“I want you to keep an eye on the newest player.” Death gestured at the wall of screens behind him, and all of them transformed into a mosaic showing a man’s face.
The boy recognized him, instantly. “Oh, yeah. Clark, or something.”
“Clint. Don’t act stupid. It doesn’t become you.”
“But it gives you the chance to act smart, sir.”
It was a dangerous joke, which was just the kind of joke Death liked. The most important part of being Death’s long-term assistant was also the riskiest: never be boring. Never stop making Death feel challenged, but not threatened.
That was always a careful balance, but the kid had spent the past couple centuries mastering it.
Now Death chuckled. “I’ve always liked that you’re cheeky.”
“Lucky for me.”
“Very.”
The boy nodded at the screen. “Why him? Is he glitching something out?”
“No, no.” Death turned in his office chair, which was covered in scaly red leather, like tanned dragon skin. The TV screens cast bluish shadows on his face as he grinned.
The Lord of Hell said, “He’s a good person who has made a terrible mistake. I can’t wait to rub his face in it.”
“What kind of mistake?”
“The kind that kills the love of your life and sends you straight to Hell.”
The kid shivered and hoped Death didn’t notice. That sounded too much like him: an irrevocable mistake and an eternal afterlife of regret. But he didn’t think he was a very good person. Not then, and not now.
“You want me to help him win?” the kid asked.
“No, absolutely not. I’m the only one who gets to cheat.” Death swiveled back toward his desk and rested his elbows upon the glass top, steepling his fingers.
The kid hid his grimace. Death had that look on his face. It was that smug contemplation he always had when he was about to say something to make the kid’s day a lot worse.
“You’ll stand by and observe, for now. If he stays alive long enough to figure out how to reach the next level, I’ll need you to follow him more closely.”
“And that means...?” the kid said.
“Ingratiate yourself. Collect information to report back to me. If he gets all the way to the end…” Death’s face had a scythe-edge to it now. “I’m going to have enormous fun breaking his spirit.”
The boy looked at Clint’s face and remembered how he’d just stormed out, pale and shocked but ready to fight whatever Hell could throw at him. Some part of him felt inexplicably guilty.
He asked, “What did he do, exactly?”
“He’s the reason his precious girlfriend is on her deathbed. And I’ll never let him forget that.” Death laughed. It was a bleak and empty sound, the kind of laugh that could turn any man’s stomach cold with dread. “Never.”
The kid thought of the way Clint had looked at his girlfriend’s face, when he thought no one was watching. The shame and despair and fury.
He had the wisdom to stop himself from saying, I don’t think he’ll let himself forget it, either.
CHAPTER 3
T
HE MOMENT CLINT CROSSED THE threshold, the rest of his HUD flared to life. The number 226 materialized in the upper right corner, while the red vector of his baseball bat appeared in the lower right. Clint dropped his bat, experimentally, and the vector changed to a fist.
Another notification blipped across his vision.
It had the same clover icon that hovered beneath his player image now. It seemed the game wanted to give him a fighting chance.
“Damn,” Clint said with a flat smile, stooping to pick up his bat. “This would be so much cooler if I wasn’t dead.”
The world went woozy for a moment. Dead. It was the first time he gave a real voice to that thought, and it made Clint feel like the floor was going to crumble beneath him.
No time for disbelief. He could sit around being shocked when he woke up again.
Clint had a plan, barely: gather what he could, stay out of sight, get to the next level. It sounded simple, until he lingered on how he was going to do it.
That part, he decided, he’d figure out as he went.
With his bat raised, Clint ventured down the hallway. He kept low, just in case the windows were open to whatever the hell waited outside.
As he searched, he quickly realized this was a near-perfect replica of his apartment as he’d left it yesterday morning. His and Rachel’s coffee cups were still on the kitchen counter. Hers was half-full and lipstick-kissed.
In the bathroom, he found Rachel’s sweatpants crumpled on the floor from her shower. Her bobby pins and hair clips were even strewn across the counter, which usually drove him crazy.
Clint picked up her hair things and put them back on her tray beside the sink, like he always did, like it was just a normal morning.
All except a little pink bow, which read Rachel’s Hair Bow when he picked it up. He slipped that into his jeans pocket, carefully clipping it to the inner lining so he wouldn’t lose it.
He imagined waking up every day without her hair clips left everywhere, or her laundry on the floor, or the tiny love notes she occasionally slipped in his wallet, and his heart hurt worse than he thought possible.
“You’re okay,” he told his reflection.
Talking to himself usually made him feel crazy, but now it was comforting. It was the only thing that felt normal since he woke up.
A huge scar now laced his temple like a map of a river. He ran his fingers over the raised edge in disbelief. The scar tissue was shiny, smooth, undeniably there.
His memory wound back to the moment he looked over Rachel’s shoulder and saw that truck barreling toward them and he yanked the wheel and instinctively reached out to catch her and then the truck hit them like a wall and his head cracked against the steering wheel and they spun and they spun and they did not stop.
All of it really did happen. All of this was real. Impossibly, stupidly real.
