Too Young to Die

by Michael Anderle

  “Less talking and more running.” Lyle chugged along at their side and reminded Justin of nothing so much as a pug. When he caught the glint in the dwarf’s eye, he revised his opinion from pug to terrier.

  The group pounded down the hallway and without warning, slid off the edge and down a flight of stairs into utter darkness.

  “Ow!” That sounded like Zaara.

  “I—oof, fuck. Are you okay?” Justin couldn’t tell which way was up anymore. He constantly tried to catch hold of a handrail but didn’t think there was one.

  “Of course I’m not okay. You’re heavy in that armor. Lyle?”

  “Relax,” the dwarf responded. “I’ve been through a ton of these. Relax, let go, and think of happy things.”

  “You are out of your mind.” Justin gasped a breath. “Fuck, how long is this staircase?”

  “The AI says not much longer,” Mary replied. “Zaara, grab my hand, I think I can—”

  “Ow!” With thuds and clanks, all four of them stopped abruptly. The wolves shuffled around at the top of the stairs but they couldn’t be sure if the beasts wanted to try coming down.

  “A door,” Justin said wildly. “Get it open.”

  “There’s no door!” Zaara told him sharply.

  “Are you sure? Wait, why aren’t you looking? Lyle!”

  “There’s no door,” the dwarf echoed.

  “You’re telling me someone carved the world’s longest staircase and it goes nowhere?” He made a fireball in one hand and glared at Lyle. “There is a door here. Find it.”

  “Do you see a door?” His friend gestured at the blank stone wall with surprising elegance.

  “No, I…oh.” He stared at the wall, closed his eyes, and breathed out as he pictured waves on the beach, but his effort was disturbed.

  A yip and some scuffling told him the wolves had started down the stairs and his head jerked around.

  “Focus,” Zaara yelled.

  “What about you?” Despite his challenge to her, he forced himself to refocus. Waves in, waves out. Don’t think about the horde of angry wolves. This was hard. In, out. Keep the fireball going. Wolves. In, out. In…out.

  “It’s there!” Lyle caught him by his armor and yanked him through the door. “You go, you go, you go…all here, okay.” He slammed the door shut with his shoulder and a moment later, they were treated to the immensely satisfying sound of several wolves careening into a stone wall at high speed.

  “Ah. Perfection.” He blew a breath out. “Everything hurts. Does everyone else hurt everywhere?”

  “I do,” Zaara said.

  “Not really.” Mary sounded remarkably calm. “I am a little dizzy, though. Wait…no, I’m not. Thank you, AI.”

  “Unbelievable,” Justin muttered. “Okay, all, let’s find a way out of here. I think we can safely say going the other way is off the table.”

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Justin’s ball of flame guided them partway down the corridor, although his mother noticed it kept burning his hand. It wasn’t far, however, before they found old, unused torches on the wall. Zaara retrieved one and lit it from the fireball before she strode away to find others. With everyone now armed with light, they set off again.

  Mary looked around as they walked. The walls weren’t marked and dust lay thickly on the floor. Whatever this place was, it hadn’t been used in a very long time.

  “What do you think this is?” Justin asked, his mind running along similar lines to hers. “The air…doesn’t seem as stale as it should.”

  “Yer right, and that’s good,” Lyle said. “A closed-off mine is the worst place you can be.” His voice showed the depth of his feeling. “It’s part of why I left,” he added gruffly after a moment.

  He glanced at his friend but held his tongue, which Mary approved of. The dwarf’s fear was obviously deep-seated and she had a sense that he wasn’t someone who made admissions like this lightly. After all, he’d been remarkably unsentimental during the fight.

  She shook her head. What was she thinking? Lyle wasn’t real. He was a fake person created by the makers of the game—perhaps shaped by Justin’s choices, but not real.

  Unwillingly, her gaze drifted to Zaara.

