But then the truck started up again and made his decision for him.
Clint dove inside and slammed the door shut. His hand hit hers as they simultaneously snapped the deadbolt into place.
The woman was still hunkered down below the windowsill. She was more petite than Clint expected. Her shotgun looked too big for her, but she held it like it was an extension of her own arm.
Whoever she was, she wasted no time on introductions.
“Follow me,” she said, army-crawling across the floor. She had a heavy camping backpack on, bulging with supplies. When she moved, he could hear the vague rattle of metal on metal from inside.
“What should we do?” Clint whispered, as he dropped to his knees.
“Basement. Now. They’re looters.”
“Looters?”
“Did you literally just join today?”
“Uh, yeah. That’s what I told you.”
The woman scoffed and kept going. Clint crawled after her, his duct tape sheath scraping across the floor.
Beyond the half-open window, a gun roared. Someone’s muffled shriek cut short.
The player count dropped to 224. Another cry of bullets, and the number tipped down to 223.
“Jesus, they move fast. How many people were here in the first place?”
“Five hundred, I think.” She paused in the kitchen to push open the back door. Clint almost questioned why, until he realized: she wanted it to look as if they had tried to escape.
“I’m surprised Death’s adding anyone new.”
Clint shrugged. “He said I’m interesting.”
“He says that to everyone.”
Clint tried not to look as put off as he felt by that.
She paused to punch his shoulder. “Chin up, buttercup. That’s how all video games start. You’re the chosen one, you’ve gotta go do blah blah. Well, this time, you’re not. You’re just another rat in an arena.”
“Glad you’re staying optimistic,” Clint muttered.
The woman ignored him. She flipped her rug back to reveal a trapdoor sunk into the floor. She heaved it open. Inside, a wooden ladder led into the dark depths of the basement.
“You’re going to have to pull the rug back over when you shut the hatch,” she said. “I nailed down the other side, so you should be able to pull it straight.”
Clint paused and grimaced. “Aw, man.”
She hesitated at the top of the ladder. “What?”
“I didn’t even think of checking under any rugs. I bet I missed a cache.”
Her smile was strained and sharp. “Maybe you should go ask those nice people in the truck to help you look.”
The woman tossed her backpack down into the darkness and followed after it.
The crunch of tires resounded from the driveway. Through the open window, he heard men and women talking. There came the harsh bark of someone’s laughter.
Clint went down after her. He held onto the corner of the rug and tugged it over the opening as neatly as he could.
The trapdoor clicked shut and, moments later, someone kicked the front door open. The door frame splintered with a kindling-crack, and the house seemed to shake with the force of the door slamming back into the wall.
For a few seconds, Clint froze there at the top of the ladder. Listening. Terrified of betraying himself with one wrong exhale.
In the darkness, the floor creaked and groaned as boots clunked across the threshold.
“There’s nobody here,” a man called out, just as he stepped on the trapdoor inches above Clint’s head.
The woman tugged on the bottom of Clint’s jeans. She gestured at him fiercely, the whites of her eyes flashing in the gloom.
Clint shook off his fear and descended as silently as possible. He held his breath all the way down.
Above them, Florence and her gang stomped and clattered around, searching everything.
The cellar smelled wet and warm. The floating border of his HUD was disorienting, too bright in the gloom.
As his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he could make out the shape of shelves lining the walls. She had stacks of canned food, bottled water, boxes of ammunition. When Clint got close enough to squint at the writing on the boxes, HUD labels appeared, little red boxes in the dark: .22LR (x30), 9mm (x44), 12 gauge (x65).
The woman nudged Clint out of the way to grab the ammo boxes and cram them in her backpack.
Then, she leaned up and pressed her mouth to his ear to whisper, quiet as a breath, “Got a gun?”
He shook his head.
Her mouth made the shape of a silent curse. She kicked at the air before she reached into her backpack and offered him a semiautomatic pistol. Its item label read, Beretta M9 (+25 ATK).
When Clint took it, the baseball vector in his HUD turned into a silhouette of the gun with the number 13 beside it. He crammed his bat into the side pocket of his backpack.
Thirteen bullets. If he was lucky, he’d land half of them. How many people could he drop with six shots?
Clint fumbled with the pistol. The metal was cold and so much heavier than he expected. He tried to imagine the gun leaping back in his hand as a bullet burst out of it.
Rachel would have laughed at him. She grew up in Montana, going hunting, shooting pop cans off of fence posts with an airsoft gun. He was a city kid who had only held a gun in Call of Duty.
The feet crisscrossed back and forth above them. Cabinet doors banged open and boxes hit the floor as the gang scavenged.
The woman was so close he could smell her sweat and fear. He clutched the gun. Adrenaline spun hot behind his eyes, pulsing against his skull.
The woman whispered, “Can you shoot?”
Again, Clint shook his head. His stomach hummed like a furious hornets’ nest.
“Figure it out,” she said. “I have a plan.”
CHAPTER 5
C
LINT WAITED ALONE AT THE bottom of the ladder. He trained his gun at the floorboards overhead with one hand. In the other, he held up a single can of fruit cocktail. His HUD now showed two silhouettes for equipped weapons: the Beretta and the tin can.