“You’re going to save her,” he told himself. “You’re getting out of this.”
His reflection only glared back at him.
Clint couldn’t bring himself to say it yet, but he promised himself, in the darkest part of his heart, You’re going to make it up to her. You’re going to make it right.
And he was. Even if he had to fight like hell to do it.
Clint scoured the apartment as quickly as he could. He threw open drawers and cupboards, scoured under pillows and furniture.
This was only his apartment at a surface level. The drawers were either empty or held the occasional random item. Instead of food, the refrigerator had a single box of ammo (9mm (x25)). Every useful thing he found went in a haphazard pile on the kitchen counter to sort out when he was finished.
Clint was about to pack his bag and get the fuck out of there when something between the sofa and coffee table caught his eye: the edge of a red item label, hovering down by the floor. He rested his knee on the couch and peered down between it and the wall.
A folded sheet of yellowish paper sat there. Its label only said, Unknown Note.
Clint grimaced. “You’d better be worth it,” he said and heaved the sofa out of the way. He stuffed the note into his back pocket, then turned to assess his scant inventory.
His backpack. His trusty bat. The 9mm cartridges. A roll of duct tape (annoyingly, it was the only thing still in his toolbox). A change of clothes. A steak knife. A compass. A couple bottles of painkillers. Bandages. The weird note.
Only his backpack, bat, and Rachel’s hair clip were from his living-self, and that made them feel precious. More real.
“You know,” Clint muttered, half to himself, half to Death, if he was listening at all, “a real video game would give me an inventory to stash all this in.”
If the Lord of Hell heard him, he didn’t bother replying.
Clint packed up everything but the b
at, duct tape, knife, and paper into his backpack, then slung the bag onto his shoulder.
He picked up the duct tape and devised a sheath for the steak knife. It was flimsy and looked stupid hanging off his belt, but it would keep his knife close enough to unsheathe and stab in one smooth motion.
For a second, he imagined that—the knife plunging into flesh, the meaty thunk of it—and he shivered.
Quickly, he unfolded the paper. It was square, about a foot wide, and completely blank. Clint rolled his eyes and started to crumple it when a black circular outline appeared across the paper’s face, like a shape floating up from pale water.
A small square embossed itself on the inner rim. It was no bigger than Clint’s fingernail, and it held a tiny red dot that flashed with the same crimson as Clinton’s HUD. The words LEVEL ONE appeared beneath the circle.
“Oh,” Clint said, grinning. “You were worth it.”
It was a map. That rectangle had to be his apartment. And Clint himself was a tiny red dot in an ocean of white paper.
A lot of ground to cover. He stuffed the map in his front pocket and hefted up his bat.
Clint paused in his kitchen, looking around at all the open cupboards, the gaping drawers. He had to leave it here: his terror, his dread, his heartache. He pushed away everything but the memory of Rachel to drive him to defeat Death himself.
He could deal with it all later, when he was all-the-way-dead, instead of… whatever he was.
A notification scrolled across the top of his HUD: Beginner’s Luck has expired — now detectable to other players.
“Great timing,” Clint muttered.
He turned and grasped the doorknob.
If Rachel was here, she’d chirp, Goodbye, apartment, like she did when she was in a good mood, and he would smirk and remind her, You know, despite the saying, walls can’t actually talk.
Clint wrenched open the door and stepped out into the first level.
It was a television-perfect American suburb, the air bright and clear and full of birdsong. He stood outside a pleasant yellow house in a rainbow row of cottages. It was like a shitty home makeover show, where they just remade his old place with a nicer exterior.
Clint hesitated on his porch for a long few seconds, staring out at the verdant lawns, the infinite blue sky.
He had to remind himself that it wasn’t safe here. That death could be waiting for him behind every gingham curtain and white picket fence.
Clint held his bat at his side and set out down the sidewalk. Only the HUD burning constantly in his vision kept him grounded in the reality that it was all just a game.
The houses looked empty and uncannily alike, as if someone had copy-and-pasted the same house over and over again with slightly different coloring.
After walking for a couple of minutes, Clint checked the map. Little rectangles of houses cropped up along the circle’s inner rim, a few more inches of map unlocked. It was tiny progress compared to the vastness of the rest of the map.
“Christ,” Clint muttered, “how big is this fucking place?”
As he stepped forward, another house appeared on the circle. But this one was different.
A single question mark hovered over it like an invitation.
Clint pivoted back toward the house he had just passed. It was robin’s egg blue, and a cherry pie sat on the open window sill.
That question mark pulsed at him, urging him to figure out what waited for him beyond the door.
Clint tucked away the map and hurried across the deserted street. He crept up the porch.
The stairs groaned beneath him. Clint hesitated, then gripped the knob and twisted it, experimentally.
Damn. Locked.
A shot rang out from beside him, sending a sharp sonic needle stabbing through his ears. He couldn’t hear his own yelp of surprise.
The bullet splintered the porch rail behind him, scooping out a hole in the wood the size of a golf ball.
Clint tried not to imagine that as his head.
