by Arthur Stone
Still he had not reached the turn. He realized he wouldn’t make it. Rock heard the snarling monster, just behind him.
And then he made it. He was around the turn.
Rock groaned. His journey was over, his tiny hopes evaporated. The makers of this world must be laughing at him. The forest parted up ahead, and the road led into a green field of oats, where it broke into an upward slope for as far as he could see.
If only he was going the other way.
There was nowhere to turn, and that incline would reduce his speed to laughable levels. Rock slowed down and clutched his bike, ready to hurl it at the creature, seize his bridge rod, and die an inglorious death. “Come on! Come and get me, I dare you. Move it, you bastard. I’m not waiting all day!” Rock morally prepared himself to enjoy the next round of red text burning into his vision out of the darkness of death number four.
The monster grumbled and changed its pace, preparing to leap. Just then, a new sound rang out, like a sledgehammer smacking a butchered cow square in its midsection. The zombie shuddered, knocked off course, spun a full turn, and collapsed into a puddle, splashing mud every which way as it surged forward through the water. It tried to jump, but the left half of its body would not respond. Its arm and leg convulsed violently and uncontrollably.
Rock noticed the stream of blood pulsing out of the hole in the middle of its chest. He had trouble believing the zombie had encountered a bug mid-flight, just another victim of flying without a windshield. Someone had intervened. And severely.
Taking care to keep watch on the monster wriggling in the mud with the corner of his eye, Rock turned to see a wheeled armored vehicle. He didn’t recognize the make, since a part of the car was beyond the crest of a hill. It was a foreign vehicle, and probably not the most modern. Someone had decked it out with steel bars, plates, and spikes. Gone were the days when he wondered why.
The rust-covered tank was approaching slowly, at maybe ten miles an hour. A couple of men ran alongside, submachine guns at the ready, both dressed in camo pants, green jerseys, and light field vests stuffed with spare ammo. They even wore identical bandanas. Rock might have thought they were in uniform, if not for their radically different shoes.
The zombie, seeing its predicament, began to fight the rebellious half of its body and crawl along, crossing the thirty feet between it and its intended prey. It was still dangerous, and its approach was disconcerting. Rock visibly stuck the bridge rod into the ground alongside the road, raised his empty palms to the air, and walked towards his rescuers.
These guys had to know a thing or two, like the soldiers he had first encountered. Luck had finally smiled on Rock. Even if these new comrades ditched him as quickly as the first had, at least he would get some information from them. That was what he needed most.
He tossed aside the gloom of imminent and inevitable death that had set in but tried to grimace good-naturedly, attempting to evoke a response of both friendliness and sympathy from these potential sources of priceless information.
The two running machine gunners overtook the vehicle and ignored the rescued man, rushing past with speed that made Rock jealous. They must have been charging towards the crippled monster. One of them would have been enough to finish it off, so why both?
The armored car slowed down, and another man jumped out as it rode. He looked like the others, except for the leather jacket. The man was chewing something as he walked up to Rock. Careful not to descend to an ingratiating level, Rock managed to express his gratitude nonetheless. “You came just in time. I was going to throw my bike at it. Thanks for...”
Rock had no time to finish his greeting speech. As the man walked by, he spat out whatever he was chewing and slammed the zero’s head with the butt of his machine gun. The darkness was instant. Rock didn’t even feel any pain.
Chapter 10
Life Four: Kitty
You’ve received a negative effect: Stunned. Current location: Cluster 197-33-96. Region: West Coast. Current revives remaining: 96 lives (initial value minus 3).
Active quests: Survive, Search, Learn Secret, Help, Ask Correct Question. Current status: returning to game. You will remain stunned for fifty-nine seconds, though this time may change based on your game circumstances. Hint: not all humans are friendly. Beware of enemies.
It was good advice, but so belated that Rock was sure he was being mocked. The number of his remaining lives had not changed, so whatever was happening was different from earlier revives. The darkness and the text were the same, as was his sensation of being out of his body, but the content and the presentation were markedly different.