If there wasn’t a small infantry of homicidal assholes ten feet above his head, Clint probably would have found it funny.
Sweat coursed down his forehead. He watched as the woman pushed open the storm doors behind him. Light flooded the basement, revealing how cramped and dirty it really was.
She offered him a thumbs up before shutting the door silently behind her.
The light went out with her.
You’d better fucking come back, lady, he thought.
Clint wiped his damp palm off on his pants and readjusted his grip on his gun.
He was supposed to wait exactly a minute. He began counting noiselessly, his tongue tracing the shape of the words: one one-thousand, two one-thousand.
After that minute, he only had to make a big enough sound to distract them.
The footsteps resounded from all over the house. The ceiling shuddered as the looters stomped around and threw discarded items to the floor. Dust spun through the thin light trickling through the floorboards.
When he reached sixty, Clint froze for a long and horrible second. His panic was a thick bulb lodged in his throat, choking him. But he thought of Rachel on his television screen. He thought of the way she looked in that ambulance, so close to death.
Death’s voice echoed through his head: if you do nothing, she will die.
Clint lifted the can over his shoulder and hurled it at the stack of tins and jarred preserves on the wall shelf. The cans fell clattering, and the glass shattered. He winced at the crash.
Overhead, all the boots burst into the kitchen. And paused there.
“What the hell was that?” someone barked. Her voice held all the confidence of someone whose authority was never questioned. She had to be the group’s leader.
Florence. That’s what the woman had calle
d her.
No one offered her an answer. The nervous tension made the air so thick, Clint could feel it hardening in his lungs.
Florence’s voice sharpened. “You told me there’s no one here.”
“There isn’t,” a man stammered.
A scoff. “You think a fucking ghost made that noise, boy? There must be a basement. Find the opening. Now.”
Before anyone could move, the ground rattled once, twice, with the dense and now-familiar boom of the woman’s shotgun. The very walls trembled. With the second shot, he heard one body hit the floor, and then another.
The player count in the corner of his eye ticked down again: 222, 221…
Machine guns began screaming, tearing into the kitchen walls. Something ceramic shattered.
The woman’s shotgun was silent. Maybe she paused to reload. Maybe she was already dead. Either way, sitting here wasn’t going to save his ass.
All of them will think they’ve got me, she had said, and that’s when you come up and say hi.
Clint surged up the ladder with his gun raised. He heaved open the trap door and found himself facing a pair of boots. Time unwound, a single second undoing itself in a hot pool of adrenaline as Clint’s mind picked apart every possible detail, looking for anything that would keep him alive.
His eyes traveled from the boots, up the pant leg, past the utility belt with the machete holstered to it, and finally up to the man’s face.
Their stares met. The man’s eyes opened wide in surprise. His arm moved as if in slow motion to raise his rifle.
Clint stiffened his shoulder and pulled the trigger. The pistol cracked and burst in his hands, the sound so loud he couldn’t hear a thing for a few seconds. Its bullet leapt forward with surprising force. The gun snapped back, and Clint ducked just in time to avoid smacking his own head with the recoil.
The stranger standing over him staggered, touching his belly, opening his mouth in mute horror.
Clint didn’t hesitate. Didn’t even have to think. He squared his shoulder and shot again.
This time, the bullet caught the man in the chest, just below his throat. He fell, firing as he went down. His rifle cut an arc of bullets into the wall, the kitchen cabinets, the ceiling.
Clint grabbed his boot and pulled him down into the basement. The man and his rifle clattered to the dirt floor.
220. A triumphant Single Kill (+25 XP) bannered across his vision.
God. Was it really that easy to kill someone?
Clint didn’t allow himself time to think about it. He leapt down after the dead man.
Pain stabbed through Clint’s ankle when he hit the floor. His HP bar dropped five points as the earth around him exploded in little clouds of gunfire. His ears were still roaring, and the shots themselves sounded muffled, distant.
Clint wrestled the gun off the dead man’s shoulder and scrambled backward, away from the trapdoor opening. Another crimson dialogue box appeared. Clint barely registered the words AR-15 (+40 ATK).
He cushioned the stock against his shoulder and shot wildly through the floorboards.
The player count dropped to 219, almost instantly, as Double Kill (+50 XP) spun across his HUD.
At the back of his mind, Clint wondered if that woman was still alive, or if she’d been mowed down in a hail of gunfire before he even learned her name.
But then her shotgun thundered, and he never heard such a reassuring gunshot.
There was her voice, too, snarling at them like a bear, “You stay out of my fucking house!”
Two more died as the player count dropped to 217.
Well, he thought, at least you’re not dead yet.
He switched his focus to the HUD weapon indicator. 37 bullets left. Clint wasn’t religious, but that felt like the hand of a god, handing him a tiny miracle in Hell.
Blood seeped through the floorboards like rain through a leaky roof. Everything reeked of iron and smoke, and the floor squealed as boots staggered back and away.
The gang’s leader called, her voice crackling with rage, “Forget it! Get back to the truck.”
Clint leapt up the ladder in time to see three people fleeing: the woman who could only be Florence and two men flanking her. They all carried backpacks and semiautomatic rifles, which they hugged to their chests as they fled.
