“Goddamn, this stuff is better than the crap I drink at my bar. You know I could get to like this world after all.”
The headmaster’s bunker truly was a sight to behold. There were so much tins and bottles of water they practically formed the four walls. I looked to Sara as she washed down her dried chicken food with water.
“Sorry about that”, I said. “If I hadn’t let myself get knocked down you might still have two lives.”
“Yeah that’s right”, said Ted. “Better thank your lucky stars this isn’t the Nam’ kid. A mistake like that and there’d be no second chance when Charlie slit your throat.”
“Thanks Ted”, I said wearily. “I’m sure you have a whole load of ‘When I was in the Nam’’ stories to cover every situation don’t you?”
Ted got the message and didn’t say anything else. Despite the fact there could be only one winner I felt guilty that Sara had lost a life. Usually I couldn’t give a shit about other players but when I looked at those elven features and that smile…
Right now she was smiling at me, and I realised that we were sharing a moment together. My life had not consisted of much moments like this.
“Don’t fret it Joe”, she said. “We live we learn, or in this case, we die we learn.”
“Ain’t that the truth”, Ted piped in. “Say folks”, he was now talking to the survivors. “What do you say you tell us about the antidote? Us having done the Lord’s work for you and all?”
Sharon turned to him.
“Marauders came through here a day ago. We kept out of sight but spied on them. They numbered about fifty, had ten vehicles and were heavily armed. We gathered their leader was a man named General Harper.”
“An actual General?”
Sharon shrugged her shoulders.
“Hmm”, Ted mused, “numbers, weapons and vehicles”.
The marauders sounded like they were a level way above us. This was not good.
“May god be with you”, said Sharon. With their bags full, the survivors left.
“Well, we better get going”, said Ted.
_____________
The marauders had circled the wagons. Literally. Eight cars and two vans formed a circle around the camp they had made at the river. They had two armed guards posted, looking out imperiously into the darkness.
I checked the stats of one of the guards and the whole group.
Marauder guard Marauder group
Level 6 Level 40
Mana: 24 Mana: 800
Strength: 12 Strength: 400
Endurance: 13 Endurance: 20
Speed: 11 Speed: 18
Agility: 10 Agility: 10
Willpower: 10 Willpower: 15
Intelligence: 9 Intelligence: 12
We had followed their trail here through the night, the moonlight guiding our way. A trail of ten vehicles was not one for which you needed specialist tracking skills. You pretty much just had to stick to the road, and follow the tyre marks at a cross roads. Now we were hiding within the woodland just out-with the camp.
“I bet they got just what we need in those two vans”, said Ted. “That god lady was right, there must be about fifty of them. I gotta be honest with you both, it’s kinda difficult to see how we can pull this off. Outnumbered, out gunned.”
In the middle of the night most men were asleep, or resting, I could see that almost every one of them had a gun of one description or another by his side. There was however, a small group standing around outside one of the vans.
It was then that the doors to the van opened and a figure with a yellow arrow above his head stopped out.
Extra life
General Harper. Only the head of this band of not so merry man could be worth an extra life.
He was dressed in military fatigues, a bald and well built man. He had a knife in one hand and was wiping it on a rag in his other.
“Well boys”, he said to the others gathered around the van. “He didn’t know anything.” Out of the back of the van, another two men emerged, dragging a bloody body-the throat had been cut. “I reckon his friends are holed about ten miles from here, and since he wouldn’t tell us what we needed to, it’s going to be a little messier than it might have been.”
“We like messy General”, said one of the others, a weasel faced little man with a grin on his face. The others laughed. The General smiled.
“Indeed we do. Truth be told, I guess we’ve all developed a taste for messy haven’t we? They say cleanliness is next to godliness. Well, I guess none of us have a place reserved in heaven.”
They all roared with laughter at what they deemed to be the most hilarious joke.
“Best get some rest gentlemen, at the break of dawn we roll.”
There was a splash as the body was unceremoniously dumped into the river, the moonlight highlighting the lifeless form floating away to the sea.
Ted was rubbing his forehead, grimacing, searching his brain for some kid of tactic which would give us the advantage, but he was struggling-as was I.
“What about sneaking in during the night?” Said Sara, just try and steal from the van, without having to fight any of them?”
“Look at the set up they’ve got”, said Ted, “they’d notice if a goddamned rat tried to sneak in.”
Sara and I looked to each other then back to the camp, at the rag-tag bunch of NPCs who would cut a cut throats if they didn’t get exactly what they wanted. General Harper was sitting by a campfire, gnawing on some meat as he stared into the flames.
And then…
“What is it? Said Sara, aware that something had just popped into my head. “Have you thought of something?”
“Please tell me you’ve thought of something kid, cause I got nothin’ here.”
“Give me second.” I brought up the stats I was looking for.
Zombie rat horde Marauder group
Level 50 Level 40
Mana: 10,000 Mana: 800
Strength: 50 Strength: 400
Endurance: 14 Endurance: 20
Speed: 20 Speed: 18
Agility: 25 Agility: 10
Willpower: 15 Willpower: 15
Intelligence: 6 Intelligence: 12
“You’re right Ted, they would notice one rat coming through. And I’m fucking positive they would notice thousands coming through.”