He was only stunned, not dead. He didn’t know whether to be happy about that or not.
Why the hell did they do that? Rock had done nothing to offend those guys, and he had nothing for them to steal. It couldn’t be a mugging. So why?
He didn’t come up with a clear answer, but he was troubled by possibilities, each darker than the last. Perhaps a change in his death counter would have been better. At least that would have been familiar.
His physical feeling began to return. This was also much different than the previous times. Rather than feeling reborn, full of strength, and frighteningly clear-headed, this time Rock was none of those things. His memory was still gone, but his mind was roiling in confusion.
He felt sick, nauseous, with a pulsing pain in his temples. His poor tortured knee felt like Mt. Vesuvius, erupting with agony in place of lava. Something held his hands tightly behind his back, preventing him from moving. It was the most unpleasant feeling yet. Compared to this, that disgusting dormitory had been a paradise.
Rock was short on life experience, but he knew that it might be best not to open his eyes quite yet. He didn’t need them to guess that he was not in a dormitory. His nose conveyed surrounding smells of resin and sewage. Not usually something that young students kept around in their residence halls.
His ears were also confused. They heard some sounds, but nothing significant. It seemed like Rock was in a semi-enclosed space, with the noise of the outdoors filtering in, as it might into the open window of a cottage on a summer day.
Someone else was in here with him. From time to time, that someone did something incomprehensible, accompanied by crackling, creaking, and barely audible puffing. The activity did not sound threatening. Whoever was making the noise was likely harmless. But he wasn’t sure about that, which troubled him.
Rock opened his eyes and immediately squinted at the light. The room was indeed only partially enclosed. A sunbeam was directed right in his eyes. He wasn’t in a house or an apartment building. It was more like a lumber warehouse, a glorified awning. The roof was whole, but the walls had large gaps in them. They were intentional. Staff could move freely about, dragging large items in and out. It was a cost-effective, practical design, clearly built by a master of logistics.
But the designers had not thought about how their creation might be misused. Oddly enough, this building full of huge holes had been converted into a prison.
Alright, maybe “prison” was a little generous. It was a prison without walls. A joke, really, but that didn’t make him feel freer. Both prisoners were bound to large machines with plastic zip ties.
Rock was in an almost religious pose. He sat with his legs stretched out in front on the sawdust-covered floor. His hands were held up above him, pulled to either side and fastened on both sides to complicated shelving. Plastic zip ties prevented him from lowering his arms.
The other prisoner, who was held in the open air, had the worst of it. He was fastened to a ceiling beam with the same plastic zip ties looped around his wrists. Bags of what appeared to be organic fertilizer hung around his ankles, weighing him down.
Rock suspected that the bag’s contents were what he had thought smelled like sewage. All because the corner of one had frayed. A dark, fine substance spilled out all over the floor, spoiling the aroma.
The prisoner had clearly damaged the bag. It w
as slow going, but it would get lighter. His form was diminutive, with a strange, disproportional physique: a deformed collarbone, a beer belly, uneven lumps everywhere. Against the background, he looked ridiculous, and under the radical tears in the dirty pants were visible patches of perfectly smooth, hairless skin, not at all concordant with his rough army boots. The dirt smeared all over his hands failed to hide the most outrageous feature of all: brightly painted fingernails. Beer belly, fingernails, fertilizer bags, baby skin. What kind of creature was this?
He certainly wasn’t craven. He continued to focus, always rubbing the bags against the wood to wear them down: pulling himself up a bit, then relaxing, swaying, the load on his feet brushing the plank flooring. Friction was a powerful force, but damaging the bag this way was taking a lot of work. Persistent son of a bitch.
His pants weren’t the only filthy thing about him. The skin visible through the holes in his clothing was only relatively clean; upon inspection, it was in fact so soiled that Rock couldn’t guess the man’s natural skin color. It needed some careful soap-and-water treatment. Only a couple of places were clean enough for him to observe the man’s skin was hairless.
