe for ambush.

  I couldn’t hear anyone on the stairs yet. I was hoping that no one had found that door, and I had to fight not to brace myself for the explosion that would happen up there. If I shifted, the Divers would hold on even tighter.

  There’d been enough C-4 and Claymores in that truck to take the top off of this building, but all I needed them to do was take the first floor out. With any luck, the rest would pancake down and trap us down here.

  When the shockwave hit, that was when I’d make my move. Until then, I had to bide my time and watch as Desmond shoved Sasha to the ground, looked at the guy to my right, and said, “Why don’t we record this for Redhook. If he doesn’t play ball, we can show him what we can do to his little girl.”

  I didn’t like the tone of his voice, but I had to wait.

  I must’ve been tied to Sasha close enough still that I was getting her system messages because this one sure as shit didn’t go to the Divers.

  Player Sasha Redhook. You have been invited by the Guild Leader of the [Eternals] to join their ranks. Do you accept? If so, you will be a fully-fledged member of the Guild, able upon death to respawn at the Computer Science Museum of Silicon Valley.

  “Yes,” I said, forcing as much command into my voice as I could.

  Desmond turned to look at me, unsure of what I was saying or who I was saying it to. “Yes, what?

  I shrugged, and the gesture got me even closer to escaping the guy on my left. “Just yes. And fuck you.”

  I slipped away from the guy holding my stump, yanking it free of his grasp before ramming it into the throat armor of the guy on my right. I dug my claws into that one’s upper thigh at the same time and slid down to the ground so that I could attack upward, through his groin and into the intestines once, twice.

  The Diver on my right screamed like a banshee, and I took a bite out of his ankle to make sure that he’d be mine soon. The one on my left was panicked now, and I lashed out with my feet to tangle him up as he tried to get away. He didn’t do a good job of it, and I’d watched how Desmond had gotten his helmet off. It wasn’t hard, just a simple thumb lever to attach it to the neckpiece. I tore off this guy’s helmet now and scalped him with my teeth, choking down the hair before grabbing the nape of his neck and slamming his face into the hard ground. I felt his skull split, but he’d be a Zombie soon anyway.

  Desmond was both lazy and sloppy, but he wasn’t stupid. He had his gun in his hand, and he was already firing it. I caught a round in the chest, another in the neck, one in the sternum, the clavicle, the balls. He tore me up with those high-caliber rounds, and it felt like I was getting a fence post rammed through me with every shot. I took ten of them, and he didn’t miss once. I slunk to the ground and felt like more of me was splattered on the walls than inside, but it didn’t matter. Sasha couldn’t kill herself, and I couldn’t do it with my teeth, or she wouldn’t be able to log into the game again.

  I needed to get to her gun.

  It took everything I had in me, but I’d ingested enough flesh a couple of seconds ago to still be mobile and hostile. I triggered my Lunge ability not at Desmond, but at Sasha. I landed on her in one swift, sure motion and grabbed the revolver, yanked it free, and slammed a round through her heart.

  Friendly fire and Deep Dive’s developer bullshit couldn’t stop me from killing her. She’d respawn now with the Eternals. Far from here, and if they meant her well they’d hide her until midnight. If they didn’t then, she’d be no worse off than she would’ve been.

  Desmond was looking down at his gun as if it had malfunctioned, and as I rolled onto my back and stared up at him, it was clear that he didn’t understand why I was still alive.

  “How can you still be…”

  I smiled up at him. “It’s the name of the game you fucking moron. You need a Headshot to kill me.”

  He chuckled and made a quick gesture in the air. “Very clever. We’ll track her down, but your part in this is just about over.” He put his hand to his side and seemed pleased with himself. “You can’t die now, Ryan. You can’t bleed out. I am about to turn your pain to fifty. I hope that’s okay. We can turn it up higher if you don’t give us the things we want.”

  He might not have been able to kill me, but as he raised his boot up and smashed it down on my face, pain like the explosion of a sun went off behind my right eye. It was inconceivably torturous, an agony that felt like it had filled every pore of my body at once and I was drinking it in besides. I screamed, so loud that I thought my eardrums would burst, forcing the pain out with so much power that my lungs could’ve crawled up my throat and I wouldn’t have been surprised.

  But there was no blacking out to save me. There was no mercy from Desmond, and even though he told me that things were going to plan and he wasn’t worried that Sasha had escaped the fury, what I saw in his eyes as he beat me to a pulp told me differently.

  She got free. And I, well I guess I wouldn’t…

  “Just a second,” Desmond said, and I felt his attention split. “They tell me they’re at your house. I’m going to have to turn you off for a couple of minutes, while we transfer you from your rig to the portable one. That’s okay, isn’t it?”

  He smiled down at me again, and
I tried to die and failed.

  You have been awarded a quest. Would you like to save Blake and Sasha Redhook?

  “Yes,” I whispered, just before he turned me off like a light.

  WHAT’S NEXT IN THE SERIES?

  You just read: ONE IN THE GUT

  Up Next: TWO IN THE HEAD

  THEN: THREE IN THE HEART

  The Headshot Online concludes in Three in the Heart, and you won't want to miss it.

  FROM THE PUBLISHER

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