Florence nodded, her stare thoughtful, distant.
“Does that help?”
“Maybe. At the very least, I know we’re both stupid enough to consider it.”
“I’d more call it arrogant.” Atlas nodded back over his shoulder. “You want me to come with you?”
“No. I need someone here keeping everything running smoothly.”
“This place runs itself, and you know it.” He rolled his eyes. “You just want to beat me to level 20.”
“Honey, it’s not a race. But if it was, you’re already losing. One fight won’t make the difference.”
“Whatever you say, boss.” Atlas flicked his aviators back down into place. He had a too-cool-to-care attitude that Florence usually liked. Right now, she couldn’t decide if it was annoying or not.
Florence strode down the shadowy hall, back the way she’d come.
She was already itching to blow someone’s head off. Anybody who deserved it. Especially some cocky new kid who strutted up and spat right in her face.
Her soldiers were already clambering into the cars when she came out. In their combat gear, guns slung over their shoulders, they had the air of a rebel army, all young and grinning and still convinced they were invincible.
The moment Florence walked out, all eyes turned to her and her soldiers straightened up, at attention.
“We’re after two players. Check the kill list: Clint Hawkins and Malina Ortiz. They’re the fuckers that just killed your friends. Study their faces. Remember them. Bring me the level 12, if she’s willing to see reason. If not, kill them both. First one who gets the noob wins a loot box from me.”
The game didn’t provide them, but Florence had a hell of a lot of items, some empty boxes, and just enough game experience to know how random rewards kept players hooked along.
“We’re going to each house, one by one, and we’re burning those fucking rats out of their hiding place. We don’t let anybody in this level fuck with us, do we?”
The soldiers started cheering, all except Boots. He was just staring at her, his eyes bright and intense and full of distrust.
Florence grinned a bloodthirsty grin. “Let’s go give them hell, boys.”
CHAPTER 10
M
ALINA’S FLASHLIGHT PANNED AROUND THE basement, revealing it in shards of light: a dirt floor, a filthy old worktable with tools suspended on the wall above it, shelves along one wall, a few stacked boxes. Her light flicked over a lantern sitting on a shelf, and she cried in delight. Malina turned it on, and it filled the room with a dim orange glow.
“Solar-powered,” she said. “That’s a decent find. I’m surprised it has a charge.”
Clint smirked. “Great. Exactly what I was looking for. Maybe we can go camping later.”
Malina looked at him like she was doing her best not to smile. “Let’s search this place and get out of here.”
They split up the room by silent agreement and sorted through boxes and shelves, tossing everything they found in the center of the room.
Clint felt like a massive idiot when Malina reached onto one of the bottom shelves and produced a semiautomatic rifle and three spare boxes of ammunition. The gun clattered against the concrete floor as she tossed it down.
“This,” she told him, sternly, “is why we always look thoroughly in this game. Neither one of us can afford to die.”
“You don’t have to lecture me,” Clint muttered.
“Yes, I do. If you had looked better, I might not have gotten shot.” She shouldered past him to check the other shelf. “This isn’t a game where we can cut corners.”
Clint tried not to let his irritation show. A dozen counterarguments rose and died on his tongue. Her urgency wasn’t about him. It was for a little boy trapped somewhere down in Hell. So he rubbed his eyes and held his hand there for a moment, just breathing.
He said, “Do you think she’s going to come back for us?”
“Oh, almost certainly.” Malina picked through the stack, tossing aside things she randomly declared unimportant: water and food, shirts, a can of pepper spray.
Clint grabbed one of the shirts off the ground and replaced his ruined sweater with it. This shirt was plain black, long-sleeved, and not coated with a stranger’s brain matter, which made it infinitely better than his hoodie already.
“We’re making good time.” She glanced at her watch. “I think.”
“What time is it?”
“I don’t know.” She held up her wrist, wryly. “Fucking thing’s broken.”
Clint crinkled his nose. “Why keep it?”
Malina’s stare softened. She rubbed her thumb over the cracked LCD screen. “You’re right,” she said. “It’s pointless now.”
But she didn’t move to take it off.
Clint knew that look in her eye. He wondered if he looked the same when he replayed the past in his mind, trying to undo time.
“Where to next?” Clint asked. “Scouting?”
That snapped her out of it. Malina stood up taller and said, “If Florence is still gone when we get out of here, sure.” She offered Clint the gun and asked him, “Do you recognize this?”
“I’m not that stupid. It’s an AK-47.”
He barely stopped himself from saying, I have a blue one in CS:GO.
Malina mock-applauded him. “Very good. But I’m still taking it.”
“It was in my apartment,” Clint said, only half-teasing.
“And you have my Beretta. The AR has better accuracy when you don’t know what you’re doing. Trust me. Speaking of, can you show me your rifle?”
“Only if you’re not gonna kill me with it.”
“Oh, sweetie. I would have done that from the start if I was going to. It just occurred to me you’ve almost definitely been walking around with the safety on that thing turned off.”
“Uh. You might be onto something there.” He slung the rifle off his shoulder, sheepishly, and held it out to her.