Ted and Sara looked at me blankly for several seconds, before the looks of realisation slowly but surely appeared.
“I think I’m with you kid, the only thing is, how do we find them and bring them here before morning. How do we play the pied piper?”
“Well I hadn’t thought about the details in the ten seconds since I had the idea. I just know the marauders are at a higher level than we are, but the rats are at a higher level than the marauders, so…”
“I can run”, said Sara. “I put my points into endurance and speed. I can run and find them, then bring them back here before morning. It won’t be too difficult to find that horde. They were on the road, and I just follow the trail of dead bodies starting with the lion-am I right?”
“But you only have one life left”, I said. “If you die…”
“What’s your speed and endurance Joe?”
“Ten and ten.”
“Ted?”
“Ten and eleven.”
“Fourteen and twelve. So it kind of narrows it down. It’s worth the risk. We all die if I don’t. It’s like you say, the marauders are on a different level.”
“Lady’s got a point”.
I reluctantly nodded my head. If Sara died, it was pema-death in the game. I might not see her again.
It came into my head to ask her if I could see her in the real word in case she died, but the fear of looking like a total fool kept the words bottled up inside me.
She got to her feet, staying low to keep out of sight of the guards.
“I’ll be back before you know it.”
And with that, her lovely elven face disappeared into the night. If I believed as Sh
aron did, I would have offered up a prayer that I would see that face again.
________________
“So I guess you two are gettin’ sweet on one other’?” Ted mused.
“What do you mean?”
“Ha! Ok, you play it cool if you want kid. I may be a useless son of a bitch, but I don’t need to be a fucking relationship expert to know when a boy and a girl like each other. I take it you ain’t got a woman waiting for you in the real world?”
That question felt so strange. Have you got a woman? I don’t think anybody had ever asked me that before, well, not in my adult life anyway.
“What’s the matter kid? You look like I just asked you to solve the riddle of the sphinx or some shit.”
He had noticed the expression on my face and had reacted to it. He had asked if I had a woman. This was so…like being a real person. I was in virtual form and I realised that I was having some of the most real interactions with other human beings in my life. Humans talked, noticed the expressions on each other faces, asked how they were doing, asked about the relationships they were in.
“Yeah, I mean, no, I don’t have a woman. But yeah, Sara, well, I guess she’s nice.”
“Yeah kid, she is kinda nice isn’t she? The thing is though, I doubt she looks like that on the outside, it’s kinda like those models that do…what’s that thing they do with photos?”
“Photoshop.”
“Yeah, photoshop. You see her in real life and she ain’t nothin like her pictures. I think it’s like, people only want the world to see a certain side of them, you know. Like you, you want people to see you’re a bad ass, that you’re a motherfucking zombie killer, that you take no prisoners.”
“I guess you’re right. What about you?”
“Me? Hell, the world doesn’t give a crap about me, so I stopped giving a crap a long time ago, only people I care about are…”
Ted stopped and looked away. I remembered our conversation in the supermarket earlier, when he had just stopped suddenly. This time I decided to ask. I actually felt genuinely interested, like I wasn’t just making polite conversation to paper over the social awkwardness.
“Do you have a family?”
He sat in silence for about thirty seconds before replying.
“I have a kid, a son, he’s why I’m here.”
“You want the money for him?”
“Yeah, but, it’s not…”, he paused for a second. “That kid is the only worthwhile thing I’ve ever done with my life, but the thing is, he’s sick. I mean, the hospital bills are mounting up, his mom ain’t exactly raking it in, and her…her husband has just been laid off. So my kid is sick, and needs the money. And what does a man do? He provides. He looks after his family or he’s nothing in this world.”
I said nothing, taking in the gravity of Ted’s situation.
“Tell me kid”, Ted said after we’d been sitting in silence for about five minutes. “How did you become hooked up with the fucks who run this game? I mean, if you’re one of these guys who spends all his time in his bedroom with his dick in…”
“Yeah”, I interrupted him, not wanting to hear those words again. “I have a high school friend who’s in the mob. I heard about it, found him and asked if I could join. So here I am.”
“You just want the money?”
“Yes, and I want to be the best. I’ve always wanted to be the best. You know, I see everyone else, so worried about their jobs and their kids, living these dreary fucking lives. Bu for me, being the best at a game, getting a higher score than everybody else, that makes me feel…”
“Alive?”
“Yes. Alive. But then I’d reached this point where I’d felt I’d done everything, played all the games, killed all the monsters, got all the high scores, and when I heard about these underground games…”
“Alive?”
“Yeah.” I looked down.
“I know how you feel kid. We all know war is hell, but back in the jungles in Nam’, I felt more alive than I ever did in my life, until I saw my new born son anyway.”
“What’s his name?”