The man was a revolting sight, all things considered.
He got the impression that the captive must have crawled on his belly through a swamp, or perhaps joined an “all fours” race through a mud road too mountainous for Jeeps to negotiate. It wasn’t just mud. It was several layers of mud. And the poor fellow was wrapped in worn-out rags and scraps of fishing net that all together made it impossible to discern what exactly they were concealing. The situation was even worse above his neck. Utterly filthy, with nothing natural visible but his eyes.
Those eyes were frightened, but not from panicking about the two weights. They were the eyes of a captured beast listening to its captors negotiating the price of its skin with some buyer. Yet the same eyes revealed a persistence, a stubbornness that explained, among other things, the damaged fertilizer sack. The prisoner was gagged, and roughly. Perhaps he knew how to talk, and they wanted to ensure he kept silent.
Alright, what’s the situation? Someone had imprisoned the both of them, for reason or reasons unknown. He didn’t care why the other one was here, but Rock himself had no reason to be. As he observed his colleague’s attempts to free himself, he wriggled his wrists and concluded that trying to escape would be more likely to slice his arteries open than to wear down the durable plastic. Maybe he just didn’t know how. Either way, it was fruitless. He resolved to abandon his attempt—but then, witnessing the incessant efforts of the hanging man inspired him to continue.
Perhaps if he so zealously wanted to get out of here, it was a good idea to join him.
Rock continued rubbing the plastic against the wood, wincing from the pain and suspecting he had a long road ahead of him. Sounds floated in from outside the walls of their jail. There were people nearby, speaking in calm tones. It didn’t sound like they were fettered. In fact, they seemed very much in charge, and ready to discipline misbehaving inmates. Meaning that if he got his hands free, he’d likely take another blow on the head. Then possibly wake up hanging from the ceiling with bags of shit tied to his feet.
Not the best of prospects.
He would love to exchange a couple of words with Mr. Piñata, but the man had a piece of wood jammed in his mouth, held with a bandage dirtier than a chimney sweep. Best conversation killer Rock had ever seen. Second to the man’s looks, anyways.
“Man, these fascists like you even less than they like me, huh,” Rock said softly, continuing his escape attempt, but with much less enthusiasm than before.
His colleague ceased his writhing, staring at Rock excitedly and mumbling. Rock understood nothing, and concluded he never would. He responded as best he could. “Yeah, look how comfortably they sat me down, while you’re all hung out to dry. What did you do? Fall into the toilet by accident? Sounds about right.”
Rock’s short monologue appeared to excite the prisoner even more than before. He closed his eyes with incredible force. Rock’s eyes flashed and then went unexpectedly dark, and a semitransparent rectangle with barely readable text appeared before them.
Kitty has invited you to join her party. Loot distribution policy: relaxed. Speak or clearly think one of the following: “Join” or “Reject.”
Rock took a few seconds to acclimate to the new information. It was the first time he had seen such an offer. He looked closely at the hanging prisoner, reading the information presented by the panel.
Object: immune. Humanity: low negative. Nickname: Kitty. Not armed. No Continental skills detected.
He more or less realized what was happening now. He gave a muffled laugh, trying desperately not to roar in mirth for everyone to hear. It really would have been an appropriate volume, considering the situation.
First of all, this colleague was not a guy with strange mannerisms. It was a woman, scruffy and worn, who had long ago given up caring about how she looked. He didn’t care how bad it made him sound: he had trouble even calling a creature that beer-bellied and lumpy a woman. Hag, maybe. And despite the new information, the woman’s rags and dirt-hidden legs still repulsed him.
Rock suddenly realized that that part of the female body was especially important to him. He hadn’t thought much about such things previously, since most life situations up to this point had been murderous, leaving little time to admire anything of beauty, seeing how he was always looking for ways not to be eviscerated.