The woman’s kitchen was ruined. The windows were now just broken glass, scattered across the sink and floor. The cabinets were splintered, riddled with bullets. Six strangers lay dead on the floor, their blood pooling all around them.
Adrenaline pulsed in Clint’s skull. His belly turned with triumph and horror both. He had never seen a dead body before, and now there were half a dozen strangers sprawled at his feet, spilling blood and brains all over the floor.
The shock of it dizzied him. His stomach was empty, but bile still crawled up his throat.
The woman stood in the threshold of the back door, clutching her bleeding arm. She offered Clint a manic grin.
“Well done,” she told him. “I honestly didn’t know if that would work.”
Clint’s stress spooled out of him in an impossible ribbon of laughter. “Then why the fuck did you ask me to do it?”
“Didn’t want to die hiding. I almost got Florence. She’s damn quick. She’s the one who hit me, I think.” She shrugged and knelt before the dead men. With her good arm, she began digging through their pockets.
“Help me search them,” she said.
A hundred questions leapt to Clint’s mind. He wanted to ask her how often she planned to use him as unofficial bait moving forward, but her grimace and the blood soaking her coat sleeve stopped him.
Clint asked, “How bad did they get you?”
“Not bad. Just grazed me. Like a bee sting.” She produced a plastic baggie of bandages from one of the men’s pockets and grinned. She slapped a thick wad of gauze over her arm and wrapped it with practiced ease.
“I can help you with that.”
She let out a harsh, clipped laugh. “I’m a nurse.” A pause. “Well, was a nurse.” Her stare caught his, and her face split into a smile that flickered like fire. “But thank you anyway.”
Clint shrugged. He had never slowed down to look at her closely before this. She was older than he had first realized, nearly old enough to be his mother. Silver threads streaked her dark hair. Her skin was brown and smooth as an avocado seed, except for the tiny furrows of age at the corners of her eyes.
“I’ve got these guys.” The woman nodded over her shoulder toward the basement. “Go down and check what he’s got.”
Clint stared at the black opening of the basement. It seemed like the mouth of a demon now. His arms shuddered as he climbed down the steps.
The man lay face-down on the floor, his blood pouring out of him. Clint stood at the edge of the pool, nausea churning within him. He had killed a man. True, the man had been trying to kill him, but his life ended for the second and final time when Clint pulled that trigger.
He hoped no one else in this game was like him. That he hadn’t robbed someone else’s Rachel of their chance at life.
The woman descended the ladder behind him. She peered over his shoulder and asked, “What did you find?”
Clint just shrugged. He stared hard at the back of the dead man’s head.
She tried on a ghost of a smile. “It gets easier, after the first couple times.”
“I know.” But he couldn’t bring himself to move.
The woman stepped into the blood. It lapped thick and tacky around the soles of her boots. She crouched to feel the man’s pockets, his backpack. She tossed Clint everything she found: a machete, a few boxes of ammunition (all of it labeled .223), an empty magazine.
“Fifty-five bullets,” the woman told him. “Don’t waste them.”
“I never knew a nurse who can shoot like you do.” Then, feeling stupid, he added, “I’m Clint, by the way. I think we kind of forgot to introduce ours
elves.”
“Army nurse. Afghanistan, for a couple tours.” She said this casually, like mentioning that she needed to go to the grocery store. “I’m Malina, and I didn’t forget. Just thought you were about to die, to be honest.”
Malina paused, leaning forward to inspect the dead man’s boots. She glanced back at Clint’s blood-spattered tennis shoes. “What shoe size are you?”
“Are you serious? I killed the guy.” That sentence was strange and bitter in his mouth, like a piece of metal. “I don’t need to steal his shit, too.”
“Yes, you do. Your shoes won’t last you. These are good boots. Good traction.” She sounded too much like his mom insisting he needed new shoes when he was still a kid.
Annoyingly, she was right. And he knew, if this was Skyrim, he already would have taken everything sellable out of the dude’s inventory and booked it.
But if this was Skyrim, nothing would reek of blood and there would be no glassy dead eyes watching him.
Clint knelt down, trying not to inhale, and yanked the boots off. An item label popped up: Steel-Toed Boots (+2 DEF). Cold blood smeared on his palms, and Clint wiped it off on the dead man’s jeans. Some part of him wanted to apologize for that.
“Smart choice.” Malina stepped out of the blood, leaving the imprint of her shoes behind. “Anyway. It’s time for us both to move on. Florence will be back, and she’ll be looking for blood. That bitch is a sore loser.”
“Is that a subtle fuck off or an invitation?”
Malina gave him a real smile this time. “I thought we could stick together for a bit. You made a compelling case with the whole not dying thing.”
At the top of his vision, another dialogue box popped up.
Despite the buzzing flies and reek of blood, Clint grinned as his HUD buzzed Level Up!
He’d survived his first fight. Not just survived, but destroyed them. Maybe he had a chance in this game after all.
CHAPTER 6
“W
HO THE FUCK WAS THAT?” Florence growled.
9 Levels of Hell: Volume 1 Page 3