She tapped a lever on the side and flipped it up. “Safety on.” Flipped it down. “Safety off. Don’t fucking point it at yourself or me when you’re checking it. Actually, just don’t point it at anything you don’t want to kill.”
Malina put the switch back up, then showed him how to remove the magazine (empty) and refill it with the bullets big as Clint’s pinky and sharp as a fang.
Clint watched her with mute fascination and dread. He still remembered the way the light in that man’s eyes had gone from bright and shocked to nothing at all. How little time it had taken him to waste to death on the floor of that basement.
“What’s that look for?” she asked. “Are you scared of guns, now?”
“No. No, it’s not that.”
Clint traded her the AK for the AR. The image in the lower corner of his HUD changed, just as the gun’s label appeared (AR-15 (+40 ATK)).
The weight grounded and unnerved him all at once. It was a promise and a threat: he could only save Rachel by killing whoever stood in his way.
“It’s just… I’ve never killed anyone before this.”
Malina snorted at him. “Do I seem like a hardened killer or something?”
“You said you were in the army.”
“As a nurse, jackass.” She gripped Clint’s shoulders, firmly, and stared at him hard until he met her eyes. “Look. Everyone in here is already dead. You’re not killing anybody.”
“I’m stopping someone from being able to go back to life.”
“Yeah, an asshole who tried to kill you for no reason.”
“And I’m an asshole who actually killed a guy,” Clint muttered.
Malina punched his chest. “Stop feeling sorry for yourself. You know you had to do it, and if you waste all this time mourning some random dickhead with a gun, you’ll never get out of here.”
Clint stared down at her, injured.
“What? Do you want a fucking sympathy card? It’s not a tragedy
if you kill someone who was fully intending to murder you.” She slung off her own backpack and began stuffing it with a few packages of bandages.
“Start packing up,” she said. “We have to keep moving.”
That settled coldly in his belly. He wondered how long it would take for the shock to turn to spite. Did Florence pick up a gun that first time and feel a hot rush of power, or did she have to ease into her bloodlust, death by death?
Clint dropped to his knees beside her and started filling all the pockets of his backpack. Malina divided everything up more-or-less evenly between them, though she didn’t offer him either of the grenades she found.
Instead, she tossed him the bottles of opiates (Pain Killers (+5 HP/min per pill)) and a little container of rubbing alcohol, while she stuffed the AK-47’s ammunition boxes into her backpack.
He asked her, trying not to sound tense, “Do you know how to use a grenade?”
“Better than you do. You barely know how to use a gun.”
“I’d have better luck with grenades. I was pretty good at baseball, back in high school.”
“This isn’t baseball.”
“Thanks, I hadn’t realized.” Clint scoffed. “My point is, I have pretty decent aim.”
Malina snorted. She pulled one of the grenades out of her backpack’s side pocket and slapped it into his hand (Grenade (-40 HP)).
“Prove it sometime, kiddo.”
“I’m twenty-three,” he said under his breath.
“Yeah.” She smirked and elbowed his ribs. “Kiddo.”
“Now we’re back to you being an old lady.”
Clint couldn’t help his smile. The tension unwound from his shoulders like barbed wire unhooking itself from his skin.
“An old lady who’s a better shot than you’ll ever be.” She tapped the grenade in his hand. “This does blast damage. Straight HP loss, but it has the same damage multiplier as other weapons. You’d only lose 40 HP if you got hit in the leg, but 400 HP if you got hit in the head. Defense doesn’t do shit against it. Got it?”
“Sure. Don’t throw it at my own head.”
“Perfect.” She nodded over her shoulder. “Let’s get the hell on the road before they think twice and turn back around.”
Clint followed Malina back up the ladder and out the kitchen door.
“It will take us a few hours.” Malina regarded her broken, useless watch again. She smiled over her shoulder at Clint, but the smile didn’t reach her eyes. “It takes a while to walk all the way to the forest, particularly if we don’t want to be seen.”
He remembered the shitty old truck that Florence and her gang had been in and asked, “Is there some way to find a car like they had?”
She cackled. “Florence’s? She’s got everything with wheels in this goddamn level.”
“No more spawning anywhere? Sounds like the game balance is pretty broken.”
Malina laughed. “You could complain, but Death would probably just take it as a compliment.”
Clint grimaced at the bright and cheery sky. “Then I guess we’re walking.”
They walked together, setting out southwest, according to Malina’s map. The sun was bright and hot overhead, but it never seemed to move. It only hung there, watching them.
For a long time, they walked in silence through backyards and flowerbeds. At one point Clint heard the faraway wail of an engine and pulled Malina down before she fully noticed. They crouched down behind a shed as a pair of jeeps packed with soldiers roared past them, never stopping or slowing.
“They’ll start fanning out once they’ve realized we’re not there. Florence is a vengeful bitch.” Malina looked anxiously over her shoulder, even though they were too far now to see her house.
Clint pulled his map out of his pocket and looked it over. He’d managed to fill barely an eighth of his map’s circle, even though there were now at least forty or fifty little squares of houses filled in between his spawn-point and his current location marker.