Kitty’s legs looked out of place. They didn’t match anything else about her. Slender limbs had been sawn off of a model somewhere and mistakenly sewn onto a crippled, dying camel forced to navigate a minefield of see-saws.
Slender legs were great, but only when joined with an equally attractive rest of the body. Everything above the hips, though, was rough. Her figure was like a balloon wrapped up with filthy rags. He sorely doubted that, if she turned around and removed her disgusting outer garments, the body of Aphrodite would be revealed underneath.
The nickname “Kitty” was a mockery. “Scarecrow” was more like it.
Rock didn’t know where all of this was coming from. Amnesia was a strange thing. Some intangible memories always remained. “Kitty” was a name for kittens, right? It was a nickname for cute girls. The kind that warmed your eyes and your heart. And perhaps other organs, as well.
But looking at this mud heap suspended in the air made him want to go blind. He wanted to vomit his heart out onto the sawdust-covered floor, if that were possible.
So despite the alluring nickname, Rock’s Luck boost had apparently not affected his cellmate. But that was just as far as externals went. He could, in all honesty, be blind to things like that and cooperate with even the ugliest of trolls.
So he stopped thinking and said, quietly and clearly, “Join.” The invitation disappeared. Nothing else was displayed. Rock suspected that he had missed something important. He stared at the filthy woman, and she stared back. Her gaze was no longer exciting. Now it was withering.
“Well, what now, Kitty?”
She looked hostile now and resumed writhing her figure, which was already unattractive enough when out of motion. The woman was apparently trying to lose the gag, or at least to mutter a few abusive words from underneath it. Rock was certain that he had given something away during his mental rumination of her unattractiveness.
Maybe he had accepted her invitation incorrectly. Or misunderstood something about it. Kitty was straining her facial muscles with such fierce absurdity that the dried crusts of dirt across them rippled. Pieces of them fell, exposing dirty skin underneath, which Rock wouldn’t have been surprised to see covered in stubble and tattoos.
If this was the kind of girl named “Kitty” here, Rock doubted he’d ever find anyone he could manage being with.
Her grimacing, however, was not in vain. An unpleasant crunching noise followed, and ultimately the gnawed wooden gag slipped out from under the bandana over her fac
e. It was dripping with blood. Kitty tried to spit, soaking the dirty bandage in blood and gurgling at the liquid filling her mouth. She croaked, full of seething and sawdust. “Idiot. Chewed out half my teeth for you!”
“Spit them all out if you want. Not my fault,” Rock replied without hesitation to the brash insult.
“Just answer me. Quick, before those freaks hear us!”
“What was wrong with my answer?”
“Oh, shut up! Are you sure you’re not infected?” She paused.
“Oh... you’re new.” The woman softened a little, sobbing a small whimper of pain through the bandage. Something small and hard rolled onto the floorboards. “So how high is your Luck by now?”
Rock recalled the information from his last revive. He saw no sense in concealing it. It wasn’t worth anything, as far as he knew, but the locals loved to ask, apparently just out of curiosity.
“Twenty-eight.”
Kitty twitched, and a thick layer of mud fell from her cheek and cheekbone, transforming her face. It still wasn’t quite human, but at least now she didn’t look like a hippo. “Damn, I wasn’t wrong. You really are a moron. Whatever. I don’t have time to waste belittling and patronizing you. But how can you be so dumb and so blind that you don’t know about the chat window?”
Her use of “belittling and patronizing” surprised Rock a little, and her question discouraged him. “Chat window” was self-explanatory. She meant some visual form of chat communication. Inaudible. A way to exchange messages without speaking. He hadn’t seen anything like that.
“Chat? There wasn’t any chat window. I just saw a message about Kitty inviting me to her party. I’ve met a few Kitties in my time, but you’re the saddest one I’ve ever seen. Did you think up the name yourself? Self-deprecating sense of humor? Look, you’re a cheerful girl, I get it, but that degree of imagination is just unhealthy. How about ‘horse’?”