  While she hated to say it, she could see what her son saw in the girl. Her appearance wasn’t the first thing you noticed about her. Rather, it was the way she walked—not the confidence she projected as she tried to be a dangerous outlaw but the real confidence that lay beneath. Behind the black armor and double daggers, she was watchful and protective, as well as brave. She’d been the one who ran down the corridor first, after all, even knowing they would likely face opposition.

  Mary was lost in her thoughts when she heard the strange skittering sound from the darkness ahead.

  Everyone froze and only the flames from the torches continued to dance and send their shadows flickering over the walls. She peered into the tunnel ahead of them and realized she was holding her breath. The battle with the wolves hadn’t affected her as much as she’d expected, not with the realization that she was immune to damage.

  This, though… Something about an enemy lurking and not knowing what it was made it more difficult.

  She thought she saw a gleam in the pitch-black shadow and leaned forward. A pair of eyes appeared, then another pair. The two of them must be close together, and they were very far off the ground.

  When she saw the other four eyes, she uttered a little sound of fear.

  More than anything, she hated spiders and always had. She was a country girl and had gutted deer and fish, mucked stables out, and planted and harvested in every kind of weather imaginable. There was a time when she used to catch snakes and bring them inside.

  But she couldn’t stand spiders.

  “What do you want to bet,” Justin said slowly, “that it’s poisonous?”

  Mary resisted the urge to clap her hands over her face—which wouldn’t be good, given the fact that she carried a torch.

  “I’d say the odds are good,” Lyle said.

  Zaara nodded.

  “So I’d propose we burn it,” he said and looked at Zaara, then at Mary. “Zaara and I will throw fireballs. Do you want to join in with some of your death bolts, Mom?” He gave her a crooked smile she remembered from his childhood. “Maybe you’ll feel braver around spiders if you help deal with—”

  “Justin!” Zaara yelled.

  The spider had come down the hallway in a rush as if sensing the team’s distraction.

  Mary screamed as loudly as she could and threw her hands out. The torch tumbled into the dust and black power poured out of her, flanked by bolts of flame from Zaara and Justin.

  The three strikes were more than enough to kill the creature but not enough to halt its momentum. It uttered an unearthly shriek as it caught fire but still skittered forward at high speed. His mother gave another full-volume scream of her own before he tackled her sideways against the wall as the flaming body went past.

  “Mom. Mom!”

  She managed to stop screaming. “What?”

  “You’re deafening me,” he told her but laughed as he held one hand up to shield his eyes and studied the spider. After a moment, he turned her away and marched her down the hall. “I wouldn’t look if I were you. Suffice it to say it’s taken care of. Come on, everyone. Zaara, if you’d take the front?”

  “Right-o.” The young woman grinned and handed Mary’s torch to her before she added shyly, “And I don’t suppose you could teach me that spell, could you? I’ve never even seen that one.”

  “Uh…”

  “She’ll think about it,” Justin said firmly. He draped an arm around his mother’s shoulders and steered her down the hallway behind the other two. “How about that, huh? You killed the spider to end all spiders. My mom, the spider-slayer. Did you get any levels from that?”

  “Levels?” she asked. She still tried to calm the racing of her heart.

  Blue letters popped up on one side of the screen, readin
g FEAR SLAYER, Level 1.

  “Oh. I guess I’m a Fear Slayer.”

  “That’s cool,” he said encouragingly. “As you do more and more, you’ll level up.”

  “As I do more?” She thought she might have a heart attack. “How do you survive this game? Good God above.”

  Justin laughed and hugged her. “Dad’s not gonna believe this unless he’s watching it right now.” He looked at her and some of what she felt must have shown on her face because he said slowly, “Is everything okay? And why did you disappear like that last time?”

  “Oh, I…” Mary cleared her throat and couldn’t decide what to tell him. The thought of him being closed in darkness without this world around him and without friends was terrifying—and surely it would be more terrifying for him without knowing what was happening. But then again, if Tad and the others found a way to avert this, he might spend the rest of his time in this world waiting for an ax to fall, and surely that would be cruel.

  She considered what to say, conscious that he was waiting.