“Then we’d better hurry,” he said.
They kept going, the fastest they could move without burning NRG.
Clint gripped his rifle by the handguard. The metal was smooth, cold, reassuring. Even if he didn’t want to shoot somebody, he could. There was a good chance he’d even win. There was safety in that.
Malina was the first one to notice the smoke.
Clint was looking only forward, scouring every fleeting shadow for the hint of another human being. But she grabbed his elbow and pointed backwards.
A thick column of black smoke was rising into the air in the distance, back where they’d come from.
“They’re trying to burn us out,” she said. “It won’t be long until they realize we’re not there.”
Clint watched the smoke spread like a warning. He swung his rifle around so he could hold it in both hands, the butt nestled against his shoulder. But he kept the muzzle pointed down toward the earth, his finger firmly off the trigger.
“What do we do?”
Malina narrowed her eyes. “Something tells me you were raised to think there’s no such thing as a stupid question.”
“It’s really nice that you have the time to roast me while we’re running for our lives.”
It was comforting to banter. It felt normal, almost.
“Our only choices are to fight or run and hide,” Malina said. “Do you want to fight two-against-ten again?”
“Well, no—”
“Then obviously we’re going to hide.”
They leapt the fence into another random backyard, and the suburban maze felt so thick that Clint could barely make sense of it anymore. If it weren’t for Malina and his map, he would have been lost hours ago, looping through backyard after backyard, trying to remember which little cottage he’d been to last.
But Malina strode confidently to the back door, which had a window pane and little gingham curtains. (Rachel would have declared it so cute.) She rattled the handle.
When it didn’t move, she raised a boot and kicked it down. A couple of the glass panes popped and shattered, and the frame splintered.
The door swung inward.
Malina hollered inside, “We’re not here to hurt you! Florence’s gang is trying to fucking murder us.”
“Is there anyone even here?” Clint whispered, lifting his gun up.
“I don’t know, but I prefer not to fight when I don’t have to. And I know I’d sure as hell shoot anyone who kicked down my back door.”
Malina glanced over her shoulder and shied away from Clint and his rifle. “What did I tell you about not pointing that shit at people you don’t want to kill?”
Clint flustered and apologized. His gun still felt awkward, unfamiliar.
This house was small and pleasant and reminded him distinctly of his grandmother’s house. There were patterned tea towels, frames of pressed flowers, family pictures of strangers. Clint watched the faces as he passed and wondered if they were dead or alive.
They swept through the first floor of the house and found nothing. The second floor was equally barren, except a single bullet sitting on the bathroom sink. He left it there and met Malina in the hallway.
“There’s an attic,” she told him. “I want you to cover me, and I’ll check it out.”
Clint bit his lip, hard. “Is that the safest idea?”
“Aw, are you worried about me?” Her smile was charmed and derisive.
Before Clint could argue, the television downstairs turned itself on. They both froze at the crackle and pop of static.
Malina pressed a finger to her lips. She raised her shotgun and crept back down the hallway to the top of the stairs.
Clint followed her, trying to velvet his steps. He focused on the line of Malina’s shoulders, watching her body language to see if anyone was there before he turned the corner with her.
But the living room was empty. The television screen glowed with flickering lines of
black and white.
“What the fuck?” Malina said.
Death’s face appeared on the screen, bone-pale and distinctly disappointed. He sat in a high-backed leather chair, the color of old blood.
Something instinctive within Clint lurched. He wanted to fight. He wanted to tear that fucker apart.
“Honestly, I thought you humans would be much faster at this. No one’s even gotten close to the second level yet.” Death spread his hands and smiled, generously. “I suppose it’s time I gave you a hint.”
CHAPTER 11
T
HE LORD OF HELL SAT with his fingertips pressed together, scowling through the television as if he could really see Clint there. For a moment, Clint believed that he somehow could.
Death’s clothing had changed, and now Clint wondered just how much time had passed within the game. His suit was sky blue, his tie a sheeny gray. His cuff links were little silver-dipped vertebrae.
He said, “While I admire your uniquely human dedication to gleeful homicide, you all have missed the mark utterly. None of you are big readers, it seems.”
Beside him, Malina’s fingers tapped out a restless pattern on her arm. She chewed at her lip until it bled and watched Death with a look that was fear and resentment both.
“I will tell you this much: if you waste all your time murdering each other, you’ll never get to the next level.” He tugged down the sleeves of his suit and offered them a brief, hollow smile. “I have faith, but it is dwindling. Don’t let me down. I get nasty when I’m bored.”
The image froze there, and Death said nothing more.
Malina kicked hard at the television. The glass splintered, splitting Death’s smile underneath.
She shouted at the screen, “What the holy fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Clint stared hard at Death’s cracked smirk. The bright buzz of an epiphany rose in his chest. “He means go find a bookshelf.”
“A bookshelf? Why?”
Clint ignored her. His mind was reeling, all focus now. There was no room for anxiety or fear. Only rage, driving him like fire chasing hot oil.
9 Levels of Hell: Volume 1 Page 6