“Put your hands up,” someone said, her voice muffled around the ringing in his ears.
Clint froze and lifted his hands over his head. He looked out of the corner of his eye at the open window.
There, hidden behind the pie, was the dark muzzle of a shotgun. A woman held it, and her glare pierced him like a bullet itself.
His heart began pounding, maddened. He remembered the rules.
Death was possible here. Real death. And he was staring it down the barrel.
The woman’s finger flexed over the trigger.
CHAPTER 4
T
HE NEW QUEST NOTIFICATION POPPED up across the top of Clint’s vision, but he couldn’t move his stare away from that shotgun trained at his head.
“Wait!” Clint yelled. “I’m sorry! You don’t have to shoot me!”
She hissed at him, “Shut up. They’ll hear you.”
Clint whirled around. He scanned the cheery, sleepy little neighborhood.
There wasn’t another soul in sight. Across the street, the curtains in the window seemed to twitch, but the longer he stared, the more uncertain he was that he’d seen them move at all.
“I just woke up here,” he said. “I’m just trying to figure out what’s going on.”
“Figure it out somewhere else. I play solo.”
A rattle of bullets rang out, close enough to make Clint’s heart leap for his throat. The number in the corner of his vision fell to 225.
“But—” he started.
A car engine roared from somewhere down the street. It sounded like it was only a block or two away, maybe.
Clint flattened himself against the door and crouched low. His heartbeat was so loud, he wondered if the woman could hear it.
“Oh, shit,” murmured the stranger at the window. She started to lower the blinds. “You’d better run, buddy.”
Clint peered over the porch railing just in time to see a truck full of people turning onto the street.
It was far enough away that Clint could only make out the shape of about a dozen players in the truck bed, guns resting on their knees. The dark metal glinted in the light. Every head swiveled, like hawks searching for a meal.
“I take it that’s not a friendly neighborhood watch,” Clint said. He tried to keep his voice casual, but he couldn’t force a smile. His brain was adrenaline-scattered already.
A knife and a handful of bullets versus twelve armored bastards carrying semiautomatics. Didn’t take a tactical genius to figure out those odds.
“That’s Florence’s gang.” Her gaze flicked to his. “They don’t take prisoners. Or newbie recruits.”
Clint hunched down lower. He watched through the slats of the railing as the truck whined to a stop. The soldiers poured out and stormed the first house on the street, guns raised.
A middle-aged man, strong-shouldered and thin, staggered out of the doorway with both his hands up.
“Please, no,” he cried.
His voice was like nothing Clint had ever heard before: blind mortal terror. It was the upward-ratcheting sob of a man who had lost everything but his life and realized that, too, was about to be gone.
“Take whatever you want, take—”
A woman stood at the head of the group. She was tall and lean, built like a soldier. Her hair was a terrific afro that moved with her as she turned her head from the weeping man to her soldiers. She waved a dismissive hand at him.
Bullets screamed out, silencing him forever.
“Jesus Christ,” Clint gasped. “They killed him.”
Nausea tugged at his belly. He wondered if he would go out begging or fighting.
No, he told himself. You’re not gonna die. Not this soon.
“Welcome to the whole point of the game,” the woman in the window said. “Now, fuck off.” She pulled back and let the blinds drop.
Clint twisted hard at the doorknob and found it locked.
The woman growled back, “We all have someone to save.”
Clint looked back at the gang. They had kicked down the door of the house and disappeared inside. That would buy him an extra few minutes, maybe. He could bolt now, get a head start. Maybe they’d be so busy he could slip right past them, to… whatever the hell existed beyond these rows of suburbs.
No. Running wouldn’t work. They were the hawks, and he was a mouse in an open field, just waiting to be devoured.
“Listen,” Clint said. “If we play alone, we’re gonna die, just like that guy. Together, we have better odds.”
She lifted the blinds with the nose of her shotgun and glared at him, her eyes green and furious. “Yeah, so, when I said fuck off, I meant get off my porch before I blow your head off.”
“You’re not gonna kill me.” Clint was surprised by his confidence, given that her shotgun was still aimed at him. “If you were, I’d be dead already. You don’t want to be here any more than I do.”
Clint couldn’t see her face, but he could feel the tension in the air, the certainty that she was chewing over everything he said. That buoyed him, kept the words tumbling out of him.
“I don’t know much,” he said, “but I know this: we’re not gonna live working alone.”
The woman stared at him like she was seeing him for the first time. She moved away from the window, wordlessly, letting the blinds shut again. Leaving Clint alone.
Down the street, the soldiers swaggered out of the house, stepping on and over the dead body on the lawn. They tracked blood across the sidewalk as they tossed guns and bandages and backpacks into the truck before continuing on to the next house.
Clint swallowed a hot coal of fear. Shit. All that time wasted. He should have started running, should have—
The door opened a crack.
For a fraction of a second, Clint wondered if this was a bad idea. If all his psychoanalysis and panic-babbling was nonsense, and she was just going to kill him where she could hide the body.
9 Levels of Hell: Volume 1 Page 2