  Finally, she patted his hand. “We miss you,” she said. “Putting many people in the game at once isn’t something they had a good idea how to do, you see. They want to be sure everything is working. I was glad to test it, of course, but I don’t want to be selfish and get in the way of your progress.”

  “You’re not getting in the way,” Justin said stoutly.

  “Oh, really?” Mary raised an eyebrow. “Having your mother come along with you on your adventures isn’t getting in the way?”

  The light wasn’t very good, but she was sure she saw him blush and Lyle cleared his throat in a way that might have been a stifled laugh.

  “Mom,” he said, embarrassed.

  “You don’t need me here,” she said. As the words emerged, she realized she truly meant them—and that, in a way, she was glad. “You’re doing well, Justin. I heard you speaking to—Lyle, is it? Yes—about when you should kill and when you should not. I like that you hesitate.” She smiled at him. “Tell me about who we were fighting back there.”

  “I assume you mean the wolves,” he said wryly. “I have no idea if the spider had a backstory.”

  “Oh, do you have to bring it up?” Mary groaned.

  “Sorry, sorry.” He grinned. “Ah, the wolves…long story short, there’s a pack who were probably turned into werewolves by a witch. They want us to kill her so they can be set free of the curse. She wants us to kill them because she says they were robbing people and they’re cursing the forest. We have no idea who’s right.”

  She nodded. The corridor had begun to slope up slightly as they walked and it wound gently into a curve. So far, thankfully, nothing else moved in the darkness.

  Justin was different here. She could hardly believe how much, in fact. No, not different. She considered the best definition.

  More. She looked at briefly him, then looked away. Would he remember this when he recovered?

  She hoped so and that he would be this person when he returned. He had always been smart and able to determine the best course of action. Now, though, he was decisive, willing to share his opinion and argue for it, or even take control of the situation when it was needed. Clearly, he wasn’t using the video game as an excuse to go on a murdering spree and as far as she could tell, he hadn’t even made a move on Zaara.

  Though DuBois had been evasive when she asked about that.

  With a sigh, she conceded that it was none of her business.

  “Is something wrong?” Justin asked her. “Seriously, Mom.”

  “I have to say that when I saw you playing all those games, this isn’t quite what I imagined.”

  He smiled. “Yeah. Me, neither.” He lowered his voice slightly. “I told Zaara and Lyle the truth, kind of, but they mostly think I’m crazy. I mean…you know what I mean.”

  She nodded. “Lyle,” she said a little more loudly. “Tell me about yourself.”

  The dwarf gave her a look over his shoulder. He seemed quite respectful of her, even if he wasn’t particularly respectful to Justin.

  “What d’ye want to know?”

  “You said you left your home to come adventuring,” she said lightly. “That’s interesting, isn’t it? And you’re fighting at my son’s side, so I was already interested.”

  “Ah, he’s not so bad with a sword as we say,” he said gruffly. “And me…well, there’s not much to tell. I decided to find my own way rather than stay in the fortress. I haven’t had as many adventures as I thought there’d be, but yer son seems to attract them.”

  Mary smiled at that. “Do you have any brothers or sisters?”

  “One o’ each. Twins. Older’n me. They were hell and never went anywhere apart. ʼCourse, they also couldn’t stand each other. That was fun. Last I heard, they couldn’t decide whether to train as blacksmiths or goldsmiths. Now, me ma was a stonemason, see, and she…”

  They continued to walk as Lyle rambled about his family. To Mary’s surprise, the story had the little touches she wouldn’t have expected from a game. She looked at Justin and he smiled at her.

  When she tilted her head curiously, he said quietly, “You wondered what I loved about games? This was part of it—all these stories.”

  She had never considered that. When at last Lyle began to wind down and the corridor finally showed the faint promise of sunlight, she called, “Your turn, Zaara.”

  “I have nothing as interesting as Lyle’s story, ma’am.” The girl seemed almost shy. “Or yours, I’m sure. I’m only a mayor’s daughter.”