“Well, I wanted to call him Theodore Junior, but his mother wasn’t having that. Maybe she didn’t want to be saying my name every time she spoke to our son. So we, or should I say she, called him Francis.”
“And what’s wrong with him?”
Ted sighed.
“I’m sorry”, I said, “I didn’t mean…”
“Na, that’s ok. He has…Put it this way. He’s not too likely to make it past his eighteenth birthday, but I’m goddamned sure his last years on this earth are going to be good ones, even if his mother doesn’t want me there.” He stopped for a few seconds then continued. “You know kid, when I was your age, I used to think the white picket fence and the family were lame as hell. Now when I see my only son with his mother and another man, I realise the joke’s been on me all these years.”
I lay my head back against thee tree, just staring at the virtual moon.
_____________
Morning. We were looking down into the camp, which was bathed in the morning mist. Almost all of the men were down by the river, bathing and brushing their teeth.
My mana was down to eleven, as was Teds’. We had been talking about what to do if it got down to three or lower and there was still no sign of Sara.
“Your girl better arrive soon”, said Ted, “otherwise, we’re just as well going down there and going down in a blaze of glory.”
General Harper was by a car, looking into the side mirror and combing his hair back. An NPC who thrived on murder, but didn’t like to have a hair out of place.
I felt the urge to take him on. I knew he was the boss and that he out-levelled me, but I so wished I had multiple lives to take a shot at the son of a bitch. I felt that craving, that urge, almost a physical need to walk out from the trees, stride up to him and do battle with him. I imagined us in the middle of the circle of cars, like a makeshift arena, fighting to the death. I would dodge his blows, then slide my nail into his thick neck, watching his mana bar slide from green to nothing as the look in his eyes told me he couldn’t believe I had killed him.
“You want to stick that son of a bitch bad don’t you? If Sara doesn’t get here, we’ll go for it, just you and me, like high noon.”
“She’ll be here. I know it. I…”
“Listen”, Ted interrupted me, cocking his head to one side.
I froze. There it was. That high pitched squeaking and screeching that we had heard on the road. A smile crept onto Ted’s face.
“Goddamn, sounds like your girl has done it. Best go see how the Pied Piper of Deadhead is doin’!”
My heart was pounding as we slinked back through the woods, being sure not to be seen, and then we ran. Ran toward the sound, ran toward the zombie rats that we knew were coming.
There was Sara charging through the trees. My heart leapt, I was so glad to see her. I had never been so glad to see anyone.
Those speed points were showing, she was leaping over branches and logs like an Olympic hurdler.
“Run”, she cried, “run, run, run!”
I could see her face was covered in several red trickles, her clothes were torn up and bloodied, but there was no time for me to ask about her health.
Then I saw them, about twenty feet behind her. The green and brown of the forest floor was quickly turning black, like there had been a volcanic eruption and black lava was now coursing through the woods. The sound of a mass of undead squeaks filled my ears, a mass of blood red eyes burning through the morning mist.
The flesh eating horde that had made such short work of the king of the beasts was now coming straight for us.
“Run! Didn’t you hear me? Fucking run!” Cried Sara as she crashed past us.
I turned on my heels, the three of us now heading straight for the marauder camp, as had been our plan, but I suddenly felt like this wasn’t so well thought out.
“What the hell will we do when we get
there?” I cried.
“I’ll take out the guards“, said Ted as he ran alongside me. “Then we take cover where we can, I doubt they lock the cars, we’ll get inside one of them. Sara you fire your weapon, we need as much gunfire as possible.”
We charged out into the open. Ted dropped to one knee, took aim and fired off two rounds. The first was a perfect head shot, taking out the guard on the right, his mana bar instantly dropping to zero as he fell to the ground. The other shot hit the guard to the left’s body, a small hole appearing in his chest, his mana dropping to four as he collapsed against the car. He was down but not out, his firearm by his side as he looked up to see who his attackers were.
We charged down to the camp, Ted was firing wildly, as was Sara, but accuracy was not entirely necessary. The marauders down by the river flattened themselves to the ground escape the bullets.
The pain on the face of the guard who had been shot slowly transformed into one of pure horror as he laid eyes on what was coming behind us.
Sara hauled open the backdoor of the first car we got to, as Ted fired the last of his shots to cover us. Some by the river were returning fire, the bullets pinging off the bonnet of the car. I dived in behind Sara into the backseat. Ted fell in behind me, slamming the door shut, the three of us now cramped together and panting heavily as the gunfire pounded our makeshift hiding place.
But the marauders armour was working against them. The windscreen of this car had corrugated iron across it, with some holes cut so as to be able to see through, protecting us from their hail of bullets. But the sound of gunfire soon came to a halt.
“Jesus fucking Christ! Look out, get the fuck out of here! Fall back! Fall back!”
The first scream we heard was just outside the car to our right, where the shot guard had fallen. I took the chance of raising my head to the passenger window to look out.
His screams were very quickly stifled as he disappeared under a black swarm just like the lion on the road, his remaining four now no mana at all. I was looking at some resemblance of a humanoid form now.