  Justin snorted. “Merely your average mayor’s daughter. She taught herself daggers and magic and ran away to kill an evil wizard. Normal stuff.”

  “Justin!” Zaara flushed. “I barely know magic, especially compared to your mother.”

  “She’s—” He looked at Mary and she saw his mouth twitch madly. “Yes, I suppose she does know magic. Mom, why don’t you tell them your story?”

  “Now, now,” she said, “if I tell all the details, where would my aura of mystery be? I prefer to be mysterious.” She smiled at Zaara and Lyle. “But it’s clear I could wish for no better companions for you, Justin.” She stopped him and squeezed his hands. “It was good to see you. I’ll go now.” She hugged him. “You’re doing well. We think of you every day.”

  “I think of you, too,” he said. “Tell Dad I said hi.”

  “I will.”

  She continued to watch him as the world dissolved around her into darkness. Moments later, she stared at the entire PIVOT team.

  “Is something wrong?”

  “Well, someone called the cops on us,” Nick said, “because a woman screamed bloody murder. So, rest assured, Mrs. Williams, the next time we put you in the game, there will be no spiders.”

  Justin watched as his mother’s form faded before he rejoined his friends with a sigh.

  “I never learned any of her spells,” Zaara said mournfully. “Justin, she’s wonderful. Imagine having a sorceress for a mother. You never told us that.”

  “I never knew,” he said philosophically. When the other two gave him a confused look, he cleared his throat. “Ah…I mean, I never knew until…oh, whatever. Maybe the next time she’s here, she can teach you some spells.”

  “I’d like that,” she said.

  He stared at where the sunlight slanted into the mouth of the tunnel—werewolf-free, so far—and considered their options. “So, what on earth do we do next?”

  “Well…” Lyle sounded contemplative. He held up a crystal vial of something that sparkled like stars and blood and death all at once. Looking at it too hard made the young man’s head ache. “We could use this potion I stole from the werewolves and kill us a witch. What do you say?”

  Chapter Fifty

  Jacob looked at the clock. They had eight hours and three minutes left—or, in more commonly accepted terms, it was 2:17 AM. He hadn’t slept since four hours before the FDA had arrived the previous day, and he was fairly sure none of the othe
rs had either.

  It wasn’t that he hadn’t tried. He had attempted to snatch a catnap a few times. He knew their chances of getting out of this hinged on their ability to think clearly, and that ability would go down the tubes increasingly the longer they stayed awake.

  But nothing, not even pure exhaustion, could rob him of the sheer rage that circled through his brain. He was furious, he was afraid of spending the rest of his life in jail, and he was even angrier that this was what was dangled in front of him to force him to back down.

  He hadn’t done anything wrong.

  Not that the FDA cared. The agents worked with the absolute certainty that their bosses were doing the right thing. As far as they knew, he was running uncleared experiments on a comatose patient.

  With his head buried in his hands, and gave a groan that turned into a shout of frustration. “What the fuck do we do?”

  When he looked up, Amber was seated in her chair and stared at the ceiling.

  “We could back down,” she said. “It’s the first time. There’s enough evidence to show we saw it would be safe and we could almost certainly get you off without jail time. I trust Jamie when he says that.”

  The lawyer had, to his credit, given them all their options. He was sure the man would prefer it if they backed down.

  Amber, however, was a surprise—and one that made his blood pressure climb even higher.

  “You want us to back down?” he asked her. “You sat through sixteen hours of brainstorming and you didn’t say that. And you watched me come back from getting bail, you told Mary you’d keep fighting, and you told me you thought we were doing the right thing and now, you tell me we should back down?”

  She said nothing and watched him with dark, inscrutable eyes.

  “Let me tell you something.” He stabbed his finger on the kitchenette table. “We did the right thing. We used technology with a good track record to give Justin a better chance to survive this. We’re only in this mess because some assholes at big companies don’t want their quarterly reports to take a hit, and I’ll be damned if I let them get away with that. We will not back down.”